AAAS Board Resolution Urges Opposition to "Intelligent Design" Theory in U.S. Science Classes

What do you mean? Are you proposing some kind of constraint on scientific inquiry? How do you obtain knowledge of such constraint?

God is always going to be bigger than nature.,/p>

That may very well be the case, but how do you prove that God even exists? I know this is a recurring question, but the point seems to be lost on those in favor of ID.

Is naturalism to be conceived free from the constraints of anything that is not naturalism?

This remark speaks incisively to the quintessence of the discussion. I have observed numerous times myself that what calls itself "science" today has quite forgotten its history; it has quite forgotten that it is only a twig on a larger branch of thought called natural philosophy. Nobody has ever answered back to that observation. Nobody. Because the Emperor is shown that without being furnished clothes, the only thing he can be is naked.

How are you going to prove there is not a God-or-designer? We cannot literally hurl various random universes into being to empirically test how likely it is that one will cook up some life, but reason shows that such an occurrence requires quite a bit (understatement) of tuning, and that to perform this feat even our own universe would need a good deal of shepherding after it came into being. It is the faith of autonomous God-doesn't-matter naturalism which bucks this.

I recall, but not exactly where, the chair of the theology department of a leading university was quoted as saying that when they need an opponent for a debate, they have to go to the philosophy department. The astronomy department is of little use.

"...reason shows that such an occurrence requires quite a bit (understatement) of tuning, and that to perform this feat even our own universe would need a good deal of shepherding after it came into being. It is the faith of autonomous God-doesn't-matter naturalism which bucks this."

I don't know whether there is a God or not. What I do know is that we have a lot of evidence which suggests the Universe is very old, that more complex forms of life arose from less complex forms of life, etc. The purpose of my research and the research of so many others is to understand the mechanisms of life and the Universe as we know them. And while some scientists would dearly love to disprove the existence of God, this is not the goal of most researchers that I know. We simply what to understand how things work, not to pass judgement on the validity of philisophical viewpoints.

"The astronomy department is of little use."

Is your point that scientists are somehow inferior to theologians and philosophers?

Santorini has a good claim to be the physical source of the Atlantis legend.

I change nothing.

Sure you did. In post 425 you state:

If he anywhere cites the once-condemned AMNH as being a good example, please show it.

You then realize I've been doing that all along. You eventually point to post 291 in another thread. And that very post, which you claim I didn't understand, supports exactly what I've been saying all along. So in a post you claim I didn't understand, it was actually you who didn't comprehend the post. Then you changed your acceptable criteria.

Show me Eldredge praising the exhibit. "The horse is a good example" doesn't get you there.

I see. Are you always in the habit of telling others what they can and cannot use for evidence? Context is the guide to use, not what you care to allow.

His using Hyracotherium, Mesohippus, whatever as props for his talk doesn't help you either. Every specimen in that display (each one a near-perfect skeleton, IIRC) is still good evidence. (Do you even understand, or will you admit to understanding, that the exhibit may present a misleading picture but all the specimens making it up are valid?)

I certainly understand context. I also understand Evolutionary Logic and you're trying to change the subject. Of course individual specimens can be valid with a misleading overall picture. But that, VR, is not the issue. You either realize this and are desperately trying to change your acceptable criteria, once again, or you just don't understand the problem. From what I've seen here today I'd say it's the former.

I'm not arguing and have never argued that the horse fossil exhibit was lined up out of order. Eldredge did call the exhibit deplorable, speculative and imaginary, then says it's good evidence for evolution, not once talking about the problem with the linear exhibit and not once did he mention tree or bush like evolution of the horse. If you want to argue otherwise, use the transcripts from the interview. Oh that's right, you've never seen the transcripts.

I did not catch that he was using the exhibit items on TV, no.

It really helps to slow down and read what you're telling others they didn't understand, doesn't it. The irony meter blew so loud Saddam thought we dropped a daisy cutter.

I do catch that he continues as of 1995 to make both of the statements I recognize as true and non-contradictory, which sort of makes me think my interpretation of what he says is correct here.

C'mon, VR, you're getting there.

Furthermore, you can't cite Eldredge as an authority when you want to while calling him a lair every time you don't like what he tells you.

