Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Panicked Evolutionists: The Stephen Meyer Controversy
The theory of evolution is a tottering house of ideological cards that is more about cherished mythology than honest intellectual endeavor. Evolutionists treat their cherished theory like a fragile object of veneration and worship--and so it is. Panic is a sure sign of intellectual insecurity, and evolutionists have every reason to be insecure, for their theory is falling apart.
The latest evidence of this panic comes in a controversy that followed a highly specialized article published in an even more specialized scientific journal. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, wrote an article accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The article, entitled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," was published after three independent judges deemed it worthy and ready for publication. The use of such judges is standard operating procedure among "peer-reviewed" academic journals, and is considered the gold standard for academic publication.
The readership for such a journal is incredibly small, and the Biological Society of Washington does not commonly come to the attention of the nation's journalists and the general public. Nevertheless, soon after Dr. Meyer's article appeared, the self-appointed protectors of Darwinism went into full apoplexy. Internet websites and scientific newsletters came alive with outrage and embarrassment, for Dr. Meyer's article suggested that evolution just might not be the best explanation for the development of life forms. The ensuing controversy was greater than might be expected if Dr. Meyer had argued that the world is flat or that hot is cold.
Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, told The Scientist that Dr. Meyer's article came to her attention when members of the Biological Society of Washington contacted her office. "Many members of the society were stunned about the article," she told The Scientist, and she described the article as "recycled material quite common in the intelligent design community." Dr. Scott, a well known and ardent defender of evolutionary theory, called Dr. Meyer's article "substandard science" and argued that the article should never have been published in any scientific journal.
Within days, the Biological Society of Washington, intimidated by the response of the evolutionary defenders, released a statement apologizing for the publication of the article. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the society's governing council claimed that the article "was published without the prior knowledge of the council." The statement went on to declare: "We have met and determined that all of us would have deemed this paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings." The society's president, Roy W. McDiarmid, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, blamed the article's publication on the journal's previous editor, Richard Sternberg, who now serves as a fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institute of Health. "My conclusion on this," McDiarmid said, "was that it was a really bad judgment call on the editor's part."
What is it about Dr. Stephen Meyer's paper that has caused such an uproar? Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, argued in his paper that the contemporary form of evolutionary theory now dominant in the academy, known as "Neo-Darwinism," fails to account for the development of higher life forms and the complexity of living organisms. Pointing to what evolutionists identify as the "Cambrian explosion," Meyer argued that "the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans" cannot be accounted for by Darwinian theory, "neo" or otherwise.
Accepting the scientific claim that the Cambrian explosion took place "about 530 million years ago," Meyer went on to explain that the "remarkable jump in the specified complexity or 'complex specified information' [CSI] of the biological world" cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.
The heart of Dr. Meyer's argument is found in this scientifically-loaded passage: "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion."
In simpler terms, the mechanism of natural selection, central to evolutionary theory, cannot possibly account for the development of so many varied and complex life forms simply by mutations in DNA. Rather, some conscious design--thus requiring a Designer--is necessary to explain the emergence of these life forms.
In the remainder of his paper, Meyer attacks the intellectual inadequacies of evolutionary theory and argues for what is now known as the "design Hypothesis." As he argued, "Conscious and rational agents have, as a part of their powers of purposive intelligence, the capacity to design information-rich parts and to organize those parts into functional information-rich systems and hierarchies." As he went on to assert, "We know of no other causal entity or process that has this capacity." In other words, the development of the multitude of higher life forms found on the planet can be explained only by the guidance of a rational agent--a Designer--whose plan is evident in the design.
Meyer's article was enough to cause hysteria in the evolutionists' camp. Knowing that their theory lacks intellectual credibility, the evolutionists respond by raising the volume, offering the equivalent of scientific shrieks and screams whenever their cherished theory is criticized--much less in one of their own cherished journals. As Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Discovery Institute explained, "Instead of addressing the paper's argument or inviting counterarguments or rebuttal, the society has resorted to affirming what amounts to a doctrinal statement in an effort to stifle scientific debate. They're trying to stop scientific discussion before it even starts."
