Saturday, April 7, 2012
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
This is a cut & paste job from http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13428 (which doesn't work).
I think the illustrative sentence, for all three of what I call the great premises of Idiot America came from The New York Times, which was talking about the intelligent design movement. And the sentence that appeared on the front page of The New York Times is called the intelligent design movement -- "a politically savvy challenge to evolution." Which is self-evidently ridiculous. It's like deciding that you're going to have an agriculturally savvy challenge to Newtonian geometry. It doesn't work.
It doesn't matter how many people vote for the candidate of the Alchemy Party ticket. He's not going to be able to change lead to gold. It doesn't matter how many people in the Gallup Poll think they should be able to flap their arms and fly to the moon -- they're not going to be able to do it. So when you have The New York Times, on the front page, posing a self-evidently ridiculous notion like a politically savvy challenge to evolution -- actually it's not. It's a politically savvy challenge to the poor bastards who are trying to teach high school biology.
"Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science." -- Jerry Coyne
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