NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/talk/origins/16667

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-25 | 5.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!philjohn
From: [e-mail] (Phillip Johnson)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Ideology and Indoctrination
Date: 25 Jan 1993 14:34:38 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Chris Colby complains that Darwin on Trial reports that
biologists have been hiding things from the public.   Why not,
when leading figures have admitted as much on behalf of their
profession?  It is not I but Stephen Jay Gould who described the
prevalence of stasis and sudden appearance in the fossil record
as the "trade secret" of paleontology.  Stephen Stanley has
written that the doubts of paleontologists about the conformity
of the fossil record with Darwinist gradualism were for long
"suppressed."  Most revealing of all, Niles Eldredge confessed in
print that "We paleontologists have said that the history of life
supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while
really knowing that it does not."  That is a smoking gun indeed.

We owe these candid statements to the frustration of
paleontologists with the Darwinian ideology that required reports
of stasis to go unpublished.  [For Gould's frank acknowledgement
of this and other references see Darwin on Trial, pp. 59-61 and
the research notes to chapter 4.]  We also owe them to the
assumption of the writers that the rulers of "science" are not
accountable to the public for what they do.   Dr. Gallo and Dr.
Baltimore made similar assumptions in believing that they were
beyond accountability.   As more of these instances of scientific
arrogance come to light, the public becomes become more aware
that scientists are as corruptible as members of other
professions.  This is particularly the case when science
becomes mixed with ideology, money and power.

I wrote in another thread that dogmatic Darwinists should
practice seeing themselves as others see them.  What I meant is
that many outsiders see them not as the pure truth-seekers they
claim to be, but as ideologues similar to their close cousins in
the family of scientific materialist ideology,  the Marxists and
the Freudians.  The problem is not so much that Darwinists tell
deliberate untruths as that they believe their own propaganda,
and interpret everything they see as confirming the ideology that
controls their own thinking.

An excellent example is the standard Darwinist delusion that the
peppered moth example illustrates "evolution" in any non-trivial
sense.  That this unremarkable instance of population shifts has
anything to do with the great creative process that produced
moths and trees and scientific observers in the first place is so
absurd to any unprejudiced mind that my lecture audiences
consistently laugh when I explain it to them.  Many Darwinists
throw the peppered moth overboard, like Thomas Jukes writing in
response to me in First Things:  "Johnson's opening discussion
incorrectly states that 'the most famous piece of evidence for
Darwinism is a study of an English peppered-moth population....'
He uses the peppered-moth example three times.  The phenomenon
shows fluctuations of populations rather than evolution, and even
creationists have pointed this out." Indeed.

Even the California science framework, itself a piece of
naturalistic propaganda, no long presents the moth example as an
illustration of directional or creative change:

"Students should understand that this is not an example of
evolutionary change from light to dark to light moths, because
both kinds were already in the population.  It is an example of
natural selection, but in two senses.  First, temporary
conditions in the environment encouraged selection against dark
moths and then against light moths.  But, second, and just as
important, is the selection to maintain a balance of both black
and white forms, which are adaptable to a variety of
environmental circumstances.  This balanced selection increases
the chances for survival of the species.  This is in many ways
the most interesting feature of the evolution of the peppered
moth, but it is often misrepresented in textbooks."  [P. 103]

That frequent misrepresentation occurred, of course, because
cyclical variation within a fundamentally stable and unchanging
situation is not what Darwinists need to show.  They are trying
to tell a creation story for a culture, and for that purpose the
moth example has to illustrate the kind of change that eventually
makes a butterfly from a bacterium.

Darwinist indoctrination makes its victims incapable of
understanding that the fundamental problem of biological
evolution, or creation, is not diversity within the type but the
origin of complexity. It is pathetic to see advanced biology
students (or faculty members) say that natural selection does not
have to be "the least bit creative" to be "the primary mechanism
responsible for bringing about, from a single common ancestor,
all of the species on earth  and their phenotypic features."
That isn't even reasonable by the standards of Darwinist
literature, where the creative power of natural selection is
often extolled hyperbolically.  As Richard Dawkins puts it,
a single cell has more genetic information than all the volumes
of an encyclopedia.  If you don't understand that explaining the
origin of all that information presents a serious problem,
it is probably because indoctrination in the notion
that population fluctuation in the peppered moth is the paradigm
example of evolution in action has a tendency to cloud the mind.

I recognize that this frank talk will cause offense.  My purpose
is not to insult anyone, however, but to free minds.  Many of you
have been indoctrinated not to question assumptions that are
based on ideology rather than evidence.  You can be free of that
indoctrination if you wish to be.
--
Phillip E. Johnson
  School of Law, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720