Posted on 01/17/2006 1:40:30 PM PST by truthfinder9
In fact a study last year showed that a large % of journal reports were full of errors.
See also:
Science, 'frauds' trigger a decline in atheism
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050303-115733-9519r.htm
Bah--the scientist frauds that have been exposed just in this last month would not have been but for the whistle-blowing of colleagues. A Norwegian physican that had made claims for a cancer treatment was shown to have fabricated everything about his study--and was only "caught out" because those who worked with him exposed him. Same with the Korean "superhero scientist"--the guys who worked for him exposed him.
I think they'd still be getting the red-carpet treatment if we had to depend on the peer-review system...
And it was this Korean scientists who inspired John Edwards to make his uproarious claims about curing Christopher Reeve!
A century ago, you could evoke a kind of (pum, pum, PUM) drumroll of goose bumps by saying the word, "art" or by styling yourself an "artist"--poetry delighted the masses, if you can believe that, and poets were feted as celebrities.
Now it's the white lab coat, the affectation of the Holy Temple of Science.
The prestige of the scientist is headed for a fall--and it will be caused by the same thing that brings all would-be celebrities down--vanity.
So you're saying the system is inherently flawed from the start? So journal articles aren't the standard of excellence that many claim they are? Of course you don't realize that many popular science books are reviewed by credentialed peers before publication. So are journals necessarily better than books? No.
But arguing about his qualification rather than the content of what he writes is ad hominem in the strict usage of the term.
Get it through you head, that the inclusion of a stochastic (a.k.a. random) element in the Darwinian paradigm does not assert that life, or even species, arose by random chance. Our best model of financial futures pricing has a stochastic element, but futures prices are not fixed by random chance, but by the purposeful actions of traders.
That was part of my point in asking for a scientific definition of intelligence. I suggest reading Marcus Hutter's works on universal artificial intelligence. Once one digests his proposed definition of intelligence, one sees fairly easily that what the neo-Darwinian synthesis describes, is, like a functioning free market, a distributed intelligent system. Quite bizarrely given the heat of these discussions and recent court decisions, once one gets a scientifically sound notion of intelligence, neo-Darwinism implies intelligent design.
Ross convincingly (to my mind) argues that the universe and earth are remarkably special. It is only in the context of well-tuned environments that self-reproducing systems (be it terrestrial life, or genetic algorithms) exist at all.
Just as in the case of genetic algorithms, so in the case of life, the place to see the design is in the context in which the changes take place, not in the details of the changes.
Not when his credentials are presented as lending credence to his theories, e.g. "world renowned astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross". "World renowned astrophysicist" seems rather tendentious to say the least, but in any case if he intends to lean on them, it hardly seems reasonable that an examination of same is beyond the pale.
I see you are good at convincing yourself that you can fit design into evolution by picking and choosing some theories and assuming people like Hutter are correct simply because it sounds good to you.
Random chance is all evolution has. By the words of the Darwinian Fundamentalists, evolution eliminates all design possibilities. What's left? Chance. Chance couldn't produce information or much of the complexity we see if it had unlimited time to do so.
At least we agree that Lee Smolin doesn't know what he's talking about.
Nobody disputes his qualifications or credibility as a bibler. He is presented as a scientist, however, not as a preacher or theologian. And as a scientist he could only be classed as "ex-".
The 'random' element in the neo-Darwinian synthesis could be a perfectly deterministic phenomenon like a cellular automaton that produces lots of variations some of which fit the environment, and others of which don't, without the theory being disturbed in the least--if you look at expositions of the theory by working biologists (other than some who double as atheistic polemicists, and even some of these) you find that they give a technical definition of 'random' which doesn't sound at all like 'random chance': simply that variation does not anticipate the environment, is 'not predictive with regard to fitness'.
Nor does an actually random mechanism at the micro level at all contradict design: annealing and hardening of metal are thermal phenomena--random motions at an atomic level during the heating phase, but with atomic bonding forces imposing order in the cooling phase, but annealed or hardened metal is taken as a sign of intentional metallurgy by archaologists.
I don't think Hutter's definition is correct because 'it sounds good to me', but because it's the only mathematically rigorous definition of intelligence I've seen, and because there are nice theorems about it. It was only after reading it in another context (he's working on AI, as I said, and I'm a pure mathematician whose original field has some contact with CS), and later musing on the Dover decision that I made the connection. His work and genetic algorithms are the two different bits of cutting-edge AI I'm at all familiar with. The fact that the evolutionary biologists' and atheist polemicists' favorite analogs for biological evolution, their 'proofs' that complexity can arise without design, are regarded as an example of (artificially) intelligent phenomena is surely at least ironic, given the heated opposition to intelligent design. I think, however, that it actually offers insight into the problem of modelling the 'how' of biological diversity, regardless of where one stands on the 'crevo' debate (absent having embraced six-day literalism).
Consider an analogy: the universe (or biosphere) as a computer producing 'genetic algorithms' with 'fitness' defined as approximation to the imago dei, and a lot of 'subgoals' (observed retrospectively as 'environmental fitness') included to boot-strap the process.
I think we've disagreed over the random thing before.
If mutation is random, then it is appropriate to call natural selection "random." If the natural selection is a specific predictable process (which it really isn't, but we'll allow it for a moment)... then one would always multiply that process by the randomness principle inherent in mutation.
Dittoes - Hugh Ross is like Grape Nuts, cereal that is neither Grapes, nor Nuts...Ross is neither a "world-renowned astrophysicist" nor a "creationist"
In their minds only
Your argument doesn't work. Let me suggest an over-simplified example to show why.
Suppose a 'fitness criterion' for rocks for use in some project is to be in a certain size range. A random heap of rocks is put into an environment (a seive) and subjected to random vibrations. Rocks which are 'unfit' by being too small fall out. The rocks are then put into another environment (another sieve with bigger holes) and rocks which are 'unfit' by being too big stay in this seive when it is subjected to random vibrations, while the ones in the 'fit' range fall out into a hopper for use.
Notice here are three random elements: the initial heap of rocks, and the two vibration patterns. The designed environment produces a non-random outcome despite these random elements.
Ross's argument is that the *environment*: the physical universe, earth, are remarkably special. One doesn't need to look for design in the dynamics of biological diversity, nor do random elements (or stochastically modeled elements--remember the example of futures pricing) in the dynamics make the outcome random, or efface design from the environment in which the dynamics take place.
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