hysterical Darwinites panic

The theory of evolution is a tottering house of ideological cards that is more about cherished mythology than honest intellectual endeavor. Evolutionists treat their cherished theory like a fragile object of veneration and worship--and so it is. Panic is a sure sign of intellectual insecurity, and evolutionists have every reason to be insecure, for their theory is falling apart.

The latest evidence of this panic comes in a controversy that followed a highly specialized article published in an even more specialized scientific journal. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, wrote an article accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The article, entitled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," was published after three independent judges deemed it worthy and ready for publication. The use of such judges is standard operating procedure among "peer-reviewed" academic journals, and is considered the gold standard for academic publication.

The readership for such a journal is incredibly small, and the Biological Society of Washington does not commonly come to the attention of the nation's journalists and the general public. Nevertheless, soon after Dr. Meyer's article appeared, the self-appointed protectors of Darwinism went into full apoplexy. Internet websites and scientific newsletters came alive with outrage and embarrassment, for Dr. Meyer's article suggested that evolution just might not be the best explanation for the development of life forms. The ensuing controversy was greater than might be expected if Dr. Meyer had argued that the world is flat or that hot is cold.

Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, told The Scientist that Dr. Meyer's article came to her attention when members of the Biological Society of Washington contacted her office. "Many members of the society were stunned about the article," she told The Scientist, and she described the article as "recycled material quite common in the intelligent design community." Dr. Scott, a well known and ardent defender of evolutionary theory, called Dr. Meyer's article "substandard science" and argued that the article should never have been published in any scientific journal.

Within days, the Biological Society of Washington, intimidated by the response of the evolutionary defenders, released a statement apologizing for the publication of the article. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the society's governing council claimed that the article "was published without the prior knowledge of the council." The statement went on to declare: "We have met and determined that all of us would have deemed this paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings." The society's president, Roy W. McDiarmid, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, blamed the article's publication on the journal's previous editor, Richard Sternberg, who now serves as a fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institute of Health. "My conclusion on this," McDiarmid said, "was that it was a really bad judgment call on the editor's part."

What is it about Dr. Stephen Meyer's paper that has caused such an uproar? Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, argued in his paper that the contemporary form of evolutionary theory now dominant in the academy, known as "Neo-Darwinism," fails to account for the development of higher life forms and the complexity of living organisms. Pointing to what evolutionists identify as the "Cambrian explosion," Meyer argued that "the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans" cannot be accounted for by Darwinian theory, "neo" or otherwise.

Accepting the scientific claim that the Cambrian explosion took place "about 530 million years ago," Meyer went on to explain that the "remarkable jump in the specified complexity or 'complex specified information' [CSI] of the biological world" cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.

The heart of Dr. Meyer's argument is found in this scientifically-loaded passage: "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion."

In simpler terms, the mechanism of natural selection, central to evolutionary theory, cannot possibly account for the development of so many varied and complex life forms simply by mutations in DNA. Rather, some conscious design--thus requiring a Designer--is necessary to explain the emergence of these life forms.

In the remainder of his paper, Meyer attacks the intellectual inadequacies of evolutionary theory and argues for what is now known as the "design Hypothesis." As he argued, "Conscious and rational agents have, as a part of their powers of purposive intelligence, the capacity to design information-rich parts and to organize those parts into functional information-rich systems and hierarchies." As he went on to assert, "We know of no other causal entity or process that has this capacity." In other words, the development of the multitude of higher life forms found on the planet can be explained only by the guidance of a rational agent--a Designer--whose plan is evident in the design.

Meyer's article was enough to cause hysteria in the evolutionists' camp. Knowing that their theory lacks intellectual credibility, the evolutionists respond by raising the volume, offering the equivalent of scientific shrieks and screams whenever their cherished theory is criticized--much less in one of their own cherished journals. As Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Discovery Institute explained, "Instead of addressing the paper's argument or inviting counterarguments or rebuttal, the society has resorted to affirming what amounts to a doctrinal statement in an effort to stifle scientific debate. They're trying to stop scientific discussion before it even starts."

