Posted on 06/22/2006 1:28:41 PM PDT by Tim Long
600 dissenters sign on challenging claims about support for theory
More than 600 scientists holding doctoral degrees have gone on the record expressing skepticism about Darwin's theory of evolution and calling for critical examination of the evidence cited in its support.
All are signatories to the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement, which reads: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."
The statement, which includes endorsement by members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, was first published by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute in 2001 to challenge statements about Darwinian evolution made in promoting PBS's "Evolution" series.
The PBS promotion claimed "virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true."
The list of 610 signatories includes scientists from National Academies of Science in Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, India (Hindustan), Nigeria, Poland, Russia and the United States. Many of the signers are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as Cambridge University, British Museum of Natural History, Moscow State University, Masaryk University in Czech Republic, Hong Kong University, University of Turku in Finland, Autonomous University of Guadalajara in Mexico, University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, Institut de Paleontologie Humaine in France, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, MIT, The Smithsonian and Princeton.
"Dissent from Darwinism has gone global," said Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman. "Darwinists used to claim that virtually every scientist in the world held that Darwinian evolution was true, but we quickly started finding U.S. scientists that disproved that statement. Now we're finding that there are hundreds, and probably thousands, of scientists all over the world that don't subscribe to Darwin's theory."
The Discovery Institute is the leading promoter of the theory of Intelligent Design, which has been at the center of challenges in federal court over the teaching of evolution in public school classes. Advocates say it draws on recent discoveries in physics, biochemistry and related disciplines that indicate some features of the natural world are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.
"I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favor of Darwinian dogma," said Raul Leguizamon, M.D., pathologist and professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
"Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all," he added. "Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as Bernard Shaw used to say."
I will not claim to be an expert on Ayn Rand or her philosophy of Relativism but I wonder if that is where you are coming from.
Indeed the educators in our culture should be teaching about communism and other things you mentioned.
It is so freaking stupid to ignore the very notions and beliefs which have been instrumental in shaping the reality that we 21st century dwellers actually abide in.
Instead we get kids in Massachusetts reading fairy tales about the Prince who found his Prince, and methods of engaging in fisting, and other forms of sexual behaviors. Public Schools are a mess because they don't teach our kids about relevant things that are balanced.
All that while little Jimmy and little Nancy are are indoctrinated by a bunch of union radicals who swear every year it seems that they are underpaid, overworked, and not in it for the money. Please name another vocation with 14 or so weeks off every year for me.
Oh, and please not the US Congress. I'm not interested in that. I'd like to think that I might have a chance to get to Heaven when I die.
Behe testified under oath that the reason we didn't see evolution ID changes now is because God may be dead.
I have read several and also several curriculum guidelines. BTW, NEVER has a creo backed up your claim with evidence. They usually come back with something like "go look yourself and see". Well I have and it is NOT what you claim.
hmmm. You hit the nail on the head for the origin of the Bible.
Carbon 14 dating, for a start.
LOL!
This'll do. You can take it whole or address any specific example.
Do none of you evos recognize me here?
(I knew I should have picked a better screenname.)
I have received radiocarbon dates >11,000 years of age. (Didn't I mention this to you before, or was that somebody else?)
Except that I was talking about past experience of CREATIONISTS. It was (real) Creationist Scientists who established that the earth is ancient and that there was no global flood. Whatever you may happen to think of their conclusions in retrospect, this is an historical FACT. The young earth was dead in professional science while Darwin was still in knee-pants.
Heck, even the fundamentalist antievolutionists of the 1920s were overwhelmingly old earth creationists! YEC was only revived as a significant view (among fundamentalists and evangelicals; not within science) by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb with the publication of the The Genesis Flood in the 1960's. And as Morris would later affirm:
The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since he has told us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures that it is several thousand years in age, and no more, that ought to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology.
(I've pulled the quote above from the web, cited as from The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, 1972, page 94. I have this book in my library and have that quote marked, so if anybody should have trouble finding it just let me know. I don't like to trust other people's citations, but I'm too lazy to dig the book out unless I need to!)
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hmmm. You hit the nail on the head for the origin of the Bible.
That coupled with an ignorance of how the world works. So they made up stories to explain things, doing the best they could to come up with stories to make sense of it all. The people who made up the stories that became Genesis were clearly trying to come up with answers to questions like, "Where did we come from." They made up a power god, his nemesis, created fanciful tales to explain such things as origins, diversity of languages, etc. Given their lack of sophistication, technology-wise, they did what they could to make sense of the world.
The authors of the Genesis stories had an inquisitiveness about the world but were merely saddled with the handicap of living in a time where they didn't have the knowledge and tools to adequately answer these questions. Compared that to their putative descendants, such as the modern-day creationist. These people have been given the gift of living in an age where the technology and science exists to begin to really answer these questions for real, no made up fairy stories, and they just... spit... it away.
These YECs and other of their ilk blind themselves, clamp their hands over their ears and kill any spark of inquisitiveness in them, shunning true answers out of a fear that somewhere along the line they may have to contemplate unpleasant things.
Not to mention varves, cresoote bush rings, ice cores. Of course these all match exactly, the fat years and the lean years, summer and winter, hot and cold, wet and dry, major and minor, Guelphs and Ghibellines, but I digress.
