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The "Theory" of Evolution vs. "Creationism"

steen said:
Yes, it is, as mutations build on the former DNA.
So a person with the Sicle-cell mutation is completely different than the person which did not experiencing the Sicle-cell mutation? That is just plain nonsense.

sicklemia is sickle cells in the blood a disease that is adverse to the environment even though it may have been developed to ward off malaria, hence it is still a defect causing problems and is not functional to homeostasis.
 
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alphieb said:
sicklemia is sickle cells in the blood a disease that is adverse to the environment even though it may have been developed to ward off malaria, hence it is still a detect causing problems and is not functional to homeostasis.

Thus causing deaths
 
steen said:
Actually, we are debating Scientific Method validity, which very much has to do with all Scientific Theories, including those in physics and chemistry.

Nope, different topic.
 
I must say Steen, This is very interesting the way you get so intense is moving.
 
alphieb said:
OH OK..... Now Steen is arguing with F.A. Davis the author of TABER'S MED. DICTIONARY. That is a good one.
Sure I am. I argue from the biological sciences. care to involve Dr. Davis in the specific intricacies of the Scientific theory of Evolution? If it turns out that I am right, will you provide a public appology and acknowledgement that you were flat-out wrong? Or are you to chicken, don't you trust your own claims because they are all sophistry and no knowledge?
 
alphieb said:
I simply ignored your link. I want an explanation in your words. I don't trust links as they may be viruses.
That is the most lame and pathetic excuse I have ever heard for avoiding being shown that you are flatout wrong. but let me help you in the evidence (And next time don't be so %^@%$#@QW%$ ****ing dishonest in your lies as to then claim that what was proven is not possible, because I will then chase you all over the place exposing what a friggin' liar you are. That's a promise, so you better pay attention! %$@$)

Anyway, here is the text from the link that does NOT contain virues, your pathetic and cowardly excuse none withstanding (numbers may not quite match up per graphics issues):

My favorite example of a mutation producing new information involves a Japanese bacterium that suffered a frame shift mutation that just happened to allow it to metabolize nylon waste. The new enzymes are very inefficient (having only 2% of the efficiency of the regular enzymes), but do afford the bacteria a whole new ecological niche. They don't work at all on the bacterium's original food - carbohydrates. And this type of mutation has even happened more than once!

So, what is a frame shift mutation?

It happens when a chunk of genetic code (remember those AGTCTAGATCGTATAGC... DNA sequences from Jurassic Park?) is shifted by one or more nucleotides. In DNA, each triplet of nucleotides codes for one amino acid, and each such triplet is called a codon. So, the amino acid Arginine (symbol Arg) is coded by the DNA nucleotide sequence CGT, and also by codons CGA, CGC,CGG, AGA, AGG. Likewise, the amino acid Glutamic Acid (symbol Glu) is coded by the DNA nucleotide sequence GAA, and also by the sequence GAG. There are four types of nucleic acids, which naturally bond in one of two pairs: Thymine/Adenine, and Cytosine/Guanine (T/A and G/C). A thymine (T) on one strand of DNA will bind to an adenine (A) on the paired strand, and so on. There would be 64 different possible amino acids with a three-nucleotide codon (43=64), but several of these are redundant, as shown in the lists above for amino acids Arginine and Glutamic Acid. In biological organisms, there are just 20 different amino acids. Various DNA triplets code for these amino acids, and strings of amino acids form proteins - molecules (such as enzymes) that really do something specific, such as metabolize sugars.

A Frame Shift is a radical mutation in which a single nucleotide is inserted or deleted, causing a shift in the triplets coded by the DNA strand. It's fairly technical, so I'll present what a Frame Shift is by analogy with a different Digital Code, that being the ASCII code used in computers to convert numbers from 0 to 255 into symbols or characters. For example, the ASCII code for the letter "A" is 65, which in binary converts to 64+1, or 26 + 1, written thus: 01000000 + 00000001 = 01000001. For this analogy, we'll just be using the first 128 characters, and so we can use just 7 digits: thus, an "A" then has the 7-digit code 1000001. A lower case "a" is 32 higher than a capital A (which leaves room for 26 letters and a few extra characters), and is thus written 1100001 in 7-digit binary notation (=64+32+1 = 97 in decimal). A "b" is written 1100010 in 7-digit binary notation (=64+32+2 = 98). Likewise, a "d" is written 1100100 in 7-digit binary notation (=64+32+4 = 100), and an "e" is written 1100101 in 7-digit binary notation (=64+32+4+1 = 101).

What has all this to do with Frame Shifts, you ask? In this analogy, actual biological proteins or enzymes (strings of amino acids) correspond to words or phrases (strings of ASCII characters). Individual amino acids (such as Arginine) are analagous to individual ASCII characters (such as the letter "A"). Finally, the DNA nucleotides A, T, C and G correspond to the binary digits 0 and 1.

