Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962)
quoted here
"I first wrote that in a book review in the New York Times in 1989, and it has been much quoted against me ever since, as evidence of my arrogance and intolerance. Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.
By far the largest of the four categories is "ignorant," and ignorance is no crime .... Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid, or insane (probably ignorant), and you wouldn't think me arrogant for saying so. It is not intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid, or (probably) insane. It's just true. The difference is that not many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the Earth is flat, so it isn't worth calling attention to their ignorance. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million U.S. citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago. This is more serious. ...
I don't withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other. I think this is one of the truly bad things religion can do to a human mind. There is wickedness here, but it is the wickedness of the institution and what it does to a believing victim, not wickedness on the part of the victim himself. "
Ignorance Is No Crime by Richard Dawkins
Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 21, Number 3.
Well, I'd say I'm very confident of the fact of evolution,
but Dawkins is very confident indeed, eh? (Of course, he should know.)
(A page on this site on / Richard Dawkins /)
"Saying that evolution is a theory and not a fact confuses the scientific meaning of these words with their common meaning. In science, "theory" does not mean "guess" or "hunch." It means an overarching explanation that has been well-substantiated by extensive evidence. ...
...evolution is a theory supported by so much observational and experimental evidence that the overall concept is no longer actively questioned in science. Scientists continue to study the details of how evolution occurs. But there is no debate within the scientific community over whether evolution occurred.
Requiring teachers to declare that evolution is an unresolved issue creates a dangerous precedent. What other religiously or politically based views should science teachers be required to present? And what groups would decide that these views should be included in the science curriculum?"
Students Need to Learn About Evolution by Bruce Alberts
An opposing view --
"Evolution is false science‚ and most people, not having been trained to work with scientific tools, feel unable tosuccessfully reply to "science." Please, do not let the subject buffalo you! The problem is not science, but evolutionaryinterpretations. Although you may not have been educated in scientific research methods, you can understand the basic facts;and that is what counts. All that it takes is common sense."Facts You Should Know - Evolution injures people, their morals, and their minds. (sic)
from the Creation-EvolutionEncyclopedia
On the one hand, it's fair to say that the Scientific Method is highly refined and formalized common sense.
On the other, this refinement and formalization allows Science to discover the truth far more effectively than "common" common sense.
-- See, for example, the superb comments from Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World : Science As a Candle in the Dark, in chapter 18, "The Wind Makes Dust". From page 315,
"Scientific thinking has almost certainly been with us from the beginning....Of (Alan) Cromer's criteria for "objective thinking", we can certainly find in hunter-gatherer peoples vigorous and substantive debate, direct participatory democracy, wide-ranging travel, no priests *, and the persistence of these factors not for 1,000 but for 300,000 years or more. By his criteria hunter-gatherers ought to have science. I think they do. Or did."* This is perhaps slightly misleading,
as the ubiquity and antiquity of shamanism among hunter-gatherers is well-attested,
and I'm not sure whether Cromer's criteria would distinguish between "priests" and "shamans".
Sagan does say that "There is no hint in the !Kung tracking protocols of magical methods --
examining the stars the night before, or the entrails of an animal,
or casting dice,or interpreting dreams, or conjuring demons, or any of the myriad other
spurious claims to knowledge that humans have intermittently entertained."(page 315)
Cromer, Uncommon Sense : The Heretical Nature of Science
-- Sagan is following a remark by Thomas Huxley
Collected Essays, Vol 2, Darwiniana : Essays, pages 175-176 (from "Mr. Darwin's Critics"),
quoted on page 308 of Candle
-- and cf. this comment from Richard Nelson, in his article "Searching for the Lost Arrow", chapter 6 of The Biophilia Hypothesis
by Stephen R. Kellert (Editor), Edward O. Wilson (Editor)"Several times, when an Inupiaq hunting companion did something particularly clever, he pointed to his head and declared: "You see .. Eskimo scientist!" At first I took this for hyperbole, but as time went on I realized he was telling the truth. Scientists had visited his community and he recognized a familiar commitment to the empirical method."
"Several thousand years ago, a small tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories were embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject."
Science Made Stupid
quoted here
"... examination, pondering and possible revision have firmly established evolution as an important natural process explained by valid scientific principles, and clearly differentiate and separate science from various kinds of nonscientific ways of knowing, including those with a supernatural basis such as creationism. Whether called "creation science," "scientific creationism," "intelligent-design theory," "young-earth theory" or some other synonym, creation beliefs have no place in the science classroom. Explanations employing nonnaturalistic or supernatural events, whether or not explicit reference is made to a supernatural being, are outside the realm of science and not part of a valid science curriculum."
from the Position Statement on Teaching Evolution
of the National Association of Biology Teachers / NABT
-- a nice linklist
There's no reason to think that the entire universe -- complete with mountains, fossils, redwoods, ruins, fingernails, and memories -- was not created this morning (the Omphalos theory.) Creationism is therefore not empirically refutable and is not a scientific theory by most definitions. -- and "Of that whereof we cannot speak, we may as well remain silent" (Wittgenstein, more-or-less)Creationism and evolutionism are both "theories of origins".
Creationists commonly expand the area of inquiry beyond that which is formally covered by Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.
In a larger sense, however, Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is a subset of the naturalistic/materialistic scientific worldview.What is the mechanism of species origination?
This is the realm formal Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory addresses.What is the origin of life on Earth?
This is of peripheral interest to Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, however, the consensus of modern science is that no non-naturalistic mechanisms are required to account for the origin of life.What is the origin of the Earth itself, the Moon and other astronomical bodies and phenomema?
This topic is completely outside the scope of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, however modern science is entirely comfortable addressing it, and no novel mechanisms seem to be required.What is the origin of the Universe itself?
