NewScientist Magazine
Shoots Themselves in the Head
Just in case they actually take this page down or alter it,
I'm capturing it for all internet eternity here,
as a prime example of how Evolutionists falsify data
and make up completely outrageous claims
to mislead those who don't bother to read the fine print,
like our friend MCThomas and Paulos
who actually dared to post a link to this fabrication:
Note the critically important admission in the 8th paragraph:
"Crucially, tC19Z can [only] copy pieces of RNA that are
almost half as long (48 per cent) as itself.
If an RNA enzyme is to copy itself, it has to be able to copy
sequences as long as itself,
...."
Doing an artificial experiment that fails to create replicating RNA:.. $50,000
Posting the results in a misleading way on a credible Science Site: $5,000
Having a proponent of Evolution attempt to use it as evidence: ... Priceless.
(21) Hindsight bias - The tendency to see past events as predictable. "I knew all along Philip Phillips would win American Idol." Sure you did...
One of the classic examples of this in Evolutionary theory is the absurd claim that "Evolution predicted the fusing of Chromosome 2 in Man."
Of course Evolutionists did nothing of the kind. In fact, their
behaviour during the whole 30 years prior to any evidence of fusing was
to actually cover up the immense difficulty that humans having 23
chromosomes versus apes having 24 created, once genes and chromosomes
were discovered.
In other words, Evolution propagandists marched on oblivious to the
scientific knowledge of the time, when as scientists they should have
publicly acknowledged the ridiculous situation they were in for 30 years
when they knew about chromosomes but had no explanation for why men
and apes had different counts.
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(22) Ideometer effect - Where an idea causes you to have an
unconscious physical reaction, like a sad thought that makes your eyes
tear up. This is also how Ouija boards seem to have minds of their own.
It is insufficiently appreciated how personal events can bias our
propensity and outlook, our worldview. No one is immune to the sometimes
overwhelming effects of tragedy. C.S. Lewis for instance, lost his
faith as a child when his mother unexpectedly died. This was probably
involuntary, at that vulnerable age. Nonetheless he recovered his faith
upon serious reflection as an adult.
In a similar way, it is strongly suspected that many Evolution
proponents are likely involuntarily committed to an Atheist ideology on
an emotional basis long before they begin rationalizing their beliefs.
Tragedy in their lives in one form or another leaves them unable to
entertain alternative solutions to the problem of Life, or to form
faith-based worldviews.
This is an obvious bias, but one which is rarely acknowledged by apologists of any stripe.
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(23) Illusion of control - The tendency for people to overestimate
their ability to control events, like when a sports fan thinks his
thoughts or actions had an effect on the game.
This is a form of 'projection' or anthropomorphism which is extended to inanimate and non-living objects.
Among Evolutionists we see this anthropomorphism and projection running
rampant as such objects as dead, mindless molecules and processes
'actively compete' and 'achieve goals' only consistent with higher order
living creatures.
This 'empowerment' of inanimate objects is a form of fanciful
imagination quite counterproductive of real scientific investigation,
and of no use in understanding real physical processes.
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(24) Illusion of validity - When weak but consistent data leads to confident predictions.
Such examples of the coincidental positioning of fossils in deep
sedimentary layers, as though they represented local stages in
'evolution' when they were plainly sorted rather on the basis of
relative buoyancy and/or a natural seive-process based on size.
Examples of this magical thinking abound in evolution textbooks.
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(25) Information bias - The tendency to seek information when it does not affect action. More information is not always better.
As more and more fossils and sites are uncovered and catalogued, it has
become tediously obvious that no solutions to key problems such as the
absence of clear transitional species in the record are forthcoming.
Instead, the more fossil information that is gathered, the more
problematic current reconstructions have become. Very advanced creatures
continue to emerge in the most primitive layers and geological eras,
making logical and plausible reconstructions of evolutionary stages
impossible.
It can be truly observed that the Theory of Evolution was more
convincing and plausible in 1950 than today, mainly due to what we did
not know then.
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(26) Inter-group bias - We view people in our group differently than we would someone in another group.
