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

AAAS ^ | November 6, 2002 | Ginger Pinholster

[gore3000]

Shades of AndrewC: make assumptions, take a few grand jetés, arrive at radical conclusions, don't show the work.

Aaaah a double concession! You cannot refute either what cornelis or AndrewC say so you insult them both. This crass, ungletemanly, unscientific form of concession to an argument seems to be the preferred mode of concession by evolutionists.

[VadeRetro]

I want to say that I've never found you ungletemanly.

[gore3000]

Perhaps a larger font of random cut-n-pastes will catch the attention of the real thinkers.

What you call 'random cut and pastes' show evidence against claims made by you and other evolutionists. The fact that you can only insult but not refute the evidence shows the evidence presented in those posts to be true refutations of evolution.

[Phaedrus]

Either critters evolved to their current form or they were specially created in situ.

I'm not a major fan of the either/or form a argument, especially in this context. There is, without doubt, "something going on" but these two alternative do not encompass all the possibilities. Are we mere humans too proud to say "We're not entirely sure, just yet"? Well, Yes, we are.

I certainly don't have any final answers but the mind is open (endless accusations to the contrary notwithstanding). I am sure that Macroevolution is a non-starter. But I'm also not sold on an anthromorphic God fashioning each species with His hands. That God exists is without doubt. Perhaps "He" is a whole lot more subtle and intelligent than we give "Him" credit for. Ergo, I think we need to take a whole nother very hard look at our fundamental assumptions. FWIW...

Picking on you as the only Catholic Evolutionist that I know . . . ;-}

[Phaedrus]

I want to say that I've never found you ungletemanly.

She's not even manly ... ;-}

[gore3000]

I'd like to hear what Darwin, Huxley and the late Steven J. Gould have to say about it today!

Do not expect an answer to your post anytime soon. I have been trying to find out what evolutionists have to say about the tons of Evidence Disproving Evolution to no avail.

[gore3000]

Evolution is materialistic and therefore leads to atheism in those who believe in it. -me-

No, it isn't. This has been explained to you so many times

Evolution is not materialistic????????

Guess that according to you it proposes that God created life and human beings????????

Your statement that 'this has been explained' somewhere else is a totally lame excuse for not even attempting a refutation of my statement. No doubt you learned it from those great sophists Steven J. Gould and Niles Eldredge who claimed that the evidence of evolution is to be found where no one can see it.

[gore3000]

In other words, evolution means what you say that it means,

What evolution means is to be found all over this board, however since you are looking for 'proof' that my statement about what evolution means is true let's go to the original source:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse;. a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows evolution."
From: Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"

As you can see above from the words of the great charlatan, evolution is about greater complexity. The definition of evolution given in TalkOrigins and other evo sites that "Evolution is defined as change in allele frequency over time. That's quantified and measurable." In no way deals with the increased complexity and transformation of species. Every individual gets half the alleles from each parent so the 'frequency' of alleles in a population changes with each birth. This is a truism from genetics. However, this in no way implies any change in the genetic pool of a species or any new genetic information. It therefore does not account for the transformation of species into more complex species as Darwin's definition requires.

[gore3000]

And if ID is true, science will hit upon it.

It has, many times and that is why evolutionists are trying to dismiss it out of hand - because they neve have been able to scientifically refute it.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker. (code 13)

[gore3000]

CalConservative makes a popular claim for ID as a useful research program: That if you assume a biological structure is designed, it will point you towards understanding how it works.

Since this has been shown to be correct, then ID cannot be said to be a useless scientific theory as evolutionists claim. Furthermore, since the above is the opposite of what evolution claims, it shows evolution to be scientifically useless. And indeed mainstream scientists have determined evolution to be scientifically useless and are following up on the design proposition by throwing away evolution's claim about junk DNA and hurling ahead in trying to find out what the 95% of DNA not in genes does. They are finding how the human organism works not by assuming that it is the detritus of previous evolutionary transformations but by assuming just what ID assumes - that DNA is a very involved PROGRAM.

[gore3000]

Until that happens, I recommend you skip all replies posted in BLUE FONT.

You might as well! Evolutionists cannot honestly refute the blue posts so evolutionists might as well leave doubt in the mind of lurkers about evolutionists being fools instead of being proven fools.

[gore3000]

IDists become crackpots when they don't use scientific methodology to make claims of truth about the world.

When evolutionists try to disprove the existence of God they are being crackpots because science cannot disprove God. Further, evolutionists are constantly making assumptions for which they have no scientific proof. Their assumptions are totally based on what evidence needs to be found to support evolution. That these assumptions are constantly disproven by the discovery of new scientific facts shows quite well that evolutionists are the crackpots.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for your posts!

