"Exposing Discovery Institute": video series by "Professor" Dave Farina

I think the challenge here is terms like "slow semi-random-walk".

That already puts things beyond a layperson, or even a STEM educated person. I did an undergraduate degree in Maths but it has been some time since I looked at random walks.

There seem to be strong motivational reasons to accept OR deny ID, though there are also Christians who don't seem to find much value in ID. OTOH we do have a few scientists who aren't involved with ID either accepting certain aspects of the research/concepts. We also have non-ID scientists who suggest non-materialist views of biology like the Platonism Levin and Wagner have proposed.

So I would tentatively accept that some of ID could be true, but keep in mind there is a lot of debate on just the validity of the work. This contrasts with Cosmic Fine Tuning which involves a debate around constants that everyone accepts are within a narrow range to allow for life as we know it.

The "semi-random walk" term I used is my own and not used by the DI, and I should have defined it. I simply tried to come up with a single term that I think capsulizes the major factors comprising undirected Darwinian RM + NS evolution. By this term I meant that undirected Darwinian evolution by definition consists of the combination of and interaction between two forces, one random with respect to fitness and one nonrandom with respect to fitness - a random series of genetic changes which are random with respect to fitness consisting of mutations and other types of genetic alterations, and natural selection which does have a direction. Natural selection is the mechanism by which some of the random genetic changes affect and change the genotype and phenotype (body structure) in the direction of increased reproductive fitness. The tendency of natural selection to gradually achieve bodily changes according to their reproductive fitness is the non-random direction of NS. The overall process tends to achieve gradual change in phenotype in the direction of increased reproductive fitness, and significantly detrimental mutations tend to die out in the population since these organisms tend to die before reproducing. Neutral or just slightly more fit mutations tend to remain in the genome. 

This to me doesn't seem to require a PhD in biology to understand. 

I'm curious. Do you think that any of the 5 major arguments against Darwinism and for ID that I summarized are too esoteric to be understood by laypersons?

I'm curious. Do you think that any of the 5 major arguments against Darwinism and for ID that I summarized are too esoteric to be understood by laypersons?

Well I might be a deficient layperson in this regard, because my biology and chemistry were weaker than my physics and pure maths.

But I've tried to follow the debates and while I can grasp both sides of the argument it seems the technical details matter a lot. As such I don't know if I would fully side with Design in ID and Cosmic Fine Tuning but I do lean that way because:

1. There seem to be an increasing number of academics who are not affiliated with ID but have shifted to sympathizing with at least some of the movement or at least some non-material possibilities in biology & physics.

2. I know that across history there has been a hard push by Materialist/Physicalist Fundamentalist-Evangelicals to close the door on any aspect of reality or any scientific finding that *could* be a sign of God. This is admittedly tempered to some degree by the hard push to get religion back in control against increasing shifts toward secularism though I feel the pro-Materialist message has been weighted even more in STEM.

3. ID seems inline with what we find when we study the "physical", which is the mental has a funny way of showing up. Examples include the mystery of why the "physical" is so amenable to mathematical description, QM level interpretations arguing for irreducible minds, and the Cosmic Fine Tuning that suggests Design.

4. Given testimonies of Survival evidence, and testimonies for the existence of spirits (including anthropologists of some repute), and a variety of Weird cases involving strange entities or Psi-effects it seems that ID fits with the world view that immaterial entities exist among us and impact the "physical".

5. Since I think all causality involves consciousness in some way, there isn't anything extravagant about ID or Cosmic Fine Tuning.

Of course there are counter arguments, like the one  @Laird gave against Goff's argument for Fine Tuning. I try to consider these as well if only to keep my own biases in check.

I think the idea that mutations are uniformly random with respect to the genome is no longer assumed

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-...are-random

~~ Paul

I think the idea that mutations are uniformly random with respect to the genome is no longer assumed

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-...are-random

~~ Paul

Problem is that it should never have been "assumed" ~ that's not science, that's ideology.

If it were really "scientific", there should be scientific knowledge, not "assumptions".

Great article exposing how shallow "Professor" Dave actually is.

I would counter and say this is in fact a god awful article which Professor Dave responds to in his video series and absolutely shreds like it was nothing.

I would counter and say this is in fact a god awful article which Professor Dave responds to in his video series and absolutely shreds like it was nothing.

Seems you are familiar with him - Do you know what his educational background is?

AFAICTell his only STEM degree is a Bachelor's in Chemistry...

[Laird]

Like I posted in the other thread, don't go just by what Farina says, see how DI responds to his criticism.

start here:

https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/debunk...hen-meyer/

He responded to that series of blog posts in the very video series to which I linked:

Exposing Discovery Institute Part 4: Günter Bechly

[Laird]

So is it correct that Farina only has a bachelor’s in Chemistry as his highest level STEM degree?

According to the bio on a site which looks like his, his education is:

• BA Chemistry (Carleton College)
  
• MA Science Education (Cal State Northridge)
  

A degree isn’t necessarily a sign of expertise or honesty, but I do wonder about the fact Josephson has a Nobel in physics but was very complimentary toward Signature in the Cell. The physicist-mathematician Wolfgang Smith has also incorporated the idea of Irreducibly Complex Information into his current ideas about QM.

