David Klinghoffer noted recently that an anthropologist, Richard Leakey, and some lawyer named Jonathan H. Adler seem to be using different meanings of the word "evolution" [For Richard Leakey and So Many Other Darwin Advocates, Evolution Is a Word that Can Mean Anything]. It doesn't seem to matter to Klinghoffer that one of those men is a scientist and the other isn't.Picking up on the point that evolution is a word that can mean anything, Joshua Youngkin1 adds his 2 cents [On the Useful Instability of the Word "Evolution"].
David's concern, I think, is that Darwinists use the term "evolution" in various and even conflicting ways in order to occasionally serve less-than-noble purposes. It's almost as if Darwinist usage of the term "evolution" is sometimes meant to keep skeptics and even the public guessing, as if to avoid a fair fight on the evidence about a stable, commonly understood set of propositions. Why would anyone want to do that?The meanings of the word "evolution" can be found in evolutionary biology textbooks and at many places on the web. You can read two of my contributions at What Is Evolution? and Evolution Is a Fact and a Theory. It seems to me that many evolutionary biologists are making a very serious effort to define their terms.
Some of the IDiots actually get it as I pointed out a few weeks ago [All IDiots Believe in Evolution!]. That was in response to a posting by johnnyb who said ....
So what is one to do? Well, thankfully, our friends the evolutionists have given us a way out. In their zeal to claim consensus on the “fact of evolution,” they have had to steamroll together such a large diversity of opinion into the single term “evolution”, that the word “evolution” no longer has the grand meaning it used to. The only real meaning everyone can agree on is “change in allele frequency over time” – and that is a definition that literally everyone can agree with.Apparently his fellow IDiots didn't get the memo.
It doesn't take a lot of effort to recognize what evolutionary biologists mean when they use the word "evolution." You have to be really stupid to imagine that they are deliberately using different meanings in in different contexts for the sole purpose of confusing the IDiots. As you can see, the IDiots are quite capable of confusing themselves without our help.
Speaking of deliberate obfuscation ... I wonder why they continue to refer to "Darwinists" when they've been told hundreds of times that this is not a synonym for "evolutionary biologists"? Is that for a "less-than-noble purpose" or is it just because the IDiots are stupid? I think we know the answer to that one.
I have some sympathy for bloggers who are ignorant but I don't like liars. However, the people I really hate are the hypocrites.
1. Joshua Youngkin is a lawyer who works for the Discovery Institute. He's probably an expert on the meaning of the word evolution.
