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

Section 10. Steganography of Dembski's speech states that second-order steganography would, in my view, provide confirmation for ID. For lurkers, he is speaking of an "operating manual" being encoded in organisms. He says Dense, multi-layered embedding of information is a prediction of ID.

This has already been found to a certain extent. The information in a single gene is reused in different ways to make different proteins. Sone genes can be made to [produce dozens of proteins.

That's not much more than the very criticisms we lay on ID ("there's no positive evidence for ID"),

There is positive evidence for ID - the impossibility of life arising from inert matter is one recognixed by scientists, the extremely well designed universe is also another evidence recognized by science, Behe's claim of the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum is also strong evidence for ID and it has not been refuted.

except that he spins them as opportunities for further research instead of criticisms of the theory.

What Dembski shows is that ID can be the basis of research. Whether people do the research or not is irrelevant as to whether the theory itself is correct. Anyways, the research is taking place regardless of what it is called because life is indeed intelligently designed and the findings of real scientists doing medical, biological and other research are showing the complexities of life. These ever deepening complexities show the interconnections of all functions of an organism, interconnections which cannot be altered either arbitrarily or randomly.

At lower levels of science education, the kids must learn the language and present evidence first.

But there is evidence against evolution. It is everywhere - from living species which have no possible evolutionary explanation to the tremendous gaps in the fossil record, to the inextricable complexities in the human organism. All these refute evolutionary theory and evolutionary predictions. What you and your fellow evolutionists are trying to do is therefore not to teach, but to indoctrinate.

How else will they be properly equipped?

Indeed how will children be properly equipped when they are told that something is undeniably true when it is not. How will they be properly equipped when the facts they are given have been discredited and more importantly from the point of view of a proper education, those facts have never led to any advancements in biology?

You're still playing "Twist and Shout" and it fools no one. I'm going to type slowly and give you the "For Dummies" version. We're going over it in detail.

Here I told LiteKeeper, in part, the following about Hastie's AiG article:

Hastie should know this, [that tree structures, not straight lines, are to be expected from evolution] because he closes the article with a quote from Eldredge which has been discussed on FR lately and should be instantly familiar to denizens of these threads. Although you wouldn't know from how Hastie uses it, the fact of horse evolution being a tree and not a straight line is exactly what Eldredge was talking about.

Here, you tried to tell me that I can't say that.

Starting here and continuing in that thread, it is well documented Eldredge was not talking about a tree in the link you provided or the Chase interview. Context is everything.

My statement set off some alarm bells for you, evidently. Your story seems to be that prior to about 1981 Eldredge was a bomb-throwing anti-E who believed that something other than the following--we'll call this "statement B"--was wrong with the AMNH exhibit:

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.
Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin, as cited by jennyp.

That's a criticism he made in 1995 and which you urgently, frantically interrupt me to say he did not mean earlier when he said ("statement A"):

I admit that an awful lot of that has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some of this stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we've got science as truth and we've got a problem.

Why is this important? Because you've gone on record elsewhere, elsewhen as calling him a liar or a turncoat for saying two things which are true. That's why you jumped in when I attacked that quote mine of Eldredge. It is your mission to save same as an arrow in the creationist quivver of lawyerly obscurantism forever and ever. It's important to your mission that he have changed his story, which can only be demonstrated if in fact the earlier statement isn't the later one writ simple. First he was an anti-E, then the E establishment put a horse's head (non-fossilized) in his bed or whatever.

But why is the horse exhibit downstairs in the first quote, the one that's so bomb-throwing-radical anti-E in character that it supposedly disallows him from ever going downstairs, pointing to the million-year-old horse, and saying "The horse is a good example?" It's downstairs because he's already a curator of the American Museum of Natural History. If he ever sold out in his professional life, he did it rather earlier than when he assumed that position. I really, really doubt that a fossil-scoffing Luddite would be elevated to that job. He's been associated with AMNH in one capacity or other since 1969.

You're calling him a liar based upon "B is not A," despite my having recognized A for what it was even before I went back and noticed B. You see, by the time Eldredge said A, everyone knew about George Gaylord Simpson's critique of the Marsh/AMNH series. He had published it in 1945, 40 years after the AMNH set up its exhibit but long before 1981. Nobody had to ask, "Gee, Dr. Eldredge, what are you talking about?" Everybody already knew and still knows. I have linked The Evolution of the Horse saying the same thing. Talk Origins says the same thing.

