Posted on 08/28/2005 2:14:36 PM PDT by AZLiberty
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Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That's strange. You just blew the case for all the creos that keep posting (without proof) that it is being taught as fact. May I link to your post the next time a creo says that?
Dear Mr Theunissen,Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."
I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.
That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.
I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.
Yours Sincerely,
[signed]
Colin Patterson
Source http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html
do you have a source for your exact quote other than a creationist website? They're somewhat less than reliable when it comes to quotes.
Dan Dennett is an authoritative source, on many things.
I agree, but here in Alaska they're going backward, inserting evolutionary dogma in the public schools. Maybe that is why there is such a large number of homeschoolers here.
Hmmm. It is the creationists that keep repeating this strawman argument as their wedge issue.
Well done. Darwin Central has noted your accomplishment.
Zero evidence. None nada zip.
Anyway, it was typical of Wald to "throw" things into people's faces to get a reaction. And this would be typical of him, if he actually said it. I cannot find it at any of the authentic Wald sites, but it certainly sounds like something he would say.
OTOH, the experiments of Pasteur did indeed "disprove" spontaneous generation, in the limited scale they were designed (it was actually a proof for the existence of microorganisms, not a disproof of spontaneous generation). We all know the almost impossibility of proving a negative and this goes for Louis too, much as I revere him as one of the Fathers of my science. His experiments on spontaneous generation do not negate the possibility of abiogenesis in the prebiotic Earth.
And, besides, we all know the mantra - abiogenesis is NOT a part of the TOE.
I hope you don't own a cat.
I hope you don't own a cat.
Thank you finding that. I had looked a few days ago when it began cropping up and couldn't find it. I assumed that , at the least, it was out of context or (intentionally?) misquoted and that appears to be the case. It's the kind of thing he would say conversationally, but not in print.
His biology was pretty damn good - his politics sucked.
Maybe there's so many homeschoolers in AK because there are roads there that go anywhere.
Not really. They present evolution itself as fact throughout much of the book. Its when they attempt to explain how the eye evolved or how the sexes evolved or macro evolution that they dance, bob and weave and have to include "may explain's" and "could's" etc because they have so little convincing evidence to work with. But I will give them some credit for showing some humility here and there.
It appears that the textbook writers are now finally being forced to defend macro evolution. ID'ers and Creationists must be making some headway in getting the evo's to defend their theories and concepts. That's a good thing for everybody.
Here are some more excerpts from my son's College Biology textbook.
"Preface - Unit Four: Mechanisms of Evolution: As the central theme of Biology, evolution unifies the entire book...
Chapter 22: A Darwinian View of life now includes HIV as a case study of natural selection in action....
Unit Five: the evolutionary History of Biological Diversity...."
HIV is a case study of natural selection? LOL! I also noticed they throw in the words diversity and unity quite a bit in this textbook. They like those words. And of course AIDS/HIV has to be mentioned. I'll look and see if they tie in global warming somehow.
Nonsense. I cited Richard Dawkins, who is no creationist.
One quote from one man does not make your case.
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