The bias here is most embarrassing and painful. We see such "world-class
geneticists" as Richard Dawkins making the most absurd excursion into
foreign philosophical territories, only to humiliate himself as a naive
and unscientific thinker. We see such 'scientists' totally abandoning
their own scientific methodology and caution to propound ideological
viewpoints with the most tenuous and impoverished support.
Yet somehow, instead of calling these people to task when they
overextend themselves, Evolution proponents circle around them and
protect them in a way that rivals police ranks closing around a fellow
officer accused of a crime.
The very core of science, open, transparent examination of activity is
obscured and covered up with smokescreens and tactics better seen at a
circus.
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(27) Irrational escalation - Investing more money or resources
into something based on prior investment, even if you know it's a bad
one. "I already have 500 shares of Lehman Brothers, let's buy more even
though the stock is tanking."
Here again we see proponents of Evolution insisting that their way is
the only rational course, their research fields are the only ones
deserving of funding, etc., etc., in spite of and in direct
contradiction to the lack of results and even the negative findings of
actual scientific investigation.
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(15) Empathy gap -
Where people in one state fail to understand people in another state.
If you are happy you can't imagine why people would be unhappy. When you
are not sexually aroused, you can't understand how you act when you are
sexually aroused.
In a similar manner, Evolutionists have no sympathy for ordinary people
who have other belief systems and world-views. They make their own goals
of the greatest importance in an entirely self-centered and
self-oriented manner, trampling afoot whatever is in their path.
Such antisocial behaviour and systemic lack of empathy points toward
obsessive aggressive-compulsive behaviours bordering on sociopathic and
psychotic illnesses.
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(16) Frequency illusion - Where a word, name or thing you just
learned about suddenly appears everywhere. Now that you know what that
SAT word means, you see it in so many places!
Evolutionists commit this gaff on a staggering frequency-level, seeing
"Natural Selection" everywhere, even where it is blatantly not only not
operating by any rational definition, but where other overwhelming
forces would negate any chance of its operation.
Just as even ordinary scientists and mathematicians tend to 'over-apply'
a new technique, Evolutionists have become a broken-record, endlessly
repeating the 'Natural Selection' mantra as if it was a cure-all and
panacea for every biological problem that arises.
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(17) Galatea Effect - Where people try to succeed because they think they should.
As so often happens in certain areas of science that impose upon
politics, religion, and ideology, the Galatea Effect is compelling and
often overwhelming in apologetic popular books on "Evolution", the sole
purpose of which is to promote an ideological belief-system at the
expense of science and reason.
Evolutionists feel they have a 'just cause' that overrides all other
causes, even the cause of historical accuracy and scientific truth. All
things are bent toward supporting and corroborating even the most absurd
aspects of Evolutionary theory. They are 'true believers' in one of the
most dangerous ideologies ever artificially constructed.
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(18) Halo effect - Where we take one positive attribute of someone and associate it with everything else about that person or thing.
In this vein, we see Evolution propagandists and ideologues held up and
venerated in the same way as if they were 'saints' or great heroes of
nations.
Its bad enough when rich conquerors and despots make gigantic statues of
themselves, or when ordinary people have their real lives re-written to
portray them as near-perfect heroes and saints for various causes from
Roman Catholicism to Communism.
But these irrational behaviours are wholly inappropriate for scientists
and those heralding the cause of accurate reality and historical truth.
Scientists are not heroes, and most people are quite ordinary.
Mimicking religious or despotic behaviours is another sign of
unscientific and emotional bias precisely where we want to see it least.
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(19) Hard-Easy bias - Where everyone is overconfident on easy problems and not confident enough for hard problems.
Very little should need to be said on this, however our previous
analysis of the problem of synthesizing and/or discovering a
self-reproducing molecule is quite revealing as to the ridiculous
over-optimism and naive unscientific methodology used in supposed
experiments said to support theories of Abiogenesis.
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(20) Herding - People tend to flock together, especially in difficult or uncertain times
It hardly needs illustrating, that the educational community, many
scientific fields, and other political and ideological groups band
together in the face of sometimes irrational fear-mongering.
