I don't think that anybody is stopping the discussion from taking place. They're keeping the discussion out of schools, and they're not looking too fondly on people who take the discussion to the popular press rather than doing actual research, but I don't know of any pro ID research that created new knowledge, was submitted to the appropriate journal, and then rejected without good reason. If somebody can point it out, I'm all ears.
There's an important distinction to be made between squelching discussion and making sure that the discussion is held in the proper forum. An academic who, rather than doing real work in the scientific community, goes to the popular press with, "My colleagues are full of shit! Here's evidence that I never submitted to them for peer review to prove it!" or worse, goes straight to primary school textbooks with no vetting, usually gets the smackdown from his colleagues. I don't think that it's really that unjustified. That kind of behavior is a classic hallmark of crackpottery and is unbecoming a good researcher.
I think my argument comes from something I read maybe a year or two ago, where one text merely stated, after discussing evolution, that some people believed God guided evolution. It didn't state that God guided evolution, it merely stated that some people take that philosophy. I simply don't have a problem with that, but it caused a huge debate at the time.
In a case like that, people are outraged on principle rather than practicality. Should we caveat any scientific claim of fact with a list of religious objections to it? "Some people don't believe that the mountains formed this way. Some prefer to believe that the world was made from the corpse of Ymir, the frost giant." At some point, you have to just let science class be science class. Caveats like that are just there to stroke a few religious egos and don't contribute anything to the science discussion.
Pure ID (i.e without the superfluous Creationist baggage) is agnostic about the nature of the designer, other than it requires intelligence.
Pure ID also happens to be completely devoid of claims, results, or even testable hypotheses. The weird thing about it is, the closer they come to defining an actual, testable hypothesis, the closer they usually end up coming to Biblical creationism.
So anyway, why did I use the word paranoid? It seems to me that with notable exceptions*, the Evolutionists I've come across when they're dealing with Creation/Evolution have been badly bitten by the antics of the rabid Creationists. The Evolutionist response to Intelligent Design seems to be disproportionate and often off topic - which looks to be somewhat paranoid about a rabid Creationist resurgence.
There are a few issues at work here. The first and most obvious is the fact that in the context of what goes into primary school textbooks, ID is, without any real argument to the contrary, little more than the same creationism that we've been keeping out of schools for years. The cdesign proponentsists would have us believe that they're a totally new animal with interesting new ideas, but the evidence simply doesn't bear it out. It's easy to call it paranoia, but when you see the same people showing up over and over again, you start to suspect a pattern.
More importantly, though, we're not talking about a bunch of crackpots who are being dismissed simply because they're crackpots. I don't think that there would be much resistance to a paper that actually contributes something to our knowledge being accepted into peer review. The problem is that nobody on the ID side is touching peer review with a 10-foot pole. They'd rather skip that inconvenient stuff and jump straight into textbooks for kids.
Given that they don't have a testable hypothesis but rather a simple philosophical objection to the way science is done now, it seems to me that it makes sense to reject ID from schools on its own merits. The fact that it's almost always just stealth creationism is mere icing on the cake. If they can successfully divorce themselves from creationist fringe players and formulate some testable hypotheses and generate some actual results, then we can talk. Until then, it's not paranoia that keeps them out of the game.
It says that X isn't possible on it's own natural state so it was moved along (designed if you will) by an intelligent being. If X is possible naturally, then ID is falsified.
That doesn't sound like a meaningful theory so much as, "Evolution as it stands is wrong, so I accept the only alternative hypothesis that I can think of at the moment." The ID crowd seems to be the null hypothesis plus some implications that don't necessarily follow from failing to reject the null hypothesis.
What is disingenuous kind sir is your complete lack of understanding that generations pass away and that I am talking about the court of public and scientific opinion in THIS generation.
