That’s the promo video for the ICR’s Your Origins Matter conference, which should actually have wrapped up a few hours ago. Is it just me, or is that exactly how creationists operate? It’s like it was satire, but no, it’s their official promo video. Amazing…
(I suppose they think they’re satirising their opponents. It’s not very good at that, is it?)
Eye on the ICR 
Oh
My
God.
This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.
Your origins is important. Evolution is important.
For it is necessary. Over the past 150 years evolutionary theory has been used to identify new drugs, improve the efficacy of existing drugs, track the spread of disease and employ efficient countermeasures, increase the productivity of farms and fisheries, develop organisms that create helpful products and decompose hazardous materials, identify new causes of disease as well as save endangered animals from extinction.
And those are just a handful of known practical benefits, evolution still has a lot of potential for more; evolutionary psychology might help uncover why we act the way we do, for example. On top of these practical outcomes there’s the quenching of curiosity. Evolution helps uncover where we came from, a question worthy of answering my opinion.
Imagine all that would be lost if anti-evolutionists had there way and the theory was abandoned. In fact, we don’t have to imagine it actually happened once. In Soviet Russia Lysenko, the chief biologist, essentially outlawed Darwin’s theory since he didn’t like the concept of inheritance. It ran counter to his communist manifesto and so he advocated a form of neo-Lamarkism instead. Some professors who refused to renounce evolution were killed.
Whilst Lysenko was in charge Russian biology made next to no progress with much of its effort being spent fabricating results that showed Darwin’s theory false. Contrast that to what was going in the West at the time, which hadn’t abandoned evolution. Whilst Lysenko was starving evolutionary biologists to death Norman Borlaug was using evolutionary theory to create crops that have saved over a billion people from starvation.
Evolution is important and the more we can help people realise that the more as a society we will be willing to invest in it. And if one billion lives can be saved when only ~half the planet accepts evolution, imagine what can be achieved with more
You should have gone then – after all, they did say that they were tackling the confusion!
They’re on drugs. For ages I’ve been wondering whether they’re ignorant and or stupid (and if either situation is wilful), but I’ve just been overlooking the obvious: These guys must have access to a limitless supply of high quality hallicinogens.
That, or they really are Chimps. But I’ve met some fairly sane Chimps…