The comment feature of this WordPress template is not the best. I chose this template because it is plain and easy to navigate. I hate overly complex sites with loads of web scripting. National Review and the Daily Caller are horrible to navigate because of the ridiculous scripts they have running, all intended to jam ads in your face. I went for simple and that means the commenting space is limited.

Readers have made some points I’d like to address so I figured a post addressing some of the comments would be worthwhile. Here are a few:

fodderwing writes:

There’s a big dif between having one’s questions answered and having them answered satisfactorily. That Fred is still asking is not necessarily evidence that he has ignored the “libraries full of books,” but may only be telling us that the books give unsatisfactory answers.

Satisfactorily to whom? It seems that millions of people have had no trouble finding the answers Fred says are elusive. John Derbyshire has addressed all of his points hundreds of times. Further, these answers are more than satisfactory to the people interested in evolutionary biology. They are, in many cases, axiomatic.

fodderwing continues:

I have my own unanswered questions about evolution, but the real lazy wusses in my view are the ones who get defensive when I ask. After reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box I thought it best to let him ask the hard questions, I would stick with the easy ones. I have read many answers to his “black box” concept, absolutely none of which seemed sincere or for that matter particularly well thought out. As for my easy questions, those are the ones that really frustrate people as the usual responses can probably best be summued up as “why can’t you just believe, man, like the rest of the smarter set? There is such overwhelming evidence, so many libraries full of books … “

If someone keeps asking you to explain why water is wet and ice is cold, you will begin to think that they are uncommonly stupid, have an agenda, or are passive-aggressively challenging your aptitude. If it is the first case, there’s only so many ways to explain something. Once you have exhausted them all, you give up. The world needs ditch diggers and hod carriers too.

If it is the other two, then you are dealing with a dishonest person. In both cases they are concealing their agenda, which is to sow doubt in your mind about your knowledge of the subject. This form of argumentation is common with the anti-science crowd, which makes it a campaign to spread ignorance. It is why the response from science these days when asked these sorts of questions is this.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it again. I have no quarrel with creationists or intelligent design people. These beliefs are not science, but the world will not spin off its axis of people believe that stuff. We get enough oogily-boogily from the Left and their war on science and reason. Christians would be wise to not follow their lead.

Bones writes:

Whatever else Fred is or isn’t, he isn’t a phoney. He’s always been upfront about his life. Fred comes from a mildly prominent Virginia family, but he was born in the coal mining town of Crumpler, West Virginia and spent a lot of his youth in rural West Virgina and Northern Alabama. He has a high regard for the people in the parts of Appalachia where he grew up. The ‘down home’ writing style he sometimes adopts is simply a literary device, used by people such as Joel Chandler Harris and many others.

Fred has an excellent command of the English language. He is making writing mistakes these days because he was hit in the face with shrapnel in Vietnam and his eyesight has deteriorated. He is now blind in one eye as the result of his latest eye surgery.

You may not like Fred or the stuff he writes. He may or may not know what he’s writing about. But ‘phoney’ is no more than name-calling

It is name-calling and I’m proud of my ability to use nouns. Without name calling, we would still be riding those big things in that place or whatever. I think Fred is a big phony and I have no qualms about saying it. At least you know where I stand.

I could be all wrong on that. Maybe his act is harmless and sincere. We all don a mask in public and maybe that’s just how Allah made him. I don’t know and I can’t know. All I can go on is what I see and my own sense of these things.

james wilson writes:

There are several factors. Jews, especially the ones you are describing, have no great affection for the country (I am increasingly sympathetic to that state of being). That being so they always have an exit strategy and a tradition of using it, so they continue to indulge their opinions–which are life itself to them–without restraint. And if the block is busted, well, they’ll once again be the first to sell. This strategy has worked well for them in recent times except for that miscalculation of 1933-45. But Montaigne wrote that even opinion is of force enough to make itself be espoused at the expense of life. No one contributes more to opinion than Jews, with less regard for the consequences.

A couple of points here. Steve Sailer points out frequently that Jews dominate certain industries and are wildly over represented in the millionaire and billionaire clubs. The thing is, Jews dominate transactional industries like the entertainment business, retail and the law. You don’t see a lot of Jews in construction, agriculture, mining or manufacturing. These are industries that require planning and investment to mitigate events currently over the horizon.

Is that cultural? Maybe. The old line was that Christians did not let Jews own property so they had no choice but to go into banking and commerce. That was always nonsense. Jews in Europe left the farm for the village 2,000 years ago. It is more likely the result of being a distinct minority that has often needed an exit strategy. Loading up the furniture and money is a lot easier than packing up the cattle or the fame land.

The other point is the Jewish relationship with the state. This has often been the justification for persecuting Jews. They were accused of dual loyalties, with loyalty to the tribe overriding all else. If you look at the world today, that seems like a shrewd position. Being an American citizen carries little value. Abroad it is a burden and home it is becoming a liability. We treat illegal alien invaders better than our own poor.

The Jews seem to have it right. Governments and countries come and go. Why sacrifice for a concept that has so little utility? America may have been a special place long ago, but today it is just a slab of land with a bunch of people living in it. It’s every tribe for himself, so to speak, whether we like it or not. Only a fool clings to his patriotism these days.

Deck writes:

The second law of thermodynamics puts the lie to evolution. Evolution is atheistic dogma dressed up as science, nothing more. Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God.” The vituperation coming out of Pisco shows Fred hit a nerve. Read, In The Beginning by Walt Brown.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy. Put another way, the natural process is for the complex to decay into the simple. The final result is complete randomness.

This is a popular misappropriation of physical science to biological science. This line of argument has been addressed many times in many places. Here’s one I found just by entering “second law of thermodynamics” in a search engine. The fact that it remains popular with creationists underscores my point about Fred Reed. There’s no amount of facts and reasoning that will ever satisfy the creationist. Therefore, why would I or anyone else bother trying?