I know some real estate agents who would beg to differ with you. Of course, they're just as sharky and scummy as the idiot "stock analysts" that rah-rah these securities as a "no-lose" investment...
I know some pretty smart real estate agents, but I also try to bear in mind that some of the dumbest economics majors in my graduating class are now real estate agents.:::shudder:::
This is exactly what I was talking about... All that nonsense about water is garnering a little more attention, these days. Have you seen the studies that show microscopic pictures of frozen water crystals after they've been exposed to different words. Some (or all) of that "nonsense" may end up being very real phenomena.
Yes, I have. In fact, it's exactly what I was referring to as the worst type of pseudoscientific garbage I've seen. Masaru Emoto cherry picks through water crystals and shows us sample sizes of 1 to prove his point that prayer and good feelings change how water crystalizes. He cruises along, blissfully unaware of actual experimental procedure or the simple fact that water crystalization produces random results from which you can pick any pattern you happen to like. He and others like him put out books with extensively physics-like sounding nonsense that the public eats up like candy, but it simply has no relation to the physics that's actually understood by physicists, throwing around words like "energy" and "force" as religious terms rather than words with serious meaning.
Some (or all) of that "nonsense" may end up being very real phenomena. You want a mainstream example? How nonsensical is Quantum physics when you stick it next to Newtonian physics.
The difference is quantum mechanics made sense to the physicists of the time and had data to back it up. Emoto and his ilk don't have the data and they're not making any sense. Yes, QM is weird stuff and highly counterintuitive, but it works because it's backed by data, calculations, and expert review. Emoto's work is designed to be intuitive and comforting and great for publishing in books on new age health, but there's nothing there that actually realtes to reality.
Sure, our current understanding of physics could be totally wrong, but think about it for a minute. Our current models work well. It's going to take some serious data (not just cherry picked snowflakes) to show that he's right and the rest of the world's chemists and physicists are wrong. Until then, he's just another guy with a crazy idea and unfortunately, most of the guys on the 'net with crazy ideas actually are crazy.
can't really cite examples from its history, but I'm willing to bet there were some schaubergeresque nonsensical ideas that sparked the revolution that has us where we are today.
I would hardly call today's water worship a revolution.
Most of what you read when you look into the history are the initial experiments that showed particles in 2 places at once, but someone had that idea before it was teste...and someone decided to test it while half of his colleagues were probably calling him a nut.
If you look at the history of quantum mechancs, you'll find that it was all hammered out in the scientific literature. It got as far as it did through peer review and constructive collaboration. Nobody jumped out and published "Probability and Electrons: A New Healing Revolution" and sold it to the general public. In fact, most of the general public doesn't have the first clue about QM to this day. The work was done scientifically and subject to scrutiny. That's what separates quantum physics from net.kookery.
Look at the string theorists of today.
This is how science works... Hard/fast dismissal like you're promoting only holds us back.
I promote hard and fast dismissal of ideas that have no good data behind them and use sloppy or misleading methods as junk science. Guilty as charged. The string theorists of today are not dismissed as nuts. They aren't holding the interest of most of the physics community mainly because they're unable to generate data to test their ideas. Once that happens, I'm sure they'll be given more attention (or dismissed if the data doesn't work out in their favor). In the mean time, it's looked at as an interesting idea with so
If you're not willing to get down to the nitty-gritty-detail level of research for the benefit of you're theory, it's not likely that anyone else is going to do it for you. So, what to do? Drop the other potentially great ideas that you have so you can perform mind-numbing studies and give yawner-lectures? Or... Do you hit one idea after the next, milk them for all you can without sacrificing diversity, get labeled as a kook for not having enough "proof" for any of it... I'll take the latter, thanks. Recognition isn't my thing. Some day...a great mind will see the potential of my ideas and explore them as they should be explored.
Recognition may not be your thing, but what about success? Dr. B. could have cured AIDS had he not been so easily distracted! Recognition clearly is his thing and research clearly is not. The vast majority of scientific and medical breakthroughs just aren't easy. You have to actually do work to make them happen.
Take a look at Viktor Schauberger, as an example... Though, technological limitations may have prevented some of his work from being sufficiently explore, many of his ideas were so far out there that most scientists of the time wouldn't touch them with a 10 ft pole.
For somebody who never had time to pursue things, he had a decent list of interesting patents and working inventions. At the same time, his work seems to have spawned a lot of nonsense about water that only works if you ignore everything we know about the physics of magnetism and chemistry. I suppose that even Newton did his time as an alchemist.
Well, first, by definition "controversial stuff" is less likely to survive review. That's how Schon got his stuff through: it looked very, very plausible; it was just not reproducible in any way (heck, it was fake). I have no doubt Dr Batmanghelidj believed his results reproducible - and from what I've read, his assertions are not only based on his own trials, but are easily tested.
Secondly, it is odd that you would use the construction "what makes him stand out as a scientist". Is that your own phrase? It seems an odd one to use, when you are saying that he does not pass conventional criteria for accepted "standing": being published widely but not too widely - and don't, whatever you do, put any non-reviewed papers on your site or they will conclude you're a kook!
I used the construction because he no doubt holds a lot of very conventional views about biology and chemistry. Those aren't, however, what he's known for. I don't see him publishing books that say, "table salt contains sodium and chlorine." The point is that he's known for his unconventional views while at the same time, his unconventional views are the ones that have fizzled the most among the experts. Again, read his papers on his web site. The ones that actually hit the hot button issues and earned the man his notoriety are exactly the same papers that he has self-published. I can give you a nearly endless list of folks posting their own nonsense theories to the web for all to see. This man is nothing particularly special in that respect. It would be more interesting if the bulk of his academic work was not self published.
Judging by the trajectory of my post's moderation this evening, I am going to earn more kook points than karma points by citing the late Dr F.B. I'm okay with that.
I can't say I'm all that impressed with Slashdot's moderation system. I personally think that negative moderation should be reserved for people who are obviously trying to be disruptive. You got a bum rap. What can I say? I've been there myself.
Don't you think there are very powerful mechanisms to suppress them? I read an aphorism recently along the lines, "Control a man's support and you control the man." We know that the first effective restraint on people is financial, for instance. One does not have to get fully melodramatic and invoke Lynchian Cowboy chats or late night telephone calls here.
Sure, but everybody? Even the tobacco industry couldn't pull that one off. I have to point out that the vast majority of the drugs that the pharmaceutical industry is producing work. They passed double blind tests and have been shown to be effective against what they're trying to treat. If they're making it all up, they're doing a dandy job of cooking the books.
I'd be thrilled if somebody would investigate the possibility that he might be right about something. You don't seem at all inclined to do that. Your energy is devoted to sitting on the fence, discounting iconoclasts as kooks without a trial (on circumstance alone); and awarding "kook points" to their defenders. A harmless hobby but not very helpful.
