"What are the legal ramifications of this? I sure hope they don't set a precedent of involving Free/Open Source Software in questionable legal dealings."
If there were legal ramifications for forking, it wouldn't be Free Software!
"Those aren't forks, they're different versions of Windows."
Some of them actually are forks. 9x/NT are actually two separate forks. The fact that it is developed by the same company doesn't make it any less of a fork.
This is nice, except that Microsoft Word isn't 100% compatible with Microsoft Word. In fact, there have been several instances where OpenOffice was more compatible with a specific version of Microsoft Word than newer Microsoft Words.
My guess is that the argument was not based on trivializing their job responsibilities, but understanding how poor of a tool Office Suites are to the jobs that they are routinely given. In 99% of the cases, the Office Suite is not the right tool for the job. But it is used anyway, simply because that is what businesses provide.
Unfortunately, the market momentum is toward office suites, rather than towards better tools. For example, a much better general-purpose tool would be an XML editor with extensive templates and stylesheets. These don't exist because the market is so used to doing things the Office Suite Way that they don't understand the point.
The problem is that the tool (in this case, the Office Suite) has made people look at the problems in the entirely wrong way, simply because that was the primary tool available. Therefore, we have tool upon tool built on an erroneous model.
Saying, "perhaps it is the foundation that is cracked" is not always popular, and not even always true, but is worth considering.
It's mostly because other stuff I generally want to see and touch before buying. Books and computers are the only thing I'll buy from a distance. That's probably related to how familiar I am with the two.
I think Amazon's advantage is that because of the sheer volume of shipping they currently do they can probably get better prices on video shipping.
However, personally, I really never use Amazon for anything more than books. Perhaps it has caught on in other markets, but I really see Amazon as a book place. I think my first instinct would still be to go to Netflix if I wanted to rent movies.
"No, creationists are making up new terms that sound cool, but really are just admissions that change does occur, but they think it doesn't occur across "kinds"."
Everyone agrees that change occurs. To say that creationists don't think that change occurs is simply a caricature, not reality. Creationists have believed in change since Linnaeus.
"Take this change and add billions of years and there is nothing yet seen which it cannot explain. And there is, further, much evidence in the fossil record showing exactly what one would expect from this hypothesis."
That's incorrect. Evolution supposes that diversity precedes disparity, but the fossil records shows the opposite.
"So which is it? "Semantic information" cannot be created or it can be created in 9 days?"
It is semantic information which cannot be created. Think about it this way: a program can use non-deterministic methods to devise solutions to problems, but what makes the non-deterministic methods usable is the fact that they are based on a very stable system that has such changes planned in. It is the stable constraints and systems that are the semantic information. The organism has simply inferred a set of enzymes from the environment, but was ultimately able to do so because it is specifically programmed to adapt in that way. I argue this in greater detail here.
"Ok. So the allegation is that it could not have occured without divine intervention."
Nope. You misunderstood my argument. The allegation is that it could not have occurred if the cell was not specifically designed to search and find adaptations for a new food source, and that the ability of a genome to adapt is fundamentally constrained because if it weren't the adaptation mechanism would fall into error catastrophe. This is why, even though pseuodomas can generate genes in 9 days, it has been fundamentally stable for over a hundred years -- it's basic foundational programming around which change occurs has remained the same.
The alternatives are (a) pseudomonas has been subject to random mutations at this rate, and it just happened upon this one that worked. This would lead almost immediately to error catastrophe if the general mutation rate throughout the genome occurred at this speed. The other alternative (b) is that pseudomonas already had the ability to do this, which has been confirmed to be untrue.
"Huh? Genetics was predicted long before the mechanism of the "gene" was found. When it was found it was very quickly understood and embraced. To say otherwise is comically bad revisionist history."
It was ignored for about 35 years, and then barely taken up for another 35 years until mutation was proposed as a way to integrate it into neo-darwinism.
"My mouth is hanging open in disbelief on this one. McClintock won the nobel prize for this work, that's hardly a rejection by science for *any* reason, much less so called evolutionary sensibilities."
What McClintock proposed was that transposons were _tools_ used by the cell to reconfigure itself. This was almost immediately changed to being viewed as parasitic elements because a genome that can change itself as a response to environmental conditions sounded too much like design and lamarckism. It is only very recently that McClintock's actual thoughts on the transposons she found have been taken seriously.
"Right. So, if we were to test this hypothesis one of the things we would look for is slower change in asexually reproducing things than in sexually reproducing ones. And, unsurprisingly since evolution is so widely accepted by folks who have done just such analysis, we see exactly that. Sexual things are capable of much more rapid change than asexual things. It's almost as if sexual reproduction is the more important driver of change when compared to mutation."
