Some have compiled exhaustive lists of play and trump links which help newcomers get past the 'boilerplate' so that new discussion can commence. That would be me.
But for an oldtimer like me on these threads, the subject gets stale fast when posters play "battle".
Yes, for me too. That's why the links were assembled, to obviate the tedium. But what else can we do when the same old, oft-rebutted arguments keep coming up?
It's like a soap opera, where maybe the first 5 minutes should be devoted to bringing the viewers current, but somehow those first 5 minutes never seem to end, because just when the intro phase ought to be over, a new viewer tunes in and needs to be brought up to speed, so it starts all over again. As long as the audience is an open one, we can't get beyond the introductory stage, and for the "regulars" it gets to be a dull routine. (It doesn't help things that some of the regulars who have sat through the intro a million times never seem to learn anything.)
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. . . BTW, the school board meetings also strike me as a game of "battle". Each side throws rational alternative views on the table and ultimately both sides complain that the other's theory is a fabrication and is not falsifiable. Boasts of "explanatory power" and accusations of "just so" stories go back and forth. A case in point:
DrJacques:Now to go directly to the point about "the quality of science" you raise in your last response I defy you or anyone else to point out one single thing within the above quoted conclusions about how "purposive or intelligent design" is "a causally adequate explanation for the origin of the complex specified information required to build the Cambrian animals and the novel forms they represent" that can be tested scientifically. There simply is none and as scientific scholarship it is woefully deficient.
Both sides are blinded to its applicability to their own theory . . ." . . .
I reject your contention that there is any equality of argument as presented by "each side" of the evolutionary debate and that "both sides" are blinded" to the applicability of their own theory. Proponents of the Theory of Evolution have a solid body of evidence upon which to base their claims and anyone who wishes to contest their hypotheses, arguments, and conclusions, can go directly to that evidence and observe, test, and compare new results if they want to challenge them. And that body of evidence is enormous. The evidence of Geologic Time provides a framework -- see
my post #91 in this thread for more, the concurrence of the fossil record within distinct strata dated by geologic periods (stratigraphy) is consistent, morphologies and taxonomy can be argued from observation and comparative analysis of skeletal remains, evolutionary biologists and geneticists now work with DNA sequences and find evidence of common genes that cut across biological phyla, researchers working to find a cure for AIDS are making new discoveries about retroviruses that both begin with studies undertaken by evolutionary biologists and inform them further about new directions in their research, and on top of all of this is a mountain of field work in microbiological, botanical, and zoological studies that has tested various aspects of the Theory of Evolution.
What do its opponents have to offer in contrast? Though they are not an amorphous group who argue consistently in the same fashion the list of their objections include a misapplication of epistemological theory that argues "nothing is proven" whenever "absolute proof" is an impossibility in inductive reasoning (the basis of scientific method), which only seeks generalizations as its goal, a denial of the fossil record, a denial of Geologic Time, a denial of nuclear physics when contesting the ability to date rocks, a denial of the genetic findings of DNA and RNA sequences showing shared genetic traits across phyla, and, when all else fails, the postulation of the "Great Evolutionist Conspiracy" that includes almost the entirety of the scientific community including field researchers, the medical community, professional journals, independent theoreticians, government agencies, technically skilled professionals working in the private sector, academia, public school teachers, book publishers, and others who are supposedly all working in concert because anything that undermines the Theory of Evolution challenges their world-view, even though no group composed of such diverse backgrounds could possibly have such a unified world-view. This is the context in which I view the above-cited quote, we're now back to the "Evolutionist Conspiracy" again in which those who are asking for scientific proof and calling for observation of recognized standards within science need not be heeded because the very fact that they call upon authoritative sources as the basis for argument informs one and all that they cannot be trusted. I'll step outside of my usual restraint and respond in the vernacular here. B______t!
Now some brief comments on your last post. Exobiology does treat the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but that is now a scientifically-based pursuit since the discovery of the Murchison Meteorite revealed the presence of organic compounds which have also incidentally been discovered in gaseous clouds in space. And as for panspermia, I certainly don't believe in the version Hoyle argued.