When the Biological Society of Washington issued its embarrassing apology for publishing the paper, the organization pledged that arguments for Intelligent Design "will not be addressed in future issues of the Proceedings," regardless of whether the paper passes peer review.

From the perspective of panicked evolutionists, the Intelligent Design movement represents a formidable adversary and a constant irritant. The defenders of Intelligent Design are undermining evolutionary theory at multiple levels, and they refuse to go away. The panicked evolutionists respond with name-calling, labeling Intelligent Design proponents as "creationists," thereby hoping to prevent any scientific debate before it starts.

Intelligent Design is not tantamount to the biblical doctrine of creation. Theologically, Intelligent Design falls far short of requiring any affirmation of the doctrine of creation as revealed in the Bible. Nevertheless, it is a useful and important intellectual tool, and a scientific movement with great promise. The real significance of Intelligent Design theory and its related movement is the success with which it undermines the materialistic and naturalistic worldview central to the theory of evolution.

For the Christian believer, the Bible presents the compelling and authoritative case for God's creation of the cosmos. Specifically, the Bible provides us with the ultimate truth concerning human origins and the special creation of human beings as the creatures made in God's own image. Thus, though we believe in more than Intelligent Design, we certainly do not believe in less. We should celebrate the confusion and consternation now so evident among the evolutionists. Dr. Stephen Meyer's article--and the controversy it has spawned--has caught evolutionary scientists with their intellectual pants down.

>>Flak about math fonts, with a little science thrown in which doesn't change the issue:<<

Well here are a few responses to that post which you seem to say you only had a font problem ...

To: 2AtHomeMom
As we all know, delta-S = SdQ/T. (S is entropy, SdQ the energy input, T the absolute temperature.)
Crap. We all know no such thing. Whoever wrote this idiocy - and I suspect it wasn't you; you probably cribbed it from some basher web-site - can't even transcribe a formula correctly, let alone understand it.

The equation is dS=dqrev/T. q (lower case) is the reversible heat, not the energy. Unless you specify it's the reversible heat, it's not correct to write it as a differential at all. Heat itself is a path variable.

While you're staying at home, Mom, pick up a chemistry text.

605 posted on 01/30/2005 2:31:55 PM PST by Right Wing Professor

To: 2AtHomeMom
As we all know, delta-S = SdQ/T. (S is entropy, SdQ the energy input, T the absolute temperature.) On inspection, change of entropy is always nonnegative;
Your equation is for reversible processes where the net entropy is ZERO. Let me quote from a reputable science text for that situation:

"The interpretation of entropy as a measure of the capacity of a system for doing work is consistent with the result that the change in entropy is zero for a reversible cycle, for a system carried through such a cycle loses no capacity for work"

BTW, which YEC website did you get that "T the absolute temperature" quote from?

620 posted on 01/30/2005 2:47:11 PM PST by WildTurkey

3) Pointing out that entropy is 0 is in perfect agreement with my statement that entropy is nonnegative and does not advance WT's case.
I would have thouth you would have said zero since you you left open the posibility of positive entopy change in your statement. Nice try, though. Strike ONE!

And we don't all have math fonts turned on.

Math fonts won't get you from reversible to irreverible cycles. Srike TWO!

I am open to a civil, moderated education on path variables and reversible cycles, please proceed. I suspect reversible cycles apply to open systems, because how could entropy increase over time in a closed system? See you later.

Let me quote from the same previous text:

"These equations (entropy) can be summarized by the statement that a natural process always takes place in such a direction as to cause an increase in the entropy of the system plus environment. In the case of an isolated system it is the entropy of the system that tends to increase."

Strike Three. You are OUT!

[You left out all the lies and the false-science promoted by the anti-evolutionists.]

That's a pretty sweeping statement, WildTurkey. Could you help me narrow it down a little bit? Just give me an example or two, and I'll go chase it (them) down.

One example (of literally countless thousands)... The following is a review of "Skeletons in Your Closet", a creationist book aimed at "educating" children: Review: Skeletons in Your Closet.

