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

[Laird]

The professor gives a list of alternatives to Darwin's theory. This is somewhat deceptive, because I don't think any of these contain a mechanism that continuously improves something, in the way that Darwinian selection would appear to do.

Why not? As I wrote to @nbtruthman above, it might seem intuitively plausible that they don't, but empirical science is often counter-intuitive, and Dave references research in which advantageous mutations are observed in the laboratory. Again, that they are due solely to these undirected processes is open to question, but, again, how could that be tested?

[Laird]

The general feeling I get is DI overemphasizes current questions in evolution, and Materialists underplay how troubling those questions might be for the idea that matter precedes and generates consciousness.

I concur, along with these from later posts:

I suspect a thorough examination of this topic involves not just ID advocates versus those who think the standard story of evolution is adequate, but a variety of options "in between" such as Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance or the kind of Platonism Wagner and Levin have proposed...there's also the "Third Way" options...

As I said earlier, to me it seems DI overemphasizes current issues with our knowledge about evolution *and* Farina de-emphasizes how much of a problem those issues might be for a materialist view of reality. Also keep in mind alternatives do exist to ID's claim of intervention at particular points on the evolutionary timeline as well as the RM + NS standard view of that timeline.

Moving on:

I also question how much people can assess Farina's claims just by watching the videos in the background, to be honest. I'd have thought people would be bringing specific examples to bear where DI folks are wrong, not saying they got a strong sense of fraud on the DI's part while leaving the Farina videos running in the background...

Just to clarify: I didn't mean my attention was meaningfully elsewhere to the point that I was distracted from the videos. I meant I was doing something else to save time: either my morning exercises, or falling asleep in bed, and if I fell asleep before the end of a video, then I'd go back and watch / listen to what I missed the next day.

I didn't bring anything specific frankly because (1) I wouldn't have known what to choose out of such a lot of content, (2) there are vast numbers of references to the scientific literature, each of which I'd have had to examine carefully, (3) I am not qualified to judge the literature anyway, and (4) I don't have the spare time and motivation to do a deep dive on this particular issue right now.

I did think Dave's critique was worth drawing the board's attention to anyway, especially because of common sentiments like, "Proponents of mainstream neo-Darwinism are reluctant to debate ID proponents because they know they can't back their position": here's a proponent of mainstream neo-Darwinism who's not at all afraid of debating ID proponents, and who really brings it. When I watched his first video (the debate with James Tour), I sort of smugly thought to myself based on those sort of sentiments, "The poor guy, he's going to get smashed", but after not long I realised that that was far from the case.

[Laird]

@Laird Gonna make a separate thread for every video in the playlist, as I think this thread now is more about meta-commentary.

Maybe we can merge them all after all the discussion, but I also understand if you and @Ninshub decide to merge them beforehand.

Great idea, and it's probably best to keep them separate and not merge them afterwards, but we can revisit that possibility later if necessary.

Even if they were, at every turn, pushing Christianity…would it really be different than the Materialist evangelism we see across STEM? I actually feel DI has been more honest about where one takes a leap of faith beyond the data, whereas the dishonesty of the Materialist faith has been claiming the data is by default supporting their beliefs in something outside of all experience, only known by experience, yet also generating the experiencer.

I think it would be very different. The thing about materialism in STEM fields is that it's the default, science is the study of the natural world and it has been that since the time when science as a proper enterprise started being practiced. There is a fundamental separation from anything that might be considered paranormal and it takes a lot of work to get that baggage removed. Ironically it's BECAUSE of the Church's hold on literacy and education all the way back in history that this whole divide became as big as it is ect ect. (Not to mention if parapsychology became a true mainstream enterprise and it's findings were widely proven, wouldn't they just be considered part of the natural world then anyway?)

On top of that, people have this form of materialist evangelism because it very much works, as much as we may consider it to not be true it is a VERY solid position to hold. Evolutionary biology (and emphasis on evolutionary biology not Darwinism, Darwinian biology is a downright outdaded concept at this point) is so popular and so widely defended because it is testable and offers reliable replicable results. That goes for numerous other topics that we even discuss here on this forum, we are interested in the outlier cases that point out the cracks and holes in explanations, but the explanations that are there are pretty damn good still. 

