THE VINE SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
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Yesterday I noted that only one Republican running for a Senate seat this year believed in climate change. That was Delaware's Mike Castle, who got ousted in his state's primary last night by Christine O'Donnell. And what's O'Donnell's deal? Well, she doesn't believe in the greenhouse effect. But she also doesn't believe in evolution. New York's Dan Amira dug up an old discussion (I hesitate to use the term "debate") O'Donnell had with a University of Tennessee evolutionary biologist:
CHRISTINE O'DONNELL, Concerned Women for America: Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned, evolution is a theory and it's exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put — that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory. But creation —
This is a good time to be crassly commercial and plug TNR contributor Jerry Coyne's excellent book Why Evolution Is True, which explains quite clearly that evolution does "consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests." That's why it's widely accepted as fact by scientists. Anyway, here's where O'Donnell gets nutty:
CHRISTINE O'DONNELL: Now, he said that it's based on fact. I just want to point out a couple things. First of all, they use carbon dating, as an example, to prove that something was millions of years old. Well, we have the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens and the carbon dating test that they used then would have to then prove that these were hundreds of millions of years younger, when what happened was they had the exact same results on the fossils and canyons that they did the tests on that were supposedly 100 millions of years old. And it's the kind of inconsistent tests like this that they're basing their 'facts' on.
And:
CHRISTINE O'DONNELL: Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.
Remember, kids, fossils were placed there by Satan to test us.
12 comments
"Does Christine O'Donnell Think Dinosaur Bones Are Fake?" You mean, "Does Christine O'Donnell Think?" don't you? I don't see much evidence in her favor.
- IowaBeauty
September 15, 2010 at 4:05pm
In the 60s (before my time) didn't the term "Tea Party" have other connotations?
- NR027810
September 15, 2010 at 4:34pm
When I was at a certain university a decade or so ago, pursuing my PhD, we had a unionization campaign (ultimately successful) throughout the system. The UAW (which has a lot of white-collar locals, incidentally) was fighting a long battle to organize TAs and RAs as we were clearly doing regular work for the school but we were being generously given a "stipend" as opposed to paid a salary, and the NRLB had officially validated our position. The "Tea Party" was the name we gave to those grad students who did not want to get involved, but who refused less in the name of principle than because they (mostly female) wanted at all costs to maintain a friendly, intimate atmosphere in the department and prized their vertical relationships with professors much more than any solidarity they might feel with fellow grad students. "Tea Party" suggested a sort of namby-pamby "are you one of us?" decorum, all pastel colors and Earl Grey. I prefer English Breakfast, myself.
- ironyroad
September 15, 2010 at 6:31pm
The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board, I believe), sorry.
- ironyroad
September 15, 2010 at 8:07pm
I don't know why I'm even bothering to point this out, but anyone with any familiarity with the radioisotope dating (as in, has spent 3-5 minutes reading about it) knows that carbon 14 dating only works over a scale of a few thousand years...
- Curran1
September 16, 2010 at 11:42am
Thanks, Curran - good you pointed that out. You can push a carbon-14 date out to about 50,000 years maximally (10 14C half-lives, more or less), but anything over 30K years is very tricky. The rest of that is just totally incoherent. Mt. Saint Helens would probably involve potassium-argon dating of the ash, not C14 (except maybe on the living things killed in the blast). Both would come back with generic 'modern' dates.
- SMacEachern2
September 16, 2010 at 4:04pm
No, fossils were actually placed by *God* to test us. Sadly, I once had a colleague who actually believed that.
- cspencef
September 16, 2010 at 9:34pm
Fossils were placed by *God* to make oil so we could drill baby drill.
- lisap1999
September 17, 2010 at 8:16am
God placed crackpots like this in our face to test us.
- WandreyCer
September 17, 2010 at 1:05pm
I'm pretty sure that lisap1999 has nailed it, here. Ugh, O'Donnell's ramblings sound like a bad student essay.
- frippo
September 17, 2010 at 3:42pm
But shes so cute! Don't that count for something?
- Haole45
September 18, 2010 at 7:29pm
Haole, you can think she's cute but you better not go any farther than that where Christine O'Donnell is concerned. Christine herself told us all so, back when she was young and full of faith.
- wildboy
September 20, 2010 at 11:23am