Dawkins Recommends Human Meat

Would you let this man baby sit with your [tasty, milk fed] children?

Richard Dawkins Suggests Eating Human Flesh to Overcome Cannibalism ‘Taboo’

Richard Dawkins Tweets Support for Possible Antifa-Friendly Shooter

‘Durn Tootin’, Great Shootin”: Richard Dawkins Mocks Americans, 2nd Amendment After Las Vegas Shooting

Noted evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins greeted the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas by tweeting his contempt for Americans and the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah!”

Dawkins tweeted, apparently attempting to mock a southern accent — perhaps in a reference to the country music festival at which the shooting took place.

He added: “Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns”.

One observer tweeted this in response:

Joe George • 16 hours ago

We know that Stephen Paddock was living with Marilou Danley. Marilou Danley had been married to Geary Danley. Geary Danley was an Antifa supporter, a violent Trump hater, and a registered Democrat. This information was available on his FB page until it was closed this morning. It is 'likely' that they all shared similar political views. There was a Country Western event taking place, so white conservatives. The fact that a man associated with Antifa Trump haters chose to shoot up a group of white conservatives indicates that his motive was political.

Should this work out to be the case, then Antifa has scored big against the hated Right Wing. The Democrat Party military arm starts the revolution? We'll see.

Dawkins: Banned at Berkely

Richard Dawkins Now A Heretic To Progressives

Never analyze Islam if you want to speak at Berkeley. Islam is a Protected Victimhood Category.

‘World’s most famous atheist’ booted from Berkeley because of his ‘hurtful speech’ on Islam

Dr. Dawkins’ Deceptive Demonstration Doesn’t Display Descent

Evolutionists sometimes claim that there is nothing which evolution cannot “explain”. Stories can be created to cover everything and nothing. However, there are some creatures which serve as falsifiers, in the sense of not having any stories possible to account for their existence. Of a number of cases which have no story – e.g. woodpeckers, platypus - the Bombardier Beetle is a common first-lister.

The Bombardier Beetle is named for its ability to discharge and aim a hot, steaming chemical toxin from its posterior glands to repel predators. This entails generating and combining two chemicals in the presence of two specific necessary catalysts in an internal reaction chamber, also called the explosion chamber [1]. The resulting heated toxin and steam are aimed and directed toward predators, with some being able to deflect the stream straight forward and even to cover themselves with the offensive defense soup, to prevent being eaten. Others merely expel a hot, toxic fog in front of the predator.

The issue is how this evolved; specifically, what evolutionary path created the many components needed for this defense mechanism to work, even at a minimal level. Where are the precursor beetles which evolved in steps to this condition of complexity?

There are several components which must simultaneously exist for this to happen.

Watch Dawkins take on the evolution of the Bombardier Beetle in his video:



Dang. I missed it, I guess. Where in this "explanation" does Dawkins reveal the evolutionary steps required to develop the internal chemistry and structure of the beetle? Where does he enumerate the mutations and their exact locations in the DNA which made this beetle entirely different from all others? Where does he point out the "gradual" mutations which were kept, and which must have included both the peroxide, the claimed catalyst, and the hydroquinone. Not to mention the output of boiling temperature benzoquinones and steam. And also not to mention the fully aimable, pulsed jet stream which can be directed nearly 360 degrees including forward, or to the beetle’s own shell to deter attackers.

Here’s what Dawkins purposefully did: he ignored the actual conditions for catalyzed explosion in the beetle’s explosion chamber. He did this in order to prove his point that some catalyzed oxidation events can be shown to have gradations in the volatility which correspond to the amount of catalyst. He did this by using gun powder, which does not at all correlate with the process used in the chemistry of the beetle’s explosion. He did NOT show that to be the case for the beetle, and further he showed absolutely zero interest in defining the evolutionary steps required – and requiring isolation empirically – for the development of the beetle’s chemical processes. However, Dawkins was successful in demonstrating the possibility of gradual hardening of the explosion chamber, IFF the beetle used gun powder instead of the actual components.

Here’s the full story, which Dawkins dishonestly avoids by claiming that the hydroquinone is of no importance, when in fact it is of specific importance.

1. The output spray product is at roughly 100 degC, and is a caustic product called benzoquinone along with steam. Benzoquinone has been compared with burning plastic, and it is an interrupter of synapses in the control of skeletal muscles.

2. The process starts internally in cells that are said to produce both the hydrogen peroxide and the hydroquinone; they are stored separately, and are recombined on demand. The chemical process requires the presence of catalysts, one for the reduction of the peroxide in order to form oxygen, another which catalyzes hydroquinone with oxygen to produce benzoquinone and H2O plus heat. The catalysts are present in the explosion chamber.

3 There is a valving system which allows the two chemicals into the reaction chamber when the pressure inside the chamber is lower than the supply line pressure. When the reaction chamber pressure increases to greater than the supply line pressure, the inline valve closes, preventing backwash. The high pressure in the reaction chamber is released outward past deflection devices which are muscle controlled and are aimed with high accuracy. The deflection devices change the path of the ejecta to the direction chosen by the beetle.

4. Tests on various predators show revulsion and confusion when hit with the hot toxin which is sprayed by the beetle. Some show loss of control of musculature.

5. The spray varies by beetle “tribe” or sub-clade from a mist to a pulsed jet.

It’s no wonder that Dawkins didn’t use the hydrogen peroxide with the hydroquinone: it might have damaged the audience and himself. That would demonstrate the improbability of that combination of chemicals being developed accidentally, without the protective chambering and valving pre-existing. And why would the chambering and valving become so complex without having the combination of hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone production systems to use it?

And why is the beetle not affected by this toxin?

What Dawkins did was to use the magician’s trick of diverting attention away from the actual subject. He did this with a misdirection to a pretense of scientific experiment – smoke and beakers. And he made a point which fails the slightest examination (beetles don’t use simple gunpowder), yet which the audience accepted completely.

And more conclusively, Dawkins provided absolutely zero validation for the claim that evolution actually did produce this one-off capacity. In the final analysis, it’s all smoke. All of it.

Might we legitimately conclude that Dawkins, Darwin's Chihuahua, has no actual "story" for explaining the Bombardier Beetle? Yes, we might.

UPDATE:
After watching the video one more time, I notice that Dawkins actually says that "the hydroquinone does nothing at all, and we can set it aside". That is more than a misdirection; it is false, and is a purposeful lie. The actual, real reaction involves hydrogen peroxide, hydroquinone, and two (2) catalysts. The result is not what Dawkins produces in his science-fair misdirection cum lie. The actual reaction is more complex.

UPDATE 2:
Two interesting videos on Bombardier Beetles (there are a number of less interesting ones of course).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgqF-ND2XcY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukSdJizRFI

NOTES:
1. http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-bombardier-beetles-produce-defensive-spray-0430

Dawkins: No Atheist Violence

Richard Dawkins responds to the suggestion atheists are violent

'If you think atheists are violent you don't know what violence means'

"The evolutionary biologist, 75, gave his response to the question "Why is the Atheist Religion so violent?" during a Reddit AMA.

"There is no atheist religion," Dawkins replied. "And 'violent'? Did you say 'violent'?

"Oh yes, I was forgetting. All those atheists beheading people, setting fire to them, cutting off their hands, cutting off their clitorises.

"If you think atheists are violent you don't know what violence means."

Tell that to the Kulaks, the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the Nicaraguans, etc., etc., etc. I really don't know how Dawk gets around what with his head up where he keeps it. He's an ever increasing embarrassment to his cause.

Regarding Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker

The blogger-troll self-appelled "IM Skeptical" is making assertions at another blog:

IM Skeptical:

"- I have read the entire book. [Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker] And I think you have entirely missed the point. Yes, people have an intuitive feeling that biological things are designed. But intuitions are often wrong. I suggest you read Coyne's Why Evolution Is True.[note 1] It describes many vivid examples of why that intuitive feeling doesn't bear critical scrutiny."

