The skepticism that death is too blunt an instrument for fine-tuning should cut across all evolutionary optimism. It should inspire skepticism against the fitness of brains, derived by natural selection (or death). But it doesn’t. They can find as many “defects” as they want in the content of a vast majority of other people brains and believe that their brains were honed in the fires of Natural Selection.

It allows, Dennett to make the evolutionists’ appeal to mystery that reads “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Not cleverer than the Brites, mind you. They can strip down and rebuild our evolutionary predispositions like ace mechanics.

Anyway, the study is pretty amazing in that it openly expresses the belief that there is no purpose in the universe. And, that those with teleological expectencies or ideas are ‘mis-educated’.

From what I could read of it (my browser kept crashing whenever I went to their site) they also feel that something needs to be done to rid people of this crazy, false idea that earth, or anything in it, exists for a reason!

Hard to believe but true. The materialist fundamentalist fanatics will do anything – including pretending to have a purpose in this study of theirs! – to fool people into believing that there really is no reason for existence. Oh, excuse me – except the one you make up for yourself, which by their own logic, is still meaningless.

Go figure.

Like: “Self-esteem drives achievement.” Remember that one? Remember “self-esteem courses”? A huge waste of public time and money.

Lots of criminals in jail are jam-packed with self-esteem – as cocky as a rooster with fifty hens. And they’re NOT putting it on. They really do believe in themselves!

They’re totally wrong, of course, and they have achieved nothing except the loss of their freedom at considerable public expense.

And the nerd who is posthumously awarded a prize (= he committed suicide because he thought he had found a mistake in his work, but when others looked at it, it didn’t turn out to be a mistake after all … )? Lack of self-esteem didn’t stop him from achieving something, though it obviously shortened his life.

So, I am not saying self-esteem isn’t important. Self-esteem is important for a feeling of well-being (and for preventing unnecessary victimization* or other unfortunate events, like suicide). But it is not important for achievement, which is a different matter.

The world if full of false knowledge right now, and the best advice I can offer is, check the details.

Later, I will try to write on false knowledge in a more organized way, but one way you can detect false knowledge is that it is easy.

True knowledge says that you may need to practice 1000 times before you gain mastery of a skill. False knowledge says you can do it in ten seconds, using a special formula. You be the judge.

*This is especially important for girls. A girl should always know that she is valuable, loved, and wanted, by someone, somewhere. If a guy is bashing her around, it is his fault and his problem. Not her fault or her problem.

I would be interested where that urban dictionary definition came from. It sounds like a liberal attempt to get at Charles Johnson.

Glen Reynolds of Instapundit is another person highly critical of ID because he also conflates it with creationism and he believes Darwinian evolution. Though I doubt if either he or Charles Johnson know the nuances of the differences of just what ID believes or understands the problems with Darwinian macro evolution. If asked they would both probably cite micro evolution for their belief.

A person who Glen Reynolds respects a lot is Jerry Pournelle who is one of the more interesting characters on the planet. Here is a description of Pournelle’s ideas from Wikipedia

“Pournelle has expressed support for several viewpoints that differ from the general scientific consensus. These include skepticism on a significant human contribution to global warming and on evolution, and he has advocated research to directly investigate Peter Duesberg’s controversial views on the cause of AIDS. He emphasizes that in some cases, particularly when the effects of wrong decisions could be disastrous, contrarian research by competent researchers is valuable as insurance.

Although claiming not to be a proponent of Intelligent design, he argues (in opposition to many critics) that it can generate falsifiable hypotheses that contribute to the understanding of evolution. He regards proposals to teach Intelligent Design in public schools as less damaging to education than the expert-dominated, centralized educational systems he sees as a prerequisite for banning such proposals.”

A lot of conservatives or libertarians are anti ID because they associate it with creationism or junk science. They fail to discern the difference, and any attempt to do so with them get shouted down or mainly just ignored. The only way they would actually learn what is so is for them to read about the difference and they would probably say they do not have the time. They will not listen to anyone because they believe anyone who defends it is a kook.

Now they say “He’s Hitler’s man!” It amounts to the same thing, really. It is not, in itself, an argument.

Paging Walt Ruloff. Walt Ruloff to the white courtesy phone, please.