Bones of Contention.

[jcrawford]

Creationist professor Marvin Lubenow contends in his 2004 edition of "Bones of Contention" that all neo-Darwinist theories about the origins and evolution of the human race are a scientific form of racism. Being somewhat familiar with the several claims, arguments and ramifications of his thesis, I am prepared to defend his claim that neo-Darwinist theories of human origins and evolution are theoretically racist should anyone care to debate and substantiate their claim to the contrary.

[perfessor]

The neo-Darwinist view of nature is a man-centered natural view and anthropocentric philosophy of nature.

This is really too funny. Have you actually read Genesis?

What has Genesis got to do with neo-Darwinist race theories? Have you actually read Darwin?

My point, which evidently flew over your head, was that a man-centered natural view and anthropocentric philosophy of nature is hardly an innovation of "neo-darwinism". It has been around at least since Genesis was written, and probably long before that.

[Chimp]

jcrawford,

You have posted an identical thread in 4 forums ( that I found...I admit
I didn't do an exhaustive search ). In none of them have you presented
any evidence to support your claims. You merely assert that it's true.
I disagree, the term troll does apply to you. It is not necessarily a pleasant
term, but what you are doing is neither informative, nor a debate. Many
people have bothered to cull your argument down to a selective use of
a broad definition of race to suit your argument. The term "human race"
is used to convey the ubiquity of humans, not as a scientific definition. This
is used much in the same way as mankind. Your "theory" is not falsifiable
as it relies purely on the possibly true supposition that man ( distant past
to present ) may have been able to inter-breed. The evolution model uses
more than just the supposition that inter-breeding could not occur.


Here are various terms from the talkorigins jargon file...

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/jarg ... _authority
Argument from Authority

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/jarg ... _allopecia
Argumentum ad Assertion Allopecia

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/jarg ... ad_nauseam
Argumentum ad Assertion Repetitio ad Nauseam

This last one seems to apply to you...although 1 and 2 also apply.

[The Happy Humanist]

I really don't know why you people are bothering to engage this guy. There are more productive and informative topics on this board. Heh...like, all of them. Seriously, you people need to recognize when you're getting your chain yanked, and just move on.

[Chimp]

Agreed...

[jcrawford]

Upnorthfan said: "There is going to be an announcement on November 5 2005 regarding radiometric dating. Supposedly it will blow holes in that type of dating. If you like I can paste a preview if you are not already familiar with it."

I'd like all the information you can provide on it if you could be so kind. However, since jcrawford said it was from the ICR I am somewhat of the opinion I can guess what it is going to be.

#1. We still hate radioactive decay!
#2. We're going to admit that radioactive decay exists, but god aged your samples so the Earth is still young.

Maybe Upnorthfan should go ahead and "paste a preview" for you in order to discredit your ludicrous presumptions about what ICR scientists might have discovered about neo-Darwinist dating methods.

In the meantime, since Cathar1950 previously said that it might be fun to discuss some of the human fossils which neo-Darwinists offer up as evidence of the human race's origins from ancestors of African gorillas and chimpanzees, I think it timely to quote Lubenow's understanding and application of 'racism' in the context of neo-Darwinist theories of ancestral monkeys and chimps mutating into the first 'species' of people in Africa.

Lubenow on Racism: (From Bones of Contention, BakerBooks, 2004)

Racism centers around three elements. First, racism always involves differences in population groups. Often the differences involving racism are ethnic, tribal, cultural, or even religious. Racism is not about the differences that are found among individuals. The popular word for those differences is the term diversity.

Second, the crucial factor in racism is “inherent superiority.” Throughout most of history, this “inherent” superiority was based on some vague belief that one’s own group was for some reason superior to others. Since the 1800s and the rise of evolution with its “scientific racism,” the emphasis has been on genetic superiority. Evolution deals with mutational changes in the genes, which are the very stuff of life. Hence it is obvious that evolution is not only the cause of that alleged “inherent superiority,” but according to Darwin, evolution also preserves that “inherent superiority.” When applied to humans, this “inherent superiority” of some race or group over others is properly called “racism.”

