----- "Geoffrey Purcell" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 
> My point re Creationism though still stands. It is in direct opposition to the theory behind the Palaeolithic Diet, as the PD diet depends mainly on evolution for its basic theories re evolutionary adaptation. 

When people express strong opinions about things that they know little about, or only know about from sources that debunk them, heated conflict is the expected result. I'm not a creationist, but I've taken the time over the years to study creationism a bit, to understand what they do and don't believe. The first thing I learned is that there is no single position called "creationism", but a number of theories that vary among themselves in details. And of course, the same is true of evolution, or "evolutionism", if you like. 

The minimum commitment of evolutionism is the common ancestry thesis : All species, and indeed all individual organisms, have common ancestors if you go back far enough. To say that evolution happened is to say that the common ancestry thesis is true. That is the "what" of evolution. Neo-Darwinism purports to supply the "how". 

Creationists deny evolution; that is, they deny the common ancestry thesis. That is their minimum commitment. They believe that species, or families of species, or classes, were individually created and did not descend from other species, families, classes, etc. So, some creationists believe that dogs, wolves, foxes, dingoes, etc. all have common ancestors, but none of them have common ancestors with cats. Some creationists accept that tigers and mountain lions have common ancestors; some don't. Some creationists believe the earth is young (6,000 or so years old); many don't. 

So when you talk about creationists in general, about all you can take for granted is rejection of the common ancestry thesis. 

And incidentally, some Intelligent Design theorists, including Michael Behe, one of its founders, do accept the common ancestry thesis, i.e., evolution. 

You do not have to accept the common ancestry thesis to make sense of the paleo diet. You only need to accept that adaptation happens within species. Adaptation in itself is not, and does not entail, evolution. The evolution thesis is that adaptation eventually leads to speciation. That is largely irrelevant to the paleo diet. If you believe that the human race is old enough to have been subjected to dietary selection pressures, and that as a result became adapted to certain foods and not others, you have all you need to make sense of the paleo diet. This might exclude young-earth creationists, but that's about it. 

And one more thing. 

The opposition between belief and fact is utterly wrongheaded. Facts are the ways the world is. The facts are what they are regardless of what anybody believes, or even whether there is anybody to believe anything. Beliefs are mental states; facts are not. Facts are what make some beliefs true and others false. 

Todd