So, let us string together several letters to make a "digital" word. The ASCII digital code for the word "bed" is made by stringing together the 7-digit codes for b (1100010), e (1100101), and d (1100100) to make one long code: 110001011001011100100.

The image below shows what happens when we apply a Frame Shift to the digital code for bed. Here, we shift the "reading frame" by one digit to the left, which requires that we add one extra digit as a prefix. Here, the prefix I chose was the digit 1.


The Frame Shift is not a mild mutation. It is HUGE. We still have a 3-letter string, but each letter is different. Shifting the reading frame one digit gives us three NEW characters: q:(1110001), 2 (0110010), and r (1110010).

This particular Frame Shift scrambles the perfectly fine word "bed" into the unintelligible, meaningless word "q2r." In this case, the Frame Shift is not only a drastic mutation, but has completely altered the meaning of the word "bed." In this case, at least, information has been "lost"or "degraded," just as creationists say will happen ALL THE TIME - EVERY TIME.

And that's where they are wrong. While most Frame-Shift mutations do indeed scramble meanings and degrade information, not all of them do so.

Here's an example of a frame shift creating information: here, the word "gas" is coded as g(1100111) + a (1100001) + s (1110011). When we apply a Left Frame Shift to the long code for "gas," we do NOT end up with a meaningless phrase such as "q2r." In THIS case, we end up with a new, meaningful word: spy.


Similarly, the word "jib," when right-frame-shifted, is mutated into the new word "USE."


As a final example, the word "ICE," when left-frame-shifted, is mutated into the new word "dab."


Certainly, MOST frame shifts will destroy information. BUT NOT ALL - and that is where creationists have it wrong. I have shown three examples where such "Frame Shifts" indeed create new information. After all, in the proper context, the words "spy," "USE," and "dab" actually mean something. Since their meanings are totally unrelated to the original meanings, it is obvious that, at least in this case, the Frame Shift mutation process has created new information. It's important to note that context really means something as regards interpretation of these words. For example, if the word "luz" was generated, that would mean nothing in English, but it means "light" in Spanish. Without a common language and culture, words won't mean anything! It's different with DNA, because the "context" in which DNA strands are interpreted is the world of chemical reactions. The "meaning" of novel strands of DNA lies in how these strands are transcribed, what the new proteins look like, and (most importantly!) how the proteins react with other molecules, perhaps even affecting the organism's lifestyle.

Now, let's get back to Biology, and the case of the bacterium which has evolved the capability of ingesting nylon waste (see Kinoshita et. al.). This case is most interesting. Nylon didn't exist before 1935, and neither did this organism. Detailed examination of the DNA sequences of the original bacterium and of the nylon-ingesting version show identical versions in the gene for a key metabolic enzyme, with only one difference in over 400 nucleotides. However, this single microevolutionary addition of a single thymine ('T') nucleotide caused the new bacterium's enzyme to be composed of a completely novel sequence of amino acids, via the mechanism of frame shifting. The new enzyme is 50 times less efficient than its precursor, as would be expected for a new structure which has not had time to be polished by natural selection. However, this inefficiency would certainly not be expected in the work of an intelligent designer. The genetic mutation that produced this particular irreducibly-complex enzyme probably occurred countless times in the past, and probably was always lethal, until the environment changed, and nylon was introduced.

The image below shows just a part of the 400+-long nucleotide string for the key enzyme (see the Susumu Ohno paper). The original ("old") enzyme's amino acid sequence appears on top, and the frame-shifted ("new") sequence on bottom. The DNA nucleotides appear in the middle for both the old species and the new (one T inserted). Over this small portion of the enzyme, the old DNA coded for the amino acids Arginine, Glutamic Acid, Arginine, Threonine, Phenylalanine, Histidine, Arginine and Proline.


But the NEW DNA strand, which includes one extra T nucleotide, is shifted, and the new string of amino acids is completely changed. The addition of the thymine nucleotide produces a new Methionine amino acid, which, like the conductor tapping his baton, indicates the Start of a new Protein. This is followed by other new amino acids because of the frame shift: Asparagine, Alanine, Arginine, Serine, Threonine, Glycine and Glutamine. The new string of amino acids - the new protein - is completely different from the original.

While most frame shifts of such a key enzyme would destroy the enzyme, resulting in immediate death of the organism, this particular protein happened to react with nylon oligomers. And so it was that a drastic mutation suddenly gave an ordinary sugar-eating bacterium the unusual ability to digest nylon, which just happened to be present in abundance in the little waste pond behind a Japanese factory. The Japanese scientists who discovered strange bacterial mats growing in their scum ponds became very interested in this new ability, and finally found it was all due to a single Frame Shift mutation. The new enzyme is not active on common substrates - the bacteria's old "food" - and plenty were checked. Whether or not these bacteria retain enzymes to digest their former food source, the fact is that the former food source became much less important because of the new-found ability to ingest food from a novel source - nylon waste.

