Creationism: another casualty of Innumeracy

Some of us who sincerely treasure the scientific fact and scientific theory of evolution have brought on some of our own problems with our choice of nomenclature. For instance, sometimes “random mutations” gets uncoupled from natural selection, leading some to believe that it is the randomness of the process that is the be-all and end-all of evolution. Consider also Francis Crick’s description of the associations of amino acids with their three base codons as a "frozen accident." Creationists, ignoring these (legitimate) scientific and scientific/poetic usages, have jumped all over the terms such as "random" and "accident" to characterize scientific evolutionary theory in the following warped way: "All life forms just suddenly spring into existence as accidents." Though I am aware that sophisticated creationists would embellish this attack, this characterization is certainly the straw man put forth by most of the people out there who tremble at the thought that human beings are (gad!) animals. It recently occurred to me that, perhaps, creationists’ willingness to assume that evolutionists are claiming that complex life forms "just happen" might be another symptom of "innumeracy." It might be that they don't understand how incredibly rare it is that biological "accidents" survive and reproduce. In his bestseller, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1988), John Paulos introduced the term “innumeracy” to refer to "an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance." Paulos bemoaned that innumeracy "plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens."

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If the entire Bible is inerrant, don’t skip these parts . . .

I'm getting so incredibly tired of hearing from the cherry-picking fundamentalists (yes, I admit.  I shouldn't have listened to fundamentalist talk radio on the way home from work tonight). Here's a challenge for each of them:  If the entire Bible is inerrant, then read each of its passages closely.  Don't…

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Schiavo Rule keeps Democrat majority solid in Senate

Recent reports are that South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is recovering from a life-threatening episode of bleeding in the brain.  That is good news, indeed.  It remains to be seen, however, how well he will function cognitively in the coming months.  Johnson suffered a brain hemorrhage last Wednesday caused by…

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