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Post by dodger on Aug 11, 2013 23:06:47 GMT
Debunks lots of nonsense, 21 May 2009
This Will Podmore review is from: Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Hardcover)
Robert L. Park is professor of physics at the University of Maryland and author of Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud.
In this brilliant book, he examines and debunks many popular illusions: intelligent design, parapsychology, spoon-bending, reincarnation, astral projections, extra-sensory perception, homoeopathy, acupuncture, magnetic healing, crystal healing, pyramid healing, life after death, the existence of souls, the efficacy of prayer, and the notions of hell and heaven. He also wittily proves that inter-stellar travel and time travel are impossible.
He shows that these are all products of wishful thinking, or of outright fraud (spoon-bending, for goodness' sake!). Some are cultural relics from a pre-scientific age, others are misunderstandings, wilful or not, of scientific advances (for example, ignorant notions of `quantum' healing). Some are superstitions learnt in childhood.
He describes how people developed randomised controlled trials so that they could sift sense from nonsense and impose checks on their perceptions. By thorough testing, we have made great progress in science, especially in medicine. He praises Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection as one of the greatest steps forward in our understanding of the world around us.
Using science's skills, we have moved from purging, cupping and bleeding to anaesthetics, antibiotics and surgery. We have ended smallpox and could end polio and malaria were it not for the resistance of ignorant imams and greens. We have progressed from a belief that disasters are God-given (to punish sinful mankind) to understanding how to predict and cope with disasters.
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Below is a SUPERCOHERENCE GENERATOR,,,,,,My Sceptographic Monitor is bleeping like crazy 
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Post by dodger on Aug 13, 2013 8:52:42 GMT
Religion bores the pants off most of us. I got "asked" at 13yrs old if I wanted to be confirmed, I grunted and declined. "NARGH!!" Much as I had done when my sister's best friend invited me to go with her to the cinema. Both times they foolishly asked if I might elaborate, as to "WHY?" A nagfest, not fueled by messianic faith but my weak minded father had promised new outfits for Ma and 3 sisters. Though by their masks of hate I could tell they wished me to burn in hell for eternity. "See!! See! See!...We --k n e w he wouldn't!!" The old man was roped into the inquisition. Singularly unsuited as a judge--he could see both sides of any argument, two points of view. Though saving money on new outfits and deflecting all blame,clinched it. A judgement of Soloman. "Dodgey, must decide for himself!" Patriarchy.
My response to the girl soon cast into the shadows, that episode. Apparently she had cried herself to sleep--all my doing. She must have recovered quickly , she asked my 'best friend' out, following day. She told him I was likely as not, an 'OMO', he agreed the Jezebel. Though neither he or I had the foggiest what that might be. "OMO??" My long suffering father was directed to explain various facts about life to me. "Cough! Cough!" "Girls, Dodgey, d'ya like'm, boy?" Grunt...."some are OK".. 1959....roll on the '60's. She was the first and last girl to ever ask me out. Though several have asked me to share their faith...."NARGH"...."Why Dodge?"...."Why-Why-Why, is the sky so high?"
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Post by dodger on Aug 17, 2013 17:51:44 GMT
This William Podmore review is from: Intellectual Impostures (Paperback)
Sokal and Bricmont, two professors of physics, show that fashionable French intellectuals in the fields of social and cultural studies - Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Luce Irigaray - habitually misuse scientific concepts and terms. Unable to produce genuine science in their own fields, Lacan et al import concepts from the physical sciences - typically, chaos theory, fuzzy logic and the uncertainty principle - to try to impress. They regard science, evidence, reason and knowledge as oppressive. Kristeva characteristically responded to criticism by calling Sokal and Bricmont Francophobes!
The two physicists attack relativism, the idea that a statement's truth or falsity is relative to an individual or social group. (Some US colleges run courses like 'queer studies', whose very subject is defined in relation to the interests of a social group, not by its field of study.) Relativists imply that modern science is just a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction'. This allows in the notion that, for instance, creationism is just as valid as the theory of evolution.
