Fuggedabowdit, HiTech RedNeck: From where I sit, based on what I have directly observed in recent times and circumstances, so-called "peer review" is a total JOKE these days. And I have objective evidence that directly supports this thesis....
Science provides a HUGE part of the description of the total picture of universal and human existential reality. AND it has EVER been so. We must give science its due, for we owe it the "pay-down" of an incalculable debt in terms of human progress.
That is not, however, the same thing as saying that science "knows all," or could even "know all," given an infinity to prove that it does.
Science tells us about the physical. To the extent that human persons understand themselves as somehow being more than physical, then science alone will not satisfy the craving, the quest for human understanding of the Truth of reality, by which we humans may truly guide and direct the course of our own self-determined existence.
We touch on enormous questions here, my friend. Thank you oh so very much for your reply.
Please post some evidence (actual articles, the peer-reviews, the editor's replies, etc.) to show this is so. I'll be glad to pass your evidence to the publishers. You must have evidence though. Many well know kooks (Archimeded Plutonium, Albert Silvermann and James Harris on the Usenet, for example) also claim peer-review is a joke because their junk is rejected.
In Process and Reality, rather than assuming substance as the basic metaphysical category, Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion which he calls an actual occasion. On Whitehead's view, an actual occasion is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Donald Sherburne points out, "It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is 'all window.' It is as though one were to take Aristotle's system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its preeminence by the category of relation …."[5] As Whitehead himself explains, his "philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world."[6]
Significantly, this view runs counter to more traditional views associated with material substance: "There persists," says Whitehead, "[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived."[7]
The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when addressing issues of teleology and when trying to develop a comprehensive, intergrated picture of the universe as a whole. According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is therefore essential, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand modern physics as from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology. Says Whitehead, "Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events."[8
The Twilight of Darwinism at the Dawn of A New Millennium -An Interview with Dr. Paul Chien
IMHO, it is also a pillar of evolution theory as it is argued today - simply because, once it is removed, then there is no contention between evolution theory and the intelligent design hypothesis.
IOW, the intelligent design hypothesis does not stipulate a designer - it could be any intelligent cause.
The acceptance that certain features of life v non-life/death in nature are best explained by intelligent cause rather than undirected cause settles the issue.
If the science community is ready to accept that "randomness" is not part of evolution theory, then I suggest we stop posting these threads, ask the school boards to present it accordingly and suggest to the Discovery Institute that they redirect their efforts to other work.