This person insists that speculation which is not testable or falsifiable is to be regarded as valid because it is loosely labeled as “science”. He says, “I’ll stick with science”, despite the failure of his sources to produce a single mote of objective knowledge in the form of empirical justification. The Dawkins book to which he refers is a splendid example of such sources. As shown below, Dawkins preaches rather than referring to falsifiable, testable concepts which are backed by empirical non-falsification.

Dawkins and the Eye
I love Dawkins assessment of the eye's development: What good is 5% of an eye? Dawkins spends 10 pages [p77-86] on the benefit of 5% of vision, assuming that there is a completely connected system, formed using 5% of the completed pathway. ”Without an eye you are totally blind. With half an eye you may at least be able to detect the general direction of a predator’s movement, even if you can’t focus a clear image.” It's like a bike path compared to a 12 lane highway, with both being complete and going to the same place. But that's, as David Berlinski points out, "the magician's age-old tactic of misdirection." The issue is not the percentage of an eye, it is the percentage of the entire sight systemic complex, from photon input to qualia of vision in the mind. Half and eye produces zero vision, unless there is a complete vision system from lens to qualia.

For example, five percent of an eye, then, would be an orb with a lens and nothing more; no receptors, to neural connections, no path to the brain, and most importantly, no qualia - no experience of sight. Or 5% of an eye might be the muscles and the movement of the orb, and nothing else; again no connection, no qualia, no sight.

I think Dawkins is not so stupid as not to understand this. I think the deception is purposeful sleight of hand – misdirection of an argument by arguing not about vision, but rather arguing only about part of the system. It is necessary to obscure the obvious conclusion that the development of the sight system cannot have happened one (not so simple) sub-system component at a time, accidentally and without purpose. A complete eye is useless without the other sub-systems which are absolutely necessary for any representative qualia to occur.

The facts surrounding negative mutations (which obliterate the probability of saved proto-beneficial mutations for individual components) are devastating to this simplistic argument. Those beneficial mutations would be nuked by negative selection of deleterious mutations long before a 100% complete vision system (even at 5% vision) would ever be produced.

On page 40, Dawkins compares the time allowed for evolution to produce an eye (actually a complete sight system) is “several hundred million years.” For comparison he notes the much quicker time in which humans have guided the evolution of dogs from wolves (falsified recently) into

“Pekinese, Bulldog, Chihuahua, and Saint Bernard. Ah but they are still dogs, aren’t they? They haven’t turned into a different kind of animal. Yes, if it comforts you to play with words like that, you can call them all dogs. But just think about the time involved.”

So Dawkins admits, grudgingly, that it is the Black and White Fallacy that he is invoking, but he goes ahead and does it anyway. There is no rational comparison between breeding wolves downward or upward within their own genome (micro-evolution within a species’ genome), and creating a brand new, highly complex vision system. The projected time of several million years is superficially a misdirection based in large numbers which relate to nothing which is pertinent.

This type of meta-narrative thinking is rampant in evolutionism. To make a simplistic, molecular-evidence-free speculation with less credibility than most science fiction allows the evolutionist to declare a “science”.

Bombardier Beetle
Another astonishing claim in Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker” is his assessment of the Bombardier Beetle [p87]. According to Dawkns, claims about the explosion chamber are false; there is no explosion when the two chemicals are added together. So there could be no “exploded beetles”. The real situation is that the chemicals do react violently in the presence of a catalyst. He concludes that since the two chemicals pre-exist in living creatures, then

“the bombardier Beetle’s ancestors simply pressed into different service chemicals that already happened to be around. That’s often how evolution works.”

And that’s it. That is the entire explanation Dawkins puts forth. It matters not that the complexity of the combination of chemicals, catalyst, and insulated fluid dynamic chamber with its jetted port and triggering mechanism has gone UP under his assessment. He has used misdirection again, and left the issue hanging as if he has solved it.

Complexity

”Organized complexity is the thing we are having trouble explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. That, indeed, is what most of this book is about” [p141]

That is certainly true, in both cases. When you presuppose the existence of something which you cannot prove, cannot see, cannot test, and THEN base your hypotheses for your remaining career-making theory, including the deceptions in this book, why, nothing is too hard to explain any more. Just presuppose its Truth. And presuppose the Truth of your conclusion right there in the premise..And that is, indeed, the concept underlying the entire book.

The Weasel Routine
For another example presented in the “Blind Watchmaker”, Dawkins designed a computer routine which would randomly select letters to be fit into the spaces occupied by the phrase, “methinks it is like a weasel”. Dawkins then found that within only a few generations, the phrase had been created from the random inputs. [p46-50] It took only 41 iterations, and 11 seconds. Dawkins claimed that this is a case for “cumulative selection” [p49], “in which each improvement, however slight, is used as a basis for future building”. He continues,

”if evolutionary progress had had to rely on single step selection, it would never have got anywhere. If, however, there was a way in which the necessary conditions for cumulative selection could have been set up by the blind forces of nature, strange and wonderful might have been the consequences. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what happened on this planet, and we ourselves are among the most recent, if not the strangest and most wonderful of these consequences.”

The world of programmers, engineers and rational seven year old nerds immediately pointed out the obvious flaws in the “weasel” program. First, the computer routine is teleological, in that it knows the answer in advance. So when a letter matches the predetermined answer, that letter is kept because the selection criterion is previously determined. This progresses until all the letters turn up and the correct letter for each position is kept, and the desired phrase is formed. Second, the entire enterprise is intelligently designed. So this routine is another misdirection; it does not even represent actual theories of evolution, and in fact goes counter to them.

Mutations
And the admitted necessity of accumulation of all the necessary components before they are asserted all together fails the test of rationality, first in the certain knowledge that the probabilities are so powerfully against this occurring, that they are effectively zero, because the creation of a series of interrelated organs requires many, many perfect information-bearing mutations to be absolutely correct and completely available. And most importantly, they would never survive long enough to accumulate due to modification by deleterious mutations which far outnumber any accidental organ-forming beneficial mutation.

If there were a smell test for evolutionary bull excrement, this would fail immediately.

For any of the claims in this book one might ask, “what is the material evidence which makes these claims into objective knowledge?” and the answer would be: none. Every claim is speculation without any hope of verification, validation or non-falsification. No claim is any more than the proverbial “Just So Story” which Stephen Jay Gould warned about. Bottom line, then, is that it is all imaginary, but is built up as a “rational case” for an unprovable hypothesis.

Thus it cannot succeed as representative of empirical science, because empirical science robustly provides the conditions for objective knowledge by providing testable, replicable, falsifiable deductive hypotheses which are independently verifiable, falsifiable and replicable with open data taken on the cause and effect being tested.

Evolution is a presumed effect of unknown causes (“mutation” is not a cause, it is a category of presumptive causes which are unknown) which cannot be objectively falsified, tested, or replicated. For example, creating all the phyla out of a single cell progenitor cannot be replicated, because the cause cannot even be estimated.

The real questions, those bearing on the actual, functional mechanisms regarding molecular-level changes are not addressed, because there is no knowledge to provide to the reader on that level. The entire thrust of evolution is couched in hierarchical meta-hypotheses, and never in specifics or particulars. There is nothing testable about Darwinian claims, nor about Dawkins’ attempt to justify them. Thus, not being falsifiable, the claims are found to be in the category of blind belief: fundamentalist religion.

Here are some issues and questions that should occur to any truly disinterested student of Darwinism and Evolutionism:

1.Mutations are subtractive [p169]. Modification of something which already exists necessarily deletes something which pre-existed. Some part of the genome is modified from A to B, eliminating or at least destroying the capability to produce A. So in this sense, all modifications are foremost destructive if they are not also additive.

2. Exactly what portion of the genome had to mutate, in order to produce an all new organ/system? I.e., where on the DNA did the modifications occur? Or is the information not in the DNA genome, and rather is contained elsewhere, as is much of the organism’s information?

3. How many bits of information are involved in the creation of the new organ? I.e., how much of the DNA had to be changed – correctly – and with correct intron/exons and other markers? If the information regarding the construction of a vision system is not found in the DNA, then where is it located?

