There must be a connection.
Posted on 08/17/2005 4:37:36 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Is a physics class an open forum? Is a physics exam an open forum?
It is fine to have peer-reviewed professional journals but there needs to be another outlet for scientists who have been rejected.
There are lots. There is the web. Or one can start one's own journal.
There must be a connection.
This is doubtful. No one has ever denied a scientists credentials based on whether or not he was creationist. What has been questioned is whether the scientist's credentials make him an authority of consequence within the fields of evolution.
"Further, perhaps you've read as I have of incidents where those who've done the work and paid the dues have then been denied their doctorates because they won't say the Apostate's Creed, and affirm their faith in the Lord Darwin All-Knowing, world without beginning, amen.
This is quite the assumption. Without knowing the particulars it is just as easy and more honest to conclude that they were denied credentials because the work done was sub-par. The anti-evolutionist's conspiracy theory has yet to be backed up with anything other than conjecture.
There must be a connection.
Reduce thinking
Re-use old arguments
Recycle Haeckel's embryos.
I think there are some differences between speeking lines in a play and taking off your clothes in public. Acting involves saying whatever an author writes. If you can't play the role of a bad character, you have probably chosen the wrong profession. There are religious schools where this would not happen, and religious acting companies where this would not be required. But the secular stage is pretty raunchy, as anyone who has made it to college should know.
Sternberg's motives can be inferred from the fact that he did not discuss his article except with a closed circle. If he had discussed his proposal amongst his co-workers, they would have suggested other approaches and conclusions. As it was the reviewers disagreed with his conclusions.
Thanks for the link, RWP. I'll read the paper.
A triple inductive fallacy!
Where would they be without the abusive ad hominem and the misuse of induction?
To match a bald assertion with a bald assertion, yes, it does happen, and has happened. Do some homework if you're not convinced; there were several articles about a prof (in TX, I think) would wouldn't pass his students if they did not confess faith in evolution. Period.
Dan
The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history. For the same reason, the journal will not publish a rebuttal to the thesis of the paper, the superiority of intelligent design (ID) over evolution as an explanation of the emergence of Cambrian body-plan diversity. The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.
That was also the one that initially came to my mind. We don't need to mention specific cases, however, since the evos are collectively refusing to allow criticism of their religious fairy tale at any level: government schools, textbook stickers, museums, etc. and they invite the ACLU to help stamp out academic freedom.
Publishing is so cheap that anyone can do it. In the long run, all that matters is whether you have something to say. the value of originality is not determined by the presitge of the the journal, even if prestige advances your career. Some of the giants in textbooks had no science careers at all.
It looks like I will be going into day 11 without hearing from an ID proponent about what they would teach and about what elements of mainstream science they agree with.
There have been a number of strange rumors and allegations concerning the procedures for the publication of the Meyer paper. As these allegations come to my attention I will add to this page additional information regarding the truth of the matter.
I did not act unilaterally or surreptitiously in my handling of the Meyer paper. Within the Society, I raised and discussed the paper and its potentially controversial nature with a scientist on the staff of the Museum of Natural History and a fellow member of the Council of the BSW soon after its submission and before deciding to send it out for peer review, and then again after receiving the peer reviews and before sending notification to Dr. Meyer of acceptance. I discussed the paper with this scientist on at least three occasions. Each time this person encouraged me to proceed, stating that the controversy would be beneficial since it was good occasionally to shake up people's established views on important issues.
I followed the standard peer review process, sending the paper to four qualified scientists, three of whom agreed to review it. The reviewers' comments were provided to Dr. Meyer who made changes in the paper accordingly.
Dr. Meyer became a paid member of the BSW after the paper was accepted and before it was published, the standard practice for first-time authors or authors whose previous membership has lapsed. He also paid all the appropriate "page charges" for his article, a bill amounting to approximately $1600.
Concerning other disputes - and particularly with regard to the besmirching of his two degrees in evolutionary biology - I offer the link to his home page and this excerpt:
Summary of key points
Many distortions and inaccuracies are circulating in the press and on the web regarding the publication of the Meyer paper. The key facts are:
In the case of the Meyer paper I followed all the standard procedures for publication in the Proceedings. As managing editor it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors I chose myself, something I had done before in other appropriate cases. In order to avoid making a unilateral decision on a potentially controversial paper, however, I discussed the paper on at least three occasions with another member of the Council of the Biological Society of Washington (BSW), a scientist at the National Museum of Natural History. Each time, this colleague encouraged me to publish the paper despite possible controversy.
