Antievolution &Law and Politics &Media Wesley R. Elsberry on 28 Jan 2009 06:44 am
Fuz Rana: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
An old joke can be recycled…
Q. How do you know when a professional antievolution advocate is lying?
A. Their lips are moving.
Sometimes it seems like the derivative above comes close to the truth. Take, for instance, Fuz Rana’s article, “What Darwin Didn’t Know”, appearing in Charisma magazine. Here’s an example of a whopper that Rana passes on with all the confidence that gave us “con man” as a phrase:
Researchers have traditionally maintained that hundreds of millions of years would be necessary for abiogenesis. They also claim that the first life to emerge would be extremely simple, evolving toward complexity.
Darwin embraced the protoplasmic theory-the idea that the cell consisted of only a wall surrounding a nucleus and a homogeneous, jellylike protoplasm. This understanding made early evolutionary explanations of abiogenesis plausible. Biologists and chemists easily envisioned chemical routes that could produce the single ingredient believed to form the cell’s protoplasm.
Fuz Rana joins a plethora of other antievolutionists who push the same lie. Darwin famously propounded an incorrect mechanism of inheritance, pangenesis, that required an enormously complex sub-cellular organization, and Darwin published scientific work showing complex sub-cellular changes induced in living cells when exposed to certain chemicals. The notion that Darwin was a proponent of the idea Rana and other liars assert would be fully worthy of being taken up by the Mythbusters folks, except I don’t see how they’d work a large explosion into such a segment.
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on 28 Jan 2009 at 7:43 am 1.Hank said …
The mythbusters once ran a segment where they powered a lawn mower on methane from cow dung. Sadly, I don’t think the writings of creationists will prove as useful a power source.
on 28 Jan 2009 at 12:01 pm 2.Karen S said …
Funny, he doesn\’t tell us exactly what genetic comparisons were made, or any other details.
on 28 Jan 2009 at 3:56 pm 3.John Pieret said …
except I don’t see how they’d work a large explosion into such a segment
Oh, I can … trust me, I can …
on 19 May 2012 at 2:55 am 4.CALHALL said …
Rana begins, seductively, with seemingly state-of-the-science details of evidence supporting mainstream human evolution. He doesn’t open questions about why a god “created” humans more than once, nor why scriptures don’t present such.
Later, an agenda seems to insinuate itself, clandestinly at first, then, in style reminiscent of bait’n'switch, we are in a conclusory rush to selectively come to the preordained but veiled goals of,not induction,but philosophical deduction.
Why do these delusions seem to haunt chemists, especially biochemists?
All this must be superficially satisfying to an uninitiated fundamentalist-absolutist cult, especially those with political predispositions, but for this writer it’s, despite our extensive education, baffling to sort thru the shotgun blast of asserted facts covering multiple disciplines.
When we Googled F.”Fuz”Rana, we got 9 pages of Wiki-biased links in RTB-leaning/creationism sites before the first contrarian site…this one was about a dozen “nexts” in. WAZZUP?!!