Camaban

sent this e-mail

"As one of the more amusing bits of your article, I was wondering about this:

" man came from an ape, why are there still apes today?"

Tell me... Why should man evolving from the same common ancestor as Apes (which is what is actually said to have happened) mean that Apes shouldn't be living today?"

Want the reply (if I get one) or what?

beoba

I never noticed him myself, however, I don't think I've ever really paid much attention to the KC Star. For a newspaper, they don't really give much.. well.. news. Even when you DO find news, it's a rare thing when it's in the form of a good unbiased article.

I prefer nytimes.com. It's free, good, and I can set up my free account to receive daily news via email. Very classy.

RufusAtticus

Okay guys. I'll see if I can cobble together a responce tomorrow or this weekend. I seriously doubt the Augusta Chronicle will run it, given the amazing pandering to the Kwazy Kwonservative Kwistians that love to call Disgusta home. It's probably not a coinencidence that the Southern Baptist Convention began in Augusta, GA.

TerryTryon

Sci-girl:

I guess you're right about most people misunderstanding one of the basic precepts of evolution, i.e, that it branches; it doesn't climb. But dammit, I have as little respect for ignorami that maintain that the proper metaphor for evolution is a ladder, rather than a tree. Wasn't it Christian apologists who wanted to fuse evolution and creationism who came up with this gross misrepresentation anyway?

I once found a high school science text from the forties that showed a diagram of a ladder with "primitive" forms on the bottom and glory of glories Homo sapiens perched on the rung that usually has a sticker that says "not a step" on the top. It explained that the lineage for humans did not specialize and thus (in the tree analogy) remained always in the trunk of the tree. Kinda like a conifer, with a central trunk and dead ends branching off at 90 degree angles all the way up!

But the same book did a pro and con discussion of Piltdown man a full generation after the hoax was definitively settled. Weird, outrageous stuff that boggles the mind. Why can't I save this really dumb material for later reference? I would have a regular Ripley's Believe It or Not!

[ August 29, 2002: Message edited by: TerryTryon ]</p>

Blinn

More stupidity. This Letter to the Editor is in today's Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:

Quetzal

You're more or less correct about the creationists clinging to the metaphor. However, it has a much longer history than first appears. It derives directly from the 17th Century scala naturae - which IIRC went from the four elements to angels. Couple that with the old idea of orthogenesis (linear progression within species from "primitive ancestors" to "modern" and from simple to complex in a straight line) and you have in a nutshell the creationist ladder - with man at the top, of course.

It's merely part and parcel of the desperation of inerrantist clinging to the rapidly crumbling shreds of their philosophy in the face of a constant onslaught of scientific discovery. It's really no different from the "kinds" barrier they keep harping on. The kinds barrier thing has an even hoarier history, originating in ancient Greece (Platonic essentialism), through the taxic discontinuity inherent in the scala naturae to the modern cretinist insistance on kreated kinds. Of course, Darwin's great sin is that he blew taxic discontinuity completely out of the water (Mendel notwithstanding).

Just my 11 kopeks.

pz

It's also a bit unfair to pin it solely on creationists. Quite a few evolutionists clung to the scala naturae for quite a long time. Need I mention Teilhard de Chardin? I also recall one of the first books on evolution that I read in grade school: it was called The Great Chain of Being, and you know who was at the end of the chain. SJ Gould has also written several essays that rail at biologists who perpetuate unthinkingly these kinds of assumptions about the nature of life on earth.

Tom Sawyer

In response to the question of why this was posted in a Georgia newspaper, here is the answer:

<a href="http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/metro/sat2002/27sat.html" target="_blank">SAT scores land Georgia in 50th place</a>

nuff said

frostymama

Now you know why I don't wear any of those nice atheist shirts. This is the same paper that printed very nasty anti atheist letters blaming us for 9/11. It really isn't acceptable to be anything other than Baptist or some other variety of fundy here.

RobertE

If a 15th century mathematician and former Nazi rocket engineer are the best Cal can do in support of biblical creationism, we shouldn't have anything to worry about. Unfortunately, too many people think Cal knows what he's talking about. What a shit-twinky.