According to the official description of the Proceedings published in each issue, the journal "contains papers bearing on systematics in the biological sciences (botany, zoology, and paleontology)." The journal has published in areas such as comparative cytogenetics, phylogenetic hypotheses and classifications, developmental studies, and reviews of faunal groups. In addition, evolutionary scenarios are frequently presented at the end of basic systematic studies. Even a casual survey of papers published in the Proceedings and the occasional Bulletin of the Biological Society of Washington will reveal many titles in such areas. Thus, the topic of Meyer's paper was well within the scope of the journal.
The Meyer paper underwent a standard peer review process by three qualified scientists, all of whom are evolutionary and molecular biologists teaching at well-known institutions. The reviewers provided substantial criticism and feedback to Dr. Meyer, who then made significant changes to the paper in response. Subsequently, after the controversy arose, Dr. Roy McDiarmid, President of the Council of the BSW, reviewed the peer-review file and concluded that all was in order. As Dr. McDiarmid informed me in an email message on August 25th, 2004, "Finally, I got the [peer] reviews and agree that they are in support of your decision [to publish the article]."
Following my resignation in October 2003, a new managing editor for the Proceedings was selected in May of 2004, and the transition from my editorship to the new editor has taken place over the past few months. By the time that the controversy emerged I was finishing up my last editorial responsibilities. Thus, my stepping down had nothing to do with the publication of the Meyer paper.
I will be leaving shortly to help in construction this afternoon, but will be glad to respond this evening!
Your unanswered challenge is what inspired me to issue my own, which I now repeat for the third day running:
1. If something can be explained without the necessity of a designer, why is ID a better explanation?Reason for the question -- The Discovery Institute's definition:2. If something is not yet explained by natural causes, why is ID the only possible explanation? How can an ID theorist conclusively demonstrate that something could not have arisen naturally?
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. [Emphasis added by me.]
Source: Top Questions3. If the Designer designed everything, then what are the distinguishing characteristics of design?
4. Is there any possible observation that could falsify the theory of ID?
5. If an intelligent designer is responsible for the evolution of life on earth, then why are over 90% of all species now extinct?
Dear js1138, I'm sorry your challenge is falling on deaf ears. To do justice to it would require a thoughtful, comprehesive effort which, frankly, I just don't have the time to do right now. But maybe I can get the ball rolling and make a few suggestions.
First of all, I would not in any way want it said that ID is "antievolutionary" or in any way seeks to "replace" classical (or "mainstream") evolutionary theory. That would be a grotesque misrepresentation. Most scientists working in the ID field (I'd say the overwhelming majority) do not regard evolution per se as controversial.
Perhaps it would be good to mention that, to the extent that Darwinist evolutionary theory is based on the Newtonian model of the universe, in which everything can be explained in terms of force-field driven relations in nature as governed by the physical laws of motion and Newtonian gravity, any further development of the theory may be overly constrained by the materialist view. Indeed, science today often uncritically accepts the materialist presupposition -- although it has never as far as I know been subject to experimental test. This may operate as a constraint on the types of scientific searches that can and will be made to further elucidate problems in biology. To me, it seems awareness of a potential methodological constraint can only improve scientific methodologies.
I would also point out that Darwin's theory maintains that a random process can give rise to purposeful biological outcomes. There are logical objections that can be made against this supposition. In any case, I am not aware that the theory itself has ever taken a serious look at whether randomness is something (objectively) real or something (subjectively) apparent to an observer. This is an epistemological issue. Darwin's theory does seem to rest on a number of points that have not yet been critically clarified, but whose clarification could shed light on the soundness of Darwin's method and the results he obtained.
My own view (not that it really matters, and I'm not writing school curricula nor textbooks anyyway, so who cares?) is that Darwin's insights with respect to microevolution probably will hold up against future challenges. But the macroevolutionary assumption of a Common Ancestor for all species looks to me to be on shaky ground -- for epistemological reasons. No one's ever seen the common ancestor, nor ever likely will.