Completely outside the purview of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, and a topic of considerable mystery to science in general.
However, in and of itself this means very little. To say honestly when we do not know, "I do not know" can hardly be considered reprehensible. To say, "I will endeavor to find out" cannot either.
The astonishing progress of scientific knowledge should make us very wary of believing that what is a mystery today is fated to remain a mystery forever, or even for the next hundred years.
Richard Dawkins succinctly expresses the modern evolutionary orthodoxy in The Selfish Gene, p 192
-- "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities"
That Darwinian selection is an accurate description of the behavior of replicators is pretty much tautological -- i.e., we can say that Darwinian theory is "the body of theory which describes the behavior of replicators".
Therefore, as a formal system, Darwinian theory is definitely true, in the same way that "the bishop moves on the diagonal" is definitely true of chess.
So what is left to consider is:"Does this theory of Darwinian evolution apply to actual life on Earth?"
The sorts of issues we want to discuss are:- Does the theory of Darwinian replicators in fact describe the reproduction of genes?
- Even if genes are inherited according to the rules of Darwinian replicators, do the observable anatomical and behavioral characteristics of living things (phenotype) result from these genes?
- Is there a qualitative distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, or do these both operate by the same process?
"Thus, the orthodoxy of young-earth creationism poses an insane dilemma; if the world is old, God would be a fibber, and ifyoung, He would be a counterfeiter! Taking young-earth dogma to its conclusion, if we could not trust God to give us a truehistory of the world we live in, how could we trust Him to give us true history and true prophecy in His Book? A God whocould falsify nature might falsify a resurrection!"
"Although evolution is incompatiblewith with some sectarian religious dogma, there is nothing in evolution that rules out the existence of God. Darwin's theory ofnatural selection has been falsely interpreted to apply to the philosophical concept of "Social Darwinism," which states thatthose who believe in the validity of evolution must necessarily support the politics of "might makes right." "
"The evolutionists wanted to remove God from people's lives. In its place, they substituted viciousness. Evolutionary theory laysthe seeds for the destruction of civilization. Evolution teaches savagery. It declares that only those creatures who were the most vicious have succeeded down through theages. "Survival of the fittest" it is called, and it means that those animals and primitive man, who crushed their competitors,succeeded. This is a horrible teaching to give to humanity."
Pretty horrible, yes. However, it's not what evolutionists claim.
""The evolutionists wanted to remove God from people's lives."
This of course is backwards. The evolutionists, being scientists, wanted to remove any unscientific bits from our description of the origins of species (we'll follow Steven Schafersman here and define "scientific" as "determining the truth of an idea by applying empiricism, rationalism, and skepticism"). And of course, they did want scientific knowledge to be part of people's everyday understanding and lives. And the existence and activities of God not being subject to scrutiny by empiricism, rationalism, and skepticism, any understanding of God is not part of a strictly scientific description of the origins of species.
"In its place, they substituted viciousness and savagery".
This is a misstatement of evolutionary theory, though a common one. "Fitness" can be defined as the success with which an organism's descendents, or (to look at it another way) genes, survive and spread. A mother, for example, ensures the survival of her genes not by showing viciousness and savagery to her offspring, but by helping them. Similarly, by helping one's other relatives, one increases the chances one's genes will survive and spread. Commensal or symbiotic relationships are also common, where completely unrelated species "help" each other. This altruistic or helping behavior is every bit as much a part of evolution as competion and "struggle".
"Speciation is a fundamental issue in evolutionary biology, but it is both fascinating and frustrating: we know it does happen butit its an historical phenomenon so it is difficult to observe. ...We must rely on strong inference to properly understand speciation. Thisinference is in many cases very rigorous and scientific although it is historical, i.e., requires an interpretation of what has goneon in the past."
--the good folks at OCRT are being charitable
-- I'd say it's far more accurate to write this as "Creation Science" or Creation "Science"
"Historians have documented meticulously the fact that Darwinism has had a devastating impact, not only on Christianity, but also on theism."On the site of the Institute for Creation Research / ICRand presumably intended to support the Creationist view, but unlike most Creationist literature presents the philosophical naturalist perspective (aka "evolutionary humanism", to use ICR's own phrasing) frankly and without editorial embellishments.
"Within the first pages of Richard Dawkins' newest book - The Greatest Show on Earth; the evidence for evolution the author continues on his life-long spree of neologisms by coining a new term for expressing the concept of evolution. Dawkins proposes a change from calling it the "theory of evolution" to the "theorum of evolution." This is not to be confused with a mathematical THEOREM spelled with an e but is chosen to give a more specific slant and weight to a particular meaning of the word "theory" in the context of evolution. This particular meaning being a systematic set of ideas that account for a body of facts."
"It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this knowledge gap, newly published research suggests the key factor isn’t faith per se but rather a benefit it provides that Darwin does not: A sense that our all-too-short lives have meaning. ...
A team of researchers led by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy report reminders of our mortality apparently inspire antagonism toward this basic scientific precept.
Tracy and her colleagues use the framework of terror management theory, which is based on the seminal theories of anthropologist Ernest Becker. According to this extensively researched school of thought, humans buffer their fear of death 'by construing the universe as an orderly, comprehensible, predictable and meaningful place, where death can be literally or symbolically transcended.' ...
Reminders of death tend to evoke 'enthusiastic adherence' to our religious and political belief systems, since they are the mechanisms that promise us either literal or symbolic immortality. (This dynamic -- the threat of annihilation by an enemy leads us to pledge allegiance to our nation or faith even more vigorously -- provides another plausible explanation for the prevalence of war.)"