Posted on 11/16/2005 9:57:35 AM PST by Junior
Interesting. Do IDers feel not threatened by bird flu and Darwinists do? Is there a political breakdown comparing opinions of Left versus Right on the possible epidemic?
If the fittest only survive, how do you explain France? :)
Thank you for your post, have you read Zecharia Sitchins
"The 12th Planet"? it cover this questian fairly well
That's simply untrue. One can believe absolutely every principle that science has discovered to date, while still believing that the world was set in motion entire on May 5, 1972. The origin of species is not primarily a scientific question; it is a historical question. It is completely orthogonal to any other scientific issue.
This is why ID advocates like Behe and Denton do not try to deny the historical fact of evolution and the historical fact of common descent.
So you confess it's an historical question. That's enough to defeat your assertion that one must either believe evolution or else be condemned to an ad-hoc, piecemeal understanding of biology.
If the leading critics of Darwinism cannot find a scientifically defensible refutation of evolution, then it ain't available.
Perhaps, but thta's a separate question. I said a person can be a biologist without actually believing evolution. I didn't say that evolution is or isn't true.
That would be Last Thursdayism, an irrefutable position that is the king and queen of ad hoc theorizing.
It makes no difference. If you believe a tree was created last Thursday, it still has tree rings, and the tree rings are explained by a history -- even if the history was created last Thursday. Evolution describes a history and natural selection describes the mechanism behind that history, even it it was all created last Thursday.
Thanks for the ping!
You're absolutely correct. But is there any way to test this hypothesis? If not, it doesn't meet an essential criterion of science.
Whether or not one accepts evolution & natural history shouldn't have to affect one's recognition that they are useful in describing natural phenomena - and hence legitimate science.
And what does that heve to do with Evolution?
If you know enough biology to be a competent medical or scientific researcher in a biomedical field, and you don't consider ToE to be the only reasonable current explanation for how the living world got to be the way it is, I'd question your scientific acumen.
But that doesn't answer the question. I know you believe the sun rises and sets (ok - I know it doesn't actually - just a figure of speech) with Darwin but what difference would it make in real life?
So if you don't believe in evolution, it's impossible to develop a vaccine against bird flu? How so?
But without evolution (or some overarching theory that works as well), biology is just stamp collecting, or memorizing recipes from a cookbook. Sure, some people can thrive in their jobs with that simplistic level of understanding, but you can't seriously believe that biology (or medicine for that matter) could have grown as it has without the overarching theory to guide the researchers.
Heck, just look at animal testing: If evolution weren't true, then we couldn't rely on animal testing for anything. Every similarity of one species to another is either convergent evolution, or dumb luck, or a design decision by the inscrutable Designer. Either way that makes all testing - or any basic research - on animals useless.
Let's look at some real life examples. Scott Minnich is an IDer, does research on microbial motility, and yet publishes papers which report that some parts of the bacterial flagellum can be deleted without totally destroying flagellar function. If he really believed the flagellum were irreducibly complex, he would face a serious contradiction with his experimental results. He seems to resolve the contradiction by publishing the result, and ignoring the conflict with ID - which makes him a good experimental scientist, but a man whose theoretical underpinnings directly contradict his research results. He seems to ignore the cognitive dissonance.
In a related field, Baumgardner is a young-earth creationist. Yet his big research achievement is a program that models plate motion. This model is essentially irrelevant if you're a YECcer, since there just hasn't been time for the plates to move. And in fact, Baumgardner publishes papers which, in examining plate motion over hundreds of millions of years, directly contradict his own beliefs.
Behe is the one guy who doesn't seem to have adopted this cognitively dissonant stance; on the other hand, his productivity has been near zero, and the one paper he's published recently that has been anti-evolution/pro-ID has been shot to pieces.
So there seem to be two modes of operation for scientists who reject evolution while working in a field that evolution impacts; either simply ignore the contradiction, or stop doing research.
No it isn't. Because you can't understand how or why retroviruses behave the way they do unless you're looking at them from an evolutionary perspective.
No, but anyone competent enough in biology to contribute significantly to developing such a vaccine would most likely realize that all known relevant evidence points to evolution.
Perhaps but it's as good as anything else they have to offer.
No, all ID really does is write the words "And then a miracle happened" in the gaps without making even a modest effort to present anything descriptive or testable about the presumed miracle.
Research is fine if they can get the grants.
Forget medical practice, though, unless we want more Baby Fae episodes.
Absolutely true--but absolutely irrelevant to the question of studying avian flu. It's relevant to studying natural history, but not the flu.
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