All Material Copyright 2005 by NMSR unless otherwise noted
 
(continued)


I will do my own research and get back to you, since you can't dictate it.
See above. We are allowed to cite and copy from the site with reference to their copyright.
Do you not understand the text or just say "hey look at this",
I understand the text. I NEVER link to anything I don't understand. I stand 100% behind my links and if there are areas I disagree with, I detail that as well. But take a look at the bolded text above.

If you have any questions that are serious rather than just creationist denial falsehoods and deceptions, I will be happy to deal with them. If you are just goingto play the sophist lie games, then I will spend my time more constructively in pointing out your dishonesty.

Good, as long as we are clear on that.
and by the way it doesn't make it any more valid than my points.
YOU ARE LYING. It directly proves that a single mutation can lead to a new species as detailed in the bolded text above. (You know the text from the site you claimed not to be able to look at because of viruses)
 
alphieb said:
one celled organism became a complex highly functioning organism sounds as bogus as jesus walked on water.
And that's a nice "because I say so" ignorant postulation disproved by factual scientific evidence.

Oh, I forgot, you don't believe in evidence that disturbs your fervent beliefs. Silly me for even contemplating suchh a radical concept as you actually looking at evidence.
 
alphieb said:
Light colored moths DECREASED for a reason.
Exactly. They decreased, they didn't die out as you so falsely claimed.
The logical reason I just described. I stand corrected they did not die out, but almost. They certainly did not mutate into dark moths. Which somewhat validates my point.
Are you nuts? Nobody said that light moth turned into dark moth. Rather, natural selection favored the one type whose morphology was most condusive to survival.

So whatever point it is you think was "validated" sure sounds nuts and bogus to me.

PLEASE, PLEASE start reading up on some of this stuff instead of just spouting off, so we can have at least the resemblance of an intelligent discussion instead of you just spouting off false nonsense and us having to spend all our effort in simply correcting your misinformation.
 
alphieb said:
sicklemia is sickle cells in the blood a disease that is adverse to the environment even though it may have been developed to ward off malaria, hence it is still a defect causing problems and is not functional to homeostasis.
Not if there is malaria around, in which case the ones who carry the single-gene allele for the mutation are protected against malaria and hence is more likely to reproduce than those who does NOT carry the allele at all and thus are likely to die from malaria without reproducing. ie. natural Selection.

As such, if it keeps the person alive, it VERY MUCH is condusive to better homeostasis than in those who die from malaria.

What part of this don't you understand?
 
alphieb said:
Thus causing deaths
The 25% offspring with no allele will die from malaria. the 50% offspring with the allele willbe protected against malaria and will reproduce. The 25% offspring who has 2 alleles will show the disease and will suffer the symptoms but not necessarily die and certainyl are able to carry offspring even when sick.

So yes, those who have the alleles are in for better survioval, and your claim thus is flat-out false.

Agaian, I BEG you to read up on thsi stuff before spouting off falsehoods. It is much more interesting to actually discuss the science than to have to waste my time correcting your misrepresentations.
 
alphieb said:
Nope, different topic.
So you are now claiming that you have not questined the validity of the data generated thrioguh the Scientific Method in Biology and contrasted this with the same process in the field of physics?

I say that you are lying. FLAT-OUT LYING!
 
alphieb said:
I must say Steen, This is very interesting the way you get so intense is moving.
I just can't stand liars, finding them despicable. And you are lying right and left here.

But I guess your god has told you to bear false witness all the time, right?
 
kal-el said:
Well, let's start with the law of gravity. What the hell holds you to the ground? Not god? Now let's go to physics. If you place your hand on a car muffler after it was driven, it will burn, right? O, yea, I forgot, that also must be your "supernatural" god's doing?:lol:
God created both gravity and the elements. Man didn't.

More theory on your part. A stupid claptrap fallacy.
Actually I didn't originate the belief. God did. Which makes it more than a theory. Apparently you have a personal problem with other people's beliefs.

Keep telling yourself this. You might start believing it.:lol:
Do you believe my belief to be bad or something? Your methods of dissuasion aren't working. You'll have to do better than that.
 