The editors of 'Social Text' accepted Sokal's famous spoof article, 'Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity', in which he wrote: "Physical 'reality', no less than social 'reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." The editors of 'Science and Culture' accepted the Madsens' supposedly serious article, '."Structuring postmodern science', in which they wrote "A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth." Says it all really!
This book tears apart these postmodernist theorists. Sokal and Bricmont uphold the scientific approach, that knowledge is based on respect for the clarity and logical coherence of theories and on the confrontation of theories with empirical evidence. Knowledge in both natural and social science is cumulative; our understanding of the world grows as we constantly check our ideas against the reality.
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Who's next for the Custard Pie? Sure as hell,we 'ave our own targets, firmly in our sights Must have been a few choked on their canapes, when all was revealed.
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Post by dodger on Aug 17, 2013 18:27:14 GMT
The Unwitting Agents of the Imperial Order
The Wishful Thinking Left
by JEAN BRICMONT
Louvain, Belgium
www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/14/the-wishful-thinking-left/
The Left's insatiable search for victims. Followed by a self righteous feeding frenzy. Warped defence of the indefensible. Wind the spring on the clock to an unbearable tension. That old bird will come hurtling out again and again. Internationalism? For Cuckoos. Bricmont is using his head. Trusting in his own experience. Do well to listen. Unless of course you enjoy wishful thinking.
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Post by dodger on Aug 19, 2013 19:51:48 GMT
Indulgent review of marginal egotist, July 11, 2003
This Will Podmore review is from: Ralph Miliband And The Politics Of The New Left (Paperback)
This book on Ralph Miliband, one of the key figures of the New Left, gives us useful insights into why that movement failed.
Newman (like Miliband a Professor of Politics) tells us that Miliband was happy `to speak, debate and write political statements' but `found meetings and organisational work very tiresome' and found `organisation and discipline unacceptable'. Newman reveals the earth-shaking insignificance of the New Left's disputes at dinner-parties and seminars.
Not surprisingly, a New Left composed of egos like Miliband, E. P. Thompson and Tony Benn (who wrote in his 1985 Diary, "I'm always thrusting myself forward for publicity") could never work together. These `critical' intellectuals only agreed in seeing themselves as superior to the `ignorant' workers.
Newman tells us that by the mid-1960s Miliband had `come to the belief that a new Socialist Party would eventually need to be established ..." And he did as much as helping in `preparing the ground for the coming into being of a new party'! But did the New Left ever manage to found this new party?
In fact the New Left, just like the old left, adopted the tried and failed Fabian tactic of permeating the Labour party. The famed `independent Marxism' ended up as a marginal colony of social democracy.
At history's turning points, the New Left always supported the US government: it was for the CIA-backed counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956, against Vietnam's liberation of Cambodia from Pol Pot, and against the Soviet assistance to Afghanistan's only progressive government ever, which gave women equal rights and land to the peasants. At these crucial times, the New Left took the enemy's side, then moaned that the `left' was divided. It was always divorced from the working class, from the trade unions, from reality.
The New Left constantly whinged about the `left's disarray'. But what did its fragments all have in common? They rejected Leninist democratic centralism, by dishonestly caricaturing it as oppressive! In democratic centralist parties, the minority carries out the decisions of the majority, whereas the New Left always wanted minority rights, its rights, to trump the majority. Marxism without Leninism is playing without winning.
The New Left's endless projects for renewal, unification, realignment, and saving the Labour party, are all part of the confusion of thought that alone has held back the British working class for so long.
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Post by dodger on Aug 20, 2013 18:14:10 GMT
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Post by dodger on Aug 21, 2013 11:00:39 GMT
Superb attack on importing Idealism into science, 2 Feb 2005
This Will Podmore review is from: Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Paperback)
What are you, a ghost in a machine or a living human being? In this excellent book, the authors, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, answer the question.
They say that Rene Descartes' ideas still cause many muddles. He thought that we were all ghosts in machines, two things in one. This was because he believed that there were two basic kinds of thing, mind and matter (a theory called dualism), and that what we are depends on what our minds do (idealism).
The authors show that commonsense clears up the muddles. We are all living human beings. "The person ... is a psychophysical entity, not a duality of two conjoined substances, a mind and a body."
