I'm gone for the evening.
Freedom, reason, and evolution!
God Bless America!
Posted on 10/14/2002 4:59:49 PM PDT by RCW2001
| The Associated Press
|
| COLUMBUS, Ohio Oct. 14 — A state school board panel Monday recommended that Ohio science classes emphasize both evolution and the debate over its validity.
The committee left it up to individual school districts to decide whether to include in the debate the concept of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is guided by a higher intelligence. The guidelines for the science curriculum simply put into writing what many school districts already do. The current guidelines do not even mention evolution. "What we're essentially saying here is evolution is a very strong theory, and students can learn from it by analyzing evidence as it is accumulated over time," said Tom McClain, a board member and co-chairman of the Ohio Board of Education's academic standards committee. Conservative groups, some of which had tried and failed to get biblical creation taught in the public schools, had argued that students should learn about intelligent design. But critics of intelligent design said it is creationism in disguise. On Monday, the committee unanimously forwarded a final draft without the concept in it to the full 19-member board. Board member Michael Cochran, who had pushed for intelligent design in the standards, said, "The amendment allows teachers and students in Ohio to understand that evolution really is a theory and that there are competing views and different interpretations. This allows them to be discussed." The Ohio school board will decide Tuesday whether to adopt the new standards or order that they be revised.
On the Net: Ohio Department of Education: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/ |
When prediction is probabilistic, a theory cannot be accepted or rejected just by seeing what it predicts (Royall 1997, ch. 3). The best you can do is compare theories with each other. To test evolutionary theory against the hypothesis of intelligent design, you must know what both hypotheses predict about observables (Fitelson and Sober 1998, Sober 1999b). The searchlight therefore must be focused on the design hypothesis itself. What does it predict? If defenders of the design hypothesis want their theory to be scientific, they need to do the scientific work of formulating and testing the predictions that creationism makes (Kitcher 1984, Pennock 1999). Dembski’s Explanatory Filter encourages creationists to think that this responsibility can be evaded. However, the fact of the matter is that the responsibility must be faced.From How Not to Detect Design, a review of William A. Dembski’s The Design Inference -- Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities.
"...that some biological structures are true evolutionary impossibilities"
Nobody has to prove that any organism is an "evolutionary impossibility" (whatever that means). All that's needed in the marketplace of scientific theories is to present a theory better supported by the available data.
Now that there is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted precisely to Intelligent Design, Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design, you would think that there'd be a flurry of scholarly articles appearing, full of useful concrete, meaty discoveries using ID as a research framework.
Well, let's see what happened: Issue 1.1 (Jan-Mar, 2002) had 8 papers and 3 book reviews. Issue 1.2 never came out, and so they recently published a "Double Issue, Vol 1.2 & 1.3 Apr-Sep 2002", containing a total of 8 articles.
Now I can relate to the growing pains of a young publishing venture, and maybe there are more articles in the pipeline. But Wm. Dembski is the founder & on the editorial board. It's an explicitly ID-friendly peer-reviewed journal. So far the development of an actual ID research program (as opposed to a series of polemical books) is looking a little iffy.
First, let's make up a definition of peer review such that Dembski's book fits the definition and, lo and behold, Dembski's books is peer reviewed.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
Peer review means that a manuscript is reviewed by peers in the field. A publishing committee, not matter how prestigious, is not a peer. The Cambridge Series are not peer reviewed.
No, what I wrote is back a few posts in the thread.
The same laws govern chemical bonding in DNA as govern chemical bonding in a crystal. Both are held together by electrostatic attraction/repulsion, subject ot the rules of quantum mechanics.
I don't know if it's ignorance on your part, or malice, but inserting words someone didn't use into a quoted piece of text, without indicating your insertion, is a fabrication. Or to use a shorter word, since you seem to be having problems with the written word, a lie.
Read post 40 again. Intelligent design theory does not seek to identify a specific designer or designers. It only seeks to demonstrate the probability of intelligent design is far greater than that for undirected causes. Also (as made clear in the post 40 citation), ID theory does not seek to demonstrate when or at what intervals (or even by what means) a designer/s designed. Dembski makes it clear that this is outside the purview of ID. So why would you ask? It was right there for you to read.
No? Unless this is done, ID has no more function than Santa Claus.
All that's needed in the marketplace of scientific theories is to present a theory better supported by the available data.
