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Not so much the medical community, as the educators. Science and math literacy is shockingly low and dropping. . .

Multiple examples:

Australia

India

And the US

Fear that science might upset some religious applecart or pop-culture shibboleth is the mind-killer. . . literally. . .

This appears to speak to your question, especially the last two paragraphs before the notes section.

The Peppered Moth Story: Vindicated!

A quick search appears to show they haven't folded their cards as yet.

About Irreducible Complexity
Michael Behe Hasn't Been Refuted on the Flagellum
mouse trap illustration vs. 3-glasses-3-knives illustration — Irreducible Complexity, Depth of Integration

I would think that evolutionary theory would predict, and even practically demand, the presence of ID theorists and Creationists of various flavors as part of the scientific community. Every scientific community, and they are segmented, is its own little ecosystem. It has sources of energy (grants), and consumers (scientists) and various forms of reproduction (ideas and new scientists, etc.). Some members of the ecosystem will consume resources, but give little back, or produce poor quality offspring. The herd only improves if the strongest survive. Think of the role of predators taking the weak in any animal stock. In this case it is weak theories and science. By the two communities engaging in adversarial struggle, the weak science is exposed and made stronger. What is passed over in silence by on community is exposed by the other and account demanded. Intellectual rigor increases. Their ways are strange to you, perhaps even irritating. But directly and indirectly they help real science grow stronger, and more innovative. They probably also bring additional funding into the scientific community that it otherwise wouldn't have. And without them, your droll post would have no meaning.

The evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium came about for a reason - to explain missing data - transitional forms, data that couldn't be found but evolutionary theory said should be there. It is certainly a bold approach to the problem - we can't find it because it doesn't exist so, never mind. In a way it brings to mind the Fermi Paradox.

Of course the ID community has a view: Punctuated Equilibrium and Patterns from the Fossil Record

Note to moderators: I am neither kidding nor trolling. Feel free to ignore the post.

You believe Al Gore as a credible spokesman (and it was people like you that gave him an Oscar AND a Nobel), yet you dismiss people like Reid Bryson as an economist, a trickster, or "Pentacostal inspired merchant" (whatever the fuck that is)?

Sure, THAT's credible.

BTW Reid Bryson is Emeritus Professor of Meteorology, of Geography and of Environmental Studies. Senior Scientist, Center for Climatic Research, The Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (Founding Director), the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Many climatologists regard him as the father of climatology. Professor Bryson calls manmade global warming absurd.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/off-topic/father-of-climatology-calls-manmade-global-warming-absurd/

The real question is why is pseudo-reporting taking over for real reporting. The report by Nature is misleading at best. There has been *no* removal of evolution, just a removal of outdated evolutionary ideas. Many of the textbooks are simply replacing outdated evolutionary examples with more modern ones. What should be news is that it took a group of creationists to convince the education establishment to modernize their textbooks. Don't take the Nature report at face value - if you prod further, you'll find that *what* they are being asked to do is not problematic, they are just mad because creationists are the ones asking them to do it. I put more detail here.

By the year 2005, young children won't even know what snow is. (It's funny how all these dire warnings from the UN and other nation-level climate bureaus never seem to come true. - ed.) BTW the rate-of-rise of sealevel on these island nations is only two-thousandths of an inch per year. Hardly a great tragedy.

LINK Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

LINK # 2 http://www.uncommondescent.com/science/no-more-snow-in-england-say-global-warmists/

...is a proponent of intelligent design and rejects evolution.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/roy-spencer-on-intelligent-design/

nuff said

You should go and visit "uncommon descent" the blog HQ of intelligent design. They're always bringing up AGW skepticism, since the notion of a far-reaching conspiracy of scientific propaganda and elitist repression is the same excuse they use to wave away the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is in favour of evolution. Throwing their lot in with other denialists "makes their worldview make sense".

Also institute for creation research states:

• Global warming appears to have been occurring for the last 30-50 years.
• This warming may only be a short-term fluctuation but could be a longer-term trend.
• Evidence is still inconclusive whether man is causing the warming.
• No "natural" causes for global warming have been confirmed.
• One possible new theory is that galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) modulated by solar activity affects low-level cloud cover and is causing the warming.

Global warming may affect some parts of our society negatively but would likely benefit others. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. Compared to climate changes which have occurred in earth history, a temperature rise of a few degrees is a small fluctuation which will not lead to a complete melting of the polar caps or another ice age. Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God's intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times

Answers in genesis cry conspiracy and even cite "The Day After Tomorrow"!

