Monday, August 17, 2009

Junk Science Goes Green

Some say smarts do not make for wisdom. That certainly holds for evolutionists who, while generally smart people, publicly admit to believing the evolution myth. They say it is a fact, as sure as gravity, that life arose on its own. This form of junk science has been promoted for years by science writer par excellence, Carl Zimmer. His book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea is a strange combination of excellent writing coupled with science that is so bizarre it cannot even be said to be wrong.

Zimmer's latest piece reveals how evolution is fine-tuned to ensure it is politically correct. In recent decades rapid adaptation has been observed which falsifies evolution's prediction about mechanism and time scales of biological change. As one evolutionist admitted, with regard to rapd adaptation in response to environmental changes:

People really weren’t thinking about evolution at all, They thought it happened on thousand-year time scales.

Or as another evolutionist admitted:

Darwin thought evolution was gradual, and that it would take longer than the lifetime of a scientist to observe even the slightest change

Here we have a fundamental failure of evolutionary theory which must be denied. Zimmer does just that by ignoring entire fields of inquiry and erroneously ascribing such adaptation to natural selection and "plasticity." (Wouldn't it be nice to just make up vacuous terms whenever needed?).

And to help steer clear of the politically incorrect fact that biological evidence contradicts evolution, Zimmer sets up climate change as the culprit and focus of the article.

But here he confronts yet another politically incorrect obstacle. If this new, fast, version of evolution is so adept at responding to global warming, then is climate change not such a threat? Does evolution's magic resolve environmental worries?

This would spoil the story. The right denouement is that while the wonders of evolution never cease, our modern day creation story nonetheless cannot foil the town villain. After all, some species may not be able to rapidly adapt. Surely more research is needed to better understand evolution--that foundation of all biology.

If that research doesn't pan out then we can always assign hard limits to evolution. After all, "natural selection can hit biological walls." Zimmer ends on this potentially dangerous note. Can there really be limits to evolution? Isn't this what creationists have been saying?

No problem. We all know evolution creates everything from blue whales to bald eagles. Its inventiveness may seem unlimited, but it can be fine-tuned when necessary--after all, we define how it works.