The End of Intelligent Design?

As to Creationism in general, I have personally debated Duane Gish, Walter T. Brown, and the late A.E. Wilder-Smith

An intelligent person would have learned something from the experience...

You might want to read this and then update your talking points.

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/23/7899.full.pdf+html

Now, if the greatest scientists could not create anything remotely as complex as a "human machine," how could blind material forces?

Simple answer: They can't. Evolution is no longer being defended by anybody with brains or talent, basically just by academic dead wood.

Please cite one of Behe’s papers supporting Intelligent Design that has been published in a creditable peer-reviewed journal.

I’m not a theist, so of course do not buy any creationist ideas, but cannot buy any current evolutionist hypotheses, either.

But Id, is absurd. If any engineer in any business in history produced such a bad design he would have been instantly fired.

Hank

Peer reviewed journals are basically a closed system. I mean, we’ve all just seen that in the case of “Global Warming(TM), haven’t we? What’s the difference??

Again with the straw man, is that all that you have?

I guess when the facts are not on your side, or you have a question you cannot answer you got to go with it.

Martin Anderson ("Imposters in the Temple") describes the trivial pursuits which have replaced teaching as the major objective of many if not most professors, in many if not most schools:

"For most professors, the surest route to scholarly fame (and some fortune) is to publish in the distinguished academic journals of their field. Not books, or treatises, for these are rare indeed, but short, densely packed articles of a dozen pages or so.
"The successful professor's resume will be littered with citations of short, scholarly articles, their value rising with the prestige of the journal. These studious articles are the coin of the realm in the academic world. They are the professor's ticker to promotion, higher salary, generous research grants, lower teaching loads, and even more opulent office space.
"...These are supposed to be scholarly pieces, at the cutting edge of new knowledge.
"But now I must confess something. Many years ago when I read these articles regularly as part of my academic training and during my early years as a professor, I was bothered by the fact that I often failed to find the point of these articles, even after wading through the web of jargon, mathematical equations, and turgid English. Perhaps when I get older and wiser I will appreciate them more, I thought. Well, I am now fifty-five years old, and the significance of most academic writing continues to elude me."
"In recent years, I have conducted an informal survey. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I ask scholars about their academic journal reading habits. For example, I recently asked a colleague, a man with a solid reputation as a scholar, what he considered to be the most important academic journal in his field of study. An economist, he immediately replied "The American Economic Review".
"Let me ask you a question", I said. "Take, say, all of the issues of the last five years. What is your favorite article?"
"...Sure enough, he answered like all the rest. There was a silence of a few seconds, and then he cleared his throat a bit and, looking somewhat guilty and embarassed, said "Well, I haven't been reading it much lately." When pressed, he admitted that he could not name a single article which he had read during the last five years which he found memorable. In fact, he probably had not read any articles, but was loath to admit it.
"...There are exceptions of course, a handful of men and women in every field who do read these articles and try to comprehend any glimmers of meaning or significance they might contain. But, as a general rule, nobody reads the articles in academic journals anymore.
"...There is a mystery here. For while these academic publications pile up, largely unread, on the shelves of university libraries, their importance to a professor's career continues unabated. Scarcely anyone questions these proofs of erudition on a resume.
"...One reason why these research articles are automatically accepted as significant and important is that they have survived the criticism of "peer review" before being published.
"...Some of the manuscript reviews are done 'blind', with the author's name stripped off, while others are not and the reviwer knows exactly whom he or she is evaluating. Given what is at stake in peer reviewing... it would not be unreasonable to worry a little about corruption sneaking in.
"But these questions are not explored. The fact that some fields of study are small enough that the intellectuals involved in them are all known to eachother, or that friends review friends, or that reviewers repay those who reviewed their own writings favorably in the past -- all these potential problems are ignored...

That of course simply describes the "peer review" system which normal academia is based on. Grandiose flim-flams and scams like "global warming" or evolution amount to the same methods with intent to scam the whole world and not just academia.

Still whacking at that same old straw man I see.

