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You can edit any page, including this one, just by clicking the red "Edit" at top left. Go ahead, try it.

POSTING CONVENTION(S): Dave Anderson asked in email, after posting what's below, "Is there any particular protocol for additions to the wiki? I added a post yesterday, below what was there. Now I'm wondering if I should have put it above, so the most recent item is at the top." Good question, Dave. I hadn't really thought this through. You did the right thing *this* time, as I want certain meta-wiki issues, like this post itself, or the Password Change Request post, to be at the top. It's not a blog, in fact, it's probably more like a forum, where posts follow on to each other. For that reason I just removed the START HERE entry, and suggest to posters that you enter your post at the end.

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OK, kids, I just got THIS in my email:

Subject: Password Change Request for rootcellar.pbwiki.com

Hi! Someone (hopefully you) requested to change the password on your
pbwiki. If this wasn't you, don't worry, we haven't done anything.
If this *was* you, then click the link below to change your password.

(cut)

No, it wasn't me. If it was You, whoever you are, trust that I won't be authorizing a password change I didn't initiate. I just hope it wasn't some kind of "bot" because - just in case - I don't want to spam-block the Subject.

Pithecophobia - the morbid fear of apes, especially as cousins

http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/smalldocs/pithecophobe-talk.html

Anyone who thinks the current flap over Creationism and Evolution is all about facts or theories is missing the point. It has a lot to do with culture, and increasingly, it's about power. For your consideration, I submit this essay from John Lynch, a professor of biology at Arizona State University with a particular interest in the history of science vis a vis antagonistic religion.

"This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornography, pollution, poisoning, and the proliferation of crimes of all types." I would have expected this kind of statement to come from the later 1800s; but actually, it came from a Georgia judge in fairly recent times. In the minds of some, Darwin is the lynchpin in the whole Liberal conspiracy. And if I had known monkeys were so subversive, I would have had one as a pet back in the '60s.

Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creation Research, stated in 1985 that "...by 1995 we plan to have captured and therefore to run the Republican Party." He might have been a few years off, but not by many. At times I feel like William Shatner in that old Twilight Zone episode, looking out the window of the plane and seeing mutant Republicans tearing up the engines.

Lynch's essay is interesting not only for his comments on the culture of Creationism, but for his exploration of a certain confluence between Darwin and Karl Marx - in fact, some say that Marx got his ideas from Darwin. It personally annoys me when people equate natural selection with "survival advantage," which does sound a lot like Marx's dialectic materialism - the ongoing struggle of the haves and have-nots, which often doesn't have much real explanatory power.

Apologies for the awful formatting of this page - Lynch apparently had trouble getting Word to produce decent HTML. You might want to CTRL-A, copy and paste it into a word processor, which will correct the formatting.

(Posted by Dave Anderson, 8/21/2005)

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