Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

How do you distinguish between something dressed up to sound sciency, and the real thing?

What about checking if something is based on good, peer reviewed, scientific literature?
Of course, if that research goes against your personal convictions, you can always invoke a massive scientific conspiracy against your viewpoint.

If you want, there is always an excuse to deny the science. But that raises the question, if you are going to decide for yourself, then why even bother to ask the question?     
  

The only possible answer I can think of is to examine the arguments themselves!

David

And what if you do not have the expertise to come to a conclusion either way?

Are you going to believe the one "expert" that is aligns with your believe system, even though he or she is at the absolute fringe? Or do you go with the consensus of the field, and adapt your believe system?

If you go for the former, you are basically saying you know more than the combined expertise of a whole field.

On the other hand, aligning yourself completely with the Discovery institute also does not help ones credibility too much either.

What are you suggesting? We ignore the DI's anti-scientific, theistic, political, goals? Their feeble attempts to mimic peer review?
Their deliberate, and repeated, misunderstanding, and misrepresenting, of what evolution by NS actually means? 

Do we believe what they say without any doubt? Is there any shred of scientific evidence for what they say?
How do we know there something beyond their pointing at a gap in the knowledge and simply stating "that'st design"?
 

My approach is to look at the actual arguments for some sort of design in biology, and discard completely that the god of the Bible had anything to do with it. I am not a Christian, and neither is Nbtruthman.

The crucial thing, is that there are lots of good hard arguments that evolution by natural selection will not cut it.

Do you discard the ideas of Newton because he was also interested in alchemy?

There are some very interesting books coming out the problems with Darwinism, some are by Discovery Institute people, and if those people are motivated by the idea because they identify the intelligence with the Christian God, well I'd say they must believe in a rather odd God.

1)           A god that would help both sides in a biological arms race.

2)          A god who devises ghastly diseases for human beings. If you identify the Christian god with ID, you are saying He doesn't just permit these tortures, he sits in his lab and hones the diseases to perfection.

Obviously whatever the intelligence is, it is a lot more local - i.e. the intelligence that helps a parasitic wasp is not the same as the intelligence that helps its caterpillar prey.

David

From their founding document, the one that laid out their "wedge strategy":

The DI's defence against accusations about the "wedge document" can be downloaded from here. Read it and decide whether or not it convinces you.

Personally, I'm not a biblical or any other kind of religious creationist. Neither are a number of members of the DI; nor, for that matter, are most of the Darwin doubters here at Psience Quest.

What I like about the DI is that on Evolution News and Views, it presents good criticisms of Darwinism. That doesn't mean I accept an Abrahamic idea of God (one that, for instance actively intervenes in the evolution I believe has undoubtedly occurred). Some DI people are agnostic, for crying out loud.

However, even if they were all Abrahamists, how would that in and of itself affect the validity of their points? If one bothers to read their criticisms, one will see that a lot of them are really quite cogent. There are few (though not non-existent) places on the web where one can read such critique in relation to recent research on both sides of the argument, and EN&V is one of the best.

OTOH, there are no end of places where one can read Darwinian fairy tales. Darwinian groupies who attend the church of the gullible are immune to rational argument and there's little point talking to them.

No matter how reasonable your argument for considering what has been presented in Evolution News or by Meyer, Behe, etc., you will not convince people like Steve001 and Sparky (BartV). They cannot see that their stringent atheism is every bit as responsible for their tunnel vision as evangelical Christianity is for bible literalists. When the debate is reduced to countering such bigotry, then it has become pointless.

Perhaps open-minded members of this forum would be interested to review the current state of science in paradigm-threatening areas.

There is an ongoing culture war that has recently somewhat hotted up, where materialism (which has become a sort of religion) has been winning the battle for a long time and has gotten used to it. But new evidence and new ideas are starting to threaten the culture and faith of reductive materialism, so naturally the establishment fights back. The materialist faithful, especially the zealots, fight back with amazing ferocity - after all, their most cherished belief system is being challenged. 