AlbqOwl said:
Just an observation here, anger, insults, demeaning and belittling comments, absolute unprovable statements as rebuttal, and pompous arrogance, do not contribute to either civil discourse or true debate. If one cannot rebut a comment without casting negative aspersions on their opponent, it's pretty certain that person cannot rebut it intelligently at all.
Very well said. Steen is not so much debating as he is engaging in retaliatory accusation at this point. The greatest rebut that he came up with was calling me a dumb liar. He'll have to do alot better than that if he plans on an honest debate.

steen said:
Of whatever the Scientific Question is. Tell me, do you know ANYTHING AT ALL about the Scientific Method? This is grade-school level stuff.
Ah, so it is God's word because you SAY it is God's word? Anybody xcould claim that the Biology Textbook was written by men under direction of God. How would you know whether that was right or not?
But the Bible is not, so your claim of this just being a "theory" is downright false. Be careful about your claims here. Simply spewing self-righteous blabbering doesn't give you ny credibility; it would merely show you bearing false witness. And I am sure you know THAT is frowned on in the Bible?
An outright lie. Antibiotics today are synthetically derived and generated in labs, there is nothing "nature" involved. So I ask you again, relating to the length of time we have "known" things (Obviously relating to what WE have known, not antibiotics), in the hope that you are actually going to show a glimmer of understanding of what you are talking about instead of silly fervent nonsense and falsehoods: " For thousands of years, we knew that illness came from God rather than from bacteria. So obviously, antibiotics is a bunch of huey."
Actually, this quote that you've emboldened didn't originate from me. You're debating the wrong person on this point. You're using misrepresentation in a futile attempt to reinforce your psuedo-arguments. I'm not actually aware that you've made any positive points beyond juvenile wrangling.

You claim that if we have known "A" longer that "B" then A must be more correct. That is what you expressed eaxlier. So back to the Scientific Germ Theory of Diseases. We have "known" that illnesses came from God for thousands of years. We now KNOW that illnesses come from germ. yet, we have only known that for about 100 years. Per YOUR logic, that must mean that the original idea of these illnesses being punishment from God is the correct idea and that bacteria therefore are a figment of our imagination and antibiotics are placebo.

So please explain how you can spew such utter and complete nonsense.
You have GOT to be kidding? EVIL SPIRITS cause diseases?
So the part of the bible talking about Joshua's day, that part is lying? The Bible is LYING?

I am not sure what my impression of you is, but it is vaccilating between ignorant and dumb right now. Please start putting a bit more thought into your answers so they don't sound so stupid, please.
Further demonstrating your ignorance, your utter cluelessness and lack of even rudimentary knowledge of what you are arguing about? Well, OK. Evidence nof changes in a population from generation to generation.
And you obviously have no problem bearing false witness to this capacity, "lying for Jesus."
You seem both retaliatory and accusatory.

Luke 13
11 And there was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent double, and could not straighten up at all.
(NAS95)


Declaring someone a 'dumb liar' hardly demonstrates competent debate skill. Right now you're simply wrangling. Try again. Self-discipline this time though. You're bordering on a temper tantrum.

steen said:
BTW, GiH, your comment was so outrageous that I had to put it in my sig. What do you think?
Unfortunately, you're lacking context. Check out my sig though.
 
God-Is-Holy said:
God created both gravity and the elements. Man didn't.

Ohh, and is this factualy evident? If not, please refrain from spouting such claptrap nonsense.:lol:

Actually I didn't originate the belief. God did. Which makes it more than a theory. Apparently you have a personal problem with other people's beliefs.

No it dosen't. A theory is one step below a fact. And the postulation that a supernatural entity originated anything is not fact. Stop spewing rabid lies.

Do you believe my belief to be bad or something? Your methods of dissuasion aren't working. You'll have to do better than that.

What? That means so much coming from the founder of the blind postulation. Either provide factual evidence of your man in the clouds, or please refrain from spouting off stupid mythology in parrot fashion. Thanks.:2razz:
 
kal-el said:
Ohh, and is this factualy evident? If not, please refrain from spouting such claptrap nonsense.:lol:
Yes, but God makes clear in his word that man's perception is darkened. As is quite evident in your responses. It seems that you're already decided. Nonetheless, I'll be glad to proclaim God's truth all the more. God proves himself through divine miracles as recorded in the scriptures. But not all believe.

No it dosen't. A theory is one step below a fact. And the postulation that a supernatural entity originated anything is not fact. Stop spewing rabid lies.
You reinforce my assertion that you have a problem with other people's beliefs. This is common among many of the angrier atheists. Nor have you validated your wild theory of evolution. Get to it. I'm waiting.

What? That means so much coming from the founder of the blind postulation. Either provide factual evidence of your man in the clouds, or please refrain from spouting off stupid mythology in parrot fashion. Thanks.:2razz:
You're just excited because God doesn't believe in your atheist theories. Nor have you substantiated them.
 
God is Holy said:
Yes, but God makes clear in his word that man's perception is darkened.
What words? How do you know that it is God's words?

God proves himself through divine miracles as recorded in the scriptures. But not all believe.
How can I know that the Bible is true? Can you see how these things would be important to include in an argument that uses the Bible as a reference?

You reinforce my assertion that you have a problem with other people's beliefs. This is common among many of the angrier atheists.
I am not an Atheist, can I not look at the evidence of Evolution and decide that it is a working scientific theory? What does it matter if I am Atheist or not, science doesn't care. Science only knows testable facts, science only knows the Scientific Method. Atheist and Theist are irrelevant, speculation and feeling (and faith) are irrelevant.