As new fossils were discovered, though, it became clear that the old model of horse evolution was a serious oversimplification. The ancestors of the modern horse were roughly what that series showed, and were clear evidence that evolution had occurred. But it was misleading to portray horse evolution in that smooth straight line, for two reasons:

First, horse evolution didn't proceed in a straight line. We now know of many other branches of horse evolution. Our familiar Equus is merely one twig on a once-flourishing bush of equine species. We only have the illusion of straight-line evolution because Equus is the only twig that survived. (See Gould's essay "Life's Little Joke" in Bully for Brontosaurus for more on this topic.)
Second, horse evolution was not smooth and gradual. Different traits evolved at different rates, didn't always evolve together, and occasionally reversed "direction". Also, horse species did not always come into being by gradual transformation ("anagenesis") of their ancestors; instead, sometimes new species "split off" from ancestors ("cladogenesis") and then co-existed with those ancestors for some time. Some species arose gradually, others suddenly.

You see, anyone whose argued on these threads for a bit and read a little about horse evolution can look at Eldredge's quote and recognize immediately what's the beef. The burden is on you to show it's anything else. So, if Eldredge didn't mean any of the above when he criticized that display downstairs as a basis for textbooks,

WHAT DID HE MEAN?

Please support your assertions. It is important to show that he actually discredited something downstairs besides the organization and framing narrative of the display, because you're using this "B is not A" to disallow him from ever again later going downstairs, pointing to fossil equids, and saying true things about what lived when and what it looked like. You're using this "B is not A" to tell me I can't say what I told LiteKeeper in 264. You're using this "B is not A" to say Eldredge is dishonest.

That last one is the biggest problem for you that I see. You've gone far out of your way to defend A as something other than standard creationist quote-mining ore. Now, raging Holy Warrior Syndrome, you have to destroy him to keep misquoting him when by any reasonable interpretation of his words everything he said was and still is true. Not very Christian of you. "False witness" and all that.

I'm surprised at this extreme dichotomy. Is Wolfram so easily forgotten?

Rocks do not think, they do not write algorithms. Only intelligent beings make rules. That is why Darwin postulated randomness for his theory of evolution. He wanted to take nature away from God's hands. Wolfram may be asserting that he is a materialist. He may be doing so honestly or otherwise, nevertheless his premises prove intelligence as the source of order in nature.

Because the argument between evolution and ID is essentially a theological one, not a scientific one, it is indeed a dichotomy. This is an argument about ultimate causes. Evolution tries to replace divine creation with material order. Only one can be correct.

Placemarker (code 69 purple)

Matter isn't that inert ;)

Your ability to confuse yourself on that other thread despite Eldredge's absolutely clear words

Eldredge's absolutely clear statement that he believes in evolution is irrelevant to his absolutely clear words and evidence disproving Darwinian gradualism. His replacement of gradual evolution, what he and Gould called punk-eek is absolutely laughable and scientifically impossible. Punk-eek essentially claims that species transform themselves in a single giant leap. Like Darwinian evolution, it neglects to tell us how these miraculous transformations occur. Like Darwinian evolution it just claims that they happen and that is sufficient proof for the theory. Of course such is not true. Materialistic evolution needs to provide materialistic explanations for such changes. However, such proof has not been found and has not been given.

The proof that has been found is completely against punk-eek. For punk-eek to be true and for species to transform themselves into new more complex species you would need not just one little mutation adding up to another as in gradual evolution, but you would need numerous mutations taking place not only just about all at once, but taking place throughout an entire species (else the individual with the mutations would have no one to mate with). Punk-eek is therefore a thoroughly stupid and thoroughly dishonest theory. We must thank Gould and Eldredge for thoroughly discrediting Darwinian gradualism. However, we must condemn them for trying to keep alive a godless, atheistic, materialistic explanation of life by means of a totally unscientific, illogical and just plain stupid theory.

IDism is not about macroevolution, but about the nature of science.

No it is not. Intelligent Design does not seek to destroy scientific investigation, it seeks to give it proper direction. Direction back to what was being done before Darwin. Direction towards discovering the law and order of nature. Evolution is and has always been an intellectual dead end. It seeks to explain away the discoveries of science, not to make new ones. That is why for 150 years all that evolution has been responsible for is explanations which are soon refuted such as spontaneous generation, melding, and junk DNA.

Punk-eek essentially claims that species transform themselves in a single giant leap.

That, sir, is simply not true.
Sometimes I have the impression you have straw-men factory in your backyard working night and day.

