Tag Archives: Darwinism

News

Darwinists present a solution to the Cambrian explosion

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Story from Darwin’s God. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Now, thanks to the latest research, we have the answer: calcium. Evolutionists are now saying that a rise in ocean calcium levels triggered the assembly of unicellular organisms into multicellular organisms and the rest, as evolutionists say, is history. What is astonishing is that there is anyone left out there who questions evolution. Can’t they see that these guys are doing the heavy lifting? This is just rock solid investigative research, the kind we’ve come to expect from evolutionists.

From the abstract of the paper:

We propose that stronger cell adhesion allowed the integrity of genetically uniform animals composed only of “self” cells, facilitating genetic constitutions to remain within the metazoan individual and be passed down inheritance lines. The Cambrian explosion might have been triggered by the coincidence in time of primitive animals endowed with self-/non-self-recognition and of a surge in seawater calcium that increased the binding forces between their calcium-dependent cell adhesion molecules.

It seems to me that the thing to be explained in the Cambrian explosion is “where did the NEW information come from for the NEW body plans”. Positing better glue to stick single cells together doesn’t address where the NEW code came from totally NEW body plans and NEW organ types.

Please post challenges on Dr. Hunter’s blog, as biophysics is his area of expertise.

Commentary

Did Darwin’s ideas influence Mao Tse Tung to murder millions?

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This is taken from China and Charles Darwin, by China scholar James Reeve Pusey of Bucknell University, published in 1983 by Harvard University Press. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li — “To rebel is justified” — but that standard translation obscures the force of the li (reason or principle) that rebellion was now said to have. That Neo-Confucian word in [its] new context really meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin. For the li of revolution, they had said, lay in evolution.

Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Hu Shih, and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K’ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung. As things turned out, therefore, he seemd to help Mao Tse-tung the most, and indeed he did. He helped make the Marxists the fittest.

Darwin created the ideological vacuum [by undermining traditional ideas] that cried out for something like Marxism, and he established criteria for what that something should be. The new fit and fittening ideology had to be based on the Western science of evolutionary progress. It had to identify inevitable, natural stages of human social development. It had to promise historical inevitability and yet at the same time recognize the vital importance of human action. It had to be based on struggle and yet stress mutual aid among members of the ch’un. It had to provide a non-racial enemy to explain China’s inner and outer troubles without damning the Chinese — and it had to give the underdog a chance.

More:

The notion that one can be prescient of evolution’s Way has led some to feel that the prescient have special rights, if not duties, in the struggle they believe that Way requires. And so Darwin has ironically helped produce a new kind of religious know-it-all-ism, and a concomitant new kind of religious self-righteousness and religious intolerance….

More:

Mao Tse-tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore that “all demons shall be annihilated.” He dehumanized his enemies, partly in traditional hyperbole, partly in Social Darwinian “realism.” Like the Anarchists he saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction. The people’s enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.

Evolution News notes that “Pusey writes on the same theme, more briefly, in the November issue of Nature.” Nature? How did they let that in to the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the world.

Commentary

Does Darwinism explain anything?

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Dr. Cornelius Hunter answers the question here. (H/T ECM)

Here’s the criterion specified by naturalists to make an explanation scientific:

…in order to qualify as legitimate science a theory must distinguish between different outcomes. Naturalism is needed because otherwise each outcome is equally probable and the theory is not true science.

Deciding what does and does not qualify as legitimate science is notoriously difficult. There seem to be exceptions to every rule. But perhaps Felsenstein’s criterion is reasonable. Shouldn’t a scientific theory say at least something about the probabilities of what we might observe in the data?

Does Darwinism satisfy the criterion? Hunter argues that it does not.

Whatever we find in biology, evolutionists say it must have evolved. Their predictions and expectations are often falsified and they have to patch their theory repeatedly. And there is no distinction between a new, fantastic design and a repeated design–both are equiprobable under evolution.

If a new, fantastic design appears such as the trilobite eye, then evolutionists ascribe it to natural selection. If similar designs are found in different species, then it is ascribed to common descent. If later cousin species are found to lack the design, then common descent can be dropped as an explanation and the design can be said to have evolved independently. The evolutionary explanation is extremely flexible.

If distinguishing between outcomes is the hallmark of true science, then evolution is the theory that doesn’t qualify.

Read the whole thing!

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