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No faith in AM 600 KOGO after Cliff Albert’s: Darwin’s Random Birthday Selection
beingzoe about 1 year ago | 2 responses    

I live in San Diego and am also a talk radio enthusiast. I listen to it all just to hear what everybody is thinking regardless of their viewpoint. My own worldview tends to be drawn from so many sources it is often difficult to find media that I completely agree with. Often I find myself listening to hotheads and megalomaniacs spewing radical statements from their own world view, that I tend to suspect is mostly entertainment value anyway.

But I take it all in stride and attempt to be informed to more than one viewpoint on any given subject. Which is why I found it so shocking that I would be at first baffled and ultimately incensed by a “fluff promo piece” on a local San Diego AM Talk station, AM 600 KOGO .

The piece was from Cliff Albert who does ‘Cliff Notes on the News’, his version of Paul Harvey’s ‘So Now You Know the REST of the story’. It was entitled, Darwin’s Random Birthday Selection and you can read and hear it the KOGO website. I have taken the liberty of including it here (assuming that the station will appreciate the free publicity):

Did you know that Charles Darwin would have been 200 years old this week? In fact, the man who invented evolution was born the same day as Abraham Lincoln, February 12th, 1809.
So while one of them born that day grew up to be maybe the best U.S. president we’ve ever had, the other grew up studying beetles, eating wild animals and writing books claiming we all came from monkeys.
But both men born that same day 200 years ago certainly had an impact. Lincoln was responsible for ending a war between north and south. Darwin was responsible for starting a war over where we came from.
Lincoln worked to abolish slavery. Darwin worked to abolish creation.
Abe Lincoln believed in God and depended on him for guidance. Charles Darwin rejected God and left his life to chance.
So this week, we mark the birthdays of both men. Lincoln’s birthday has evolved over the years into President’s Day. Darwin’s birthday over the years has been a victim of random selection…and is hardly noticed. Maybe in that way, his theory was right.

As the piece started I went from interest, to amusement, to dismay, until I found myself muttering to myself, “You are sh!#@ing me!” Maybe I am overly sensitive to religious attacks on science these days, or perhaps I was just really tired (Cliff Notes plays at 7:35am), but I could not believe what I had just heard.

The piece aired on February 10th and since then I had forgotten all about it. Then today, two days later, after stumbling onto a National Geographic article 7 Major ‘Missing Links’ Since Darwin showing fossil proof of the so-called missing links in evolutionary theory Cliff’s piece came rushing back into my mind.

After finding the piece on the KOGO website and both reading and rehearing it I was disturbed all over again and found myself on the KOGO feedback section of their site entitled Your Space where I penned this response:

Seriously?

The recent Cliff Albert “Darwin’s Random Birthday Selection” clip gave my heart a big bang as I drove to work the other morning.

To hear Charles Darwin denigrated on air at your radio station was extremely disappointing. While it is difficult to forget just how conservative San Diego is, this clip is an insult to thinking individuals the world over, forcing me to ask, “Is there an intelligent design at our local News & Talk station?”

In this clip Cliff says of Charles Darwin, ”...grew up studying beetles, eating wild animals and writing books claiming we all came from monkeys.”

Despite the title of his work, “The Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin never actually identified a common ancestor or directly addressed where life came from. What he did do was describe the mechanics behind variations in species. He did later draw an evolutionary tree conjecturing that humans evolved from a common ape-like creature.

Cliff went on haughtily stating, “But both men born that same day 200 years ago certainly had an impact…Lincoln worked to abolish slavery. Darwin worked to abolish creation. “

Which is a naive statement and simply isn’t true. Though having struggled with his faith and eventually withdrawing from the Church, Darwin never called himself an athiest, instead choosing the label of agnostic. Certainly his research led him to be critical of the Bible as literal history, and with good reason.

But setting Darwin’s personal religious beliefs aside for a moment, we can clearly see that even the church can no longer refute the theory of evolution that has evolved from his work. The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin was on the right track, officially stating that the theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith. The Church of England likewise has officially apologized to Charles Darwin. Indeed many churches have accepted the theory of evolution and adopted it into their belief system.
Cliff concludes his hilarious piece, and not the not ha-ha kind of funny, with this statement, “Darwin’s birthday over the years has been a victim of random selection…and is hardly noticed. Maybe in that way, his theory was right.”

So I ask you Cliff Albert, are you seriously, in the year 2009, in the face of overwhelming evidence, intimating that Charles Darwin was wrong? We know he didn’t get it all right, but then humans had yet to even discover DNA at the time “Origin of Species” was published.

I tried repeatedly to somehow interpret the piece as a joke, y’know, ha-ha funny. Yet I cannot find this interpretation especially after reviewing the transcript. Instead the piece serves as an ignorant and not so veiled religious insult to the reality we can see and measure around us. As far as I’m concerned, putting this piece on the air calls into question my trust relationship with the content KOGO puts on the air.

Reference sources:

• The Daily Telegraph
  http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24345772-5016574,00.html
• Times Online
  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5705331.ece
• Wikipedia
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
• LewRockwell.com
  http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi105.html
• But you can Google all this yourself:
  http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=charles+darwin

And of course I was so amused by the whole thing I thought I would share it with you here. I have since read many more of Cliff’s notes, and am now forced to concede that at least this particular piece had a bit of wit and style about it that not all of his work carries. I would also like to note that as of the time of this writing, my comments have yet to appear on the KOGO website.

So what do you think? The blog lines are open and we are not accepting callers…

The Newsweek cover is from the July 7-14, 2008 issue of Newsweek, but I borrowed this particular copy from plethoric pundigrions: Lincoln Blogs where they were discussing that article.

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