The authors show that dualism - the ghost in the machine - can never explain how our minds relate to our bodies. Our minds are not things, so they cannot cause changes by acting on our brains.
Often neuroscientists wrongly ascribe to our brains the activities that Descartes and his followers like John Locke ascribed to our minds. But human beings - not our brains or minds - think, see, decide and feel. "The brain and its activities make it possible for us - not for it - to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects."
Too many neuroscientists trap themselves in idealism. For example, Francis Crick wrote, "What we see appears to be located outside our body. ... What you see is not what is really there. ... In fact we have no direct knowledge of the objects in the world."
But the authors reply, "What we see does not appear to be located outside us. What we see is necessarily located outside our body, unless we are looking at ourselves in a mirror, or at our limbs or thorax." We see what is really there, the real world, and we directly know objects in the world, which exist whether we see them or not.
This is materialism, which "In its simplest and warranted form amounts to a denial that there are mental or spiritual substances." Materialism does not mean that our minds are our brains. It does not mean that we explain things, even material things, by studying the matter of which they are made. Materialism does not reduce everything to physics, or reduce our minds to our nervous systems.
Colin Blakemore was wrong to write, "We are machines", Crick wrong to write, "You ... are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Our goals, motives and reasons - not our cells or molecules - explain our behaviour.
The authors show that scientists and philosophers do two different, useful jobs. Scientists analyse what's true and what's false. They create theories to explain and hypotheses to predict.
Philosophers analyse concepts and the rules for the use of words. They clarify what makes sense and what does not. And these authors have done this job superbly.
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Post by dodger on Aug 25, 2013 11:15:05 GMT
Brilliant demolition of various idealist nonsenses, July 8, 2007
This Will Podmore review is from: Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Paperback)
Frederick Crews is a retired teacher from the University of California, Berkeley. In this brilliant collection of essays, he passes judgment on `Intelligent Design' creationism, UFO reports, satanic mind control, alien abductions, previous incarnations and telepathy. He demolishes the frauds Freud and Jung, and he exposes the cults of psychoanalysis, theosophy, Zen Buddhism, channelling, rebirthing and past life regression.
As he writes, science is "not a body of correct or incorrect ideas but a collective means of generating and testing hypotheses, and its trials eventually weed out error with unmatched success." He suggests, "If knowledge can be certified only by a social process of peer review, we ought to do what we can to foster communities of uncompromised experts. That means actively resisting guru-ism, intellectual cliquishness, guilt-assuaging double standards, and, needless, to say, disdain for the very concept of objectivity."
He observes, "trust in the supernatural does get shaken by the overall advance of science. This is an effect not of strict logic but of an irreversible shrinkage in mystery's terrain. Ever since Darwin forged an exit from the previously airtight argument from design, the accumulation of corroborated materialist explanations has left the theologian's `God of the gaps' with less and less to do. And an acquaintance with scientific laws and their uniform application is hardly compatible with faith-based tales about walking on water, a casting-out of devils, and resurrection of the dead."
He notes that certain features characterize religious fanaticism - "undue deference to authority, hostility towards dissenters, and, most basically, an assumption that intuitively held certitude is somehow more precious and profound than the hard-won gains of trial and error." He writes, "certain indicators of bad faith ... are unmistakable: persistence in claims that have already been exploded; reliance on ill-designed studies, idolized lawgivers, and self-serving anecdotes; evasion of objections and negative instances; indifference to rival theories and to the need for independent replication; and `movement' belligerence."
Unfortunately, he uses his justified attack on Freud to swipe at Marxism, as if exploitation and class conflict were as unreal as the Oedipus complex. Marxism is an ally of reason and common sense against wishful thinking and superstition. Nonetheless, Crews has produced a valuable book that examines and explodes many absurd claims and theories.
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The paragraph highlighted above certainly describes the religious fanatic. Closer to home perhaps it could well be written about a good dozen political entities. You may well agree, in which case, fill in the initials yourself. Or try to put a name to that face--he told me I was "not fit to lick Gerry Healey's boots". When I pointed out he was eminently fit for the task......the expected punch or bums rush never happened. The leader had risen and was addressing us. Trotsky's death mask stared down ,fixing me with a contemptuous stare. We were in the 'holy of holies. In the presence of two giants.....I but a mere dwarf.