You're confusing real change with heterozygous fractionation. Fractionating a genome into homozygous traits isn't doing any significant change except a statistical change in the population.
For real change, asexual organisms such as Pseudomonas can actually manufacture a pair of genes to adapt to new food sources in less than 9 days. If this were the result of undirected mutation, then change this radical this fast would result in error catastrophe. This isn't the result of existing material for two reasons: (1) the genes were not present before the food source was supplied, and (2) the food source was nylon, which has only been invented in recent history.
"The creationist community accepts new evidence between a decade and a century behind the scientific community."
That can be equally said of the evolutionist community, who waited 70 years to incorporate genetics into their view, because it was against evolutionist sensibilities. Likewise, the idea that transposons are tools used by the cell was proposed by McClintock who original found them in the 1940's, yet science has rejected this view because it, again, is against their evolutionary sensibilities. Only very recently (as in Shapiro) have they started taking this seriously.
"Really? Cause they are still using a lot of arguments which were disproven in some cases decades ago?"
Also, you have to look at what you mean by "disproved" as well. Simply because someone claims that an argument is disproven doesn't make it so. All you have to do is browse the bad logic on Talk.Origins index to creaitonist claims to find that out.
"It should be viewed via a scientific lens just as the results from those who start from a platform trying to prove that god exists. Whichever is *factually* true will win the day regardless of the motivations of their respective camps."
It appears you have reversed your previous decision, or I misunderstood you.
"Calling it fancy names like "symbolic codal system" doesn't change that it is simply a chemical reaction "
It's not the name, it's what it signifies. The interesting thing about DNA is that the message is distinct from the medium. If you spill ink on paper, the properties of the ink working together with the properties of the paper are the same ones as if you wrote a Shakespearian masterpiece. The informational content of the ink on the page has nothing to do at all with the properties of the ink or the paper. If the ink and paper contain a specification for a motor, it is not the properties of the ink and the paper that are interesting, but that they were arranged by a designer. Likewise, there is an intepretation apparatus that is used.
Are the ink and paper material objects operating under law? Yes. But if what was on the page was governed solely by the actions of the ink and the paper resulting from natural law, the result would be meaningless. It is the arrangement by an intelligent agent that puts meaning into the page.
Likewise, with DNA. DNA would be useless if its arrangement were merely the result of the interactions of its chemical environment. It is the ordering of these into messages which are distinct from the medium which make it novel. There are mechanisms for reading, copying, and performing what is coded in DNA. None of these mechanisms exist for crystals or polymers. It is the informational content of the sequence of DNA that is so surprising. To say that such amounts of informational content arose without regard to an information-giving agent would be admitting effects without a cause, and an abandonment of reason.
Note that the person who discovered DNA, Crick, believes in panspermia precisely because (a) he did not want to believe in God, and (b) he did not believe it was possible for such a system to have arisen on the earth.
"So does that mean that they will stand behind their hypothesis and, when someone can show evolution from one "kind" to another, admit that their hypothesis has been disproven?"
In the sense that they will probably search for new demarcation lines, definitely. In the same way that an evolutionist would redraw taxonomic hierarchies if they were shown that a given animal could not have evolved from another (in fact, these lines have been constantly drawn and redrawn, and most of them are not certain even among evolutionists).
If you're interested in creationist biosystematics (even from a curiosity what the hell are these people thinking point of view), you should take a look at Understanding the Pattern of Life. It is not a creation-vs-evolution book, but a book on biosystematics from a creationist point of view. It has chapters on biodiversity, biogeography, biological imperfection, statistical classification methods, etc. The authors are Todd Wood, who was part of the team that sequenced the rice genome, and Kurt Wise, who studied paleontology at Harvard under Stephen Gould.
"And in fact mutation is not the driver of *any* evolution."
Really? Natural selection doesn't _produce_ *anything*. It simply kills off what doesn't work. Natural selection _requires_ a separate driver of change.
"What happens when siblings have kids?"
This is the nuttiest explanation of evolution I have ever heard. It still leaves unexplained any possible driver of population-wide change (as opposed to merely statistical shift). In fact, before mutation was found, this precise line of reasoning was viewed as evidence AGAINST evolution, because the traits are discrete (or themselves made up of discrete units), and what is being inherited was discrete -- so while you can have statistical change in the traits of a population, you will not generate _new_ traits by these means.