Fine. Then do it. So far, ID is a bust, because evolution explains the data. ID asserts that there are data that cannot be explained by ID. [Now, see your first statement, at the top of this post.]
We have interpreted the Filter as sometimes recommending that you should accept Regularity or Chance. This is supported, for example, by Dembski’s remark (38) that “if E happens to be an HP [a high probability] event, we stop and attribute E to a regularity.” However, some of the circumlocutions that Dembski uses suggest that he doesn't think you should ever “accept” Regularity or Chance. The most you should do is “not reject” them. Under this alternative interpretation, Dembski is saying that if you fail to reject Regularity, you can believe any of the three hypotheses, or remain agnostic about all three. And if you reject Regularity, but fail to reject Chance, you can believe either Chance or Design, or remain agnostic about them both. Only if you have rejected Regularity and Chance must you accept one of the three, namely Design. Construed in this way, a person who believes that every event is the result of Design has nothing to fear from the Explanatory Filter -- no evidence can ever dislodge that opinion. This may be Dembski's view, but for the sake of charity, we have described the Filter in terms of rejection and acceptance.Dembski has a filter that can only accept design, reject regularity, fail to reject regularity, reject chance, or fail to reject chance. It will never accept regularity, accept chance, or reject design.
OK, it's another thing he's left vague, whether he does or he doesn't. But such ambiguity looks cultivated in a theory that is almost entirely about another theory being false.
Contrary to your claim, ID has a very robust research program. The reason you think it doesn't is because you fail to acknowledge that ID theory is different in character from the theory to which you so single-mindedly subscribe. Unlike neo-Darwinists, ID theorists do not waste their time digging endlessly for fossils of missing links that never materialize -- all in a desperate attempt to prop up their presuppositions about common ancestry.
Another critic who has never actually gone to original sources. The Design Inference barely even mentions existing evolutionary theory, and the one or two times that it briefly alludes to it, it does not attack.
Like Patrick Henry, who at least admits his bias and lack of interest in learning what ID actually says, you are not qualified to render an opinion on what you have no knowledge of.
Your post – specified complexity or natural occurrence?
Please understand, I do not ask this in malice, but in hope of a mutual understanding.
You should get your story straight. If you think peer-review is a scurrilous process, dominated by nefarious Darwinians, then why did you claim Dembski's work was peer reviewed as if it were a sign of its merit? Claiming it was peer reviewed, and then backing off and saying peer review is biased, simply gives the impression you were trying to put one over in the first place, doesn't it?
Michael Behe and others have pointed this out, but apparently nobody clued you in. The only substantial thing by Behe I've actually read is his work on nucleic acids; he managed to get that peer reviewed. The article he wrote about flagella was disastrously timed; he claimed they couldn't have evolved, about two years before experiments that make it dramatically obvious how they evolved were done.
I will grant Behe this; he's the only one of this bunch who's done any significant amount of real science. He wrote 30 odd papers back in the eighties/early nineties. It's a shame he seems to have given it up.
This purpose is precisely the same as that followed by the editors of the prestigious series, "Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory," the series in which The Design Inference appeared. Are you claiming that this scholarly committee chose to include unscientific claptrap among their series offerings?
Mathematics is not a science. Mathematicians need to be reminded of that occasionally.
The reason you fail to argue data/methodology and instead impute sinister agendas, is because you have never actually read The Design Inference. You haven't have you? And since you haven't even examined Dembski's work, you're in no more position to criticize it than Patrick Henry is, are you?
No, you're right. I simply know what I've seen posted here, or can find on the web. I'm arguing on my own behalf, from first principles, not playing dueling quotations, which seems to be the oly thing creationists are good for. And I'm not going to read Dembski's book unless someone can explain its basic arguments to me in simple rigorous terms, so that I'm convinced I'm not wasting my time and there is something there. All I've seen here, and elsewhere on creation sites on the net, is specious nonsense my 18 year old daughter could drive a truck through. Now, it is possible (I suppose) that Dembski is being horribly served by his friends and supporters, so now's your chance. Explain to me what 'specified complexity' is, and why it means we could not have evolved from simple one-celled organisms by natural selection.
Plowing the mainstream research for just the right data to mischaracterize the state of the evidence? In the sciences, such activity does not correspond to real, original research, even when the scholarship is conducted with integrity.
And the scholarship in ID paper "research" sucks. I once looked at this paper on the Cambrian from the Discovery Institute for Alamo Girl. I was repelled.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.