Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

[Tripe]

Yes but that consistency can be avoided while still avoiding treansfats is all I'm saying.

Best digression ever by the way people. 

[AmandaGal]

Maranatha make an organic peanut butter that has the consistency of normal peanut butter, it's delish

If you mix it well and refrigerate it, I've come to prefer all natural peanut butter (smuckers doesn't count.).  I had no idea there was such a thing as 'natural' peanut butter until a few months ago.  It took some getting used to, but I'd rather my body return to the earth as quickly as possible once I'm gone. 

I hope you're not getting embalmed, buddy.  I figure if you're getting cremated, it's going to go quickly anyway, peanut butter and corn syrup or not.

[gbeenie]

Really? I can't think of the last time I even ate peanut butter.

Then may I suggest an experiment? Next time you're feeling uptight and contrarian (be honest; this is US you're talking to), have yourself some peanut butter, and see if your mood doesn't brighten almost immediately.

Are you suggesting my uptight contrarity is a state of mind rather than a state of being? 

I can't presume to know, but it never hurts to try and find out.

[BathTub]

A new interview with Stein

Did you do a lot of reading to prep for the role?

Stein: Some. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler, and that was a very interesting book—one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin's theory—supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus—led to the murder of millions of innocent people.

So he read a book from the Discovery Institute, the people behind Intelligent Design.

[Junkyard]

So, some people misunderstand Evolution and use it to justify their own twisted agendas. Don't doubt it.

However, Evolution still needs to catch up on a few thousand years of bloodshed if it's ever gonna beat out Christianity.

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

owever, Evolution still needs to catch up on a few thousand years of bloodshed if it's ever gonna beat out Christianity.

i think stalin and hitler got you pretty much the way there.  but dont worry im sure theyll be others to use cloaks like religion and science to kill people so this idtiotic sentence can go on being quote unquote debated on the internet for some time. 

[torgosPizza]

i think stalin and hitler got you pretty much the way there.

Once again, wrong and wrong. I thought you knew better than that, Sarc.

People who think Hitler was an atheist are lying to themselves. And even if he were, he didn't exterminate millions of Jews because of evolution. Trying to create a master race is artificial selection - NOT natural selection! There is a fundamental difference and people who use him as the Darwinist Scapegoat are really lacking a fundamental grasp of the ideas that evolutionary science puts forth.

[sarcasm_made_Easy]

at what point did i say hitler was an atheist? 

further didnt i say cloak somewhere in there? 

I got this out of hitlers wiki. 

One of the foundations of Hitler's social policies was the concept of racial hygiene. It was based on the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, a pseudo-science[weasel words] called eugenics which sought to breed humans as if they were farm animals[citation needed], and a misuse[citation needed] of Charles Darwin's ideas called social Darwinism.

its a misuse of evolution, which is in NO WAY different than people who cloak themselves in the name of Christianity and cause atrocities. 

[GregMcduck]

[citation needed]

[torgosPizza]

at what point did i say hitler was an atheist? 

You were responding to a quote about Evolution needing to catch up with Christianity with all the bloodshed, and you said Hitler and Stalin already got us there. I didn't mean to explicitly say Hitler was an atheist, but that's the general idea you are putting forward - maybe not to the extent of atheism, but at least to the extent that he bastardized natural selection for his own purposes. Most common people confuse Darwinism with Evolution, hence why Expelled was able to get made at all. People are idiots and will confuse science and evolution with atheism if it's yelled loudly enough.

You went to Hitler's wiki, but not the Eugenics page.

Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention

"Social philosophy" is not the same as "organic process of natural selection." It's not a misuse of evolution, it has nothing to do with evolution. That's the distinction I'm trying to make.

its a misuse of evolution, which is in NO WAY different than people who cloak themselves in the name of Christianity and cause atrocities. 

I agree with you there. People who say "God is on our side" and go to war have just as much explaining to do when they realize what they are saying is impossible.

TalkOrigins archive has more:
1.  Eugenics is based on genetic principles that are independent of evolution. It is just as compatible with creationism, and in fact at least one young-earth creationist (William J. Tinkle) advocated eugenics and selective human breeding (Numbers 1992, 222-223).

