Free The Animal

Greg Swann quoted the best part. I’ll take on the second best. And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!” The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.) And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood…

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Here we go again. Another presumably smart person lashing out, getting together with a bunch of other presumably smart people, all who feel threatened because their primitive superstitious beliefs make them look increasingly like fucking morons rather than…well…”presumably smart people.” So, they’re going to try to poke a hole or two in Natural Selection, which is then somehow, magically, supposed to make your imaginary friend more real. Either they are fucking morons, or they surely think you are. Just deal with it (reality) and stop the silly nonsense in dressing up non-science with a nice pink ribbon. Religion is a pig when seen as anything other than fantasy. As fantasy, go ahead and knock yourselves out. Jesus. Later: And just to make it clear, the premise of the film, that you can’t question Darwinism is a load of bullshit, not to mention a big fat lie. Real scientists are out questioning Darwin’s hypothesis every single day. That’s how science is done: you form a hypothesis that’s falsifiable in the sense that it’s formed in a way that allows it to be tested, so that if false, you can actually prove it false, and if true, you can’t; in spite of…

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