Third, racism always involves prejudice and rejection - active or passive, latent or expressed. Whereas the qualities of love, acceptance and respect always unite, racism, with its prejudice, hatred and rejection, always divides. That is why racism is evil. A “loving racist” is a contradiction in terms. And because evolution is racist, evolution is an evil philosophy. Almost everyone focuses on the alleged “scientific” aspects of evolution. Few ever consider the moral implications and ethical consequences of evolution.

The concept that some entities are inherently superior or “more fit” is basic to evolution. Evolutionists believe that two similar entities existing in the same environment cannot coexist indefinitely. Over time, one of them will acquire some slight mutational advantage, usually in feeding, defense or reproductive mechanisms, so that it will simply out-compete the other. It will survive, being more favored or “more fit.” The other entity, being less favored or less fit, will eventually die out. In other words, evolutionists claim that nature works by what Darwin called “natural selection” to cut out the weak and thus allow the strong to proliferate.

When the concept of evolution was applied to nature generally, nothing could have seemed more benign, innocent or obvious. It was utterly racist, but so was the audience to which it was addressed. It wasn’t that no one noticed the racism. No one cared. And when, with Darwin’s 1871 publication, the concept of evolution was extended to include humans, that racism seemed normal. No European, hearing reports of the various savage races throughout the world, doubted for a moment that he or she, as a European, was among those favored races of mankind. No one could deny that those “savages” were less favored. As proof, when Europeans came into direct competition with those “savages,” the “savages” always lost. This is what evolution is all about: “the survival of the fittest.”

[jcrawford]

The neo-Darwinist view of nature is a man-centered natural view and anthropocentric philosophy of nature.

This is really too funny. Have you actually read Genesis?

What has Genesis got to do with neo-Darwinist race theories? Have you actually read Darwin?

My point, which evidently flew over your head, was that a man-centered natural view and anthropocentric philosophy of nature is hardly an innovation of "neo-darwinism". It has been around at least since Genesis was written, and probably long before that.

Regardless of actually dating when the original Book of Genesis was first "written," or otherwise recorded, and whether it is either an anthropomorphic, anthropocentric or theocentric POV or natural philosophy, it has nothing to do with neo-Darwinist race-based theories of the first African people on earth actually evolving from non-human ancestors of African monkeys and apes.

[Sender]

ok here it is. I called ICR and they said I could post this.

few years ago an initiative was undertaken to research thoroughly the whole area of Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth. The RATE project began as a cooperative venture between the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), the Creation Research Society (CRS) and Answers in Genesis (AiG). (Our contribution was mostly providing the expertise of geologist Dr Andrew Snelling; however, when he commenced work with ICR, the project rightly reverted to a joint project of ICR/CRS.)

With the release of several key peer-reviewed papers at the recent ICC (International Conference on Creationism), it is clear that RATE has made some fantastic progress, with real breakthroughs in this area.

The main ones of these will be described and summarized in this paper, but first I want to give congratulations and credit to ICR. Even though a substantial proportion of the scientists working on this project have not been actual ICR staff, ICR’s initiative and perseverance, and in particular the patient skilful coordination of their Dr Larry Vardiman had the major role in getting things to this point this quickly.
Exciting news on ‘ancient’ granites

When physicist Dr Russell Humphreys was still at Sandia National Laboratories (he now works full-time for ICR), he and Dr John Baumgardner (still with Los Alamos National Laboratory) were both convinced that they knew the direction in which to look for the definitive answer to the radiometric dating puzzle.

Others had tried—and for some, the search went on for a while in the early RATE days—to find the answer in geological processes. But Drs Humphreys and Baumgardner realized that there were too many independent lines of evidence (the variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium radiohalos, fission track dating and more) that indicated that huge amounts of radioactive decay had actually taken place. It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be a single, unifying answer that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves.

Since, from the eyewitness testimony of God’s Word, the billions of years that such vast amounts of radioactive processes would normally suggest had not taken place, it was clear that the assumption of a constant slow decay process was wrong. There must have been speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.

There is now powerful independent confirmatory evidence that at least one episode of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper1, though technical, can be summarized as follows:

*

When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas which readily escapes from rock.
*

Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
*

By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
*

There is a significant amount of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
*

Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5680 (+/- 2000) years.

