Why didn't RON PAUL raise his hand?

[lame54]

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/14021.html
As it turns out, though, there was one more evolution-denier on the stage who, for whatever reason, didn’t raise his hand at the time. Ron Chusid directed me to this Ron Paul video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPoCsC8VT9g
posted to YouTube last week. Here’s the key exchange:

Audience member: I saw you in one of the earlier debates, all of the candidates were asked if they believe the theory of evolution to be true and they had a show of hands, but I didn’t see which way you voted, and I was wondering if you believe it to be true, and should it be taught in our schools.

Paul: First, I thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know, for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter. And I, um, I think it’s a theory, theory of evolution, and I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory…. I just don’t think we’re at a point where anybody has absolute proof, on either side.

Yes, in 2007, 10 Republicans were running for president, and four of them reject modern biology.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. what is as depressing is the total lack of response by the Dems.

my gosh, this is an absolute winner of an issue. Rational thinkers, versus religious idiocy! Just look at what religious idiocy has brought us for 7 years.

[gateley]

4. They shouldn't even bring it up - (the Dems). Peoples' beliefs have no place

in politics. Creationism vs evolution shouldn't be part of ANY political platform.

[lame54]

5. Here's a comment from the youtube video

If a person cannot understand something so simple as evolution, how is said person going to decide on even more complex scientific issues? Global warming? Birth control? Stem cells? NIH funding? If you aren't going to listen to the people who spend their entire lives studying these things, who will you listen to? Some people might consider evolution a non-issue, but it really does say a lot about the person when they just call it "a theory."

[laconicsax]

9. Funny thing about that

is that evolution is a complex process taking place over many generations (often thousands). Since it can be generalized in simple terms, many people believe that it's a simple process, which can lead to the process being misunderstood as it often is.

[gateley]

11. Many of the samples you cite are based on beliefs - not science (obviously).

It's not necessarily that they can't understand, it's that they CHOOSE not to even research it. It's akin to asking a devout Christian to just take a look at Islam and surely they'll see the wisdom and true teachings behind it. They don't NEED to. They already KNOW.

I heartily admit, though, that such closed-mindedness is truly frightening.

[David__77]

7. Evolution is a basic scientific fact.

I would hope that acknowledgment of this fact wouldn't be prevented by somehow thinking it's an "off limits" religious issue. At a minimum, scientists do work under the basic working principle that evolution is a fact, and I'd hope that a president would respect this since it's based on the basic methodology of science itself.

[comradebillyboy]

12. If one rejects modern scientific thought

in favor of a 5000 yr old Sumerian creation myth, then I think that is a legitimate issue. If you believe the universe is 6000 years old you must also reject geology, physics, biology and astronomy in favor of magical thinking.

[alarimer]

20. Science policy and education should be part of the platform

If those flat-earthers get elected, they get to set science policy based on their religious idiocy. I for one would like to know which one of our candidates may be scientifically clueless as well. None of them are creationists but they might support abstinence education (which does not work) instead of more rational educational policies. The Republicans have been engaged in a war on science for years. Bush has politicized science like no other. Can you imagine the kind of administrators for NOAA or the NIH Mike Huckabee might appoint?
:scared:

His science policy will be directly tied to his stance on evolution and beliefs in general.

In any case, the evolution debate does belong in politics because school boards in some places have decided to make an issue of it. Judges have been on the right side so far but imagine the kind of religious non-thinkers a Huckabee would appoint. Another scary thought. Creationism or ID is very much an attempt to teach religion in the public schools and, thus, a violation of the separation of church and state. It very much matters where the candidates stand on the issue.

[Hoof Hearted]

24. Insulting half your own base is good? That's what you do when you fling intolerant, derogatory

phrases like "religious idiocy".
I know I've just satisfied your adolescent impulse for a "rise", but you may consider it my Christmas gift, to you. MOST of your Dem and progressive humans in arms are Christian or some variant thereof. :hippie: Perhaps it may not seem so, but accross the country, yes.

Mr. Paul apparently knows from whence and where his relevant support comes, and they would be the embarrassed Republicans. He is playing his cards in order to maintain his present income. Can't blame him, can you?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

32. I only insult those who believe in an inerrant bible.

that collection of fairy tales is instructive, but it was collected (stolen, really) from earlier sects. That new testament thingie did not even exist in an recognizable form into the 1500s, and only after a generation of street fights and bloody negotiations known as the council of trent.

Heck, JC was not even mentioned in writing until almost 400 CE. The pseudo-historian Papias (d. 130 CE) was one of the earliest people to gather the words of actual witnesses, such as John the Evangelist, and put pen to paper. One of the reasons was he was one of the very few who learned how to read and write. He included some of his favorite, new and improved apocalyptical theories that called for a reign of peace a thousand years long after which the world as we knew it would end. Yet, Papias never mentioned anyone named Jesus. No references, no story telling, no nothing about him feeding the multitudes, or curing the blind, not even his attack on the money changers.