That's just more Evolutionary Logic. You're trying, desperately I might add, to paint an untrue picture. Trying to sway the jury so to speak. What I do is stick to the context. You may find that rather inconvenient, and I can understand that to a point, but sheesh, dude, you need to realize admitting something like this doesn't make your whole world come crashing down. Or is that your problem?

[science] has quite forgotten that it is only a twig on a larger branch of thought called natural philosophy.

But in comparison to all the other branches it is the only one that has produced reliable knowledge of nature. It continues to do so. Perhaps someday it will run out of steam or be surpassed by a more productive method, but that time is not now and theology (of which ID is a branch) is not it.

I have only read this thread, and have not followed up on the reference links provided. I'm busy with other things right now, and want to make sure I'm following this correctly. Based on this thread only, then, I understand Eldredge's two "conflicting" statements to be these (not necessarily in order):

1) The horse is a good example of evolution.
2) The AMNH's exhibit is poor representation of horse evolution.

Do I have the basics down?

I believe you have the basics down.

Yes, though he said 2) first to Sunderland, then a few years later said 1) on ABC.

Did you miss post 290? Did you realize that in Jenny's post Eldredge admits to using the horse exhibit when he was on TV? The same exhibit he called deplorable, speculative and imaginary?
Are you finally going to admit Eldredge contradicts himself? I mean, c'mon, VR, the post you referenced supports the contradiction.

Look, Scripter, Eldredge said in 1995 that, even though the AMNH display ca. 1982 was lacking, the progression in horse size & number of toes & etc. is real:

The museum's old display (recently revamped) included four near-perfect skeletons arranged in order of geological occurrence, from Eocene to the present. The changes are strikingly apparent. At the height of the creationist controversy in the early 1980s, I went on TV, using the horses as a backdrop to show the truth of the general evolutionary assertion that organisms indeed do change through time. Creationists, in turn, used the horses to depict how nefarious evolutionists can be. They charged, completely falsely, that we evolutionists had lined up the fossil horses to demonstrate evolutionary change, without regard to their proper placement in geological time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those horses were lined up in the exact order of geological sequence in which they were discovered.
But trends are indeed a tricky subject. George Gaylord Simpson spent a considerable segment of his career on horse evolution. His overall conclusion: Horse evolution was by no means the simple, linear and straightforward affair it was made out to be. Yes, those fossils on display reflect the true position of four species in geological time. But horse evolution did not proceed in one single series, from step A to step B and so forth, culminating in modern, single-toed large horses. Horse evolution, to Simpson, seemed much more bushy, with lots of species alive at any one time–species that differed quite a bit from one another, and which had variable numbers of toes, size of teeth, and so forth.
In other words, it is easy, and all too tempting, to survey the fossil history of a group and select examples that seem best to exemplify linear change through time. The net evolutionary change, after all, is real. But picking out just those species that exemplify intermediate stages along a trend, while ignoring all other species that don't seem to fit in as well, is something else again. The picture is distorted. The actual evolutionary pattern isn't fully represented.
It is easy to see how a penchant for simplistic linear renderings of real examples of evolutionary change originated. It is the very essence of Darwinian extrapolationism to imagine that long-term trends are simply shorter term, within-species examples of linear, selection mediated trends. Put more positively, there is a seamless connection between short-term microevolutionary change projected up through geological time to embrace tens of millions of years of (purportedly) directional evolutionary change.
The evolutionary change in all these examples is real, and it is directional: net increase in size, net decrease in number of toes in horse evolution. Perhaps an even more gripping example comes from human evolution. Four million years ago, early hominid brains averaged something like 450 cubic centimeters (milliliters). Our own brains average out at some 1,400 cubic centimeters. Samples drawn from intermediate strata throughout the past four million years are themselves pretty much intermediate, if we ignore some of the side branches whose brain sizes fall off the nice neat line of gradual increase through time.
But if the trends are not exactly linear, they are nonetheless real. There is net direction in many evolutionary lineages. Trends are indeed real, however simplified to fit a single linear picture they may have been rendered. And that was a real challenge to us as we developed our ideas on punctuated equilibria.
Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin (1995), pp. 129-132

Here's Sunderland's transcript of Eldredge's ABC interview again:

Ahh, the horse is a good example. Here's an effectively modern horse which is a million years old, but we can all recognize it as a horse. And as we go deeper in lower layers or rock, back further in time, we excavate successively more primitive horses. Here's one that is two million years old. They are becoming less and less obviously horselike till we get back 60 million years agao, and here is the ancestor of the horse which doesn't really look much like a horse. And the really interesting thing about this is that it is also the ancestor of the rhinoceros - or very close to the ancestor of the rhinoceros. So when the creationists tell us we have no intermediates between major groups, we point to a creature like the dawn horse and say, 'Here we have 60 million years ago an exact intermediate between the horses and the rhinos.