And don't just take the rewiewer's word for it, I can vouch that his criticisms are accurate ones. Here are some excerpts (each "paragraph" is a separately excerpted passage):

Skeletons in Your Closet, by Gary Parker (1998), is a creationist book for children which tackles the subject of human evolution and argues that there is no valid evidence for it.
Parker's book consists of an enormous amount of misdirection, and evasion of most of the best evidence for human evolution. All the old creationist favorites such as Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ramapithecus and Nutcracker Man are discussed. Of course, these have little or no relevance to the modern study of human evolution, and some of them never did.
Parker mentions three other "huge mistakes": an alligator bone, a horse's toe bone, and a dolphin rib, all supposedly misidentified as hominids. The first two of these are so obscure that I have never been able to find out the details about these fossils or who misidentified them. Whatever they were, they are irrelevant - they were never accepted or even named as hominid species, and sank without a trace.
As for the dolphin's rib, it's almost as irrelevant. Parker says that "... the evolutionist who found it thought he could prove it was an ape-man who walked upright!" but the truth is somewhat different.
It too was never named as a hominid, and its discoverer never claimed he could prove it walked upright - that detail was just invented by Parker.
In contrast to the space devoted to these irrelevancies, legitimate fossils are either ignored or misrepresented.
p. 11: As an example of the arbitrariness of reconstructions, Parker claims that a camel skull could be reconstructed to look like a vicious meat-eater. It turns out that this is true only if you're incompetent; in real life, a class of students had no difficulty working out from a camel skull that it had to be herbivorous rather than carnivorous (see Anj Petto's article Over the Hump - Taking the AIG Camel Challenge!, based on this creationist article)
p. 12: Parker repeats the tired claim that Neandertals were just normal people with bone disease. Naturally, like us, Neandertals suffered from bone disease, though I don't believe any Neandertal has ever been discovered with rickets, which Parker implies when he claims that they suffered from a shortage of vitamin D. But the idea that bone diseases caused Neandertal anatomy is discredited (and has been for well over a century), and few if any scientists believe it now.
p. 23: "Even science traces all human beings back to just two people. The Bible calls them Adam and Eve, and all of us came from just those two and no others." This is almost certainly referring to the concepts of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam. Parker's statement is an astonishing howler; anyone with even a basic familiarity with these concepts should know that they do not mean what Parker says (see What, if anything, is a Mitochondrial Eve?). The mitochondrial Eve and the Y-chromosome Adam are only the respective common ancestors of our mtDNA (inherited from mothers) and Y-chromosomes (inherited from fathers). No scientists claim that they are the only two ancestors of all humans, and many popular articles explicitly point this out. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam are not our exclusive ancestors, they probably lived at different times and in different places, and they almost certainly never knew each other.
p. 35: Parker says that Eugene Dubois, the discoverer of Java Man, "also found regular human skulls in the same gravel", strongly implying that they were found in the same deposits. This is totally false. These skulls are known as the Wadjak skulls, which should be a pretty good tip off that they were found somewhere else. They were; Wadjak is about 65 miles (104 kms) away from Trinil, where Java Man was discovered. (Many other creationists make the weaker claim that the Wadjak skulls were discovered "at the same level". This is also false; Java Man was discovered in river deposits in a flood plain with a non-modern fauna, while the Wadjak skulls were discovered in a mountain cave with a modern fauna.)

Parker says that Dubois "didn't tell anyone for over thirty years about the human [Wadjak] skulls he discovered". This is also false; in fact Dubois published three articles mentioning the Wadjak skulls soon after their discovery.
p. 49: "[Donald] Johanson even said that Lucy was the ancestor of all the apes as well as human beings." Almost certainly nonsense; Parker is probably misremembering a claim by Johanson that Lucy was the ancestor of all later hominids.
p. 51 contains the following dialogue:
"Mom: ...But other scientists didn't just look [at Lucy]; they took measurements.
Dana: What did the measurements show?
Mom: They showed that Lucy did not walk upright. In fact, another ape, an orangutan, would have walked more like a person than Lucy could."
As far as I can tell, this is complete fiction. I have never heard of any scientific papers claiming that Lucy did not walk upright. I can only imagine that Parker has some muddled memory of a well known paper by Charles Oxnard (1975), in which Oxnard claimed some functional similarities between some australopithecine bones and orang-utans. However, Oxnard was examining South African specimens of A. africanus, not Lucy (which is in A. afarensis).
p. 52: "Two scientists put pictures of Lucy's skeleton on top of a chimp's just to show you could scarcely tell the difference." This almost certainly refers to a paper by Zihlman et al. (1984), which contains a drawing comparing a chimp with Lucy. (As a minor point, Zihlman's drawing doesn't show Lucy's skeleton on top of a chimp's. Did Parker even bother to look at the drawing before writing about it?) Parker even gives a cartoon representation of this drawing. However the real drawing shows considerably greater differences than Parker does:

