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Friday, July 08, 2011

Comment of the day

I said this in my post below about Menken's clownish attempts to discuss evolution, but one of my commenters said it better:

Menken said: Once my biases were removed, however, I gradually rejected evolution as an unproven and unlikely conjecture.
To see the bias of the evolutionists, on the other hand, one merely need observe their reaction to the theory called Intelligent Design.
Sir Francis Crick himself (with James Watson, the discoverer of the DNA molecule) found the probabilities for evolution to have occurred by chance so overwhelmingly unlikely that he promoted a theory of Directed Panspermia, genetic seeding from outer space


SKP said: In these debates about evolution, two things scream that the anti-evolutionist likely doesn't know what they are talking about:

1) When they demonstrate that they don't know the scientific meaning of the word "theory"
2) When they confuse evolution and abiogenesis

If they don't know what a "theory" is and they don't know what "evolution" is, then they probably don't know what the Theory of Evolution is for them to be opining/criticizing it in the first place!
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In a follow-up comment to his own post, Menken avers that he has two very smart friends who also think evolution is bunk... er "that the mathematical probabilities are too poor for chance mutation to explain the evolutionary process." The fact that Menken thinks this relevant tells us all we need to know about how his epistemology works. See, neither of his two smart friends are biologists! Both are physicists. Why would Menken offer their opinions as evidence? I have an extremely smart plumber. He's an absolutely brilliant guy. Should we see what he thinks about heart surgery? 

Look, I don't doubt that these friends of Menken are intelligent, but they obviously haven't read up on this particular subject. Had they, or Menken bothered with elementary research, they'd have discovered that the  probabilities behind evolution are not too poor, and that this has been demonstrated several times over.

Also,  they'd have learned that the evolutionary process has nothing to do with random chance. If it did, Menken would be right. It it all came down to random chance, it would not be possible for life to develop via evolution. However, this is not the claim. Scientists don't say evolution was the product of random chance, but of NON RANDOM natural selection.The fact that Menken and his friends are unaware of this basic fact, is another reason to disregard their objections.

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