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Post by dodger on Aug 25, 2013 11:25:06 GMT
Brilliant study of fascism's hatred of reason and science, 8 Jun 2010
This William Podmore review is from: The Destruction of Reason ([International library of social and political thought]) (Hardcover)
In this brilliant book, Lukacs shows how Nazism attacked reason and science. Irrationalism mirrors reaction's contempt for science and its indulgence in superstition and myth.
He writes, "the subject-matter which now presents itself to us is Germany's path to Hitler in the sphere of philosophy. That is to say, we mean to show how this concrete path is reflected in philosophy, and how philosophical formulations, as an intellectual mirroring of Germany's concrete development towards Hitler, helped to speed up the process."
Lukacs shows how irrationalism was born in German feudal absolutism's reaction to the French revolution of 1789. He studies the idealist irrationalism of Friedrich Schelling, Soren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and, in particular, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche said, "The need is for a new reign of terror." He called for `a daring master race', for `the great man' and for great wars. "There will be wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before." He praised `the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast in greedy search of spoils and conquest'.
Lukacs examines and criticises German sociology in the imperialist period (Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and Carl Schmitt), social Darwinism and racial theory from Joseph Gobineau to Houston Chamberlain, and vitalism in imperial Germany (Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers). He shows how their ideas were either no barrier to Nazism (Weber, Mannheim, Dilthey, Simmel and Jaspers) or actually paved the way for fascism (Schmitt, Gobineau, Chamberlain, Spengler and Heidegger).
Lukacs shows how Nazism took over the whole legacy of irrationalism. Irrationalism is always an ideology of militant reaction; it is all about combating Marxism, dialectical and historical materialism
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Post by dodger on Aug 25, 2013 12:39:06 GMT
Great critique of fashionable propaganda, March 4, 2010
This William Podmore review is from: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Hardcover)
In this brilliant book, Barbara Ehrenreich shows how harmful the `positive thinking' movement is, how it means self-blame, victim-blaming and national denial, inviting disaster. She shows that it wrecks efforts for education, skills and reforms.
She cites a guru who said, "the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived." There is a long tradition in the USA of this kind of mind-over-matter idealism: it includes William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science), Norman Vincent Peale (The power of positive thinking), Dale Carnegie (How to make friends and influence people), Scott Peck (The road less travelled), Tom Peters (The pursuit of wow), Deepak Chopra (Quantum healing), Oprah Winfrey, and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret). Byrne evilly said that tsunamis only happen to people who are `on the same frequency as the event' - blaming people's personalities for their deaths.
In the field of health, `positive thinkers' tell us that being positive will help to cure cancer. But research has found no such link: see for example James Coyne et al, `Psychotherapy and survival in cancer: the conflict between hope and evidence', Psychological Bulletin, 2007, 133, 3, 367-94, and `Emotional well-being does not predict survival in head and neck cancer patients', Cancer, 2007, 110, 11, 2568-75. So, even if you believe, with Ann McNerney, that, "Cancer will lead you to God" (The gift of cancer: a call to awakening), `positive thinking' won't make you better.
The business world loves positive thinking. The US market for motivational products is worth $21 billion a year and companies use them against their workers. For instance, AT&T sent staff to a motivational event on the same day it announced 15,000 redundancies. The motivator's message? "It's your own fault; don't blame the system; don't blame the boss - work harder and pray more."
Ehrenreich presents us with this striking image: "a candlelit room thick with a haze of incense, 17 blindfolded captains of industry lay on towels, breathed deeply, and delved into the `lower world' to the sound of a lone tribal drum. Leading the group was Richard Whiteley, a Harvard business school-educated best-selling author and management consultant who moonlights as an urban shaman. `Envision an entrance into the earth, a well, or a swimming hole', Whiteley half-whispered above the sea of heaving chests. He then instructed the executives how to retrieve from their inner depths their `power animals, who would guide their companies to 21st century success'."