It is sometimes suggested that if people with dissenting views are even
allowed to speak, the sky will fall, and all will be enslaved by
religious tyrants.
Even Mark Twain would laugh at such scare-stories.
(11) Curse of knowledge - When
people who are smarter or more well informed can not understand the
common man. For instance, in the TV show "The Big Bang Theory" it's
difficult for scientist Sheldon Cooper to understand his waitress
neighbor Penny.
In
the debate about Evolution or rather the protracted attempts to
indoctrinate ordinary people by proponents, there are literally
thousands of opportunities for confusion and miscommunication due to the
Evolutionist's prior commitment to certain 'precise' definitions of
words that are already in circulation in the general public.
Thus
we often see Evolutionists ragging on opponents and the uncommitted
for 'confusing Evolution and Abiogenesis' for example. The
Evolutionist knows in advance that the two ideas are independent enough
that even if Abiogenesis can't be demonstrated, essential elements of
the theory of Speciation (i.e., Natural Selection) are unaffected,
since they deal with a different time, place and circumstance.
But
John Q Public knows intuitively from the nature of the public debate
that what is really being sold is Atheistic Materialism, and Evolution
is being used to justify that belief system. Part and parcel of the
whole package is the idea that "Life" doesn't have and doesn't need a
Creator, and therefore people don't need to believe in or obey a Living
God.
Thus
Abiogenesis in the sense meant by Evolutionists IS a part of the
package, and ragging on both opponents and uncommitted listeners for
grouping them together is just a handy smoke-screen, whereby
Evolutionists don't need to prove or support the idea of Abiogenesis
when inconveniently asked to do so.
The
whole argument devolves into a game of semantics that lets
Evolutionists off the hook from demonstrating how Life could
spontaneously evolve out of Non-life.
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(12) Decoy effect
- A phenomenon in marketing where consumers have a specific change
in preference between two choices after being presented with a third
choice.
This isn't so much an unconscious bias as a dirty sales-scam, meant to fool the victim (although Evolutionists are certainly biased).
Ordinary
Religious people are naturally inclined to believe in a Creator God,
who is both the First Cause and necessary to explain the origin and
existence of Life.
Evolutionists convince the listener to abandon that natural inclination by a ruse:
Young
Earth Creationism (YEC) in its most extreme form is presented as the
only alternative to Evolution, and is presented in such a way as to make
it hopelessly implausible and blatantly false. Then Evolutionary
theory is propounded as the only alternative to YEC. The victim is
bamboozled into embracing Evolutionary dogma as the most probable
explanation.
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(13) Denomination effect - People are less likely to spend large bills than their equivalent value in small bills or coins.
The same principle is at work here as the 'divide and conquer' rule.
Evolutionists
chop up the integrated belief-system of orthodox Christianity and
mainstream religion, so that each part can be separatedly assaulted and
an audience can accept the (smaller) loss of one or two seemingly
unimportant components of their own position.
This process is continued until the entire worldview has been
assaulted and apparently dismantled. It matters not that many of the
attacks and assaults are ineffective and unconvincing. The appearance
is given that these attempts are only provisionary, and since other
assaults and attacks appear successful, the difficulties must not be
unsurmountable and will eventually be solved.
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(14) Duration neglect - When
the duration of an event doesn't factor enough into a valuation. For
instance we may remember momentary displeasure as strongly as protracted
displeasure.
A classic example is the claim that Evolution has taken place over millions of years.
These gigantic time periods were originally proposed in order to allow
small, uniformitarian processes, like normal erosion, volcanism,
continental drift etc., could account for the major geophysical features
of the earth.
Likewise,
it was naively assumed that "given enough time", the most unlikely
event will become 'certain', i.e., must eventually take place.
That
naive thinking worked in the last century when people were unable to
accurately calculate probabilities and understand the basis of so-called
'random' events.
