Following a brief discussion with another member, I looked up the papers of randman's idol Professor Emeritus John A. Davison. He's always a bundle of laughs in the way that he believed that when a critic of Darwin expresses an opinion on something, this is incontestable proof that this something is true, whereas when a non-critic of Darwin expressed an opinion on the same thing, he is blinded by ideology. Also: he believes that English names for morphological structures is a clue to homology and that maybe we should consider that God did it.
Anyway, looking through his
New Essays, I came upon this wonderful insight into how Davison works:
Davison approaches this claim in his normal manner, by claiming that there are many different kinds of oil that are produced by metabolism in living organisms:
He adds some assertions which fit into his god-based worldview, but does not lower himself to actually back this up with any references:
He refers to unnamed and named purported experts in the field (1):
He then mentions, but does not refer to, some experiments:
Naturally, no analysis or even brief mention of how this experiment was carried out is mentioned, nor any detail whatsoever on where this experiment was published. He offers a challenge:
Without waiting for the response to his challenge, he declares victory:
He wouldn't be Davison if he didn't conclude with tying this to that hated Darwinism somehow:
And ends by quoting a famous scientist, because citations of opinions are more important than references to data:
Naturally without any reference to where this quote is from, but then again, no such reference is needed, for the very fact that Galileo is claimed to have said that -- and he may very well have done so -- is in itself evidence that Davison's analysis is correct, even if the quote as such is entirely irrelevant to the original claim.
It is important to keep in mind that the god-based front-loading ideas of Davison are all structured in the same way -- assertion, appeal to opinions of or quotes from old scientists taken out of context, declaration of victory -- and
this is the explanation for the diversity of nature that randman prefers, because there is, according to him, just no evidence for evolutionary theory (= "mainstream evo practices").
Again, I can really recommend reading Davison. He's hilarious.
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(1) Remarkably for a creat-- critic of mainstream evo practices, he is fully in support of a champion for something called "abiogenesis".