Now, I want to comment on Semiosis and its relevance to this discussion, which you seem to suggest is a sidebar. It is not, because Semiotics is the branch of evolutionary biology that is moving the discipline away from a reliance upon pure "randomness," which you continue to suggest is a major failing of evolutionary theory. What I am seeing is that you argue that mathematicians are asking questions that put the logic of randomness under fire, evolutionary theorists are ignoring the questions, and the Theory of Evolution must therefore be called into doubt as a result. I am responding that randomness is for many trained observers a recognizable problem in evolutionary theory, scientists doing field research have called it into question by raising problems with natural selection, and theoretical constructs for evolutionary development are being reexamined, e.g. Pattee, Rocha, and Josslyn, that propose alternative models in which natural selection is at the very least undermined significantly. But it appears to me that you are attempting to hang on to what I consider to be a central misconception, namely; that there is no challenge to randomness. Perhaps, given your repeated insistence that the work of mathematicians is being ignored, what you really mean to say is that evolutionary theorists refuse to reject randomness on the grounds of mathematical probabilities. That last point is true and for good reason. It makes no sense in the world of science that the results of observation (induction) should be discarded in favor of probabilistic inference (deduction) because probabilistic inference has no direct relationship to causality (which is a central point of Shannon's communication theory by the way). The place of randomness in evolutionary theory is related to natural selection, for which I even provided a quote from a scientific source, which you also seem to ignore.
Now; mathematicians may be more "espistimelogically zealous" in proposing theoretical constructs that can be applied to the study of evolution, though certainly no less zealous than Pattee, but their propositions for reexamining randomness do not carry the weight of the field research produced by evolutionary biologists to undermine natural selection, since the latter must put theory into practice.
Let me deal with Shannon and information directly now. Shannon's propositions fall within statistical analysis and probability theory, something with which I am thoroughly familiar from my own professional background. The relevance of probability theory to models of evolutionary development is that they inform evolutionary scientists of logical constructs which, depending upon the context of theories, either should be incorporated into their work, or at the very least accounted for in some way. When Shannon talks about "successful communication" he refers to a message that begins as information is then sent and received and afterwards is transformed back into information that is either exactly or approximately the same as its original. When applied to systems theory in general it can be used to establish a statistical correlation between the behavior of two systems, from which we may hypothesize a causal influence of one system acting upon the other in some fashion, but only at risk because "successful communication" is not a theory of causal influence, it is pure probability. It is also relevant to "Shannon Entropy," which refers to the number of placeholders (or bits) needed to represent the message. Dembski and other Intelligent Design theorists rely upon Shannon entropy to establish probability models to explain "complexity" which they believe indicates that a deterministic model, such as evolution, is statistically impossible. First of all, that is false. Complexity is not the same thing as the probability of an event occuring and the probability of life processes becoming so complex as to be statistically impossible is not represented in communication models either. But Intelligent Design theorists want to believe it is because they wish to move the debate from scientific observation and testing (induction) to deductive mathematics (intuition) because they know they cannot win if their proposals are to be validated against empirical data, which is something that cannot be done with Intelligent Design.
With that in mind I come to your last assertion about where evolutionary theory is heading:
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. . . All of these are moving together towards a model which identifies information (Shannon, successful communication) as that which distinguishes life from non-life, complexity arising from the iteration of autonomous rules (von Neumann, cellular automata, self-organizing complexity) and randomness as an illusion of self-organizing complexity. . . ."
Only in the dreams of Intelligent Design advocates is the debate over the Theory of Evolution moving towards a probabilistic information model that denies randomness has been addressed in evolutionary theory and dismisses real world scientific observation, seeking only to negate its results with mathematical formulae. While I am only an outside observer, my restatement of where evolutionary theory is going would look something like the following:
Evolutionary theory will have to be modernized so as to accomodate the scientific revolutions in systems theory that is the result of quantum mechanics, in genetics and microbiology that suggests a semantics of genetic translation and expression, in geology to incorporate the evidence of real-world catastrophes, in mathematics to accomodate chaos theory and the morphology of structures, and in evolutionary field studies that have undermined the previously-held inviolability of natural selection.
While I have probably left something out I am certain that I am much closer to where evolutionary theory is really going.