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.
He sure do talk purty though, don't he?
I have already attempted to rebut this point. Apparently my rebuttal has been phrased insufficiently clearly. Would you like me to rephrase it?
If it is not too much trouble, I would also appreciate a direct citation to Yockey's claim that the origin of the genome is unknowable in principle.
Writing is what he does professionally.
I suggest you read the article, HayekRocks. Mr. Gilder accords plenty of deference to working scientists and mathematicians, such as Chaitin, Yockey, Godel, Delbruck, Planck, Shannon, Turing, among many others, basing his argument on their findings. Clearly he thinks these men know/knew how to do their jobs.
Didn't think he wrote like a scientist.
2. what makes you believe that a representative organism from a transitional species would be in any way an "incomplete" life form?
Please be specific, including the anatomic anomalies your model predicts as necessary for an "incomplete" life form, and how "incomplete" life forms can be decisively discerned from "complete" life forms.
We often see this posted as "Its not a transitional, it's fully-formed". Just what would a non-fully-formed or an incomplete animal be like?
Is a platypus a fully-formed mammal? (it doesn't have a separate genito-urinary opening, or bear live young, or have nipples). Is Archeopteryx a fully-formed bird, with its teeth and reptile-like tail?
It is interesting that five of the seven you cite were mathematicians. One was a physicist, and one was a physicist who migrated to biology.
It appears Mr. Gilder is using a second-hand account of Dale Earnhardt's driving to teach Lance Armstrong how to ride a bicycle.
It also seems to me that information itself implies intelligence of some sort...
why? do you look at a sugar molecule and see intelligence in the structural information it contains? do you look at atomic fission and see intellect? do you look at the molecular, energetic, and structural process of volcanic detonation and see a mind at work? I do not - I see physical and chemical processes, characteristics, and interactions. Where does "intelligence" get implied?
Refutation: a race of space aliens first visited the earth 4 billion years ago. Noting its potential for life, they periodically visited it, collecting specimens. They directly observed the appearance of life and its subsequent evolution, and created a detailed scientific account of the process
I do not care how implausible this may be. Please inform me how it is a scientific impossibility.
it is interesting that a question to their stipulated axiomatic argumentative assumptions, requiring specific predictions, seldom results in answers to the question.
it WOULD be greatly gratifying, to encounter such a race and gain access to just those detailed records.
I don't think "evo-fanatic" is an insult. It describes the obsessiveness of some people who frequent these crevo threads, hanging around them for hours, yet posting little or nothing on issues of more general interest to conservatives. I don't see FR as a debating society on the validity of scientific theories. It's a political forum for conservatives. Yes: conservatives, not liberaltarians, Randian "objectivists," or other adherents of utopian ideology.
If you have evidence against what I say, please present it. However, just repeating some slogan like "no true Scotsman" doesn't prove anything.
The basis of Christianity is the New Testament, nothing else. Yet there are people in churches who never read the Bible, or ignore what is in it. Yes, to many people it is just a social club. You can't be a Christian and an atheist, yet there are mainstream Protestant clergy who privately admit to being atheists or agnostics.
Also frustrating.
No problem, HayekRocks!:
The paradox is seldom mentioned that enzymes are required to define or generate the reaction network, and the network is required to synthesize the enzymes and their component amino acids. There is no trace in physics or chemistry of the control of chemical reactions by a sequence of any sort or of a code between sequences. Thus, when we make the distinction between the origin of the genetic code and its evolution we find the origin of the genetic code us unknowable. We are aware that we must take it as following from the axiom of the existence of life (Bohr, 1933). The existence of life is based on the sequence hypothesis and consequently, as [George] Gamow proposed, there must be a code between each of several sequences such as those in DNA, mRNA, and protein. Accordingly... I shall discuss the evolution of the genetic code, not its origin, which is unknowable. -- Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005; p. 93f. Emphasis added.]Yockey also has this to say about abiogenesis theory:
Those who believe in a prebiotic soup are aware of the difficulties in the prebiotic formation of pyrimidines. For example, cytosine is obtained in a yield of about 5 percent in an aqueous solution of 1.0 M potassium cyanate and 0.1 M cyanoacetylene held at 100 degrees C for twenty-four hours. This is hardly a reasonable prebiotic synthesis because it is obvious that such controlled conditions require a deus ex machina in the form of an expert biochemist. [Ibid., p. 97.]Yockey can be so droll!!!
BTW, thank you for your earlier correction of my reference to Crick's Central Dogma. I "mis-remembered" it -- though it stands to reason that the messenger function should precede the transfer function. I stand corrected, and will not make this mistake again.
Thanks, HayekRocks!
By "don't run too far afield with this" I meant that there are conditions and caveats I did not specify that will limit its usefulness to how I know you will try and apply it. If you do not grok it, it could easily lead to naive conclusions that cannot be supported with it.
I do not see the reason for your postulate, "and God is completely external to our universe." Do you mean to say that the only way we can get a good understanding (or any understanding at all) of the universe is to evict God from it -- which seemingly is Laplace's method?
You have it backward. If God was not completely external, it would have consequences that are not in evidence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but Laplace was correct in his observation that we have yet to observe any such consequences that would lead us to rationally assert an external God monkeying with the internals of the system. All assertions of higher interactive beings have this problem; nothing about the system requires or suggests their existence. Whether or not they objectively exist is immaterial if their existence has no measurable perceivable consequence; it is the same reason the purple elephant that lives under my bed is immaterial. The purple elephant's objective existence has no material impact on my life or the universe and so it really is a null belief as it has no use in any calculus.
Null beliefs are neither true nor false, they are simply null. Beliefs that are either true or false in some fashion have consequences, but null beliefs have no consequences except for the amount of time spent considering them. A rational and economical person does not waste time on null beliefs because they are all equally silly.
You are making the common mistake of conflating a belief with no value (i.e. it never has use in a rational calculus) with a belief that something is false (which does have a use in a rational calculus). I can accept that anything might be true, but the astronomical majority of those "anything"s have no utility in a rational analysis because they rely on null priors that makes their truth undecidable.
you make the assumption that your interpretation of Christianity is the one true version.
those I noted from history made the same claim, with the same level of evidentiary support.
this renders your dismissal of them as false Christians a matter of he-said-she-said. in matters religious, such are best labelled "no true scotsman" arguments.
Agreed, since relatively clean and rigorous theories exist that require neither e.g. the so-called Modified Newtonian Dynamics. The "dark <foo>" theories are starting to look a lot like epicycles IMO -- convenient, but without good reason and lacking direct evidence.
An oral agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
As the large hadron collider comes on line and experiments progress, it may be that particles indicating the extra dimensional realities will be detected, showing with experimental data that there are dimensional characteristics beyond 4D spacetime which are the reasons dark matter and dark energy remain outside our common detection. The detection of KK particles (Kaluza Klein), either directly or as evidenced in energy escaping (disappearing) the post impact tracks, will pretty much confirm that the greater dimensional concept of the universe is on the right track. The math is not so arcane, the concept of emergent phenomena is not an imagination. As Lisa Randall points out in her recent book, there are electron micrographs of crystalline patterns for the non-stick coatings on cooking utensils which indicate dimensional effect from beyond the 4D of current conceived spacetime. There are other examples, but that one struck me as astonishing. Emergent properties defy common explanation of the underlying law governing the process (such as the particle nature of sound transitioning from particle to resonant sound wave or the super conductivity of ceramics which have no electron sea to be effected for super conductivity).
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