On Jan 12, 2008, at 6:40 PM, B. wrote:
>
> The piece has the embedded video where Paul announces
> he doesn't believe in evolution:
>
> http://suicidegirls.com/news/politics/22859/
I checked the video. Ron Paul definitely did *not* say he didn't believe in evolution. He said that evolution is a *scientific* question about which he lacked qualification, but that he did not accept "the theory of evolution." So what did he mean by "the theory of evolution?" Presumably the standard textbook "NeoDarwinian" explanation of the *fact* of evolution by gradual mechanical/ecological/statistical processes to the explicit exclusion of any factors implying consciousness or teleology. He rejects that theory, he says, because he believes that there was a Creator of the universe (and surely belief in a Big Banger is at least as reasonable a belief as belief in the Big Bang), with the argument implicit that such a Creator would continue to exert a meaningful influence over its Creation. So Ron Paul is--who'd a thunk it-- a theist.
But of course belief in the Christian God is scarcely necessary to reject NeoDarwinism as a general model of evolution. NeoLamarckian approaches are powerful alternative explanations for the rapidity of evolutionary change under radically catastrophic stresses.
I wonder--is the tendency of some here to trash a politician who differs from almost all his peers by his antiwar and pro civil liberty statement and convictions somehow a displaced resistance to a temptation to support one or another of the rest of the bourgeois politicians playing in this primary circus.
Shane Mage
"This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 30