The problem is that most people don't have time to chase down and verify every hypotheses that every guy with a typewriter can bat out. The supply of iconoclasts with wild (brilliant?) ideas is incredible. The ones to be avoided almost always display the same set of behaviors, though. They publish in the popular press or their own private journals rather than subjecting their work to the rigors of peer review. They seem to be in the minority opinion on just about everything, no matter how unrelated the different subjects may be (water, OK, but AIDS and cholesterol? Now we're starting to have a track record). They have a small group of followers and loads of anecdotal evidence without any serious statistical data. They blame flaws in the system that keep them down and suppress their brillia
There's an ocean of difference between being thought nuts and being nuts. Challenging conventional thinking practically guarantees the former, in our age of deadly conformity. However, I find no evidence for anything other than solid scientific research in his book. Dr. Batmanghelidj is certainly not alone in questioning orthodox theories about AIDS.
As I said, it's great when somebody brings in a refreshing point of view. At the same time, when your points of view are always "refreshing" it might mean that you're just stirring up trouble to sell books (or you're simply a kook). The probability of being right given that you're unable to convince the astounding majority of experts of your case is generally not high. It happens, but I'm afraid that Dr. Batmanghelidj is not in good company on the average. Yes, he's not alone in questioning the HIV => AIDS orthodoxy, he is damn near alone, and while serious research in antiretroviral drugs has made a dent in the appearance of AIDS in HIV infected people, I'm not sure what the people who deny the link have managed to do to treat the disease.
The fact that his Foundation chooses to make additional research available under their own banner, in addition to the several papers in independent journals, does not prove it is all hokum.
No, certainly not. At least, not by itself. However, if you combine it with the fact that only a small portion of his work is actually published and the larger volume of it is self published, that's a little more suspect. Add to that the fact that his really controversial stuff and the work that's really central to what makes him stand out as a "scientist" is also the stuff that has never made it through peer review, and it starts smelling a little less authoritative. This is the same set of arguments creationists and other groups selling pseudoscientific nonsense tend to use. Sometimes we need to remember some of the lessons Carl Sagan taught us: But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
It is not as if peer reviewed journals have a clean slate, given the continual trickle of hoax results (recently Korean Hwang Woo-Suk, Bell Labs' Henrik Schon) so I am not sure that your point is as strong as you may think.
Knocking the peer review process generally earns you some kook points as well. What percentage of peer reviewed articles do you suppose are fraudulent? What percentage of ground breaking work (which his AIDS work certainly would be) that makes it through peer review do you think is wrong? Now compare that number with the percentage of "ground breaking" work posted by random folks on the web. There's a reason good college professors try to teach their students that "got it from the web" is second only to "heard it in a bar" as a serious academic reference.
Dr Batmanghelidj was certainly well aware of the disinterest of industry in his findings; imagine if the popular conception that chemicals should be the universal first resort were rejected in favour of treating chronic dehydration as a first step! That his views are commercially unpalatable (like those of AIDS iconoclasts) is hardly commentary on the quality of his research.
And then the appeal to the widespread conspiracy. Adding up the points...
Certainly, our society does tend to over medicate. Medication is a profitable industry, too. But don't you think you'd be seeing more whistle blowers if it were all some conspiracy to keep us taking AIDS drugs? Something doesn't smell right with that assumption. Sometimes when nobody agrees with you, you're just wrong. It doesn't always mean you're a misunderstood genius or you're tearing down The Man.
I stop to defend the man because I am tired of the sam
I hold the idea that the AIDS is not a viral disease, but is a metabolic disorder precipitated by an exaggerated way of life.
Although, I must admit that, "'Bad' Cholesterol: A Myth and a Fraud" was nearly as interesting.
While it's interesting when somebody smart posits a contrarian view or two, the people who seem to think that essentially everything about prevailing theory is wrong are usually... well... nuts. I couldn't help but notice that very few of his papers had anything in them that indicated that they were actually published by a journal other than his own. Coincidence?
No. I gave up talking about the point because of the lack of good information about the subject./. readers, apparently, know little about how it all fits together, escpecially the social aspect.
Perhaps that's because you're making some rather vague assertions about mating rituals and chromosome count. We're simply not following it, and I doubt that it's entirely due to all of the people in this thread not having a clue.
What I have gained is an appreciation for how diverse genes and chromosomes are; apparently some genes are bigger than some chromosomes, and have more to do. This is news to me.
I don't see how this is relevant to your original point that seemed to center first around the supposed inability of organisms with different numbers of chromosomes to breed.
Still, I am quite unconvinced that great changes in the genetic structure will MOST CERTAINLY not prevent speciation, as claimed here. Perhaps I am wrong, which would not be the first time, but, so far, I have not been shown how repeated horse-to-mule sexual contact would produce a viable mule species, for example.
Your first sentence has too many negatives for me to parse fully and guarantee that you meant what you said. Your original point was about chimpanzees and human choromosome counts. You have been shown, I hope, that this is not a problem. So now you're left with something about mating rituals that only you seem to be able to tie together.
Still, I am quite unconvinced that great changes in the genetic structure will MOST CERTAINLY not prevent speciation, as claimed here. Perhaps I am wrong, which would not be the first time, but, so far, I have not been shown how repeated horse-to-mule sexual contact would produce a viable mule species, for example.
Agreed.
DNA is not a metal one can alloy.
Yes (?), but organisms with different chromosome counts can interbreed.
Anyway, I am tired of seeing both sides' stupidities, so this thread is dead.
Yes, those who have the relevant information and those who don't have it should probably just agree to disagree. It's easier that way.
First, I'm not dismissing anything. What I am doing is drawing a distinction. More about that later. I am constantly reading about this subject and trying to make sense of what I read. Have I read the papers you are talking about? I don't know. The one concrete reference you made, I haven't yet found. I stipulate that you are more knowledgeable about the subject than I am, and there simply isn't enough time for me to reach your level of knowledge before having this discussion. So we either have to accept that you can throw more specifics and continue the discussion anyway, or we can end it. Discussing this with you is a helping me to think through my positions. I am obviously in a position of ignorance compared to you. I still think that I have something valid to say. It doesn't appear that you agree.
I certainly don't want to imply that I'm a biologist or by any means an expert, but I have seen a lot of examples (especially on/.) of people who clearly haven't done the work to chase down the relevant information before claiming that an entire field of science has done inadequate work. I'm afraid I've misinterpreted your efforts. I'm sorry about coming on as strong as I did. The thread "Is Darwinism the Only Factor?" down a little lower in this discussion is a good example. We have somebody casting doubt on a well-developed idea based on a supposed lack of research, when the poster had in fact not looked at any of the relevant information. It's one thing to say, "I don't know how this happened. Does anybody else have any ideas?" and quite another to say, "I don't know how this happened, so biologists at large must have no clue either." There seems to be this strange expectation among some posters that people should knock at their door with random information and the fact that the answers haven't been volunteered to them means that they're not out there.
Let me start with some things we both might agree on.
