Humanoid automatrons
Their books contain large amounts of competent scholarship. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Intelligent Design guys raise VALID questions. The name-calling, back-biting, snark and vitriol are not even the worst part of the problem.īoth sides are completely talking PAST each other! Richard Dawkins’ and Jerry Coyne’s pro-Darwin books say almost nothing about this stuff. Systems like transposition and symbiogenesis.
The two main camps – ID and the Darwinists – both omit or downplay the significance of evolution’s “Swiss Army Knife” – the cell’s astonishing ability to re-program itself. Even though the two are not at all the same. The Discovery Institute, the Intelligent Design think tank, routinely equates “evolution = atheism” in their articles, books and blog posts. Some churches and schools will throw you out in a hot second if you admit you’re an “evolutionist.” The creationist websites are offended at the very thought of evolution. The average church won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. The “pro-Darwin” websites and conferences are boiling with rage and vitriol. Some universities will fire professors for suggesting that the universe appears to be planned or fine-tuned for life. Not without getting apprehended by the Political Correctness Police. You cannot go to university and have a frank, open, civilized debate about Naturalism vs. I believe that your will to discover the truth has to be greater than your fear of whatever that truth might be. We have to pursue the truth, pursue the truth, and ignore no verifiable fact. That’s what we have to do in this debate. You respect a guy who doesn’t sell you a car because he knows it’s not right for you. Why? Because the guy is trying to get to the sale, not the truth.
Everybody knows that if you go to a car lot and the person just wants to sell you a car, regardless of whether it’s the right car for you, that you have this icky used car salesman experience.
This is a phrase I got from my colleague Ari Galper, who’s a sales trainer. You assume that they are here because they want to solve this, and there’s a good reason why they believe what they believe, even if you think it’s nutty. You need to assume that whoever you’re talking to is there for a good reason, even if you don’t like their values or even if you don’t like their position or their platform or the tribe that they belong to, or their metaphysics or their anti-metaphysics or whatever. The DMZ is for people who relish the clash of ideas and have the courage to be right or wrong in public. If you will not sign your name your opinion is worthless. The DMZ is not a haven for anonymous cowards. If you have to sign your name to what you’re saying online or offline, then you’re a lot more likely to say something helpful. We have to talk.Īnonymity brings out the absolute worst in people. If we’re going to talk about this, you don’t come with the intention of shooting somebody dead, even if you don’t like them, even if they’re from a different tribe than you. The DMZ has a number of buildings for peace talks between the two sides.Įvolution 2.0 is a De-Militarized Zone for the evolution debate. A place where people from both sides can go… and not get shot. Between North and South Korea there’s a “DMZ,” a De-Militarized Zone.