The paper looks at the various avenues a long-ager might take by which to wriggle out of these powerful implications, but there seems to be little hope for them unless they can show that the techniques used to obtain the results were seriously (and mysteriously, having been performed by a world-class non-creationist expert) flawed.
More great news on radiocarbon

It’s long been known that radiocarbon (which should disappear in only a few tens of thousands of years at the most2) keeps popping up reliably in samples (like coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to be ‘millions of years’ old. For instance, AiG has over the years commissioned and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’ sites (e.g. with Jurassic fossils, inside Triassic sandstone, burnt by Tertiary basalt) and these were published (by then staff geologist Dr Andrew Snelling) in Creation magazine and TJ. In each case, with contamination eliminated, the result has been in the thousands of years, i.e. C-14 was present when it ‘shouldn’t have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate C-14 further, building on the literature reviews of creationist M.D. Dr Paul Giem.

In another very important paper presented at this year’s ICC, scientists from the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental data. The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how ‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable C-14 levels.3 This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000 years. (When one takes into account the likely much lower ratio of radioactive to ‘normal’ carbon pre-Flood4, it brings it right down to within the biblical ‘ballpark’.)

Interestingly, specimens which appear to definitely be pre-Flood seem to have C-14 present, too, and importantly, these cluster around a lower relative amount of C-14. This suggests that some C-14 was primordial, and not produced by cosmic rays—thus limiting the age of the entire earth to only a few thousand years.

This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond, formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.

This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be expected to find its way into the interior.

The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration of radioactive decay.5

C-14 labs have no real answer to this problem, namely that all the ‘vast-age’ specimens they measure still have C-14. Labelling this detectable C-14 with such words as ‘contamination’ and ‘background’ is completely unhelpful in explaining its source, as the RATE group’s careful analyses and discussions have shown. But it is no problem or mystery at all if the uniformitarian/long-age assumptions are laid to one side and the real history of the world, given in Scripture, is taken seriously. The C-14 is there, quite simply, because it hasn’t had time to decay yet. The world just isn’t that old!

The C-14 results are an independent but powerful confirmation of the stunning helium-diffusion results. 2003 looks like going down as a bad year for megachronophiles (lovers of long ages), but a good year for lovers of the Word of God.

Postscript: In addition to the book expected in 2005 reporting the final results of the RATE project, the project expects to publish a book for laymen summarizing the project shortly thereafter. Dr Don DeYoung will be the author. He has written several popular books on creation science and has been on the RATE since its inception. His grasp of the details of the project and his excellent writing skills should combine to produce a highly readable book for creationist laymen.
References and notes

1. Humphreys, D. et al., Helium diffusion rates support accelerated nuclear decay, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/Helium_ICC_7-22-03.pdf.
2. Even with the most sensitive AMS techniques used today, nary an atom of C-14 should be present after 250,000 years.
3. Baumgardner, J. et al., Measurable 14C in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Baumgardner.pdf.
4. Factors which would lower the ratio: (1) More C-12 in the biosphere (more land area, higher CO2), (2) less C-14 production due to stronger magnetic field deflecting cosmic rays better, (3) C-14 starts building up at creation, so it would only have had 1,600 years to build up, nowhere near equilibrium.
5. This burst of accelerated decay would be expected to have a greater effect, proportionately, the longer the half-life. Compared to the effect on a uranium isotope with a half-life of billions of years, the effect of speeded-up decay on C-14, with its half-life of the order of 5,000 years, would be much less, which would explain why there is still some of this primordial C-14 left. Other papers by RATE scientists at this ICC dealt with theoretical grounds for this (by Dr Eugene Chaffin, ref. 6) and also gave further supportive evidence from isochron dates for this varying effect (by Dr Steve Austin, Dr Andrew Snelling and Bill Hoesch, ref. 7). (‘Good’ isochrons obtained for different decay chains within the same rock sample, which should have all registered the same ‘date’, varied from one another in a manner consistent with this.)
6. Chaffin, E., Accelerated decay: theoretical models, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Chaffin.pdf.
7. Snelling, A., Hoesch, W. and Austin, S., Radioisotopes in the diabase sill (Upper Precambrian) at Bass Rapids, Grand Canyon, Arizona: an application and test of the isochron dating method, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/ICCBassR ... and_WH.pdf.

