Dafydd, I think that the casualty counts come from taking averages: The high estimates are 600,000 dead or a million. The low estimates are 40,000 or thereabouts. Ergo, probably the right answer is in the middle --> hundreds of thousands dead.
This kind of nonsense is what passes for logic too often today.

MikeR:

So if Johns Hopkins issued a new "survey" claiming 100 million dead Iraqis, would AP just split the difference and say "tens of millions?"

Yeesh.

Dafydd

The Global warming/climate change movement is an attempt to unify the people. While the problem is classed as global in nature the warmenists basically say we need to rise up as a people to force change.

I think that's exactly what would happen, Dafydd. Take a look at the wikipedia article, Casualties of the Iraq War. They have no interest in grading the different estimates; after all, they are "reputable sources", as required by wikipedia guidelines.
By the way, the wikipedia article on the Iraq War is awful beyond imagining. One would never know from it that the Surge showed remarkable success or really any success at all. Maybe you could recruit from your army of admirers a few wiki-savvy people who could work to move the page to a more sane level of bias? A lot of people use wikipedia.

So far, we have not reached any fascist moment today;

In some places, we have. In Washington, the urban imperialists who run Seattle have reached out into the county and seized control of 65 percent of all rural properties. It was done under the unifying pretext of 'the environment', but once the smoke cleared, each owner of a rural property was left to decide which 35% of his own property he would choose to actually act as an owner on. The rest was to be prohibited to him and left in a state of 'nature' so that those urban imperialists could make it the subject of their new warm fuzzy dreams at night of bunnies and fish, unviolated by the crude actions of the unworthy owner.

Um, an addendum to the Seattle post: the targeted properties were located within King County only.

But isn't it the case that when environmentalists yearn to 'protect' something under private ownership, their intent is to seize control of it?

Keep your eyes on the liberal crisis-myths. The time to worry is when they start to "make sense" to regular Americans; that is when they become truly dangerous.

Many of the Leftist Crisis Myths are true inequities that are used as an excuse to enact destructive Socialist 'reforms'. Feminism was initially an attempt to bring equality between the sexes; very quickly the movement was taken over by leftists who use real gender inequities as a whip to enact Socialist cures. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a huge crowd describing a dream of a colorblind society. Now Leftists like Rev. Wright use real racial inequities as a whip to promote Socialist cures. Environmentalists used to lobby to help the environment, now Leftists have taken over the cause and use the Environmental Crisis as a whip to enact Socialist cures. There used to be a radio commentator in Seattle who used the term "Watermelons" to describe the last group... "Green on the outside, Red on the inside". Heh.

But you can see the pattern in many advocacy groups, and it is a very successful practice. Take a true problem that catches the sympathy of the average American, take over the organization that pushes that cause, claim Absolute Moral Authority and then use that cause to enact your basic Socialist solution. Anybody who resists the Socialism is declared an enemy to the appropriate cause.

It's when the newer, younger activists get active that they lose their 'cover' and are seen for what they are. Perhaps the patient and tempering hand of the Leftists' old Soviet manipulators kept them from going over the edge and they are now missing that influence, I don't know... but it seems that since the end of the Soviet Union all of the activist groups have lost their esteem and their respectability. I'm glad the new kids on the block are so honest... but the time you worry about Dafydd occurred many years ago, and the damage they have done is visible proof of their treachery.

Of course, when the damage to our Nation becomes unbearable, the Leftists use the crises that hey have themselves created as another excuse to enact... but you see the pattern.

By the way, I'm not really that well versed in President Wilson and fascism... but is that why the 'Mercury' Dime has a fasces on the reverse? It's the right time period.

Also, it may occur to you that I confuse Socialist with Fascist. This is true. What is the actual difference between the two systems/beliefs? With all of the name calling that goes on, I can't even properly define them.

And yes, that is terribly embarrassing to admit in print.

Mr. Michael:

Also, it may occur to you that I confuse Socialist with Fascist. This is true. What is the actual difference between the two systems/beliefs?

