finally it comes to Virginia: the lies of anti-evolutionists

[acroyear]

A biology prof @ Northern Virgiinia Community College lectured a biology 101 class that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.

I know the son of one of the owners of the college.  He's gonna hear abou this one.

The article, as usual, is full of he-said-she-said's rather than being a proper expose of the lies of this woman.  Criticism is being assembled by several.

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

If the point was "promoting the idea of intelligent design", that would be one thing. I don't care of someone says "I don't think it happened the way that mainstream science says it happened, i personally feel there was something more going on."

That is not what this lady was doing. She was actively telling her biology students flat-out lies about biology. She was running the anti-evolution playbook straight out of Wells's "Icons of Evolution".

Shall we run through the list?

Many scientists, Crocker added, believe that complex life reveals the hand of an intelligent designer.

The current "list" of "scientists" runs about 400, with very few of them (maybe less than 40) being biologists or biochemists. But numbers don't mean anything, only evidence, and ID has none.

Crocker was about to establish a small beachhead for an insurgency that ultimately aims to topple Darwin's view that humans and apes are distant cousins.

This is bad reporting here or at the least bad teaching if that's how it was mentioned in the class. It is today *hardly* "Darwin's view" anymore. The evidence for our descent from our primate ancestors is far more complete than anything Darwin could have imagined. The writing (at that point) tries to present this concept that Darwin's ideas have gone unchallenged in the last 150 years, which is untrue.

No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory.

And no one ever will, but that is not what macroevolution (a term scientists generally never use in the first place) means. She is presenting an argument from incredulity by making a claim for evolution that scientists have never made, and then using it to sow the seeds of doubt into her students minds and that is utterly unethical.

The theory of intelligent design holds that while the evolutionary forces of random genetic mutation and natural selection may shape species on a small scale, they cannot account for the kind of large-scale differences between, say, chimpanzees and humans.

This is not the "theory of intelligent design" except as this woman thinks of it and described it to the reporter. It is not a definition that either Behe or Dembski would agree with.

Crocker believes that biological systems cannot grow more complex on their own any more than a novel, through chance typographical errors, can turn into a different book, with a different story. How could anyone think that new books get written because of typos in old books?

An utterly inappropriate metaphore. Unless one is referring to the Bible which has a long, traceable, and generally fascinating history of typos and mistranslations being propogated from earlier sources.