H.P. Lovecraft, Darwinism's Visionary Storyteller

Imagine another horror, people so worried about their religious preconceptions that they have to attack working science at every turn, even wanting to demand that bogus theologically-inspired "weaknesses" of the working theory to be taught in classes where genuine science is the only legitimate curricula requirement.

How would anyone do science if such nonsense were to succeed? True, the proponents of this bogosity would be thrilled, but children would be misled, science brought into disrepute, and the wedge of theocracy would be in place to potentially demand that far more theologically-inspired nonsense become official policy.

That's what freedom lovers fear. I'm sure that science may worry many theists whose concerns remain parochial. I just wonder why this is supposed to stray into the realm of policy.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p

I normally don't bother speaking here, since you're clearly not open to reason on most topics, but this post was just too ridiculous.

"In a universe unguided by the intelligent purpose of a just, loving God, there's no reason to imagine that the intelligent creature or creatures that resulted from the endless churning would be nice, cute, or noble. The probability seems reasonably high -- why not? -- that they would be grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly."

By what standards would you apply those adjectives? Of course, to us Cthulhu, with his tentacles and such, would appear grotesque and abhorrent. However, to such a being, WE would doubtless prove to appear the same.

Obviously there is no particular cosmic standard of beauty between squid and man, snake and bird, dolphin and planaria. Even within traditional theology, beauty remains a subjective concept in the eye of the beholder, at least at the physical level.

As for the non-physical, of course Cthulhu would seem abhorrent to us...he is opposed to our very existence. (Although honestly, he's simply indifferent to it...man matters not to the Great Old Ones, just as ants matter little to man.) Of course, you can rest assured that to animals in factory farms, or deer on the run from hunters, we too seem terrifying and abhorrent. This is nothing more than a matter of perspective.

Perhaps there is room for discussion and debate concerning evolution, intelligent design, et. al. But the idea that the specific physical form of man as a bipedal hominid somehow reflects perfect beauty, and the likeness of God, requires the most facile and thoughtless reading of Scripture imaginable.

Clearly, in whatever sense man is "made in the image of God", it's not in that we LOOK like him physically. God has no physical attributes whatsoever. To suggest otherwise is idolatry. And a being without physical attributes can obvious NOT bear a physical resemblance to one who does. To assume this position presents a level of intellectual grasp that mighty Cthulhu himself would find...well...abhorrent.

Brought to you by the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu. Are you tired of choosing the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu for President in 2012.

I get really, really annoyed whenever I see the name Haeckel, because I teach high school biology, and five of the seven textbooks provided by my school contain copies of Haekel's faked embryonic drawings, all of them published within the last twenty years. All of them written by PhD's. So I've seen the proof with my own eyes of scientist perpetrating a fraud on the public.

High School biology textbooks may have the name of a professor on them, but the editors and the demands of the Texas School Board butcher those books as much as David butchers science. Still, if you would name names, we could put some pressure on the publishers to clean up their acts.

JPL: Great post! I second it!

Lawrence: Isn't there a "unity of form and function in the wholeness of the body" of a squid, a dolphin, or a dinosaur? From a strictly scientific perspective, until and unless we encounter other unquestionably intelligent species, we have no way of knowing whether there is anything essential about humanoid form or not. It would be like trying to deduce what the "typical" automobile is like if the only one you've ever encountered was a '67 VW Beetle. You'd think that of course cars must have their trunks in the front!

Theologically, unless you think God really is a huge, bearded man in the sky (which with the possible exception of Mormons no monothesistic religions do), then He can perfectly well create in His image any kind of being, right? Can't He do whatever He feels like?

By the way, David, once more you're proving my point. Don't bring up philosophical or metaphysical issues if you're not willing to discuss and defend them.

chaldean periphrast: "A petition to David Klinghoffer from posters to this blog: FOLLOW GOV. PALIN’S EXAMPLE"

Add my name to your petition, Aramean Auxiliary.

This blog series advertises as "recovering the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible." This post doesn't even mention that subject. Most of the posts are merely vehicles for the author's personal vendettas and pseudoscience. Even where the Bible---or at least the Kabbalah---is somehow involved, as in "Whose Signature is in the Cell," the content is hijacked to serve another purpose.

But your petition will be feckless. Klinghoffer's vocation is Commentating, and Commentators live to hear their heads roar.

