Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m rating this book on the assumption of a stipulated umpteen-billion-year history of the universe. That is not my current belief, but I have virtually no knowledge of the science of dating so I have nothing to say about it at this point.

I recently read Coyne’s much more recent Why Evolution is True. Seems that Darwinists have not been able to improve their presentation, because Darwin on Trial pretty much destroys Coyne as if he were responding to him, rather than writing a book twenty years ago.

This covers the issues really well. Given the fossil evidence, paleontology presents us with a picture of sudden appearances of intact species rather than any kind of gradual evolution. The "survival of the fittest" is a tautology rather than a testable hypothesis. And any theory looks good if you disregard all counter evidence.

What I learned from Johnson that I didn’t know before was how scientists are having to police other evolutionary scientists to punish them when they don’t sound dogmatic enough about the evidence for Darwinian evolution. It also seems that evolutionary biology is a "closed system" from biology in any other field even when the scientists are convinced Darwinists. An ape expert who bothers to look at the fossils and say that the idea that the creature walked upright is wishful thinking, will be marginalized and rejected. It is an insular field that expects to be accepted on faith.

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Time to close shop.

Then this May, the administration imposed even more draconian restrictions. Mr. DeHart wanted to alert students to recent reversals in key evidence for Neo-Darwinism, and sought approval to distribute articles from mainstream scientific journals to correct old, outdated information in the textbooks. Astonishingly, the principal said no. In short, the ACLU’s intimidation tactics have been so successful that Mr. DeHart is being compelled to teach a caricature of the scientific method.

For example, the textbook the school requires Mr. DeHart to use presents Stanley Miller’s 1953 life-in-a-test-tube experiment as evidence that the building blocks of life arose spontaneously in a “primeval soup” on the early earth. But today most biologists dismiss that experiment as outdated, since it relied on assumptions about the early atmosphere now known to be false. An article in Scientific American tells the story, yet the school forbids Mr. DeHart to tell students how science has corrected itself.

Again, the most famous example of natural selection involves the speckled peppered moth. Supposedly, when industrial pollution darkened tree trunks, birds could see the lighter moths against the blackened trunks, while darker moths blended in and increased in numbers. Yet a recent article in The Scientist reveals that these moths don’t even rest on tree trunks-and that photos shown in textbooks were staged: Dead moths were glued onto tree trunks. Yet the school forbids Mr. DeHart to correct this false impression for his students.

Read the rest: Pearcey, Nancy. World Magazine: Creation Mythology:Defenders of Darwinism resort to suppressing data and teaching outright falsehoods. June 24, 2000.

“it is very amazing, it is utterly shocking because it flies in the face of everything we understand about how cells and tissues degrade” –Mary H. Schweitzer

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A Major T. Rex Breakthrough

Broken Bone Leads to Discovery of Soft Tissues

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A01

Paleontologists have recovered what appear to be soft tissues from the thighbone of a 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, potentially enabling dinosaur research to make a leap into studying the animals’ physiology and perhaps even their cell biology, the research team said yesterday.

Anthony Weiner Scandal: C’mon, America, Nobody’s Perfect – The Daily Beast.

Here’s the picture:

OK, I want to know: would the civil rights movement never happened without Martin Luther King Jr? Would we still have Democrats ruling a segregated South?

I don’t believe it.

How do we know that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s real gift wasn’t seeing a means to ascension and jumping on it?

How do we know?

For all we know there were other possible leaders who were truly of heroic character as well as integrity who lived and died in obscurity because MLK elbowed his way in.

All of this is speculative. It requires biographical and historical research before anything more could be said. But those questions immediately come to mind in response to the argument Lee Stiegal uses.

Every time we endorse flawed “heroes” we turn our backs on others and encourage people not to care about their own flaws.

[Addendum: This post by Doug Wilson led me to the article.]

Anyone hear that Weiner was just  born that way?

Anyone claim that he has a sexual orientation and that his critics are all cyberexhibitiophobes?

One would almost think people believed that a man/husband/father has a public and objective calling to which he has a duty to respond and to which his sexual impulses should be harnessed.

But that can’t possibly be right. Our sexual natures are just given to us apart from our will in the matter and have nothing to do with biology or duty. That is the modern Faith.

Every once in a long while we get a public scandal and media response which is like Gideon sneaking into the Midianite camp.

It is not difficult to see where this dynamic, if uncorrected, will lead—to more pronounced financial cycles and recurring crises. I would argue that the failure to reform the banking system in Japan was one of the principal reasons for that country’s “Lost Decade(s).” We must not let that pathology take hold here.

via A Perspective on the U.S. Economy and Monetary Policy – Richard Fisher Speeches, May , 2011 – News & Events – FRB Dallas.

Boorda died May 16, 1996 a suicide, having apparently shot himself in the chest. The autopsy results were not released to the public. He reportedly also left two suicide notes, neither was released publicly, but they were said to have been addressed to his wife and to his Public Information Officer. He was reported to have been disturbed over a news media investigation, led by David Hackworth of Newsweek, into Valor device enhancements he wore on his Navy Commendation Medal and Navy Achievement Medal (small bronze “V” devices, signifying valor in combat), which the media report claimed he was not entitled to wear. He was said to be worried this issue would cause more trouble for the Navy’s reputation. Former CNO Elmo Zumwalt, who was Boorda’s commander in Vietnam, wrote a letter to the effect that Boorda’s wearing of the devices was “appropriate, justified and proper.” Wearing a “V” to denote that a medal was awarded for combat actions was a widespread practice, but not authorized unless the “V” was specifically noted in the citation.

Boorda was survived by his wife, Bettie Moran Boorda, four children, and 11 grandchildren.

In 1998, one of Boorda’s sons requested a review of his service record. The Board for Correction of Naval Records, the ultimate arbiter of whether Boorda was entitled to wear the Combat “V” on both medals, determined that he was not.

via Jeremy Michael Boorda – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Makes total sense. A guy is embarrassed and goes home before a scheduled interview and shoots himself in the chest. Sure.

How many posts do you think I could make out of known Clinton associates who are now dead?

The five SWAT team members remain on active duty. No criminal charges have been filed and no disciplinary action taken.

via Arizona Police Under Scrutiny After Opening Fire on and Killing Marine in His Home – FoxNews.com.