Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Except with origin-of-species questions, the "search" has already yielded plenty of results; it's just how those results are interpreted that determines whether ID or Darwinism is the better way of accounting for them. SETI is not at that point yet. If SETI finds signals within the target frequency band, then it would be time to inquire as to whether those signals are natural or artificial, and that could very well involve the same types of questions that are currently engendered by the crevo debate.
What an asinine statement, given (for example) the massive amount of genomic information available, and the fact it completely supports evolution
Why is there so much tolerance of this wanton destruction of the reputation of the field of science? There was a time when a successful challenge of a scientific observation or conclusion was all it took to send everyone back to the labs. These days, if even 55% say "It sounds reasonable", then any attempt to debunk the results is shut down by the loud majority.
There has been no successful challenge of evolution, nor is there likely to be.
Go rant at someone else, will you? I'm tired of angry people whose anger is based on nothing more than ignorance and delusion.
Projection, Sir Professor?
As I said, go rant at someone else. In the unlikely event you find something originaL intelligent or witty to say, ping me. Otherwise, go howl at the moon.
There's always hope, LWP. Don't give up yet.
Man, those coyotes are loud tonight. Must be after the garbage.
Well I'm not mad at least not yet. I agree with TaxRelief that lots of the science in evolution is bunk, and one of the other posters here one your side just admitted that science is a 'closed shop'
So...your latest manipulative trick is to refuse to post to me, but instead, argue with me while posting to someone else. You're quite the little trickster.
You are absolutely right about science being a closed shop--it is only open to people who can and do read and publish in scientific journals, and the opinions of those who don't even try are not taken into any serious scientific account, unless they threaten scientists with bodily harm under color of law, as in Galileo's trial, or Bruno's burning.
ID and Darwinism are not at loggerheads, except in the overheated imaginations of strict creationist, as is the case with Odin-buried-the-giants-after-the-battle-of-the-horefrost-bridge theory of origins, and the natural panspermia theory. You can have an infinite number of theories to explain life's origins and major turnings, and when the evidence is only gaps in our understanding of the mundane naturalistic answer, all are equally valid, and equally entitled to claim a place at the scientific table. Doesn't that sound scientifically useful? Maybe we can conduct science like they did at the Nicene Council, and science-priests can have bloody pitched battles over questions framed like whether Jesus is of the essence or the substance of God.
SETI is not at that point yet. If SETI finds signals within the target frequency band, then it would be time to inquire as to whether those signals are natural or artificial, and that could very well involve the same types of questions that are currently engendered by the crevo debate.
SETI = "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence". This search is clearly not driven or funded or cared about, because it might produce a modulated narrow band carrier, with the implications of that discovery left entirely as an abstract exercise for later. That is clearly not remotely the case. Like the Michaelson-Morley experiment, it is a search targeted on validating an hypothesis which is, in fact, at loggerheads with the alternative hypothesis. And if I may say so, it seems rather silly to argue against the title of the scientific endeavor.
The search is for a specific, well defined phenomenon. What happens if they find it will depend on the details of the find, which are currently unknown.
You might get back to the point, which is the question, "What specific phenomenon is ID searching for?"
Obviously SETI researchers are "motivated" by the hope of finding an exterrestrial signal from another civilization. but motive is irrelevant in research. To search for something, you have to define what you are searching for, and SETI is looking for a narrow band signal. Oddly enough, in science, not finding what you are looking for is useful information, even when it is personally disappointing.
In the case of ID, there is no definition at all of the signal being searched for.
I'm having a hard time believing SETI's self-selected charter isn't broader than that, and pretty much encapsulated in it's name.
...the SETI Institute's Dr. Jill Tarter recently told Space.com that evidence of extraterrestrial activity might be present in our own solar system. "It's possible that there could be, in fact, within our solar system, some evidence of ET technology," said Dr. Tarter, the woman upon whom Jodie Foster's character in the movie "Contact" was largely based. "They may be here."
If its big goal was a modulated narrow band radio signal, I'd think they'd have called it Narrowband Extra-terrestrial Radio Deep Search.