A mutation is a change in a genetic sequence
Agreed. What I was seeing before is that to call something a "new gene" you seem to want it to appear all at once rather than adding to some existing (atlhough possibly not active) DNA. I think that we disagree here, since mutations can certainly be additive and must necessarily make use of (or rather, become part of) the DNA that's alredy there.
Evolution posits that mutations accumulate over time leading from a lack of genetic diversity to the genetic diversity we see around us
Yes. The bacteria clone experiments are a good example.
For example, the chimp/human precursor accumulated enough different changes to divide into the two different species
Yes, and the thread "Is Darwinism the Only Factor?" actually has some discussion on some interesting molecular evidence to this effect.
Let's return to the human/chimp divergence. If "we are our viruses" (Lynn Margulis, google it), then the accumulation of minor changes is not what made us human. We apparently received the genes that differentiate us from the chimps fully formed from somewhere else. I AM NOT SAYING THAT GOD DID IT!!!! I'm simply saying that it doesn't fit the accumulated minor changes model. To me this opens up the POSSIBILITY of intelligent design.
OK, if we did acquire the genes elsewhere, then that is certainly an alternative possibility to the idea that the accumulation of minor changes didn't do it. That would support an alternate theory, but I don't see how it casts too much doubt on mutation as a source of variation.
Hi again. I'm running out the door in a few minutes, but I'll try to get to the other material you're posting. The classic example is the Luria-Delbruck experiment. The experiment itself was not designed to show that mutations occur, but rather to show that the mutations occur randomly and not in response to some sort of "need." However, the results are quite telling. The way you start any one of these experiments is to start with a colony formed from a single specimen. That way, in the absence of new mutations, every member of the colony should have identical DNA. What is actually observed in these cases is that as colonies grow, mutations occur and subcolonies of bacteria containing those mutations appear. The experiment showed that this happens randomly in the absence of selection. This experiment was done in the 1940s. Similar experiments are actually done in some high schools involving antibiotic resistance.
The trick is to begin in a sterile environment and start with a colony of clones. After that, it's a simple matter of letting them grow and applying an antibiotic. Most of them will die (becuase most come from unmutated lines), but some colonies will survive. These are the colonies that come from parent cells that have acquired the mutation required to make them resistant. The ID crowd currently tries to get around these results by claiming that the DNA change is invariably some sort of "loss of information" without really defining what "information" is in that context. Of course, one talk.origins poster pointed out that if you showed the same people an experiment in which wings evolved, they would claim that the animal had "lost the inability to fly."
I'm still trying very hard to understand how you get from differences in chromosomes to requiring a brand new mating ritual. It has been pointed out that a primate with a fused chromosome like the one we observe would still be able to breed with normal members of the population. There's no indication that a change in the number of chromosomes would have anything to do with mating rituals. Are you discarding the entire point about chromosomes and genetics and talking only about how new mating rituals evolve now?
Hmmmm... no I don't think that paper has a lot to do with my original point. You said:
The "mutation" you refer to is not necessarily the generation of new genetic code, but can very easily be the expression of existing code that wasn't active before.
That sort of implies that you had done some actual reading about the mutations I referred to. It's fairly clear that you haven't and you're dismissing the idea out of hand because you think that they could "very easily be" something else. So, the question again is, did you read the relevant material to see if they discussed the possibility, or are you assuming that you're the only person who had considered it?
I think that all of this still goes back to a more fundamental misunderstanding on your part as to what constitutes a "new gene." You might start by describing what changes to a strand of DNA you would accept as being a new gene, and then continue by discussing your survey of the relevant research material that indicates that it hasn't happened or perhaps a theoretical discussion about what mechanism prevents them from happening.
It is my point that swapping DNA across organisms weakens the strength of the evolution argument, especially when it occurs in eukaryotes. If, in fact, "we are our viruses", then we did not "evolve" new functions through random chance mutation. We received them, already working, from some other organism. If this is a common mechanism, as it seems to be, where did the original, functional genes come from?
Well, there's always the set of mutations I pointed out to you earlier. That seems like a likely source. The fact that genes move from one place to another in no way negates the fact that mutation is a well understood source of new genetic material. You've hit on the point yourself. I'm saying, "Here's a source of novel genetic material." You seem to be saying, "Genetic material moves around a lot and accounts for most of our variation, but where does the novel genetic material come from?"
This swapping negates, for example, the statement that an eye is so useful that it evolved 40 different times (Richard Dawkins). It was not necessary for any particular type of eye to "evolve" multiple times thereby proving that evolution works in parallel lines. It was merely necessary for the genes to exist and then get moved around by viruses to multiple organisms.
Of course, you'd have to propose how that happened given that the eye appears to have shown up in a lot of very different forms. The idea is nice, but actually breaking down the details would be more interesting. As it stands, there appear to be groupings of organisms whose eyes appear to have come from a common ancestor that differs in some material way from other eye-bearing common ancestors. Even if you can account for the genes moving around, how do you account for the differences between the common ancestors?
It seems to me that the evolution argument is weak on this point, leaving open the possibility of a scientific intelligent design argument. I don't reject evolution, but I am willing to consider that it has weak points.
Frankly, I don't see how. You seem to be saying that because other sources of variation exist, the idea that mutation is a source of genetic material is weakened. I'm not seeing it.
As with your example of nylon metabolizing organisms, these involve minor changes to existing genes or the turning on or off of existing genes, not the creation of novel, working genes.
:::boggle:::
What, exactly, is your definition of a gene?
I accept your statement as it stands, but a colony of clones can very easily contain unexpressed genes.
In the case of a bacterium, you probably mean that it contains genetic code that is not coding for anything. This is true. These regions of DNA are where most neutral mutations occur because there is no selection mechanism to kill the organism if they somehow go wrong. Imagine a chunk of non-coding DNA getting longer through a few insertions and duplications. Then, imagine a single point mutation that causes a start codon to appear in that non-coding DNA. Boom! You suddenly have a new region of DNA that codes for a protein--which is the very definition of a "new gene."
The "mutation" you refer to is not necessarily the generation of new genetic code, but can very easily be the expression of existing code that wasn't active before.
I'm not sure why you put "mutation" in scare quotes. If it's a change in the DNA sequence, it's a mutation. There's nothing spotty about that conclusion. I can't quite tell what you think a mutation is. Sure, it could be the expression of code that wasn't active before, but was it? Did you read the papers? Probably not.
Genes are turned on and off regularly. That does not seem to meet my requirement of "generating a new gene".
Perhaps that's because your requirement is nonsense? DNA is ju
Here's a simple test that will make Intelligent Design(the creationist stalking horse) and intelligent design (the scientific idea that maybe, just maybe, random chance isn't the driving force behind the creation of new genes) irrelevant:
A demonstration of random chance mutation generating a new gene under lab conditions, either in biological or artificial life.
Well, that would certainly support evolution, but because the ID supporters have never really explained exactly how the "intelligent designer" interacts with our reality, does it really make him go away? Sure, the mutation happened. Did the intelligent designer do it? If not, does it follow that the intelligent designer doesn't do other things? Did it happen only because the intelligent designer willed it to be so? All we're doing is needlessly multiplying entities, and I'm fairly sure that there's a rule of thumb about that.