The trends are real, and the fossil horses he was referring to in his ABC interview were real. The progressions they represent are real. He was referring to horse fossils & the earlier & earlier geological strata in which they were found. They likewise are real.

He quite simply was not contradicting himself.

Look, Scripter, Eldredge said in 1995 that, even though the AMNH display ca. 1982 was lacking

He didn't just say it was lacking back in 1979, he said it was deplorable, particularly speculative and an imaginary story. That's a very strong condemnation of the exhibit. Yet that same exhibit was used as a backdrop for a TV interview and claimed to be "good evidence" for evolution two years later. Please demonstrate where Eldredge mentioned bush or tree like evolution of the horse in the 1981 interview.

He quite simply was not contradicting himself.

Of course I disagree due to the context of the original sources which you've never seen. I don't care who you are, nobody can successfully change the context of something previously said. You can try, but original sources are key to the original context. I can't help but wonder about anybody who continues to throw in context from a different source so many years after the fact. It appears some folks don't understand the concept of context.

Speaking of context, here (again) is the Eldredge quote from the 1981 ABC interview that you typed in, where he talks about the 1 million year old fossil, the 2 million year old fossil, and the 60 million year old fossil and how the older you go, the less like modern horses they look like and the more they look like the common ancestor with rhinos (emphasis mine):

Ahh, the horse is a good example. Here's an effectively modern horse which is a million years old, but we can all recognize it as a horse. And as we go deeper in lower layers or rock, back further in time, we excavate successively more primitive horses. Here's one that is two million years old. They are becoming less and less obviously horselike till we get back 60 million years agao, and here is the ancestor of the horse which doesn't really look much like a horse. And the really interesting thing about this is that it is also the ancestor of the rhinoceros - or very close to the ancestor of the rhinoceros. So when the creationists tell us we have no intermediates between major groups, we point to a creature like the dawn horse and say, 'Here we have 60 million years ago an exact intermediate between the horses and the rhinos.

As he consistently says in his 1995 book, "the trends are real".

There's another problem with embedding a message in DNA: A good coding system should not have a dual purpose, otherwise you can't express ideas without hurting the code snippet's second purpose. If you had to pay $.01 every time you used the letter "d" and $.006 for every "e", and were paid $.002 for every "k", you't int up changing the way you spell things, & mayby you't even invent new kuwl worts too.

So the coding sequences aren't good candidates for holding the hidden message. But the non-coding sequences aren't good either. (Such as the silent 3rd letter of each coding triplet.) These letters mutate more rapidly than coding letters, because they never get selected out of the genome. This of course destroys their utility for storing the message over deep time.

Where else would the message be stored?

I knew a guy (plant fossil expert) who had drawn family trees of fossil plants on both sides of the South Atlantic. He did his work in the early 1950s before plate techtonics was a well-established theory.

I think it's the same with New World and Old World monkeys, and several other species as well. Funny how it all fits together -- geology, plate tectonics, and evolution too. (Or maybe Noah steered a strange course while dropping all those critters off.)

I have every idea of what I'm talking about. Either critters evolved to their current form or they were specially created in situ. If they evolved, the fossil record gives an indication of what transpired. If they were specially created, the fossil record has absolutely no bearing on anything we see around us -- indeed, any realtionship between two different species -- of mice, for instance -- is purely superficial and figment of researchers' imaginations. You can have it one way or you can have it the other, but you can't have it both ways.

That's the basics. The problem is, that's also about all there is for all this huffing and puffing. Scripter has uncovered that Eldredge at least once, as curator of AMNH, pointed to the "poor representation" exhibit at AMNH and said "The horse is a good example."