Interestingly, mainstream SETI astronomers have
made no secret of their searches for "Bracewell
probes," theoretical automatic devices left by
visiting civilizations
Ok, I'll bite. Why is specificity of search a discriminating criteria as to whether something is a science or not? This seems like a puzzling argument to me: I'd have said, at first blush, that more powerful, abstract and generalized claims, are closer to being science than lab tinkering is.
Go back and read my last post. The motives and personal beliefs of scientists are unimportant to the product, as long as a rational methodology is employed.
I have nothing against SETI and nothing against the concept of ID. I do have something against ID advocates who ask for recognition before developing a rational research protocol.
The planetary probes are a separate issue from the radip astronomy search. I don't really understand biochemistry enough to comment on what is being done on planetary probes. I do follow them however, and I know that the results of the Viking probes are still not fully understood.
What this tells me is that you can't draw earth shaking conclusions from a single line of evidence. When you find something interesting you need to formulate hypoteheses about the cause, project expected data, and search for confirming or discomfirming evidence. If the hypothesis is out of the ordinary, it may take years or decades to build confidence in it.
Because you can find patterns in anything, even random bit streams. Patterns have no meaning unless they conform to a theory of causation. In other words, a picture of Mickey Mouse formed by cumulus clouds is not scientifically significant unless you have a theory that predicts its occurrence. After the fact prediction is not very compelling.
Science is about formulating productive hypotheses, guesses that conform to current knowledge and which predict evidence yet to be found. The exact nature of these predictions depends on the subject matter, but without prediction, it isn't science.
I am not really into the details of SETI, but I would assume SETI is based on a null prediction, namely that no known natural phenomenon produces a narrow band radio signal at the frequencies being monitored. Null predictions are pretty common in science.
The brainwashing has been going on for 75 years or so :-).
I don't understand why it should be so complicated. There are 4 or 5 books that an intelligent high-school student could read, and come to the conclusion that, "There is more than one reasonable interpretation of the observable scientific facts."
Once one accepts that the interpretation is driven by philosophy, not science, there not much ground for argument.
I'd suggest, contriwise, that without overweaning personal beliefs and motives,--and THEORIES. There'd hardly be any progress at all in science. The universe has a relatively infinite supply of data impinging on us all the time, all of which could be explained in an infinite number of ways. If experimentation wasn't directed by theories, we ought just as well look at the infinite supply of data to be had for free, instead of paying mega- bucks to chivvy it out from obscure corners of the universe.
as long as a rational methodology is employed.
Like, say, methodically looking for examples of unobtainable complexity, or gaps in fossil records in natural phenomenon?
I have nothing against SETI and nothing against the concept of ID.
I do. Not because I think either is wrong, but because I think both are highly likely to produce no useful experimental results in any timeframe I care about, and wasting terribly finite scientific resources in a world full of scientific problems with more potential bang for the buck, that presently are underfunded.
I do have something against ID advocates who ask for recognition before developing a rational research protocol.
Behe and Dembski aren't engaged in rational research? Their results may be flawed, but does that make them irrational? Were the scientists who accepted phrenology, fixsd continents, and the ether irrational? Or were they doing the best they could with what they had to look at, and the intellectual tools they were aware of?
The planetary probes are a separate issue from the radip astronomy search. I don't really understand biochemistry enough to comment on what is being done on planetary probes. I do follow them however, and I know that the results of the Viking probes are still not fully understood.
eh...? Just off hand, this doesn't seem responsive to what I wrote.
What this tells me is that you can't draw earth shaking conclusions from a single line of evidence. When you find something interesting you need to formulate hypoteheses about the cause, project expected data, and search for confirming or discomfirming evidence. If the hypothesis is out of the ordinary, it may take years or decades to build confidence in it.
So the new thesis is that longevity and variety of research makes ID not-science and SETI science? Now you're sneaking up on my thesis as to why SETI is a science and ID ain't.
Darned right. That's why we need to make sure students are aware of the healing crystal pyramid theory in physics, and the hollow earth theory in astronomy. Both of which have had thicker books with more diagrams published than is the case for ID.
A scientific hypothesis is a guess about future data points. ID is not even a guess. It doesn't have even the outline of a research plan. It doesn't offer anything in addition to the research that is already being done.
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