Weekly Wrap-Up

Dr. Francis Collins, author of the best-selling, but ultimately self-defeating book, The Language of God, is expected to be President Obama’s nominee to head the National Institutes of Health. A cliche choice for a cliche President.


A review of Niles Eldredge's book, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism: "Where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms."


Denyse O'Leary Coins A Great Term: "Darwinbots." "I call the outraged Darwinists “Darwinbots” because I’ll bet that most of them have never seen The Privileged Planet or considered grappling with the questions it raises about design and purpose in the universe.Einstein and Heisenberg grappled with these questions, but the matters that torment great thinkers are beneath the notice of Darwinbots, whose program does not, so far as I can see, contain an independent thinking module."


Denyse O'Leary on the Motivation Behind "Evolutionary Psychology:" The Darwinist "cannot accept that humans actually have consciousness or free will, or that our current circumstances largely result from the exercise of these functions. Rather, he needs to find the answers in the unthinking behavior of non-humans and pre-humans...Any explanation of that sort, no matter how ridiculous, will always make more sense to him than any explanation based on the effects of intelligence, as a creative force in its own right."


Denyse O'Leary on the Link between Darwinism and Marxism: "I don’t see my blog as an exercise in Christian apologetics...I am fascinated by the decline of materialism, typified by widespread public scoffing at its creation story, Darwinism. Had I been born twenty years earlier, I might have covered the decline of Marxism in the same intrigued way, but that show was largely over by the mid-Eighties." For my take on this subject, see here and here.