As far as I can tell, we have never seen this. Our studies of the genome suggest that most adaptation takes plaace because of gene swapping, not because of random chance mutation. Try googling this quote by Lynn Margulis, "we are our viruses".
Well, a great deal of variability is due to gene swapping, but that's not all of it. However, we have observed substitutions, insertions, deletions, frame shifts, and duplications of DNA in lab environments. Those behaviors are sufficient to account for a lot of interesting changes. A good example is an insertion error that causes a particular type of nylonase to develop.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, though. Does swapping of DNA across organisms somehow support ID? Maybe that's how the Designer is shining His Wisdom down onto us...
Artificial life research (computer simulations) always seems to start with good genes and then demonstrate that natural selection works to find good combinations of those genes, but, so far, no experiments that show the generation of new, working genes. Where do the working genes come from? I know that evolution says they have been generated out of millions of years of mutations being tested by natural selection. Showing this in action would, for me, make the idea of intelligent design unnecessary
Usually when somebody says, "No experiments have been done to demonstrate [insert fairly well accepted phenomenon]" it means that they haven't actually looked through the literature and they're repeating something that somebody else said. Do you have any idea how many times the old "start with a colony of clones that lack antibiotic resistence and watch antibiotic resistence emerge" experiment has been done? This is not new stuff. It's DECADES old. In a colony of clones, the only way for funny DNA sequences to show up is mutation. That's what's going on.
For some discussion on the topic (with some references), check out the 1998 talk.origins usenet thread "Antibiotic Resistence -- Dubious Evidence" in which Howard Hershy thoroughly beats on somebody quite thoroughly for basically the same claim.
This is an old and falsified argument. If a part of a system does not have a useful function, then natural selection has no way to favor it. This is no better than to say that the part just happened to be favored and put into the system by chance without the guidance of natural selection.
I think you misunderstand the point. Intermediate form A may not be useful for task A, but it may turn out to be useful for task B. Behe's analogy is somewhat painful here. He simply asserts: The fact that they were used in other roles (as a crowbar, in a clock, etc.) does not help them to be part of a mousetrap. I'm not sure why this is. One could imagine a half-formed mousetrap to be useful for any number of things, even though it may not catch any mice.
Getting out of tortured analogy mode, Behe's specific biochemical claims involving the immune system and bacterial flagellum have been refuted directly. Numerous valid pathways have been proposed and published (see the Kitzmiller transcripts to watch Behe dismiss 50+ publications on the topic without specifically addressing them for a good laugh). When such a pathway is proposed, though, the typical creationist/ID/"sudden emergence theory"/"alien visitors theory" response is, "But you have no evidence that it DID happen that way!" Of course not, but Behe's fundamental argument is that because he can't think of a valid intermediate arrangement of parts that might be good for something, then it couldn't have possibly happen. The every existence of counterexamples demolishes his idea.
We could go further and keep proposing new "irreducibly complex" systems for modern science to puzzle over, and it's certainly a very interesting exercise for evolutionary biologists. As Behe and his followers use it, though, it is little more than god-in-the-gaps dressed up in biochemistry to make it too scary for the average person to try to contradict.
Sorry if my facts with respect to numbers of chromosomes are wrong (I will check the info out -- I HATE to be wrong!) but that in no way changes the question.
Well, you are quite wrong, and it is relevant to the question. There is a biochemical explanation for the chromosome count and significant genetic evidence that it did happen the way it is claimed. Your next question is a bit hard to parse.
How did a mastodon or a proto-horse mutation recognize a new species with one more pair of chromosomes?
I'm not sure how to take this, but I'll go back to your original question which, I think, had to do with finding a mate that has the same fused chromosome. The short answer is that it isn't necessary. Google "Robertsonian transformation". Basically, the organism produces some viable gametes (half of which include the fusion) and a lot of nonviable gametes. It reduces fertility, but it's still perfectly possible to reproduce with a mate with a full complement of chromosomes, producing some offspring with normal chromosomes and some offspring with fused chromosomes.
The mating ritual and time-and-place "coincidences" are not easily explained away, either.
There is no reason to believe that chromosome counts have anything to do with either of these issues.
Both theories, IMO, are quite imcomplete.
You're entitled to your opinion, uninformed though it may be. Do you see what you did in your parent post, though? Based entirely on ignorance of a topic, you derisively dismissed a field of experts without so much as looking around to see if there was an explanation for your question. In reality, the hole you think you've found is well understood. In fact, it's extremely strong evidence for evolution.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who have only minimal understanding of a topic assume that the experts are wrong when their conclusions don't match the expert conclusions. Rather than assuming that perhaps their understanding is incorrect and looking for further explanation, they accuse the experts of living in their own "little worlds" or being part of a good old boy's network determined to keep society ignorant. Face it: sometimes you just don't know what you're talking about, and it's best not to cast aspersions on those who do until you find a clue.
Most intelligent Christians (i.e., not young-Earther super-fundies) draw a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution.
The problem is that they redraw the arbitrary distinction every time evidence mounts up that meets their definition of "macroevolution." Even your definition of it is pretty squishy. I think that most of them are on safe ground by defining macroevolution as some sort of huge leap that would take lifetimes to observe, but they've still never explained what phenomenon prevents a whole bunch of microevolution from adding up to a little bit of macroevolution.
1) ID has no mechanistic theory.
2) ID's supporters can't agree on what it means or how it works.
3) ID makes no claims whatsoever except that there needs to be a god in there somewhere.
4) Most of IDs supporters are formerly militant creationists or so-called "creation scientists."
5) The flagship textbook "Of Pandas and People" was originally a creationist textbook that has essentially had phrasing referring to "creator" and "creation" now referring to "designer" and "design."
Sure, some ID supporters may think that it's somehow different from the various brands of creationism, but the fact it appears to be a big tent under which everybody who has a beef with evolution gathers and promotes an agenda that is not at all intellectually different from creationism.
If science is not "afraid" of being proven wrong, why be so adamantly against a competing theory? If it truely is balogne, shouldn't the students be allowed to decide for themselves?
This is the "feel good" position that does a terrible disservice to science. ID is not science for many reasons, but the simplest one is this: it breaks the tools of observation and testing. As it happens, those are the tools available to science. There is no observation or test that could possibly conflict with the vague notion of undefined intervention by undefined intelligence. If we allow ID into a science classroom, we're introducing methods that fly in the face of the real scientific method.
In my opinion, teaching students about the natural world in high school science class is secondary to teaching them to understand the tools of science and what falls into its purview and what is clearly outside the scientific realm. If we bring in ID, we are not only disregarding good and worthwhile facts, but we're also giving kids a bogus set of broken tools. My experience indicates that by and large, people can't tell when they're seeing good science versus pseudoscientific babble. Bringing ID into the mix makes that problem worse, not better.
