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Strawman extraordinaire
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No, not the made up fellow dancing down the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz. An even older and completely type of strawman. The kind that someone creates as a rhetorical device to help misinform. Rather than try to explain, let's just look at one that PZ linked last year so that I don't have to:
Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs").
That strawman was brought to you by a guy named Ray Comfort. Of course, Darwin proposed no such thing. As far as I know, no evolutionary biologist has ever seriously proposed that kind of nonsense. Anyone that did would be drowned out by peals of hysterical laughter marking the end of their career.
Mr.Comfort claims that Darwin made that claim so that Comfort can then knock Darwin down. Since Darwin is inseparable from evolution in the mind of most creationists, knocking down a false claim attributed to Darwin means knocking down evolution. I.e., tearing down a strawman and pretending you are fighting a real person or powerful idea.
It's easy to laugh at guys like this. But it's not all fun and games: Comfort now claims he has printed 170,000 copies of a book he wrote mocking Darwin specifically and evolution in general. Using, we can only assume, tactics like the strawman above. He plans to hand many or most of those copies out to students for free. No way to confirm that number or plan, but if it's anywhere close that's astounding and worrisome. It means that Comfort is either being funded to the tune of several hundred thousand wasted dollars, or he's able to parlay the whole deal into profit, somehow. One we can confidently infer rests on the shoulders of trusting and in some cases gullible masses.
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