The ID Report

Coffee!!: A message from "so-called Denyse O'Leary" ...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Yesterday, I was at the Canadian Science Writers' Association convention, held in Ottawa this year, and noted an evolution display by the British Council..

In its obsequies to Darwin, the Council advises the public that

Darwin gathered a mass of information to support his ideas. The types of evidence he used – from fossils to distribution of species – are all much more developed 150 years later. The proliferation of living forms in the so-called Cambrian explosion around 530 million years ago, for example, has been studied in enormous detail.

What I want to draw your attention to is the use of the term "so-called" Cambrian explosion.

I have usually heard the fossil find in Canada's Burgess Shale called the "Cambrian explosion" - where most phyla of life forms appeared in a short period, some went extinct, and others continued. Darwin, famously, knew it was a problem for his gradualist theory of evolution, and blamed the imperfect fossil record. A more perfect fossil record has not helped much.

The big question is why it is so important for the British Council to defend Darwin's theory of evolution on this and other questions, when other theories of evolution might more reasonably account for this sequence of events.

I think I shall take to calling that organization the "so-called British Council".

Oh, and another piece of misinformation on the page is, "The spread of bacteria that can resist antibiotics is a good example of evolution in action." Yes, if evolution means tossing out working equipment, to avoid detection and destruction. But most people want to know how the equipment was created, and - to the handwringing of Darwinists - find their particular theory unconvincing.

Here is an example: You are a pro-democracy dissident in a totalitarian regime, and you type a newsletter. You get a tip that the secret police are coming, and you row out into the middle of a nearby lake and throw your whole system into it.

Of course, the secret police could arrest you without cause, but they would prefer to have a cause, so that the government-supported and -funded media can trumpet you as a villain.

Now you don't have that system any more. You are reduced to getting unwanted books at lawn sales and writing messages at agreed pages, known only to the person whose page it is. Then you arrange discreet delivery at the homes of democracy supporters, by various covert means. Still, you manage. They really want the messages.

But someone rats, under torture. Now, you are reduced to hiding baggie-wrapped messages in grapefruits, delivered by a sympathetic travelling fruit vendor. Soggy, but not without information value. Until ...

Maybe, messages could be hidden in leafy thickets or in their root systems ... I mean, if you inserted them carefully, in plastic - because they grow variously, so they will not likely be watched. But the recipient must be warned. This works, until ...

Still, the system goes on because there is an intelligence that wants to hear the news about dissent from the Totality.

Okay, this is the evolution!! of a communications system - if you, as a total Darwinist, like the British Council - believe that bacterial resistance shows evolution in action.

Sure it does, Amoeba. Now let me no longer detain you, but dump you quickly into your latest new pond.

Otherwise, read Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.

Note: Behe's title is curious, because - if you go by current science guff - Darwinism explains everything, and taxpayers must be forced to fund it.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).