Rally monkeys??

My statement in post#314 which you seek to dismiss by taking out of context is below:

Totally wrong. It is evolution that brings nothing to the table. It is evolution that gets thoroughly discredited with every single biological discovery. Let's see, in 1859 Pasteur showed that spontaneous generation does not occur, so much for abiogenesis which it took evolutionists some 10 years to take out of their philosophy. Then in the beginning of the 1900's Mendel's work was rediscovered, it discredited Darwin's UNSCIENTIFIC 'melding' theory and it took evolutionists decades to make up a story to reconcile it. Then in the 1950's DNA was discovered and evolutionists had to run for the hills again but this time it was not so convincing, the creation of new genes is well nigh impossible at random and many scientists said so. Then came the genome project which got rid of the self-serving but totally unscientific claim by evolutionists that all DNA not in genes was junk and just the remnants of mutations and previous species. It showed that genes were nothing, and that the junk was what made organisms tick and furthermore that the mechanisms were so intricate that they could never have arisen at random. Now the evos are trying to say that evolution is the result of some kind of an algorithm which makes everything fit. Well when someone shows me a thinking rock, or a thinking cloud, I will believe that nonsense. Personally I am a million times more likely to believe that a million monkeys with typewriters wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Why don't you address the point made there instead of quoting what I am denying?

Maybe it is just me, but I also fail to understand the process of adding genetic information via a random mutation or, for that matter, any mutation.

It's not just you.

Eldredge does not disagree with modern mainstream science.

Since Eldredge debunks gradual evolution, I can certainly agree with the above!

For any latecoming lurkers, a good summary of punctuated equilibrium. It is of course wasted upon the usual suspects whose indulgence I beg for posting it.

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

Quite true. What evolutionists are doing is trying to dismiss arguments against their theory by fiat. Now this shows not only that evolution is not science but an ideology, but it also shows quite well that they are very much afraid of ID. They cannot refute it scientifically. They cannot answer the scientific questions posed by ID either. They therefore try to deny it. ID has been around much longer than Darwinism. ID was what Darwin was trying to disprove and replace. ID will not go away as easily as they wish. It's revival is due to mounting evidence in support of it. The evidence keeps getting more and more undeniable. The effort to dismiss ID is the last gasps of materialistic evolution.

I believe you have the basics down.

Thank you. But if those two statements are accurate paraphrases of Eldredge, I'm afraid I can't for the life of me see how the contradict one another.

The minute you start making predictions based on random events, you are admitting that they are not random. That is one of the things that bothers me about the work being done on mitochondrial DNA to trace back and date human origins. In order to date the various branches of humans, they assume a constant mutation rate in the mitochondrial DNA. Is this not a contradiction to the random mutations that evolution claims? If there is a constant mutation rate does that imply design or a plan?

Mitochondrial DNA is being thrown out by evolutionists already. It showed that the kangaroo was earlier than the platypus (the playtypus lays eggs). So they are looking for other genes to prove the 'evolutionary clock'. Problem is though that if there was such a clock (as there should be if evolution were true) then all genes should give proof of the same 'evolutionary tree'. Since it does not, the notion of an evolutionary clock is false like much else in evolution.

Logically though, the idea itself of an evolutionary clock is ludicrous. If any gene is constantly in change, then any example of it should be equally different from the 'original' of such gene. In other words an organism which is 3 billion years away from the original of the gene should be just as different as that of a completely different organism with the same gene nowadays. We do not have the original DNA of any living being 3 billion years old. All the comparisons are done from the DNA of living organisms. Therefore these comparison cannot show descent because they are all equally far away from the original gene in point of time. If evolution were true and the proposition of a molecular clock were true, then all the organisms of today should have kept on mutating at the same rate throughout all this time. The proposition is therefore totally false and just one more of the pseudo-scientific lies (and I call it a lie because those making this claim are far too smart not to see the wrong logic in their premise) told by evolutionists.

1945

The 1945 publication by Simpson seems to have been something else. The first edition of Horses by G.G. Simpson came out in 1951, for all the difference it makes. It's still solidly after 1905 and before 1981. There's a later edition, 1961, mentioned on the T.O. site. Still the same thing.

Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

Of course this silly program does not prove evolution in more than one way. For a program to show evolution to be true, it would have to create a new play, not copy an old one. Evolution is supposedly the replacement of the intelligent Creator which we call God, a program that proves evolution would need to create, not replicate.