What Are The Darwinists Afraid Of?

The Post Chronicle | 8\07\05 | Patrick J Buchanan

[Right Wing Professor]

The article discusses the civilized world from the third century BC onwards. What has that to do with the Prophet Isaiah?

[LifeOrGoods?]

You're unaware of any evidence supporting evolution?

So give me one simple evidence of evolution.

[Right Wing Professor]

How do you pitch a tent on circle?

Google the word 'yurt'.

What kind of tent do you think the Israelites had? Hint: it's didn't have 'Coleman' stencilled on the rain-fly.

[Sybeck1]

I'll give you two super-educated girlie EVO's and call it even.

[Right Wing Professor]

That's the glory of the internet. You no longer need an IQ above room temperature to bless the entire civilized world with your opinions.

[Sybeck1]

So give me one simple evidence of evolution.


It just happened, don't you know. (Wink, wink.)

There is about 20% of people on this board that evo-creo debate is the highlight of their lives. They live for it.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

What is wrong with Pat's little synopsis/

Buchanan is right. Although had the by line read George W Bush he'd be more right, there'd oceans of koolaide served and a wave of zottings.

[balrog666]

Yeah, we just love pointing out that you clown-college graduates shouldn't be setting public policy for the rest of us people.

[Sybeck1]

Fine, if it hadn't been for us knuckle dragging creos in 2004 you'd be saying President Kerry. We all serve our purpose.

[balrog666]

Fine, if it hadn't been for us knuckle dragging creos in 2004 you'd be saying President Kerry. We all serve our purpose.

Thanks. Now crawl back under your rock.

[Gumlegs]

G: Ummmm ... is there a dispute regarding the presence of the earth?

FC: No, and that is my point. Asking for a hypothesis, or scientific test to detect design is like asking for a hypothesis to detect the existence of planet Earth.

Your point is nonsense. You propose "design" but can't test for it. It's as obvious, you say, as the earth. You propose design, which would require a designer. It's incumbent on you, therefore, to demonstrate that there is one.

In addition, the "designer" concept has no explanatory power at all. What would we expect to see if there were no designer?

Want a falsification of evolution: A fish giving birth to a horse. A pre-Cambrian rabbit. That's two. This has been pointed out to you many times on FR. It seems to me you simply ignore what you don't like reading.

G: Depends on what you mean by "them."

FC: By "them" I mean planet Earth and the universe. Nothing cryptic about it.

Just your sentence structure.

FC: If the earth and the universe were not designed, science would have no way of exploring it.

How do you arrive at this conclusion?

FC: Deal with it. Explain it away. Amuse the thinking man with your response. Besides, I'm sure you were there when it was all laid down and can explain the lack of an intelligent designer most intelligently yourself.

I'll be delighted to amuse the thinking man. Or even you. Science can only use and explain what it can test for and demonstrate. You keep wanting your unsupported assumption to govern science. It won't.

G: "Design" is a given under which science does take place. Science is "designed." It does not follow that life is "designed," or that the "design" of life should be assumed.

FC: Why not?

Because it's a non sequitur.

FC: More people than scientists have figured as much, namely that where there is design, there is a designer.

1) Figgerin' ain't science. 2) I believe that "more people than scientists have figured as much." That still doesn't make it science.

FC: Not only so, but it has become increasingly apparent to many that life itself follows rules and patterns that are most easily attributed to design.

"Many." That same "many" that have been flocking to creationism for the last hundred years?

FC: Scientists who desire to push the notion that order and life can arise without the aid of an intelligent agent should pull their heads of the dark places where they are prone to looking and list themselves for hire in the philospohy and history segments of school cirricula.

Science cannot include that for which it cannot test. Propose a falsifiable theory for intelligent design and it will be adopted.

FC: It boggles the mind that evolutionists have the audacity to foist their philosophy upon science while demanding creationists supply hypotheses regarding the orderly nature of the world and the universe.

You don't know what science is. You've demonstrated that beyond any doubt. Evolutionary theory fulfills the requirements of science. You need to deal with that. If it didn't it wouldn't be part of science at all. Oh, but wait! There's a Great Conspiracy afoot, perhaps a Great Science-Wing Conspiracy!

FC: If anything it is testimony to sheer laziness on the part of academia that evolutionism's ass wasn't kicked into the philosophy room a century ago or more. Somehow the NEA and its ilk must have gotten the better of us.

Judging from creationists' posts here, that's not much of an accomplishment.

