Today being the 29th of February, it’s appropriate to emphasize that the necessity of calendar corrections such as leap year is unambiguous evidence that the solar system was not intelligently designed. It’s also appropriate that on this day, the Discoveroids are leading off with a post by Michael Denton, a Discovery Institute “senior fellow.”
Denton is famed in creationist circles for his 1985 classic, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. He just released an update, published by the prestigious Discovery Institute Press, about which we wrote Discovery Institute Touts Denton’s New Book.
We now present to you, dear reader, some excerpts from The Types: Why Shared Characteristics Are Bad News for Darwinism, which Denton wrote for the Discoveroids’ creationist blog. The bold font was added by us:
One of the major achievements of pre-Darwinian biology was the discovery that the living world is organized into a hierarchy of ever more inclusive classes or Types, each clearly defined by a unique homolog or suite of homologs possessed by all the members of the Type and which in many cases have remained invariant in divergent phylogenetic lines for tens or hundreds of millions of years.
Alarm bells are already ringing, because Denton is using an unfamiliar term — “Types.” The field of biology has long-accepted words for classifying organisms, based on the pioneering work of Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). Why do we need a new expression like “Types”? Let’s find out. Denton says:
Virtually all pre-Darwinian biologists, and many after Darwin, saw the Types as immanent and invariant parts of the world-order, no less than crystals or atoms. There is currently a widespread impression that pre-Darwinian biologists derived their discontinuous-typological conception of nature from all sorts of discredited metaphysical beliefs.
Denton, of course, thinks the pre-Darwinians were right all along. Let’s read on:
[W]hatever their metaphysical leaning, pre-Darwinian biologists did not derive their view of the Types as changeless components of the world order from any a priori metaphysics but from solid empirical observations.
Right — they made observations. So did Darwin. But before Darwin, there was no theoretical basis for understanding what was being observed. Denton continues:
Today, 150 years after Darwin, … [t]he vast majority of all organisms can be assigned to unique classes based on their possession of particular defining homologs or novelties that are not led up to via Darwin’s “innumerable transitional forms.”
This sounds like Baraminology, which, according to Wikipedia:
is a creationist system that classifies animals into groups called “created kinds” or “baramin” according to the account of creation in the book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. It claims that kinds cannot interbreed, and have no evolutionary relationship to one another
To be precise, it’s Dscoveroid-style Baraminology — the same creationist concept, but without reference to Genesis. Skipping some of Denton’s mumbo-jumbo, we’re told:
Ironically, it is only because organisms can be classified into distinct groups on the basis of their possession of invariant [hee hee!] unique homologs that descent with modification can be inferred in the first place. If it was not for the invariance of the homologs and the Types they define, the common descent of all the members of a particular clade from a common ancestor would be in serious doubt. The living realm would conform to a chaotic network rather than an orderly branching tree.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! The appearance of a branching tree disproves descent with modification! We hesitate to disagree with a distinguished Discoveroid like Denton, but it seems to your Curmudgeon that if truly invariant Types existed, with no biological relationship between them, then — aside from wondrous creations like us, we should see some groups of organisms like helium balloons, and others like crystals, and still others comprised only of energy. But that’s not what we see.
Ah well, skipping another ark-load, here’s the end of Denton’s article:
Types are still as distinct today as they were … in the pre-Darwinian era and even for Darwin himself. They are still clearly defined by homologs or synapomorphies that are true evolutionary novelties without antecedent in earlier putative ancestral forms.
So there you are, dear reader. This is hard-core creationism. Are you surprised?
Copyright © 2016. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Surprised? No. They quit trying to pretend they were addressing evidence years ago. It’s all just rhetorical salve for the base at this point.
Wow, 600 words just to say “I ain’t kin to no monkey.”
This is like that one guy who said that wolves and Tasmanian wolves were the same thing because they had “wolf” in their name. Forget about placenta vs. pouch, and teeth counts, and bone structure. They are the same “type” because they are both wolves.