I'm consistently amazed by the narrative that creationists are trying to sell here. The idea is that creationism is some brilliant new scientific theory that would catch on if only it was allowed to. The reality is that creationism and mysticism were the default case until barely 200 years ago, and they've gradually been replaced as new results come in. The fact that creationism isn't making some sort of amazing resurgence is due, quite simply, to the fact that it's still in the same place it was in the 18th century. It has no new useful models, no explanatory power, and only retroactive "predictions" about data that actual scientists are doing all the leg work to create.
The fact that the modern scientific community realizes this does not constitute a conspiracy.
No offense, but did you actually read that paper? I don't think that it says what you think it says.
You may also be interested in a more detailed explanation which includes some examples of beneficial mutations and not-so-beneficial mutations as well.
I appreciate the link, but I was looking for a source for your specific claims like the "3 generations" claim and the claim about "simultaneous" mutation.
As to Dawkin's actual quote in the Blind Watchmaker, he repeats the usual line about how micro evolution over time can lead to macro evolution given enough time while at the same time referring to the contradiction that we find in the problem posed by the Cambrian Explosion.
And before the quote, after the quote, and inside some of the ellipses you've added, he explains why these observations are not the problem you think they are. I note that you assiduously avoid posting those portions of the text each time you quote mine Dawkins.
Credits: I am quoting portions from www.anointed-one.net
I hope that you quote them more honestly than you quote Dawkins. Then again, if the Dawkins quotes are cribbed from anointed-one.net, I wouldn't be quite as proud as you are to be quoting from their web site.
No no no. An intelligent designer is necessary for objective morality, but does not necessarily mean that there is morality.
I'm not sure that even an intelligent designer can provide objective morality. Why would morality imposed by an intelligent designer be any more objective than morality imposed by anything else?
I'm not saying that having a creator means there must be morality, I'm saying that since there is morality, there must be a creator.
a) Very few genetic mutations are actually beneficial. And even if they are beneficial, very few of these mutations actually carry over to the 3rd generation.
Cite?
b) Some mutations are only beneficial if it *simultaneously* occurs with many other mutations.
Such as?
c) Even if (a) and (b) occur due to the vast geological time available for these things to occur, we should still expect to find many transitional while we have actually found very few. Especially troubling is the Cambrian Explosion problem.
To quote Dawkins from the Blind Watchmaker:
Notably absent from your quote is the continuation in which he points out why the creationist interpretation of the Cambrian explosion makes quite a bit less sense than the more conventional interpretations like hard exoskeletons and hox genes.
Though it is often argued that macro evolution follows the same processes as micro evolution, famous evolutionists such as Gould have nonetheless proposed theories such as the "Punctuated Equilibrium" theory which states that evolution actually took place in big steps and it wasn't always through millions of accumulated micro-level evolution.
Not so much. Punctuated equilibrium has to do with the distribution of changes over long periods of time, not how gradual changes over short periods of time. The end result of "macroevolution" is still the result of small changes adding up. They just don't happen uniformly over time.
Another reason for this theory is to account for the Cambrian Explosion problem which Dawkins also refers to in his books including the Blind Watchmaker.
Cambrian explosion "problem"?
Some of the other theories proposed for large changes between generations is the Horizontal Gene Transfer theory. However, the problem with this theory is that horizontal gene transfer is seen in simpler organisms like bacteria and is not seen on any other organisms such as vertebrates.
Are you claiming that experts in biology are positing a gene transfer mechanism not found in vertebrates as an explanation for rapid changes in vertebrates?
So is it not accurate to say that micro evolution and macro evolution follow the same processes. Even many prominent evolutionists will disagree with that.
Not at all. I think that you're missing the point of punctuated equilibrium.
Ask yourself this. What truly is the underpinning for any morality at all if everything exists because of random chance?
What is the underpinning for any morality at all everything exists for reasons other than chance? You seem to be assuming that having a creator somehow necessarily means that there is objective morality. I don't see why that should be the case.
Even if it is the case that the lack of a creator means that there is no objective morality, does it follow that there necessarily must be a creator?