Easy to remember. Socialism divides fairly neatly into two main branches:

1. International socialism, which wants to abolish all national borders and create a one-world government. Think of the "ComIntern," the Communist International.
2. National socialism, which sees the nation as a vital "myth" (identifying the people with the land) to unify the people. Thus, "Germany for the Germans," "100% Americanism," Fascist Spain, etc.

(1) includes Communism, Kropotkian and Bakuninite anarchism, the Socialist International, the 60s revolutionaries here in the U.S., International ANSWER, and any other socialist party or group that doesn't recognize national boundaries. (2) includes all versions of fascism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge, the American socialisms under Wilson, FDR, and suchlike -- anything that centers around a nation-state.

Thus fascism is a form of national socialism, which is a subset of socialism in general.

Dafydd

By the way, I think I should have called the 60s radicals "international socialists" instead of "fascists" in the actual post above. Oh well, if I ever turn this into an article, I'll monkey with it then.

Dafydd

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 03/17/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

Hey, what's with the drive-by on us Creationists?

Perhaps you could share some of our cited debunkings of evolutionary theory that have been debunked?

Baggi:

Perhaps you could share some of our cited debunkings of evolutionary theory that have been debunked?

That would be all of them.

Baggi, the first problem is that creationists don't seem to have the slightest idea what a disproof of a scientific theory should look like; so they're continually trying, with great desperation, to find some quirky site where you find fossil remains in reverse-complexity order -- without even bothering to notice that there is clear evidence of geological folding there.

Even were they able to find some area with no folding that showed such a reverse, that doesn't "disprove" evolutionary theory; it means that evolutionary theory must itself evolve, as it were... as it has done many, many times in the 149 years since Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species.

To disprove a theory, you must first find the core elements; then set up a measurement or observation that the theory predicts must go a certain way; then perform it and have it go an incompatible way; then wait many years for other scientists in the field to search for alternative responses other than "throwing out everything."

Evolutionary theory was finally accepted (after many decades) precisely because scientists kept trying to do so but were unable to disprove it. Certainly creationists have never been able to achieve this... for the simple reason that evolutionary theory is a very good model for the physical universe.

Then, if you want people to accept intelligent design, you must do exactly the same thing: You must try to disprove it -- and fail. But the attempt must be honest; to date, no creationist has proposed a measurement or observation that even has the possiblity of disproving creationism or intelligent design... the conjecture is carefully crafted to be unfalsifiable.

Can you describe an experiment or observation that could, even in theory, "disprove" intelligent design? How can you, when any anomaly can be answered by merely saying, "because God hath willed it so?"

Why are fossils always presorted in the sedement to go from simplest on the bottom to most complex on the top? Because God hath willed it so.

If every living thing was specially created by God, then why do all creatures above the level of some anaerobic bacteria -- plants and animals alike -- share the same DNA coding pattern? Because God hath willed it so.

Why are great strands of DNA redundantly duplicated throughout the chain? Because God hath willed it so.

Oh... and the creationist explanation must also explain astronomical measurements that show an old Earth, physics theory that shows an old Earth, mathematical-statistical theory that implies an old solar system, observed evolution from one species to another (which we see all the time in microbal life, which evidently doesn't interest creationists much), and so forth.

A scientific hypothesis must be compatible with all previous observations, both in the same field and in related fields. Scientific fields are not compartmentalized into little boxes; they all must fit together. ID doesn't fit with any other scientific discipline.

You see the problem? ID is not a scientific theory: It's not falsifiable; it's not based upon previous science; it's not compatible with other observations; it's based upon no physical law that is still in operation today; and it appeals to some force believed to be outside the universe and not itself provable.

ID is a religious teaching based upon the fundamental fallacy of incompatibility... for which see below.

Another dead-end approach creationists employ is the aptly named Argument by Personal Incredulity (discussed in the Language of God, by Francis S. Collins): Evolution cannot possibly have occurred because the creationist can't, for the life of him, understand how such a thing could happen.