Then there’s Meyer who thinks that a mole and a mole cricket could be classified together because they have front limbs for digging. Forget that one is an mammal and one is an insect, they are the same thing. http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2014/05/12/darwins-doubt-chapter-11-part-5/
Ken nails it: “It’s all just rhetorical salve for the base at this point.”
The Discoveroids have abandoned any pretense of using evidence and logic to sway people to their creationist ideas. Now it’s all about shoring up the base to keep the money flowing in. That’s what you do when you have nothing but an old book full of Iron and Bronze Age mythology upon which to base your cult.
Thirty years and Denton hasn’t been able to identify even one single baramin ….
This sounds like Meyer’s “Darwin’s Doubt” and his “top-down” explanation of diversity. It still requires enormous amounts of evolution – speciation, adaptation, and so forth. Not to mention, Linnaeus put humans in the Quadrupedia, the Anthropomorpha with the Simia (Monkeys and Apes) and Bradypus (Sloths). So much for the ancients buying into human exceptionalism.
“Cdesign Proponentsists”
is now:
“BaTypesmins.”
The Tooters don’t have a base. Old Hambo has a base. A base donates millions and millions and follows you slavishly. Nobody follows the Tooters. They have to go out to seek attention constantly. Google Analytics shows that the Tooters have no impact – anywhere.
Now that Dembski and the Gerb have bailed (great name for an action movie, btw), the Tooters are falling back on a sort of homeless, street person kind (haha) of creationism. Not quite Biblical but not quite not. Sort of a dirty, rumpled, unwashed smelly kind of creationism that you might find on the floor of a dark closet in an abandoned fraternity house.
Finally, the fact that they’ve dredged up old Denton, who should have retired a century ago, as their lead singer in the choir is testimony to their desperation to be heard. Don’t worry, folks, I’ve got a bushel basket more of mixed metaphors!
You’re barking up the wrong, um, tree here. Denton is one of the few IDiots who believes in universal common descent. These “types” are not said to exist because of fiat creation, at least not of the organisms or taxa themselves. As far as I can tell, Denton thinks that “types” arise by sudden macromutation because those particular macromutations are written into the laws of nature.
That is, to a baraminologist, discontinuities are the result of separate creation. To Denton, they’re the result of instant evolution.
Then why is the DI hawking his book?
docbill1351 offers a genuinely inspired notion:
Yes! I so want to steal that! But is the world ready for Dembski and Gerb, the hard-hitting TV series about two buddy-buddy cdesign proponentsists who charge around LA in their red and white Gran Torino battling the underground Darwinist thought-crime syndicate–aided, of course, by their street-wise token ethnic character, the loveable Flingy Poo?
Dimski and the Gerb thought it was a Gran Torino. But they also think ID is science.
@michaelfugate:
Then why is the DI hawking his book?
Big Tent, same as for Behe.
They can also be hired as cdesign proponentsists soldiers of misfortune.
Honestly, this sounds like a “world view” argument from Ken Ham. It’s a big tent indeed.
An orthodox Jewish pimp who sports an oversized Borsalino, drives a sensible Volvo and caters to Southern Baptists.
“As far as I can tell, Denton thinks that “types” arise by sudden macromutation because those particular macromutations are written into the laws of nature.”
The “types” we see today are not only the result of evolution (which results in diversity) but also of extinction (which results in the apparent gaps). As long as a group has a sufficient diversity of extant members, nobody tries to divide it into “types” as the “intermediates” still all exist.
Case in point: the family Bovidae. If all we had left today was a bison and a dik-dik the creationists would surely call them “different types”. But given the huge range of extant bovids, nobody seems to notice how different the tail ends of the distribution are.
“Types” are just “kinds” under another name. Garbage remains garbage no matter what you call it.
But I’m surprised young-earth creationists’ heads aren’t exploding over the following:
I predict that sooner or later there’ll be a civil war among creationists between the young-earthers and the old-earthers, who have so far remained relatively cordial toward each other against the common foe, satanic Darwinism. Fanatics always go nuclear on other fanatics with different crazy ideas.