Daily Kos diary

From web diary at Daily Kos: http://nemonemini.dailykos.com


Thanks for all the comments.
I am a little surprised at the way secular liberals respond in the Darwin debate. You are getting cut to pieces by the Bible Belt, and can't figure out where you are going wrong. Too much bad advice from people like the NCSE and Talk.Origins. It is hard to stand up to the bullying of these people and to realize just how poor their treatment of evolution is. The Bible Belt has got your number if you think that stuff has a sound foundation.

It's a tough game to navigate through because of the misleading tactics on both sides.

The key point always scrambled is simple: The claims for evolution are very strong, the claims for Darwin's theory of natural selection are problematic.
Then why won't scientists say so, admit to this and preempt the gift handed to creationists by their rigidity? That's a tougher puzzle than evolution. Lemmings, I guess.
One problem is that this is really a propaganda war, and both sides compute their Ad Budgets and/or social clout stats before they do any thinking. The positions of both sides are too tricky to alter in such a debate, and the since the key issue is who controls the social space, what views they use for that need to be formulaic--doesn't matter if they are wrong.
Whatever the reason, science in its current form is striking out on evolution and I see no reason why an intelligent liberal perspective on evolution that isn't either reductionist or religious propaganda isn't possible.
Best get the message. These boilerplate junk talking points from NCSE, and Talk.Origins aren't going to make it, although due to their current dominance they will seem to prosper for a long while to come.

I have a lot of material on this at my website(s).