For example, he cannot imagine how an eye could have evolved; therefore (he argues) it could not have. Or he cannot imagine how organelles can be created by mutation/variation plus natural selection; therefore (he concludes) they weren't.

The fact that Fred cannot imagine how an eyeball evolved doesn't mean that nobody else can; it means that Fred is uniquely unimaginative.

(Entire books have been written on the evolution of the eye, the wing, mitochondria, organelles, symbiotic digestive bacteria, and so forth, all of which have escaped creationists' notice. Another objection I have is that creationists are woefully ignorant of the scientific literature of evolutionary biology.)

What it almost always boils down to, in my scores of debates with creationists (even under the modern and rather misleading title of "intelligent design"), is that many people -- on both sides the aisle, sadly -- have internalized the fallacy that evolutionary theory and belief in an omnipotent Creator-God are mutually incompatible.

Many science popularizers -- such as Richard Dawkins, Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and many others; along with "skeptics" like James "the Amazing" Randi, Philip Pullman, and Penn Jillette -- have emphatically pronounced that you can only believe in science if you're an atheist... that scientific principles "prove" that there is no God.

Faced with such a choice, either you believe in science or you believe in God, but not both, believers quite naturally reject the former in favor of the latter.

But why should they be incompatible? Let me ask you a simple question; and I would like you to really take a stab at answering, Baggi. This is not a rhetorical question.

Suppose for sake of argument that God, when He chose to create the universe, wanted to create it by first creating the physical laws, then creating all the matter of the universe packed in the center, then pulling the pin and letting it go.

Suppose He wanted to do it that way. Would He have been able to do so?

That is, would God have been intelligent enough to create the necessary physical laws and the necessary amount of matter, and place it all in the necessary position, in order to cause a universe to come into existence in which galaxies, then stars, then stellar systems, then the Earth, then life would have come into existence... and biological laws such that, by an evolutionary process, humans would ultimately arise... whose brain was equipped for God to instill in them a moral sense and self-consciousness?

Is God that smart? Is God that powerful? Is God able to look that far into the future?

If He wanted to do this, do you believe He would be able to do it?

That's the question, Baggi. Because if you believe that He could have if He wanted to, then you must admit that evolutionary theory and belief in God are not mutually incompatible... no matter what Richard Dawkins says.

Dafydd

Not having spoken with God I can't tell you what he can, or can not do. My personal position is that he can do what he wants. You are welcome to disagree. It will be settled in the not so distant future to our satisfaction.

It also has long been by understanding that those who believe/push any theory are required to prove that theory using the scienitific method. Sorta like on the net the claimer has to provide the proof.

So far neither side has done so.

Creationists,

Sorry guys, the theory of evolution has proved its point using every scientific and logic tool available to mankind, and continually invents new and more clever ways to test and hone its theories, while creationism...well let's just say its argument seems to firmly rest on the "nuh-uh" principal I learned in first grade.

My basic problem with creationism is that I do not believe in a malevolent God, one who would leave lying around the evidence for evolution, then say, more or less, "Just kidding!". I think God, if he exisits, wants us to explore, to find the answers. I think the evidence is there for that very reason.

Creationist question - why did God create the fossil record? What possible purpose does it serve, other than to fool us into believing in evolution? Was it just..practice? How does that fit with a being powerful enough and wise enough to create the entire universe?

Is the fossil record not what it seems to be? Then biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and statistics must ALL have significant, previously unnoticed, and perhaps fatal, flaws.

Geoman:

Your points are good and valid; but I think we need to get at the root of the problem: Many IDers think that they have to choose between believing in God, or believing in what they like to call "Darwinism" (as if it were the "philosophy" of one guy).

But there is no dichotomy. If God exists, and if He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent -- as I suspect 100% of believers in intelligent design would agree He is -- then he could very easily have created the entire universe, including Man... but still have done so using the mechanism of evolution (which of course, He would also have created).