Why can't we take out all speculation, feelings, faith, and preconceived notions and really study out the facts, and decide?

Nor have you validated your wild theory of evolution.
Ok, what makes it wild? What about evolution makes it invalid? We can have no debate if you do not provide actual specific informations. Statements such as "Evolution is false" are not arguments for debate, but they are stances that debaters take. Now we know your stance, now debate it.

You're just excited because God doesn't believe in your atheist theories. Nor have you substantiated them.
Yes, we're all excited now. Now you can start putting forth your actual arguments.
 
-Demosthenes- said:
What words? How do you know that it is God's words?
Ephesians 4
17 So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind,
18 being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart;
(NAS95)

The Holy Spirit offers confirmation to believers. But not everyone believes.

How can I know that the Bible is true?
You need God's help. I can't convince you if you don't want to hear it.

Can you see how these things would be important to include in an argument that uses the Bible as a reference?
I'm more than glad to discuss these things, but thus far some have only thrown retaliatory accusations towards me in the context of this thread. Instead of providing validation for their wild evolutionary theories. That's hardly debate.

I am not an Atheist, can I not look at the evidence of Evolution and decide that it is a working scientific theory?
That's up to you.

What does it matter if I am Atheist or not, science doesn't care.
God cares.

Science only knows testable facts, science only knows the Scientific Method.
Science is ignorant of spirituality. Spirituality is not measurable by classic scientific methods.

Atheist and Theist are irrelevant, speculation and feeling (and faith) are irrelevant.
In your eyes perhaps. Not God's.

Why can't we take out all speculation, feelings, faith, and preconceived notions and really study out the facts, and decide?
Then you'd have to throw out the whole evolution theory, if you wanted to do that. What facts would you like to present? I haven't seen any yet.

Ok, what makes it wild?
The whole ape thing is rather wild.

What about evolution makes it invalid?
It's lack of factual basis.

We can have no debate if you do not provide actual specific informations.
Actually, I'm waiting on you. Simply give me a scientific fact (beyond mere theory) which supports evolution. I honestly believe that you don't have one.

Statements such as "Evolution is false" are not arguments for debate, but they are stances that debaters take.
You're just now arriving at this conclusion? I was hoping that this was understood awhile back when it was insinuated that God is false.

Now we know your stance, now debate it.
But you've not given me any facts to support your wild theory.

Yes, we're all excited now. Now you can start putting forth your actual arguments.
I already have. And was met with mere retaliatory accusations instead of sincere debate. Now I'm waiting on you. Present a fact.
 
God-Is-Holy said:
God created both gravity and the elements. Man didn't.

Again, this point is only valid if you already have the prerequisite religious belief. If you don't already have the belief, then the evidence points to a different origin.

Or, can you supply some evidence to support your claim?

God-Is-Holy said:
Actually I didn't originate the belief. God did. Which makes it more than a theory. Apparently you have a personal problem with other people's beliefs.

Do you believe my belief to be bad or something? Your methods of dissuasion aren't working. You'll have to do better than that.

The problem is that you are putting your belief forth as fact. What you don't seem to realize is that all religious beliefs are equally valid (or equally invalid). It is just a valid to say Odin, Jupiter, the Lord and Lady, or any other of the dieties that have been worshipped as it is for you to say God.
 
MrFungus420 said:
Again, this point is only valid if you already have the prerequisite religious belief.
Much like evolutionary beliefs.

If you don't already have the belief, then the evidence points to a different origin.
What origin are you referring to?

Or, can you supply some evidence to support your claim?
By what criteria do you accept something as evidence? Legal courts accept the testimony of two or three witnesses, for example, even if you do not. This practice originated from the bible.

2 Corinthians 13
1 This is the third time I am coming to you. EVERY FACT IS TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE TESTIMONY OF TWO OR THREE WITNESSES.
(NAS95)

You, however, do not seem to accept the testimony of two or three witnesses, even though this method is equally accepted by lawyers and biblical scholars alike.

The problem is that you are putting your belief forth as fact.
If you don't like what I say, you'll have to work that out on your own. You have just now presented this last sentence of yours as a fact, insofar as you've asserted the existence of a problem. When actually it constitutes more of a subjective belief on your part, which merely exists within your own mind.

What you don't seem to realize is that all religious beliefs are equally valid (or equally invalid).
And all scientific theories as well?

It is just a valid to say Odin, Jupiter, the Lord and Lady, or any other of the dieties that have been worshipped as it is for you to say God.
Not really. These do not all have the same basis.
 
There is some undeniable art—you might even say design—in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron—a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.

At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can find, which is not much. It's hot as hell this morning.

They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far away as New Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle-Resistant and Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite women in traditional dress—small bonnets and long skirts. All of them wander off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seems from the outside to be the most finished part of the complex.

Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles into the lobby of the building, where they are greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.