[VadeRetro]

BTW, the problems with the Meyer-Minnich paper's attempted "refutation" of Miller have been noted on the Panda's Thumb site:

1. Regulation is a fairly trivial thing to change. All that would be required to solve Minnich and Meyer’s problem of differential regulation would be a simple change in the temperature sensitivity of the regulation of one of the secretion systems. Numerous bacteria, including disease-causing bacteria, have multiple secretion systems. The number of secretion systems can vary even between closely related bacteria, and furthermore the secretion systems are often found on plasmids that can be duplicated and transferred to other bacteria. Besides, if differential regulation is really so hard to evolve, then on Minnich and Meyer’s analysis, bubonic plague was intelligently designed. This resonates rather well with medieval notions about the cause of the Black Death (demons, curses, etc.), but is not likely to have much of a future in 21st century medicine.
2. Meyer says, “the other thirty proteins in the flagellar motor (that are not present in the TTSS) are unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system.” This is flat-out mistaken, as Meyer would have known if he had read my survey of the peer-reviewed literature on the evolutionary origin of the flagellum. Off the top of my head, nonflagellar homologies have been documented — in the scientific literature, not by me — for the 2 motor proteins (MotAB) (see here), the 10 or so chemotaxis and MCP proteins, FlgA, FliA, the FlgJ C-terminal domain, the two master regulator genes FlhDC mentioned by Minnich in the paper, and FliK. Furthermore, FliM is essentially a fusion of another flagellum protein (FliN) and a chemotaxis protein (CheC), and all of the 11 or so flagellar axial proteins (rood, hook, flagellar filament, linkers, caps) are probably homologous to each other (the references for most of the proteins discussed can be found here, although I discovered a few of these homologies after that article was written). Altogether, there are very few flagellar proteins “unique to the motor” in Meyer’s sense, particularly if we throw in a few more that are probably homologous to each other (4 chaperones), those probably homologous to Type II secretion (FlgH, FlgI), and those that can be deleted with little or no obvious ill effect (FliL, FliE, FlgM).
3. Meyer writes, “present-day bacteria need an elaborate system of genetic instructions as well as many other protein machines to time the expression of those assembly instructions. Arguably, this system is itself irreducibly complex.” This is, first of all, moving the goalposts to a different system — protein assembly and gene expression systems, which probably date back almost to pre-cellular replicators. You can’t ask someone to explain the origin of the bacterial flagellum, and when they do, turn around and say “no, I actually meant you have to explain the origin of life.” Second, irreducibly complex protein systems have evolved in recent history, mostly by the kinds of regulational changes Meyer and Minnich say can’t happen (see references here).
4. Meyer concludes, “Finally, phylogenetic analyses of the gene sequences [20] suggest that flagellar motor proteins arose first and those of the pump came later.” Reference 20 is Nguyen et al., and it is a popular bit of ID folklore that this paper showed that TTSS genes were phylogenetically derived from flagellar genes. The paper was indeed about “Phylogenetic analyses of the constituents of Type III protein secretion systems,” but the actual phylogenetic trees of flagellar proteins produced by Nguyen et al. showed TTSS proteins as sister to, not nested within, flagellar proteins. Meyer therefore gets this point exactly backwards. Despite the gene sequences, it is still possible to argue that flagella came before (known) Type III secretion systems based on other evidence (this is the approach Nguyen et al. take), but this is quite different than Meyer’s statement [2].

[Sybeck1]

No, we'll stir up even the least educated among us, just to make it a bad day for you. We delight in that you know.

[Revolting cat!]

Do you believe in evolution? Who cares?! What difference does it make if you do or not? The real question is do you believe in the feverish promoters of some 19th century scientific dogma or another (19th century or 20th)? Snake oil for athlete's foot, anyone?

[Gumlegs]

Evolution is thought to be unintentional like the latter incident, where creation is thought to be intentional. Either's presumed effects can be validated by science or refuted by science. Both can be called sciences and both can be called faiths or theories.

Only if the words "faith" and "science" have no meaning ... or any.

So yes, why not assume that a complex object is not designed?

Because you're assuming facts not in evidence (as the lawyers like to say).

[balrog666]

No, we'll stir up even the least educated among us, just to make it a bad day for you. We delight in that you know.

Yes, we know you will cut off your nose to spite your face. Too bad for the rest of us.

[shuckmaster]

Show me how evolution answers the origins of the universe (where the raw materials for the process originated from).

Please show me from where you get the notion that evolution is supposed to answer the origins of the universe. I'm no scientist but, I've read and studied a lot on evolution and I've never ever seen any book on the subject remotely suggest that Darwin's theory is in any way related the origins of the universe. The origins of the universe is a completely different subject that has absolutely nothing to do with Darwin's theory on the origins of species and you only make yourself look like a fool trying to squeeze orange juice out of an apple by relating the two.

[Sybeck1]

Can anyone point me toward a fossil that is not fully ape or fully human?

[VadeRetro]

No, we'll stir up even the least educated among us, just to make it a bad day for you. We delight in that you know.

So you're the smart one, right?

[Sybeck1]

Don't you think the primordial soup would need a petri dish (pre history earth) to form? Clearly how the universe came into being should be considered.