Introduction: The Illusion of Design [Richard Dawkins]

Natural History Magazine ^ | November 2005 | Richard Dawkins

[js1138]

Don't worry about 680. Try 683.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1535529/posts?page=683#683

[don asmussen]

Somehow or other, so far I have managed to be spared The Clan of the Cave Bear!

Try it, you may like it.. The series is fairly well written speculative fiction, about a point in time when two species of men existed together. Everything the author writes about ~could~ have happened.
- It is not fantasy.

[ChessExpert]

Dawkins writes:

“today’s biologists are more fortunate than Darwin was in having access to beautiful series of transitional stages: almost cinematic records of evolutionary changes in action.”

That sounds impressive. I would like to confirm this claim. I would like to see "almost cinematic records" going from the first mammal to each of the following mammals as we find them today: bat, whale, elephant, zebra, and cheetah. I did not pick these to be especially hard, or especially easy. This independent selection simply shows some variety among mammals. Please, no artist reconstructions, claymations, cartoon animations, or computer animations should be advanced. Fossils should be ordered for our cinema without benefit of the theory of evolution. Each fossil should be independently dated for sequencing in the cinema. One dating method should be chosen and used throughout to avoid suspicion of cherry-picking of methods. My request should not be especially difficult given the nearly one hundred fifty years of effort attempting to prove (not test) the theory of evolution, and the frequent claims that evolution is so well established that even the term "theory" does an injustice to it's empirical foundation. When the existence of these five cinema's have been confirmed, we can get serious and move on to more challenging assignments. It is sad to say, but some might be tempted to fraud. One should consider the case of the "Piltdown man" that was successfully used for many decades to win converts to evolution, before it was acknowledged to be a fraud. Evolutionists are still trying to live that one down.

[hosepipe]

[ Somehow or other, so far I have managed to be spared The Clan of the Cave Bear! Try it, you may like it.. ]

My long dead wife cajoled me into reading "The Clan of the Cave Bear"(first on in the series).. I laughed at romance drama readers(wife) and wouldnt be caught in a 1000 years reading one.. Educated and snooty professional that I was.. But it was O.K. for the underachievers, heck they had to have something to amuse them..

This lady(wife) was way ahead of me.. She said.. read 10 pages and if you don't like it then you don't.. so there.. I fell for it.. Heck I could read 10 pages in a heartbeat before the wordless glanceing wry smile as I looked over my John Denver glasses and tossed the book on the coffee table..

Needless to say thats not what happened..
You want to know what happened.?..
Well I ain't tellin.. Nyah!.. d;-)~',',

(fill in the blanks)

[betty boop]

...a point in time when two species of men existed together

I'm sure that would be a most interesting speculation, don. But I confess my real interest in this question is the succession, or transition, of one to the other, and why that transition was successful. We do not get that sort of information from the consideration of biological data alone. Or so it seems to me.

Thank you so much for writing!

[betty boop]

Why not?

[don asmussen]

a point in time when two species of men existed together --

I'm sure that would be a most interesting speculation, don. But I confess my real interest in this question is the succession, or transition, of one to the other, and why that transition was successful.
We do not get that sort of information from the consideration of biological data alone. Or so it seems to me.

Hmmm, -- are you suggesting that we can surmise why our species survived without using scientific data?

btw.. What would be your reaction if were proved that Neanderthal genes live on in modern humans? That hybrid vigor contributed to our 'successful transition'?

[ChessExpert]

"People often assert that no one is ever convinced one way or the other by debates on this issue, but this is not true"

People assert all sorts of things of course. I assume that many people are open to arguments based on reason and fact. Some of these move toward, some away, from evolutionary theory.

I followed your links. They do not convince me that Denton and Behe are evolutionists. The Denton link introduces the idea of directed evolution. That's not evolution as most know it. It seems to accept some, and reject other, tenets of standard evolutionary theory. The Behe link shows Behe calmly and civilly responding to eight attack quotes, half of which refer to him as "ignorant." In context, he seems to be saying that his book only dealt with the lack of demonstrated evolutionary mechanism at the biochemical level.

"Nearly all the major players in the ID game accept common descent, even if they quibble over details of mechanism."

Sorry, but I'm not convinced.

I knew a little about Behe. Thanks to your post, I may buy a couple of books by Denton! Is Nature's Destiny the last book he wrote?