If Darwinism has a weak point, it would be due to the fact that, as a historical science, many of its findings cannot be directly observed. It will be argued that many of Darwin's predictions have been experimentally observed. But here is a simple epistemological fact of life: One designs an experiment with an intended result in mind; and one selects and qualifies evidence, and constrains the experimental conditions in such a way as to reach that result.
With the CA, what I think we have is a hypothesis that has extraordinary explanatory power, and that is a major reason for its success. But then Genesis has extraordinary explanatory power, too. That doesn't make Genesis "science."
So I guess what I would say to biology students at the high school level (or rather, their parents and school boards) would be something like this: If materialism is true, then quite likely Darwinism is bullet-proof. But if it is not, then quite possibly the theory needs some updating -- in particular to reflect more recent discoveries in the physical sciences, such as relativity theory, quantum theory, and information science.
These latter fields do not bet the whole farm on "matter in its motions." Indeed, non-corporeals (mathematics, consciousness, fields, et al.) -- that is, immaterial things -- receive due consideration as a matter of course.
If ID were to be taught at all at the high school level, I probably wouldn't put it in biology class. What I'd like to see instead as a regular part of the H.S. science curriculum is a new course that maybe we could call "Scientific Cosmology." It would be devoted to the various cosmologies that science has been producing of late -- multiworlds, multiuniverses, parallel universes, etc. -- as well as some of the "stranger" perplexities that have been unearthed by relativity theory and quantum theory (the observer problem, non-locality, superposition, probability theory, theories of gravity, etc., etc.). The course would simply provide a general overview of some of the leading-edge recent scientific findings in fields outside of biology which, in the final analysis, may be relevant to the question, "What is life?" -- to biology, that is -- and thus to evolutionary theory in principle.
Lastly, it probably wouldn't hurt to remind students that Darwinism does not explain the origin of life, just the "origin of species." Darwin assumed that God made life, and then presumably withdrew from the scene; and then Darwin stepped in and explained "what happened to it" thereafter.
Maybe not all students (or their parents) would appreciate the question of the origin of life. Essentially, this seems to me a spiritual question that doesn't belong in science class. But we must recognize the question/problem is there all the same; and I'll tell you, when I was 15 or so, I was vitally interested in that question [still am!]....
But what would it hurt to acknowledge the obvious -- that life in the universe had an origin, a beginning? And that Darwinism doesn't deal with this question?
Well, FWIW. Lunch hour's over; must get back to work. Thanks for writing, js1138!
Thanks you for presenting von Sternberg's side of the controversy. We certainly have two very different accounts of this imbroglio.
Neither of us knows the truth of the situation. At this point, taking sides is going to be based on one's pre-conceived notions. For my part, based on considerable experience in these threads, I can't help but mention that creationists don't have a great track record for intellectual integrity (quotes out of context, denial that evidence exists, bizarre accusations about Hitler, Stalin, etc.). That said, I concede the possibility that von Sternberg may have acted in good faith. I just don't know.
It's certainly true, however, that the Meyer paper was a wild departure from the usual fare for that publication. That much we all can agree on. Beyond that, we'll have to wait for the facts to shake out. If they ever do.
Care to point them out?
Thank you for responding. I do not consider my request so much a challenge as an attempt to find whatever common ground there is.
The people supporting the teaching of the ID hypothesis in biology classes cover such a wide spectrum -- from young earth creationists, through people who accept all of mainstream biology except stochastic variation.
There are people on these threads who argue that ID is science and that the earth is not much older than ten thousand years. This broad-spectrum sciencide is not something I will allow, without protest, to be taught in science classes.
If ID is going to be taught as science, it has to stand for an organized body of knowledge, and an organized set of methods and procedures for acquiring and testing knowledge.
If ID simply stands for the assertion that science doesn't know everything, then I can agree to that. It would be great for young students to know that there are unsolved problems as exciting as those that faced Galileo and Newton and Einstein.
I suspect, however, that some ID proponents aren't interested in motivating kids to study the great unsolved problems. They seem to be interested in reinstating discredited methodologies, abandoning hard-won principles like the double-blind experiment. I really have trouble separating the statements of ID from the statements of New Age science.
So I would be really excited by a statement from knowledgeable ID proponents outlining what they would teach as the content of science classes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.