A third of British CEOs of FTSE 100 companies used such personal coaches in 2007. The debt crisis was built on runaway positive thinking. As Ehrenreich notes, "the recklessness of the borrowers was far exceeded by that of the lenders, with some finance companies involved in subprimes undertaking debt-to-asset ratios of 30 to 1."
The promoter of a master's programme in `positive psychology' at the University of East London saw `healthy British scepticism' as one of the `challenges' facing her. But we need to be sceptical, to see things as they are, not as we wish them to be. We need not `positive thinking' but real thinking.
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 12:41:25 GMT
Brilliant account of bad medicine, 16 Dec 2008
This Will Podmore review is from: Bad Science (Paperback)
Ben Goldacre is a doctor who writes a weekly column in the Guardian exposing bad medicine. He writes, "The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries, it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London's Science Museum."
He attacks the idea that social and political problems can be solved by pills, even Patrick Holford's Optimal Nutrition pills, or those of the TV 'nutritionist' Gillian McKeith, with her PhD from a non-accredited correspondence course 'college' in the USA. Their advice is just 'a manifesto of right-wing individualism', blaming people's ill-health on their food choices, not on the social inequality that drives health inequality.
Dr Goldacre writes, "All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people."
He praises the brilliant Cochrane reviews of medical literature. He notes that to say that giving placebos in trials of treatments is unethical is to assume that the treatment is better, which is to assume what is being tested. We don't know the result of the trial before we do it - that is why we do trials.
For example, trials have proven that the painkiller Vioxx caused 80,000-139,000 heart attacks, a third probably fatal, during its five years on the market. Trials have also discredited antioxidants, hormone replacement therapy and calcium supplements.
Dr Goldacre notes that anti-arrhythmia drugs when given to all heart attack patients, not just to those with arrhythmic heartbeats, increased their risk of dying. He reminds us that Benjamin Spock's well-meant but wrong advice - that babies should sleep on their tummies - led to tens of thousands of cot deaths. What counts is the effect, not the intent.
He recounts the media's disgraceful nine-year campaign against the Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine. The campaign caused an epidemic of mumps, with 5,000 cases in January 2005, and 2008 saw the highest number of measles cases since 1995. Nearly half of all homoeopaths irresponsibly advised against taking the vaccine, as did almost a fifth of chiropractors. Only a few homeopaths and just a quarter of the chiropractors acted professionally and recommended it.
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Post by dodger on Aug 29, 2013 13:05:12 GMT
Study of an anti-Marxist reformist, 26 Sep 2008
This review is from: Perry Anderson: Marxism and the New Left (Paperback)
Paul Blackledge, a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Leeds Metropolitan University, has written a study of New Left Review editor Perry Anderson, tracing `Anderson's retreat from revolutionary to reformist politics'.
Anderson believed in the socialist potential first of Harold Wilson, then of Jacques Delors. Now he believes that the only alternative to present-day capitalism is a more humane form of capitalism, so we should `support local movements or limited reforms'.
For a Marxist, an understanding of class is basic. But Anderson splits the working class into four parts - manual workers, white-collar workers, women, and an intelligentsia. He assumes that the real working class is made up of manual workers, that white-collar workers are not real workers, that women are a separate stratum (neither manual workers nor white-collar workers nor intelligentsia?), and that a separate intelligentsia would be the `sources of consciousness in society'. So workers are not conscious and need an intelligentsia, like Anderson and friends, to tell them what to think? He wrote, "in Britain ... there has been no coherent Marxist thought at all." Didn't Marx himself live and work in Britain?
Since Anderson never grasped the labour theory of value, he fell for Robert Brenner's notion that class struggle makes no difference. Both blame the fall in the rate of profit on the competition between nations, not on the working class's successful trade union struggle to wrest part of the surplus value from the employing class. Because they don't understand the working class's creation the trade unions, they can't see the importance of the wages struggle.
Anderson has always backed the European Union, to overcome what he sees as Britain's `backwardness'. In 1961 he backed Britain's entry into the EEC, even though he saw that it was run by business for business. In 1992 he called for `a genuine federal state in the Community with a sovereign authority', in 1997 for `a much more centralised supranational authority'.
Blackledge shares Anderson's New Left delusion that the revolutionary forces' defeat of the Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956 discredited Marxism. In reality, as Anderson's flop into reformism proves, the New Left's rejection of Leninism led it to embrace capitalism.