Arguments about evolution and the existence of God are pointless and silly. God is an idea, a concept, a construct that has changed over time (see Karen Armstrong's A History fo God). "God" is best understood as a linguistic element that is used in various social practices and institutions. Theology is the study of the use of this God language. An idea can not be destroyed by science any more than the idea of "checkmate" is threatened by rational inquiry. We can all agree that God exists at least as a human idea. To assert that something out there exists that corresponds to this idea is an unprovable act of faith. Lets' not fight over that and our varieties of God games. What is fundenemtally important is to act with empathy,compassion, and respect--or we will continue to kill each other over linguistic nonsense.

Kavid K. why believe in superstitious nonsense?? Accept evolution, it is a fact!! Without it society would of have the breakthrough science applications that we have. I don't understand that you can believe in this.

First David lies about Hitler, calling him a Darwinist. I can see the point; Hitler was guilty of horrifying crimes and tarring Darwin by association is a tactic worth trying.

But H. P. Lovecraft was a pulp fiction writer who has been dead for over fifty years, and the vast majority of Americans wouldn't even know his name. (I've got four or five Lovecraft collections at home). What is the point of trying to tar HIM to Darwin?

This is the first time I've read one of your posts.

If specious reasoning were an olympic sport, then the gold medal would certainly be yours.

Uh was there a real point to Klinghoffer's ramblings? I mean other than living in a Lovcraftian universe could be dangerous? Just pathetic.

""Yet after reading him, you can't comfortably go back to the naïve Ken Miller way of thinking that Darwinian evolutionary was somehow certain to provide God with children over whom He would approve with the Biblical formulation, "And behold it was very good.""

Correct. So one obvious conclusion would be that there is no such "god".

The Marketing Overlords at the Discovery Institute have spoken,
demanding that David produce yet another blog post "revealing"
a negative aspect of Evolution - no matter how tenuous and silly
that connection may be. I can only assume that David, desperate
to please his masters, looked around his office and chose a volume
by Lovecraft as his inspiration for this bit of fluff, hoping to avoid their wrath and his personal destruction.

I find other blogs instructive; this one is really only good as a drinking
game, and a poor one at that.

Well i got 'monstered' in a Lovecraft film 'The Unnamable Returns', and i can assure you Lovecraft's creatures are smart, purposeful, scary and deliberate, and won't wait for you to give an explanation why they shouldn't monster you. Meet them and beware.
Prurient sidebar - our monster was played under all those prosthetics and latex by Julie Strain, the Penthouse Pet of the Year. And she actually got the part because she was the best at bringing this creature to life - also didn't hurt she was over 6 feet tall and twiggy at that and didn't mind six hours in the makeup chair. So you never know what's underneath all that 'skin'. Kind of a metaphor for this topic.
This argument that science and religion are at odds is ridiculous. t's the same thing, just different languages, as referenced in the mysticism/intelligent design post. Sephir Yetzirah - 22 Hebrew letters = amino acids is not fancy talk, one of my kabbalah partners who is a PhD scientist has had years of DARPA grants regarding this. The Pentagon uses the Torah/Bible Code. It's real.
Science uncovers/discovers what already is.
Evolution is in the Bible, things evolve - the story of Israel evolved.
That said, "Let Us (elohim) make man (Adam) in our image" is not a wishy-washy statement. It is quite precise. 'Let man have dominion over the earth' is not let dolphins or octopi or spiders or snakes have dominion -- and you'd be hard pressed to not take notice of who has dominion over the earth - it's us - maybe people don't want to accept this responsibility as it is a large one for sure. But it is. And doesn't diminish Yah's being in dolphins or octopi - it just states what is - we got gifted a little more than the rest and that is a Big Gift - that we're all related is in all our DNA and we know that too, so we should be more connected and sharp - question is what will we do with it?
And while no doubt things evolved (anyone ever read Job Ch 39 on? - Yah talks about the previous earth age and dinosaurs - great behemoth with the tail the size of a cedar tree - only one fits that, a dinosaur)- there are no half monkeys/half humans like in the Geico insurance ads. They're not there. If things were constantly evolving at that cross/new-species level like Darwin hypothesized then you'd have hybrids all over the place, and we don't. And Darwin believed in God - he was trying to crack the mystery, and he got pretty far.
Genesis 1 says Elohim created the heavens and the earth. Period.
It's a first sentence - it doesn't say how long ago, and it doesn't say when. Genesis then goes into the re-creation of this earth age in the six day re-birth and shabbas rest.
The Bible talks about a previous earth age, a present and a future earth age.
If you add the seven days up and go with 2Peter (apologies kids, i'm a Meshianic Jew, and David and i disagree on that one which is fine) that a day with Yah is 1000 years to man, then add in the Hebrew calendar - you get an interesting number - approximately 12500 years ago - when scientists know a cataclysm happened on earth. Something happened - apparently the poles shifted. Mammoths with buttercups still in their mouth were found in the Alaskan tundra by our modern scientists - what was then a lush landscape became a deep freeze - the mammoths are preserved and this is science fact. So something happened around 12500 years ago, and we know it. The Bible describes it exactly if read properly, and science backs it up.
That something is us right now. We have a responsibility. To stop arguing and start uniting and doing what was Gifted Us to Do - take care of the Earth, the animals and each other.

