Thanks for your reply and I want to congratulate you on avoiding the kind of snottiness that always comes out the nose of Right_Wing_Prof, who, I suspect, is really a Left_Wing_Prof in masquerade. Incidentally, I'm into blue today.
He [Darwin] discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics—the laws according to which things “just happen”—could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design.
Not true. Darwin hypothesized that the laws of physics could lead to the great variety of living forms in the fullness of "geologic" time. He did not discover that they "could" or "did".
You're quibbling. Darwin did discover a way for the diversity and the appearance of design of organisms to arise out of the workings of physical laws. Whether it's the correct way or the only way, it's a way. The fact that it was a discovery is attested by the forehead-smacking moment experienced by Huxley.
I disagree. Darwin did not make such a discovery. Dawkins speaks as though Darwin came up with a model and demonstrated that from it within a certain period of time measured in the low billions of years, life could have evolved as it has. Darwin did not do that at all. He had no grasp of how long it would take life to evolve by random variation and natural selection, precisely because he had no model. He had an idea of how life might have evolved. We are still waiting for the model that would render it plausible. For quantum mechanics, we have a model, the Schroedinger equation. For General Relativity, we have the field equations. Now, I don't expect a similarly simple and, so far as we know, perfectly accurate mathematical description for evolution, but I suspect something more than something like "it must be, because we can't think of anything else". There is a very real problem of demonstrating that the kinds of changes that have occurred could really have occurred in the time in which they took place based on the laws of physics alone.
The breathtaking power and reach of Darwin’s idea—extensively documented in the field, as Jonathan Weiner reports in “Evolution in Action”—is matched by its audacious simplicity. You can write it out in a phrase: nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions for building embryos.
And still no one has shown this can lead to life as we know it in "geologic" time.
That's an open problem, being worked on as we write by many researchers around the world. I feel confident in saying that almost all of these researchers are working on the problem from within the framework of (some version of) evolutionary theory.
Yes, and that is a very, very important issue. It is at the root of the uneasiness many of those who support intelligent design have about Darwinianism.
What the Darwinians are saying is the universe is closed under the laws of physics, about as we know them, and that our philosophical framework which says everything must happen by law or pure randomness is correct. Maybe that's the wrong philosophical framework. Maybe that's why they can't come up with a model.
True design, the kind we see in a knapped flint, a jet plane, or a personal computer, turns out to be a manifestation of an entity—the human brain—that itself was never designed, but is an evolved product of Darwin’s mill.
But, then, "true" design is also not by design, hence, not true. Is this a contradiction?
You seem to be trying to argue that if the human brain was not designed and the human brain designs a jet plane, then the jet plane was not really designed. This argument is fallacious, of course; the properties of 'being designed' or 'not being designed' are not transitive.
If you believe that what we are follows from physics by law and chance alone, why would you believe that what we do does not also do so? The argument is not fallacious. If you are admitting a shortcoming in your philosophy by accepting that what humans do is not just molecules bouncing around in their partly lawful, partly random way, then you have identified an x-factor (let's call it) that has something to do with what happens that is not by law and chance alone.
If a human can design a jet, he can design his life, by, for example, exercising his judgment about where he goes and whom he mates with. Such design affects evolution in an obvious way. Moreover, it is obviously intelligent.
Paradoxically, the extreme simplicity of what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called Darwin’s dangerous idea may be its greatest barrier to acceptance.
Dennett is the kook who thinks that not only do you not exist, neither do your thoughts.
Ad hominem alert.
It's a comment on Dennett, which expresses, pithily, the attitude of many philosophers toward Dennett, though they are too polite to call him a kook. Dennett's position on consciousness (as the term is ordinarily used in philosophy), that it does not exist, is at the heart of what's wrong with ascribing evolution to law and chance alone.
The arguments of creationists, including those creationists who cloak their pretensions under the politically devious phrase “intelligent-design theory,” repeatedly return to the same big fallacy. Such-and-such looks designed. Therefore it was designed.
This is painting with a very broad brush indeed. More accurately: some who reject the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of evolution have argued that living structures of the complexity existing could not have evolved in "geologic" time by random variation and natural selection
Michael Behe began his recent New York Times Op-Ed piece on Intelligent Design by making remarks of the type that Dawkins mentions. Furthermore, IDists who desire to be taken seriously as empirical scientists are going to have to do a lot more than argue that complex living structures couldn't have evolved in the manner described by evolutionary theory; they're going to have to present an alternative account that stands up to critical scrutiny while accounting for all of the phenomena that evolution accounts for. "Well, God did it" won't hack it.
Michael Behe is one guy IMHO. The key difference between the ID people and the Darwinians is that the former think that law and chance alone cannot explain evolution and the latter think they can. You cannot expect those that don't believe a model can explain evolution to come up with a model. There program is necessarily a negative one of trying to convince others that their must be some additional x-factor operating that has not been modeled. Darwinian theory doesn't account for anything, because they don't have a model.
If, as the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle mistakenly thought, the spontaneous origin of life is as improbable as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and having the luck to assemble a Boeing 747, then a divine designer is the ultimate Boeing 747. The designer’s spontaneous origin ex nihilo would have to be even more improbable than the most complex of his alleged creations.