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Post by dodger on Sept 7, 2013 21:11:43 GMT
"Fight it Obamaself....then...?"
Not my civil war, chum.
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Post by dodger on Sept 19, 2013 23:44:55 GMT
Useful study of Bono's public activities, 19 Sep 2013
This Will Podmore review is from: The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power) (Counterblasts) (Paperback)
Harry Browne, a lecturer at Dublin Institute of Technology, has written a fine study of Bono's public activities.
From the start, Bono signed on to a "strategic agenda that would suit `financial capital' and US hegemony, erasing poverty, eventually, it was hoped, through the working of markets and technocratic planning in Washington and on Wall Street, not through any democratic mobilisation of poor people on their own behalf."
But, as Browne points out, "it was precisely the insistence on free and open markets in the developing world that had inhibited growth there, compared to the earlier period when `developmental states' had been allowed to pursue their own industrial and trade policies with an emphasis on domestic development. ... neoliberalism was actually costing poor and moderate-income countries $375 billion annually, compared to the growth they might have enjoyed by embracing the policies (and thus the growth rates) of the pre-neoliberal 1960s and 1970s."
Browne notes, "the vast majority of the world's poorest people live not in very poor countries - in other words, the ones consistently targeted by Bono's campaigning over the years - but in middle-income countries, where the problem is not desperate national poverty but enormous internal inequality."
Browne sums up, "For nearly three decades as a public figure, and especially in this century, Bono has been, more often than not, amplifying elite discourses, advocating ineffective solutions, patronising the poor, and kissing the arses of the rich and powerful. He has been generating and reproducing ways of seeing the developing world, especially Africa, that are no more than a slick mix of traditional missionary and commercial colonialism, in which the poor world exists as a task for the rich world to complete. In big and small ways, he has turned his attention to a planet of savage injustice, inequality and exploitation, and it is not unreasonable to argue that he has, in some ways, helped to make it worse."
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Post by dodger on Sept 20, 2013 13:50:06 GMT
Evolution, a book review by W. Podmore
imarxman.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/evolution-a-book-review-by-w-podmore-guest-reviewer/
Posted on March 29, 2011 by imarxman
Why evolution is true, by Jerry A. Coyne, paperback, 309 pages, ISBN 978-0-19-923085-3, Oxford University Press, 2010,
In this superb book, Jerry Coyne, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, makes what the New York Times called ‘an unassailable case’ for evolution.
He sums up the modern theory of evolution: “Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) evolutionary change is natural selection.” The theory has six components: evolution, gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection (‘the non-random survival of random variants’ – Richard Dawkins), and nonselective mechanisms of evolutionary change.
Coyne writes, “Given the gradual pace of evolution, it’s unreasonable to expect to see selection transforming one ‘type’ of plant or animal into another – so-called macroevolution – within a human lifetime. Though macroevolution is occurring today, we simply won’t be around long enough to see it. Remember that the issue is not whether macroevolutionary change happens – we already know from the fossil record that it does – but whether it was caused by natural selection, and whether natural selection can build complex features and organisms.”
He continues, “creationists often claim that if we can’t see a new species evolve during our lifetime, then speciation doesn’t occur. But this argument is fatuous: it’s like saying that because we haven’t seen a single star go through its complete life cycle, stars don’t evolve, or because we haven’t seen a new language arise, languages don’t evolve.”
Coyne argues, “If we want to see selection in action, then, we should look in species that have short generation times and are adapting to a new environment.” He cites Galapagos finches, soapberry bugs in the New World and wild mustard plants, then writes, “There are many more examples, but they all demonstrate the same thing: we can directly witness natural selection leading to better adaptation.”
He sums up, “we’ve seen new species form, both in real time and in the fossil record, and we’ve found transitional forms, between major groups, such as whales and land animals.” As he points out, “Despite innumerable, possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don’t have a single one. We don’t find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order.”
He concludes, “Selection is both revolutionary and disturbing for the same reason: it explains apparent design in nature by a purely materialistic process that doesn’t require creation or guidance by supernatural forces.”
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