It is very unfortunate that Christian fundamentalist young-Earth Creationists are muddying the waters by promulgating their very unscientific Scripture-based beliefs.     

Intelligent Design is not Creationism but is of course also closed-mindedly opposed by the mainstream scientific establishment regardless of any scientific arguments. The leading journals like Nature and Science absolutely exclude any papers or articles on ID on phony grounds that ID really is Creationism (an ad hominem attack), is not science or is even anti-science. They would rather publish something on phrenology or homeopathy rather than anything challenging their Darwinist tenets of faith. This exclusion is ideological, based on a clash of paradigms, not on any open-minded examining of the evidence. 

This also applies to other areas of scientific thought and research conflicting with the mainstream consensus materialist paradigm - in particular parapsychology, especially research into taboo subjects like NDEs, reincarnation, the afterlife, and mediumistic communication.

Any scientists who have the temerity to let it be known that they find any of the evidence and arguments persuasive, much less actually write any papers or books on the taboo subjects, are punished for challenging the taboos by having their careers ruined or at least stunted. Fortunately some medical professionals have been able to study phenomena like NDEs and still keep their positions. Students looking at starting careers in science know that challenging materialism can easily torpedo their going on to a PhD or Masters. 

Naturally, this toxic environment of persecution causes most scientists who are interested in ID or parapsychology to keep it mostly private and secret from their colleagues. 

In the field of parapsychology, psychologist Dean Radin lost his faculty position at the University of Nevada because he had the courage to write a very good book on psychic phenomena that became quite popular (The Conscious Universe). The ID-interested scientists especially have faced the refusal by most professionals who oppose ID to respond to the theory on its scientific merits, combined with blatant persecution, censorship and intimidation. There are many cases of this, for instance Guillermo Gonzalez, Richard Sternberg, Caroline Crocker, Robert Marks, and most recently Günter Bechly. Fortunately Michael Behe has tenure at his university, or he would be out. 

Also, since funding sources and organizations faithfully believe the materialist scientific mainstream creed they have been taught, there is practically no funding for research in the forbidden areas. What funding there is has usually come from the rare private bequests, like Xerography inventor Chester Carlson's to the University of Virginia, which funded Ian Stevenson's research into reincarnation.  

So, as the inevitable result of all these factors, there is little peer-reviewed scientific literature on ID or parapsychology in leading journals and little research is conducted. Fortunately, despite these obstacles a body of work has still been established. 

This is a devastating comment on the lack of integrity of current science.

In the field of parapsychology, psychologist Dean Radin lost his faculty position at the University of Nevada because he had the courage to write a very good book on psychic phenomena that became quite popular (The Conscious Universe). 

I'm not sure it's quite that simple. According to this article, Radin had been funded by Robert Bigelow, but the funding ceased after two years, and instead Bigelow endowed a chair of consciousness studies, whose first occupant was Charles Tart. The article says Radin's response was that he could have raised more funding if the university had given him an unpaid leave of absence, but that does seem to be an implicit acknowledgment that funding was a problem: 
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/fea...10.article

My approach is to look at the actual arguments for some sort of design in biology, and discard completely that the god of the Bible had anything to do with it. I am not a Christian, and neither is Nbtruthman.

I am willing to believe that, but both of you keep parroting sources that clearly have a religious premise as their starting point. 

The crucial thing, is that there are lots of good hard arguments that evolution by natural selection will not cut it.

Like what? Again, the only thing i see is pointing at gaps in the knowledge and claiming that as evidence for ID/creationism. 
We discussed one of these over at Skeptiko.  If you are honest, you would have to admit that that argument went nowhere. 

Do you discard the ideas of Newton because he was also interested in alchemy?

No, of course not. What's your point?
If the evidence for ID was only a fraction of what Newton laid out in his "Principia" we would not have this discussion.