I wonder if Darwin’s theory when he originally offered it would pass the same bar imposed on Intelligent Design. I took your words from #395 and reversed the actors to picture my question. I wonder what Darwin’s reaction would have been if a creationist said this to him so long ago:

Evolution [ID} can point to no positive evidence for evolution [ID]. Every one of its current arguments amount to saying "there's a hole in creation [Darwinian] theory here." But even if those claims are true, merely pointing out a hole in an existing theory does not prove your competing theory. There are any number of competing sub-theories or future discoveries that could fill the gap without necessarily hurting the overall theory. And if those don't show up, there are any number of possible competing theories for the "supertheory" itself.

Likewise, when evolutionists dismiss “design-centric” theories and insist on “designer-centric” theories – they are inviting the corollary: creationists dismissing evolution theories that do not incompass abiogenesis.

You said that Dembski’s hope for a hidden message in the DNA ”doesn’t cut it” in your view as a positive proof for intelligent design. You elaborated in post #399 and #477 that your objections are that you can no reason for the “operating manual” to be hidden, that the “organism is the operator” and that a coding system should not have a dual purpose You are certainly welcome to your opinions, but objections do not constitute a counter (naturalistic) explanation for the origin of such an “operating manual” - if indeed one is found.

Algorithms are the expression of intelligence, a step by step procedure for accomplishing a thing. Therefore, in my view, an algorithmic encoding of the DNA is prima facie evidence of intelligence in the design. I could not infer from that discovery who the designer is. If these algorithms exist as Dembski believes, they can be discovered much like the Mandelbrot set, Schwarzschild Geometry, etc. were discovered.

Or to put it another way, from The Ontology and Cosmology of Non-Euclidean Geometry:

Nevertheless, there is often still a kind of deliberate know-nothing-ism that the mathematics is the explanation. It isn't. Instead, each theory contains a conceptual interpretation that assigns meaning to its mathematical expressions. In non-Euclidean geometry and its application by Einstein, the most important conceptual question is over the meaning of "curvature" and the ontological status of the dimensions of space, time, or whatever. The most important point is that the ontological status of the dimensions involved with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature is a question entirely separate from the mathematics. It is also, to an extent, a question that is separate from science--since a scientific theory may work quite well without out needing to decide what all is going on ontologically. Some realization of this, unfortunately, leads people more easily to the conclusion that science is conventionalistic or a social construction than to the more difficult truth that much remains to be understood about reality and that philosophical questions and perspectives are not always useless or without meaning. Philosophy usually does a poor job of preparing the way for science, but it never hurts to ask questions. The worst thing that can ever happen for philosophy, and for science, is that people are so overawed by the conventional wisdom in areas where they feel inadequate (like math) that they are actually afraid to ask questions that may imply criticism, skepticism, or, heaven help them, ignorance.

Again, thank you for the discussion! It’s been very interesting!

[gore3000]

With a biological function that forms as the result of random mutations, it is completely unclear how you can predict anything.

So true. That is why evolution is the anti-science - randomness precludes scientific investigation. There can be no scientific predictions about random events and indeed there could be no scientific 'laws' if nature operated in a random fashion. That there are such things as scientific laws is in itself a refutation of scientific materialism of which evolution is a prime example.

[gore3000]

Context allows us to better understand exactly what was said. When someone comes along and says, but that's not what he said here, or here, that has no bearing on the context of what has been said elsewhere.

The context of Eldredge's quote shows quite well that he rejects gradual evolution and the evidence presented by NeoDarwinists for such gradual evolution. What the evolutionists also refuse to admit is that Gould and Eldredge's punk-eek, their whole claim to fame, their whole lifetime work, was itself a refutation of gradual evolution. What they said once in a while to appease the NeoDarwinists with whom they were constantly batling, does not refute that.

[gore3000]

Evolutionary biology isn't a theory -- it's a pile of promissory notes for future theories, none of which has been redeemed since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species almost 150 years ago.

Yes indeed. The biggest promisory note is that the bones will prove the theory. The gaps in the fossil record however have not been filled even to a small extent. Clear examples of gradual evolution which should be the norm are still not to be found anywhere. The Cambrian explosion has devastatingly shown the falsity of gradual evolution also.

Research in biology has also disproven many of the promises of materialistic evolution from spontaneous generation to melding, to junk DNA.

[gore3000]

Matter isn't that inert ;)

True. Some matter can without human help recombine itself. A good example is oxidation. However, to ascribe any sort of intelligence or method to matter is quite ludicrous. The natural combinations are quite simple and non-specific. The combinations required for life are quite specific and unlike natural combinations are not determined by chemical properties. DNA for example is not sequentially arranged according chemical affinities.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The minute you start making predictions based on random events, you are admitting that they are not random.

Absolutely false. The existence of casinos belies this assertion.

You really need to do a study of probability, statistics, and stochastic processes. Random has little to do with unpredictability. They are quite independent concepts.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The problem with ID is not that it has a high bar to leap over; ID's problem is that it hasn't even got off the ground yet. For one thing, ID hasnt' made any testable predictions.