Posted on 12/05/2005 4:06:56 AM PST by PatrickHenry
"But you just happen to know a large selection of standard creationist mantras yet appear blithely unaware of the equally stock mainstream science refutations"
And the science refutations are weak. BTW, my education is in physical science.
Yea, well, imagine away, that's what makes for good science fiction, however, before we blame the cambrian explosion on the rigelian lizard people, we should look into less surprising natural explanations, such as the lack of calcium saturation in sea water before the mountains heaved out of the water to be leached by erosion. No calcium, no bones or shells; no bones or shells, no great abundance of fossils.
Also, as I recall, either Watson or Crick believed that DNA did not evolve on Earth, but came from elsewhere
Watson, as I remember, who was willing to share quite a few um...speculative theories in his later years. There are a lot of avenues of potential explanation here on earth to exhaust before we can manage to look meaningfully outside earth for explanations.
Also, there's something fundamentally scientifically disfunctional about this--it doesn't really give much of a satisfactory answer, if true. We are still left wondering what the actual mechanisms that brought life to be are; panspermia is a more naturalistic explanation than the goddidit form of ID, but neither answer quells the curiosity bump to any great extent.
Contrary to the expectations of creationists, and the stealth creationists of ID, if ID turns out to hold scientific water, it isn't much more than a small detour for evolutionary theory, and we've had plenty of those already, and evolutionary theory survived them all. There are vividly tangible, incredibly persuasive, massive mountains of highly detailed evidence of the slow grinding process of evolution on biological populations, with a backlog of unexplained, tantalizing enigmas that curious biologists in droves become so enamored with as to dedicate their lives to persuing--and just about none of them will evaporate if ID becomes part of science. The ID game isn't remotely worth the prize its proponents are hoping for, even if they win.
So...I guess I have a piece of advice. I think you should abandon your implied argument that it is lack of imagination that makes scientists uninterested in ID. That's kind of rude, and such is not the case. Because it is an idea inherently lacking in detailed support, ID is shallow comic book brainfood: It lacks the imaginative understructure that makes ideas become satisfying grist for the center stone of the scientific mill. It is a sideshow whose outcome isn't very important to the scientific discussion, regardless of outcome.
(1) the cilium, (2) the bacterial flagellum with filament, hook and motor embedded in the membranes and cell wall and (3) the biochemistry of blood clotting in humans....Each of which which has been debunked. I guess honesty only goes so far in ID-land.
Well, if it has been debunked then you can't say it's unfalsifiable, can you?
Please point to any scientific article which delineates the actual, not hypthetical, merely conceivable, or logically possible, but ontologically possible, confirmed by experimental evidence, origin of the bacterial flagellum by purely Darwinian means, i.e., by numerous, successive, slight modifications.
Cordially,
No significant number of natural scientists agree with you. The vast majority of scientists, including physical scientists, when asked, will tell you that the best vetted, best supported by experiment and field study, most reliable theory in the natural sciences, at present, is evolutionary theory.
BTW, my education is in physical science.
...and so if follows, I presume, that you don't have a particularly educated opinion about the details of the arguments in favor of evolutionary theory.
Doing so wouldn't falsify ID. It would just falsify a particular claim made be some ID proponents, which is that the BF could not have evolved.
Why do you set the bar so high for this particular disproof? Why is a hypothetical path not sufficient to disprove the notion, since the essential contention of Behe is that no hypothetical path exists.
Why don't you post here the ways in which the scientific refutions of your assorted stock creationist claims are weak. Rather than just starting with the stock claims as if the refutations don't exist. Then we can discuss whether you are right or misunderstanding something.
I smell fish.
Because that's the game. If you can't reproduce it molecule for molecule in a lab experiment, it's ID. If you can reproduce it in a lab experiment, it was through an experiment designed by human intelligence, and therefore an example of ID. Everything is a proof of ID!
You have unwittingly described why ID is not falsifiable. It starts with the premise that there is no possible path to the flagellum by small steps. When a possible path is presented, suddenly the criterion is: no speculation; show us the actual path.
When the flagellum was first proposed as irreducible, it was found to be have subcomponents that actually exist in living bacteria. When this was pointed out, ID advocates came up with other excuses. The gaps are getting smaller, along with the god people insist on finding in them.
Please explain the notion of "mental defect" from an atheistic evolutionary perspective. The implication of dysfunction presumably entails that there is something 'wrong' with the noetic functioning, or that it is not functioning as it 'ought' to function. But the idea of something not functioning as it ought to function is only coherent if that something was designed for some purpose. Evolution, whether of brains or anything else is not by design; it knows nothing of "ought". So how then do you account for your notion of mental dysfunction or defect?
Cordially,
Darwin recognized the gaping hole in his theory - the absence of an earth teaming with transitional fossils. Gould and Dawkins admitted as much in my earlier post from last night.
Behe is a molecular biologist and sees everything from this prism. He has done a terrific job demonstrating the irreducible complexity at the molecular level. He doesn't explore the paleontological evidence which evolution lacks.
"shouting him down" was a metaphor. The number of scientists who disagree with evolution is a tiny fraction of the scientists in the world. The number of practicing biologists who disagree with the theory of evolution is a fraction of the tiny fraction. Kooks can be found to support any nonsense; 99% consensus rather than 100% consensus hardly indicates weakness of biology's unifying theory.
Just off the top of my head:
Anything from "Silent Spring" except the page numbers.
The next ice age is upon us (my favorite from 1975).
Second hand smoke will kill you at 20 paces.
Alar will kill you even if you just look at it.
Salt doesn't cause high blood pressure.
Global warming is caused by humans.
Global warming is causing an ice age.
Global warming causes more storms.
I'd be willing to be proved wrong on any of the above but from everything I've read on any of the above the "facts" were generated to fit the agenda. I didn't hear anyone in the scientific community say bravo sierra or, actually some did, they were just very few and far between and certainly a minority.
Perhaps you know a better class of scientists; all those I know are so worried about funding and being accepted by their peers (humm, the SCOTUS model comes to mind) that they wouldn't open their mouth if their peers decided the world was flat.
"Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever."
--Robert Nozick
"During the 1880s, Charles Peirce began to develop a system of 'scientific metaphysics', an evolutionary cosmology that explains the evolution to a law-governed external world from a state of pure possibility. This appeals to his 'tychism', the view that there is absolute chance, and provides a defence of his realism."
--Oxford Scholarship Online
Which must be why he doesn't find any significant support within science, even within his own university. Others have demonstrated that the BF is not IC at all as Behe originally defined IC. The IDists don't even seem to be able to provide a clear explanation of what IC or Specified Complexity is, let alone be able to explain how they know it when they see it.
He doesn't explore the paleontological evidence which evolution lacks.
I'm not quite clear. Do you agree with Behe's conclusions about evolution, common descent, and the age of the earth or not. Be aware, much of the most powerful smoking-gun evidence recently discovered that shows evolution to be true is molecular, and well within Behe's field of comprehension.
Perhaps what FR needs is a kill file feature (grin).
I wish you well my FRiend and patience for both of us as I can use my share as well.
Perhaps you are joking. Neither of those things sound like anything to do with the theory of evolution, and neither of them sound like something that would be taught to high-schoolers.
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