Well, I was having a gay old time browsing the YouTube when all of a sudden I saw this related video after watching a cool video of a 2003 Special Election candidate running to oppose the raise in student fees for the UC/CSU/CC systems of California; this is something that interests me as both a student and a believer in higher education. My reaction was a bit hesitant at first when I noticed the "(RAW FTGE)" in the title of one of the related videos, so I thought I might as well give it a look, as I was promised by the title that it wouldn't be full of Creationist propaganda by the "raw footage" part. But, as you're about to see, it was, implicitly. Pic related.
Here is the video:
So everyone who dislikes Dawkins can finally rejoice! The leader of Atheism is dead! The Wicked Witch of the West is no more! All is suddenly well!
Not so. Like most in this world, there is one more take on this "raw footage" that we haven't even examined yet: Dawkins' explanation. There might be a possibility that this is something more than a "Gotcha soundbite" (as John McCain famously said about Sarah Palin's remarks on "cross-border attacks"). His reply was found on the Australian Skeptics' website.
I'm not going to get into the details of the argument, but I think I might just post Dawkins' side of the story:
they issued a truculent challenge to me to “give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome.” It is the kind of question only a creationist would ask in that way, and it was at this point I tumbled to the fact that I had been duped into granting an interview to creationists — a thing I normally don’t do, for good reasons. In my anger I refused to discuss the question further, and told them to stop the camera. However, I eventually withdrew my peremptory termination of the interview as a whole. This was solely because they pleaded with me that they had come all the way from Australia specifically in order to interview me. Even if this was a considerable exaggeration, it seemed, on reflection, ungenerous to tear up the legal release form and throw them out. I therefore relented.
He then goes on to provide an informative discussion of information in genetics, and how it's something that is more complicated than can be explained in a short interview being shown to people with no presumed knowledge of the subject (much less a Creationist documentary, LOL). Believe him or not, at least he made his point explicitly clear. This quote was taken from the first paragraph of his article. So there you have it. It's not as if there's some kind of mystical hole in Dawkins' theory all of a sudden. This is just more skulduggery by the same ignoramuses who want to keep us in the dark praying to cloud-people to watch over us in our times of need, all the while being totally passive in what goes on around in government. The people who promote this deception on YouTube are the same crowd who would like to see us go back in time while we mistreat those who are not White, Straight, Protestant, American and "anything that I am and you're not".
Which brings me a more abstract conclusion than usual; the Internet is a great tool for doing your own research on things, and not accepting someone else's conclusions, provided you have the requisite tools for separating BS from reliable information. I felt my intuition telling me not to click on the Dawkins video in the first place, because deep down I knew I would have to deal with some sort of dumb argument that would eventually shown to be proven false. The truth eventually comes out if you are willing to do the 2-second Google search or follow enough YouTube links to arrive at someone who has devoted the time to provide the truth. I've gotta give it up to the people in the YouTube trenches doing the debunking we sorely need on the Internet. Because if no one makes responses to these videos, what stops people from blindly believing these idiots? People need to be exposed the truth, and at the same time, people need to be willing to reach out of their comfort zones of their own private philosophies and allow their beliefs to be challenged. I hope that if someone is hesitating to click on a video because it might show them something uncomfortable that might challenge (or even offend!) their views, that he/she should just click on that video and analyze it to see if it's worth investigating further or whether it is just another clichéd, rehashed, manufactured argument put forth by anti-intellectuals and people who deny the theory of evolution. (By the way, it's my belief that in good time people will associate those who denied evolution as ridiculous idiots who believed in something as ludicrous as the idea that gravity doesn't exist).
I was also thinking that the ID-vs-Science debate would be a great drama, if intelligent arguments were personified as villains and the scientists leading the quest for knowledge were some kind of super-justice-squad. I should patent that idea or something, because it sounds like a novel idea. I'd watch that show.
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