We must have missed something somehow, especially that thousand years of global peace he predicted. Some of his many critics suggest that he might have authored them as part of his own fraud.

Around 200 years later, Eusebius made a point of showing that Papias got it mostly wrong. (He also called him “a man of exceedingly small intelligence”, a serious insult, even in those days.) Only in the time of Eusebius does the name Jesus even appear.

[cali]

2. he's just another asshole puke

and he's a fundy just like Huckabee.

[Hydra]

3. They have to

their base believes that the good book tells them all they need to know to live their lives.

I swear I'm in wonderland- large numbers of people consider a book that was written by a bunch of obnoxious men(which most of them haven't bothered to read completely) to be holy and unassailable.

Next thing you know, comets will be declared to be made out of chocolate, and people will try to stand in the path of incoming ones in the hopes of getting to the cosmic chocolate sundae first!

[TwilightGardener]

6. BWAH! A doctor who doesn't believe in science. Nice.

[Buzz Clik]

8. Amazing.

And I voted for him once a long time ago.

Oy. :shrug:

[1monster]

10. The problem is that most people confuse Evolution with Darwinism.

And they further confuse variation with evolution and natural selection.

I had this conversation with a recent college grad in a laundromat one afternoon.

I explained to him that evolution was a fact and Darwin's Natural Selection was the theory.

He didn't buy it, so I offered him some very basic truth.

Living in a very old city which has several very old buildings which have been preserved, I was able to offer visual proof. I pointed out the size of the door ways and ceilings in the older houses.

I'm somewhat vertically challenged (I can walk under open kitchen cabinet doors with out banging my head if I'm not wearing high heals or platform wedgies :D ). But even I would need to watch my head going through the old houses doors.

I pointed out that our children's feet are bigger than than their parents' feet, and our feet are bigger than our parents' feet are/were.

His comeback was, "That's not evolution. That's variation."

I pretty much gave up at that point. I had to leave, and I didn't think that this young man was going to open his mind up enough to even consider evolution, especially as he didn't understand the terms he was using.

Variation is the differences within a generation, not over long periods of time...

[doc03]

13. I don't think it is a relevant question to ask

a Presidential candidate IMHO. I would consider that more of a religious question, some people Democrat or Republican may not believe the theory and interpret the Bible literally. When I was in school it was called the (Theory of Evolution). How does peoples height prove evolution, couldn't it just as well be our diet has improved over the last 300 years. That's the same as the global warming, I couldn't say it is fact, there are some scientists that don't think so. I remember back in the mid-seventies we had a couple very cold winters and there were a lot of scientists that had the belief we were going into another ice-age. The meteorologist on our local TV station had a week long series on the coming ice-age
and many scientists supported the theory.

[comradebillyboy]

15. In scientific parlance, theory is as good as it gets

like in theory of gravity, theory of relativity, quantum theory. Evolutionary theory is supported by overwhelming real evidence and refuted by no actual scientific research at all.

One of the major differences of the "scientific method" and other methods of seeking knowledge is that, in science, we test our theories trying to disprove them (This is what most of science is about - trying to find chinks or errors in out theories). When we do find errors this way, we admit that we were wrong and look for other explanations instead of denying the evidence against our original theory and sticking to the old idea.

Science is a long difficult trek of closer and closer approximations to modeling reality. Yes, it started with religious explanations - those explanations were tested and found to be lacking so a closer approximation was tried and found to be better. This closer approximation was tested and found to be lacking so a closer approximation was tried and found to be better. etc. etc. Each closer approximation keeping the parts of an earlier that worked and refining those parts that didn't. This is still continuing today. We are getting closer to better and better (defined as able to predict what we can observe) explanations. - But we don't know everything.

[doc03]

16. If man evolved from apes where are all the

variations in the species over the 1000's of years. You have apes then the cave men and modern humans, they couldn't have just evolved from one to the other overnight. The change had to be gradual with evidence of the change over time, where are they. I hear they think whales once had legs and walked on land, if that is true they just didn't wake up one day and decide I am going get rid of these things and move to the sea. This had to happen over thousands and thousAnds of years, where are all the skeletons showing this gradual change?

[mopinko]

19. punctuated equilibrium

change does not, in fact, happen slowly over time. rather, some organisms are more fit to survive cataclysmic changes in the environment.
ie- why do some people carry a gene for cystic fibrosis? it is a fatal disease, and until recently, usually killed before the age of reproduction. yet it persists in the human population. why? because people who carried the single gene for this, that is did not have the disease, which takes 2 copies, still had the thickened mucus that is the hallmark of the disease. so they survived the bubonic plague.
where are the missing links? they failed to survive some environmental event. some plague, drought, or some such. but we did. they are in the museums. you should try that.