[Virginia-American]

...One should consider the case of the "Piltdown man" that was successfully used for many decades to win converts to evolution, before it was acknowledged to be a fraud. Evolutionists are still trying to live that one down...

Could you please provide a source for the bolded claim. I've never heard anything of the sort before.

[ChessExpert]

O.K. I'll get on that. But I'm going to watch "Survivor" first. So that's a delay of three hours. I might get to it tomorrow. Maybe someone else can post first.

[caffe]

If you check my posts, I'm not talking about hard sciences: I believe this thread is responding to Dawkin's trivial application of science to his own desired outcomes.

Actually, a creationists would know that when Adam and Eve sinned, the whole earth was tainted by sin. This is why we have germs. Believing this does not mean one cannot be a physician, microbiologist, immunologist or any other scientists. Believing in atheistic evolution, theistic evolution, Intelligent Design or the literal Biblical creation account has NO bearing on hard science .

[reasonisfaith]

I would say Dawkins receives far too much credit for his unremarkable style of thinking which appears to be marked by regular examples of carelessness.

In the paragraph which begins “Yet the highly improbable…” Dawkins starts out by saying the improbability argument doesn’t work for anti-evolutionists because improbability exists in the real world. Then, in blatant self-contradiction, he criticizes intelligent design by his own use of the improbability argument.

In the very next sentence Dawkins’ language is a bit disorganized. (Why does he make use of a premise by Hoyle immediately after describing that premise as a mistake?) He uses the improbability argument to discredit the notion of God’s existence, but then he somehow gets himself into the position of suggesting that God’s existence is unnecessary because natural selection can “do his work for him.”

So Dawkins maintains that God’s existence is highly improbable but if true is unnecessary anyway.

This ugly little pothole in Dawkins’ thinking reveals a pattern of logic observable during the interrogation of a suspect by law enforcement when the suspect is attempting to malinger an explanation of his innocence. For example, the suspect will state that he could not have shot the murder victim because at the time of the shooting he was in another city hundreds of miles away. Then the suspect will provide a second reason, saying that even if he were in town at the time of the shooting he couldn’t have been the shooter because it took place inside the victim’s house, and he had no access to a key.

Either alibi alone would be significant as evidence, but somehow when used together each serves to discredit the other. This technique, using multiple separate and independent excuses, is identified by expert witnesses as a strong indication that the person is lying.

The anti-Christian movement needs to find a better hit man.

[ChessExpert]

I found three books in my limited library that refer to the Piltdown Man. In each case, I went to the index, then zeroed in on the reference with the greatest number of pages. I'll give one reference from each book.

Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial has a brief but good comment on pg82.

Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution devotes a section, the Piltdown fraud, on pgs 217-218.

Cremo and Thompson's The Hidden History or the Human Race, devotes a chapter, The Piltdown Showdown, pgs 177-190.

The story is the same. The Piltdown Man was a significant missing link on display in the British Museum of Natural History from 1912 to 1953. It is generally agreed that this was intentional fraud. Some have spun it as the self-correcting nature of science. Some have spun it as the tip of the iceberg, a visible case of calculated fraud, over an invisible mountain of biased research.

[ChessExpert]

Darwin's Howard Dean?

[reasonisfaith]

Good point.

I just hope Darwin doesn’t have a Hillary Clinton.

[betty boop]

...are you suggesting that we can surmise why our species survived without using scientific data?

Why do we need such data, when we clearly and readily see that we have "survived?" (Otherwise you wouldn't be around to ask this question, nor me to reply to it.)

What would be your reaction if were proved that Neanderthal genes live on in modern humans?

If Neanderthals were actually protohuman (which designation seems to cover a whole lot these days), that wouldn't surpise me at all. And it seems they were.

Are these "trick questions," don?

[snarks_when_bored]

No claymations???? You ask too much, sir!

[Alamo-Girl]

LOLOL! Thanks for the chuckle!

[snarks_when_bored]

[ If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must not be a duck. ]

O.K.. Bring out the big guns...

Al Gores Law..

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for sharing these additional aspects of your worldview!

Reality is a metaphor, a division of the word, an illusion.

There are no laws, no patterns in nature.

Considering these views of reality, I don't really see where we have anything to explore.

I run into the same kind of problem with those who view reality as their own consciousness and everything else as merely an illusion - i.e. no common ground, no language to discuss nature or spirit.