The idea of mutation was the only way that Darwinism could be melded with genetics, and is likely the reason why genetics was not taken up in full force until 70 years after its publication despite the experimental basis for it.
So, if you deny that mutation has any role, you are back to the same problems that Mendel found in evolution:
Gärtner, by the results of theses transformation experiments, was led to oppose the opinion of those naturalists who dispute the stability of plant species and believe in a continuous evolution of vegetation. He perceives in the complete transformation of one species into another an indubitable proof that species are fixed with limits beyond which they cannot change. Although this opinion cannot be unconditionally accepted we find on the other hand in Gärtner's experiments a noteworthy confirmation of that supposition regarding variability of cultivated plants which has already been expressed.
The only thing you have added to this is:
"there are otherwise unknown bits that combine in new and novel ways."
Which is equivalent in power to mutation, just using existing pools of strands instead of modifications of other ones. Their very combination equivalent to a mutation, if not a mutation itself! The one way around that is to say the bits and pieces were designed to combine with each other in specific, novel ways, but then you've got teleology back in the mix. To say that happenstance genetic material combines in happenstance ways to someone bring microbes to man is a far-fetched hypothesis, and it only works in the sexual case. It won't do anything to progress asexual organisms.
"The embryo drawings are discredited in the scientific world and any textbook which still has them decades later is a discredit to their ability to stay current, not an indication that evolution is false."
I didn't say it was an indication that evolution was false. I said it was a perpetuation of a secular myth. Just as you don't want religious myths being perpetuated by the school system, I don't see any reason why secular myths should likewise be perpetuated. Yet much of the teaching of evolution is more indoctrination of secular mythology than in actual science.
"Though similar kinds of changes have been observed on many occasions (which for some reason the creationists don't tell us) it is true that the methodology behind the peppered moths findings was flawed."
Actually, creationists believe in faster diversification than evolutionists. Creationists believe that the original "created kinds" were roughly at the family level of taxonomy, at least for vertebrates. This is confirmed with breeding evidence, for which creationist groups have been building the hybrid database for research along these lines.
The difference is that creationists believe that the change process in animals are (a) a designed mechanism, and (b) limitted. Think of genetic algorithms -- while they are able to vary quite significantly, each is ultimately restricted to the constraints of their programming.
For one creationist hypothesis of how this change mechanism occurs, see this paper. He fleshes out more specifics in later papers. Todd Wood, the author of the paper, is part of the team that sequenced the rice genome, and, while not an authority, is well-published secularly. Also see Chris Ashcraft's review of genetic recombination and variability.
"Partly true. It isn't that the drastic change selects nothing, it's that very few survive. But those few that do then have a chance to do massively different things."
What do you mean by "a chance to do massively different things?" Does the mutation rate change? If you have a drastically higher mutation rate, how does that not lead to error catastrophe? If you don't have a drastically higher mutation rate, how would you get away from your localized maxima to produce anything sufficiently novel? This ability either has to be either (a) preprogrammed into the organism, or (b) preprogrammed into the environment, or else you will have stasis, extinction, or error catastrophe.
You would have an interesting point if I were advocating NOT teaching evolution in public schools. I know of noone in the young-earth creationist, old-earth creationist, or ID movement that wants to _remove_ the teaching of evolution from schools.
Therefore, the work of Mendel should have been disregarded at the outset, yes? For that was precisely what he was doing -- working from a theistic perspective to show why evolution was improbable.
What about research based on the atheistic assumptions of no God? Francis Crick went into biology for the sole purpose of doing as much damage as he could to religion.
"Not in a scientific forum. At least not until you have a plausable hypothesis showing god exists or a research finding which demands he does."
How about the existence of the symbolic codal system of DNA? Do we know of any other case where a symbolic codal system arose without a designer? Doesn't that shift the burden of proof onto the biologists to have a repeatable experiment where a symbolic code is created from nothing?
"to cause any reasonable man to even consider the prospect magic (aka teleology) has anything to do with biology."
Why is this? Do you reject teleology as a cause totally? If so, then that is what we should be debating, because it comes long before this. If material causes are the only causes, rationality ceases to exist.
If we don't exclude non-material causes a priori, then there is no reason to exclude them a priori. Is there any reason to include them? I think its fairly obvious. First of all, nearly every biological textbook starts off with something like "biology is the study of beings that _appear_ designed, but are not". If they appear designed to everyone who is looking at them, then shouldn't the burden of proof lie on the person who says that there is no design to them at all?