4. What (exactly defined at the molecular level) was sacrificed in order to produce the new organ/system?

5. Evolutionist arguments are stuck at the level of the set of all possible mutations. And to the concept that DNA contains all the information, when it is known not to be the case. This set of all possible mutations is endowed with characteristics which are not measured or measurable, but are assumed for no reason other than science fiction. The invocation of “positive mutations” is undefinable at the actual level at which it supposedly occurs. The portion of the genome which was supposedly replaced is unknowable, since it is gone in the modern organism. It is more likely by far that the destruction caused by even a “positive mutation”, especially one of organic complexity, would outweigh the benefit of the “positive mutation”.

6. The proposed acquisition of multiple interdependent organic systems, along with their regulatory feedback systems and multiple language requirements for comprehensive control would mean a massive subtractive destruction of prior DNA. This makes the success of such an enterprise rationally impossible.

Further, the appropriate sudden acquisition of all the proper components of interdependent organ systems and their regulatory feedback systems with multiple appropriate languages which function together properly is rationally impossible. Further, any claims that gene-switching and epigenetic manipulations such as recombination [note 2] cause the creation of interdependent organic systems, feedback control systems, and multiple languages appropriate to each communication system are rationally impossible.

The standard response to this type of argument is the “Deep Time” plaint, which is made as if time were causal; time is not causal and the issue remains as the simultaneous creation of these organic systems due to build-up of saved beneficial mutations.

But, the deeper the time require to acquire and save these fortuitous mutations, the less probability that beneficial mutations, if they existed at all, would avoid annihilation by deleterious mutations.

The specific development of the interrelated cardio-vascular system, with the oxygenation and CO2 elimination function, and with the blood generation and filtration systems, along with the necessary metabolic and nutrient intake/waste output systems is massive complex. To believe that this all occurred due to saved up beneficial, correct information-bearing mutations to be expressed all at once is the concept which evolutionists must accept, as blind faith.

So this is the type of science which impresses IMS, and which he insists is valid and must be accepted; not to accept such irrationality has, in the past, caused IMS to go directly to Ad Hominem Abusive eptithets, such as science-denier, creationist, rather than to provide actual scientific, falsifiable, testable data in defense of the blind belief in evolution. And again, without such empirical justification, however conditional and fragile, the belief remains totally blind, blinded by science-fictional Just So Stories. If materialist evolution is to be believed, the argument for it must include, not more-meta narrative, but specifics of what happened at the molecular level (the effect), and the cause for that effect.

As it stands, there is neither a credible effect for evolution, nor any sign of a credible cause. It is merely a fantasy story built at the meta-narrative level, one which supports both many careers (with taxpayer funding) and the unprovable and falsified Philosophical Materialist worldview.

NOTES:
1. Coyne's fallacies are discussed HERE.

2. The following is a discussion of recombination:

“Whereas asexuals must move against selection to escape local optima, sexuals reach higher fitness peaks reliably because they create specific genetic variants that "skip over" fitness valleys, moving from peak to peak in the fitness landscape. This occurs because recombination can supply combinations of mutations in functional composites or 'modules', that may include individually deleterious mutations. Thus when a beneficial module is substituted for another less-fit module by sexual recombination it provides a genetic variant that would require either several specific simultaneous mutations in an asexual population or a sequence of individual mutations some of which would be selected against.”

This is found in a posting which purports to support recombination as a source of multiple mutation variation in a single step; Yet it does not explain how the “beneficial module” came into existence in the first place. Why should the expectation be that all the information for a working multi-organ system pre-exist in the genome, just waiting to be engaged in recombination? Even and especially if that involves some sort of shuffling action? So the recombination argument is not useful in defending Darwinism or any other form of evolutionary hypotheses.

Jerry Coyne Gets A Richard Dawkins Award

Jerry Coyne Receives 2015 Richard Dawkins Award!
Atheist Alliance of America is pleased to announce that Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D., is the 2015 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, presented annually at AAofAmerica’s national conference. Dr. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Why Evolution is True as well as the soon-to-be-released Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.

Next up, Dawkins will be celebrated with a Jerry A. Coyne Award.

Coyne's claim to fame is his book, "Why Evolution Is True". This book uses the same type of "truth" that is used in the book, "A Universe From Nothing", by lawrence Krauss. In both books the title refers to a concept which is both false, and which is not proven in the book. Like Krauss' book, Coyne's book is also completely false, as he admits toward the end. But starting early in the book, page 16, Coyne makes this claim:

"A theory becomes a fact (or a truth) when so much evidence has accumulated in its favor - and there is no decisive evidence against it - that virtually all reasonable people will accept it."

Let's parse this. First, "fact equals truth". This is a redefinition. Coyne takes the language into his own hands, for his own purposes. Krauss took the same presumptuous liberties with the word, "nothing", a term used in an inflammatory fashion to garner book sales. Fact is not the same as truth. A fact is a contingent thing which has limits; truth is not. For example it is fact as I write this that today is Tuesday. But that fact is contingent on my location, since that is not the case just across the international date line, even at this moment. The "fact" then, is merely a reporting of a volatile variable based on a human convention. Truth, as philosophers would have it - and as Coyne would pretend it - is immutable, incorrigible and non-contingent. Evolution is none of those things.

But it is worse than that. Coyne also says,

"This does not mean that a "true" theory will never be falsified. All scientific theory is provisional, subject to modification in light of new evidence. There is no alarm bell that goes off to tell scientists that they've finally hit on the ultimate, unchangeable truths about nature. As we'll see, it is possible that despite thousands of observations that support Darwinism, new data might show it to be wrong. I think this is unlikely, but unlike zealots, scientists can't afford to become arrogant about what they accept as true."

By this point, Coyne has claimed that (1) true = fact; (2) that true might be false; (3) that there are thousands of observations supporting Darwinism; (4) that only zealots and not scientists are arrogant about what they accept as true. None of these claims are correct, as is obvious by their inspection.

Despite these non-coherences, Coyne proceeds:

Evolution is predictive, Coyne claims on page 223:

"We've also seen that evolutionary biology makes testable predictions, though of course not in the sense of predicting how a particular species will evolve, for that depends on a myriad of uncertain factors such as which mutations crop up and how environments may change."

Short version of the above: Evolution can't predict evolution. Undaunted by this admission of evolutionary failure as actual useful, objective knowledge, Coyne charges ahead on the next page:

"Now, when we say that "evolution is true", what we mean is that the major tenets of Darwinism have been verified. Organisms evolved, they did so gradually, lineages split up into different species from common ancestors, and natural selection is the major engine of adaptation."

No. none of that is true. None of that is even contingent fact from the empirical science point of view. In fact, most of that is not even accepted theory by the elite evolutionists of today.

Consider this statement from "The Extended Synthesis" which is the compendium written as a result of the efforts of the Altenberg 16 conference on the status of evolution in 2011 (Coyne's book was written in 2009; he did not attend Altenberg).

"The overcoming of gradualism, externalism, and gene centrism are the general hallmarks of the Extended Synthesis, whether in the forms presented here or in the various other accounts to a similar effect published since the late 1990's."

Gradualism, the need for deep time, was defeated early on by the recognition that the Cambrian explosion created in a geologic moment (5 to 10 mya) all of the phyla (except one smaller one). Externalism refers to mutations as the mechanism required to leave the current genome in order to create a new one. In fact, the genome itself is now rejected as causally central to the creation of the phyla, new organs, new species and new information as is required by interpreting the fossil record as having "evolved".

In other words, Darwin's theoretical mechanisms, aka Darwinism, is dead. The mechanisms have been defeated for decades. The only remaining hope for Darwin is the fossil record and the story-telling that goes along with it. Beyond that, there are no - NO - data which show immutably and incorrigibly that evolution from protokaryotes to all the eukaryotic phyla was observed (not thousands of observations), nor that evolution of beneficial new organs or naturally selectable features ever actually even happened.

The fossil record provides objective knowledge of just one, single category of information: different animals lived at different times in history, the evidence being that their fossils are found in separate strata. (Note that no common ancestor for the eukaryote phyla has been found).