Lovecraft's contemporary, Robert E. Howard wrote stories that had a lot of Darwinian Racist content. Stuff about white men, aryans, etc. being superior, and how racial conflict, and even outright war has the narural order.

I popped over here from Pharyngula to see what the fuss is about. The phrase 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' springs to mind. Monstrosity is a relative term. This so obvious, why on earth make an issue of pretending it isn't?

Why are you religious people so frightened of science? It only makes you look weak and silly.

Lovecraft's contemporary, Robert E. Howard wrote stories that had a lot of Darwinian Racist content. Stuff about white men, aryans, etc. being superior, and how racial conflict, and even outright war has the narural order.

This is really pathetic. Now we are playing "Six Degrees of H. P. Lovecraft"?

You didn't have to go to Howard. H. P. Lovecraft was quite racist by today's standards, which you'd know if you'd read him. Furthermore, his idea of "white" didn't include Irish, Italians, or Eastern Europeans and he was clearly quite hostile to Catholicism (see "The Dreams in the Witch House").

What's your point? "Darwinism is believed in by bad people"? How many evil people believe in God? (c.f. 9/11)

Want to read something revolting? Try "Malleus Maleficarum", the Inquisition manual for investigating witchcraft. The title translates to "Hammer of Witches", which will give you an idea of the content. Written by God-fearing Christians.

"The line between good and evil runs through every human heart."

freelunch:

I know that Gould expressed outrage at the fact that the drawings were used in textbooks for the last century. In fact, that was the title of the article. What else can that mean? Do you want me to provide you with a list of the textbooks I've seen that have the drawings? And if the publshing company executives are the ones who decide to include the drawings, why do entire teams of PhD's alow their names to be used? The honorable thing would be to say "I won't allow my name to be attached to a fraud."

Freelunch:

Here are some:

Living Environment: Biology
Rick Hallman Amsco 2000

Biology, The Study of Life
William Schraer Herbert J. Stoltze PhD. Prentice Hall 1995

Biologia (Spanish)
Kenneth Miller PhD. Joseph Levie PhD.
Prentice Hall 2004

All these books mention recapitulation theory as support for evolution.

"Here are some:"

Funny that the exact same text can be found at

http://jewishphilosopher.blogspot.com/2008/01/few-observations-about-evolution_02.html

so you've never looked at these books and have no idea what they actually say. You're just another liar for Christ or Jehovah or whatever mythical being you bow down to.

I'm the NatSchuster who posted that on That Blog. You can check the books if you don't believe me. I provided the names, authors and publishers of the books, so you can check if you don't believe me. And the point is that Haekel faked the drawings, he confessed, yet the same faked drawings were used in textbooks. Again, Gould expressed outrage at the fraud. (I got the year wrong, sorry. And mammalian blastula are different than other vertebrate blastula, so they are called blastocists. And at the gastrula stage, all the vertebrate embryos are very different. The cells go through different developmental pathways. So the differences are at least as great as the similarities. But I digress. I have a confession of fraud by an evolutionist, I see the evidence wiht my own eyes. What more proof do I need?

Now, why would the reproductive apparatus mean that the early stages of development are different? They all start as a single cell? I'm just curous.

I linked the Gould article. I just read it again. What am i missing? It says that haeckel faked the drawings, and used they were used in textbooks ever since.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_2_109/ai_60026710/?tag=content;col1

This is a photocopy from the Schraer Scholze book:

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1254

Yes, its from the discovery institute, but you could find the book and check for yourself. I saw that very page, you'll just have to trust me.

