“You didn’t notice for instance most freepers don’t buy into the cult of evolution?
I’ll bet you didn’t notice FR is a conservative website too.”
—Of course I noticed it’s conservative. Whether most are evolutionists or not, hard to say, it looks like a pretty close call.
“What I find much more interesting is that despite the site being around for a decade as you point out, nevertheless the list indeed grows.
—It’s hardly interesting that the list grows. What’s the alternative? (Even if “dissent from Darwinism” is rapidly shrinking within the scientific community, the list would still grow)
And as I said before, skepticism of facts and theories should come naturally to scientists. And besides that, if we look again at the statement: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life” — far from mere skepticism, we KNOW that random mutation and natural selection don’t “account for the complexity of life”. There are other extremely important mechanisms: genetic drift, neutral selection, sexual selection, group selection (maybe, that one is controversial), and probably other things we haven’t thought of. And so there’s no reason for ANY scientist to not sign the statement - even the most hard core dogmatic follower of the Temple of Darwinism - except perhaps familiarity of how the signatures are being used to mislead laymen.
You’re singing to the choir when saying scientists should be naturally inquisitive. THIS is the entire point!
It’s not our side shutting down debate and smearing these observations:
As a chemist, the most fascinating issue for me revolves around the origin of life. Before life began, there was no biology, only chemistry – and chemistry is the same for all time. What works (or not) today, worked (or not) back in the beginning. So, our ideas about what happened on Earth prior to the emergence of life are eminently testable in the lab. And what we have seen thus far when the reactions are left unguided as they would be in the natural world is not much. Indeed, the decomposition reactions and competing reactions out distance the synthetic reactions by far. It is only when an intelligent agent (such as a scientist or graduate student) intervenes and “tweaks” the reactions conditions “just right” do we see any progress at all, and even then it is still quite limited and very far from where we need to get. Thus, it is the very chemistry that speaks of a need for something more than just time and chance. And whether that be simply a highly specified set of initial conditions (fine-tuning) or some form of continual guidance until life ultimately emerges is still unknown. But what we do know is the random chemical reactions are both woefully insufficient and are often working against the pathways needed to succeed. For these reasons I have serious doubts about whether the current Darwinian paradigm will ever make additional progress in this area.
Edward Peltzer
Ph.D. Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute)
Associate Editor, Marine Chemistry
If there’s any misleading going on here. it’s pretending all is well with these scientists merely signing these statements.
You ignored the “IT DESERVES TO BE HEARD” part.