GilDodgen

In this Denyse O’Leary UD thread I included a quote from David Berlinski’s infamous The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski video interview.

I thought UD readers might enjoy some of his other comments on various science and Dawinism topics.

On science as a self-critical enterprise:

The idea that science is a uniquely self-critical institution is of course preposterous. Scientists are no more self-critical than anyone else. They hate to be criticized… Look, these people are only human, they hate criticism — me too. The idea that scientists are absolutely eager to be beaten up is one of the myths put out by scientists, and it works splendidly so they can avoid criticism.

We’re asking for standards of behavior that would be wonderful to expect but that no serious man does expect. A hundred years of fraudulent drawings suggesting embryological affinities that don’t exist — that’s just what I would expect if biologists were struggling to maintain a position of power in a secular democratic society. Let’s be reasonable… the popular myth of science as a uniquely self-critical institution, and scientists as men who would rather be consumed at the stake rather than fudge their data, is okay for a PBS special, but that’s not the real world; that’s not what’s taking place…

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A family friend, who is a brilliant electrical engineer, recently spent some time at our home for a holiday get-together. The topic of ID came up and he asked me how I could possibly have bought into such a silly idea. I quizzed him about what he knew about ID. I asked him about which prominent ID theorists he was familiar with, and mentioned a few, along with the titles of their books. He had never heard of any of them, and was completely unfamiliar with any ID literature or even elementary ID concepts. As it turned out, he had gotten all of his information about ID from the mainstream media, and didn’t have the slightest clue what ID is Read More ›

This year should be an exciting one for ID. It sounds like Expelled, The Movie will have very wide distribution in major theaters all across the nation in April. One sad aspect of the Darwinian propaganda machine is that, once it is exposed to the general public for what it is (materialistic philosophy pretending to be science, and even in opposition to the evidence of modern scientific discoveries about the severe limits of the Darwinian mechanism that is presumed to explain everything in biology), the public may lose trust in legitimate science. This state of affairs is extraordinarily ironic. The claim is that denial of Darwinian orthodoxy will destroy science, but perhaps attempts to defend the indefensible claims of Darwinists Read More ›

Last week, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence In Biological Systems was in the 17,000-20,000 range at Amazon.com. Since the Darwinist-sponsored negative-review spam campaign (with “reviews” written mostly by people who obviously had not read the book), and as of this writing, the book is sitting at about 3,000, and is: #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology #1 in Books > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology

This is a recurring challenge that most recently reared its head in a comment concerning my essay, Why Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Engineers Tend to be More Skeptical of Darwinian Claims.

The argument goes like this (as presented by the commenter in the link provided above):

The majority of degreed computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians have completed no college course work in the life sciences. Virtually all have college physics under their belts. Some studied chemistry in college. Relatively few enrolled in college courses in biology.

Among “expert” critics of scholarly fields not their own, at most one in a thousand makes a substantive contribution. If UD should happen to be chock-full of engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians who have all caught life scientists in fundamental error, then it would constitute a singular event in the history of science.

If UD readers promise not to tell anyone, I’ll disclose a secret about my college academic training.

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Larry Moran’s presentation in a comment in Granville Sewell’s UD post, I found not particularly persuasive, for the following reasons. I’m not interested in definitions of science; I’m interested in how stuff actually works. I’m perfectly amenable to being convinced that the complexity, information content, and machinery of living systems can be explained by stochastic processes filtered by natural selection, and I would not even demand hard evidence, just some rigorous argumentation based on the following:
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In a previous UD thread, a dude named Poachy (where do these guys get these screen names?), with much sarcasm about a comment I made, proposed: We need to start voting with our feet and eschew all but the medical advances that come from application of the ID paradigm. Here’s a prediction and a potential medical application from ID theory: Design a chemical or protein which would require a triple CCC to defeat its toxic effects on a bacterium, and it will exhaust the probabilistic resources of blind-watchmaker mechanisms to counteract the toxic effects. Such a success could and will only come from engineering and reverse-engineering efforts, not from Darwinian theory. In the meantime, medical doctors should prescribe multiple antibiotics Read More ›

In a previous UD thread Leo Stotch commented and inquired:

I see that you are now part of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, Gil. That must be exciting, to now be part of the scientific work associated with ID. Any previews of coming features for us?