However,
some things are not "random" in this free, classical sense, based on
an oversimplified view of physical laws. The world has turned out to
be neither deterministic (as classical mechanics suggested) or purely
probabilitistic (as statistical theories of causation suggested), but
both in part deterministic (for instance it is impossible to 'block' or
shield the force of gravity because it is now understood to be a
distortion in spacetime itself) and in part probabilistic (as in quantum
mechanical forces).
Thus we cannot
expect "every possible event" to occur, even in infinite time, since
(a) there isn't sufficient time, (b) some things are indeed impossible
by definition, (c) some things are eliminated from probability by the
fact that alternate events have already occurred, and (d) some
processes are time-directional, and not reversable.
For instance,
there can never evolve a literal "Santa Claus" , because such an event
is intrinsically impossible, eliminated by its own definition.
In Evolutionary
theory we see this irrational trap fallen for again and again, as
species after species is 'discovered' to have existed both now and
simultaneously hundreds of millions of years in the past, without
evolving!.
Originally
the vast time-scales were considered necessary to justify Evolution,
but the actual creatures are found to have already evolved at the very
beginning of these time periods, while inexplicably NOT evolving for
vast subsequent eras. This makes Evolution a self-contradictory
nonsensical theory, about magical events.
(1) ATTENTIONAL BIAS - When someone focuses on only one or two choices despite there being multiple options or outcomes.
In the case of flipping a coin, landing on
its edge may a very unlikely (but still possible) event, thus "heads or
tails" seems an adequate set of options. However in typical coin
tosses under uncontrolled conditions subject to human error, up to 30%
of tosses actually result in disputes, due to insufficient
specification of how to handle 'mis-tosses' etc. Often coins and dice
fly off tables, people violate fair tosses in attempts to influence
outcome, and uneven surfaces or poor tossing cause ambiguous rolls.
Evolutionist propagandists attempt similar
choice restrictions concerning possible options when they insist (a)
that their personal theories are true, and (b) that the only
alternative choice is 'Young-Earth Creationism', or non-scientific
superstition, and (c) they refuse to investigate alternative
possibilities and/or variations on the accepted versions of the
Evolution theme.
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(2) The Availability Heuristic - is where people overestimate the importance of limited information that is available to them.
One example would be a person who argues that
smoking is not unhealthy on the basis that his grandfather lived to 100
and smoked three packs a day, an argument that ignores the possibility
that his grandfather was an 'outlier', i.e., a person lying
statistically near the edges of a more complete bell curve.
Evolutionists have historically viewed
mankind as 'descending' from early apes, on the basis of broad and
superficial similarities, such as bilateral symmetry, mammalian
classification, toe-counts, bipedalism, depth perspective, when recent
evidence suggests several overriding problems with this view: (a) lack
of a clear geographical basis for the evolution, (b) lack of
transitional forms for a history, (c) complexity of the DNA evidence
and its accompanying problems, (d) the general statistical similarity
of DNA across very divergent and distantly related animals, (e) lack of
a coherent treatment or scientific methodology for measuring
similarity or difference in DNA coding.
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(3) Backfire effect - When you reject evidence that contradicts your point of view or statement, even if you know it's true.
A good example of this
is how Evolutionists have treated the question of Birds and their
evolution. Early fossils were first regarded as 'transitional' forms
on a path from dinosaur/reptile to modern bird. Subsequently true bird
fossils were discovered anti-dating those alleged transitional fossils
by millions of years. Yet no significant revision of the theory or
the position of birds on the Evolutionary Tree as descendants of
dinosaurs has been made.
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(4) Bandwagon effect -
The probability of one person adopting a belief increases based on the
number of people who hold that belief. This is a powerful form of
groupthink.
Evolutionists constantly
appeal to 'the majority of scientists' supposed allegiance to standard
Evolutionary theory (i.e., Darwinism and 'Natural Selection'), when
the true situation is far more likely to be similar to the personal
commitment of individuals found in surveying religions and
denominations. That is, the majority of people will be uncommitted or
uninterested in the question, with population numbers rapidly dwindling
as commitment to the ideology rises, and detailed knowledge is
required. As in all politics, people will tend to sign onto the Status Quo position for reasons of expediency regardless of their personal commitments.