I agree. And it has also been counter-refuted by many men smarter than myself. And then re-counter-refuted, and then... you get the idea. That's what happens when all you have is theories, and no proof. Kind of like religion has been refuted, and counter-refuted, and... you get the idea.
The difference between the refutations and the counter-refutations is usually this: The refutations reference known science and match up well with what other fields of research (e.g. geology, physics, probability) believe. The creationist counter-refutations (if indeed they exist), frequently end up appealing to breakdowns in the laws of physics or strange geological phenomena that are generally not accepted by experts in their field. The response to this criticism is usually a claim that physicists and geologists are also so tied to the theory of evolution that they're willing to corrupt their entire field (e.g. radiometric dating) in order to be part of the conspiracy of biologists. It eventually turns into a "new science" versus "the entire scientific establishment of multiple independent fields" argument.
Creationist: Evolution is wrong.
Biologist: Why do we see sequences of fossils?
Creationist: We don't. They all happened at the same time.
Biologist: The radiometric dating patterns indicate otherwise.
Creationist: Radiometric dating is based on assumptions. If we change X and Y universal constants, it no longer works.
Physicist: If you change those constants, the earth's crust would melt and we would all be dead.
Crationist: Not if you tune 10 other cosmological constants.
Next we're dragging astrophysicist, astronomers, geologists, and everybody else into the mix. To accept the creationist position you end up having to revamp your understanding of countless other scientific results (many of which work really well... like nuclear physics). At some point it's easier to ask yourself, who is likely to be right? On one hand, we have thousands of experts in their respective fields, most of whom do not have a vested interest in evolutionary theory. On the other hand, we have a band of largly non-experts spouting off about fields of research with which they're generally unfamiliar, most of whom have a religious or philosophical interest in evolution being wrong.
It could also be that there is one eternal, transcendent, intelligent being, GOD, who is self existent and is outside of all universes, including the one we are in. Why is it, strangely, the this "could be" is the one most disliked or fought against and why should this idea of GOD cause so much controversy? I could answer that question, but this forum is not the place for that.
With the exception of militant atheists, there is no controversy over that point. The controversy is generally over people who dump on valid scientific theories with pseudoscience and try to get it into schools. Believe whatever you want philosophically. That's fine by me. Just don't call the life's work of a lot of good scientists "bad science" simply because your philosophical position doesn't match with their observations.
On a second point, the so-called "fine tuning" of the universe has about as much relevance to evolution as it does to physics. I don't see anybody concluding that it means that there is intelligence behind every ball falling due to gravity. The origins of the universe and the process of evolution are simply independent ideas, and andybody who tries to tie them together is usually either ignorant of both, or they're trying to sell something that no reasonable scientist would agree with.
Funny how the definition of theory for science is just a rewording of the definition for other contexts. There's a reason why the same word is used - it's the same thing. Get over it.
What you're doing is called equivocation. When somebody says "theory of evolution" they are referring to a well supported framework of knowledge. The fact that there are other definitions and that you use it in a different way doesn't change the meaning applied to it when scientists use the word in that context. When somebody says, "It's only a theory, even the scientists say so!" it's clearly a logical fallacy, regardless of what the dictionary says. They're using the ambiguity in a word to change the meaning of a phrase used by the opposition in order tos upport their point. Dig through dictionaries all you want, it's still just a way of scoring cheap rhetorical points.
There is no clear idea as to what observation(s) could falsify the General Theory of Evolution. Therefore its status as a theory is weak at best before theories like the Theory of Special Relativity which has a clearly defined mathematical framework. If observations are made which deviate from what the theory predicts, the theory is falsified -- just like Newtons laws were falsified by relativity experiments.
The reason you believe this is because most of the interesting tests have already been done. The people who dig up fossils are testing the theory of evolution every time they do it. Finding fossils out of place would really change our understanding of how things happened, for example. They're not finding fossils out of place without legitimate geological explanations for them, though.
Likewise, proving that the earth is young would be a death blow for evolution. The earth is probably not young though, as an overwhelming pile of evidence indicates. That's another test passed.
You can't call something un-falsifiable simply because it has already passed every test you're capable of devising. You'd simply note that it has not yet been falsified.
The easist way of falsifying common descent would be to find fossils that are totally out of place with our understanding of history. Find a rabbit in with some dinosaur fossils.
Alternately, if we were to find nested hierarchies behaving strangely, it would deal a fairly serious blow to evolution. For example, squid eyes and mammalian eyes are very different designs with different evolutionary leftovers in them. If you find a squid eye with a mammalian blind spot, it would really throw a wrench into our understanding of how eyes developed.
No single observation would take down such a well established and thoroughly supported theory, but a bunch of them probably could. People complain that evolution is so entrenched that there aren't many tests left to use to falsify it. They're ignoring the fact that this is mainly because it HAS been tested over and over again and it has passed all of the tests.
it doesn't matter. the nebraska man was a pig's tooth, right? did macro-evolution roll over and cry mea culpa? nope.
Nebraska Man was hardly a pillar of evolutionary theory. There wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for Nebraska Man among the mainstream scientific community. No, evolutionary theory didn't roll over, probably because Nebraska Man was not central to the claim. What did happen, though, was a half page retraction published in Science. What percentage of hominid fossils did Nebraska Man make up? Think about it.
Of course, we hear nothing from the creationists when Carl Baugh mistakes a fish tooth for a hominid tooth.
no matter how many fossils are faked or wrongly interpretted, macro-evolution (ME) isn't going anywhere.
The point is, there are a LOT of fossils left behind. You can't just explain them away by finding a handful of faked or misinterpreted fossils.
the broader question is how come not a single series of obvious fossils shows the path of ME for an animal. yes, there are some fossils that *could be*, almost all using very fast and loose criteria...
Take a look at ambulocetus and friends. To those who think that the fact that fossils look the same is the only evidence that they're related by common descent, try to answer this: There appears to be a time when no rabbits existed, but other stuff was roaming the earth. Now, rabbits exist. Where did the rabbits come from?
ME has never been observed in the wild. micro-evolution has, but not macro-evolution. it has never been observed. repeat that 20 times. now, how does anyone prove that something that has never been observed can't happen? don't you need to prove IT ACTUALLY DID HAPPEN, FIRST?
Of course, the goalposts on so-called "macro evolution" have been moved over time. Originally, no evolution could possibly occur. Then, it was speciation that was the barrier. Now "macro evolution" is defined as some nebulous "change above the species level" or some nonsesnse involving the word "kind."
nobody has ever observed the creation of new adaptive genes due to environmental stress. you assume something that hasn't been established. yes, GENES THAT ALREADY EXIST may be expressed and selected due to environmental stress, but no new adaptive genes have been created.
OK, this is evidence that you have no cluse what you're talking about. New genes don't appear because of environmental stress. Environmental pressures change the relative frequency of genes in a population after new genes appear. The appearance of those genes is a different situation entirely. Google "nylonase" for an example of the appearance of a gene due to a frame shift. Cue the moving of goalposts based on some nonsense definition of "information."
evolutionary theory predicted the gradual change of species over geologic time. this is false. the fact is that lots of different animals and birds appeared on the scene in BIG BANG fashhion. macro-evolution's prediction was wrong, SO THEY JUST ADJUSTED THE THEORY.
