Portsmouth, UK, has a creationist fucktard problem.

PETER FROST

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2019

Frosty’s Ramblings: Creationist nonsense still alive after 160 years

PETER FROST celebrates the 160th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, but not everyone is happy about it.

IN the naval town of Portsmouth, there is a tiny museum called Genesis Expo.

This weird place is the centre of the British Creation Science Movement. This is the extreme wing of the Christian church which believes that evolution is a fraud and a lie and that the entire world and every living thing on it was created in a few days by an all-powerful God just a few thousand years ago.

Strangely the small museum shop sells a good range of real fossils but of course these too were made by God just to fool us earthlings.

The books, videos, leaflets and pamphlets on sale will explain the creationist position. Their common theme is that the scientific theory of evolution is just nonsense and the man who came up with the theory, Charles Darwin, was a liar and a fraud.

Weird their theories might be, but they seem to be mainstream thinking in Donald Trump’s reactionary and decidedly unscientific United States where the president can get away by totally denying climate change.

More than a century and a half after Darwin published his groundbreaking thesis on the development of life, evolution remains a contentious topic in the United States — and (thankfully to a much smaller extent) in Britain.

In 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, a schoolteacher named John Scopes was fined $100 for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Even today 40 per cent of Americans think Darwin was a liar and a fraud. They believe that humankind was created in the garden of Eden less than 10,000 years ago.

Darwin’s book had the full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was published on November 24 1859 — 160 years ago.

The book introduced the scientific theory of evolution that showed that populations of plants and animals evolve over the course of many, many generations through a process of natural selection.

Darwin’s theory of evolution explains that if every species had all its offspring survive, the population would grow to enormous numbers. Yet, despite periodic fluctuations, most populations remain roughly the same size.

Resources such as food and space are limited and are relatively stable over time, so there is a struggle for survival.

Individuals in a population vary significantly and often this variation comes down from parents.

Those less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and pass on their heritable traits to future generations. This is natural selection.

This process is very slow and takes many thousands of generations, but over millennia populations change to adapt to their environments, and ultimately to form new species.

Horror of horrors, Darwin said that this evolution also applied to human beings — that man shared a common ancestor with apes and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve was just an unscientific myth.

The religious establishment was horrified. They knew that God had made the Earth and every species of plant and animal had been lovingly designed by the Almighty — and that included men and women.

That debate still goes on today and TV presenter David Attenborough often refers to it. He is often asked by viewers of his programmes why he didn’t give credit to God for the design of all living things. His answer tells it far better than I can.

“They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.” Thanks, David.

Darwin used his studies and observations, both in his garden, greenhouses and laboratories along with his five-year expedition all around the world on HMS Beagle, to present a body of convincing evidence that the huge diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution.

His wasn’t the only, or even the first, idea of evolution. Such ideas had been put forward by a scientific community making new discoveries in biology and zoology.

Indeed, support for such ideas was gaining in strength but during the first half of the 19th century the English scientific establishment was closely tied to the church.

Many of the finest naturalists were country vicars and both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church held firm to the belief that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to other animals.

The political and theological implications of Darwin’s and others’ theories were hotly debated. Darwin was denounced from many a pulpit.

Even worse, Darwin had written his book for a non-specialist audience. He wanted everyone to be able to read it. In 1872 Darwin told John Murray, his publisher, of working men in Lancashire clubbing together to buy the 5th edition at 15 shillings.

He wanted it made more widely available and for the next edition the price was halved to seven shillings and sixpence by printing in smaller type to make a smaller book.

With big or small type, the book attracted widespread interest upon its publication, not just from scientists but among those who thought about the world.

Darwin’s ideas were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical and religious discussion.

The public debate over the book contributed to the campaign by TH Huxley and fellow members of his group to secularise science and promote scientific naturalism. So enthusiastic was Huxley about these new ideas he became known as Darwin’s Bulldog.

It took only 20 years for science in general to accept the idea of evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent.

However the other arm of Darwin’s theory — natural selection — took much longer to gain general acceptance.

From the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit but the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s established Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaption through natural selection as the centre of modern evolutionary theory.

Today Darwin’s ideas are the almost universally accepted truths throughout the study of life science.

Almost universally accepted that is, except by those who still believe, 160 years after Darwin told it like it is, that the world was totally created by a wonderful God who carefully designed a worm that could only live by eating little African children’s eyeballs.

Sorry, but there is no way I’m saying “Amen” to that.