It's not uncommon to tie evolution to "bad" consequences, but that has no real bearing on whether or not it's true. It makes no more sense than saying, "If relativity were true, people could make terrible weapons and destroy cities!" Well, yes, it does. That doesn't make relativity any less true, though.
"micro-evolution" involves a loss of information. "macro-evolution" requires more information. A St. Bernard and a Chihuahua have less genetic information than their ancestor, thus invalidating this as an argument for evolution of humans from unicellular organisms, which requires a substantial increase of information. And mutations don't add information, they only change or destroy existing genetic information.
So how are you measuring information? You seem to have these quantities all nailed down, but that just leads me to suspect that you're full of crap. Numbers, please. Or is this more of a "touchy feely" intuitive definition of information which, by thought experiment alone, invalidates actual observation?
I'm a fan of Stein's work (movies, speechwriter for Nixon, his late great show Win Ben Stein's Money and his books), but I've never believed he is MENSA material.
I have enjoyed some of Stein's work as well, but I tend to agree. He seems like the type of guy who would rather be the smartest guy in a room full of half-wits than actually engage in serious debate.
I do have to say that my favorite contribution of his was his "open letter" to Paul Krugman about his remarks about James Tobin, accusing Krugman of having a "limited background in economics." The response was classic, including such gems as, "Thanks to TNR for its put-down - alas, not available online - which points out that I received the Clark Medal, and that Mr. Stein is a game-show host"
What about the Bible? As a theory, it deserves 100% of the respect and care and consideration and analysis and investigation you devote to the kewl kidz' little theory.
The Bible was given all the respect and care and consideration as an explanatory model of how things happened. It was tested and found wanting. Among the results of those tests are things like modern geology, astronomy, and evolutionary theory.
You act as if it has been all evolution all the time for all of recorded history. The reality is that the modern scientific theories that explain how we got here supplanted the Bible. When did that happen? Not surprisingly, when modern scientific techniques really came into their own. Coincidence?
What say Public School #123 educates at an average cost of $5687 a head. Give every student a $5687 coupon they can apply towards public or private school tuition. That simple - in fact, more people would have more access to more schools.
That assumes that there are no fixed costs in education. Due to fixed costs, educating half as many students likely costs more than half as much money, so it's probable that taking one school's population and dividing it into two separate and equally funded schools will result in two schools that are proportionally more underfunded than the original. It depends on where they're operating along their marginal cost curve.
You see, off budget means that we don't include it in our fiscal accounting until the end of the year for various reasons.
I'll agree that those are valid reasons. I don't think that the case is quite as clear cut, but I don't see the off-budget funding of some wars as a problem. It has a few nasty side effects, including the fact that it makes the budget look better than it really is and that the same mitigating effects that make a necessary war more bearable can make an unnecessary war easier to ignore. That being said, the decision to go to war or to end a war should be made by humans rather than by budgets. Wise humans should, in theory, think about those budgets, but if we force their decision with firm fiscal policy, we may burn ourselves when that flexibility is needed.
My point was rather that it doesn't really matter how the accounting is done. Debt financing has roughly the same opportunity cost as cash up front in the long run, if not in the short run. When somebody talks about what could be done with the war money, they're talking about opportunity cost rather than simple accounting.
It all goes back to the simple rule that credit is best used for emergencies and capital investments. After a certain number of years, a war ceases to be an emergency and starts being a regular expense. Whether it is booked that way or not, it should be treated that way by any sensible administrator. It's time to start looking at other places to tighten our belts, because even if the budget were in balance when excluding "emergencies" like our years-long war, the reality is that it wouldn't be in a long-run equilibrium.
Of course, I don't think that either side of the aisle has had anything resembling sensible fiscal or economic policies in my lifetime, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the fact that we're using the easy availability of credit and "off budget" funding to shirk our responsibility to keep an eye on our finances.
There is no money to divert. The funding for the Iraq war is off budget which means if we don't spend it, it simply isn't there. So you see there isn't anything to divert related to the war.
That's an interesting position to take on the existence of money.
which is why no atheist ever proselityses his belifs about god because he lacks beliefs in god. Oh wait....