Examined more specifically, lets take DNA. Do we know of any other symbolic codal system that arises spontaneously, complete with message-copying, translation mechanism, reading/performing mechanisms, editting mechanisms, and the like? Any at all? No we do not. The only symbolic codal systems we have ever seen besides biology are those designed by an intelligence. Again, it is the burden of the biologist to prove that this instance of a symbolic codal system is the product of natural forces, given our current knowledge of such, not the other way around.
If we landed on mars, and found a functioning computer complete with hardware, software, some type of new kind of drives, etc., would we assume that the computer was not built through a designed mechanism? Would that even be rational? No, rather, the burden of proof would be on those that think that the computer was merely part of the landscape to prove how it could have arisen.
"But reasonable men are in the minority thanks to poor public education and the fact that your average idiot believes what he wants to believe rather than what the scientific evidence supports."
Please tell me how the scientific evidence "supports" the idea that a codal system arose from nothing. Is there experimental evidence for this? Or is it just based on the materialistic assumptions -- everything must have only material causes, and so therefore so must this.
In that case, it's simply a case of differing assumptions and not necessarily poor education.
Nothing in here is coding for anything. The semantic space you are dealing with is so densely packed as to be meaningless as an example. The design in this case is the ruleset. However, the ruleset we deal with is much more chaotic, and therefore such simplistic types of exercises don't lead to progressively more complexity, and certainly not to codal systems like DNA.
"One can argue that Sternberg was the acting managing editor at the time, and therefore qualified to do the review."
This is correct.
"The fact that no other members of the society or associated editors were consulted looks however very strange to me."
Other members of the society were consulted. One of them was a member of the council. He did not meet with the council as a whole, and indeed had never done so as editor.
"together with the fact that the peers he claims reviewed the paper are anonymous"
While they are anonymous, the peer review file was checked over by the president of the council of the BSW (Dr. Roy McDiarmid), and agreed that the review process was valid and supported the decision to publish the paper.
It _passed_ the review process. The review process was agreed to be valid and supporting the decision to publish by the president of the society. He consulted with a member of the council to publish the paper. The paper was withdrawn when the politics of science came into the picture.
I hope your belief in evolution is hanging on more than this mechanism. I don't think if I took the last program I wrote, and copied it several times by a process that wasn't 100% accurate, and just retained the versions that still worked, that it would somehow mysterious turn from an e-commerce engine to a video game, even given 4 billion years, and any sort of "selective pressure" you wanted to apply.
The tests done by the Avida system actually go against your hypothesis. They were trying to "evolve" the absolute simplest kind of algorithms -- binary operators. The ONLY time they got ANY algorithm to develop was either if (a) the algorithm was so simplistic that it only took a few instructions, or (b) the put HUGE amounts of selective advantage to every intermediate stage of the calculation. Without (b) the higher-order calculations never once evolved. And by higher-order we're not talking about anything even remotely like the complexity in life. We're talking about, if I remember correctly, comparing binary strings to see if they are equal.
ID people think that there are both random and non-random mutations.
"And the earth is several billion years old."
Most ID'ers agree with this, though it is not part of ID per se.
"And many species can be traced back to a common ancestor."
All creationists believe that many species can be traced back to a common ancestor, even YEC. In fact, the most prevalent YEC opinion is that for vertebrates, the original created "kind" diverged roughly into the family level of taxonomic classification. ID'ers have a range of opinion, some holding to _universal_ common ancestry (I know Behe is of this opinion, for instance), others hold to a small number of original kinds (the Cambrian explosion contained most of the created kinds), and others agreeing more-or-less with the YECs.
In fact, "progressive creationism" (a la Hugh Ross) can include universal common ancestry, with the major jumps between taxa accomplished by God divinely adding the information necessary to make the jump.
Many of those in ID who believe in universal common ancestry believe that evolution was "front-loaded" -- i.e. all of the parts that cannot come about by natural mechanisms were built into the first organism which then diversified.
"All plant cells are basically the same, All vertebrate cells are basically the same, but there is enough difference between plant and animal cells to say that they need to have a different ancestor?"
"Granted all tree cells are closer to each other than they are to say grass cells so do trees get a common ancestor or just plants? How about Apple trees vs Pines?"
YECs use hybridization as the primary means of determining what the original created kinds were. You can see their online hybridization database here. You can see other YEC biosystematic methods in this book.
"Evolution as a thery provides a clean link between all life on earth so which of these are ID people complaning about and what do they find annoying about these links?"
Except that it doesn't. The links are neither clean nor obvious. The fossil record, especially for non-vertebrates, provides very little support for evolution. In addition, the mechanism supposed is inadequate in many people's view.