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[Sender]

ok here it is. I called ICR and they said I could post this. Keep in mind they are not finished, the official version is due out Nov 5, 2005. This will be a culmination of 8 years of research.

few years ago an initiative was undertaken to research thoroughly the whole area of Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth. The RATE project began as a cooperative venture between the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), the Creation Research Society (CRS) and Answers in Genesis (AiG). (Our contribution was mostly providing the expertise of geologist Dr Andrew Snelling; however, when he commenced work with ICR, the project rightly reverted to a joint project of ICR/CRS.)

With the release of several key peer-reviewed papers at the recent ICC (International Conference on Creationism), it is clear that RATE has made some fantastic progress, with real breakthroughs in this area.

The main ones of these will be described and summarized in this paper, but first I want to give congratulations and credit to ICR. Even though a substantial proportion of the scientists working on this project have not been actual ICR staff, ICR’s initiative and perseverance, and in particular the patient skilful coordination of their Dr Larry Vardiman had the major role in getting things to this point this quickly.
Exciting news on ‘ancient’ granites

When physicist Dr Russell Humphreys was still at Sandia National Laboratories (he now works full-time for ICR), he and Dr John Baumgardner (still with Los Alamos National Laboratory) were both convinced that they knew the direction in which to look for the definitive answer to the radiometric dating puzzle.

Others had tried—and for some, the search went on for a while in the early RATE days—to find the answer in geological processes. But Drs Humphreys and Baumgardner realized that there were too many independent lines of evidence (the variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium radiohalos, fission track dating and more) that indicated that huge amounts of radioactive decay had actually taken place. It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be a single, unifying answer that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves.

Since, from the eyewitness testimony of God’s Word, the billions of years that such vast amounts of radioactive processes would normally suggest had not taken place, it was clear that the assumption of a constant slow decay process was wrong. There must have been speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.

There is now powerful independent confirmatory evidence that at least one episode of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper1, though technical, can be summarized as follows:

*

When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas which readily escapes from rock.
*

Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
*

By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
*

There is a significant amount of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
*

Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5680 (+/- 2000) years.

The paper looks at the various avenues a long-ager might take by which to wriggle out of these powerful implications, but there seems to be little hope for them unless they can show that the techniques used to obtain the results were seriously (and mysteriously, having been performed by a world-class non-creationist expert) flawed.
More great news on radiocarbon

It’s long been known that radiocarbon (which should disappear in only a few tens of thousands of years at the most2) keeps popping up reliably in samples (like coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to be ‘millions of years’ old. For instance, AiG has over the years commissioned and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’ sites (e.g. with Jurassic fossils, inside Triassic sandstone, burnt by Tertiary basalt) and these were published (by then staff geologist Dr Andrew Snelling) in Creation magazine and TJ. In each case, with contamination eliminated, the result has been in the thousands of years, i.e. C-14 was present when it ‘shouldn’t have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate C-14 further, building on the literature reviews of creationist M.D. Dr Paul Giem.

In another very important paper presented at this year’s ICC, scientists from the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental data. The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how ‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable C-14 levels.3 This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000 years. (When one takes into account the likely much lower ratio of radioactive to ‘normal’ carbon pre-Flood4, it brings it right down to within the biblical ‘ballpark’.)

Interestingly, specimens which appear to definitely be pre-Flood seem to have C-14 present, too, and importantly, these cluster around a lower relative amount of C-14. This suggests that some C-14 was primordial, and not produced by cosmic rays—thus limiting the age of the entire earth to only a few thousand years.

This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond, formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.

This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be expected to find its way into the interior.

The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration of radioactive decay.5

C-14 labs have no real answer to this problem, namely that all the ‘vast-age’ specimens they measure still have C-14. Labelling this detectable C-14 with such words as ‘contamination’ and ‘background’ is completely unhelpful in explaining its source, as the RATE group’s careful analyses and discussions have shown. But it is no problem or mystery at all if the uniformitarian/long-age assumptions are laid to one side and the real history of the world, given in Scripture, is taken seriously. The C-14 is there, quite simply, because it hasn’t had time to decay yet. The world just isn’t that old!

