Big Bang?!#@!
rcfchess at aol.com
rcfchess at aol.com
Wed Sep 28 11:51:33 CDT 2005
Yep; it's typical stupid thinking, linking two things that have nothing to do with each other, cause-and-effect-wise. It's like saying someone drank milk and then jumped out a window, so therefore drinking milk causes you to jump out of a window. Brilliant, f'ing brilliant...
-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Johnson <bjohnson02 at insightbb.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:40:55 -0400
Subject: re: Big Bang?!#@!
A Dog and the Mind of Newton
Posted by Carl Zimmer
It's bad enough to see basic scientific misinformation about evolution getting tossed around these days. USA Today apparently has no qualms about publishing an op-ed by a state senator from Utah (who wants to have students be taught about something called "divine design") claiming there is no empirical evidence in the fossil evidence that humans evolved from apes. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with the twenty or so species of hominids that existed over the past six million years. Perhaps just file them away under "divine false starts."
But history takes a hit as well as science. Creationists try whenever they can to claim that Darwin was directly responsible for Hitler. The reality is that Hitler and some other like-minded thinkers in the early twentieth century had a warped view of evolution that bore little resemblance to what Darwin wrote, and even less to what biologists today understand about evolution. The fact that someone claims that a scientific theory justifies a political ideology does not support or weaken the scientific theory. It's irrelevant. Nazis also embraced Newton's theory of gravity, which they used to rain V-2 rockets on England. Does that mean Newton was a Nazi, or that his theory is therefore wrong?
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/08/11/a_dog_and_the_mind_of_newton.php
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