Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Devolution

It’s one thing for George W. Bush to ruin the good name of our country, to run up the nation’s credit card bill with no revenues available to pay it off, to tear up and stomp on the Constitution of the United States, to hand over regulatory authority to those who should be regulated, to reward his corporate cronies at the expense of all the rest of us, to kill thousands of young Americans and untold numbers of others in a misguided and mishandled and unconscionable war. 

It’s quite another for the atrocity currently occupying the White House to inject his opinion into the “debate” over evolution.  Especially when that opinion is one that makes Ned Lud seem like a futurist.  Parroting the inane ravings of the Discovery Institute (pointedly not linked) and their religious doctrine of “Intelligent Design” (again, I refuse to link to such tomfoolery), Dubya once again acts to build a few more planks in his Bridge to the Fourteenth Century.

Rather than bother with my ineffectual sputtering about Bush’s idiotic views, I strongly urge you to read what PZ Myers has to say over at Pharyngula.  Myers is a biology professor in Minnesota, but at least as important is that he’s a clear and vivid writer who has carefully and completely critiqued the false arguments that the anti-science, anti-logic, anti-empiricism side tries to pass off as somehow worthy of being compared with modern evolutionary theory.

There’s a place to compare the model promulgated by the Discovery Institute and their ilk with the empirical evidence supporting the evolution model ... in church.  It would do churches a world of good to do such a comparison, to see whether their metaphor holds water.  For them, I’d even bill it as examining how accurately the ancient texts describe God’s works, as evolutionary theory updating and modernizing those descriptions.