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(5) Belief bias - A
bias where people make faulty conclusions based on what they already
believe or know. For instance, one might conclude that all tiger sharks
are sharks, and all sharks are animals, and therefore all animals are
tiger sharks.
Just as people tend to
uncritically accept the beliefs and opinions of their culture and
educational system for long periods in their lives, so associations
will also bias belief.
Evolution is widely
believed among those educated in the West, because it has been made an
important part of their curriculum and it has been heavily associated
with science and technology, even though 90% of scientific knowledge
and technological advance has no basis in Evolutionary theory, and the
belief in Evolution is not required for or relevant to any modern
scientific discipline or technology.
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(6) Bias blind spots - If you fail to realize your own
cognitive biases, you have a bias blind spot. Everyone thinks they're
not as biased as people may think, which is a cognitive bias itself.
Independent tests for
bias however show that all individuals have significant biases that
prevent them from making accurate observations or logical conclusions.
Evolutionists are no exceptions.
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(7) Choice-supportive bias - A bias in which you think positive
things about a choice once you made it, even if that choice has flaws.
You may say positive things about the dog you just bought and ignore
that the dog bites people.
Here is a classic bias
Atheists have which is very transparent. Evolution is the preferred
theory because it suggests that people are not morally or ethically
answerable to any higher authority. There would be no consequences
for immoral or unethical behavior beyond interference by others in
competition for resources and power. A criminal in such an ethical
vacuum does not have remorse for crime but simply regrets getting
caught.
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(8) Clustering illusion - To conclude that data contains a "streak" or "cluster" when that set is actually random.
For instance in
basketball, the hot hand effect is the belief that a player who has hit
several shots in a row is more likely to hit the next shot.
This is also called the gambler's fallacy, where one thinks a winning number is "due."
Like many probability illusions, the
Clustering Illusion is based on faulty reasoning and estimates of
probability, due to a misunderstanding of forces and constraints.
Evolution is a NON-predictive 'theory'
because nothing that has occurred before or which can be presumed to be
true can be used to predict what direction things will evolve in next.
Because its entirely unpredictive beyond the vaguest
generalizations, it is not a true scientific theory in any practical
sense. Scientific theories are falsifiable, because they have specific
consequences which bear on their accuracy and truth.
One can study 'Evolution' endlessly and fail
to predict or discover any subsequent event in its specific form, which
would substantiate the key elements of the theory.
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(9) Confirmation bias - A tendency people have to believe certain information that confirms what they think or believe in.
This bias is well-known, and is why
Evolutionists insist on teaching their theories and beliefs to
children, while they are not yet in a state of critical thinking, and
are vulnerable to accepting falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims.
If an Evolutionist has been brought up in the
Western educational system, it is likely that he is heavily biased in
favour of the theory, because these thinking patterns have been formed
long before he developed a capacity for critical thinking.
In general, a person who has no personal
experience with or has paid no attention to directed, controlled or
guided forces in their life will tend to believe that such forces do
not exist, even when they are actually operating.
A person who does not detect authorities
collecting intelligence on them, monitoring their activities, or
guiding their employment opportunities, will not suspect or believe
that governments and authorities do in fact engage in such activities
in significant amounts. When suddenly confronted with the idea, that
person will reject it out of hand as 'paranoia' or 'conspiracy theory'
talk.
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(10) Conservatism bias -
Where people believe prior evidence more than new evidence or
information that emerged. People were slow to accept the fact that the
earth was round because they tended to believe earlier information that
it was flat.
This type of bias is seen strongly among proponents of
Evolutionary theory, whereby 'Natural Selection' continues to be
heralded as the most important or only force at work in real evolution,
even though this idea, was conceived by Malthus and Darwin long before
there was anything like a scientific method or framework to evaluate
it.
All subsequent evidence that goes against 'Natural
Selection' or suggests other forces might be at work that are just as
powerful is dismissed as irrelevant, as though the theory was born
'perfect' at its inception at the dawn of the scientific era.