I've been burned by materialism before, being told to ignore things and that they aren't true when in reality there's a lot more evidence for them then anyone ever cared to admit. But then I've been burned by organizations like DI that push Christianity as well with the misleading and insidious goals they have but just hide away under the surface. Maybe it's just the progressive young Australian zoomer blood in me but I would very much prefer a group that holds their opinions on their sleeves like materialists, for whatever good or bad those opinions might cause, then trust an American brand Evangelican Christian style group which says this and that but keeps their real political goals hidden. In most recent times on of these things is very much worse than the other.

I think it would be very different. The thing about materialism in STEM fields is that it's the default, science is the study of the natural world and it has been that since the time when science as a proper enterprise started being practiced. There is a fundamental separation from anything that might be considered paranormal and it takes a lot of work to get that baggage removed. Ironically it's BECAUSE of the Church's hold on literacy and education all the way back in history that this whole divide became as big as it is ect ect. (Not to mention if parapsychology became a true mainstream enterprise and it's findings were widely proven, wouldn't they just be considered part of the natural world then anyway?)

On top of that, people have this form of materialist evangelism because it very much works, as much as we may consider it to not be true it is a VERY solid position to hold. Evolutionary biology (and emphasis on evolutionary biology not Darwinism, Darwinian biology is a downright outdaded concept at this point) is so popular and so widely defended because it is testable and offers reliable replicable results. That goes for numerous other topics that we even discuss here on this forum, we are interested in the outlier cases that point out the cracks and holes in explanations, but the explanations that are there are pretty damn good still. 

I've been burned by materialism before, being told to ignore things and that they aren't true when in reality there's a lot more evidence for them then anyone ever cared to admit. But then I've been burned by organizations like DI that push Christianity as well with the misleading and insidious goals they have but just hide away under the surface. Maybe it's just the progressive young Australian zoomer blood in me but I would very much prefer a group that holds their opinions on their sleeves like materialists, for whatever good or bad those opinions might cause, then trust an American brand Evangelican Christian style group which says this and that but keeps their real political goals hidden. In most recent times on of these things is very much worse than the other.

You’re describing successful science, which is different than Materialism. A lot of successful scientists were not materialists, and even some atheists pushing Materialism didn’t even believe in it but saw it as a useful belief system against the Church. Some scientists were and are Christians, believing science is reading from God’s Book of Nature.

As for the Materialist religion that gets unduly evangelized - There’s no good evidence for stuff that exists outside of all experience, only known by experience, generating experiences. Heck, we don’t even know what “matter” is, nor the rest of the “physical” stuff like forces, energy, etc.

Maybe Materialism is useful for people’s political goals - that seems to be Farina’s primary motivation - but I would say that’s different than determining what the facts are. Without going deep into politics I’m probably closer to Farina than the DI folk but nevertheless I would never back Materialism because that makes all human life worthless.

Didn't Douglas Axe get a paper or papers published in a legitimate peer-reviewed journal?

On the DI not publishing much in peer reviewed journals: 

That was one of the rare cases where a mainstream scientific journal allowed an ID research paper to slip through their censorship and be published in its pages. Generally such papers are excluded and have to be published in one of DI's own publications.

This does seem intuitively plausible, but empirical science is often counter-intuitive - witness quantum mechanics. In the very video you're critiquing, if I recall correctly - but it might be another one - Dave claims based on peer-reviewed research that advantageous mutations are much more common than ID proponents claim.

On the rarity of advantageous mutations: ID researchers have competing research that shows the predicted rarity of advantageous mutations. There is no known mechanism by which non-random with respect to fitness genetic variations can occur, except things like genetic variations due to epigenetics, where the organisms themselves seem to be able to generate changes to their genome that favor survival.

It's not a clever avoidance; he deals with it in detail in other videos, especially the one on Stephen Meyer.

On the ID researcher findings that there are very many unexplainable by Darwinism sudden saltational jumps in complexity in the history of life shown by the fossil record:

Dr. Gunter Bechly is one of the expert researchers at the DI who have written many extensive articles in the DI's online magazine Evolution News  which debunk the Darwinist evolutionary biologists' claim that the physical fossil record actually confirms slow undirected RM + NS Darwinistic evolution and also their claim that the observed fact in the fossil record of the frequent occurrence of sudden saltational jumps in organismal complexity has Darwinistic explanations.

