Posted on 12/03/2005 5:28:45 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
TO read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.
...
Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.
On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"How about sharks? They've been on the planet for 600 million years."
Really? Citation please.
As you must know if you have bothered to read any of the central texts, there is no resemblance between creationism and intelligent design theory. None.
But it's a useful way of smearing something you prefer not to argue about or permit anyone to know anything about.
OH, that was mature. *rolls eyes*
Announcements of its death are premature.
I suspect there are a large number of people who will continue to believe that God exists and that He had a hand in bringing about creation.
And if He in fact did bring "all this" about, the scientific process is no less an appropriate tool with which to examine His intelligent design than to examine the claims of evolution.
But people in our country are free to believe what they want, that a frog turned into a prince....
My posts to you on 8/21/05 concerning another evo thread, where you were too scared to give us your scholarly background:
So, Carolinaguitarman. What's your background? Running the Museum of Natural Science, or goatherding? 'Course, you seem to think it doesn't matter. You're simply anointed. Step up, my man. What's your background?
You refused, claiming you were too smart for me. I then replied . . .
"LOL. I never doubted it. So, we are just to believe some guy on the internet who calls himself Carolinaguitarman, and who won't even state his authority as to why we should listen to him? You see, oh great [self] anointed one, maybe we're not quite so stupid as you believed. On that, I'm going to bed. Cheers.
Therefore, I only thought it appropriate to dub thee "Goatherder," as that is the likely level of your qualifications to debate this topic. [You're really bad at it.]
Everything you wrote is wrong (and some of it extremely bigoted as well) but I'll concentrate on this for now.
The scientists who proposed "punctuated equilibrium" actually found evidence of it in the fossil record before they presented their idea.
Niles Eldridge found a locality which preserved a finely detailed transition between two species of trilobite that elsewhere in the fossil record appeared "abruptly" with no transition. Stephen J Gould discovered similar evidence for Caribbean snails.
This is what PE proposed: that species (or at least those with the population sizes and geographical distributions sufficient to leave a trace in the fossil record) tend to remain more or less stable for long periods of time, and that speciation events probably occur among smaller populations and in one particular place. Later when the new species spreads geographically it seems to appear "suddenly" in the fossil record.
The competing view -- phyletic gradualism -- holds that species usually change at a more or less constant rate.
If you're wondering why you have'nt heard much about debate over PE vs PG for years, its because multiple good examples of each have been found in the fossil record (it has nothing to do with your ridiculous claim that "absolutely no evidence" exists) and the general agreement is that both types of transition occur.
If this person's opinions were correctly reported, then as you say he is a fruitcake. There are some fringe organizations out there riding the Intelligent Design movement which I confess I didn't know existed until some of the Darwinists on these threads mentioned them as being the Official Intelligent Design Central.
No, they are not. They are propagandists and nut jobs who are trying to use ID theory for their own purposes without properly understanding it. That does not discredit the work of real thinkers like Michael Behe, to mention one name. No more than some silly novel about cave men discredits Darwin. Darwin and General Evolution stand or fall on their own, not on what some idiot may happen to make of them. Does George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" discredit Darwin? Of course not. It's a play, not a scientific treatise.
But when you say "My mind was made up," I can well believe it. All the Darwinists on these threads appear to have made-up minds that nothing is likely to change.
CG: Mathematicians have proved no such thing.
Sure they have. The same mathematicians who can calculate the chances of rolling a six in an unknown number of passes using an unknown number of dice with an unknown number of sides.
Your thread's been moved to the smokey backroom. The weekend mods are on duty.
www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3244,36-704663@51-699613,0.html
www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b010cf95d18.htm?
humanists.net/humankindadvancing/6/5-3.htm
http://www.sharkfoundation.com/facts.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0613_050613_sharkfacts_2.html
I'm sorry, my numbers are off. It's 400 million years. TOE predicts a few million descendant species over that time. Why hasn't anyone found them?
I liked it, actually, It should be right up there with the rest.
Parlez vous Francais? No!
Read my mind. :)
Solution: Just leave it alone. Don't squash or force feed ID or EVO. End of story.
Virgo?
The advocates for Darwin frequently lump together anti-Christianity arguments with their arguments against ID. Not only are these two different spheres of debate, there are two different wars.
The liberal war against Christianity is the one to watch. Frankly, I wouldn't want to guess the outcome of a conflict between God and his detractors. God will probably win.
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