More Darwinian lies, to be washed down with cheap gin and swelling thoughts of love for Big Brother

Here, from Time’s puff piece on the incarnate god of liberalism, is a supreme bit of cover-up, as only the spin artists at Time can do it:

The fossil record was scanty in Darwin’s day, but now it has pushed the evidence of life on Earth back to at least 3.4 billion years ago.

Now any person familiar with the evolution debate, on seeing the phrase, “The fossil record was scanty in Darwin’s day…” knows exactly what is being referenced: the missing fossils of the transitional life forms that are needed to prove Darwin’s gradualist theory of evolution, especially the transitional forms preceding the Cambrian explosion, when, after three billion years during which the only life on earth was bacteria and some primitive sponges, all the marine invertebrates in their spectacular diversity and wonder popped into the fossil record in the geological blink of an eye, with no transitional forms preceding them. Darwin himself acknowledged that the gaps in the fossil record were the greatest objection to his theory (though, as Ann Coulter has wittily remarked, to call them “gaps” is an understatement, since the whole fossil record is a gap). Darwin even suggested—though his language contained a Clintonian escape hatch—that if the missing transitional forms could not be found, his theory would be disproved. So what does the Time writer, Carl Zimmer, do? He raises the question of Darwinism’s most famous weakness, the missing transitional forms, and then, instead of acknowledging that the transitional forms are as missing today as they were 150 years ago, he pulls a verbal switch about the discovery of “evidence of life on Earth back to at least 3.4 billion years ago.” Of course, the age of the fossil record is not the issue, but the almost total absence of transitional forms throughout the entire fossil record. Zimmer, with his facile phrase about the scanty fossile record having been filled out by “evidence of life on Earth back to at least 3.4 billion years ago,” is telling his readers that the biggest objection to the Darwinian theory of evolution, which deeply troubled Darwin himself, has been solved!

Only a stone-cold, Soviet-like liar, a total apparatchik, could have written a sentence like that. Indeed, I suddenly feel a twinge of sympathy for a view I’ve always disliked, Norman Mailer’s 1950s riff that the America of that time had a “totalitarian” mindset. Perhaps there were Time writers like Carl Zimmer around back then.

The rest of the article is less audacious in its lies and presents the standard type of transparently false Darwinian propaganda. Here, for example, is Zimmer’s evidence that Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by random variations and natural selection has been proved:

Darwin proposed that natural selection could gradually transform a species. Scientists have observed thousands of cases of natural selection in action. They’ve documented that beaks of finches on the Galapagos Islands have gotten thicker when droughts forced the birds to crack tough seeds to survive. They’ve observed bacteria develop resistance to drugs that were believed to be invincible. Now biologists are applying DNA-sequencing technology to natural selection, which lets them identify the individual genetic changes that boost reproductive success.

Alert readers do not need me to point out what is wrong with this paragraph. All the changes Zimmer mentions are changes within a species, not changes connected with the origin of a new species. Thus, after 150 years, Darwin’s followers are still playing the same bait and switch that the great man himself initiated in his 1859 magnum opus: claiming that they have proved the origin of species by random variation and natural (or artificial) selection, and then giving evidence of the origins of mere modifications within a species.

Do you still wonder why I call Darwinism the biggest intellectual fraud in history? Darwinians constantly say that the truth of the theory should not be judged by the bad arguments used by its proponents. But why would a true theory need to be defended by such gross deceptions?

Here is Zimmer’s next paragraph:

As populations adapt to their surroundings, they can gradually evolve into new species. “We now have, I think, a good understanding of how new species arise—that is, how biological diversity is created,” says Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of the new book Why Evolution Is True. “Darwin made little inroad into the problem, despite the title of his magnum opus.”

Notice the little problem? “As populations adapt to their surroundings, they can gradually evolve into new species.” In the previous paragraph, Zimmer gave concrete examples of modifications within a species,—bird beaks thickening, bacteria developing greater resistance to drugs. But in this paragraph, where he specifically refers to the evolution of new species, he doesn’t provide any actual examples of a new species evolving from an old species, He just vaguely asserts that populations “can gradually evolve” into a new species. It’s pure puffery, worthy of Madison Avenue, designed to make readers believe that the Darwinian theory of the origin of species has been demonstrated, when in reality nothing of the kind has happened.

After 150 years, the Darwinists still haven’t got the goods, and they are still pulling the wool over the eyes of lazy and credulous readers.

In connection with which I must say that there is one Darwinian claim that the Darwinians have inadvertently proved: a species that lets itself be suckered by the obvious lies that Darwin’s acolytes and publicists have been swilling out for the last 150 years can hardly be thought of as the crown of creation.

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Also, be sure to see my discussion of the recent New York Times article which openly admits that the Darwinian evolution of species has still not been proved.

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Ben W. writes:

It’s interesting that atheists and Darwinists point to the transcendental and moral gap as evidence against the existence of God—how can God exist if there is so much suffering or where is God when there is suffering? Yet they can co-exist with the archeological gaps in their own theories.

Ben W. writes:

I can’t believe someone could write this:

“Once there were no brains, and now there are billions”

That’s from the TIME article on Darwin. The twit who wrote this opens himself up for counterstatements such as, “But not one of those brains works at TIME.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 17, 2009 08:48 AM | Send