Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Panicked Evolutionists: The Stephen Meyer Controversy
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.
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R. Albert Mohler, Jr
The evidence that there is no observable instance of information that is not embodied in a physical process obeying known physical laws.
"Is God Dead?", Time Magazine, 8 April 1966.
Existance causes itself? Mastrubatory or tautologic. Still a deism. And flawed too, even accorded to Occam.
So what makes G-d a simpler theory? Only that we are as we are. "We are as we are" is not the same as "It all is".
The first statement is tortured by the atheists on that website (excerpted at post 1929). It is tortured by omitting to mention that the universe has a beginning and thus an uncaused cause. That omission would cause one to make a false Occam's Razor choice.
When the entire sentence is revealed, Occam's Razor chooses God as the uncaused cause. All the myriad prior causation (multi-verse, branes, etc.) theories are "unnecessary hypotheses" - which, oh by the way, do not defeat the fact that they also had a beginning and thus an "uncaused cause" i.e. God.
Thank you for the additional source information for Higgs!
That particular number, which is a form (Plato) in math, could be the measure of the reduction of uncertainty in any kind of receiver (information, Shannon). The reduction of uncertainty itself is an action, the result to a receiver of a causal action, a transmission - like a wave, sound wave, harmonic, fluctuation, etc.
Ypu are confusing Occam with the Biblical version of Pi.
Occum didn't speak of simplification. He spoke of introducing superfluous, nonfunctional concepts. 22/7 is not a simplification; it is an approximation. More precise values of Pi are not superfluous to the concept of Pi, even if they are unnecessary in a particular engineering application.
We are here, we not only think, we are sane, we enjoy. The world has a pleasant narrative -- not unbrokenly pleasant, but we see our history in it fully consistent -- not incoherently jumpy like some bad movie or bad dream, the deeper things are examined -- while complex, have no radical breaks in complexity they all relate, we can find the relationships. Whether we examine in time or in microscopic, crystal photo-detector detail, whether in layered in strata, artifact or text, music, art, etc. etc. We enjoy a pure benevolence that is woven into the very fabric of existance.
We see the G-d's back while we are sheltered between a cleft in some rock.
For anyone curious about pi, here's a great resource: Mathworld
That ratio 22/7 was Egyptian. Also 256/81. See http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/davel/pi_in_ancient_egypt.htm
We see the G-d's back while we are sheltered between a cleft in some rock.
Epiphenomenon is one of those big words that don't speak to me, although I don't deny their utility.
Back in the late sixties I found myself studying electronics at Ft. Monmouth New Jersey. I was introduced to the concept of hole current in semiconductors. My first reaction was -- pardon my anglo-saxon -- WTF. Here was the grandaddy of useless concepts, the flow of holes rather than the flow of electrons. It seemed like a completely arbitrary complication. In my schematic way of thinking it was electrons doing the moving.
Of course, hole current has both theoretical and practical engineering implications.
So thirty-some years later I am sitting here trying to see the "engineering" consequenses of accepting information theory rather than mainstream biochemistry and natural selection. What I want is a specific example of how some piece of matter, say an atom embedded in a protein, would behave in an observably different way as a result of it being used to convey information rather than just being what a chemist says it is.
Or perhaps a concrete example of how information theory has made a better prediction of some previously unobserved phenomenon.
Thanks ever so much for collecting the sources re: matter all in one spot, with links!
Right here...
And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."
Do the physical laws embody information? Are the physical laws tangible, i.e., matter-based? Are they universal? Were they "there" before they were "observed?" Or did human observation, and reasoning about same, create them, cause them to be? If the reasoning mind is an epiphenomenon of matter, does that mean that matter created the physical laws? If so, why does matter appear to be subject to them?
One can easily as well argue that for form to be expressed depends on a collection of processes; and thus form is not reducible to any particular subprocess that comprises it. The form is the "whole" of which the subprocesses or subsystems are the "parts." And as we have seen, parts do not/cannot "explain" the whole of which they are the parts.
I see no evidence that matter or whatever is "subject" to laws. Physical laws are approximations. We invent the laws as useful descriptions of phenomena. I'm not aware of any physical counterexample to the laws of thermodynamics, but existence itself seems (to me) to be a counterexample.
I read about the unreasonable utility of mathmatics, but I see historical examples where this has led astray. Faith in the primacy of integers, faith in the nonexistence of irrational numbers or imaginary numbers.
The strength of math seems to be in its self-consistency, but even that seems to be the result of invention rather than of any intrinsic quality.
I still don't see that number can exist without being embodied. In the absense of objects, what does counting mean?
Internet strikes again. This has nothing to do with growing crystals. All measurements are procedures. There is no such thing as length, but there is a procedure that results in something called 'length.' Do this, do that, you get 'length.' All measurements are like this.
I am no mereologist. Don't make that confusion. Organic fractalogist, maybe, I'll have to reflect on this Bruce Lipton point of view a while. I was okay with Teilhard's Omega Point, and Liptonism seems like a more detailed view, even if not as extensive.
What is that warp drive named, you know, the one that contracts space in front of you and expands space behind you so you can just step out on the landing platform at Alpha Centauri a second after belting in at earth?
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