Which is wearing a saddle.

It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.

This is very much a show dinosaur.

The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become "charter members" of the museum.

"Dinosaurs," Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, "always get the kids interested."

AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted with man (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest.

(Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the weight of dinosaur couples, Ham's literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)

"We," Ham exclaims to the assembled, "are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!" And everybody cheers.

Ham then goes on to celebrate the great victory won in Oklahoma, where, in the first week of June, Tulsa park officials announced a decision (later reversed) to put up a display at the city zoo based on Genesis so as to eliminate the "discrimination" long inflicted upon sensitive Christians by a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh that decorated the elephant exhibit.

This is a serious crowd. They gather in the auditorium and they listen intently, and they take copious notes as Ham draws a straight line from Adam's fall to our godless public schools, from Darwin to gay marriage. He talks about the triumph over Ganesh, and everybody cheers again.

Ultimately, the heart of the museum will be a long walkway down which patrons will be able to journey through the entire creation story. This, too, is still in the earliest stages of construction. Today, for example, one young artist is working on a scale model of the moment when Adam names all the creatures. Adam is in the delicate process of naming the saber-toothed tiger while, behind him, already named, a woolly mammoth seems to be on the verge of taking a nap.

Elsewhere in the museum, another Adam figure is full-size, if unpainted, and waiting to be installed. This Adam is recliningpeacefully; eventually, if the plans stay true, he will be placed in a
pool under a waterfall. As the figure depicts a prelapsarian Adam, he is completely naked. He also has no penis.

This would seem to be a departure from Scripture inconsistent with the biblical literalism of the rest of the museum. If you're willing to stretch Job's description of a "behemoth" to include baby brachiosaurs on Noah's Ark, as Ham does in his lectures, then surely, since we are depicting him before the fall, Adam should be out there waving unashamedly in the paradisaical breezes. For that matter, what is Eve doing there, across the room, with her hair falling just so to cover her breasts and midsection, as though she's doing a nude scene from some 1950s Swedish art-house film?

After all, Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in their lives, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed." If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can't Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?

These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn't so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.
 
Dinosaurs with saddles?

Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark?

Welcome to your new Eden.

Welcome to Idiot America.

LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person. . . . We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.

And, finally, in August, the cover of Time —for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment—clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"

Fights over evolution—and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered—roil up school districts across the country. The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:

"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

And there it is.

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it "common sense." The president's former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the "yuck factor." The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.

It's a dishonest phrase for a dishonest time, "faith-based," a cheap huckster's phony term of art. It sounds like an additive, an
artificial flavoring to make crude biases taste of bread and wine. It's a word for people without the courage to say they are religious, and it is beloved not only by politicians too cowardly to debate something as substantial as faith but also by Idiot America, which is too lazy to do it.

After all, faith is about the heart and soul and about transcendence. Anything calling itself faith-based is admitting that it is secular and profane. In the way that it relies on the Gut to determine its science, its politics, and even the way it sends its people to war, Idiot America is not a country of faith; it's a faith-based country, fashioning itself in the world, which is not the place where faith is best fashioned.

Hofstadter saw this one coming. "Intellect is pitted against feeling," he wrote, "on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."

The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn't matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn't matter how many votes your candidate got, he's not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.

On the front page.

Of The New York Times .

Within three days, there was a panel on the subject on Larry King Live , in which Larry asked the following question:

"All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?"

And why do so many of them host television programs, Larry?

This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist's words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an "expert" and, therefore, an "elitist." Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He's brilliant, surely, but his Gut's the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.

This is a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should its people hold nutty ideas but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. The right to do so is there in our founding documents.

After all, the Founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country out of new ideas—or out of old ones that they excavated from centuries of religious internment. Historian Charles Freeman points out that in Europe, "Christian thought . . . often gave irrationality the status of a universal 'truth' to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of natural laws."
 
In America, the Founders were trying to get away from all that, to raise a nation of educated people. In pledging their faith to intellectual experimentation, however, the Founders set freedom free. They devised the best country ever in which to be completely around the bend. It's just that making a respectable living out of it used to be harder work.


THEY CALL IT THE INFINITE CORRIDOR, which is the kind of joke you tell when your day job is to throw science as far ahead as you can and hope that the rest of us can move fast enough to catch up. It is a series of connecting hallways that run north through the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The hallways are lined with cramped offices, their doors mottled thickly with old tape and yellowing handbills. The Infinite Corridor is not a straight line. It has branches and tributaries. It has backwaters and eddies. You can get lost there.

One of the offices belongs to Professor Kip Hodges, a young and energetic North Carolinian who studies how mountain ranges develop and grow. Suffice it to say that Hodges's data do not correspond to the six-thousand-year-old earth of the creationists, whereupon dinosaurs and naked folks doth gambol together.

