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Larry Moran vs. Ann Gauger: Tickets are going fast

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Larry Moran.jpg Apparently, Moran called Gauger “delusional,” for asking “What if people stopped believing in Darwin?”

She suggests,

Well, textbooks would change, for one. And a newfound humility might briefly sweep the halls of academic biology. Biology students might feel free to express their opinions on origins. The world would see a new flush of academic freedom.

Guess what? It’s happening right now, but it’s happening slowly, not overnight. That’s because more and more people are recognizing that evolutionary biology’s explanatory power is inversely proportional to its rigor. Yet there is still an enormous amount of pushback from people strongly invested in the Darwinian story.

Pushback? Sounds like the street outside, actually. (Hint: If one is not looking for Darwinism, one hardly sees it.)

Most of the world doesn’t believe in Darwin, and we are not building the asylums from the inside out either. We even continue to pay pensions to people like Moran, who says,

It shows us that we are having very little impact after 25 years of debate and it shows us that the leading figures at the Discovery Institute are truly delusional.

Maybe. Or anyway, maybe someone is delusional.

Some here would say, if one is having little impact after 25 years, it would pay to revisit one’s thesis. But Darwin is a jealous god, so maybe his followers can’t revisit their thesis.

Bummer.

My sometime editor David Klinghoffer notes

Setting aside the superficiality of Professor Moran’s comments, which include no substance and only insults, is he right that Dr. Gauger is wrong?

Not if you believe the New York Times. George Johnson writes there that he is nearly in despair over the success of scientific and other ideas that he doesn’t like (“The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths”). He says, “The creationist battle against evolution remains fierce, and more sophisticated than ever.”

Okay, this is heresy, but maybe the Darwinists are dumber than the creationists, or else have a less well-evidenced cause.

For example: Funny how few Darwin followers take into account the damage done to their cause by nonsense like evolutionary psychology: If it were really true that 2.5 million years of human evolution and lots of changes in basic understandings and ideas led to no changes whatever in human beliefs and  behaviour, that would be an argument against the Darwinism they espouse. That is, change in humans doesn’t really happen after all.

But Darwin’s followers are as dumb as farm turkeys, so they never get it.

Gauger responded to Moran’s complaint that she didn’t pay enough attention to his criticism of Darwin’s Doubt:

I have now taken a look at the first two of his posts, and noticed some biases. Moran showed a few illustrations that might impress the uninformed, but it’s what he didn’t say that is revealing.

Trees seeking to represent the history of life are drawn to convey different meanings. Moran’s tree shows the diversity of life from a phylogenetic view. Of course, unicellular organisms represent the vast majority of this tree, leaving plants, animals, and fungi to one tiny portion of the tree, indicated by a circle. Moran implies that this indicates the Cambrian explosion was a mere blip. What he doesn’t say is that the Cambrian explosion resulted in the sudden diversity of metazoa, or multicellular organisms like animals and seaweed, for which we have many fossils. As a portion of the diversity on the planet they may be a small fraction, but that doesn’t mean the explosion wasn’t real.

Whaaa?? He actually read the book? Astounding.

Buy that man a beer! Two beers. Microbrew!

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Comments
I think Ann could take him.Mung
September 4, 2015
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Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin I wonder if Laurence Moran wrote a book review of this one.Mung
September 4, 2015
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