Oh noes! They adjusted a scientific theory! Stop the presses! It's not like that ever happens elsewhere (*cough* Newtonian physics). As for a gradual change over time, that's EXACTLY what they saw. What differed was the rate of change of change (the second derivative, if you will). Punctuated equilibrium describes this.
1. the fossil record would show obvious links between transition animals... FALSE. there is not a single link that can't be reasonable explained apart from macro-evolution. iow, it may be consistent with evolution, but it also consistent without the existence of macro-evolution.
Example: Evolutionary theory predicted a creature like the archaeopteryx. The archaeopteryx was subsequently discovered. The point is that there are lots of fossils that are consistent with evolutionary the
Um... Can you be more specific than that? Just asserting something as true doesn't make it so, and is hardly convincing. Irreducible complexity poses a huge problem to naturalistic evolution... I use the term naturalistic, because many IDers are evolutionists, like Dr. Michael Behe for example.
IC's most fatal flaw is that it ignores the possibility that while a given intermediate feature may not be useful in its current function, it may have some intermediate value other than what its "final" value may be. There are volumes of papers on the topic that have been written since Behe introduced the concept, but none of them are "good enough" to satisfy Dr. Behe.
Also, your list of discoveries that would supposedly falsify naturalism are very vague and are generally compatible with ID anyway:
That's the whole problem with ID. Anything is compatible with it. You point out yourself that some backers of ID support evolution and others do not. The whole idea of ID is that there is some undescribed intelligence interacting with our reality in some undefined way over some undefined time period (now or in the past). Fill in the blanks however you like. There's no possible observation that could contradict such a vague notion.
Remember, the poster you responded to was listing ways to falsify the theory of evolution. Those tests would work. Try postiting some sort of test for ID. If you can pull that off, we'll start thinking about calling it science. Until then, don't be surprised when scientists are outraged when people try to teach it to kids as if it is.
When I look at history- I have to say I can't find a time that any stock market had prices that were related to dividends paid. Wall Street, originally so named due to a sea wall close by, was originally a place where one gambled on speculative sea voyages for instance.
You'd have to look a long way back to the beginning of the 20th century to see more reasonable numbers. Looking at 100+ years of PE ratios is disturbing to say the least. Some have argued that P/E ratios have gone nuts because the risk premium that should be attached to stocks should be smaller. I'm not sure what planet they're living on, though.
But I wouldn't say it's entirely pointless- it does provide the service of wealth redistribution, which is the whole point from the point of view of a business that is trying to start up. The problem is that it can easily become more of a curse than blessing; stock price ends up the reason of your business rather than making profits, serving customers, or providing a living for your workers.
This, combined with the strange expectations Wall street has for growth, is the crux of the problem. It certainly makes sense for business owners to want to increase the value of their assets. In theory, the best way to do that is to provide the best price for goods and services and grow the business. As you point out, though, problems arise when people figure out how to game the system in order to increase asset prices without increasing asset values. Bad news all around.
To me, one needs to provide a neccessary good to earn money- money should be earned by the creation of goods. The only goods that the financial industry creates are methods for taking profit away from those who actually worked for it and give it to somebody else; either through dividends (stocks) or usury (bonds). The one way they do well is when they enable an entrepreneur to find investment for a startup- but even that can be dangerous, because of the focus on profit.
And that's the whole point of those financial markets: to get capital from those who have it to those who can make good use of it. Sure, Charles Schwab could help a brick laying business by going to work as a brick layer. Certainly, nobody could say that he didn't earn his paycheck at the en dof hte day. He could do a lot more good for the business if he allowed them access to some of his cash at a price, though, even though he'd get paid more for doing less. As much as I envy the wealthy for their ability to put their wealth to work for them instead of going directly to work every day, I have to appreciate that the economy as a whole would be a lot worse off without their input. If some small number of people get richer than they really deserve (or need) to in the process, I see it as a small price to pay for a piece of infrastructure that allows small, high quality companies to grow at rates faster than they could by borrowing alone.
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Yes, I have. In fact, it's exactly what I was referring to as the worst type of pseudoscientific garbage I've seen. Masaru Emoto cherry picks through water crystals and shows us sample sizes of 1 to prove his point that prayer and good feelings change how water crystalizes. He cruises along, blissfully unaware of actual experimental procedure or the simple fact that water crystalization produces random results from which you can pick any pattern you happen to like. He and others like him put out books with extensively physics-like sounding nonsense that the public eats up like candy, but it simply has no relation to the physics that's actually understood by physicists, throwing around words like "energy" and "force" as religious terms rather than words with serious meaning.
The difference is quantum mechanics made sense to the physicists of the time and had data to back it up. Emoto and his ilk don't have the data and they're not making any sense. Yes, QM is weird stuff and highly counterintuitive, but it works because it's backed by data, calculations, and expert review. Emoto's work is designed to be intuitive and comforting and great for publishing in books on new age health, but there's nothing there that actually realtes to reality.
Sure, our current understanding of physics could be totally wrong, but think about it for a minute. Our current models work well. It's going to take some serious data (not just cherry picked snowflakes) to show that he's right and the rest of the world's chemists and physicists are wrong. Until then, he's just another guy with a crazy idea and unfortunately, most of the guys on the 'net with crazy ideas actually are crazy.
I would hardly call today's water worship a revolution.
If you look at the history of quantum mechancs, you'll find that it was all hammered out in the scientific literature. It got as far as it did through peer review and constructive collaboration. Nobody jumped out and published "Probability and Electrons: A New Healing Revolution" and sold it to the general public. In fact, most of the general public doesn't have the first clue about QM to this day. The work was done scientifically and subject to scrutiny. That's what separates quantum physics from net.kookery.
I promote hard and fast dismissal of ideas that have no good data behind them and use sloppy or misleading methods as junk science. Guilty as charged. The string theorists of today are not dismissed as nuts. They aren't holding the interest of most of the physics community mainly because they're unable to generate data to test their ideas. Once that happens, I'm sure they'll be given more attention (or dismissed if the data doesn't work out in their favor). In the mean time, it's looked at as an interesting idea with so
I used the construction because he no doubt holds a lot of very conventional views about biology and chemistry. Those aren't, however, what he's known for. I don't see him publishing books that say, "table salt contains sodium and chlorine." The point is that he's known for his unconventional views while at the same time, his unconventional views are the ones that have fizzled the most among the experts. Again, read his papers on his web site. The ones that actually hit the hot button issues and earned the man his notoriety are exactly the same papers that he has self-published. I can give you a nearly endless list of folks posting their own nonsense theories to the web for all to see. This man is nothing particularly special in that respect. It would be more interesting if the bulk of his academic work was not self published.