Evolution is not found in fossils. Evolution is a proposed, invented process which has been created in order to provide an explanation for the location of fossils, an explanation which does not exist either observably occurring in the fossils themselves, or empirically, experimentally reproducible in the fossils or using fossils. To even claim that would be absurd, yet the claim is that the concept of evolution is "true".

What Coyne and others consider to be true is demonstrated by Coyne in his chapter on the evolution of birds. Discussing "what is the use of half a wing?", Coyne launches into this narrative:

"But if you think about it a bit, its not so hard to come up with intermediate stages in the evolution of flight, stages that might have been useful to their possessors. Gliding is the first step."

Thus he veers off into bedtime stories which he, and other evolutionists, take to be truth (=fact). He finishes off the page with the obligatory use of Archeopteryx, which has long been unseated as a precursor to actual birds.

Coyne's actual value to Dawkins is not his book, it is his virulent and nasty Atheism which he displays on his website/blog, "Why Evolution Is True".

So we see that Dawkins and Coyne are built of the same intellectual stuff: what they want to be true will be true if they say it is true and write a book about it. THAT is their definition of truth.

Hitler On Dawkins

More For Dawkins to Consider

Not that he actually would. Ideologists and contrary data don't mix, in general. But this speaks to his love for socialist Sweden:

New 'feminist' government with a Green tinge in Sweden

Stockholm (AFP) - Sweden's new Social Democrat prime minister Stefan Loefven unveiled what he called a "feminist" government including Green Party ministers for the first time in the Nordic country.

It turns out that paradise has crumbled, so they voted in some more socialism:

""Sweden is in a serious situation -- unemployment has become entrenched at high levels, school results have collapsed and the welfare system has major shortcomings," he said."

Unemployment high in utopia? What about all those equal outcomes? If the unemployed make just what the employed make, then why would anyone want to be employed? And feel-good socialist education is not working? And the welfare system needs more...

It turns out that the socialists were "profit hunting" using government programs. Who would guess that government officials would be corrupt? Could that happen in utopia?

And of course there's always the "rape" panic. Will all PIV sex be banned in Utopia? How feminist will they be? Just a little? Or the whole lesbian agenda?

"He also vowed to criminalise Swedes that travel abroad for sex tourism, and to toughen the country's rape laws. "

Dawkins should be proud. Well, he's always proud, of course; but I mean proud of his socialist icon countries. They know that socialism is never enough: more socialism is always needed.

TIME Indulges Dawkins and His Toady

TIME online has published a - what should I call it? - article By Richard Dawkins and the head of his organization. They are incensed that anyone, especially a pol, would disrespect Atheists. Dawkins, whose mantra at the Reason Conference was to ridicule, RIDICULE, those who Atheists disagree with, declares such disrespect to be HATE, when he is on the receiving end of criticism.

"Unfortunately, not only does Huckabee have to be taken seriously as a possible Presidential candidate in 2016, but his suggestion that atheists who work for the government (primarily elected officials) be summarily “fired” is an applause line in too many quarters in the United States. That nonbelievers somehow deserve to be discriminated against is a view widely shared, particularly among Christian conservatives who seem to think “religion by the sword” is an oldie but a goodie.

This latest bit of hate was offered up – where else? – at the 2014 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. The ritual hookup between Christian conservatives and Republican presidential aspirants is a right wing, Jesus-loves-us debauch of Homophobia, Intolerance and Militarism, a trifecta easily remembered by the acronym “HIM”."

Atheists are hypocrites of the first order. They cannot comprehend why they are not trusted. But they feel totally justified in slinging their "trifecta" slurs: non-Atheists do this: Hate Homosexuals (homophobia); Are Intolerant of the "Do Anything I please" amorality of Atheism; Are guilty of defending the western nations from the barbarians using The Military. We Atheists will call it HIM for short, meaning The Other.

They are not speaking here to the normal person on the street. They are not even talking to Atheists any more. They are merely berserkoids out on a tear, angry possibly because no one ever listens to them any more. Here they go off on the metaphor "fired" without any comprehension that it means: vote them out:

"Huckabee, in a tortured metaphor about answering phones “God is ringing,” exhorted his audience to answer the God-call by making sure only people with the right values are hired for jobs in Washington and by making sure those who “refuse to hear … God’s heart” are fired. No joke, Huckabee is suggesting that we should: 1) Find out whether government employees are true believers; 2) Fire those who aren’t.

Yes, that is illegal, which makes the suggestion all the more stunning from someone who expects to be taken seriously on America’s national political stage."

Aside from not being an American, Dawkins is also no longer rational. What Huckabee means is that there are values which are "valuable" and which stem from a morality outside the elitist self; those contrast with the Leftist "values" which are merely the opinions of the elitist Leftists who want to dictate their opinions as moral values,which are actually valuable only to themselves.

"This Republican congressional candidate in Louisiana and nephew of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson, suggested on his faith-based podcast that atheism contributed to the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children and six adults in 2012.

Apparently, the premier driver was not the mental illness from which shooter Adam Lanza clearly suffered, nor was it that an unstable man was able legally to amass a stockpile of weapons, thanks to his mother supplying them.

According to Dasher, “the reason why (the Sandy Hook massacre) happened is that we have denied as a culture that man is made in God’s image.” He said the “atheist agenda” reinforces a message that says “you don’t matter … all you are is chemical, all you are is material.”

Dasher is right, especially in the case of Columbine, where the two teens were fans of Nietzsche, and likely in the case of Lanza, in an education system that preaches Evolution, secularism, and Atheism, the religion of demeaning human life as purely physical animal, while denying any and all possibility of non-physical existence. Atheism has no common moral base or grounding, no common set of moral principles, nothing at all to base a life and worldview upon except the fact that humans evolved just the same as gorillas, turkeys and bottom-feeding fish.

But they go on:

"Had Dasher bothered to find out about atheism, humanism and the nonreligious, he would have come to understand just how precious this community views life.

Unlike Dasher, who believes there is another existence – a better one — outside the temporal, atheists, humanists and freethinkers believe they have one life and one chance to do something meaningful with it. With no supernatural arbiter to fall back on, nonbelievers know it is up to them and them alone to promote justice, compassion and a fair society."

And if one cares to actually examine Humanism, for example, one would find the totalitarian, intolerant, elitist anti-moral group of misogynists that one finds in any collection of Atheists, Humanists and freethinkers. They always disguise this as justice, compassion, and a fair society. Which is why they are not only not trusted by rational non-Atheists, but are actually trusted to do only that which they "feel" is right for themselves, regardless of any morality of the Other.

"The proof that secular people are good, care for others and build healthy societies is evidenced in cross-national studies. The research of Phil Zuckerman at Pitzer College, demonstrates that secular societies, such as Sweden and Denmark, among others, are more likely to enjoy broadly shared prosperity and a high level of societal health and happiness than traditionally religious ones, and certainly more so than the United States."

Still quoting the fraudulent data from Zuckerman, too. That is pitiful, especially since it is so fundamentally wrong: the real, major Atheist societies in the past 100 years are not Sweden and Denmark, they are the USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. When these "secular", Atheist tyrannies are taken into account, Atheism is seen for what it really is: elitist totalitarian destructivism.

And as for "good", well it was this same Dawkins who declared that he could not say that what Hitler did was wrong. There is no "Good" or "Bad", nor is there "Good" or "Evil"; Nietzsche informed the world of that. No Atheist can be Good because there is no Atheist standard for Good. Conversely, no Atheist can be accused of being "Evil" because there is no standard for Evil.

It's so obvious that any competent adult can see it:

Any Atheist who claims to be Good is lying.

And lying is not bad or evil to an Atheist. It's merely consequentialist. It's just a tactic.

And quoting a self-appelled "evolutionary psychologist" doesn't resonate with anyone but the choir: Gregory Paul makes up Just So Stories based on no substance whatsoever.