When the Biological Society of Washington issued its embarrassing apology for publishing the paper, the organization pledged that arguments for Intelligent Design "will not be addressed in future issues of the Proceedings," regardless of whether the paper passes peer review.
From the perspective of panicked evolutionists, the Intelligent Design movement represents a formidable adversary and a constant irritant. The defenders of Intelligent Design are undermining evolutionary theory at multiple levels, and they refuse to go away. The panicked evolutionists respond with name-calling, labeling Intelligent Design proponents as "creationists," thereby hoping to prevent any scientific debate before it starts.
Intelligent Design is not tantamount to the biblical doctrine of creation. Theologically, Intelligent Design falls far short of requiring any affirmation of the doctrine of creation as revealed in the Bible. Nevertheless, it is a useful and important intellectual tool, and a scientific movement with great promise. The real significance of Intelligent Design theory and its related movement is the success with which it undermines the materialistic and naturalistic worldview central to the theory of evolution.
For the Christian believer, the Bible presents the compelling and authoritative case for God's creation of the cosmos. Specifically, the Bible provides us with the ultimate truth concerning human origins and the special creation of human beings as the creatures made in God's own image. Thus, though we believe in more than Intelligent Design, we certainly do not believe in less. We should celebrate the confusion and consternation now so evident among the evolutionists. Dr. Stephen Meyer's article--and the controversy it has spawned--has caught evolutionary scientists with their intellectual pants down.
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R. Albert Mohler, Jr
Not in my experience. Often it's the other way around, unfortunately.
Just responded to what I considered a truly idiotic post, especially considering it immediately followed an article by Albert Mohler.
Man, I *hated* that movie...
I had been looking forward to seeing it, because it was allegedly about math, and I love math, and a friend and I had fun fiddling around with Pi in college (yeah, we're nerds, I admit it), including calculating it to a ridiculous number of digits on the tiny computers available at the time, and he had a denim shirt that his sister had embroidered literally the first several hundred digits of Pi...
And reviews of the film generally said that it was "cerebral" and "based on higher mathematics" etc.
Then I saw it, and while it might have been an interesting avant-garde film for people who aren't too familiar with numbers, it was just *insulting* to the intelligence of anyone who was.
For one of the more egregious examples, the guy's searching for a "magic" 200-digit number (give or take, I forget the exact size, but it was in that range) that's somehow the answer to life, the universe, and everything (to crib from Douglas Adams...) So after weeks of slogging on it alone, he finally seeks help from another alleged math genius, and when they meet he describes his search to the new nerdslinger, and the new guy asks, "you have of course tried every 200-digit number?" And the protagonist replies impatiently, "of course, but..."
At that point I was ready to throw my shoe through the TV screen...
Anyone who has played around with large numbers at *all*, especially while doing permutations or probability or cryptography, has learned that a 200-digit number (or even much "smaller" numbers) is so un-freaking-believably huge that you if you could turn every atom into the earth into a supercomputer and put them all to work simultaneously on the task of examining all possible 200-digit numbers, you wouldn't have even a vanishingly small fraction of the job done before the universe died of old age...
This is just *basic* math knowledge. It's "Big Numbers 101" stuff. So to have this "cerebral" movie which is supposed to about math firing off howlers like that left and right is like... It's like having a "CSI" forensics show where one investigator casually asks the other, "you've individually tested every grain of sand on Earth, I take it?" and the other guy responds, "well of course I have, but..."
Quite alright.My bad.
And like Ichy and the Ichy-ettes, throw the term "liar" around as well as any inquistor threw "heretic" at Galileo.
And I see that you confuse what the hard science parts of such science geology or archeology say about chemistry and physical properties of the things they research with the soft science theories they use to attempt to tie those hard facts and datums together. Some once soft theories have developed such backbone tying theory and observation so well together, in a manner both testable and tightly cohesive with observations they become like a "hard science", even a hard science. Plate tectonics.is one example.
"Evolution" the general term has some uses that are indeed hard science -- in artificial intelligence. In biology? Are cross-breeding and stable mutation evolution?
Where do you draw the line, what is a species anyway? Donkeys and horses?
So to set a high bar I said "mammalian species" level evolution. It is NOT hard science. It's a working theory, and works well enough -- but it ain't hard science.