Bechly directly refutes point by point Farina's so-called debunking of the explicit observation of Darwinistically unexplainable sudden saltational jumps in the evolution  of life in a long and exhaustive article in Evolution News, at https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/educat...-genetics/ . Bechly cites a number of papers published in mainstream journals. I invite you to peruse this.

What in your view makes this an invalid debunking?

On so-called "co-option" refuting irreducible complexity:

This argument is totally invalid because of the extremely intricate interlocking and interdependence of the different subsystems in cells and organisms. This requires an overwhelmingly complicated and exact matching and fitting for a substructure developed for one purpose to suddenly work with several previously unrelated parts also having a different purpose. It's like expecting a motor developed for a motorcycle to suddenly by chance fit into a car and successfully power it. An article in Evolution News explains this in detail, at https://evolutionnews.org/2018/12/advanc...omplexity/ .

He provides evidence, in the form of a study, that after knocking out the genes for a bacterial flagellum, the bacteria rapidly redeveloped flagella under selection pressure for motility. Doesn't this suggest that this so-called wait time is not such a problem? (I haven't read the paper he references, so it might not prove the point he says it does).

On the wait time problem afflicting Darwinism: 

Another long and detailed article by paleontologist Gunter Bechly thoroughly refutes Farina, at https://evolutionnews.org/2022/12/crazy-...e-problem/, again citing a number of mainstream researchers' papers in mainstream scientific journals. From the article:

"Durrett & Schmidt (2008) (https://academic.oup.com/genetics/articl...ogin=false ) attempted to refute Behe (on the wait time problem) but arrived at a prohibitive waiting time of 216 million years for a single coordinated mutation in human evolution, while only about 6 million years are available since the origin of the human lineage from a common ancestor with chimps. Behe arrived at 1015 years for such a mutation in humans (Behe 2007: 61) by translating empirical data of an actual waiting time for a coordinated mutation that conveyed chloroquine drug resistance in Malaria. He simply applied these empirical findings to humans, considering their much lower population size and much longer generation time."

Of course, ID proponents can claim that merely observing beneficial change, even in a laboratory, doesn't prove that those changes were solely due to random mutations, but how would one go about testing that?

On long-term evolution experiments having proven Darwinistic evolution in microorganisms:

Peer-reviewed studies have concluded that no new genetic information (novel gene function) evolved in Lenski's long-term bacterial evolution experiment - the bacteria merely under stress accessed latent genetic code that had already appeared in their genome. This has also been shown by DI researchers to be just another case of devolution rather than evolution.

You’re describing successful science, which is different than Materialism. A lot of successful scientists were not materialists, and even some atheists pushing Materialism didn’t even believe in it but saw it as a useful belief system against the Church. Some scientists were and are Christians, believing science is reading from God’s Book of Nature.

As for the Materialist religion that gets unduly evangelized - There’s no good evidence for stuff that exists outside of all experience, only known by experience, generating experiences. Heck, we don’t even know what “matter” is, nor the rest of the “physical” stuff like forces, energy, etc.

Maybe Materialism is useful for people’s political goals - that seems to be Farina’s primary motivation - but I would say that’s different than determining what the facts are. Without going deep into politics I’m probably closer to Farina than the DI folk but nevertheless I would never back Materialism because that makes all human life worthless.

A better thing to say in this case then would be naturalism. Science existed as a study of the natural world, reading from god's book of nature like what you said. The supernatural was left out because that was the domain of the church. But then as time went on and science continued it became apparent that science advanced quite nicely without the supernatural and hence beckoned the rise of ideas like materialism, physicalism and naturalism as we know it today. And then as that supernatural fell out of favor, so came the attitude against non materialist ideas in science because they were holdovers from outdated ideas that didn't further anything and acted as gateways for people to try and put their political or crazy ideas into science when they weren't warranted.

And then of course we find ourselves where we are today, where materialism has continued to play it's course and we've circled all the way back around to where it doesn't paint the whole picture of what reality seems to be, hence parapsychology. This is what I mean when I say people espouse materialist ideas for good reason, because it's a very reasonable position to hold. It's not a matter of political goals, it's just that extrapolating from the evidence that is apparent leads people to certain conclusions and I certainly don't fault them for that. Just some people are a bit more...zealous in their conclusions then others.