The tactic used by Lomborg (quote mining) is the definitive modus operandi of a denialist. It is the bread and butter of Creationists, and for the person employing it, it is a strong indicator of either severe cognitive dissonance or outright lying.

More accurately, he claims that IC systems derived from evolutionary process is statistically unlikely. And while that simulation can make an IC system, it has a few biases.

I don't think you were watching it properly.

The most successful algorithm doesn't seem to die.

A high-scoring algorithm continues to contribute to the gene pool until more effective algorithms displace it. Humans, in contrast, can only contribute for three generations (or four, in the case of virile males.), assuming 1 generation is 20 years. Other animals have a higher generations-to-lifespan ratio, but it isn't infinite.

From the linked page: "Reproduction. Those individuals remaining after selection become the parents of the next generation. The individuals wiped out by selection are replaced by mutated copies of the remaining individuals, or by crossover of two of the remaining individuals." A combination of sexual and asexual reproduction is used; if you think that restricting the system to put a maximum lifespan on individuals would make a difference, feel free to tweak the code and try it. But don't make the assertion unless you can back it up; it's just hand-waving.

The generations don't age

Similar to the issue about not dieing, humans and animals get old. They slow down. They don't heal as fast as they once did. They acquire life-long injuries and afflictions (polio, damaged limbs...). In this simulation, there is no such thing as a virile young adult with a hereditary predisposition towards sterility in middle age (or an accident arising from being an idiot), which would limit them to a single reproductive generation.

Why is this relevant? It's a bit of complexity papered over in the simulation because it's not directly relevant to the question of whether or not genetic algorithms can generate irreducibly complex systems.

Replication/Reproduction cycle facilitated by system and was not produced in an evolutionary manner.

Without the Java app to interpret, those codes would be meaningless; and the Java app was not a product of darwinian evolution. Biological evolution is similarly implausible. DNA goes through a fantastically complex process to duplicate a thread, and that process had to be in place alongside a DNA strand that could code a duplicate DNA interpreter as well as duplicate itself. Writing quines is complicated enough. But a quine that is self-compiling and self-executing? Generated at random in a system that is passively hostile? Please.

Again, how does this relate to the proposition in question--whether or not a genetic algorithm can produce an irreducibly-complex system as Behe defined it? The system is far, far simpler than an actual organism, but the properties it's designed to study are emulated faithfully--non-random selection on a set of randomly-varying replicators.

You might as well claim that because a human wrote the program, it was intelligently designed and is therefore not capable of showing anything at all about evolution. (Hey, it's been claimed.)

One of your criticisms is unsupported, and the other two are irrelevant. Would you like to try again?

"Intolerant fundies are simply a very vocal minority."

Unfortunately you're not even on my level... it would take years of reading for you to catch up unfortunately, when I mean "uninformed" I mean lacking in insight into humanity and human nature and it's inherent defectiveness. It's not merely intolerant fundies, go look at the ravings of mr scot here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/

These people still believe and spread things that are not true and fuckup their kids lives with their rather primitive morality, not only that most people in your red state wouldn't even qualify as christian because that is how bad they are at thinking and reading the bible (if they do at all), when it comes to things that psychologically comfort them which they refuse to let go of. They're mostly secular people with a crazy religious bent who can't let go of the blanket of religion that keeps them warm at night.

It still doesn't absolve them of the fact that they are a bunch of liars who harm the world by their lies and inflict their primtivism on others and most importantly - their children. Tolerance is not a virtue here, it is a vice that has come out of the enlightenment view of reason and humanity, human beings are not nice creatures. They are primitive and feral to the bone. Millons of years and we still have war and poverty ffs. All men are primitive and I'll be glad once we start moving away from man 1.0, human beings (that is v1.0) are a failed race, of this I am certain. I don't buy the myth that people are good people, if they were good they would restrain their feral impulses and we wouldn't live in capitalist society where we have people eat $10,000 dinners and some man has to live on the street homeless, the fact that we have homeless people at all proves that mankind is not very nice or capable of controlling itself as a species. That fact alone speaks volumes of how not good we are because most people are a bunch of selfish hyper individualistic animals.

People are naturally prejudice as we know, but it signals a deeper more disturbing message about humans being the descendents of animals -- i.e. we are more wild animal then humane. Considering we allow people to have billions of dollars while some disabled man or woman may suicide over not being able to pay the bills. This shows us just how messed up human beings really are and how ignorant / apathetic they are in reality despite all the flashy words, inspiring messages and whatnot. And also how fearful they are of commiting to building relationships with others they perceive as "the other" even when they haven't done anything wrong.