2. Many eugenics arguments, such as the expected effect of selective sterilization and the results of interracial mating, are based on bad biology. Better biology education, including the teaching of evolution, can only counter the assumptions on which eugenics is based.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA006.html

[AmandaGal]

I have to agree with Sarc.  I think eugenics is a "misuse of evolution" in a way.  I guess that's a bad way to say it, but it really is using the study, formal or observational, of the process of natural selection.  It's just perverting it.

If we never observed that genetic traits can be modified by selection pressures, then we wouldn't have eugenics.  If human kind have never noticed natural selection, we wouldn't be able to fathom "unnatural" selection.

[Junkyard]

Thing is, people recognized the concept of breeding befor ethe concept of Evolution specifically. So the concept of eugenics, and I DO mean the breeding of humans, pre- dates Darwin. Evolution was just an idea they used to justify it after that point.

[AmandaGal]

But "breeding" and heredity are studying natural selection by observation, but just not using the same words to define it.  Just because Darwin was the first to define it, doesn't mean he was the first to notice it.  That's like saying before gravity was defined, it didn't exist.  I promise you that things weren't floating in space before Newton got hit with that apple 

It's really semantics.   Darwin just penned a theory to something he and other people had observed.

To me, it's all connected. We could go back and blame Mendel or Lamarck or any number of other people, but all the theories fit together to form a whole.  To say that they're not connected at, to me, is just incorrect.  The processes may not the same, but they are branches off the same tree.

[torgosPizza]

Thing is, people recognized the concept of breeding befor ethe concept of Evolution specifically.

True, it was back in Plato's day and even ancient Rome (infanticide of "weak" males, but mostly females) etc.

So the concept of eugenics, and I DO mean the breeding of humans, pre- dates Darwin. Evolution was just an idea they used to justify it after that point.

I would not use the term "justify." Again we are confusing terms. Evolution is to natural selection as breeding is to eugenics. The problem with breeding in this manner, as the Spartans did, is that it's phenotypic selection.

A Phenotype is any observed quality of an organism, such as its morphology, development, or behavior, as opposed to its genotype - the inherited instructions it carries, which may or may not be expressed.

Yes, the theory of Evolution came about because of Darwin's observed traits in finches from the Galapagos. But a good recent example of an actually evolved trait would be the Italian wall lizards that adapted to their environment, developing new digestive tract structures within a short time span:

Examination of the lizard's digestive tracts revealed something even more surprising. Eating more plants caused the development of new structures called cecal valves, designed to slow the passage of food by creating fermentation chambers in the gut, where microbes can break down the difficult to digest portion of plants. Cecal valves, which were found in hatchlings, juveniles and adults on Pod Mrcaru, have never been reported for this species, including the source population on Pod Kopiste.

"These structures actually occur in less than 1 percent of all known species of scaled reptiles," says Irschick. "Our data shows that evolution of novel structures can occur on extremely short time scales. Cecal valve evolution probably went hand-in-hand with a novel association between the lizards on Pod Mrcaru and microorganisms called nematodes that break down cellulose, which were found in their hindguts."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm

This is not the type of trait that would have arisen from selective eugenic breeding, in which the only basis for selection is an outward phenotypic trait, which is what Hitler and the ancient Spartans did.

[Reductio_ad_absurdum]

I'm not going to see this movie, nor buy it.  I jumped off that ID bandwagon a long time ago.

However, I do agree on what point of this controversy (as if there really is one), is that philosophical viewpoints and interpretations should be left out of science completely.  Richard Dawkins can continue his antitheistic march against the Vatican itself if he wants to, I have no problem with it, but I do when he misuses scientific facts to support his philosophical atheism.  I remember him saying in a lecture once on how it is easier to understand Quantum Mechanics than it is to understand the Trinity.  Science and Philosophy, apples and oranges...

The problem is that both sides don't read enough of the other side to actually have a useful dialogue.  Science can't document the existance of God, but if there exists a God who actually does stuff and doesn't just sit outside time and space then we should be able to document spontaneous phenomena that can only happen by this God (ie miracles).  Unfortunately, the scientists who would have the curiousity to do this would get laughed down by those with the presupposition that miracles don't happen.

There IS a big problem of presuppositions in scientific circles.  Those who still stand with the debunked Documentary Hypothesis and Form Criticism of biblical historicity attest to this.