So it seems to me you have two luminaries [unaffiliated with the ID movement] in STEM giving ID consideration, which makes me hesitate to accept the word of a YouTuber with an undergrad degree as the final word…

He has a masters in science education, and his videos are education about science, so he seems reasonably well qualified. He's apparently produced thousands of them, and he has millions of views, so he's apparently doing something right.

In any case, sure, it really comes down to the arguments, which, admittedly, I don't feel well qualified to assess, but Dave has impressed me for being able to back up his claims with references to scientific literature. Admittedly, again, I haven't dug into any of them yet, but @nbtruthman's response gives us all the opportunity to do that here and now.

[Laird]

The telling arguments for ID and against Darwinism that have been developed by DI researchers and thinkers have no valid rebuttals. And understanding them doesn't really require masters degrees or PhDs in biology or evolutionary biology. These arguments are understandable by laypersons, and include the following:

Good, this gives us a chance to get into the nuts and bolts, as @Jim_Smith had asked for in another thread. Dave has addressed every one of these arguments, however, it was in hours and hours of content, and I wasn't taking notes, so I might not be able to find all of his rebuttals. I'll give it a try though. Some of my references might be broad gestures to lengthy videos though, within which I might go back later to try to find more specific references.

(1) The ubiquitous and widespread presence of large numbers of irreducibly complex biological systems that could not have come about by slow accumulations of tiny changes via Darwinian RM + NS - the concept of irreducible complexity is just that most all complex biological systems and subsystems consist of biological machines of many separate parts that are so organized that they simply can't come about through a long series of small changes. The primary reason is the fact that each step has to be fully functional or the species will die out. A prominent example is the obvious irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, just one of many irreducibly complex molecular machines identified to exist. Many human and animal organ subsystems have also been identified as being irreducibly complex, including the human and animal immune system and the blood clotting mechanism. 

I seem to recall that he addresses this in detail in his video Exposing Discovery Institute Part 3: Michael Behe.

He also makes reference to it in Part 4 on Günter Bechly at 16:22, where he says, "Case in point, in the Behe debunk I showed how he asks for researchers to knock out a bacterial flagellum and wait for flagellar motility to evolve again, admitting that this would instantly falsify irreducible complexity, having no clue that someone literally did that one year earlier. You can’t make this stuff up." He puts up a screen shot of the paper he's referencing regarding someone literally having done that a year earlier. This seems to be it: Evolutionary resurrection of flagellar motility via rewiring of the nitrogen regulation system. (I haven't read it).

Possibly he also addresses this in other places that I've forgotten.

(2) Long term lab evolution experiments with short generation time microorganisms that have shown that even under great environmental stress these organisms just don't demonstrate any significant undirected Darwinian RM + NS evolution - no real innovative jumps in complexity. 

He addresses this somewhere but I forget where exactly - probably again in Part 3 on Michael Behe.

(3) The evidence of the fossil record which demonstrates that there are no examples in the fossil record of the Darwinist-expected and predicted slow gradual accumulation of tiny selectively advantaged mutational genetic changes via natural selection - the actual fossil record shows time and time again a pattern of major evolutionary innovations happening in drastic jumps, the most notable example being the Cambrian Explosion of virtually all the animal phyla about 500 million years ago appearing in a very short period of time. 

He addresses this mostly in Exposing Discovery Institute Part 2: Stephen Meyer but also in other places, including between 23:01 and 33:41 in Part 4 on Günter Bechly.

(4) Research conducted by the DI has shown both theoretically and from the evolutionarily recent fossil record that the slow semi-random-walk Darwinian evolutionary
changes inevitably involve a rapid degradation of the genome. 

He also addresses this in the Behe episode, i.e., Part 3. He references this briefly too again in Part 4 on Günter Bechly at 42:20 where he shows a table which Behe had constructed which omits non-damaging mutations that were present in the original data.

(5) The Darwinists accuse Intelligent Design advocates and researchers of claiming the Designer(s) of evolution are the Christian God and are trying to promote their Christian beliefs, whereas the truth is that Intelligent Design merely looks for and develops evidence that existing and fossil life forms absolutely must have had a conscious intelligent designer or designers. ID deliberately does not try to identify what they were.

He addresses this with respect to the document The Wedge between 0:24 and 4:22 in Part 2 on Stephen Meyer.

He also went further into his concerns about the DI's motives between 32:06 and 37:13 in Part 1: Casey Luskin.

In a couple of places he references a typo in a document associated - I think - with the DI in which it's clear that "Creationism" has been replaced by - copy and pasted over - "Intelligent Design", but I haven't been able to remember where. If I find it, I'll post an update.

[Laird]

I've never particularly liked Professor Dave's stuff, he's a bit heavy handed on the whole bashing religious people thing.
[...]
The videos are a bit bombastic

Yep, he definitely takes a derisive and scornful approach that might turn some viewers off. It's clear that he has no respect for those he's criticising, but he also makes it clear why.

but they are good debunkings. The things he points out are so painfully, hilariously stupid that it hurts me to my soul that they were even ever made. The FIRST video demonstrating how they just selectively cut out gigantic swathes to make it seem like archeological evidence was being manipulated to disprove ID is just like WHAT, HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY DO THAT IN GOOD FAITH ARE YOU INSANE???

Yep. It's interesting that he contacts the scientist in the video they misrepresented to confirm that, yes, it was definitely a misrepresentation.