The similarity as depicted in Zihlman (1984) with chimp on left, Lucy on right
The similarity as depicted by Parker

In reality, the Zihlman drawing was done not "to show you could scarcely tell the difference", but to point out both the similarities and differences between Lucy and a chimp.
p. 62: "The skeleton [of Turkana Boy] was like that of a modern human, Homo sapiens, in every way..." A comparison of a photo of the Turkana Boy skull with a drawing of a modern human skull shows that they look considerably more different than one would expect from Parker's statement.
p. 76: "According to evolution, Diane, there is no God who made us". This is just ridiculous; the theory of evolution, like any other scientific theory, takes no stance on whether God exists or not. Despite Parker's repeated attempts to smear evolution by equating it with atheism, many evolutionist scientists are Christians, and most major Christian denominations have no problem with evolution.
An unpleasant aspect of the book is Parker's continual denigration of scientists, in both word and picture. A few cartoons depict scientists as either overweight or scrawny (but always unattractive), and foolish or dishonest. This is pretty rich, coming from someone with Parker's carelessness with the truth. Here are a couple of examples:

The discoverer of 'Nebraska Man', daydreaming about his find.
This scientist has a bubble saying "These bones obviously belong to a female 'ape-woman' with an I.Q. of 47 who was carrying one of her 3 children as she walked upright."

Accompanying Parker's claims about the Wadjak skulls is an illustration showing a masked man under cover of night putting a human skull into a box labelled "Evidence to hide - Man before Ape-man".
Later he claims that Donald Johanson deliberately and fraudulently altered the pelvis of Lucy to make it look as though she was bipedal.

Elsewhere, one of the Parker children asks rhetorically whether museum displays aren't being dishonest in displaying fossils such as Java Man and Nutcracker Man. Indeed they would be if the fossils were being misrepresented, but there's no evidence that that is the case. Java Man is correctly classified as Homo erectus in museums, and Nutcracker Man as a robust australopithecine not ancestral to humans. If Parker has any reasons to claim these aren't correct identifications, he should state them rather than casting slurs on the honesty of museums.
Referring to the Tasmanian genocide, Parker says "The settlers believed so strongly that the Tasmanian natives were part animal that they formed a human chain across parts of the island to hunt down and kill all the native peoples." [3] Although he is obviously trying to pin the blame for this on evolution, it occurred in 1830 - some thirty years before Darwin published his theory. The settlers were not evolutionists, but were mostly Christians - maybe Parker should reconsider his belief that evolution is responsible for racism.
As far as I could tell, all of the material in Parker's book could have been recycled from other creationist sources, and probably was; it is hard to see how someone familiar with the scientific literature could get so much wrong.
I'll admit that I did not come to this book expecting to be impressed by it. Still, I was surprised at how appallingly bad it was. Parker is, after all, an important figure in the world of creationism (see his bio here). He was prominent in the Institute for Creation Research for many years, and then founded Answers in Genesis along with Ken Ham.
Parker's book is an example of the worst of creationist literature, a shoddy collection of recycled misinformation.
This book is not only contains no reliable scientific information, but is dishonest to the core. Any kid who relies on Skeletons in your Closet won't have a hope of being able to participate in a discussion of human evolution - and wouldn't even be able to understand the discussion. Even creationists should be embarrassed by this book.

This is just a small sampling -- read the full review to see what a horror story of scientific inaccuracy this creationist book really is.

And yet, this error-ridden book, which makes scores of false and misleading claims about paleontology, is still currently for sale on more creationist and homeschooling sites than I can count, usually accompanied with glowing mini-reviews which declare how this book presents the "truth" about evolution...

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