Posted on 07/27/2006 3:00:03 PM PDT by BrandtMichaels
What are Darwinists so afraid of?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 27, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jonathan Witt © 2006
As a doctoral student at the University of Kansas in the '90s, I found that my professors came in all stripes, and that lazy ideas didn't get off easy. If some professor wanted to preach the virtues of communism after it had failed miserably in the Soviet Union, he was free to do so, but students were also free to hear from other professors who critically analyzed that position.
Conversely, students who believed capitalism and democracy were the great engines of human progress had to grapple with the best arguments against that view, meaning that in the end, they were better able to defend their beliefs.
Such a free marketplace of ideas is crucial to a solid education, and it's what the current Kansas science standards promote. These standards, like those adopted in other states and supported by a three-to-one margin among U.S. voters, don't call for teaching intelligent design. They call for schools to equip students to critically analyze modern evolutionary theory by teaching the evidence both for and against it.
The standards are good for students and good for science.
Some want to protect Darwinism from the competitive marketplace by overturning the critical-analysis standards. My hope is that these efforts will merely lead students to ask, What's the evidence they don't want us to see?
Under the new standards, they'll get an answer. For starters, many high-school biology textbooks have presented Haeckel's 19th century embryo drawings, the four-winged fruit fly, peppered moths hidden on tree trunks and the evolving beak of the Galapagos finch as knockdown evidence for Darwinian evolution. What they don't tell students is that these icons of evolution have been discredited, not by Christian fundamentalists but by mainstream evolutionists.
We now know that 1) Haeckel faked his embryo drawings; 2) Anatomically mutant fruit flies are always dysfunctional; 3) Peppered moths don't rest on tree trunks (the photographs were staged); and 4) the finch beaks returned to normal after the rains returned – no net evolution occurred. Like many species, the average size fluctuates within a given range.
This is microevolution, the age-old observation of change within species. Macroevolution refers to the evolution of fundamentally new body plans and anatomical parts. Biology textbooks use instances of microevolution such as the Galapagos finches to paper over the fact that biologists have never observed, or even described in theoretical terms, a detailed, continually functional pathway to fundamentally new forms like mammals, wings and bats. This is significant because modern Darwinism claims that all life evolved from a common ancestor by a series of tiny, useful genetic mutations.
Textbooks also trumpet a few "missing links" discovered between groups. What they don't mention is that Darwin's theory requires untold millions of missing links, evolving one tiny step at a time. Yes, the fossil record is incomplete, but even mainstream evolutionists have asked, why is it selectively incomplete in just those places where the need for evidence is most crucial?
Opponents of the new science standards don't want Kansas high-school students grappling with that question. They argue that such problems aren't worth bothering with because Darwinism is supported by "overwhelming evidence." But if the evidence is overwhelming, why shield the theory from informed critical analysis? Why the campaign to mischaracterize the current standards and replace them with a plan to spoon-feed students Darwinian pabulum strained of uncooperative evidence?
The truly confident Darwinist should be eager to tell students, "Hey, notice these crucial unsolved problems in modern evolutionary theory. Maybe one day you'll be one of the scientists who discovers a solution."
Confidence is as confidence does.
I don't know. I'm pretty much with you. I don't like hate.
What attacks on Christianity are you referring to?
Since you do not know the difference between a tenuous correlation and causation, it seems that you are not equipped to discuss gravity either. Have you ever noticed that the sun does not rise unless the rooster crows?
I've already posted my "Note to the bloody-minded" on this thread. I hope I don't have to do it again.
This ain't about religious freedom. It's about keeping religion out of science. It doesn't belong there. The title of the thead is, "What are Darwinists afraid of". They're not afraid of anything. They simply don't want falsehoods, religious doctrines and ideas presented and taught as science.
"subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."
I'll keep looking, though.
The constitution, Supreme Court, and more recently Dover have been keeping it at bay.
(does not follow)
There, fixed it for you.
Hate is just an strong dislike for something.
Exactly, Alamo-Girl! I don't know why the insufficiency of this type of answer goes so unnoticed and unremarked. It addresses only surface or outward appearances, or incidental "accidents" pertaining to an entity (for lack of a better word).
When in the Gorgias, Socrates asks Chaerephon what question he would ask of the renowned Sophist, a puzzled Chaerephon asks Socrates, "What shall I ask him?" To which Socrates replies, "Ask him who he is."
That is not the same as asking what does a person do for a living, or what family connections he has, (or to put it crudely, who or what he can successfully breed with), etc. The question goes to the essential nature of the person, to the quality (or "whatness") of his being, if we can put it that way. Gorgias, with Polus' help, manages to duck it. And shortly thereafter Gorgias falls silent for the remainder of the dialogue.
We are to conclude that this type of question is repugnant to a Sophist.... It seems many neo-Darwinists try to avoid this question of "what is," too, on the grounds that it's not "a scientific question." The focus is, as I suggested, in the way things appear, not on what they actually are.
I think it's true that, as Niels Bohr points out, science is about making descriptions of nature, not about "explaining" the how or why of nature. Still scientific descriptions are of appearances that necessarily arise from the "essence" of what a thing really is. I don't see how anyone can pretend there is no "essence"....
You see the epistemological problem as well as I do, A-G. I can't express how glad I am for your good company here.
Thank you for your kind words of encouragement, dear Alamo-Girl, and for writing!
Nonsense.
Piling up facts is not science--science is facts-and-theories. Facts alone have limited use and lack meaning: a valid theory organizes them into far greater usefulness.