"The historically unprecedented socioeconomic
security that results from low levels of progressive government policies appear to suppress
popular religiosity and creationist opinion, conservative religious ideology apparently
contributes to societal dysfunction, and religious prosociality and charity are less effective at
improving societal conditions than are secular government programs."

Paul makes the error in cause/effect because he claims to be an Atheist-evolutionist, and fitting the narrative is what these folks do. But reality is that abandoning faith in good times merely refers to the self-centered worldview that one develops when challenges in life lessen. Humans always assume that they are the cause of good times, and therefore, the good times will continue so long as they exist. And it always ends in decadence and the rise of totalitarianism: in other words, Atheist elitist "humanist" dictatorship of "Social Justice".

In fact, Gregory Paul appears to be a non-degreed fraud:

"So who is Gregory S. Paul and what are his qualifications to opine on the salubrious quality of agnosticism? We spent a considerable amount of time attempting to discover where Mr. (Dr.?) Paul received his training in sociology and/or statistical analysis, etc. Here’s what we found:

…

The above blank space is not a formatting error of some kind. It is the best we could come up with to signify nada, zero, zip, bupkis, nihilo, nothing. Yes, that’s right. We found nothing. As near as we can tell, Mr. Paul has no advanced degrees in statistical analysis, demography, sociology, or any other ology. In fact, it appears as though he holds no advanced degrees of any kind. He is, in fact, an artist and freelance paleontologist who has published two books in the area of dinosaur studies that re-imagine how they may have lived and operated on this planet. And to be fair, Mr. Paul seems to be respected for this work."
Verum Serum

But they, Dawkins and droid, veer ever Leftward as most Atheists do, toward communalism, aka communism, run by the elites:

"“(W)hen we consider the fundamental values and moral imperatives contained within the world’s great religions, such as caring for the sick, the infirm, the elderly, the poor, the orphaned, the vulnerable; practicing mercy, charity, and goodwill toward one’s fellow human beings; and fostering generosity, humility, honesty, and communal concern over individual egotism — those traditionally religious values are most successfully established, institutionalized, and put into practice at the societal level in the most irreligious nations in the world today."

So the actual Atheist nations, those who dominated the past 100 years, "put into practice" all the virtues mentioned above, which are actually attributable to religion, mostly Christianity? Anyone who reads either newsfeeds or cares a single whit about the history of world political cultures would gag at this assertion. North Korea? China? The USSR? Cambodia? Venezuela? Cuba? Really?

No, just the two relatively inconsequential countries mentioned by Phil Zuckerman, data which has actually been debunked.

And Dawkins Steps In It, Too

Richard Dawkins has inflamed the RadFem wing of Atheism, as has Harris (previous post). Dawkins tweeted this:

Richard DawkinsVerified account ‏@RichardDawkins

Follow @CHSommers. You may not agree with her but she's brave, & the Feedingfrenzy Thoughtpolice Bullies have got away with it for too long.

CH Sommers is the woman who is featured in the following video, "Feminism vs. Truth:



Now Dawkins is under the bus with Harris.

But over the last few months, Dawkins showed signs of détente with his feminist critics – even progress. He signed a joint letter with the writer Ophelia Benson, denouncing and rejecting harassment; he even apologized for the “Dear Muslima” letter. On stage at a conference in Oxford in August, Dawkins claimed to be a feminist and said that everyone else should be, too.

Then another prominent male atheist, Sam Harris, crammed his foot in his mouth and said that atheist activism lacks an “estrogen vibe” and was “to some degree intrinsically male”. And, just like that, the brief Dawkins Spring was over.

On Twitter these last few days, Dawkins has reverted to his old, sexist ways and then some. He’s been very busy snarling about how feminists are shrill harridans who just want an excuse to take offense, and how Harris’s critics (and his own) are not unlike thought police witch-hunter lynch mobs. Dawkins claimed that his critics are engaged in “clickbait for profit”, that they “fake outrage”, and that he wished there were some way to penalize them.

For good measure, Dawkins argued that rape victims shouldn’t be considered trustworthy if they were drinking.

Benson, with whom Dawkins had signed the anti-harassment letter just weeks earlier, was not impressed. “I’m surprised and, frankly, shocked by Richard’s belligerent remarks about feminist bloggers over the past couple of days,” she told me. “Part of what made The God Delusion so popular was, surely, its indignant bluntness about religion. It was a best-seller; does that mean he ‘faked’ his outrage?”

There’s no denying that Dawkins played a formative role in the atheist movement, but it’s grown beyond just him. Remarks like these make him a liability at best, a punchline at worst. He may have convinced himself that he’s the Most Rational Man Alive, but if his goal is to persuade everyone else that atheism is a welcoming and attractive option, Richard Dawkins is doing a terrible job. Blogger and author Greta Christina told me, “I can’t tell you how many women, people of color, other marginalized people I’ve talked with who’ve told me, ‘I’m an atheist, but I don’t want anything to do with organized atheism if these guys are the leaders.’”

It’s not just women who are outraged by Dawkins these days: author and blogger PZ Myers told me, “At a time when our movement needs to expand its reach, it’s a tragedy that our most eminent spokesman has so enthusiastically expressed such a regressive attitude.”

Is PZ currying favor with the RadFems as a political move within the movement? Whether or not, it's getting crowded under the Atheist bus.

Richard Dawkins: "It Is Immoral NOT To Abort A Downs Syndrome Human

The issue, says Dawkins, is not whether it is human; it is whether it can feel pain.

Dawkins no longer thinks through anything that pops into his head. For all I know Dawkins cannot feel pain. And for all he knows, Downs Syndrome fetuses can feel their limbs being ripped off. Muses Michael Brown,

"It is becoming increasingly clear that Dawkins is something of an embarrassment, even to other atheists (although he is still revered by many). The only question that remains is this: Are his irrational and immoral positions unique to him, or are they the logical outcome of his Darwinian evolutionism?"

Irrationality and Atheism go hand in hand, as this site has shown numerous times. The Atheist is free to make up his own morality, and given the reification and deification of Darwinist Evolution as the fundament of Atheism, it is no surprise that eugenics is part of the Atheist worldview.

Richard Dawkins has a vast echo chamber which affirms anything he says. Many Atheists credit Dawkins with saving their lives (from moral principles which they don't care for) and for making it clear that humans may be culled the same as any husbanded animal species, because human animals are accidents of evolution and no more than that.

Well, except for Atheist evolution story tellers who presume to have the moral authority to determine that it is immoral NOT to kill certain categories of humans. That person is venerated. The killing of the story teller would be an international tragedy with commensurate worldwide outrage. Even his eventual death due to Alzheimer's will likely bring about an international Dawkins Day, maybe just adjacent to Darwin Day.

The Inner Circles Of Evangelist Richard Dawkins

Capitalizing on his Savior-like visage, Richard Dawkins has created pay-for-access concentric circles, which anyone with the right amount of cash can enter. The rings work like this. For $85 per month for the Reason circle you get discounts on Dawkins items, such as t-shirts, AND you get to talk to other Atheists. But climbing through the Reason Circle and into the Science circle allows you to attend an event where Dawkins is present for only $210 per month. And the next ring, the Darwin circle, for $420/month allows you two events with Dawkins present.

This is all presented on Dawkins' site simultaneously with this scrolling message:

"Let's end secular discrimination and increase acceptance"

Well, for the right entry fee, maybe.

According to Andrew Brown at the Guardian,

Last year he tweeted a recommendation of comments collected by one of his followers at a book signing in the US. Among them were: ‘You’ve changed the very way I understand reality. Thank you Professor’; ‘You’ve changed my life and my entire world. I cannot thank you enough’; ‘I owe you life. I am so grateful. Your books have helped me so much. Thank you’; ‘I am unbelievably grateful for all you’ve done for me. You helped me out of delusion’; ‘Thank you thank you thank you thank you Professor Dawkins. You saved my life’; and, bathetically, ‘I came all the way from Canada to see you tonight.’ With this kind of incense blown at him, it’s no wonder he is bewildered by criticism.