Slashdot Mirror
"What are the legal ramifications of this? I sure hope they don't set a precedent of involving Free/Open Source Software in questionable legal dealings."
If there were legal ramifications for forking, it wouldn't be Free Software!
"Those aren't forks, they're different versions of Windows."
Some of them actually are forks. 9x/NT are actually two separate forks. The fact that it is developed by the same company doesn't make it any less of a fork.
Finally, in XP, the fork overtook the original.
This is nice, except that Microsoft Word isn't 100% compatible with Microsoft Word. In fact, there have been several instances where OpenOffice was more compatible with a specific version of Microsoft Word than newer Microsoft Words.
My guess is that the argument was not based on trivializing their job responsibilities, but understanding how poor of a tool Office Suites are to the jobs that they are routinely given. In 99% of the cases, the Office Suite is not the right tool for the job. But it is used anyway, simply because that is what businesses provide.
Unfortunately, the market momentum is toward office suites, rather than towards better tools. For example, a much better general-purpose tool would be an XML editor with extensive templates and stylesheets. These don't exist because the market is so used to doing things the Office Suite Way that they don't understand the point.
The problem is that the tool (in this case, the Office Suite) has made people look at the problems in the entirely wrong way, simply because that was the primary tool available. Therefore, we have tool upon tool built on an erroneous model.
Saying, "perhaps it is the foundation that is cracked" is not always popular, and not even always true, but is worth considering.
I believe newer Mozilla's (or perhaps a Mozilla extension) provides the ability to save form data for later use.
c) switch off SETI@HOME
It's mostly because other stuff I generally want to see and touch before buying. Books and computers are the only thing I'll buy from a distance. That's probably related to how familiar I am with the two.
I think Amazon's advantage is that because of the sheer volume of shipping they currently do they can probably get better prices on video shipping.
However, personally, I really never use Amazon for anything more than books. Perhaps it has caught on in other markets, but I really see Amazon as a book place. I think my first instinct would still be to go to Netflix if I wanted to rent movies.
I never really noticed how much noise my PC was making until I finally turned it off!
"No, creationists are making up new terms that sound cool, but really are just admissions that change does occur, but they think it doesn't occur across "kinds"."
Everyone agrees that change occurs. To say that creationists don't think that change occurs is simply a caricature, not reality. Creationists have believed in change since Linnaeus.
"Take this change and add billions of years and there is nothing yet seen which it cannot explain. And there is, further, much evidence in the fossil record showing exactly what one would expect from this hypothesis."
That's incorrect. Evolution supposes that diversity precedes disparity, but the fossil records shows the opposite.
"So which is it? "Semantic information" cannot be created or it can be created in 9 days?"
It is semantic information which cannot be created. Think about it this way: a program can use non-deterministic methods to devise solutions to problems, but what makes the non-deterministic methods usable is the fact that they are based on a very stable system that has such changes planned in. It is the stable constraints and systems that are the semantic information. The organism has simply inferred a set of enzymes from the environment, but was ultimately able to do so because it is specifically programmed to adapt in that way. I argue this in greater detail here.
"Ok. So the allegation is that it could not have occured without divine intervention."
Nope. You misunderstood my argument. The allegation is that it could not have occurred if the cell was not specifically designed to search and find adaptations for a new food source, and that the ability of a genome to adapt is fundamentally constrained because if it weren't the adaptation mechanism would fall into error catastrophe. This is why, even though pseuodomas can generate genes in 9 days, it has been fundamentally stable for over a hundred years -- it's basic foundational programming around which change occurs has remained the same.
The alternatives are (a) pseudomonas has been subject to random mutations at this rate, and it just happened upon this one that worked. This would lead almost immediately to error catastrophe if the general mutation rate throughout the genome occurred at this speed. The other alternative (b) is that pseudomonas already had the ability to do this, which has been confirmed to be untrue.
"Huh? Genetics was predicted long before the mechanism of the "gene" was found. When it was found it was very quickly understood and embraced. To say otherwise is comically bad revisionist history."
It was ignored for about 35 years, and then barely taken up for another 35 years until mutation was proposed as a way to integrate it into neo-darwinism.
"My mouth is hanging open in disbelief on this one. McClintock won the nobel prize for this work, that's hardly a rejection by science for *any* reason, much less so called evolutionary sensibilities."