[alarimer]

21. In the fossil record there are plenty of transitional forms

In addition to the fossil record, there is genetic evidence. We share 99% of our DNA with chimps, for example. We share less with other primates and even less with other mammals. For starters, you might want to read Richard Dawkins The Ancestor's Tale. He covers this ground much better than I can. Humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor a million or so years ago. The evidence is there. Change is sometimes gradual, sometimes not.

[progressive_realist]

17. Wikipedia has an excellent refutation

Of the notion that evolution is a "theory" that one can choose not to "believe": Evolution as theory and fact

The facts of evolution are incontrovertible. Genes do exist and are passed from an organism to its offspring. There is a fossil record. Organisms in a population do change from generation to generation. We can artificially "evolve" fruit-flies in an observable period of time.

The theory is only the explanation for the how and why. And any alternative to the prevailing scientific theory must be able to fit the known facts as well or better than it. Religious creation myths do not fit the facts. They not only do not help us understand the world as it is, but they actually impede such understanding to the extent that people think that they can substitute belief for knowledge. And this applies ten times over for our leaders, who should be making major decisions based on a sound understanding of the world, not some random beliefs they choose to cling to instead of educating themselves.

[1monster]

26. About a year or two ago, I was subbing in a science class where a film was

shown that documented an experiment, at first unintended, that documented the progress of a group of foxes that, over on ten generations evolved into what looked and sounded like domesticated dogs.

Fox markings are consistant. Foxes do not bark. They don't change from one generation to the next.

A group of foxes were captured and raised as domesticated animals. Changes ensued from each generation. By the tenth generation, the fox descendants were no longer fox red, they had irregular markings; some were black and white, some were brown and white, some were black and brown with white, etc. They looked like small dogs, and they barked.

This experiment has been reproduced several times since the first unintentional event. The results have been the same in each experiment.

There are hypothesizes as to why these changes took place, but, of course, they are only educated guesses.

[doc03]

27. I have heard if you take domestic dogs of all breeds

and put them in the wild in a few generations they will eventually look the same as all feral dogs found throughout the world. I have heard the Wild Boars that live in southeast are just domesticated hogs that have lived in the wild over a few generations.

[progressive_realist]

31. Ah

I should perhaps have said instead, "Organisms can change over generations." I suppose the topological map of speciation consists of basins of attraction. Organisms within a species will tend to have traits clustered around the "norm" for that species, unless and until something in the environment changes to favor characteristics that were previously outliers.

But that's a lot more technical than the point I was trying to make, which was that politicians should know better than to think evolution is only one of several equal options to be chosen from.

[NNN0LHI]

14. Four of them? McCain qualified his answer with he "sees" the hand of God at the Grand Canyon

That gets him a free ticket for admittance to the Jim Jones school for nuts as far as I am concerned.

Don

[brazos121200]

18. Four republican candidates for President reject modern scientific fact. This

should say something about the "modern" republican party. God help this country if any of these medieval holdovers ascend to the Presidency. In fact, GWB himself is an evolution rejecter, having said he believes in the creation myth. With the republican war on science in the last ten years or so in full throttle, it's no wonder America is lagging behind in scientific and medical discovery.

[SergeyDovlatov]

22. I guess it depends. His campaign said that he does believe in evolution

at least for some definition of evolution and "does".

http://www.shanktified.com/archives/ron-paul-campaign-on-evolution/

After seeing the clip after asking “who does not believe in evolution.” I shot off this email to the Ron Paul campaign:

On 5/4/07, Ron Shank wrote:

Dear Ron Paul team:

Does Ron Paul believe in evolution? I didn’t see his hand raised in the debate when asked “who does not believe in evolution.”

Thanks for your quick reply.

Thank you,

Ron Shank

They quickly replied.

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: Didn’t see his hand
Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 16:15:06 -0400
From: Ron Paul 2008 Presidential Campaign Committee
To: Ron Shank

Ron,

Ron Paul did not raise his hand during that question, it was Tancredo, Huckabee & Brownback who raised their hands. Dr. Paul is physician and believes in evolution.

[lame54]

25. It doesn't depend - his handlers lied to you

[robbedvoter]

23. See? I remebered it - he flew under the radar on this one! Like the "conservative" claims

because of the inconsistency of his followers, the most telling shortcomings of this bizarre candidate are being ignored. I knew there were more candidates not raising their hand on that mind-boggling question! Thanks for this.

[windoe]

28. Evolution is as hot

as reproductive rights, religion and gay rights, and too many candidates dance around these issues when they're in the hot seat.
A 21st Century president would really be nice, someone who passed math, science, social studies, world history, geography, English, a foreign language would be a minimum requirement.
Pandering to religious groups just indicates where their campaign contributions are coming from, and who would successfully influence them in office---get out the 10' pole.

[WinkyDink]

29. Evolution. UFO's. Angel Moroni. Who cares? Where do the candidates stand on social issues?

[Blue-Jay]

30. Who cares? Fuck Ron Paul.

His idiot followers are a running joke on the internet. They're too stupid to know that people are laughing at them.

Send him some more money, Randroids, and then bitch about your taxes.