A powerful theory not only embraces old facts and new but also discloses unsuspected facts [Heinlein 1980:480-481].
Scientists don't deny there is an essence. All they can say is what they know and what that means. That means they might be able to partially describe an essence.
"as Niels Bohr points out, science is about making descriptions of nature, not about "explaining" the how or why of nature."
Nature is self consistent, so the how and the why can be answered. Those answers just won't be satisfactory for some, because they're after the answer to the question, "why is nature". Science can only say that it is, because nature screams, I am.
Seems like that comment got the thread booted to the Smoky Backroom too. Nearly 1200 posts in News/Activism, then ruined by rudeness.
Nice weekend, ain't it?
Dead thread marker.
The only source for this allegation was an evangelist who called herself "Lady Hope". One doesn't have to be a cynic to think she made this false claim in order to increase her draw (and, just incidentally, her income).
Darwin's family, who was present during his last illness and death, denied the story.
I think if he were alive today he would be open minded enough to admit that his theory falls apart simply on the lack of true transitional fossils which he said were needed to be discovered for his theory to hold water.
This is doubly false: 1) there are many more fossils known now than there were in his day, some of them forming detailed transitional series: examples are the reptile-to-mammal series (see post 513 above), the terrestial artiodactyl-to-whale, hyracotherium (aka eohippus)-to-modern horse, austrelopithcine-to-people (see CoyoteMan's post 238 above), therpod dinosaur-to-bird, and the recent discovery of Tiktaalik (fish-to-amphibian intermediate)
2) the second way it is false is that even if no more fossils had been found since 1859, modern genetic sequencing would have revived the theory, rather than simply confirming it.
And he didn't mean fossils of completed life forms but ones that would show the gradual change over millions of years.
Please explain what you mean here. Use the reptile-mammal series as an example
It would be nice if the TOE proponents would at least admit that truth.
Assuming it is truth.
Courtesy ping to Coyteman
Oh I so agree with you, Coyoteman. Still my concern is that a theory can become so "rigid" that it starts filtering out new facts and new insights that may arise in other scientific disciplines.
For instance, Hubert Yockey has brought information science to bear on problems of evolution, particularly insights from his own field of specialization, cryptology. His keenest interest is the evolution of the genetic code. One gets the impression that Yockey thinks of the genome itself -- as a sort of blueprint or template -- as "the common ancestor." He says the origin of the genetic code is unknowable; yet its evolution is something susceptible to investigation and understanding by means of mathematical tools. Clearly he thinks there's more to biological evolution than natural selection and survival of the fittest.
Indeed, just by acknowledging a genetic code, one is tacitly acknowledging the non-randomness of a key feature or driver of biological evolution. Codes don't assemble themselves, but are intelligently specified.
One thing that really bugs me about the defenders of neo-Darwinist theory is that they tell us the main anti-Darwinist onslaught is coming from mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, supersititious-moron creationists; but this is hardly the case. The real challenges are coming from other departments of science -- from mathematics and information theory (as in Yockey's case), and from physics. There has been tremendous resistance by "mainstream biologists" to insights that do not accord with the tenets of Darwinist doctrine.
I want to thank you sincerely for the fine essay you wrote me earlier, in response to my two questions. Jeepers, Coyoteman, it's not that I think you're "wrong," but that I don't think you've taken the problems far enough. But your essay was extremely well done and helpful to me (and to others, I feel sure). I truly appreciate your taking the time to write it, and thank you for it.
There is one point I'd like to make regarding your distinction between the words "faith" and "confidence." You aver science doesn't have "faith," but only "confidence" in its findings. But do you realize there's not really a dime's worth of difference between the two words, when you boil "confidence" down to its etymological roots? Confidence = "con," with, plus "fides," faith, trust (from the Latin).
Which gets us back to the observer, and his indispensable role in the quantification and qualification of reality. I've been driving myself nutz over "the observer problem" in recent times. It's still a work in progress; but I can tell you this with some confidence: It isn't confined to relativity and quantum theory only, but is alive and well in all human knowledge disciplines. It is manifestly alive and well among Darwinist theoreticians.
I'm grateful for this conversation, Coyoteman. Thank you.
Virginia-American The only source for this allegation was an evangelist who called herself "Lady Hope"
They often expurgate Darwin's religious views when publishing his Autobiography, but he did talk about these. T. A. Goudge remarks that Darwin had difficulty with Christianity, but that he did not write as an atheist.
In the final chapter of the Origin of Species he speaks of laws having been "impressed on matter by the Creator" and of life's powers "having been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."
In his linear view of things it appears that Darwin could not see the benevolence of a first cause, yet Darwin also spoke of his seeing how this "wonderful universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance." As a result, so it seems, he preferred to remain agnostic: "the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect. . . . The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain Agnostic." [cited by T.A. Goudge in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
You are clearly confusing "random" with "unpredictable". That is a distinction with a strict difference, and your conclusions fail because you conflate the two.
Codes don't assemble themselves, but are intelligently specified.
Back to Information Theory 101 for you, Betty Boop. A "code" is a context. Ignoring that "intelligently specified" has no strict definition here, everything has a code because the very act of observation (in its most abstract sense) creates a context. To put it another way, it is not possible for there to not be a code. Your argument is trivially reduced to tautology because you do not understand even the rudimentary mathematics.
Is criticism an attack in your mind? When others resist Christians using the government to promote the Christian religion, is that an attack? And is anger a reasonable response to criticism or resistance?
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