What McClintock proposed was that transposons were _tools_ used by the cell to reconfigure itself. This was almost immediately changed to being viewed as parasitic elements because a genome that can change itself as a response to environmental conditions sounded too much like design and lamarckism. It is only very recently that McClintock's actual thoughts on the transposons she found have been taken seriously.
"Right. So, if we were to test this hypothesis one of the things we would look for is slower change in asexually reproducing things than in sexually reproducing ones. And, unsurprisingly since evolution is so widely accepted by folks who have done just such analysis, we see exactly that. Sexual things are capable of much more rapid change than asexual things. It's almost as if sexual reproduction is the more important driver of change when compared to mutation."
You're confusing real change with heterozygous fractionation. Fractionating a genome into homozygous traits isn't doing any significant change except a statistical change in the population.
For real change, asexual organisms such as Pseudomonas can actually manufacture a pair of genes to adapt to new food sources in less than 9 days. If this were the result of undirected mutation, then change this radical this fast would result in error catastrophe. This isn't the result of existing material for two reasons: (1) the genes were not present before the food source was supplied, and (2) the food source was nylon, which has only been invented in recent history.
"The creationist community accepts new evidence between a decade and a century behind the scientific community."
That can be equally said of the evolutionist community, who waited 70 years to incorporate genetics into their view, because it was against evolutionist sensibilities. Likewise, the idea that transposons are tools used by the cell was proposed by McClintock who original found them in the 1940's, yet science has rejected this view because it, again, is against their evolutionary sensibilities. Only very recently (as in Shapiro) have they started taking this seriously.
"Really? Cause they are still using a lot of arguments which were disproven in some cases decades ago?"
Also, you have to look at what you mean by "disproved" as well. Simply because someone claims that an argument is disproven doesn't make it so. All you have to do is browse the bad logic on Talk.Origins index to creaitonist claims to find that out.
"It should be viewed via a scientific lens just as the results from those who start from a platform trying to prove that god exists. Whichever is *factually* true will win the day regardless of the motivations of their respective camps."
It appears you have reversed your previous decision, or I misunderstood you.
"Calling it fancy names like "symbolic codal system" doesn't change that it is simply a chemical reaction "
It's not the name, it's what it signifies. The interesting thing about DNA is that the message is distinct from the medium. If you spill ink on paper, the properties of the ink working together with the properties of the paper are the same ones as if you wrote a Shakespearian masterpiece. The informational content of the ink on the page has nothing to do at all with the properties of the ink or the paper. If the ink and paper contain a specification for a motor, it is not the properties of the ink and the paper that are interesting, but that they were arranged by a designer. Likewise, there is an intepretation apparatus that is used.
Are the ink and paper material objects operating under law? Yes. But if what was on the page was governed solely by the actions of the ink and the paper resulting from natural law, the result would be meaningless. It is the arrangement by an intelligent agent that puts meaning into the page.
Likewise, with DNA. DNA would be useless if its arrangement were merely the result of the interactions of its chemical environment. It is the ordering of these into messages which are distinct from the medium which make it novel. There are mechanisms for reading, copying, and performing what is coded in DNA. None of these mechanisms exist for crystals or polymers. It is the informational content of the sequence of DNA that is so surprising. To say that such amounts of informational content arose without regard to an information-giving agent would be admitting effects without a cause, and an abandonment of reason.
Note that the person who discovered DNA, Crick, believes in panspermia precisely because (a) he did not want to believe in God, and (b) he did not believe it was possible for such a system to have arisen on the earth.
"So does that mean that they will stand behind their hypothesis and, when someone can show evolution from one "kind" to another, admit that their hypothesis has been disproven?"
In the sense that they will probably search for new demarcation lines, definitely. In the same way that an evolutionist would redraw taxonomic hierarchies if they were shown that a given animal could not have evolved from another (in fact, these lines have been constantly drawn and redrawn, and most of them are not certain even among evolutionists).
If you're interested in creationist biosystematics (even from a curiosity what the hell are these people thinking point of view), you should take a look at Understanding the Pattern of Life. It is not a creation-vs-evolution book, but a book on biosystematics from a creationist point of view. It has chapters on biodiversity, biogeography, biological imperfection, statistical classification methods, etc. The authors are Todd Wood, who was part of the team that sequenced the rice genome, and Kurt Wise, who studied paleontology at Harvard under Stephen Gould.
Really? Natural selection doesn't _produce_ *anything*. It simply kills off what doesn't work. Natural selection _requires_ a separate driver of change.
"What happens when siblings have kids?"
