The New Monkey Trial

Darwinists look more and more to be fundamentalist wackos, don't they?

Darwinists this month are celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Scopes trial. But critics of evolution note an irony lost on the Darwinists in the midst of their celebrations, namely, that they now behave exactly like the silencers of science they once reviled.

Desperate to shut down debate that exposes their evolutionary theory as unsustainable conjecture, the Darwinists are using the incantations of an ideology they call science and the power of law to prevent the teaching of any concepts besides random variation and natural selection. While Darwinists still pose as champions of free inquiry, they actively suppress it in the name of their scientific dogmatism.

Treat critics of evolution no more seriously than segregationists, Darwinists urge the media and school boards. Just as segregationists, whose views are manifestly irrational, don't deserve "equal time" in discussions, the critics of evolution don't deserve equal time either, Darwinists plead.

In a media forum aired on C-SPAN a while back, Slate's Jacob Weisberg in effect said this to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, upbraiding him for running stories about a school board controversy in Kansas that had quoted critics of evolution. Why did you give them equal time? Weisberg asked Keller. Would you give segregationists their say? Keller found Weisberg's criticism too radical and unfair, but assured him that anybody who read the Times's Science section would know that the paper was in the tank for Darwin.

There's a common error in statistics which arises when one tries to make predictions outside one's data set. You can't simply look at a trend line and extrapolate it into the future, since special cause variation has a tendency to creep in---something statisticians-in-the-know refer to as "Kolmogonov's First Law of Sh*t Happening."

Yet time and again, people who ought to know better take very finite and flawed data and try to magically fudge it into The Complete Theory of Everything.

Thus with evolutionary theory---because the fossil record and man's own history indicates natural selection occurs, evolutionists claim that this explains the genesis of life. It's quite a stretch to go from the Westminster Dog Show to a comprehensive explanation for biodiversity, and the furious arguments over whether or not speciation occurs on a catastrophic or geologic timescale should give one some pause in presuming Evolution-with-a-capital-E has been "proven".

It's the same problem we've got with climate data and global warming.

Our most accurate measure of surface temperatures come from satellite readings, which have only been available for a very few years. Yet we're attempting to compare a mishmash of data cobbled together from a hodgepodge of measurement systems, each with their own limitations, to extrapolate global climate data back into prehistory. The confidence bands around such speculative silliness are enormous---Miss Cleo would likely provide a more accurate reading.

The dirty little secret of science is how little we know and how contradictory, confusing, and preliminary most of what we think we know today really is.

I suspect that 10 years from now, the pro-evolution cinema classic "Inherit the Wind" will be viewed as disdainfully as "Birth of a Nation" is today---masterfully-crafted propaganda which led us entirely down the wrong path for awhile.

Update:

Darwinian Fundamentalism, a great new blog attacking the extrapolation of macroevolution (the genesis of distinct species from natural selection) from microevolution (variation due to natural selection within a species), lends great perspective to these matters.