Posted on 04/15/2006 11:44:16 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Posted: April 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
I suggested here last week that the established authorities of every age act consistently. They become vigilantly militant against non-conforming dissidents who challenge their assumptions.
Thus when the dissident Galileo challenged the assumptions of the 17th century papacy, it shut him up. Now when the advocates of "intelligent design" challenge the scientific establishment's assumptions about "natural selection," it moves aggressively to shut them up. So the I.D. people have this in common with Galileo.
I received a dozen letters on this, three in mild agreement, the rest in scorn and outrage. This calls for a response.
Where, one reader demanded, did I get the information that 10 percent of scientists accept intelligent design? I got it from a National Post (newspaper) article published two years ago, which said that 90 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science "consider themselves atheists." Since if you're not an atheist, you allow for the possibility of a Mind or Intelligence behind nature, this puts 10 percent in the I.D. camp.
I could have gone further. A survey last year by Rice University, financed by the Templeton Foundation, found that about two-thirds of scientists believed in God. A poll published by Gallup in 1997 asked: Do you believe that "man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation?" – essentially the I.D. position. Just under 40 percent of scientists said yes. So perhaps my 10 percent was far too low.
Two readers called my attention to a discovery last week on an Arctic island of something which may be the fossil remains of the mysteriously missing "transitional species." Or then maybe it isn't transitional. Maybe it's a hitherto undetected species on its own.
But the very exuberance with which such a discovery is announced argues the I.D. case. If Darwin was right, and the change from one species to another through natural selection occurred constantly in millions of instances over millions of years, then the fossil record should be teaming with transitional species. It isn't. That's why even one possibility, after many years of searching, becomes front-page news.
Another letter complains that I.D. cannot be advanced as even a theory unless evidence of the nature of this "Divine" element is presented. But the evidence is in nature itself. The single cell shows such extraordinary complexity that to suggest it came about by sheer accident taxes credulity. If you see a footprint in the sand, that surely evidences human activity. The demand – "Yes, but whose footprint is it?"– does not disqualify the contention that somebody was there. "Nope," says the establishment, "not until you can tell us who it was will we let you raise this question in schools."
Another reader argues that Galileo stood for freedom of inquiry, whereas I.D. advocates want to suppress inquiry. This writer apparently did not notice what caused me to write the column. It was the rejection by a government agency for a $40,000 grant to a McGill University anti-I.D. lobby to suppress the presentation and discussion of I.D. theory in the Canadian schools. Suppressing discussion is an odd way of encouraging "freedom of inquiry." Anyway, the I.D. movement doesn't want to suppress evolution. It merely wants it presented as a theory, alongside the I.D. theory.
Why, asked another reader, did I not identify the gutsy woman who stated the reason for the rejection, bringing upon herself the scorn of scientific authority. That's fair. Her name is Janet Halliwell, a chemist and executive vice president of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She said that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and the McGill application offered no evidence to support it.
The McGill applicant was furious. Evolution, he said, needs no evidence. It's fact. Apparently Harvard University doesn't quite agree with him. The Boston Globe reports that Harvard has begun an expensive project to discover how life emerged from the chemical soup of early earth. In the 150 years since Darwin, says the Globe, "scientists cannot explain how the process began."
The most sensible letter came from a research scientist. "I think that the current paradigm of evolution by natural selection acting on random variation will change," he writes. "I think that evidence will accumulate to suggest that much of the genetic variation leading to the evolution of life on earth was not random, but was generated by biochemical processes that exhibit intelligent behavior."
Then he urges me not to disclose his identity. Saying this publicly would threaten his getting tenure, he fears. Galileo would understand.
What would you expect? Did you get your understanding of evolution from Hollywood movies?
LOLOLOLOLOL.
Somebody says something incorrect. I correct them. And you chime in with outrage.
Quck quiz: Who is the one who brought up terminology?
Nobody ever claimed that evolution (Darwinian or otherwise) solved the problem of the origin of life. However, it does narrow the problem by postulating a few origins (ideally only one) rather than millions.
It is not possible to undermine ID. That's the problem with it.
It wasn't me. It's always an ignoramus who thinks that understanding biogenesis is necessary before understanding variation and selection.
Darwinian or otherwise, the claim that an intelligible universe populated by intelligent beings can come about wholly apart from intelligence, design, or some combination of the two can only be described as something other than emprical science.
Proof is acheived by mathematics, truth is argued by philosophy, a scientic theory is the explination and evidence for a observed fact. A scientific doctrine by defination does not exist. One term is of philosophy and the other is of science. The statement is of no use to anyone.
And I didn't post to you correcting you did I?
Nothing in that quote says that Harvardites consider abiogenesis as part of the ToE. Only the writer of this article is implying that. Reread it.
How do they suggest that? Please answer.
Do you fully understand how God came to exist? If not, then you are simply pushing the problem back. Any way you look at it, the origin of existence is beyond our understanding.
Are you calling Alter Kaker a creationist?
You posted on a public forum.
What are you talking about? How does ToE negate the polite rules of society?
Understanding the chemical processes that led to the first life on earth is as un-important to evolution as the question of whether the Vikings really sailed to North America before Columbus is to understanding the political history of America. The Viking question is interesting, but ultimately it has no bearing on our history.
And this bothers you because . . . ?
Evolutionary Biology and the theory of evolution are not the same thing.
Abiogenesis does fall within Evolutionary Biology (A field of science) while the theory of evolution is one theory in the field of biology.
Breathtakingly-inane-article PLACEMARKER
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