Like all scriptures, the Books of Dawkins contain numerous contradictions: in The God Delusion itself he moves within 15 pages from condemning a pope who had baptised children taken away from Jewish parents to commending Nick Humphrey’s suggestion that the children of creationists be taken away because teaching your children religion is comparable to child abuse. So believers can always find a scripture where he agrees with them, which naturally cancels out the one where he doesn’t.

Whether he means that religious believers are despicable ‘stumbling, droning inarticulate .. yammering fumblewits’ who are ‘likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt’ (that’s from a 2009 blogpost) or ‘I don’t despise religious people. I despise what they stand for’ (from a 2012 speech) can lead to arguments as interminable as those over the peaceful or otherwise character of the Prophet Mohammed.

Similarly, does he mean that genes are selfish, or that they are co-operative? Both, it seems, and with equal vehemence. As he wrote, ‘The Selfish Gene could equally have been called The Co-operative Gene without a word of the book itself needing to be changed.’ This doesn’t seem to me to be strictly speaking true: it subverts the sense of a famous passage to change it to read: ‘Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own co-operative genes are up to, because we may then have a chance to upset their design, something which no other species has ever aspired to.’

But what has got him in trouble with his own side is not biology of that sort, but the appearance of racism and sexism. Some of the stuff that he has written and retweeted about ‘evil’ Islam is shocking. A recent Dawkins tweet mentioning ‘mild paedophilia’ produced an eruption of outrage across the sceptical movement, not really helped by his claiming that it was all a matter of logic, and his opponents had had their thinking clouded by emotion — and the one thing everyone knows about Dawkins is that his followers are entirely rational."

Dawkins: Being A Religious Moderate "Enables" Religious Extremists

Richard Dawkins is going through a phase during which even many of his fans now reject his craziness. His tweets regarding bad date rape and worse date rape are an indication of having jumped the shark. Now he has exposed Atheism's soft underbelly by his claim that,

"...there is a sense in which the moderate, nice religious people — nice Christians, nice Muslims — make the world safe for extremists.”

Dawkins went on to say that moderate religious people who are kind create the notion that “there’s something good about religion” and that there are benefits to bringing children up to embrace theological ideals. He such such a notion leads people to believe in something without having evidence or the need to offer justification."

Sensible Atheists will understand immediately the implication of this: if that is true for the religious, the the connection also exists between "nice Atheists" and the brutal Atheist regimes which murdered hundreds of millions of humans, some of which still control huge numbers of enslaved humans under Atheist totalitarianism.

Further, the paradigm fits Atheists far better than it does Christians. Atheists have no common principles of morality; there is no document called Tenets of Atheist Morality. So Atheists have only whatever morality that they choose for themselves, and for many, it is totalitarian control of the Other. That is not the case for Christianity, where the principles are laid out in the red print of the bible. And that is a big difference from either Atheism or from Islam, both of which countenance violence and murder as a means to certain ends (read the First Humanist Manifesto and the Qu'ran for details).

Dawkins, being the numero uno Atheist in the world today, has thus produced a bottomless canyon in the path of any rational seekers who are considering Atheism. Admittedly, rationality is not a major factor in the pursuit of moral freedom, which is the more usual cause for Atheism. But Atheists in general won't be able to answer for Dawkins much longer.

Dawkins Losing It?

The recent spectacle which Richard Dawkins has made of himself reminds some pundits of an elderly man cursing the clouds while urinating on himself. Dawkins is now taken to the woodshed even by feminists and other Atheists, as he demonstrates his complete loss of contact with rationality right there on twitter (which he can't seem to relinquish even though it is beyond his capabilities). The Friendly Atheist even asks for an intervention in order to save Dawkins from himself, not to mention embarrassing the entire Atheist community.

The Other McCain has a compilation of comments from others on the apparently senescent Dawkins' inability to retire gracefully, and concludes with this:

"Atheism has a teleology — a purpose, an inherent goal — having developed in the West as a means of undermining the social and legal authority of Christian morality. Atheism is therefore not equally hostile to all religious beliefs, nor is it objective in its selection of targets.

People who hate Christianity nowadays declare themselves “atheists” in much the same way as people who hate America once declared themselves “Communists.” For that matter, it’s the same way women who hate men call themselves “feminists.” The claimed label is a means of rationalizing one’s hatred in a self-flattering way, by distinguishing one’s own enlightened sophistication in contrast to those whom one ridicules as ignorant simpletons for their traditional beliefs.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Nearly 2,000 years later, this verdict still condemns them."

When one makes up stories for a living, as Dawkins did for evolution, perhaps the distinction between fact and fantasy eventually becomes eradicated completely, at least for some with a confabulatory genetic bent. Were that the case, then that hazard to the rational perceptions could be a proper causal story for Dawkins' behaviors.

Ravi On Dawkins

Dawkins' hate has long clouded his judgment and has negated his logic. What is significant is not Dawkins himself, it is the number of his followers, his army of haters.

Mehdi Hasan interviews Dawkins for Al Jazeera

The entire interview is well worth the time it takes. But for quick reference, here are some highlight points:

At 14:34 Dawkins rather heatedly states: "I don't much care about what's good and evil. I care about what's true!" Start shortly before 14:00 for full context. Unfortunately Hasan doesn't attack the "truth" in science.

At 31:20 Evidence.

At 41:00 Civilization is not due to religion.

At 43:30 Atheist beliefs without evidence.

Regarding the universe: "the multiverse is the Darwinian way of solving the problem of fine tuning the universe" (paraphrased).
Well of course it is: another Just So Story is required, based on zero evidence. Thus the new Just So Story trumps "mystery" because it is a way around the immediate need for an agent. But it is also an infinite regress which doesn't answer the source of the multiverse, therefore yet another Just So Story is required, if the source of all things is to be maintained as physical-only.

Reply to Martin

Martin,
The difference between your two examples is that the first involved evidence of agency (and still could not deduce the correct answer), while the second was purely material, both in source and deterministic causality, and could deduce a probably correct answer. Agency operates outside the deterministic realm, and is not predictable using determinist rules. It could be said that evolution is not predictable, and thus resembles agency more than determinism. (Actually, taken under Materialism, evolution is even more random than quantum events, since there is a multiplication of randomness involved, including random mutations, carried forward randomly, matched to random environments at random times. More on that below.)

Now, when referring to evolution, the question of agency surfaces in the observation of the creation of highly complex and highly useful functionality from mere random mutations, which are necessary for the creation of functionality outside of the original genome. An example is the creation of blood systems from algae/sponges. The answer to that is not deep time, because the issue is this: how does one deduce entire blood systems arising from sponges? Time is not an answer.

The evolutionary answer is this: ”Well, it happened, right? So evolution can cause anything, everything and nothing.”

That is blind belief.

Now iirc, your position is that DNA/ERV shows common descent. In fact, there is no direct proof of common descent, so inferences must be very strong, plus they must be completely formally dedicated and devoted to Materialism, unless purely Material mechanics for the creation of useful complexity out of a non-useful non-complex initial condition can be deduced in detail and completeness.

By detail, I mean that it is not enough to say, for example, that simultaneous mutations occurred and were carried forward even while not yet useful for blood vessels and entire circulatory systems including blood pumps self-fed with blood, fan-out of arteries to all cells, return of blood via veins, oxygenation of blood via lung systems, detoxification of blood via liver/kidney type systems, blood cells created in separate systems with blood cells capable of providing both the nutrients created by other organs (necessary for the task) and the elimination of toxins, the use of coagulation processes (highly complex in themselves) to prevent death by bleeding.

It must be shown that either all of these capacities and physical artifacts developed separately due either to accidental mutations which were carried forward from sponges/algae to the complex systems which are known to have such things starting in the Cambrian, or that all the mutations occurred simultaneously in a single organism, giving it full functionality in an all new way. The probability of either of these occurrences is vanishingly small. And it is accompanied by other necessary occurrences with more vanishingly small probabilities which multiply the improbability (not even including abiogenesis – the evolution of life from minerals).