Exciting indeed. The only preview I can offer is that I plan to use my software engineering experience, expertise, and knowledge to shed light on proposed Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms and their potential efficacy in the real world.

Interestingly enough, my first inklings that the blind-watchmaker thesis was a con game began with my research into computational search algorithms and obstacles presented by combinatorial explosion. Further experience with real-world computer simulations (guidance, navigation and control software in aerospace R&D, and most recently with finite-element analysis programming) has convinced me that Darwinists are living in the dark ages, promoting a quaint 19th-century notion that has nothing ultimately meaningful to say about biological reality beyond finch-beak variation and bacterial antibiotic resistance.
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While I was growing up during the 1950’s and 1960’s the word “scientific” was bandied about with abandon. Anything that was labeled “scientific” was immediately given credibility, because of the tremendous achievements of the hard sciences like mathematics, chemistry, physics, and engineering. There were phrases like “better living through chemistry” in advertisements. When I became interested in games-playing artificial-intelligence research I found books with titles like Scientific Checkers. In the 20th century the meaning of the word science took on almost the equivalent of the meaning of the word holy. Anything that was scientific was good and true, by definition. Anything that was unscientific was suspect at best, and probably the result of ignorance and nefarious intentions at worst. In Read More ›

Paul Davies was recently interviewed on the Dennis Prager show, and a caller challenged Davies with the neg-entropic nature of living systems. Paul’s response was the usual: local, open systems can experience decreases in entropy, as long as the overall system experiences an entropy increase. He gave the example of a refrigerator, which can make ice cubes (thus decreasing entropy inside the refrigerator), while the room warms up as a result of the heat pump, thus providing a compensatory entropy increase.

There are two big problems with this line of reasoning.

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On a private listserve which shall remain unnamed, I posted the following to Phillip Johnson. Phil deserves a tremendous amount of gratitude for his insight and courage. Dear Phillip, Neither you nor I have any notion of the magnitude of the ripple effects that have emanated from Darwin On Trial, but I can tell you this: That book cut through all the Darwinian story-telling presented as science like a razor. Darwin On Trial, combined with Michael Denton’s first book, made me slap myself on the forehead and proclaim, “Holy mackerel, I’ve been conned!” Darwinism is in its evidential, mathematical, intellectual, philosophical, and ethical death throes — thus all the hysteria on the part of its adamant proponents, whose meaning in Read More ›

I don’t watch a lot of television, but I must admit that I enjoy the History Channel. The other night I was watching a program on the origin of the universe and life. At one point the narrator commented (I paraphrase), “And then, unknown chemical reactions caused life to form.” This is obviously pure speculation presented as fact, and my Carl-Sagan-inspired baloney detection kit went into immediate overdrive. I said to myself: “Self, how do they know that unknown chemical reactions caused life to form? No evidence is presented for this claim. And how did all that complex information-processing machinery come about through chemical reactions?” Baloney detection is a two-edged sword.

For those who haven’t listened to it, I encourage UD readers to check out The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski. I paraphrase some of his comments below the fold.
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For those not familiar with it, be sure to visit this site. At the bottom of the homepage there are links to various chapters. They are all worth a look, but be sure to check out the chapter on evolution. (I also loved the tables and charts, especially the geologic ages and events chart.)

From the site:

What is Science?
Put most simply, science is a way of dealing with the world around us. It is a way of baffling the uninitiated with incomprehensible jargon. It is a way of obtaining fat government grants…

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This is the wisdom promulgated by the “new atheists” at a recent conference.

From the cnsnews.com article: “Science must ultimately destroy organized religion, according to some of the leading atheist writers and intellectuals who spoke at a recent atheist conference in Northern Virginia.”

They might as well dream of destroying humankind’s urge to eat.

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