Just because one lacks a belief doesn't mean that he can't justifiably see that lack of belief as a good thing. I don't believe in werewolves. If a lot of adults around me were honestly concerned about werewolves, I'd probably be open about the fact that I don't believe in them and suggest that they should not as well. Hell, I might even be proud of the fact. I don't think that it would be reasonable to call me religious or evangelical or jihadist on the topic.
On the other hand there are many people who claim to have experienced God, in many different times and cultures, some have written about their experiences, some are happy to talk about what they experienced. etc. Many of these people are reliable witnesses (e.g. you would probably quite happily accept their evidence in court), who are sceptical about evidence in many areas, and who have put a great deal of thought into whether their experiences were genuine of delusional.
I would find that much more compelling if their testimony and conclusions agreed with one another. As it stands, it seems like those cases tend (not surprisingly) to lead them to conclude that the particular theology that dominates their culture is spot on. Jesus appearing to a nomad in East Asia in 250 AD would be interesting, while an ancient Greek having a vision of Athena is not particularly surprising.
I can appreciate that a person's spiritual experiences can be very compelling to them, but I can't help but notice that there are just as many people who have had experiences that are just as compelling that lead them to completely different religious beliefs that they hold just as strongly. They can't all be right, and there's no rational way to distinguish them.
I generally agree with you, but if a guy walked up to me, claimed to be Zeus, and then called down honest-to-god lightning to hit a target of his choice, I'd call him whatever he wanted to be called.
Here's a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye Well, let's assume for a moment that the evolution of the eye is implausible (ignoring the fact that you just linked to a very good introductory discussion of what we know about the evolution of the eye). How does it follow that an omnipotent god is the only only other possibility?
As a side note, it's interesting to me that the evolution of the eye is such a hot button issue as it isn't nearly as full of so-called "neutral gaps" as other candidates for irreducible complexity. Any minor increase in perceptive ability confers an immediate and obvious advantage. This is true with or without lenses, color, or any of the other nice features that our modern eyes have. It seems to me like it would be an ideal structure of a hill-climbing algorithm to optimize.
So that's what the Christian Supply Store is for! My point is simply that ascribing ulterior motives to positions that you don't understand is not a good way of understanding those positions.
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I don't think that anybody is stopping the discussion from taking place. They're keeping the discussion out of schools, and they're not looking too fondly on people who take the discussion to the popular press rather than doing actual research, but I don't know of any pro ID research that created new knowledge, was submitted to the appropriate journal, and then rejected without good reason. If somebody can point it out, I'm all ears.
There's an important distinction to be made between squelching discussion and making sure that the discussion is held in the proper forum. An academic who, rather than doing real work in the scientific community, goes to the popular press with, "My colleagues are full of shit! Here's evidence that I never submitted to them for peer review to prove it!" or worse, goes straight to primary school textbooks with no vetting, usually gets the smackdown from his colleagues. I don't think that it's really that unjustified. That kind of behavior is a classic hallmark of crackpottery and is unbecoming a good researcher.
There are a few issues at work here. The first and most obvious is the fact that in the context of what goes into primary school textbooks, ID is, without any real argument to the contrary, little more than the same creationism that we've been keeping out of schools for years. The cdesign proponentsists would have us believe that they're a totally new animal with interesting new ideas, but the evidence simply doesn't bear it out. It's easy to call it paranoia, but when you see the same people showing up over and over again, you start to suspect a pattern.
More importantly, though, we're not talking about a bunch of crackpots who are being dismissed simply because they're crackpots. I don't think that there would be much resistance to a paper that actually contributes something to our knowledge being accepted into peer review. The problem is that nobody on the ID side is touching peer review with a 10-foot pole. They'd rather skip that inconvenient stuff and jump straight into textbooks for kids.
