An interesting letter from Dawkins about the movie. It certainly supports the idea that this movie is really a piece of fallacious propaganda aimed at the uninformed to whip up a frenzy of emotion.

Dear Mr J

Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.

1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer.
Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!
Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.

2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.

3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?

4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.

5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).

6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.

7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.

8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.

With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.

Yours sincerely

Richard Dawkins

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2488,Open-Letter-to-a-victim-of-Ben-Steins-lying-propaganda,Richard-Dawkins

So what does Stein think this movie was all about. I challenge you to watch this video (and all of the others):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihYq2dGa29M

It all boils down to the following:

1. There are stupid people.

2. There are smart people.

Smart people think, stupid people do not. Darwinism, a group of people who do not think, stone age apes, living in modern times. They resist common sense and the possibility that people were created, not matter how strong the evidence. The entire world shouts of creation by a higher intellect, yet these people are somehow deficient, they cannot see what is in front of them. ITs that simple. And yes there are a lot of commies out there.

I see stupid people.

Stein says, "Science leads to killing people".

Stupidity is truly boundless.

Best,

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1209352911.jpg

It's all about the thread count.

Now where am I?

Dunno. But now I'm afraid to go to bed (I think there's commies under it).

I’m curious why you even ask this question. Have you not followed the discussion on the transition from reptiles to birds? Have you not followed the links that show all of the various fossils and species between reptiles and birds?

Since you are asking the question “where are they?” I’m going to assume that you believe they are not there. Why are you making this assumption? Why do you think they are not out there? How do you come to this conclusion? Did someone tell you that they are not out there? Did someone tell you there is a shortage of these fossils? Have you see, but blocked out, the evidence?

I’m more interested in how you came to the conclusion that the evidence is not out there than I am in trying to prove to you that there are ample fossils showing the transition between reptiles and birds. Educating you has been shown to be an impossible task: you remain in a state of denial even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. The evidence is out there, the fossils exist, I just want to know how it is possible for you to remain in such a state of denial.

It is very simple;

1. The evidence is there.
2. Trek has not seen it.
3. Trek will not see it.
4. See no evidence; hear no evidence; feel no evidence.
5. Evidence does not exist.

I am going to invoke Poe's Law on this and all previous posts. Until we have a formal psychiatric evaluation of Snowman preformed, there is no way to separate satire from psychosis.

Regardless whether snowman is a satirical comic or a total nut job, his posts are pure comedic gold. :)

i think he's reverse threaded

Or, perhaps, cross-threaded?

I think snowedman is one of those people who let their feeling (emotion, intuition, whatever you want to call it) that god exists override all logic and common sense. From what other source could a statement like “the entire world shouts of creation by a higher intellect” come from? He has made other statements in the past, like “even an idiot can determine that god exists,” that confirm this opinion of him.

We call him snowedman because he is “snowed under” his emotions. He’s trapped down there, with layers and layers of snow buried on top. All believers let their feeling override logic and common sense to some degree, some more than others. People like snowedman and Trekkor are at the far end of this scale.

It would behoove the rest of us to take this into consideration when discussing things with people like this. No amount of logic or common sense will override this feeling they have. They are totally blinded by it. About the only thing we can hope to do is make them aware of this, and there is really very little chance of this.

Now whether you call someone in this condition a nut job, delusional, or some other term, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

I think that the discussion between Sniper, et al can be boiled down to a simple question regarding the lack of fossil record on transitional species. With all due respect to IROC, that link is pathetically weak. It talks about how difficult it is for fossils to be formed and then found and while that may be true, that applies to all fossils, not just transitional species. Thus there should still be ample transitional species in the record to go with the known species. I would like to hear an intelligent discussion of why there is a lack of these fossils, beyond "fossils are really hard to form".

Second, I would like to hear a discussion of the explosions of species that we see in the fossil record and how that goes together with the idea of evolution. What accounts for the cambrian explosion? Why would thousands of species be forming at the same time if evolution is a result of chance and natural selection?

Just asking questions...

From what I understand, the term "explosion" is somewhat of a misnomer. I think the Cambrian "explosion" happened over a period of 80 million years?

Terrestrial fossils are difficult to find, however, marine fossils are abundant and well characterized. We tend to get hung up on tetrapod evolution because of personal bias. However, if you want lots of "transitional" fossils, read up on marine evolution (mulloscs, etc.)

The "Cambrian Explosion" is a misnomer. There is relatively rapid increase in the fossil record at that time but covers 80,000,000 years so is not really an explosion. There is good genetic evidence for the primary speciations occurring well before the end of the Ediacaran period with the Cambrian representing more of an adaptive radiation. IIRC, current thinking is that the predecessors to these animals did not have calcified parts and didn't fossilize well. I seem to recall a number of recent articles on possible fossilized embryos pre-Cambrian (even pre-Ediacaran) suggesting well developed animals long before the "explosion". Likely the primary radiation began at the end of the "Snowball Earth" period and has to do with animals finally reaching a genetic critical mass to allow developmental diversity (HOX genes).

I'm suspecting his threads may be stripped.

That is a mis quote. I said "There are stupid people"

Since you cannot get such a simple quote correct, which one are you?

NEVER cross threaded seldom stripped or reverse threaded.

Glad to entertain you all. Hope you learn something in the process. Not likely but HOPE is the latest word and it springs eternal.

Watch for those commies, esp. the ones under your bed.