The C-14 results are an independent but powerful confirmation of the stunning helium-diffusion results. 2003 looks like going down as a bad year for megachronophiles (lovers of long ages), but a good year for lovers of the Word of God.

Postscript: In addition to the book expected in 2005 reporting the final results of the RATE project, the project expects to publish a book for laymen summarizing the project shortly thereafter. Dr Don DeYoung will be the author. He has written several popular books on creation science and has been on the RATE since its inception. His grasp of the details of the project and his excellent writing skills should combine to produce a highly readable book for creationist laymen.
References and notes

1. Humphreys, D. et al., Helium diffusion rates support accelerated nuclear decay, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/Helium_ICC_7-22-03.pdf.
2. Even with the most sensitive AMS techniques used today, nary an atom of C-14 should be present after 250,000 years.
3. Baumgardner, J. et al., Measurable 14C in fossilized organic materials: confirming the young earth creation-flood model, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Baumgardner.pdf.
4. Factors which would lower the ratio: (1) More C-12 in the biosphere (more land area, higher CO2), (2) less C-14 production due to stronger magnetic field deflecting cosmic rays better, (3) C-14 starts building up at creation, so it would only have had 1,600 years to build up, nowhere near equilibrium.
5. This burst of accelerated decay would be expected to have a greater effect, proportionately, the longer the half-life. Compared to the effect on a uranium isotope with a half-life of billions of years, the effect of speeded-up decay on C-14, with its half-life of the order of 5,000 years, would be much less, which would explain why there is still some of this primordial C-14 left. Other papers by RATE scientists at this ICC dealt with theoretical grounds for this (by Dr Eugene Chaffin, ref. 6) and also gave further supportive evidence from isochron dates for this varying effect (by Dr Steve Austin, Dr Andrew Snelling and Bill Hoesch, ref. 7). (‘Good’ isochrons obtained for different decay chains within the same rock sample, which should have all registered the same ‘date’, varied from one another in a manner consistent with this.)
6. Chaffin, E., Accelerated decay: theoretical models, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/RATE_ICC_Chaffin.pdf.
7. Snelling, A., Hoesch, W. and Austin, S., Radioisotopes in the diabase sill (Upper Precambrian) at Bass Rapids, Grand Canyon, Arizona: an application and test of the isochron dating method, www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/ICCBassR ... and_WH.pdf.

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[Chimp]

Finally...

Second, the crucial factor in racism is “inherent superiority.” Throughout most of history, this “inherent” superiority was based on some vague belief that one’s own group was for some reason superior to others. Since the 1800s and the rise of evolution with its “scientific racism,” the emphasis has been on genetic superiority. Evolution deals with mutational changes in the genes, which are the very stuff of life. Hence it is obvious that evolution is not only the cause of that alleged “inherent superiority,” but according to Darwin, evolution also preserves that “inherent superiority.” When applied to humans, this “inherent superiority” of some race or group over others is properly called “racism.”

This is Lubenow's (and jcrawford's) own misconception of the theory of
natural selection. There are no value judgements involved...no one is
sitting in judgement of the mutations ( thats more in the theology realm ).
When things are described in terms of fitness, it's a value neutral term.

The concept that some entities are inherently superior or “more fit” is basic to evolution. Evolutionists believe that two similar entities existing in the same environment cannot coexist indefinitely. Over time, one of them will acquire some slight mutational advantage, usually in feeding, defense or reproductive mechanisms, so that it will simply out-compete the other. It will survive, being more favored or “more fit.” The other entity, being less favored or less fit, will eventually die out. In other words, evolutionists claim that nature works by what Darwin called “natural selection” to cut out the weak and thus allow the strong to proliferate.

This is where Lubenow equates superiority with fitness, incorrectly.
The last three sentences are more or less correct. Having incorrectly
ascribed a perjorative conotation to "fitness", he is now free to use it
liberally.

Lame attempt at lameness.

[Sender]

The ole dbl post.