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.
Publishing of Godless.
I suppose she will never feel compelled to eat pickles and ice-cream.
XXY?
Are you being intentionally dense? The mathematics of evolution have as much to do with religion or biology as arithmetic. It is not a biological concept. Just because 2 eggplants + 2 eggplants = 4 eggplants does not make arithmetic a biological concept either. Mathematics says nothing about biology, science, or religion, though many other fields use mathematics as a tool. You do not get to pick and choose which parts of mathematics you like; it is an axiomatic system and if one part is wrong, you pretty much have to discard the rest too.
If the mathematics upon which evolution is based was wrong, you could prove it in strict mathematical terms. Since you make a vague tinfoil plea instead, I'll assume it is because your assertion is baseless.
I am sure you have read examples of the statistical improbability of even one amino acid being able to spontaneously form itself.
As someone who was formerly a computational chemist and did these very calculations for profit, I can assure you that those supposed demonstrations of "statistical improbability" are laughably flawed. Anyone who conflates the size of a phase space with the probability of a point in that phase space has no business making prognostications about probability. Doubly so when using the former as an approximation of the latter has an error bound that dwarfs the resolution by dozens of orders of magnitude. To put it in terms you'll understand, it would be like doing arithmetic and inadvertently mixing up addition and multiplication, repeatedly.
As I have pointed out repeatedly, IF we accepted the probability model used in your example as generally correct, we could trivially compute from that model that all industrial chemistry is impossible. Your assertion has consequences that you cannot choose to ignore for the convenience of your belief.
Y¬
Not only does one see a rejection of biology, but geology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics.
Dembski calculated the odds at the Dover trial to be 90 percent against a slamdown of ID.
You say you can't take philosophers seriously, yet you cite a Twentieth Century philosopher (Heinlein) in support of your point that you can't take philosophers seriously. It's true, you won't find Heinlein in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (you won't find Ayn Rand either), yet his writings are often cited on FR (as are Rand's), and it's clear the intent of the quotes is that they are meant to direct our affections and inform our values (something this writer humbly proposes to be the task of a philosopher).
I don't know if Heinlein is on boop's short list of recommended reading, but, whether or no, he serves well as an example of what she meant when she wrote to you:
"By good order I mean the optimal state of existence for human beings -- This is the province of philosophy. If I might boil it all down to its essence, the problem that philosophy engages -- at least the non-school, non-academic brand of philosophy that flourished in classical Greece -- is essentially the fundamental problems of human existence. Plato (and Aristotle) would perhaps say that true philosophy deals with the right order, and right orientation, of the soul." And her conclusion: "But just because science cannot engage such problems given its methodology (which is perfectly well-suited to the investigation of the phenomena of the natural world), does not mean that such human problems 'go away.'" (message #1445)
Here's a fellow who is on my short list of recommended reading:
"State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. In this branch, therefore, read good books, because they will encourage, as well as direct your feelings."
. . . . . Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787. (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ME, Vol 5, pg 257)
No way of knowing, of course, but my inclination is that Jefferson would have found Heinlein very enjoyable.
Whence did this allergy to evidence come, which seems to plague so many creation-ist-oid-ites? Is it part of your design?
What are the odds of the Dover decision being written exactly as it was? Infinitesimal? Just changing a few words could have had the completely opposite result. Why, it is almost as if that outcome was the pre-ordained design of God.
It would be interesting to survey the religious beliefs of people buying lottery tickets or playing slot machines.
HUAH!
I guess they would, if they were like everyone else. I don't see why it's not considered a sin.
Let us not forget the point at issue. The point at issue is that Yockey, I am willing to stipulate correctly, argued that one cannot determine the origin of the genetic code from the code itself. Yockey forgot that the code is inscribed on molecules which have no such limitation, and which, it appears. do preserve some memory of their origins. Information theory is powerful, but let us remember that it is nonetheless a truncation of nature. The genome is not merely a set of instructions. It is also a physical entity.
You wouldn't be, by any chance, accusing someone of reductionism, would you? Substituting an abstraction for flesh and blood, and perhaps overlooking some important attributes of the actual?
Oh, you are trying to get me in trouble. :-)
That is the trouble with essences. The essence of the famous Texas Air National Guard memo was incriminating information about our President. Unfortunately for those who created it, some people decided to ignore the essence, and looked instead at the font.
The information was in the code, not in the history.
Exactly. A posteriori probability estimates are always crap.
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Actually, they're mostly binary.
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