If I make a machine that builds a car, then surely it's reasonable to say I made the car. Right?

So the only question we have to ask (assuming God) is... what was the mechanism by which God made the universe and everything in it? Was it a clumsy series of trillions of individual creations... or was it a single, simple, elegant act of creation that unfolded like a flower, from Big Bang to today -- much the way it's described in the longer creation story in Genesis -- and further, into whatever is yet to come.

However one answers, one must present evidence. And since evolutionary biologists have presented nearly 150 years of continuous evidence for their answer, I think it's high time the anti-evolutionists present something other than Argument by Repetitive Nitpicking.

Dafydd

By the way, I'm not really that well versed in President Wilson and fascism... but is that why the 'Mercury' Dime has a fasces on the reverse? It's the right time period.

The FDR dime has a faces on the back as a torch. The faces was a symbol of the old Roman Republic, a bundle of sticks tied together. The founders adopted the symbols of the Roman Republic for the United States as they wanted people to identify the USA with the virtues of the old Republic. Think of the phrase 'E Pluribus Unum' - 'Out of Many, One' and you can see the symbolism of using the faces. Carved faces are on the walls of the House of Represenatives, and the mace of the House of Representatives is described thus:

"The design of the Mace is derived from an ancient battle weapon and the Roman fasces. The ceremonial Mace is 46 inches high and consists of 13 ebony rods – representing the original 13 states of the Union – bound together by silver strands criss-crossed over the length of the pole. Atop this shaft is a silver globe on which sits an intricately cast solid silver eagle."

Mussolini adopted the faces as he adopted all of the other symbols of the Roman Republic and Empire. He was trying to recreate a New Rome and appropriated the sumbols of the old.

Dafydd,

I know very few Christians (that is, people who believe God created the Universe) who fall under the realm that you're describing -- that the earth is slightly over 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs aren't real, etc. Lumping all IDers in with that group would be the equivalent of saying that all Christians are Amish, or somesuch.

In fact, I have heard your very argument of inclusiveness presented many times by people on the ID side. They say that such a process or vehicle presented by evolution is further evidence of design, for surely processes represent intelligence as much as actions.

As scientifically minded as I pride myself on being, I'm not really "sure" about evolution, and it has nothing to do with my religious beliefs. For a time I was as you describe, a person who believed in God and said wholeheartedly that evolution was the method in which He chose to create the universe...scrunch it up, set up the rules, pull the pin and watch. I had no heartache and felt no internal clashes over this position.

My main beef with evolution is the idea of randomness producing order. Nowhere else in the universe have we observed such a thing. Indeed, random mutations in any code (which DNA most definitely is) are generally referred to as "static". In communication theory, which governs codes and their transmission, all mutations are given to be negative as an axiom.

I shrug at the whole thing, though, because for me it doesn't matter. My only gripe at evolutionists or Darwinists is that most of them insist on using it as a tool to shove God out of the picture.

PS I have been reading in stealth-mode and not commenting, but I must say that this post was one of the best I'd ever read. I forwarded it to all my close friends and made my wife read it to boot.

K2aggie07:

I forwarded it to all my close friends and made my wife read it to boot.

Hooray for force-feeding of blogposts!

My main beef with evolution is the idea of randomness producing order. Nowhere else in the universe have we observed such a thing.

How about matter coalescing via gravity into stellar systems?

Randomness produces order all the time; the theory of "clustering" is all about that, for one example: It's guaranteed that, given a large number of cancer cases, that there will exist areas where (by random chance) cancer cases cluster along power transmission lines... thus making it appear as though such lines cause cancer.

Too, we're not talking about pure randomness here; the environment selects for and against various random mutations or variations: Taller giraffes have access to more leaves, thus eat better, thus are better able to pass along the tall-neck genes to their offspring than those short-necked giraffes who go hungry.

(The same evolutionary forces created apatosaurus, a.k.a. brontosaurus, and other long-necked dinosaurs.)