People who believe illusions and lies are the problem in this world, people who will make dumb ass decisions that keep the world mired in confusion and the ethical backwardness it is in must be called on it. The reason teh world is so fucked up is because we allow the buck to pass, the war in iraq could have been shortened if all americans got up and caused the biggest shitstorm teh world has ever seen but most are apathetic plebes who couldn't give a rats ass for a bunch of what they might consider "brown people" in another country.

The truth is humans suck so lets not sugarcoat it ok? Millions of years, we're still at war with one another, some one or all human beings have something desperately wrong with them that needs to be fixed.

by DaveScot
So Louisiana has a new law allowing science teachers to teach the weaknesses of time & chance evolutionary theory.

What's the big deal? Evolution by time and chance is as well tested as gravity for Pete's sake. How long does take to convince a kid that when he throws a baseball into the air gravity will pull it back to earth?

According to the theophobic evolutionists there are no weaknesses in their theory.

So the teacher will quickly present just a small fraction of the "overwhelming evidence" that time & chance turned mud into Mozart, he'll have a list of zero things to present to argue against it, and all will be well with nothing lost. The biology teacher can then go straight on to teach really important specific things like how fish grew legs and lungs, dinosaurs became birds, and hippos became whales. These are things kids need to know in order to be successful, productive members of western civilization. Without knowing these things all of science will surely collapse and with it all of civilization itself. We can't let that happen. Failure to convince children of the fact of evolution by time and chance is a risk that makes global warming look like small potatoes. This is Really Important Stuff.

Uncommon Descent

The problem with this argument is that Miller fails to show that the construction/evolution of nylonase from its precursor actually requires CSI at all. As I develop the concept, CSI requires a certain threshold of complexity to be achieved (500 bits, as I argue in my book No Free Lunch). It's not at all clear that this threshold is achieved here (certainly Miller doesn't compute the relevant numbers).

Nylon Bacteria was taken up by the ID community here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/ why-scientists-should-not-dismiss-intelligent-desi gn/

2007 -- Buckle your safety belts!
by William Dembski on January 1st, 2007

Happy New Year to all UD regulars. I expect 2007 to be a bang-up year for ID. Here are three things in particular I'm looking forward to in the coming year:

      1. A new ID friendly research center at a major university. (This is not merely an idle wish -- stay tuned.)
      2. The publication of Michael Behe's book with Free Press: THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION.
      3. The publication of the sequel to OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE, authored by Jonathan Wells and me and titled THE DESIGN OF LIFE: DISCOVERING SIGNS OF INTELLIGENCE IN BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS.

P.S. I would also say that I'm looking forward to debating Barbara Forrest, but I'm giving 5 to 1 odds that she won't even start negotiations for such an event, much less show. Since she has charged me of cowardice (see here), it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I've appointed DaveScot to negotiate details of the debate (take it away Dave!).

http://www.uncommondescent.com/

Um, Forrest Mims is a creationist wingnut (and I say that with no offense meant to any nuts that might exist on wings). This article is similarly being spread by people like Dembski. Here's a debunking. Here's more.

There's one minor, itty-bitty difference between Pianka's speech and Forrest's reporting. Pianka said that it's going to happen, not that he wants it to happen. Pianka believes that a worldwide airborne plague is inevitable due to overpopulation, and campaigns to try and encourage population control (esp. in third world countries) are critical. While I don't agree with that, it's a valid argument, and is anything but "I want 90% of the world to drop dead."

Quite funny that the only reference that your struggle unearthed, while admittedly a Christian, is actually an ID critic

Except there isn't any.

Don't bother to register and ask him why, you'll get banned in seconds.

The co-inventor of Fullerenes and Nobel Prize winner
in Chemistry, Dr. Richard Smalley, rejected evolution
and championed the theory of Intelligent Design. The
following is a link containing the remarks of Dr. Hugh
Ross at Richard Smalley's memorial service:

http://www.reasons.org/about/staff/richard_smalley _funeral.shtml

The "unamed" Nobel Laureate in the following article is
Smalley:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/ 160

For background on Dr. Hugh Ross see here:

  http://www.reasons.org/about/staff/ross.shtml

Any time the subject of Intelligent Design comes up here
on Slashdot we are bombarded by people who insist that
Intelligent Design is only for stupid people who are
not "real" scientists. The above two are very much real
scientists and are only two of thousands of real scientists
around the world who see Intelligent Design as the most
plauseable, and scientifically correct view of humans,
the earth, and the cosmos.

In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process - one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence - simply cannot exist because 'the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles....It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence' (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).