One Year Later.....

Exactly one year ago, I wrote (but did not publish) the following post.....

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz and Using Reason.....

.........

Yes, reason. To start off this post, I'll direct readers to the following post by Shannon Love over at the Chicago Boyz.

An excerpt-

" The Left and Evolution
I was educated as a biologist and evolutionary theory remains an intellectual interest of mine. I spent many hours in my youth arguing with "scientific" creationists. These hours were largely spent educating the creationists on the actual theory they were criticizing, or debating the finer philosophical points of scientific methodology. I eventually gave up due to pure frustration because in the end creationists believe what they believe as a matter of faith. You can't argue somebody out of his faith.

So this post over at Powerline pointing to a biology professor who is denouncing the Powerline guys for being idiots because one of them doesn't believe in evolution grabbed my attention .

Creationists are exasperating because they never study evolutionary theory in any detail. Since they start with the unshakable presumption that the theory is wrong, they can never actually honestly analyze the theory and therefore can never understand it in any depth. They just skim over the theory looking for points that confuse them and then pronounce the misunderstood points as fatal flaws within the theory itself.

Frankly, most creationists' knowledge of evolutionary theory boils down to, "them scientist fellas what says we alls comes from monkeys!"

Of course, this is a much different view of evolutionary theory than that held by the majority of secular leftists. Their superior educations and their generally more open-minded and inquisitive natures have given them a view of evolutionary theory that might be summed up as, "them scientist fellas what says we alls comes from monkeys!"

I'm not kidding.

Your average leftist is every bit as clueless about evolutionary theory as any stereotypical bible-thumping hick with an 8th-grade education. Worse, leftists hypocritically extol evolutionary theory when it advances their political agenda, but then turn on it viciously when it does not."

Shannon goes on to use the example of the recent savaging of Harvard president Larry Summers by the leftist academic establishment for espousing the view that maybe,just maybe, the Blank Slate theory-that human intellect and behavior are strictly the products of learning that occurs after birth- may not be entirely correct. During Remarks at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, Mr Summers stated the following-

My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last fifteen years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization.

The point the Shannon makes in regards to creationists views of evolution, is that just as creationists will ignore the scientific basis for evolution, the same secular intellectuals from the left side of the aisle will ignore the scientifically falsifiable information which disproves the Blank Slate theory. Of course for even proposing this theory Summers was pratically tarred and feathered.

Here is something that I have noticed in a common thread through almost any subject- be it religion, science, politics, sports, whatever. You will have people on the far edges of the fringe of each subject that WILL NOT be moved from their positions no matter how much logic and reason you present them. Just try explaining to a christian fundamentalist evolution- once you are done banging your head against the wall, you will see my point. It's the same on every sode of any other subject though. Conservatives and Liberals right now HATE and I mean HATE each other so much that rational discourse has completely fallen off the deep end, and we are constantly reduced to ad hominem debates. It's like the Rush Limbaughs and the Michael Moores are the only ones left arguing with each other. There isn't enough REASON left in the middle for people to grasp a firm position to.

Since then, Larry Summers was removed/resigned as President of Harvard.



What a difference a year makes, eh?