Unless He has always been around. Then, you don't need an explanation of where He came from.
Correct, but then you're also not doing science at that point.
You got it! The IDers think that something is going on that science can't explain. Some of them attribute this to God, although I would not claim that they all do so.
"intelligent-design bullyboys"No propaganda here! Just rational argument!
Descriptive terminology. Some IDists have decided that what biologists teach ought to be decided by politicians and courts rather than by the biologists themselves. Those are bullyboy tactics.
Biologists should not be teaching Darwinianism as fact, but as a theory without a model. If you were a principal, would you allow a physics teacher in your high school to teach that gravity doesn't exist? Would that make you a bullyboy?
The equivalent gaps for any creationist or intelligent-design theory would be the absence of a cinematic record of God’s every move on the morning that he created, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor. Not only is there no such divine videotape: there is a complete absence of evidence of any kind for intelligent design.
The absence of a testable model for Darwinian evolution is evidence for intelligent design. The essence of intelligent design seems to be that the Darwinians have no model for how life could have evolved by random variation and natural selection. What does that leave?
"If evolutionary theorists can't right this minute explain fully and to my satisfaction how life evolved by random variation and natural selection, Intelligent Design must be true." This is what passes for an argument in your household, wotan?
There is nothing fallacious about it once you recognize that what ID is basically saying is that there is no model for how life evolved. Until there is, Darwinian theory is just, well, not really even a theory. It's an idea looking for clarification. Also, I don't demand that the explanation be complete, only that there be a plausible model, not just a lot of "well, it could have happened this way within the required time frame, we think".
“Tell children they are nothing more than animals and they will behave like animals.” I do not for a moment accept that the conclusion follows from the premise.
It's just a coincidence that children, after 150 years of Darwinism, are now behaving much more like animals.
Humans have been doing awful things to other humans since time immemorial. And as for today's kids, some are well-behaved, some are not, just like always.
I believe people are behaving in a much more amoral manner than previously in this country. Where do you think all the liberals come from?
Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism.
Does the following from Mein Kampf sound more like it came from a Catholic or a Darwinian?
"The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind everything in the ruck that is weak or diseased or wavering, while the fight of the male for the female gives the strongest the right, or at least the possibility, for the propagation of its kind."
At any time in history, a Hitler would've found some sort of specious justification for the monstrous crimes he intended to commit.
The justification he found, however, sounds sort of Darwinian. Hitler goes on to explain how this improves the species, incidentally. It's difficult to imagine a Western politician making such a public argument prior to Darwin and Wallace (the curiously neglected man). And, what makes you think Hitler's outlook was not formed partly from the various intellectual offshoots of Darwinism?
... doctrines of racial superiority in no way follow from natural selection, properly understood. ... Nevertheless, a good case can be made that a society run on Darwinian lines would be a very disagreeable society in which to live.So, what is your point?
That's my question to you. Dawkins said what he thought. Do you disagree with what he said?
I was sort of pretending I didn't get why he said it. Actually, I do know why. He recognizes what everyone recognizes: once you accept that there's nothing going on but molecules bouncing around (so to speak) there are no moral constraints because you have no control over what happens. Jesus happened just because of molecules bounding around and Hitler happened just because of molecules bouncing around with no moral distinction between the two, because moral distinctions are just God-blather. People he likes don't like the idea of Hitler, so Dawkins wants to assure them of how noble and really opposed to life working the way he says it must. That it's a hopeless contradiction doesn't bother him, because that's how liberals are. All that matters is whether you can hide the contradictions under sufficient verbiage.
Huxley, George C. Williams, and other evolutionists have opposed Darwinism as a political and moral doctrine just as passionately as they have advocated its scientific truth. I count myself in that company.
Dawkins is opposed to physical law! What a mass of contradictions he is!
You don't help your case by ignoring the plain sense of what was written.
The problem is that you don't see the plain connection between the philosophy that underlies Darwinianism with the amorality that has become increasingly apparent throughout developed Western countries. If what we do is by law and chance alone, then how can there be any morality? If I can't be guilty for what I must do and I can't be guilty for the outcome of the celestial roulette wheel, then Hitler (or Stalin or Marx) can't be guilty either.
Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics.
And just what in the heck is a normative force, Mr. Dawkins? Is it a physical force or some other kind? If it's not physical in origin, how can you blithely ascribe everything that happens in evolution to physical forces?
Even if Dawkins were to concede that what he colloquially calls a 'normative force' isn't physical (which I don't think he would), it wouldn't follow that he shouldn't describe evolution as being the result of physical forces. Try some logic, wotan...you might like it!
It is you who is short on logic here. How can Dawkins oppose a physical law? Are you opposed to the law of gravitation? Lots of luck doing anything about it.
Evolution is a fact.
Yes, but the Darwinian Theory of Evolution is a theory.
You had us at the "Yes, but"...
I guess you disagree that the Darwinian Theory of evolution is a theory! That's surprising! Incidentally, I must admit I made a mistake here. The "Darwinian Theory" is not a theory, but a misnomer. It is, in fact, an idea in search of clarification, as I noted earlier.
blockquoted statements
are satisfactory.
Best regards...