He provides evidence, in the form of a study, that after knocking out the genes for a bacterial flagellum, the bacteria rapidly redeveloped flagella under selection pressure for motility. Doesn't this suggest that this so-called wait time is not such a problem? (I haven't read the paper he references, so it might not prove the point he says it does).

Of course, ID proponents can claim that merely observing beneficial change, even in a laboratory, doesn't prove that those changes were solely due to random mutations, but how would one go about testing that?

Do you have a link to that fascinating paper?

It can't suggest that RM+NS is responsible because of the combinatorial explosion involved. It reminds me somewhat of Sheldrake's mention (I don't think he did the experiment) of how a newt embrio deprived of an eye will grow a replacement by a different mechanism.

It seems to show that ID is at work most of the time - but it clearly suggests some sort of nonmaterialist activity - like the morphogenetic field.

The problem is that much research nowadays does not reproduce well and may be even retracted.

Note that you could 'prove' Darwinian evolution by simply observing the wealth of life on planet Earth and explaining that it must have got there by RM+NS because what other alternative could there possibly be?

David

A better thing to say in this case then would be naturalism. Science existed as a study of the natural world, reading from god's book of nature like what you said. The supernatural was left out because that was the domain of the church. But then as time went on and science continued it became apparent that science advanced quite nicely without the supernatural and hence beckoned the rise of ideas like materialism, physicalism and naturalism as we know it today. And then as that supernatural fell out of favor, so came the attitude against non materialist ideas in science because they were holdovers from outdated ideas that didn't further anything and acted as gateways for people to try and put their political or crazy ideas into science when they weren't warranted.

And then of course we find ourselves where we are today, where materialism has continued to play it's course and we've circled all the way back around to where it doesn't paint the whole picture of what reality seems to be, hence parapsychology. This is what I mean when I say people espouse materialist ideas for good reason, because it's a very reasonable position to hold. It's not a matter of political goals, it's just that extrapolating from the evidence that is apparent leads people to certain conclusions and I certainly don't fault them for that. Just some people are a bit more...zealous in their conclusions then others.

I think this is more the official story, that science replaced religion because it made so many cool things.

But this, IMO, ignores a lot of historical events. For example David Griffin has written about how the Church at first wanted a dead material world, because it placed all supernatural power in their hands. There's also the admission by people such as Russell (see my sig) and Dierdot (see here) that Materialism is useful tool rather than an actual truth. Also Galileo purposefully separating questions about mechanism from questions of origin, something akin to how Newton's idea of a gravitational field was accepted for its efficacy though it was thought to be an "occult" force because of the mystery of how fields causally related to matter.

We can also look at other forces such as the advent of WWI and how this led to British Idealism being seen as too close to German Idealism, or how Behaviorism aligned with certain goals of political control. Or the way the discussions of the quantum fathers about the relation of Mind & Matter took decades to really come to the public's attention.

A different world could have the very same - or greater - advances in science but never have allowed Materialism to come to prominence. I actually would contend it was forced politically, perhaps necessarily, to oppose the power of the Church. Perhaps the occult ideas that were discussed in the Renaissance would come to the fore, or Platonism would end up being the major metaphysics of science. Arguably, given the way a lot of people see the Laws of Nature & Maths, Platonism already is the actual background belief of supposed Materialists...

I would be interested in a response from Laird that successfully refutes the 6 points I made in my post 66. I would like to know exactly how each of those points I made were invalid - the points were:

- on the DI publishing a paper in a mainstream peer-reviewed journal, 
- on the rarity of advantageous random genetic variations, 
- on the ID researcher findings that there are very many unexplainable by Darwinism sudden saltational jumps in complexity in the history of life shown by the fossil record, 
- on the Darwinist claim that so-called "co-options" refute irreducible complexity, 
- on the wait time problem afflicting Darwinism, and
- on the Darwinist claims that long-term evolution experiments have proven Darwinistic evolution in microorganisms.

I would really like to know, so as to be able to try to make better arguments (or to know that there are no successful refutations of these points).