Posted on 01/07/2002 3:16:27 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:32:03 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court declined Monday to be drawn into a debate over the teaching of evolution in America's public schools.
The refusal is a victory for schools that require teachers to instruct on the subject even if the teacher disagrees with the scientific theory.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I challenge you to prove your claim. If not, I want a public apology. Now.
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You left out 3. stupid. Evolution is basically stupid and God does not do stupid things or do anything in a stupid manner.
Bloody hell, don't be such an unrepentent twit. Evolution makes no claims about God. The position of "evolutionists" is that all available evidence is consistent with an evolutionary process (variation plus selection) causing speciation. That's it. It may not even be correct, but it IS one of several possible theories that is consistent with the evidence. As a separate issue, Occam's razor suggests that it is the most rational hypothesis currently (and before you start, Occam's razor is a mathematically valid method of hypothesis selection). It doesn't make you look very credible when you project your personal evolution fantasies on everyone else.
Evolution, in the proper scientific sense (not your weird fantasy version), is perfectly compatible with Christian theism. Get over it already.
You really need to get out more often if you beleive this.
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That would be why it was called a theory.
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Can anyone suggest ways in which the methodologies of ID and SETI differ? They seem identical to me: Either they are both scientific, or both fail.
This has already been beaten to death, but…
SETI is actually a very good example of Dembski’s Explanatory Filter in action. If we find a signal that repeats the first 1M digits of pi every 30 days, I don’t think that many people will reject the idea of LGMs.
The big difference is that we know a lot about radio signals, how they are generated and what kind of information is embedded in them. The SETI people are starting from a well-known point, drawing a line in the sand and asking is there anything that crosses this line. “If we find this, then we know it was designed.”
The proponents of ID theory look in every nook and cranny of science to find what we don’t understand, and take this as proof of some Designer. For them, it is the very lack of knowledge that proves their point. For SETI, it is the knowledge that is proof.
My understanding is that science is based on knowledge, not the lack of.
Craig Ventner (CEO of Celera genomics), a well-known atheist, was once asked if he believed that God created man (or some similarly loaded question -- I don't remember exactly) during a press conference. His response (to paraphrase): "It is obvious that no human could have created this."
It was a brilliant response. The religious crowd interpreted it as acknowledging the hand of God in our creation. The people who know something about genomics knew that he was referring to the fact that the human genome is a barely functional piece of crap that would be an egregious failure if it had been designed by human engineers. The fact is, normal human engineering practices would never allow such fundamentally flawed design to leave the drawing board. This is a VERY cogent question with respect to the intelligent design hypothesis, as there is a ton of evidence even at our relatively primitive level of genomics capability that if humans were designed, the engineering was far worse than what you would normally expect out of a human engineering team, never mind God.
O.K. Here's a small start. I pick these particular claims because they are counter intuitive (apart from evolutionary theory), were initially made well back in the 19th century, and have subsequently been extensively and successfully tested by fossil, morphological and molecular evidence not available when the claims were initially made.
Reptiles are polyphyletic (they do not share a common ancestry exclusive of other groups of comparable taxonomic rank).
Crocodiles (archosaurs) and birds share a more recent common ancestor than crocodiles and snakes or lizards (lepidosaurs).
How many do you suppose he wants?
Hey, you're right! Neither does SETI claim that finding ET will save society from its descent into nihilism caused by godless "materialism".Can anyone suggest ways in which the methodologies of ID and SETI differ? They seem identical to me: Either they are both scientific, or both fail.
The SETI community doesn't run around proclaiming that ET exists. The ID gang, on the other hand ...
I have the honor to inform you that you have exceeded my wildest expectations: earlier this evening, after noting your return to the CREVO threads, I FReep-mailed a fellow Freeper and asked if anyone wanted to bet how long it would be before G3K accused someone of committing "slanders" ("insulting") against him, and resorted to your standard "victimhood" routine. I opined that you wouldn't last more than a dozen replies before you reverted to your usual tactic, but not even I would have guessed that you'd be back in form in only SEVEN whole replies!
I would've predicted 5 or less. But his first target was Stultis! Of all people to accuse of slimingslanderdishonestinsultlies!
The butcher with the sharpest knife, has the warmest heart
-No. 6
That's ironic. I thought exnihilo was just another handle for you to gang up on evolutionists! Ah, but then you came back, paranoid as ever, and I decided that assumption was an insult that exnihilo does not deserve.
Because it's not testable.
They made it into print, but they didn't pass many tests.
The one item on your list that sounded familiar was "punctuated equilibrium (Gould et al)." That's not Stephen Jay Gould and his theory that killed evolution, in order to save it, is it?
Punctuated equilibrium was devised in an effort to see if gaps in the fossil record could be explained by a series of short, rapid changes in the fossil record followed by long years of relative stasis. It competed against gradualism for quite some time, and I Think the it has come about that both theories have validity in different environmental regimes. In an environment with little change, gradualism is the status quo, as few pressures act on the species. However, include a large environmental change, like an extinction event, and things will change rapidly, or an organism will become extinct.
The problem of Gamma Ray Bursts origininated in 1973 after a DoD satellite used to detect nuclear tests started detecting spurious gamma ray events where there were no nuclear tests going on--in space. After 15 years of data collection, there were three competing theories of where the bursts could come from--our own solar system, inside our galaxy, or other galaxies. After launching a satellite with highly specialized detectors (Compton Gamma Ray Observatory), it was determined through statistical clumping analysis (and about 1000 bursts over 5 years) that they were cosmological in origin in around 1993. Now, we are imaging the optical afterglow of these sources. According to you, scientists should have never investigated other ideas, just taken whatever was convenient for them to believe and accept it on faith, without looking at the data.
The origin of the cosmological redshift is probably the most famous of astronomical discussions, but one where one side has long lost and doesn't realize it. In the 1960's, Halton Arp compiled the Atlas Peculiar Galaxies. He was one of the most detailed observers of his time, learning from Prof. Edwin Hubble, the discoverer of the Hubble relation. After collecting his "zoo" of galaxies, he began reducing the data, and he began to see things in his data that he felt invalidated the cosmological distance scale. He felt from his images that some galaxies that were supposed to be large distances apart (according to the redshift), were actually connected by physical bridges of matter. The most famous example was Stephan's Quintet, which have five galaxies lined up, each with different redshifts. Over time, quite a few people got involved, trying to determine if the number of galaxies involved were statistically significant (consider that there are about 12 cases, in a universe of *billions*). Arp then noticed that there were what he thought were an inordinate number of a quasars lined up as if they were being ejected from these galaxies.
The problem is that if you go farther back in redshift, you begin to see quasars surrounded by large numbers of normal galaxies. Along with statistical analyses showing that his connections are not significantly higher than what is expected to be seen in a isotropic and homogeneous distribution of galaxies.
In the end, I think you can see that in the physical sciences at least, there is allowance for a paradigm shift. There is little elitist dogma that is allowed to survive if the opponents produce scientifically challenging arguments. ID has not done this yet. Dembski is too busy publishing books to challenge the scientific establishment on their grounds yet. Publishing books instead of papers is well and good, but most scientists choose to publish papers first, THEN publish books based on those papers.
That and I can pretend I'm crushing your head between my fingers.
I'm running out of slime! (I try to conserve my fire but there are targets everywhere.) Can you spare a few buckets?
Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
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