I am also convinced that people like Axe,  Behe, and other Discoverites, have done good scientific work, some of it published in well respected, peer reviewed, scientific journals. 
Since i lack the education to evaluate these, often very technical papers, i rely on the existing scientific framework to know they are sound work.

But if they are published in a mock scientific journal, like the Discovery owned BIO-complexity, i do not trust a single word they say.   

Obviously whatever the intelligence is, it is a lot more local - i.e. the intelligence that helps a parasitic wasp is not the same as the intelligence that helps its caterpillar prey.

David

I am not sure i understand what you are saying here, but it feels like you want to spread the ID/creationist claimed intervention, over a lot of smaller intervention events.

How does that make a difference? The only thing that does is illustrating the unfalsifiability of the concept. 
One can always move the goalpost further as science advances.  In the end "ID theory" can completely overlap with evolution by NS, with the only difference that they claim that the random mutations are ID interventions.

The DI's defence against accusations about the "wedge document" can be downloaded from here. Read it and decide whether or not it convinces you.

There is no accusation, the quotes from the "wedge document" speak for  themselves. The "defence" is ridiculous, at a certain point it says:
     

The best way to dispel the paranoia of the conspiracy-mongers is to actually look at the document in question. It simply doesn’t advocate the views they attribute to it.

If the best defence is simply to show the document, why did they not do that? How hard would that have been?
Instead they give a few cherry picked remarks that they think prove their point. To me even these show the DI's desire to replace science with dogma.
 

Personally, I'm not a biblical or any other kind of religious creationist. Neither are a number of members of the DI; nor, for that matter, are most of the Darwin doubters here at Psience Quest.

As i said over and over again, am willing to believe that, but then why defend an organization that clearly is?

From the document you provided, that is supposed to deny the fact that they are a religious organization:

ƒ Following are the document’s major points, which we still are happy to affirm:
(1) “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization is built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.”     

The DI, if it is true to it's founding principles, can simply not agree with the scientific consensus if that goes against their dogma.
They are dedicated to apologetics, not to scientific truths.

As i said over and over again, am willing to believe that, but then why defend an organization that clearly is?

I told you: it's because many of the critiques of Darwinism they provide are really very astute, regardless of their motivation. If you prefer to believe in the fairy tales, that's your prerogative, but seeing as you admit you don't have much expertise in evaluating some of the IDers papers because you lack the education, I don't see how you can evince that their work is suspect. Even were you to bother to read it, how would you possibly know? I stress you because all your information comes from ideologues. They present it in a form you can understand, you swallow it as gospel, and then regurgitate it ex cathedra.

A large part of your justification is that the neo-Darwinians must know, because they get a lot of their work published in peer-reviewed literature. You know, the literature that is increasingly being criticised these days because peer-review is being shown to be the work of a woefully inadequate old boy's club that acts as gatekeeper for Darwinian doctrine.

Unlike you, I do have quite a lot of education in the field of biology to evaluate the work both of IDers and neo-Darwinists, both of which are often discussed at EN&V. I have come to the conclusion that much (not all by any means) of what IDers say is cogent. I don't have to rely wholly on second-hand interpretations -- I can usually draw my own.

I can see people like you for what they are: ignorant promulgators of other people's views -- which wouldn't be too bad if those other people knew what the heck they were talking about. They're sheep being led by shepherds in precisely the direction they want them to go because it makes them feel self-important, allows them to  bask in borrowed authority. But ignoramuses have no authority. They're just a little eegits who don't know arse from elbow.

Perhaps open-minded members of this forum would be interested to review the current state of science in paradigm-threatening areas.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but then ask myself why the powers that be here relegate the potentially paradigm-busting evidence of there being no link between HIV and AIDS to a lonely backwater where hopefully no one will see it.

Tell me why that isn't hypocrisy. On second thoughts, don't bother. This message will itself probably be moved to a lonely backwater lest it offend precious sensibilities.