This one is from the Miller/Levine book:

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1259

---- Your Name said
July 12, 2009 11:20 PM

This one is from the Miller/Levine book:

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1259 ----

Show me where it says that those embryo drawings come from Haeckel???

jdg

The drawings are almost identical the Haeckels. The main difference is that these are in color, and Haeckels were in black and white. And they are inaccurate in the same way Haeckel's were.

Your name, please figure out how to put some kind of screen handle in your posts so that we know which anonymous commenter we are talking to.

Firstly, I am not in charge of biology textbooks. I know in physics textbooks bad information gets cribbed from textbook to textbook (for example, you cannot light a flashlight with lemon juice).

Secondly, biologists no longer believe that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Thirdly, thousands of NEW images of embryos exist that are not drawings--they were produced by biologists, not by anyone at Discovery Institute. It is these new images that show the Haeckel drawings to be wrong.

Fourthly, Haeckel's drawings have historic value, just as Schiaparelli's drawing of the canals on Mars can be found in any astronomy textbook. Haeckel's drawings should not be used to argue for an abandoned theory when much more recent information is readily available. If there are biology texts that are doing that, they are doing something wrong, just as an astronomy textbook shouldn't argue for canals on Mars using the Schiaparelli drawings. The textbooks should carry a disclaimer about the drawings.

Fortunately, the evidence for evolution is not based solely on Hackel's drawings. Good catch. Now go out and do some REAL science and maybe scientists will listen to you.

More from Gould:

The evolutionary version of von Baer's law suggests that embryos may give us better clues about ancestry than adults--but not because they represent ancestral adults in miniature, as Haeckel and the recapitulationists believed. Rather, embryos indicate ancestry because generalized features of large groups offer better clues than the specialized traits of more restricted lineages can provide. In a standard example, some parasites become so anatomically degenerate as adults that they retain no distinctive traits of their larger affiliation. The adult stage of the parasitic barnacle Sacculina, for example, becomes little more than an amorphous bag of feeding and reproductive tissue within the body of its crab host. But the larval stages that must seek and penetrate a crab can hardly be distinguished from the early stages of ordinary barnacles. Darwin makes the key point succinctly when he states in Origin of Species that "community in embryonic structure reveals community of descent."

Von Baer's law makes good sense, but nothing in Darwinian theory implies or requires its validity, while evolution itself clearly permits embryology to proceed in either direction (or in no linearized manner at all): from embryonic similarity to adult discordance (as in groups that follow von Baer's principle) or from larval discordance to adult likeness (as in several invertebrate groups, notably some closely related sea urchin species, where larvae have adapted to highly different lifestyles of planktonic floating versus development from yolk-filled eggs that remain on the seafloor. Meanwhile, the highly similar adults of both species continue to live and function like ordinary sea urchins).

advice to Your name:

Read and comprehend before you cite, you are less likely to be embarrassed.

Just one more point.

#1. I thought I said above that Haeckel's fraud was caught by his contemporaries,and he confessed during his lifetime. This only makes the problem worse because it means that they knowingly used faked drawings in textbooks for a century. What I meant was that the ID people were going public with the fact that the fraudulent pictures were being used, and this is what prompted Gould to write the article.

#2. Some of the textbooks do say that biologists still believe in recapitulation theory. But that is irrelvent. Even if it was true, fraudulent measn where used to demonstrate it.

reply to several people.

Your Name
July 10, 2009 7:55 PM

I get really, really annoyed whenever I see the name Haeckel, because I teach high school biology, and five of the seven textbooks provided by my school contain copies of Haekel's faked embryonic drawings, all of them published within the last twenty years. All of them written by PhD's. So I've seen the proof with my own eyes of scientist perpetrating a fraud on the public.

freelunch
July 10, 2009 10:10 PM

High School biology textbooks may have the name of a professor on them, but the editors and the demands of the Texas School Board butcher those books as much as David butchers science. Still, if you would name names, we could put some pressure on the publishers to clean up their acts.

Your Name, freelunch&
Olorin
July 10, 2009 11:36 PM

HGere's a little test: With your knowledge of biology, identify how many and which ones of Haeckel's drawings in the textbooks were faked. Remember that all of his drawings are so close to being correct that the fakery was not detected right away, and then only because of extrinsic facts about the drawings, not from comparisons with actual embryos.