Here are few more:

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred which allowed the formation of skeletons.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred developing multiple sensors useful for detecting the environment.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred developing complex neural systems for controlling both the sensors and the motions of the system.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred developing a nourishment intake/output system which provides separate sources for H+ internal emission and Cl- internal emission, which taken together form hydrochloric acid for digestion, yet in an environment which doesn’t digest itself.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred which created muscle systems (controlled by the neural system) which were attached to the skeleton, which is actually a grouping of dozens of connected levers, joints and fulcrums which are activated by the muscle/neural/blood system, and sustained by the digestive system.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred which created a self-replenishing system for all organic cells.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred which created a means of limiting growth after detecting maturity.

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred which created sexual reproduction (a highly complex system in itself).

Simultaneous mutations would have occurred which created a large membrane (skin) covering the system, and having flexibility, the ability to respire and replicate, and having self-healing capabilities.

I’ll stop here, because the necessary simultaneous systems to get from sponge to fish require a blind belief in the vanishingly small probability of randomness accomplishing such complexities, and that the complexities are being carried forward before they are connected together with living utility. The mechanism (mutation/selection) is assumed, not proven; it is not even specified with any detail, because it seems to be enough to say the words, “it evolved”, and that suffices. And the declared mechanism has the uncanny, metaphysical capacity to do anything, everything and nothing, all simultaneously: it is omnipotent within its domain, yet petulant in its performance before an audience.

When it comes to ERV’s and their placement in the genome, there is an unprovable assumption that there is no other way for that to occur.

More importantly is the necessity for the prior existence of a “universal genetic code” which came from before the “first species”, which of necessity had the code, if common descent is the case. The source of this code is never discussed, since its complexity, utility and necessity - even in the beginning - is vanishingly improbable, so is ignored so that Materialism is to be maintained.

And of course the origination subject of abiogenesis (evolution from goo to first life) is ignored by defining it out of the evolutionary process, ideologically.

The circularity of Materialism is deeply embedded in evolution:

“It looks like design, but it isn’t.” “Complexity can arise naturally” (evidence? => Evolution).

So evolution is true because complexity can arise as evidenced by: evolution.
Commonly stated thus:

“Well it evolved, didn’t it? It had to.”

And this:

“Since you have no Materialist alternative, then evolution can be presumed valid.”

I.e., because Materialism is true, then there is no other possibility than evolution, which proves that Materialism is True. Classical circularity and non-coherence.

Finally, none of the “falsifications” contained in your source negate the common design concept, which is far simpler than the evolutionary concept, and is why Crick et. al. invented Panspermia (despite its infinite regress failure).

Crick:
” Crick and Orgel wrote in their book 'Life Itself,'

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against."

In other words, it looks like a miracle, but it can't be, just because.

I will quote Dawkins extensively, because he is the 5 Star general who has arisen in order to weaponize Evolution and Philosophical Materialism. But take a look at the evidence which he gives and upon which he and his followers depend:

Dawkins:

”"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice."

A strange admission from a Materialist. Yet he sells lots of words on the subject, doesn’t he?

”"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity."

Only if one is a devoted Philosophical Materialist.

”"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
— Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)

This is the correct view of human relationships and human value, under Materialism.

”It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that). “Put Your Money on Evolution” The New York Times (April 9, 1989) section VII p.35”

It is safe to say the Dawkins pumps hate for a living.

”The illusion of purpose is so powerful that biologists themselves use the assumption of good design as a working tool. River out of Eden (1995) p.98”

And well they should.

”Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.1”

And design works fine as an explanation, if one is not ideologically locked into Materialism.

”Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.6”

For Dawkins, intellectual fulfillment stops easily, and at an intellectually immature state, which he acquired as a teen.

”In the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years (evolutionists are now dating the beginning of the Cambrian at about 530 million years), are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.229”

So much for intellectual fulfillment.

”It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.316”

Designed? Actually, it appears designed to work well on Aristotelian logic and deduction, once it is learned and put to use.

”Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe. It is the only known explanation for the rich diversity of animals, pants, fungi and bacteria. Forward to The Theory of Evolution by John Maynard Smith (2000) p.xv”

No, actually it is not. It is the only Materialist explanation.

”Natural selection is the only workable explanation for the beautiful and compelling illusion of 'design' that pervades every living body and every organ. Knowledge of evolution may not be strictly useful in everyday commerce. You can live some sort of life and die without ever hearing the name of Darwin. But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study. Forward to The Theory of Evolution by John Maynard Smith (2000) p.xvi”

Yes, Darwinism should be studied, and studied critically. There is little critical analysis in Dawkins’ approach to it, though.

”As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. A Devil's Chaplain (2003) p.10”

His acknowledgement of “belief” and “passion” is nice to hear, as is his acknowledgement of purpose even if he is deluded by his concept of illusion.

”The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.

Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. NewScientist September 17 2005 p.33”

Actually, it is only that recently that the delusion of Philosophical Materialism infested the academics to the point of their intellectual block beyond mass/energy. Their ensuing presumption of Atheist elitism locked in that intellectual block, and locked out thought beyond the physical, to the point that their own thoughts would be necessary physical and thus determinate and without value.

”I should have been talking about the combined probability of life's originating on a planet and leading, eventually, to the evolution of intelligent beings capable of anthropic reflection. It could be that the chemical origin of a self-replicating molecule (the necessary trigger for the origin of natural selection) was a relatively probable event but later steps in the evolution of intelligent life were highly improbable. Intelligent Thought (2006) p. 95-6”

So the subsequent evolutionary events were even less probable than jumping from minerals to life?

”Now if you take your science as narrowly evidential, you'll say something like, "Since you've never seen life on another planet other than this one, how can you possibly say anything about the way life might be universally, on other planets.?" On the face of it that sounds like a reasonable complaint, but on the other hand there surely must be some things that theory tells us must be so. And it can't be right to rule out of bounds everything that we can't see with our own eyes. The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On March 16 2006”

He’s right at least once in that comment: it truly cannot be right to rule out of bounds everything that we can’t see with our own eyes. But he doesn’t realize the implications of this directive for his own worldview.

It is not necessary to endorse “creationism” in order to see the flaws in evolution as “the only game in town” (Dawkins); in order to understand its circularity, its non-predictive lack of utility, and the necessity of being “deluded” by the appearance of design.

Not to mention, of course, the lack of actual explanatory power of evolution for the simultaneous creation of parallel complexities, all of which are necessary for advanced life.

And not to mention the total silence on the origin of DNA, the rational code for all life which pre-existed first life.

And not to mention that life is far different from non-life, and cannot be deduced from non-life, certainly not under evolution or Darwinism.

And finally: to comprehend that both Materialism and Evolution are circular and self-enabling internal non-coherences, so they cannot be “the only game in town” if rationality is presupposed.

It is not necessary to endorse miracles in order to see that the argument against them has no Material basis for its claims, which again, are circular:

Materialism is True, therefore miracles are false, because Materialism is True.

The evidence against miracles is not in empirical proof or material methodology, it is purely in the ideology of Materialism.

For these basic reasons – and there are others – Evolution is seen to be a blind belief, an ideology and non-empirical at best. At worst, it has shown itself to be a basis for cruelty and human eliminationism.

I have more reasons to resist evolution, but that's for a future post when I'm done with my reading.

Dawkins Pigs Out.

Richard Dawkins is lacking attention, apparently. He seems desperate to pimp his new book. He has decided to make outrageously stupid statements to help him garner the attention he is lacking. Consider his latest tweet:

"With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig".

Now, now, Richard, your desperation is truly pitiful.

This is a conclusion without any premises. It is not an argument it is a papal encyclical. It is a declaration of belief without any evidence, without any empirical support much less any rational, deductive syllogistic argumentation. In short, it is blind belief type of religious nonsense.

Let’s count the ways:

1. Adult pigs are not in possession of human DNA.

2. Adult pigs (nor pigs at any stage of development) will ever, ever, ever, ever turn into humans at any stage of human development.

3. Although female Atheists might consider Dawkins a Male Chauvinist Pig, that designation is purely in honor of his porcine resemblance in attitude and not in genetics.