If you combine random fluctuation with a filtration or selection process, whether natural or intelligent, you can build most anything. Given enough time.

Dafydd

Dafydd

The 'tall-neck genes' would only be effective and would only pass on in high enough quantities for it to effect an entire population if that mutation happen if it happened in more then one individual, evidence of ID, and that the 'positive mutations' were dominate. If ether of those options were not filled, i.e. only one male with this gene it will not pass enough of it on to effect the group, and if it is not dominate even if a lot of males had that gene it would not pass on due to the fact that in 1 or 2 generations it will no longer have an effect on the group.

Sadly South Park had a good blurb about this. And here it is:

Ms. Garrison: Now I, for one, think evolution is a bunch of *bullcrap*! But I've been told I have to teach it to you anyway. It was thought up by Charles Darwin and it goes something like this...
[she goes up to a large poster of evolution and begins pointing things out with her pointer]
Ms. Garrison: In the beginning, we were all fish. Okay? Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So Retard Fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its...
[she waves her left hand limply]
Ms. Garrison: ...mutant fish hands... and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this.
[she points to a prehistoric mammal rodent]
Ms. Garrison: Retard frog-sqirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which was a... monkey-fish-frog... And then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey, and that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey... and that made you!
[she faces the class, with the new girl among them looking around]
Ms. Garrison: So there you go! You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel! Congratulations!

I know it’s not totally accurate, but it is no less accurate then saying the all ID believe in the 'young earth' view.

I also dont buy most of the 150 years of evidence that proves that Evolution is the only way it works. If we truly came from Great Apes 55,000+ years ago (or what ever it was) why are there still any of the great apes, and they dont show any systems of adapting/evolving?

I have also read a few books bout the evolution of the eye, for example yet none of them can show the evolution of said eye in a single system. They dont show how it went from a light sensing group of cells, to a shape defining group of cells, to a full on working eye in a single species over any period of time. They always seem to show some sort of leap of faith, pun intended, from a phytoplankton with a basic reaction to light then to a zoo-plankton that hunts with a light/shadow group of cells, then poof its the eye of a fish (or something like that.) That does not show an evolution of an eye.

Just my 2 cents.

I also dont buy most of the 150 years of evidence that proves that Evolution is the only way it works. If we truly came from Great Apes 55,000+ years ago (or what ever it was) why are there still any of the great apes, and they dont show any systems of adapting/evolving?

That isn't what evolution says. That is a nice example of a false argument presented by creationists, though.

That isn't what evolution says. That is a nice example of a false argument presented by creationists, though.

Ok then were did we evolve from?

I truly want to understand, knowlegde is good.

We evolved from primate species that existed long ago. The apes and monkeys that exist now evolved from other primate species that existed long ago.

We didn't evolve from apes that exist today, in other words.

Might want to go read a few books by anthropologists, since you can find better answers than above. I'm oversimplifying things greatly.

You could also do a search on the web. I found this site, which looks interesting. That's just from a brief search on Australopithecus africanus via ask.com. There are probably more using different search engines.

Finally, could also start asking honest questions from the start like your last one, rather than leading questions that you think will give you the answer you want.

Daga More:

I'm not a biologist, but to refine Patrick Chester's point above, both humans and great apes evolved from an earlier common ancestor.

Of course, the same can be said about humans and palm trees... you just have to go back rather farther.

As to your fish example -- Argument by South Park? -- in fact, there are various types of lungfish that can live for some time outside of water, and even walk (yes, walk!) from one pool of water to another, using their fins like legs. Clearly something similar to that was the "transitional form" between real fish and real land animals.

(There may have been many such transitional forms in different times and places: A particularly useful structure can separately evolve many times.)

Anti-evolutionists are always obsessed with finding "transitional forms." The problem is that it's a never-ending quest:

Suppose you have two different species, A and B, where B evolved from A. The creationist demands that you show him the "transitional form" between them.