No one would sit up late listening to their elders if the stories were not "cool". I probably would have never opened the bible when I was a kid except for the "cool" illustrations.
I have received radiocarbon dates >11,000 years of age.
FYI, this request from GD arose in response to my original point about the young earth and flood geology being falsified and abandoned by pre-Darwinian, creationist geologists.
I cited this historical fact as a refutation of GD's claim that rejection of YEC had a "metaphysical" and antievolutionary basis. IOW YEC was debunked by scientists who were ALL antievolutionists, and most of whom were also strong Christians (e.g. Sedgewick, Buckland, Coneybear, Hugh Miller, etc) so it couldn't have been, and historically wasn't, based on or in defense of evolution.
So, anyway, strictly speaking, the facts falsifying YEC should be from among those that convinced scientists prior to 1859, which of course was before radiometric dating.
That said, GD has probably been too busy moving his goal posts to follow the discussion that closely anyway.
After reading The Origin of Species, Sedgwick candidly wrote to Darwin on November 24, 1859:
If I did not think you a good tempered & truth loving man I should not tell you that. . . I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts of it I admired greatly; parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore; other parts I read with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous-- You have deserted-- after a start in that tram-road of all solid physical truth-- the true method of induction. . .
Exactly. Sedgewick was a pious evangelical and a critic of (what he deemed) "materialist science" throughout his life. And yet he still rejected YEC and rejected the "scriptural geologists" (the YECs of the day) as unscientific. This is why I cited him (and others) as historical evidence against GourmetDan's claim that rejection of YEC is based on a "metaphysical" and evolutionary bias. Sedqewick's bias was all in the other direction, yet the scientific evidence compelled him.
Here's a snippet from an essay on Sedgewick by John M. Lynch that contains some more interesting quotes:
While Sedgwick had originally been a believer in a young Earth and in 'Flood' or 'Mosaic' geology, he recanted this view in his 1831 address as President of the Geological Society. He termed flood geology 'a philosophic heresy' and felt that Mosaic geologists 'committed the folly and sin of dogmatizing on matters they have not personally examined' (Sedgwick 1831, 313). This recantation illustrates his lifelong view that scientists should not use religion as the handmaid of geology or theologians the facts of science to prove their theological premises. Sedgwick became a ‘Gap theorist’, a believer in a period between the first and second verses of Genesis which corresponded to the geological record as observed. As he said at the 1844 British Association for Advancement of Science meeting while defending geology against the literalism of William Cockburn, the second verse 'may perhaps describe the condition of the earth after one of the many catastrophes by which its former structure had been broken up, and of which we can, on its present surface, find so many traces' (Clark & Hughes, II, 79 - 80). Conflicts between science and religion were not to be solved by'shifting and shuffling the solid strata of the earth, or dealing them out in such as way as to play the game of an ignorant and dishonest hypothesis – not by shutting our eyes to the facts, or denying the evidence of our senses; but by patient investigation carried out in the sincere love of truth and by learning to reject every consequence not warranted by direct physical evidence.' (Discourse 111)While his views on the age of the Earth changed radically, his opposition to transmutation remained constant throughout his life. This aside, Sedgwick clearly cannot be seen in the same mould as the Scriptural geologists who opposed scientific investigation, citing the primacy of the Word over observations in the natural world. As he said while clutching a Bible - 'Who is the greatest unbeliever? Is it not the man who, professing to hold that this book contains the Word of God, is afraid to look into the other volume, lest it should contradict it?' (Clark & Hughes, II, 582). Sedgwick would have little time with many modern opponents of evolution (particularly in the United States) who use biblical verse to override geological observation.
Okay... This is going to take a lot of italics.
Come on, now. You don't really believe that nonsense, do you? Following that line of reasoning, nobody at FR would ever be able to successfully ridicule John Kerry or Helen Thomas. Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter would find their careers effectively dead, and H.L Mencken's never would have occured.
Since Coulter and Steyn's careers aren't dead and Mencken's did occur, I'll assume you don't really believe that nonsense,and what you really mean is that the issues promulgated by the Discovery Institute are actually non-issues; that considering them anything but that, is silly from a scientific standpoint, and that therefore any point it purports to make ought to be suspect.
However, that really doesn't address anything I said; nor does referring to those who approve of the first list as being anti-science. You may find the question "already ridiculous" but to simply claim that the signers are anti-science because they agree with its statement still begs said question by running afoul of the "No true Scotsman fallacy".
Suppose I assert no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge. You counter this by pointing out that your friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge. I then say "Ah, yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.
It's one thing to say that ID isn't really science, and it is another to say that no true scientists endorse it. It's that latter claim that I think can't be made without committing the NTS fallacy.
As for Stephen Jay Gould, I'm a little surprised you would describe him as "great". According to John Maynard Smith, "the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
Outside of his specialty, of course, Gould is well known for having written the Mismeasure of Man, a screed attacking the Bell Curve and its authors as pseudo-scientists rather than dealing with its facts and arguments-- plainly, in the case of the late, great, Richard Hernstein in particular, an example of the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981
Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, 1994
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