Twenty five hundred years ago, the Chinese tactician Sun Tzu was a busy guy. He has a lot more free time now, but it was crazy back in the day. When not jotting poems about his kitties onto bamboo strips and ribbing Confucius for being "too preachy," Sun Tzu managed to churn out his masterpiece The Art of War. That book contains the following axiom:
Know your enemy and know yourself, and win a hundred battles without a single loss.
At least I assume that's what it contains. I've never even been able to get beyond the second chapter (that's the one on Bo Staff maintenance) without nodding off. Honestly, I only even remember the line because it was in an episode of Star Trek. But whether it's a military genius or one of the few actors to share the screen with both Captain Picard and Matlock, it's still good advice.
Good advice should be followed and not ignored. Yes Ray Comfort, I'm looking at you.
For those who have been lucky enough to never hear of Ray Comfort, let me ruin your day. Comfort is an itinerant evangelist from New Zealand who uses fresh produce and Kirk Cameron to belch forth (among other things) the message that evolution is a lie cooked up by scientists just because they are jerks.
And yes, I'm aware that "fresh produce and Kirk Cameron" is a redundancy. But to be fair, bananas are better actors, so I feel that the distinction stands
Recently, and because he needs a better hobby, Comfort decided to release a special edition of On the Origin of Species that includes a special introduction by Comfort himself. In the same vein, I'm thinking of re-releasing the guitar solo from "Sultans of Swing" and prefacing it with twelve minutes of me hitting an electric autoharp with a cricket bat.
I'm certainly not comparing the father of modern biology to Mark Knopfler. Darwin was a terrible guitar player. Yeesh.
But you got that other part right, Jim. The guy who needed Kirk Cameron to imbue him with star power and gravitas has decided to edit Charles frikkin' Darwin. I'll take a moment while you absorb that information and wipe up the resulting drool.
As you might imagine, the scientific community has decided to be all tedious and fact-based on the matter and a few people have stepped up to object.
Among them is Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), bane of every cdesign proponentist and the sultry female lead in the PBS documentary Judgment Day, about kicking the crap out of the creationists in Dover.
The inevitable conflict is now splashed across the pages of the US News & World Report, a publication no less prestigious and awesome for the fact that I thought it had closed down in 1993.
This is not much of a fight. Comfort, after all, is the same the same evil genius who tried to refute two centuries of painstaking research by thousands of scientists with the image of a crocoduck. Not a lot of work needs to go into correcting this guy. There's little mystery to a leaky roof when the hole is nine feet across. Eugenie Scott could have bested this guy in a debate while waiting in line at Starbucks. With a bad headache. And amnesia. While locked in a safe.
It would be a diminution of Eugenie Scott (Ray calls her ‘Genie', because they are clearly BFF) to point out that Comfort left the debate looking like a slippery, disingenuous weasel because this was also the initial state in which he entered the contest.
A similar disservice would result in trying to recreate the "argument" here since it is little more than Scott swatting down the painfully simplistic claims of a guy who thinks that the highpoint in a debate about religion and science is using props. Even if he weren't reduced to using soda cans to refute a bazillion tons of science, his argument is the same old stuff and can be summed up in three words.
- Complexity.
- Controversy.
- Hitler.
To which I reply:
- The complexity in nature is less problematic than the peaceful, open spaces in your mind.
- I'm sure Ray finds evolution to be very controversial; my cat takes similar exception to door knobs.
- Blaming Darwin for Hitler is like blaming a cow for McDonald's.
Let me quote Ray:
Nothing we have in creation is half evolved. The cow has a working udder to make drinkable milk. The bee has working apparatus to make edible honey. We don't find a half-evolved cow or bee."
Is he talking about evolution by natural selection or Mister Potato Head? This guy actually thinks that folks like Richard Dawkins just sit around nodding lazily as they assent to the Theorem of Natural, but Ridiculously Half-Assed, Selection. In his world, for evolution to work you start with a lump of vanilla organic goo that needs to just lay th
ere and grow new parts until it becomes an elephant or a cactus or a musician; that's what is actually happening in Ray's mind right now.
Imagine a vast primordial landscape specked with immobile loafs of life waiting patiently for a fully developed feature to pop out like Cheesy Puffs from a vending machine.
When you put it that way, Ray it does seem pretty unlikely. Thanks for clearing that up.
None of the 1.4 million species on the Earth has half an eye. All have the necessary functioning equipment, from the brain, to the teeth, to the eye...
Well, maybe one of them doesn't.