Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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This is all surpassing strange.
Not long ago I attended a talk presented by Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who directs the physical anthropology department of the Cleveland Museum of Natural history, on fieldwork his team is conducting in the Middle Awash Valley in Ethiopia. There, several seasons of hard work in a hot, dry, and remote environment have yielded very interesting fossil discoveries that illuminate a particular phase of hominid evolution. The presentation also outlined the implications of these findings for current models of hominid descent, and described the further excavations that are planned with hopes of resolving questions and testing hypotheses.
That is thrilling stuff, depicting human origins over time scales that induce vertigo (this research concerned events that occurred something like 40,000 centuries in the past). It also exemplified the hard work being done by working scientists around the world in pursuit of a deeper understanding of human origins and, more generally, the history of life on earth. These reasearchers proceed without taking note of the ridiculous polemics initiated by creationist and ID-creationist communities: there is too much difficult, time consuming, expensive, and exciting real science to be done.
The contrast between this effort and the Baroque armchair bullshit of the Walt Browns and William Dembskis of the world could not be more clear. I for one am often dismayed by the stubborn ignorance displayed by the likes of FTK as they conduct an "open minded" march around the moebuis strip of creationist belief. But I also understand that that march never stops, because it can't, because it is motivated by group membership and identification, as I observed elsewhere vis Behe.
Discussions and debate such as this one, in which bizzarre inventions such as "hydroplate theory" vie for a place alongside serious scientific work, induce in me a sort of deep weariness, and a sadness, too. So I mostly stay out.
But its all rather a shame.
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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