Just what are those Darwinists playing at now?
The first major analysis of one of the earliest known hominids suggests that humans may not have evolved from apes.
One of the principal investigators, C. Owen Lovejoy, associate professor of biological anthropology at Kent State University, said the research reveals that the reverse could be true: Apes might have evolved from the hominids that eventually evolved into humans.
So the story goes: fish, man, ape. Progress.
Of late the Ivy League seems little more than a matchmaking service for pairing East Asian women with Jewish men. Why isn’t anything being done about this? What will become of the rest of us after the emergence of a new super-race that’s funny and good at math?
That man evolved from an arboreal primate was proposed by Darwin in Descent of Man (literal descent, one supposes). I don’t know the provenance of the competing “aquatic ape” theory, but it’s making noise at The Atlantic blog.
A convention of Paleontologists met in Ohio recently, and when a few dozen of them crossed into Kentucky to visit the Creation Museum the New York Times was on-hand to report. Among the highlights:
Near the entrance to the exhibits is an animatronic display that includes a girl feeding a carrot to a squirrel as two dinosaurs stand nearby, a stark departure from natural history museums that say the first humans lived 65 million years after the last dinosaurs.
Dr. Bengtson noted that to explain how the few species aboard the ark could have diversified to the multitude of animals alive today in only a few thousand years, the museum said simply, “God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly.”
About 50 kinds of dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, the museum explains, but later went extinct for unknown reasons.
That last bit is my favorite.
Long-time followers of this blog know all about the Creation Museum, of course, so the only news lead-in is the visit by the bone-collectors. One wonders: did the Times put them up to it? This is just the sort of ploy they might use to sell a few more papers in Indianapolis or Boulder. If so, I don’t think it will work; my sense is that Darwinism as a theater in the Culture Wars has played out for now. Middle America is going to find all new ways of exhasperating the Guardians in the years to come, but Creationism won’t be chief among them.
I have no idea how old this is, but it’s new to me and it made me smile.
Never before has there been such an important question that I cared so little about: Can we avoid a mass rejection of evolution in the Muslim world?
Bertrand Russell on the inherent contradiction between liberalism and the Theory of Evolution:
Darwin himself was a liberal, but his theories had consequences in some degree inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal, and that the difference between adults are due wholly to education, was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species. If, as Lamarck held, and as Darwin himself was willing to concede up to a point, acquired characteristics were inherited, this opposition to such views as those of Helvetius could have been somewhat softened; but it has appeared that only congenital characteristics are inherited, apart from certain not very important exceptions. Thus the congenital differences between men acquire fundamental importance.
There is a further consequence of the theory of evolution, which is independent of the particular mechanism suggested by Darwin. If men and animals have a common ancestry, and if men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal? Would Pithecanthropus erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton’s? Would the Piltdown Man have Written Shakespeare’s poetry if there had been anybody to convict him of poaching? A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative will find himself forced to regard apes as the equals of human beings. And why stop with apes? I do not see how he is to resist an argument in favour of Votes for Oysters.
That last bit is already happening in Europe, where there’s a charter on ape rights under consideration. The Nineteenth Century Progressives resolved this contradiction in a manner entirely consistent with their theories: they were thoroughgoing racists who advocated birth control for the benighted masses and sterilization for the mentally feeble. The quote is from History of Western Philosophy, written in 1943 and published in ‘45.
Latter-day liberals, especially scientists, have found it possible to embrace both the Theory of Evolution and the doctrine of the equality of men by claiming that evolutionary forces ceased to shape our species soon after the taming of fire. However, there’s no good evidence for this; it’s believed because the alternative is too ugly to speak aloud–like most of our beliefs.
Gould's Hopeful Monster
The forces of Evolution struck a significant blow today to Creationism’s rearguard with the release of Spore, a computer game. (New York Times).