Let’s see the creation/i.d. “scientist” can’t play by the scientific rules the rest of the world follows so they just decide to change the rules….I get it.

When your research can’t stand up to peer-review, then it is not valid research.

Intelligent Design...is statistically irreproducible

So is evolution. You cannot reproduce a single instance of positive evolution. It is not going on. Evolutionists are as dependent upon faith as the ID'ers.............

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In fact the evos have diligently tried to produce positive lasting mutations for many decades using the extremely fast reproducing fruit fly. They subject fruit flies to every conceivable thing they can think of to make it produce positive, lasting mutations without any success. Fruit flies have had in the years of experimentation on them many more generations than man has ever suppose to have had on earth. No matter what they do in the end they still have fruit flies, and fruit flies without positive, lasting mutations. In their valiant effort to prove the merits of macro evolution they have gone a long way to disprove it.

Please don’t consider your post a waste of time as it is the first that has inspired me to comment here.

Regarding Darwin and evolution. Darwin (and Wallace) developed their ideas based on detailed observations. They developed their theories in a period when Uniformitarianism was the orthodoxy of science. Under this idea, viewing evolution as a long slow process of gradual changes where statistically, the more fit would be more likely to reproduce made sense.

However, anyone who has been following Sunken Civ’s ping list Catastrophism, or was already aware of this, knows that the evolutionary world has also been influenced by a number of very severe world wide catastrophes. An argument was made that Darwin himself was concerned about the “Cambrian Explosion” when new life forms became numerous and widespread. We now know that there was probably a major extraterrestrial crash on earth that preceeded the “Explosion”. Other major boloids may have caused the great Permian extinction which destroyed about 97% of all species. It took millions of years for the earth to recover from that one, but then the dinosaurs had their great 150 million year flowering. Until the great Yucatan boloid crashed and made their continued life impossible 65 million years ago. We now know that a number of great and lesser events caused the dying off of creatures that were probably quite fit, but were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After each of these events there has been a great movement and diversification of the survivors.

Relatively recently, 74,000 years ago, the megavolcano Toba in Indonesia exploded leaving a crater 18 miles by 65 miles in diameter. Scientists now are inclined to believe that this event reduced the human population to no more than 5 or 10,000 individuals. Certainly fitness helped those who were not killed in the first terrible years to survive. However, we do not know how many people more fit were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Unfortunately, the scientific work on boloid effects and megavolcanoes is relatively new, and as each science is specialized and isolated, it takes time for new learning in one are to permeat and influence the thinking and hypothosese of another.

Meanwhile, fascinating work is being done in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, evo devo for short. Here they show that the genetics of development is amazingly conservative (in the sense of conserving). For example the segments of an earthworm, of an insect, and the spine of a human all have the same genetic roots. Thus rather than having to totally reinvent the wheel, evolution springboards from preexisting genetic material as new variations are mutated. Thus the amount of time it takes to develop new creatures should be much shorter than if everything had to be developed from scratch. I encourage anyone who wants to know more about this exciting young field to read: Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo, by Sean B. Carroll, 2005.

“Neither the designer nor the means of design are [not?] addressed. There is no supernatural involved.”

However, the Republican appointed Judge in the Dover case did come to the conclusion that ID was being used as a stalking horse for religion, thus the decision to refuse ID equal standing with science. Furthermore, the religiously oriented people who pushed the case made fools of themselves by lying on the stand. Something which seriously annoyed the Judge. It was also shown that previous creationist literature had been basically rewritten by replacing the more religious wording with ID.

However, the Republican appointed Judge in the Dover case did come to the conclusion that ID was being used as a stalking horse for religion,

You mean the political hack whose main claim to fame before being appointed a federal district judge was heading the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and banning Bad Frog Beer because he didn't like the label?

You mean the wise jurist who let the ACLU write his decision almost word for word?

David Souter was Republican appointed too. I guess you must think he's a great judge since he was on the Supreme Court and all.

Can you give me more information about the ACLU writing his decision?

Here you go. It opens as a pdf file.