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Update re John Lennon vs. Charles Darwin: Lennon earliest to diss Darwin profs?

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“It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don’t know if there’s any harm in it except they ram it down everybody’s throat.”

At Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer elaborates on Lennon’s Darwin-dissing views:

He laughed at what he regarded as the ludicrousness of Darwinian theory, comparing it with young earth creationism. This was in an interview with Playboy, one of the last he gave and reprinted in a book by journalist David Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000):

Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way… That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything–fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage. It’s absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists. That and the monkey thing are both as insane as the apes standing up suddenly. The early men are always drawn like apes, right? Because that fits in the theory we have been living with since Darwin. I don’t buy that monkey business. [Singing] “Too much monkey business…” [Laughing] I don’t buy it. I’ve got no basis for it and no theory to offer, I just don’t buy it. Something other than that. Something simpler. I don’t buy anything other than “It always was and ever shall be.” I can’t conceive of anything less or more. The other theories change all the time. They set up these idols and then they knock them down. It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don’t know if there’s any harm in it except they ram it down everybody’s throat. Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of “experts” who made them up in the first place. There.

There, indeed. Nothing in his comments suggests that Lennon was particularly well informed about evolutionary matters, as he himself blithely admitted. But there’s something refreshing, needless to say, about hearing a man as he shrugs off all the opinions you are supposed to hold when you’re a musician or a movie star, or a professor or a journalist, and just says what he thinks. Darwinism? It’s “absolutely irrational garbage” that “old professors” want “to ram…down everybody’s throat.” Delicious.

– “John Lennon, Darwin Doubter” (June 30, 2011)

Klinghoffer makes a tongue-in-cheek stab at why, nonetheless, Yoko Ono was suing the Expelled movie: “Maybe it was because they misrepresented her husband, implying he was pro-Darwin!”

Seriously, David, if she were really representing her late husband, she should have help bankroll the film instead. At any time, she could have backed away from it, citing her husband’s true view, in print since 2000 but down the public memory hole (but surely not down hers … )  Still some doubtful matters here.

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Comments
http://www.darwinawards.com/Mung
July 3, 2011
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lennon was a little sharper then many folks and thats why a star in such a business. so its reasonable he would dismiss evolution. independent folks easily demand evidence and not just submit to authority. If he was around today perhaps he would write a song about the absurdity of attacking criticisms of evolution etc and a song about origins. IMAGINE.Robert Byers
July 1, 2011
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And what, precisely, is the point quoting John Lennon on Evolution ?Graham
July 1, 2011
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