Fallacies of Association

Guilt by association fallacy, honour by association fallacy, association fallacies

Association fallacies rely upon the negative implications of "guilt by association" or the positive implications of "honor by association."

These fallacies are based upon the implication that a claim is false or true based upon beliefs held by, or attributed to, the people or organizations that hold the belief. Obviously, the arguments of those with a mission of denying rights to others or of those with anti-expert opinions should be assessed carefully on the basis of their content. Equally, the opinions of experts should be assessed on their merit.

Creationists, in line with the emotional basis for their claims, all too often resort to association fallacies. One example of the "honor by association" fallacy is to point out that scientists and Nobel Prize winners have signed a document against Darwinian theories, as though this lends credence to intelligent [sick] design pseudoscience. Such arguments are also fallacious appeals to authority.

Conversely, it is not an association fallacy to state that biologists consider that the scientific evidence is so voluminous as to render biological evolution a fact. It is appropriate to refer to the opinions of credible experts in a field.

Godwin's Law and Desperate Attacks on Darwinism provides an example of unfounded accusations that Darwin's ideas inevitably led to Nazi atrocities, as though this would demote evolution from fact (argumentum ad nazium, reductio ad Hitlerum).

Quo Vadis?
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Design Without a Designer

"It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization
and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."

(Francisco J. Ayala, "Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design
without designer," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol.
104:8567–8573 (May 15, 2007).)

(It has been my almost invariable observation that those who write on behalf of evolutionary biology exhibit far superior grammar and wordpower to creationists. The author of the brief article surrounding this quote is an exception to the rule and writes well.)

The quote is from Francisco Ayala, "Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology," says “Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer”. Since the original was published on the "Discovery" Institute's website and we have decided to refuse to lend authority to any creationist institution by providing backlinks, this post is published without a url. Googling will pull up the original.

The DI purports to have the aim that, "The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution.".

I would agree with DI that "much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased", though the vast bulk of bias has appeared on Christian websites. If a reporter were educated and unbiased then he or she would know that there is absolutely no place for anti-science and pseudoscientific "debate over Darwinian evolution". In other words, any supposedly fair presentation of the facts on DI is merely a sham that is *designed* to bestow legitimacy on DI's pretentious, pseudoscientific, creationist aims. Calls for "debate" are merely an attempt to support ID demands that thinly disguised religious views be promulgated in science classrooms.

While evolutionary biology has moved far beyond Darwinian (natural selection) concepts in explaining the fact of biological evolution, natural selection remains one of the key mechanisms in biological evolution. Science has moved well beyond accepting Darwinian principles. Religion, on the other hand, denies well-established facts of science in a vain attempt to support disproven claims in Genesis.

Quo Vadis?
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