Posted on 06/23/2007 12:21:46 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Pro-Darwin Biology Professor Laments Academia's "Intolerance" and Supports Teaching Intelligent Design
Charles Darwin famously said, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." According to a recent article by J. Scott Turner, a pro-Darwin biology professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, modern Neo-Darwinists are failing to heed Darwin's advice. (We blogged about a similar article by Turner in The Chronicle of Higher Education in January, 2007.) Turner is up front with his skepticism of intelligent design (ID), which will hopefully allow his criticisms to strike a chord with other Darwinists.
Turner starts by observing that the real threat to education today is not ID itself, but the attitude of scientists towards ID: "Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I don't see ID as a threat to biology, public education or the ideals of the republic. To the contrary, what worries me more is the way that many of my colleagues have responded to the challenge." He describes the "modern academy" as "a tedious intellectual monoculture where conformity and not contention is the norm." Turner explains that the "[r]eflexive hostility to ID is largely cut from that cloth: some ID critics are not so much worried about a hurtful climate as they are about a climate in which people are free to disagree with them." He then recounts and laments the hostility faced by Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian:
It would be comforting if one could dismiss such incidents as the actions of a misguided few. But the intolerance that gave rise to the Sternberg debacle is all too common: you can see it in its unfiltered glory by taking a look at Web sites like pandasthumb.org or recursed.blogspot.com [Jeffry Shallit's blog] and following a few of the threads on ID. The attitudes on display there, which at the extreme verge on antireligious hysteria, can hardly be squared with the relatively innocuous (even if wrong-headed) ideas that sit at ID's core.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Case
Turner sees the Kitzmiller v. Dover case as the dangerous real-world expression of the intolerance common in the academy: "My blood chills ... when these essentially harmless hypocrisies are joined with the all-American tradition of litigiousness, for it is in the hand of courts and lawyers that real damage to cherished academic ideas is likely to be done." He laments the fact that "courts are where many of my colleagues seem determined to go with the ID issue” and predicts, “I believe we will ultimately come to regret this."
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner on Education
Turner explains, quite accurately, that ID remains popular not because of some vast conspiracy or religious fanaticism, but because it deals with an evidentiary fact that resonates with many people, and Darwinian scientists do not respond to ID's arguments effectively:
[I]ntelligent design … is one of multiple emerging critiques of materialism in science and evolution. Unfortunately, many scientists fail to see this, preferring the gross caricature that ID is simply "stealth creationism." But this strategy fails to meet the challenge. Rather than simply lament that so many people take ID seriously, scientists would do better to ask why so many take it seriously. The answer would be hard for us to bear: ID is not popular because the stupid or ignorant like it, but because neo-Darwinism's principled banishment of purpose seems less defensible each passing day.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Turner asks, “What, then, is the harm in allowing teachers to deal with the subject as each sees fit?” ID can't be taught, he explains, because most scientists believe that "normal standards of tolerance and academic freedom should not apply in the case of ID." He says that the mere suggestion that ID could be taught brings out "all manner of evasions and prevarications that are quite out of character for otherwise balanced, intelligent and reasonable people."
As we noted earlier, hopefully Turner’s criticisms will strike a chord with Darwinists who might otherwise close their ears to the argument for academic freedom for ID-proponents. Given the intolerance towards ID-sympathy that Turner describes, let us also hope that the chord is heard but the strummer is not harmed.
Exactly.. How did the first DNA sequence form ALIVE?..
Since DNA can also be dead?.. Dead DNA is just protoplasm..
Even, Dead DNA would be almost impossible to form statistically..
Wonder why nobody cares what makes DNA ALIVE or NOT..
DNA is only wondrous because its alive, dead DNA is merely "SNOT"...
Who says it is "dead" - perhaps "dormant" is a better term since it mey be merely (temporarily ??) lacking the 'tools' to 'live.' After all, we can transpose genes from one organism to another. It is not out of the realm of possiblility, were we to find a complete strand of dinosaur DNA that we might bring dinosaurs back to life ... ???
As to the first part of how the first formed "alive" - that is the mystery, perhaps miracle if you wish, although I think it is just the possibility that there can be such a thing as DNA the underlying miracle.
I think I may have an interesting perspective on that ... developing (where's the siren gif ??? ) but still some aspect to work out. Fascinating ramifications though. Sorry to tease, but just trying to explain a temporary silence on the matter.
I agree. That is the question.
Right now, the disagreement seems to be over whether or not the answer to that question is embedded in the program.
Most functions are not computable. There would be no program, no instructions.
Thats what Dr. FrankenSteyn(ominous organ chord) thought..
What I say is road kill will never become "roundish" again.. but will remain flatt..
I continue to embrace the Shannon model which I might point out is also compatible with this speculation.
And Wimmer made the point by bootstrapping the polio virus in the lab. But to do it, it started with the message itself - and then provided a cell-free juice whereupon the virus became active - or in the Shannon model, successfully communicating as "noise" in the channel.
The Miller/Urey experiments lacked the insight of the information (successful communications) - and the message.
I gather this is the classical understanding, dougd. Yet I have encountered many articles recently that speak of a zero-point vacuum field as being a mediating field of zero-point energy, spontaneous emissions of virtual particles (photons). The conjecture is such a field more basic or fundamental than the EM field may "reside" in an additional fifth "time-like" dimension. I don't know whether or not this is true. But I find the speculation interesting.
A particularly interesting example that doesn't deal specifically with photons, but with particles generally, is one offered by P. S. Wesson in his article “Five Dimensional Relativity and Two Times” — in which it is posited that time-like paths of massive particles in four dimensions can arise from null paths in a fifth dimension, where there is an oscillation around the hypersurface we call space/time. His article also suggests that a particle in the fifth dimension could be multiply imaged in the four dimensions, and that the weak equivalence principle in the four dimensions may be the symmetry of a corresponding five-dimensional metric.
Or to put it another way, instead of there being 1080 particles in the visible four dimensions, it could actually be the case that as little as a single particle in a fifth dimension is imaged 1080 times in the four dimensions of our normal experience. [P. S. Wesson, "Five Dimensional Relativity and two Times," Cornell University Library, May 2002. (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0205/0205117.pdf), which A-G and I quote in our book, Timothy.]
Anyhoot, Wesson's model seems to answer for non-local particle behavior and superluminal velocities.
Fair enough. In that context, “observation” seems to involve searching for various means of getting it to emit that information, in a form we can utilize.
Well, of course that was the premise of Jurassic Park.... Evidently you're not the only person who thinks this is possible.
Probably we could more easily find a complete strand of DNA from a recently deceased person. As far as I know, nobody has yet tried to use it to bring that person "back to life."
Programs don't create themselves as far as I know. They require a programmer. At least all the programs that we humans know about do.
I think it's quite compatible, too, A-G.
LOLOL!!!!!!!!!!
Indeed - though I was alluding to the CERN search for the Higgs field/boson.
I'll be glad to read 'em both. :^) Though if RightWhale's prose is anything like Hegel's (or even Kant's -- he seems to admire the latter), it would likely be a struggle....
If there exists an algorithm [Euclidean which includes decision, process and recursives] which is also self-modifying, at the inception of biological life, then we can pitch abiogenesis for good. LOL!
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