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Posted on 09/08/2005 1:33:48 PM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Five critiques of Intelligent Design
John Brockman's Edge.org site has published the following five critiques of Intelligent Design (the bracketed comments following each link are mine):
Marcelo Gleiser, "Who Designed the Designer?" [a brief op-ed piece]
Jerry Coyne, "The Case Against Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name" [a detailed critique of ID and its history, together with a summary defense of Darwinism]
Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne, "One Side Can Be Wrong" [why 'teaching both sides' is not reasonable when there's really only one side]
Scott Atran, "Unintelligent Design" [intentional causes were banished from science with good reason]
Daniel C. Dennett, "Show Me the Science" [ID is a hoax]
As Marcelo Gleiser suggests in his op-ed piece, the minds of ID extremists will be changed neither by evidence nor by argument, but IDists (as he calls them) aren't the target audience for critiques such as his. Rather, the target audience is the millions of ordinary citizens who may not know enough about empirical science (and evolution science in particular) to understand that IDists are peddling, not science, but rather something tarted up to look like it.
Let us not be deceived.
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as sophisticated eyes and scaled hides long preceeded the development of feathers, presumably so to did sophisticated color camouflage patterns.
I'm given to understand that evidence suggests that early "feathers" were scales with "fringed" edges.
these do not seem to me to be likely to have much thermal insulation value, but I tend to think the "blur" they'd create would have been useful in recognition-denial - a major enhancement of earlier camouflage schemes.
This is a great post!
I was finally able to get time to read the articles. They're short, easy to read without a lot of technical jargon, and address the issue in a straight-forward way.
Wonder if we'll see a rebuttal fron the Discovery Institute? Or if they'll create their own journal, as one of the authors suggests?
I call this "god" a "structural engineer".
Huh? A structural engineer keeps the electrons in each and every iron atom bonded together?
I learned something new today.
(sigh) Okay, ml1954.
...while there is random selection there is not random results.
Indeed. That's why Darwin realized that random variation needed to be supplemented with natural selection. The macro-environment 'decides' which random variations survive and which don't. But, again, there's a large element of chance in that, too, since otherwise very fit organisms occasionally have the bad luck to live at a time when, say, a 6-mile-wide asteroid hits their home planet. That sort of thing.
There are zillions of things that have to go just right from the macro the micro in order for creatures such as ourselves to even exist.
If 'zillions' means 'a whole lot' (grin), I agree completely.
But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order.
This I don't quite agree with. Randomness is not incompatible with order. The periodic table of the elements shows how beautifully ordered our cosmos is from the bottom up. There are these quite distinct steps from the simplest elements up to the most complicated stable elements and beyond, each step corresponding to the presence of one additional proton in the nucleus. That's order. And, yet, when radiation impinges on an element, it's impossible to predict with certainty whether an electron will jump up to a higher energy level and then jump back down, radiating a photon of energy in the process. The best that we can do is predict the probability of such a transition (using the rules of quantum mechanics, which have to this day never failed to work). From the lowest sub-atomic level that we currently have access to on up, randomness and order go hand-in-hand.
The mistake that many make, it seems to me, is believing that, without a conscious director, nature is incapable of producing order. This conflicts with my own view of the astonishing fecundity of the physical.
many often forget or fail to understand that order and disorder can be simply a matter of scale.
a large sample of "randomly" moving molecules produces a statistically predicatable order as an aggregate body.
large samples of such large samples - themselves orderly - can in the aggregate display "random" behavior and interaction.
Yes, good point about scaling.
awww CRAP.
I just realised that there is indeed reason to suspect a beginning event (or non-continuous/punctuated replenishment event) for the current cycle of the universe.
stellar hydrogen consumption and lack of continuous hydrogen replenishment matching that consumption provides an inescapable timeline.
damn.
also, bias of perspective.
a purely chaotic universe would be, if viewed externally, basically static and uniform (ie: orderly, if exceedingly boring)
ORGANIZATION of discrete structures within the universe actually is a form of DISorder, as it creates non-uniformity.
this goes hand in hand with my last post concerning hydrogen depletion.
Wonder if we'll see a rebuttal from the Discovery Institute?
No, they're too busy trying to convince politicians that thousands of the smartest people on the planet don't know what the hell they're talking about.
(sigh) Whatever.
Who knows whose slinky she's been playing with, or where it's been.
You gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em.
LOL. Let's just agree to disagree.
Every large random aggregate contains many small ordered aggrates.
I'll accept that as mathematically plausible.
"islands in a storm" basically
however, though their existence can be considered axiomatic, and may be statistically predictable as a proportion of the whole set, the locations, durations, and intensities of these individual ordered bits cannot be predicted.
I dunno why folks find the blend ind interpenetration of order and disorder so fundamentally offensive.
*shrugs*
Most people don't understant Stochastic® processes. They don't know what words like chance, random, chaos, stochastic, is, order, disorder, etc., actually mean.
well, I don't pretend that my competent grasp of math extends beyond trigonometry and algebra, but even so limited a mathematician as I am can recognise that randomness and order are not inherently antipodal or antagonistic.
Okay.
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