Friday 16 July 2010

New research: Darwinian ”island thinking” is an illusion



Did Darwin encourage his followers to think magically? Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Evolutionists will give us the impression that they are all for science and against magical thinking. However, new research published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography throws a dark cloud over this kind of thinking.

Shai Meiri, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University, and colleagues refuted one of the central assumptions of Darwinian evolution or the hypothesis that isolated islands are special laboratories for evolution. The name Galapagos speaks volumes of this kind of thinking.

Dr. Meiri’s research team compared the (assumed) evolution of animals on continents and on islands statistically and found out that contrary to what evolutionary thinking had assumed for a long time, islands do not cause small mammals to grow bigger and big mammals to become smaller.

Darwinists (and the popular media) have made much of a few exceptions so that many have begun to believe that there is something magical about islands that changes both animals and people like the Hobbits.

According to a report in ScienceDaily,

The reason for science and mankind's fascination with island communities could boil down to ’better press,’ says Dr. Meiri. If observers investigate human beings on 3,000 different South Pacific islands and all but one of the islands are populated by ordinary-sized people, they will tend to concentrate on the unique case. They forget about the other 2,999 islands in the South Pacific with normal-sized humans, and focus on the unusual.”

This, Dr. Meiri suggests, is ”purely a psychological bias… It's just magical thinking. Nothing more."


Source:

'Magical Thinking' About Islands an Illusion? Biologist Refutes Conventional Thinking on Evolution. ScienceDaily ScienceDaily 8 July 2010.