I can't say I'm all that impressed with Slashdot's moderation system. I personally think that negative moderation should be reserved for people who are obviously trying to be disruptive. You got a bum rap. What can I say? I've been there myself.
Sure, but everybody? Even the tobacco industry couldn't pull that one off. I have to point out that the vast majority of the drugs that the pharmaceutical industry is producing work. They passed double blind tests and have been shown to be effective against what they're trying to treat. If they're making it all up, they're doing a dandy job of cooking the books.
The problem is that most people don't have time to chase down and verify every hypotheses that every guy with a typewriter can bat out. The supply of iconoclasts with wild (brilliant?) ideas is incredible. The ones to be avoided almost always display the same set of behaviors, though. They publish in the popular press or their own private journals rather than subjecting their work to the rigors of peer review. They seem to be in the minority opinion on just about everything, no matter how unrelated the different subjects may be (water, OK, but AIDS and cholesterol? Now we're starting to have a track record). They have a small group of followers and loads of anecdotal evidence without any serious statistical data. They blame flaws in the system that keep them down and suppress their brillia
As I said, it's great when somebody brings in a refreshing point of view. At the same time, when your points of view are always "refreshing" it might mean that you're just stirring up trouble to sell books (or you're simply a kook). The probability of being right given that you're unable to convince the astounding majority of experts of your case is generally not high. It happens, but I'm afraid that Dr. Batmanghelidj is not in good company on the average. Yes, he's not alone in questioning the HIV => AIDS orthodoxy, he is damn near alone, and while serious research in antiretroviral drugs has made a dent in the appearance of AIDS in HIV infected people, I'm not sure what the people who deny the link have managed to do to treat the disease.
No, certainly not. At least, not by itself. However, if you combine it with the fact that only a small portion of his work is actually published and the larger volume of it is self published, that's a little more suspect. Add to that the fact that his really controversial stuff and the work that's really central to what makes him stand out as a "scientist" is also the stuff that has never made it through peer review, and it starts smelling a little less authoritative. This is the same set of arguments creationists and other groups selling pseudoscientific nonsense tend to use. Sometimes we need to remember some of the lessons Carl Sagan taught us: But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Knocking the peer review process generally earns you some kook points as well. What percentage of peer reviewed articles do you suppose are fraudulent? What percentage of ground breaking work (which his AIDS work certainly would be) that makes it through peer review do you think is wrong? Now compare that number with the percentage of "ground breaking" work posted by random folks on the web. There's a reason good college professors try to teach their students that "got it from the web" is second only to "heard it in a bar" as a serious academic reference.
And then the appeal to the widespread conspiracy. Adding up the points...
Certainly, our society does tend to over medicate. Medication is a profitable industry, too. But don't you think you'd be seeing more whistle blowers if it were all some conspiracy to keep us taking AIDS drugs? Something doesn't smell right with that assumption. Sometimes when nobody agrees with you, you're just wrong. It doesn't always mean you're a misunderstood genius or you're tearing down The Man.
While it's interesting when somebody smart posits a contrarian view or two, the people who seem to think that essentially everything about prevailing theory is wrong are usually... well... nuts. I couldn't help but notice that very few of his papers had anything in them that indicated that they were actually published by a journal other than his own. Coincidence?
The trick is to begin in a sterile environment and start with a colony of clones. After that, it's a simple matter of letting them grow and applying an antibiotic. Most of them will die (becuase most come from unmutated lines), but some colonies will survive. These are the colonies that come from parent cells that have acquired the mutation required to make them resistant. The ID crowd currently tries to get around these results by claiming that the DNA change is invariably some sort of "loss of information" without really defining what "information" is in that context. Of course, one talk.origins poster pointed out that if you showed the same people an experiment in which wings evolved, they would claim that the animal had "lost the inability to fly."
I'm still trying very hard to understand how you get from differences in chromosomes to requiring a brand new mating ritual. It has been pointed out that a primate with a fused chromosome like the one we observe would still be able to breed with normal members of the population. There's no indication that a change in the number of chromosomes would have anything to do with mating rituals. Are you discarding the entire point about chromosomes and genetics and talking only about how new mating rituals evolve now?
I think that all of this still goes back to a more fundamental misunderstanding on your part as to what constitutes a "new gene." You might start by describing what changes to a strand of DNA you would accept as being a new gene, and then continue by discussing your survey of the relevant research material that indicates that it hasn't happened or perhaps a theoretical discussion about what mechanism prevents them from happening.
Well, there's always the set of mutations I pointed out to you earlier. That seems like a likely source. The fact that genes move from one place to another in no way negates the fact that mutation is a well understood source of new genetic material. You've hit on the point yourself. I'm saying, "Here's a source of novel genetic material." You seem to be saying, "Genetic material moves around a lot and accounts for most of our variation, but where does the novel genetic material come from?"
Of course, you'd have to propose how that happened given that the eye appears to have shown up in a lot of very different forms. The idea is nice, but actually breaking down the details would be more interesting. As it stands, there appear to be groupings of organisms whose eyes appear to have come from a common ancestor that differs in some material way from other eye-bearing common ancestors. Even if you can account for the genes moving around, how do you account for the differences between the common ancestors?
Frankly, I don't see how. You seem to be saying that because other sources of variation exist, the idea that mutation is a source of genetic material is weakened. I'm not seeing it.
What, exactly, is your definition of a gene?
In the case of a bacterium, you probably mean that it contains genetic code that is not coding for anything. This is true. These regions of DNA are where most neutral mutations occur because there is no selection mechanism to kill the organism if they somehow go wrong. Imagine a chunk of non-coding DNA getting longer through a few insertions and duplications. Then, imagine a single point mutation that causes a start codon to appear in that non-coding DNA. Boom! You suddenly have a new region of DNA that codes for a protein--which is the very definition of a "new gene."
I'm not sure why you put "mutation" in scare quotes. If it's a change in the DNA sequence, it's a mutation. There's nothing spotty about that conclusion. I can't quite tell what you think a mutation is. Sure, it could be the expression of code that wasn't active before, but was it? Did you read the papers? Probably not.
Perhaps that's because your requirement is nonsense? DNA is ju
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, though. Does swapping of DNA across organisms somehow support ID? Maybe that's how the Designer is shining His Wisdom down onto us...
Usually when somebody says, "No experiments have been done to demonstrate [insert fairly well accepted phenomenon]" it means that they haven't actually looked through the literature and they're repeating something that somebody else said. Do you have any idea how many times the old "start with a colony of clones that lack antibiotic resistence and watch antibiotic resistence emerge" experiment has been done? This is not new stuff. It's DECADES old. In a colony of clones, the only way for funny DNA sequences to show up is mutation. That's what's going on.For some discussion on the topic (with some references), check out the 1998 talk.origins usenet thread "Antibiotic Resistence -- Dubious Evidence" in which Howard Hershy thoroughly beats on somebody quite thoroughly for basically the same claim.