In actual fact there isn't one that actually looks like Haeckels drawings, I have them here, (can we post pictures?) all researched recently at the same age as Haeckel claimed in his frauds, the salamander in real life looks more like a snail at that stage. Haeckel lied in all six drawings. He was taken to court at the time, so it has always been known that the drawings are lies. Evolutionists like them because it makes it seem to support evolution, and helps in counselling people to have an abortion.

Charles Cosimano
July 11, 2009 3:32 AM

Of course, as Darwin was right, all the rest is purely academic.
No Darwin was an idiot.

chaldean periphrast: "A petition to David Klinghoffer from posters to this blog: FOLLOW GOV. PALIN’S EXAMPLE"

What would you do with your spare time if he didn't supply you something to criticise?
Be grateful.

Dennis
July 11, 2009 2:06 PM

Arguments about evolution and the existence of God are pointless and silly. God is an idea, a concept, a construct that has changed over time

God is a real person, read the New testament and meet with Him. Also evolution is a defunct outmoded belief, it cannot compete with the science in ID.

jdg
July 11, 2009 6:35 PM

Kavid K. why believe in superstitious nonsense?? Accept evolution, it is a fact!! Without it society would of have the breakthrough science applications that we have. I don't understand that you can believe in this.

A bit garbled! Evolution never helps with scientific progress. Chemistry electronics engineering etc rely on scientific research, never on assumptions of life evolving, and it doesn't even help in medicine, which depends on what is here and now, not old wives tales.

Gabriel Hanna
July 11, 2009 7:09 PM

First David lies about Hitler, calling him a Darwinist. I can see the point; Hitler was guilty of horrifying crimes and tarring Darwin by association is a tactic worth trying.

There is plenty of evidence that he accepted Darwin and tried to follow the theory to produce a "pure race".

kernestm:

You are full of it. I produced actual quotes from Hitler, you produced nothing. Hitler believed in a Creator God and rejected evolution. He said so on numerous occasions, and I provided the quotes. You provided jack squat.

Second, if you had read the Gould article, you would have learned that the Haeckel drawings were discovered as frauds by scientists over ten years before creationists (there was no "ID" in those days) ever heard of it; and that the people who were writing the textbooks were unaware of the faked drawings--WHICH YOU COULDN'T IDENTIFY FROM YOUR OWN KNOWLEDGE IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT.

All you ever do is cut and paste some creationist B.S. You don't know one thing about biology or physics, which you proved when you tried to debate it.

Only people who deliberately decide to be ignorant, refuse to study the complexity being revealed by the ID research, and then seriously consider the implications.

Darwin knew that he didn't have the evidence for the intermediates, particularly considering the numerous small steps he was advocating. He was staggered by the human eye, and couldn't imagine how it could form by numerous small steps.

He imagined some small primordial pool with chemicals, with heat and lightning etcetera, forming some self replicating chemistry, that eventually formed the first living cell.
The scientists of the time opposed him as chemistry research was far enough advanced to know that this could not happen.

"But as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" Charles Darwin
"No one has found any such in-between creatures and there is a growing conviction among many scientists that these transitional forms never existed." Niles Eldredge

The only reason evolution became popular was because humanists and atheists saw it as an excuse to ignore God, and His morals, and they promoted it for their own unscientific reasons.

Millions of people have fallen for the fable and researchers have wasted millions of hours and billions of dollars trying to prove that the lies of evolution are instead true.

Now the ID movement is providing clear proof of intelligent design, as opposed to random unguided mutations, and anyone who refuses to read up on the evidence of complexity remains wilfully ignorant.

I see that many of you have fallen for the lies of evolution even though science is showing it is impossible for life to form itself from chemicals and produce elegant improvements by blind chance, and you are promoting it as if evolution is true, in spite of the evidence.

Niles Eldredge:

But Archaeopteryx is simply the common showpiece example that intermediates between major groups of organisms do show up in the fossil record. All working systematists and paleontologists know of other, less celebrated, examples from their own work.

Eldredge, Niles. The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism New York: Washington Square Press, 1982. p.123

So, as usual, the creationist has taken a scientist's word out of context, and not been the slightest bit curious about the truth of what the scientist actually says (merely copying and pasting from some dreadfully dumb creationist source), nor about what the evidence actually indicates.

The usual reaction, of course, is for the creationist to go back to the same highly dishonest sources, and come back with some other mangling of thought, logic, and sources. Wouldn't it be something if we were surprised just once?

Well, don't hold your breath, you're likely to die waiting.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p