This is the nuttiest explanation of evolution I have ever heard. It still leaves unexplained any possible driver of population-wide change (as opposed to merely statistical shift). In fact, before mutation was found, this precise line of reasoning was viewed as evidence AGAINST evolution, because the traits are discrete (or themselves made up of discrete units), and what is being inherited was discrete -- so while you can have statistical change in the traits of a population, you will not generate _new_ traits by these means.
The idea of mutation was the only way that Darwinism could be melded with genetics, and is likely the reason why genetics was not taken up in full force until 70 years after its publication despite the experimental basis for it.
So, if you deny that mutation has any role, you are back to the same problems that Mendel found in evolution:
The only thing you have added to this is:
"there are otherwise unknown bits that combine in new and novel ways."
Which is equivalent in power to mutation, just using existing pools of strands instead of modifications of other ones. Their very combination equivalent to a mutation, if not a mutation itself! The one way around that is to say the bits and pieces were designed to combine with each other in specific, novel ways, but then you've got teleology back in the mix. To say that happenstance genetic material combines in happenstance ways to someone bring microbes to man is a far-fetched hypothesis, and it only works in the sexual case. It won't do anything to progress asexual organisms.
"The embryo drawings are discredited in the scientific world and any textbook which still has them decades later is a discredit to their ability to stay current, not an indication that evolution is false."
I didn't say it was an indication that evolution was false. I said it was a perpetuation of a secular myth. Just as you don't want religious myths being perpetuated by the school system, I don't see any reason why secular myths should likewise be perpetuated. Yet much of the teaching of evolution is more indoctrination of secular mythology than in actual science.
"Though similar kinds of changes have been observed on many occasions (which for some reason the creationists don't tell us) it is true that the methodology behind the peppered moths findings was flawed."
Actually, creationists believe in faster diversification than evolutionists. Creationists believe that the original "created kinds" were roughly at the family level of taxonomy, at least for vertebrates. This is confirmed with breeding evidence, for which creationist groups have been building the hybrid database for research along these lines.
The difference is that creationists believe that the change process in animals are (a) a designed mechanism, and (b) limitted. Think of genetic algorithms -- while they are able to vary quite significantly, each is ultimately restricted to the constraints of their programming.
For one creationist hypothesis of how this change mechanism occurs, see this paper. He fleshes out more specifics in later papers. Todd Wood, the author of the paper, is part of the team that sequenced the rice genome, and, while not an authority, is well-published secularly. Also see Chris Ashcraft's review of genetic recombination and variability.
"Partly true. It isn't that the drastic change selects nothing, it's that very few survive. But those few that do then have a chance to do massively different things."
What do you mean by "a chance to do massively different things?" Does the mutation rate change? If you have a drastically higher mutation rate, how does that not lead to error catastrophe? If you don't have a drastically higher mutation rate, how would you get away from your localized maxima to produce anything sufficiently novel? This ability either has to be either (a) preprogrammed into the organism, or (b) preprogrammed into the environment, or else you will have stasis, extinction, or error catastrophe.
You would have an interesting point if I were advocating NOT teaching evolution in public schools. I know of noone in the young-earth creationist, old-earth creationist, or ID movement that wants to _remove_ the teaching of evolution from schools.
Therefore, the work of Mendel should have been disregarded at the outset, yes? For that was precisely what he was doing -- working from a theistic perspective to show why evolution was improbable.
What about research based on the atheistic assumptions of no God? Francis Crick went into biology for the sole purpose of doing as much damage as he could to religion.
"Not in a scientific forum. At least not until you have a plausable hypothesis showing god exists or a research finding which demands he does."
How about the existence of the symbolic codal system of DNA? Do we know of any other case where a symbolic codal system arose without a designer? Doesn't that shift the burden of proof onto the biologists to have a repeatable experiment where a symbolic code is created from nothing?
"to cause any reasonable man to even consider the prospect magic (aka teleology) has anything to do with biology."
Why is this? Do you reject teleology as a cause totally? If so, then that is what we should be debating, because it comes long before this. If material causes are the only causes, rationality ceases to exist.
If we don't exclude non-material causes a priori, then there is no reason to exclude them a priori. Is there any reason to include them? I think its fairly obvious. First of all, nearly every biological textbook starts off with something like "biology is the study of beings that _appear_ designed, but are not". If they appear designed to everyone who is looking at them, then shouldn't the burden of proof lie on the person who says that there is no design to them at all?
Examined more specifically, lets take DNA. Do we know of any other symbolic codal system that arises spontaneously, complete with message-copying, translation mechanism, reading/performing mechanisms, editting mechanisms, and the like? Any at all? No we do not. The only symbolic codal systems we have ever seen besides biology are those designed by an intelligence. Again, it is the burden of the biologist to prove that this instance of a symbolic codal system is the product of natural forces, given our current knowledge of such, not the other way around.
