Petr
02-09-2008, 06:27 PM
Larry Auster notes something that I too have so often noticed: dogmatic evo-pushers are some of the most hubris-filled tools ever to grace the surface of the earth. (Pride goeth before the fall) They know nothing about the Christian virtue of humility - their worldview is as far away from healthy scepticism and self-doubt as possible.
Evo-preachers like Dawkins are so greatly institutionally protected by the modern secularist society from any serious challenges (evolution is the de facto religion/narrative that secularism uses to justify itself), that they are like some obnoxious pampered brats of inherited wealth who simply cannot imagine what being poor is like - and what's more, cannot even theoretically conceive the possibility that they themselves might become poor some day. Likewise Darwinist materialists scoff at the very notion that their paradigm might be falsified (as it actually has already been, in many different ways).
In a fair fight, dogmatic Darwinists would be easily crushed (that why they no longer like to have open debates with their critics), but just like rich kids are protected by their powerful parents, committed secularist ideologues in media, academia and governments make sure that those ID/creationist gutter punks won't be able to lay their hands on their precious darlings.
Below, Auster shows Dawkins putting forward a mediocre argument, then shows why it's wrong and then notes the ridiculously conceited attitude of evo-propagandists.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009892.html
A Darwinian quiz
(Update Feb 9 1:38 p.m.: I've received quite a few reader responses, pretty much covering the gamut, which I have posted below.)
Please read the following passage from Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale, p. 592, then see the questions below:
Bombardier beetles of the genus Brachinus are unique, in Dr McGavin's experience, in mixing chemicals to make an explosion. The ingredients are made and held in separate (obviously!) glands. When danger threatens, they are squirted into a chamber near the rear end of the beetle, where they explode, forcing noxious (caustic and boiling-hot) liquid out through a directed nozzle at the enemy. The case is well known to creationists, who love it. They think it is self-evidently impossible to evolve by gradual degrees because the intermediate stages would all explode. I enjoyed demonstrating the error of this argument during my Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children, shown on BBC television in 1991. Donning a Second World War helmet, and inviting nervous members of the audience to leave, I mixed hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, the two ingredients of the bombardier explosion Nothing happened. It didn't even get warm. The explosion requires a catalyst. I raised the concentration of catalyst gradually, which steadily increased the hot whoosh to a satisfactory climax. In nature, the beetle provides the catalyst, and would have had no difficult in gradually, and safely, increasing the dose over evolutionary time.
What do you think of Dawkins's disproof of the anti-Darwinians' argument that the Bombardier beetle's explosive device could not have evolved by gradual, Darwinian processes of minute random mutations and natural selection? Do you think his demonstration and reasoning are persuasive, and, if so, why? Do you think his demonstration and reasoning are not persuasive, and, if so, why?
Please mail your answer to me here, putting "Darwinian quiz" in the subject line.
...
Paul T. writes:
I don't know much about this, but if it's difficult to accept that precisely the two chemical components required for the explosion evolved by chance in the same organism and in just the right way, surely it's even more difficult to accept that just the right chemical catalyst also evolved with them? Instead of removing the difficulty, Dawkins seems to have increased it.
LA replies:
Right--instead of two chemicals to account for, he has to account for three!
...
LA writes:
I thank readers for contributing their thoughts on this. Many points have been made that had not occurred to me. My own main criticism of Dawkins's argument, prior to reading everyone else's (which have influenced my thinking), was as follows:
Dawkins thought that he had hit the bullseye when he revealed to his audience that the two chemicals do not explode in the absense of a catalyst. Whicn means that he thinks the entire anti-Darwinian argument comes down to the idea that the two chemicals would combine and explode, thus killing the beetle, before the ability to target the explosion at an enemy had evolved. Therefore he thought that the need for the catalyst sufficiently refuted the anti-Darwinian objection. But as commenters have pointed out, the main problem is not a pre-mature explosion killing the beetle, the main problem is how the entire multi-part apparatus got put together at all.
Also, what Dawkins' doesn't realize is that the need for the catalyst, far from making the Darwinian evolution of the explosive device plausible, makes it more complicated and harder to explain.
However, the most interesting thing to me about Dawkin's explanation is not that it is inadequate, but how obviously inadequate it is, and, further, that Dawkins smugly believes that this obviously inadequate answer wipes the floor with the anti-Darwinists:
"The case is well known to creationists, who love it. They think it is self-evidently impossible to evolve by gradual degrees because the intermediate stages would all explode. I enjoyed demonstrating the error of this argument during my Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children..."
It is Dawkins's sense of his complete superiority over the other side, combined with the fact that his argument is in reality embarrassingly weak, that reinforces the impression of the Darwinian orthodoxy as a Wizard of Oz, creating a show in which he puffs himself up to gigantic and terrifying proportions, intimidating all who would dare approach, when the reality is a scared little man behind a curtain pulling levers.
Over and over, I have seen the Darwinian using two types of arguments:
(a) The argument from authority: We Darwinians are simply right and our critics are simply idiots.
(b) Some vague abstract explanation that does not at all answer the challenge to Darwinism, but the Darwinists act as though it does answer all challenges.