Getting out of tortured analogy mode, Behe's specific biochemical claims involving the immune system and bacterial flagellum have been refuted directly. Numerous valid pathways have been proposed and published (see the Kitzmiller transcripts to watch Behe dismiss 50+ publications on the topic without specifically addressing them for a good laugh). When such a pathway is proposed, though, the typical creationist/ID/"sudden emergence theory"/"alien visitors theory" response is, "But you have no evidence that it DID happen that way!" Of course not, but Behe's fundamental argument is that because he can't think of a valid intermediate arrangement of parts that might be good for something, then it couldn't have possibly happen. The every existence of counterexamples demolishes his idea.
We could go further and keep proposing new "irreducibly complex" systems for modern science to puzzle over, and it's certainly a very interesting exercise for evolutionary biologists. As Behe and his followers use it, though, it is little more than god-in-the-gaps dressed up in biochemistry to make it too scary for the average person to try to contradict.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who have only minimal understanding of a topic assume that the experts are wrong when their conclusions don't match the expert conclusions. Rather than assuming that perhaps their understanding is incorrect and looking for further explanation, they accuse the experts of living in their own "little worlds" or being part of a good old boy's network determined to keep society ignorant. Face it: sometimes you just don't know what you're talking about, and it's best not to cast aspersions on those who do until you find a clue.
1) ID has no mechanistic theory.
2) ID's supporters can't agree on what it means or how it works.
3) ID makes no claims whatsoever except that there needs to be a god in there somewhere.
4) Most of IDs supporters are formerly militant creationists or so-called "creation scientists."
5) The flagship textbook "Of Pandas and People" was originally a creationist textbook that has essentially had phrasing referring to "creator" and "creation" now referring to "designer" and "design."
Sure, some ID supporters may think that it's somehow different from the various brands of creationism, but the fact it appears to be a big tent under which everybody who has a beef with evolution gathers and promotes an agenda that is not at all intellectually different from creationism.
In my opinion, teaching students about the natural world in high school science class is secondary to teaching them to understand the tools of science and what falls into its purview and what is clearly outside the scientific realm. If we bring in ID, we are not only disregarding good and worthwhile facts, but we're also giving kids a bogus set of broken tools. My experience indicates that by and large, people can't tell when they're seeing good science versus pseudoscientific babble. Bringing ID into the mix makes that problem worse, not better.
The difference between the refutations and the counter-refutations is usually this: The refutations reference known science and match up well with what other fields of research (e.g. geology, physics, probability) believe. The creationist counter-refutations (if indeed they exist), frequently end up appealing to breakdowns in the laws of physics or strange geological phenomena that are generally not accepted by experts in their field. The response to this criticism is usually a claim that physicists and geologists are also so tied to the theory of evolution that they're willing to corrupt their entire field (e.g. radiometric dating) in order to be part of the conspiracy of biologists. It eventually turns into a "new science" versus "the entire scientific establishment of multiple independent fields" argument.Creationist: Evolution is wrong.
Biologist: Why do we see sequences of fossils?
Creationist: We don't. They all happened at the same time.
Biologist: The radiometric dating patterns indicate otherwise.
Creationist: Radiometric dating is based on assumptions. If we change X and Y universal constants, it no longer works.
Physicist: If you change those constants, the earth's crust would melt and we would all be dead.
Crationist: Not if you tune 10 other cosmological constants.
Next we're dragging astrophysicist, astronomers, geologists, and everybody else into the mix. To accept the creationist position you end up having to revamp your understanding of countless other scientific results (many of which work really well... like nuclear physics). At some point it's easier to ask yourself, who is likely to be right? On one hand, we have thousands of experts in their respective fields, most of whom do not have a vested interest in evolutionary theory. On the other hand, we have a band of largly non-experts spouting off about fields of research with which they're generally unfamiliar, most of whom have a religious or philosophical interest in evolution being wrong.
On a second point, the so-called "fine tuning" of the universe has about as much relevance to evolution as it does to physics. I don't see anybody concluding that it means that there is intelligence behind every ball falling due to gravity. The origins of the universe and the process of evolution are simply independent ideas, and andybody who tries to tie them together is usually either ignorant of both, or they're trying to sell something that no reasonable scientist would agree with.
Likewise, proving that the earth is young would be a death blow for evolution. The earth is probably not young though, as an overwhelming pile of evidence indicates. That's another test passed.
You can't call something un-falsifiable simply because it has already passed every test you're capable of devising. You'd simply note that it has not yet been falsified.
Alternately, if we were to find nested hierarchies behaving strangely, it would deal a fairly serious blow to evolution. For example, squid eyes and mammalian eyes are very different designs with different evolutionary leftovers in them. If you find a squid eye with a mammalian blind spot, it would really throw a wrench into our understanding of how eyes developed.
No single observation would take down such a well established and thoroughly supported theory, but a bunch of them probably could. People complain that evolution is so entrenched that there aren't many tests left to use to falsify it. They're ignoring the fact that this is mainly because it HAS been tested over and over again and it has passed all of the tests.
Nebraska Man was hardly a pillar of evolutionary theory. There wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for Nebraska Man among the mainstream scientific community. No, evolutionary theory didn't roll over, probably because Nebraska Man was not central to the claim. What did happen, though, was a half page retraction published in Science. What percentage of hominid fossils did Nebraska Man make up? Think about it.
Of course, we hear nothing from the creationists when Carl Baugh mistakes a fish tooth for a hominid tooth.
The point is, there are a LOT of fossils left behind. You can't just explain them away by finding a handful of faked or misinterpreted fossils.
Take a look at ambulocetus and friends. To those who think that the fact that fossils look the same is the only evidence that they're related by common descent, try to answer this: There appears to be a time when no rabbits existed, but other stuff was roaming the earth. Now, rabbits exist. Where did the rabbits come from?
Of course, the goalposts on so-called "macro evolution" have been moved over time. Originally, no evolution could possibly occur. Then, it was speciation that was the barrier. Now "macro evolution" is defined as some nebulous "change above the species level" or some nonsesnse involving the word "kind."
OK, this is evidence that you have no cluse what you're talking about. New genes don't appear because of environmental stress. Environmental pressures change the relative frequency of genes in a population after new genes appear. The appearance of those genes is a different situation entirely. Google "nylonase" for an example of the appearance of a gene due to a frame shift. Cue the moving of goalposts based on some nonsense definition of "information."
Oh noes! They adjusted a scientific theory! Stop the presses! It's not like that ever happens elsewhere (*cough* Newtonian physics). As for a gradual change over time, that's EXACTLY what they saw. What differed was the rate of change of change (the second derivative, if you will). Punctuated equilibrium describes this.
Example: Evolutionary theory predicted a creature like the archaeopteryx. The archaeopteryx was subsequently discovered. The point is that there are lots of fossils that are consistent with evolutionary the
Remember, the poster you responded to was listing ways to falsify the theory of evolution. Those tests would work. Try postiting some sort of test for ID. If you can pull that off, we'll start thinking about calling it science. Until then, don't be surprised when scientists are outraged when people try to teach it to kids as if it is.