All right, so you show him T, which existed in between A and B. So now you have A, then T, then B. What's he going to do next? Why, he'll demand you show him the "transitional forms" -- betweeen A and T, and between T and B! If you find T2 and T3, so you have A, T2, T, T3, and B, then... but you're way ahead of me: All right, smarty pants, so where are the transitional forms between A and T2, T2 and T, T and T3, and T3 and B, huh?

You see the problem, DM? No matter how many "transitional forms" one finds, a creationist can always demand more transitional forms between the previous transitional forms. It never ends.

Another problem is that creationists imagine a linear evolution from A to B -- and they think it somehow a contradiction if you can still find A after B begins appearing in the fossil record.

But why should every, last member of A die out except for the one line that is heading towards B, each and every generation? Just because B may be more successful than A doesn't mean that A cannot still survive, albeit probably in smaller numbers than it existed prior to competition with B.

In reality, B can evolve out of A, as can C and D and E, even while A itself also continues to exist more or less the same. You end up with more diversity of life, as A spins off many variant species, and eventually perhaps entire phyla.

So what are the biggest fallacies in the creationist (intelligent-designist) critique of evolutionary theory (ET)? Here are nine big ones. But bear in mind, not every critic embraces every fallacy.

This is, however, the betting line:

1. They wrongly think of ET as "Darwinism," as if it were or should be a static philosophy enunciated by one prophet, like Marxism or Paulism.
2. Therefore, they often argue that ET must be false because it changes all the time. "Every time somebody finds a fallacy, scientists just change the theory!" Anti-ETers often argue that such "inconstancy" means ET is a fraud... because they fundamentally misunderstand the scientific method (see 5).
3. They see ET as a "house of cards," so that finding even the tiniest inconsistency in detail will cause the entire edifice to come a-tumblin' down. This induces them to waste energy and time nitpicking this or that detail, rather than develop a holistic argument against the core ideas (assuming that is even possible). This leads them deep into the weeds -- where they're usually wrong, often risibly so. See point 4.
4. Anti-ETers are typically very poorly read in actual modern ET literature and in scientific literature in general... even for laymen. They seem curiously incurious about the actual theory they're debating... possibly because of point 1: If they believe ET hasn't changed since 1859, then why bother reading even popularizations, let alone actual journals, of modern evolutionary theory?
5. Due to 4 above, they're typically ignorant of what constitutes science in the first place. They don't understand that any scientific hypothesis must satisfy certain criteria: (i) It must arise from existing science; (ii) it must explain all known relevant observations; (iii) it must be predictive; (iv) it must be falsifiable; (v) and it must rely only upon forces still extant in the world today. This ignorance leads them to think that, if only they can "knock out" ET, then creationism du jour (intelligent design) must prevail!
6. Also because of 4, they imagine a bizarre caricature of ET, rather than modern ET itself; this leads them to mischaracterize it as saying, for example, that "humans evolved from modern apes," rather than what it actually claims -- that humans and apes have a relatively recent common ancestor.
7. They believe that if species B evolves from species A, then there should be no populations of A remaining; thus if A still exists, that (they believe) proves that ET is bunk. "If it evolved, why do I still see it today?"
8. They rely heavily upon Argument from Personal Incredulity: If they cannot imagine how an eye or a wing or some other organ or body part evolved, they conclude that nobody else can, either.
9. And they foolishly listen to ET cheerleaders who also happen to be atheists; anti-ETers typically think that ET requires that they renounce God and faith. In fact, there is no conflict; religion and science exist in different realms; an evolutionary biologist can be a believer, an atheist, or an agnostic.

If those who reject evolution out of hand would just take the time to really sit down and understand it -- not by reading anti-ET "textbooks," but from evolutionary biology's popular literature itself, even if you have to grit your teeth at Richard Dawkins' irrelevant atheism -- they would better understand modern evolutionary theory: Where it came from, why it came about, and what it actually says.

And the odds are that many would see how logical and powerful an explanation it really is... and they might be willing to embrace it as the model for one facet of life in this here universe.

Dafydd

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