Given that they don't have a testable hypothesis but rather a simple philosophical objection to the way science is done now, it seems to me that it makes sense to reject ID from schools on its own merits. The fact that it's almost always just stealth creationism is mere icing on the cake. If they can successfully divorce themselves from creationist fringe players and formulate some testable hypotheses and generate some actual results, then we can talk. Until then, it's not paranoia that keeps them out of the game.
The fact that the modern scientific community realizes this does not constitute a conspiracy.
I appreciate the link, but I was looking for a source for your specific claims like the "3 generations" claim and the claim about "simultaneous" mutation.
And before the quote, after the quote, and inside some of the ellipses you've added, he explains why these observations are not the problem you think they are. I note that you assiduously avoid posting those portions of the text each time you quote mine Dawkins.
I hope that you quote them more honestly than you quote Dawkins. Then again, if the Dawkins quotes are cribbed from anointed-one.net, I wouldn't be quite as proud as you are to be quoting from their web site.
There is morality? In what objective sense?
Such as?
Notably absent from your quote is the continuation in which he points out why the creationist interpretation of the Cambrian explosion makes quite a bit less sense than the more conventional interpretations like hard exoskeletons and hox genes.
Cambrian explosion "problem"?
Are you claiming that experts in biology are positing a gene transfer mechanism not found in vertebrates as an explanation for rapid changes in vertebrates?
Not at all. I think that you're missing the point of punctuated equilibrium.
Even if it is the case that the lack of a creator means that there is no objective morality, does it follow that there necessarily must be a creator?
It's not uncommon to tie evolution to "bad" consequences, but that has no real bearing on whether or not it's true. It makes no more sense than saying, "If relativity were true, people could make terrible weapons and destroy cities!" Well, yes, it does. That doesn't make relativity any less true, though.
HTH.
I do have to say that my favorite contribution of his was his "open letter" to Paul Krugman about his remarks about James Tobin, accusing Krugman of having a "limited background in economics." The response was classic, including such gems as, "Thanks to TNR for its put-down - alas, not available online - which points out that I received the Clark Medal, and that Mr. Stein is a game-show host"
You act as if it has been all evolution all the time for all of recorded history. The reality is that the modern scientific theories that explain how we got here supplanted the Bible. When did that happen? Not surprisingly, when modern scientific techniques really came into their own. Coincidence?
HTH.
My point was rather that it doesn't really matter how the accounting is done. Debt financing has roughly the same opportunity cost as cash up front in the long run, if not in the short run. When somebody talks about what could be done with the war money, they're talking about opportunity cost rather than simple accounting.
It all goes back to the simple rule that credit is best used for emergencies and capital investments. After a certain number of years, a war ceases to be an emergency and starts being a regular expense. Whether it is booked that way or not, it should be treated that way by any sensible administrator. It's time to start looking at other places to tighten our belts, because even if the budget were in balance when excluding "emergencies" like our years-long war, the reality is that it wouldn't be in a long-run equilibrium.
Of course, I don't think that either side of the aisle has had anything resembling sensible fiscal or economic policies in my lifetime, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the fact that we're using the easy availability of credit and "off budget" funding to shirk our responsibility to keep an eye on our finances.
I can appreciate that a person's spiritual experiences can be very compelling to them, but I can't help but notice that there are just as many people who have had experiences that are just as compelling that lead them to completely different religious beliefs that they hold just as strongly. They can't all be right, and there's no rational way to distinguish them.
I generally agree with you, but if a guy walked up to me, claimed to be Zeus, and then called down honest-to-god lightning to hit a target of his choice, I'd call him whatever he wanted to be called.
As a side note, it's interesting to me that the evolution of the eye is such a hot button issue as it isn't nearly as full of so-called "neutral gaps" as other candidates for irreducible complexity. Any minor increase in perceptive ability confers an immediate and obvious advantage. This is true with or without lenses, color, or any of the other nice features that our modern eyes have. It seems to me like it would be an ideal structure of a hill-climbing algorithm to optimize. So that's what the Christian Supply Store is for! My point is simply that ascribing ulterior motives to positions that you don't understand is not a good way of understanding those positions.