However, I just came upon an article at the TalkOrigins website that presents a 15-step scenario by which the author says that the Bombardier beetle could have evolved. I haven't had time to take it in yet, but I will do later later and discuss it. This should be interesting. I hope it's better than a supposed refutation of Michael Behe's bacterium flagellum argument I read recently, in which the author said in essence, "Well, part X of the bacterium flagellum could earlier have had some other useful function Y, and therefore it was selected, and this explains how intermediate Darwinian mutations led step by step to the functioning 30-part bacterium flagellum! I have just refuted that idiot Behe who might as well be a dog catcher." The author (like Dawkins above) evidently thought his argument was not only persuasive but definitive.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 08, 2008 09:32 PM |
Evo-preachers like Dawkins are so greatly institutionally protected by the modern secularist society from any serious challenges (evolution is the de facto religion/narrative that secularism uses to justify itself), that they are like some obnoxious pampered brats of inherited wealth who simply cannot imagine what being poor is like - and what's more, cannot even theoretically conceive the possibility that they themselves might become poor some day. Likewise Darwinist materialists scoff at the very notion that their paradigm might be falsified (as it actually has already been, in many different ways).
In a fair fight, dogmatic Darwinists would be easily crushed (that why they no longer like to have open debates with their critics), but just like rich kids are protected by their powerful parents, committed secularist ideologues in media, academia and governments make sure that those ID/creationist gutter punks won't be able to lay their hands on their precious darlings.
Below, Auster shows Dawkins putting forward a mediocre argument, then shows why it's wrong and then notes the ridiculously conceited attitude of evo-propagandists.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009892.html
A Darwinian quiz
(Update Feb 9 1:38 p.m.: I've received quite a few reader responses, pretty much covering the gamut, which I have posted below.)
Please read the following passage from Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale, p. 592, then see the questions below:
Bombardier beetles of the genus Brachinus are unique, in Dr McGavin's experience, in mixing chemicals to make an explosion. The ingredients are made and held in separate (obviously!) glands. When danger threatens, they are squirted into a chamber near the rear end of the beetle, where they explode, forcing noxious (caustic and boiling-hot) liquid out through a directed nozzle at the enemy. The case is well known to creationists, who love it. They think it is self-evidently impossible to evolve by gradual degrees because the intermediate stages would all explode. I enjoyed demonstrating the error of this argument during my Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children, shown on BBC television in 1991. Donning a Second World War helmet, and inviting nervous members of the audience to leave, I mixed hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, the two ingredients of the bombardier explosion Nothing happened. It didn't even get warm. The explosion requires a catalyst. I raised the concentration of catalyst gradually, which steadily increased the hot whoosh to a satisfactory climax. In nature, the beetle provides the catalyst, and would have had no difficult in gradually, and safely, increasing the dose over evolutionary time.
What do you think of Dawkins's disproof of the anti-Darwinians' argument that the Bombardier beetle's explosive device could not have evolved by gradual, Darwinian processes of minute random mutations and natural selection? Do you think his demonstration and reasoning are persuasive, and, if so, why? Do you think his demonstration and reasoning are not persuasive, and, if so, why?
Please mail your answer to me here, putting "Darwinian quiz" in the subject line.
...
Paul T. writes:
I don't know much about this, but if it's difficult to accept that precisely the two chemical components required for the explosion evolved by chance in the same organism and in just the right way, surely it's even more difficult to accept that just the right chemical catalyst also evolved with them? Instead of removing the difficulty, Dawkins seems to have increased it.
LA replies:
Right--instead of two chemicals to account for, he has to account for three!
...
LA writes:
I thank readers for contributing their thoughts on this. Many points have been made that had not occurred to me. My own main criticism of Dawkins's argument, prior to reading everyone else's (which have influenced my thinking), was as follows:
Dawkins thought that he had hit the bullseye when he revealed to his audience that the two chemicals do not explode in the absense of a catalyst. Whicn means that he thinks the entire anti-Darwinian argument comes down to the idea that the two chemicals would combine and explode, thus killing the beetle, before the ability to target the explosion at an enemy had evolved. Therefore he thought that the need for the catalyst sufficiently refuted the anti-Darwinian objection. But as commenters have pointed out, the main problem is not a pre-mature explosion killing the beetle, the main problem is how the entire multi-part apparatus got put together at all.
Also, what Dawkins' doesn't realize is that the need for the catalyst, far from making the Darwinian evolution of the explosive device plausible, makes it more complicated and harder to explain.
However, the most interesting thing to me about Dawkin's explanation is not that it is inadequate, but how obviously inadequate it is, and, further, that Dawkins smugly believes that this obviously inadequate answer wipes the floor with the anti-Darwinists:
"The case is well known to creationists, who love it. They think it is self-evidently impossible to evolve by gradual degrees because the intermediate stages would all explode. I enjoyed demonstrating the error of this argument during my Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children..."
It is Dawkins's sense of his complete superiority over the other side, combined with the fact that his argument is in reality embarrassingly weak, that reinforces the impression of the Darwinian orthodoxy as a Wizard of Oz, creating a show in which he puffs himself up to gigantic and terrifying proportions, intimidating all who would dare approach, when the reality is a scared little man behind a curtain pulling levers.
Over and over, I have seen the Darwinian using two types of arguments:
(a) The argument from authority: We Darwinians are simply right and our critics are simply idiots.
(b) Some vague abstract explanation that does not at all answer the challenge to Darwinism, but the Darwinists act as though it does answer all challenges.
However, I just came upon an article at the TalkOrigins website that presents a 15-step scenario by which the author says that the Bombardier beetle could have evolved. I haven't had time to take it in yet, but I will do later later and discuss it. This should be interesting. I hope it's better than a supposed refutation of Michael Behe's bacterium flagellum argument I read recently, in which the author said in essence, "Well, part X of the bacterium flagellum could earlier have had some other useful function Y, and therefore it was selected, and this explains how intermediate Darwinian mutations led step by step to the functioning 30-part bacterium flagellum! I have just refuted that idiot Behe who might as well be a dog catcher." The author (like Dawkins above) evidently thought his argument was not only persuasive but definitive.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 08, 2008 09:32 PM |