Let me get your psychosis straight ... a "liar" is anyone who understands what you thought you wrote in the way you -- in your own mind -- demand it be understood? The only non-lie interpretation of your writing is that which you alone can make? That model of paranoid psychotic thinking is consistent with the body of your efforts here.
Let me get your psychosis straight ... a "liar" is anyone who understands what you thought you wrote in the way you -- in your own mind -- demand it be understood?
Could you restate that in a manner more closely resembling cogent English? But since it's so bizarre, I'm going to have to go with an answer of "no, that's not what I said".
The only non-lie interpretation of your writing is that which you alone can make? That model of paranoid psychotic thinking is consistent with the body of your efforts here.
You're not making *any* sense...
You're going to feel *really* silly when you sober up and reread your post tomorrow.
(Can anyone else manage to parse this gibberish?)
Here's a restatement of what I said which seems to be giving you such difficulty, in a way that should be easy for you to grasp even in your intoxicated state:
You misrepresented what I had actually said (by yanking a tiny fragment of it out of context) and then "restated" it in an obnoxious, false manner. So naturally, I wanted to know whether your misrepresentation of my post was the result of a) an error on your part, or b) intentional dishonesty on your part.Are we clear now, jerkwad?
Thermodynamics is not a branch of epistemology.
The second law of thermodynamics has very little to say about evolution. The entropy decrease involved in evolution is minuscule. Since evolution is coupled to a heat source at a very high temperature (the sun) which generates entropy in vast quantities, the entropy of the sun-earth system is guaranteed to increase over any time period you care to name. There is therefore no problem with the second law.
Sorry, the whole issue of the second law is a red-herring raised only by those with no understanding of thermodynamics. It's a red flag for ignorance.
:-)
Only if you first show us actual pictures of the making of Adam and Eve...
(Are you *trying* to make the hurdles too stupid to accomplish, or what?)
However, if you want a detailed description of a likely scenario of abiogenesis which is well supported by a great deal of evidence (available in links in the same post), spend a few hours with post #158...
Or perhaps you care to take a couple chapters of the bible and prove to me where they are false.
Why? The subject is evolution. Please try to stay on topic.
If you care to list all those essentials from Darwin's theory with the visible scientific prove to back them up I will be happy consider them.
Believe me, you *really* don't have the bandwidth, and FreeRepublic.com doesn't have the storage space. But just for fun, name a number between 73 and 433, and I'll show you a good-sized chunk of it.
In the meantime, head back to post#158 and start reading.
Maybe you can show me where DNA is incompatible with Intelligent Design. I'm waiting.
Sure thing. If you mean the kind of "Intelligent Design" where different "kinds" of creatures are separately designed and made instead of evolved from a common ancestor, here you go: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1316020/posts?page=233#233
If on the other hand you mean the kind of "Intelligent Design" where some {unnamed_thing} snuck a bit of {unspecified_amount_of_planning} into the DNA of {unspecified_creature} at {unspecified_time}, then no, there's no evidence in the DNA or anywhere else which is incompatible with that, because it's an UNFALSIFIABLE hypothesis -- in exactly the same way as is the notion that the entire universe was created last Tuesday and we were *poofed* into existence at the same time in the middle of whatever we were doing last Tuesday, with pre-recorded "memories" of our "lives" prior to that point, etc.)
This is exactly why a) a literal version of the "Genesis ID" creation story can be and has been falsified by the evidence, and b) the "ID movement" doesn't rise to the level of a scientific hypothesis, much less a scientific theory, and doesn't belong in science classrooms.
But while I've now addressed *your* questions, I'm afraid that you really haven't answered js1138's questions. Just turning them around on him doesn't really address them.
Why do you believe in space aliens? Possible, yes.
No. It was so OBVIOUS that you got your thermodynamics from a creationist website. The errors were all consistent and so theoretically in error to as to boost your case. Now admit. Thank you.
We get that "entropy" argument all the time so when you popped up, you were a sitting duck.
There have been lots of responses to you showing that you have no clue what entropy is.
Are you making the case that there are infinite galaxies and infinite worlds and infinite earths populated with living creatures? Very probable.
Same with electricity way back when but scientists are working on it.
Evolution.
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