4. His statement is a dictum of degradation and devaluation from a position of arrogance and presumed elitist superiority to all other humans, whom he is at liberty to compare to other animals, lower life forms, or minerals as he declares them available for elimination as is convenient.

5. This is the same Dawkins who could find no moral basis for declaring that “Hitler was wrong”.

6. This is the same Dawkins who very cowardly protected his own life by “…not knowing much about the God of Islam” when pressed for a position on Al Jazeera. He always has courageous positions about Christianity, of course. Abortion of himself is not as issue, since he didn’t have his own skull scissor-stabbed and crushed, and his arms ripped off to ease the abortion.

7. This is the same Dawkins who considers himself to be a biologist and evolutionary expert/hero; so he probably knows that a pig is not more human than “any fetus”, since a pig is not human under any interpretation, even the loose interpretations of evolution. So he is declaring rather that a fetus is in no manner a human, regardless of the fact that it is alive and growing; it is a fully defined individual human with its unique human DNA; all humans (1) are unique and go through the stages from fertilized egg through developmental transitions to birth, and onward.

Richard Dawkins has stepped on himself, but it likely will be hardly noticed amongst his aficionados. Logic is not their bag. Conclusions without premises is what works for them.

(1) Split cell twins, etc. excepted, of course.

ADDENDUM:

In a subsequent tweet, Dawkins clarifies his criteria for being human vs. non-human:

“Human” features relevant to the morality of abortion include ability to feel pain, fear etc & to be mourned by others.

Dawkins has added one incredibly revealing feature: "to be mourned by others". The fact that Dawkins adds this indicates that he actually believes that the loss of certain classes of preborn humans cannot be mourned. Cannot be. His presumptuousness is massively arrogant. He knows no such thing. And I personally know differently; all it takes is observation of living things (an empirical approach apparently not familiar to evolutionists). (1) This criterion is too absurd to be considered a rational statement. What it reveals is the callousness and the total lack of empathy which Dawkins has, not just for the preborn human, but also for the adult humans who lose preborns. Let's repeat: total lack of empathy. And let's add this: total ignorance of the psychology surrounding the death of preborns, including mourning.

These criteria, of course, can be applied to postnatal humans too, under certain circumstances. For instance, anyone who is under sedation. (2) And Trotsky likely never felt anything when the icepick ended his human existence.

The abortion lovers will continue to word-shop around for terminology which they think suffices to allow them to devalue humans. The fact is that they are engaged in devaluing living, unique, growing human individuals at necessary and therefore legitimate stages of human development. They do this using false intellectualism and false moral declarations, the exact tactics of totalitarians.

The specious arguments made by the abortionistas illuminates how desperate they are to preserve eugenics and their right to devalue humans to enable their killing. They are passionate in their defense of eugenics to the point of demonstrating fully that their passion completely destroys their remnants of rationality.

(1) I had a cow that miscarried twins at a very early stage of development. She was hysterical, and went berserk when I tried to remove them. So I left them there for a while for her to mourn. She licked them and licked them, and hours later she was still at it.

(2) which is transparently why Dawkins added the absurd “mourning” requirement, while neglecting the unintended consequences of adding that criterion, which in turn demonstrates that it is ideology and not biological science.

Dawkins Explains Evolution

Here are some clips of Richard Dawkins responding to the questions of a (friendly) interviewer last week. As with all quotes, they are out of context, so for the full interview and context, go to "the not so angry evolutionist".

"It is utterly remarkable that DNA is a scientific digital code. It’s text, it’s exactly like written human language, with letters – you can actually count the number of letters. It means you could really compare every animal with every other animal, or plant, or bacterium, letter by letter, word by word, in their actual genetic text."

Let's review. DNA is a scientific code, exactly like written human language; therefore there is neither intelligence nor design involved? Dawkins once made the most ignorant statement I think I have ever heard. Paraphrased, he said, "No engineer in his right mind would use previously existing designs to base his design upon". In actuality, every engineer would and does leverage off of previous designs (that are not IP protected). An engineer who did not do so would lose his job, it is that stupid.

Dawkins feels comfortable backfilling opinion into slots that should be reserved for verifiable evidence. This is called rationalization in the world of Logic and Rational Thinking. It is, however, actually the method of forensic sciences: make an observation (say, a new fossil) and then make up a story about it. It is rampant in offshoots of evolutionary science such as evolutionary psychology.

...

"The genetics of Darwin’s time was completely wrong, apart from Gregor Mendel, who was a contemporary of Darwin. But unfortunately Darwin never read his works. Even Mendel was surpassed in a very big way by Watson and Crick, and the molecular biology revolution of the last half of the 20th century – which has now made genetics into a branch of information technology. And this has enormously increased the sheer weight of evidence in favor of Darwin. Darwin would simply have loved that.

A branch of information technology? He finally admits that there is information in the code... It used to be common to hear that it wasn't information, it was just random code that happened randomly, then randomly changed, got tested by the environment, and stuck if it passed the test.

And never, ever discussed is the source of the code, nor the probability of the code describing a living thing existing inside the living thing...nor the paradox of which came first, the code or the critter.

...

"The point about the detective and the crime-scene analogy is not that the information is incomplete, or not 100 percent. It can indeed be – if not 100 percent, then 99.99 percent. The point is that it’s not eyewitness evidence. You can’t actually see a murder taking place. You can’t actually see most of evolution taking place, obviously, because it happened in the distant past. But the evidence for a crime can be exceedingly strong, even without eyewitness evidence.

Eyewitness evidence is actually not the most powerful evidence anyway. Eyewitness evidence even in human crimes is notoriously poor. Eyewitnesses get all sorts of things wrong."

Dissing eyewitness evidence is extremely odd for a scientist; science methods depend heavily upon experimental evidence (eyewitness), and replication (eyewitness). But he is right in saying that "it's not eyewitness evidence" with regard to evolution. Yes, that is correct; it is not empirical, experimental, replicable evidence, it is inferential, extrapolatory, story telling. The incontrovertable evidence that exists is (a) a genetic code of indeterminate origin; (b) fossils (without genetic material) of animals that no longer exist. Everything else is inferential - a made up story.

...

"Another big stumbling block is that an awful lot of people think evolution is a theory of random chance. It isn’t. If it really were a situation of random chance, of course it wouldn’t work. Any fool can see that. Natural selection is the very opposite of random chance. Natural selection is non-random survival of genes that work."

This is almost too false to believe that it came from an educated person. Evolution is most certainly based on random changes (mutations) to genetic workings, changes that might just happen (randomly) to bring into existence new beneficial characteristics for survival in a changing environment. Any fool who educates himself can see that.

But I gotta love that quote:"If it really were a situation of random chance, of course it wouldn’t work. Any fool can see that."

...

"That was a technique that Darwin himself used. Everybody understands domestic breeding, and everybody can see the dramatic consequences of breeding dogs, for example, which came from wolves not that long ago. So you can see a lot of evolutionary change packed into just a few centuries. All you then do, if you’re explaining it as Darwin did, is just remove the human breeder and let nature do it instead.

Nature does it inadvertently, unconsciously, non-deliberately – by some animals surviving and some not surviving. That is the precise analog to the role of the domestic breeder choosing which puppies to breed from."

The "Big Dog/Little Dog = Evolution" Fallacy is still false. See the next item.

...

"The human mind partitions the world into essential objects: "A rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit. There’s an unbridgeable gulf fixed between a rabbit and any other species." People can’t grasp the idea that it’s not true that a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit. It gradually changes over time. There’s a constantly sliding definition of what it is to be a typical rabbit. That goes for any species."

Conflating the idea of "atypical" with mutated creatures that are no longer the same species is a staple in the evolutionist bag of tricks. It's a gloss over the massive probability against such beneficial mutations.

...

"I very seldom actually meet a creationist. I don’t know where they’re hiding. Polls tell me they’re extremely numerous, but they don’t seem to come out of their holes when I’m around."

It is hard to tell if Dawkins is truly self-deluded or if he merely wishes to deceive his listener. He consistently refuses to meet and debate with any detractor, creationist or otherwise: they are too far below him.