If we landed on mars, and found a functioning computer complete with hardware, software, some type of new kind of drives, etc., would we assume that the computer was not built through a designed mechanism? Would that even be rational? No, rather, the burden of proof would be on those that think that the computer was merely part of the landscape to prove how it could have arisen.
"But reasonable men are in the minority thanks to poor public education and the fact that your average idiot believes what he wants to believe rather than what the scientific evidence supports."
Please tell me how the scientific evidence "supports" the idea that a codal system arose from nothing. Is there experimental evidence for this? Or is it just based on the materialistic assumptions -- everything must have only material causes, and so therefore so must this.
In that case, it's simply a case of differing assumptions and not necessarily poor education.
Nothing in here is coding for anything. The semantic space you are dealing with is so densely packed as to be meaningless as an example. The design in this case is the ruleset. However, the ruleset we deal with is much more chaotic, and therefore such simplistic types of exercises don't lead to progressively more complexity, and certainly not to codal systems like DNA.
"One can argue that Sternberg was the acting managing editor at the time, and therefore qualified to do the review."
This is correct.
"The fact that no other members of the society or associated editors were consulted looks however very strange to me."
Other members of the society were consulted. One of them was a member of the council. He did not meet with the council as a whole, and indeed had never done so as editor.
"together with the fact that the peers he claims reviewed the paper are anonymous"
While they are anonymous, the peer review file was checked over by the president of the council of the BSW (Dr. Roy McDiarmid), and agreed that the review process was valid and supported the decision to publish the paper.
It _passed_ the review process. The review process was agreed to be valid and supporting the decision to publish by the president of the society. He consulted with a member of the council to publish the paper. The paper was withdrawn when the politics of science came into the picture.
I hope your belief in evolution is hanging on more than this mechanism. I don't think if I took the last program I wrote, and copied it several times by a process that wasn't 100% accurate, and just retained the versions that still worked, that it would somehow mysterious turn from an e-commerce engine to a video game, even given 4 billion years, and any sort of "selective pressure" you wanted to apply.
The tests done by the Avida system actually go against your hypothesis. They were trying to "evolve" the absolute simplest kind of algorithms -- binary operators. The ONLY time they got ANY algorithm to develop was either if (a) the algorithm was so simplistic that it only took a few instructions, or (b) the put HUGE amounts of selective advantage to every intermediate stage of the calculation. Without (b) the higher-order calculations never once evolved. And by higher-order we're not talking about anything even remotely like the complexity in life. We're talking about, if I remember correctly, comparing binary strings to see if they are equal.
"So ID people accept that mutations are random?"
ID people think that there are both random and non-random mutations.
"And the earth is several billion years old."
Most ID'ers agree with this, though it is not part of ID per se.
"And many species can be traced back to a common ancestor."
All creationists believe that many species can be traced back to a common ancestor, even YEC. In fact, the most prevalent YEC opinion is that for vertebrates, the original created "kind" diverged roughly into the family level of taxonomic classification. ID'ers have a range of opinion, some holding to _universal_ common ancestry (I know Behe is of this opinion, for instance), others hold to a small number of original kinds (the Cambrian explosion contained most of the created kinds), and others agreeing more-or-less with the YECs.
In fact, "progressive creationism" (a la Hugh Ross) can include universal common ancestry, with the major jumps between taxa accomplished by God divinely adding the information necessary to make the jump.
Many of those in ID who believe in universal common ancestry believe that evolution was "front-loaded" -- i.e. all of the parts that cannot come about by natural mechanisms were built into the first organism which then diversified.
"All plant cells are basically the same, All vertebrate cells are basically the same, but there is enough difference between plant and animal cells to say that they need to have a different ancestor?"
In my view, yes very much so. Here I defend why.
"Granted all tree cells are closer to each other than they are to say grass cells so do trees get a common ancestor or just plants? How about Apple trees vs Pines?"
YECs use hybridization as the primary means of determining what the original created kinds were. You can see their online hybridization database here. You can see other YEC biosystematic methods in this book.
"Evolution as a thery provides a clean link between all life on earth so which of these are ID people complaning about and what do they find annoying about these links?"
Except that it doesn't. The links are neither clean nor obvious. The fossil record, especially for non-vertebrates, provides very little support for evolution. In addition, the mechanism supposed is inadequate in many people's view.