Hodges is recently returned from Nepal, where he rescued his research from encroaching Maoist rebels, who were not interested in the least in how the Himalayas became the Himalayas. They were interested in land, in guns, in power, and in other things of the Gut. Moreover, part of Hodges's duties at MIT has been to mentor incoming freshmen about making careers in science for themselves.

"Scientists are always portrayed in the literature as being above the fray intellectually," Hodges says. "I guess to a certain extent that's our fault, because scientists don't do a good enough job communicating with people who are nonscientists—that it's not a matter of brainiacs doing one thing and nonbrainiacs doing another."

Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.

"My earliest memory," Hodges recalls, "is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering—particularly science, at that time—people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it's like there's no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.
It's more than a general dumbing down of America—the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It's like you're happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it's like this abdication of intellectual responsibility—that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them."

The country was founded by people who were fundamentally curious; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, to name only the most obvious examples, were inveterate tinkerers. (Before dispatching Lewis and Clark into the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson insisted that the pair categorize as many new plant and animal species as they found. Considering they were also mapping everything from Missouri to Oregon, this must have been a considerable pain in the canoe.) Further, they assumed that their posterity would feel much the same as they did; in 1815, appealing to Congress to fund the building of a national university, James Madison called for the development of "a nursery of enlightened preceptors."

It is a long way from that to the moment on February 18, 2004, when sixty-two scientists, including a clutch of Nobel laureates, released a report accusing the incumbent administration of manipulating science for political ends. It is a long way from Jefferson's observatory and Franklin's kite to George W. Bush, in an interview in 2005, suggesting that intelligent design be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the nation's science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," said the president, "so people can understand what the debate is about."

The "debate," of course, is nothing of the sort, because two sides are required for a debate. Nevertheless, the very notion of it is a measure of how scientific discourse, and the way the country educates itself, has slipped through lassitude and inattention across the border into Idiot America—where fact is merely that which enough people believe, and truth is measured only by how fervently they believe it.

If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress, we have done so by moving the debate into the realm of political and cultural argument, where we all feel more confident, because it is there that the Gut rules. Held to this standard, any scientific theory is rendered mere opinion. Scientific fact is no more immutable than a polling sample. This is how there's a "debate" over the very existence of global warming, even though the preponderance of fact among those who actually have studied the phenomenon renders the "debate" quite silly. The debate is about making people feel better about driving SUVs. The debate is less about climatology than it is about guiltlessly topping off your tank and voting in tax incentives for oil companies.

The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it's tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity's sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson's disease.

"Even in the developing world, where I spend lots of time doing my work," Hodges says, "if you tell them that you're from MIT and you tell them that you do science, it's a big deal. If I go to India and tell them I'm from MIT, it's a big deal. In Thailand, it's a big deal. If I go to Iowa, they could give a rat's ass. And that's a weird thing, that we're moving in that direction as a nation."

Hence, Bush was not talking about science—not in any real sense, anyway. Intelligent design is a theological construct, a faith-based attempt to gussy up creationism in a lab coat. Its fundamental tenets cannot be experimentally verified—or, most important, falsified. That it enjoys a certain public cachet is irrelevant; a higher percentage of Americans believes that a government conspiracy killed John F. Kennedy than believes in intelligent design, but there is no great effort abroad in the land to include that conspiracy theory in sixth-grade history texts. Bush wasn't talking about science. He was talking about the political utility of putting saddles on the dinosaurs and breaking Ganesh's theological monopoly over the elephant paddock.

"The reason the creationists have been so effective is that they have put a premium on communication skills," explains Hodges. "It matters to them that they can talk to the guy in the bar, and it's important to them, and they are hugely effective at it."

It is the ultimate standard of Idiot America. How does it play to Joe Six-Pack in the bar? At the end of August 2004, the Zogby people discovered that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry. Now, how many people with whom you've spent time drinking beer would you trust with the nuclear launch codes? Not only is this not a question for a nation of serious citizens, it's not even a question for a nation of serious drunkards.

If even scientific discussion is going to be dragged into politics, then the discussion there at least ought to exist on a fairly sophisticated level. Again, the Founders thought it should. They considered self-government a science that required an informed and educated and enlightened populace to make all the delicate mechanisms run. Instead, today we have the Kabuki politics and marionette debates best exemplified by cable television. Instead, the discussion of everything ends up in the bar.

(It wasn't always this way. Theodore Roosevelt is reckoned to be the manliest of our manly-man presidents. He also was a lifelong science dweeb, cataloging songbirds, of all things. Of course, he shot them first, so maybe that makes all the difference.)

It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that fact is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.
 
"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.

"There is an entire network [the Fox News Channel] that bills itself as news that is devoted to reinforcing people's fears and saying to them, 'This is what you should be scared of, and here's whose fault it is,' " Olbermann says. "And that's what they get—two or three million frustrated paranoids who sit in front of the TV and go, 'Damn right, it's those liberals' fault.' Or, 'It's those—what's the word for it?— college graduates ' fault.' "

The reply, of course, is that Fox regularly buries Olbermann and the rest of the MSNBC lineup in breaking off a segment of a smidgen of a piece of the television audience. Truth is what moves the needle. Fact is what sells.

Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.

Once, it was very hard to get into the public square and very easy to fall out of it. One ill-timed word, even a whiff of public scandal, and all the hard work you did in the grange hall on all those winter nights was for nothing. No longer. You can be Bill Bennett, gambling with both fists, but if your books still sell, you can continue to scold the nation about its sins. You can be Bill O'Reilly, calling up subordinates to proposition them both luridly and comically—loofahs? falafels?—and if more people tune in to watch you than tune in to watch some other blowhard, you can keep your job lecturing America about the dangers of its secular culture. Just don't be boring. And keep the ratings up. Idiot America wants to be entertained.



Because scientific expertise was dragged into political discussion, and because political discussion is hopelessly corrupt, the distrust of scientific expertise is now as general as the distrust of politicians is. Everyone is an expert, so nobody is. For example, Sean Hannity's knowledge of, say, stem-cell research is measured precisely by his ratings book. His views on the subject are more well known than those of the people doing the actual research.

The credibility of Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania on the subject of the cultural anthropology of the American family ought to be, well, minimal. He spent the summer promoting a book in which he propounded theories on the subject that were progressively loopier. "For some parents," he writes, "the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home." He goes on later to compare a woman's right to choose an abortion unfavorably with the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, he's welcome in the mainstream, at least until either he's defeated for reelection or his book doesn't sell.

"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy *chocolate* picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.


ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike—in New York and in Africa and in the harbor in Yemen. That morning, in the Situation Room in the White House, Clarke watched the buildings burn and fall, and he recognized the organization's signature as well as he'd recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around him—people who didn't know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat—wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over and over again. He left the government.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, when the key issue became arms control, the traditional diplomats couldn't do the negotiating because that negotiating involved science and engineering," Clarke recalls. "Interagency decision papers were models of analysis, where assumptions were laid out and tested.

"That's the world I grew up in. [The approach] still applied to issues, even terrorism. Then these people come in, and they already have the answers, how to spin it, how to get the rest of the world on board. I thought, Wait a minute. That isn't analysis. It's the important issues where we really need analysis. "In the area of terrorism, there is a huge potential for emotional reaction. The one thing I told my team [on September 11]—they were mad and they were crying, the whole range of emotions—was that we didn't have time for emotion that day."

Nothing that the administration of George W. Bush has done has been inconsistent with the forces that twice elected it. The subtle, humming engine of its success—against John Kerry, surely, but most vividly against poor, cerebral Al Gore—was a celebration of instinct over intellect, a triumph of the Gut. No campaigns in history employed the saloon question with such devastating success or saw so clearly the path through the deliberate inexpertise of the national debate. No politician in recent times has played to the Gut so deftly.

So it ought not shock anyone when the government suddenly found itself at odds with empirical science. It ought not shock anyone in the manner in which it would go to war. Remember the beginning, when it was purely the Gut—a bone-deep call for righteous revenge for which Afghanistan was not sufficient response. In Iraq, there would be towering stacks of chemical bombs, a limitless smorgasbord of deadly bacteria, vast lagoons of exotic poisons. There would be candy and flowers greeting our troops. The war would take six months, a year, tops. Mission Accomplished. Major combat operations are over.

"Part of the problem was that people didn't want the analytic process because they'd be shown up," Richard Clarke says. "Their assumptions would be counterfactual. One of the real areas of expertise, for example, was failed-state reconstruction. How to go into failed states and maintain security and get the economy going and defang ethnic hatred. They threw it all out.

"They ignored the experts on the Middle East. They ignored the experts who said it was the wrong target. So you ignore the experts and you go in anyway, and then you ignore all the experts on how to handle the postconflict."

One of those experts was David Phillips, a senior advisor on what was called the Future of Iraq program for the State Department. Phillips was ignored. His program was ignored. Earlier, Phillips had helped reconstruct the Balkans after the region spent a decade tearing itself apart with genocidal lunacy. Phillips knew what he knew. He just didn't believe what they believed.

"You can just as easily have a faith-based, or ideologically driven, policy," he says today. "You start with the presumption that you already know the conclusion prior to asking the question. When information surfaces that contradicts your firmly entrenched views, you dismantle the institution that brought you the information."

There was going to be candy and flowers, remember? The war was going to pay for itself. Believe.

"We went in blindfolded, and we believed our own propaganda," Phillips says. "We were going to get out in ninety days, spend $1.9 billion in the short term, and Iraqi oil would pay for the rest. Now we're deep in the hole, and people are asking questions about how we got there.

"It's delusional, allowing delusion to be the basis of policy making. Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's repeated. You can't fix a policy if you don't admit it's broken."
 
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