Jon Wells on science journal boilerplate

8 Replies to “Jon Wells on science journal boilerplate”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   April 20, 2015 at 11:57 am

   The only evidence ever witnessed of unguided neo-Darwinian evolution creating non-trivial information is when neo-Darwinists themselves create elaborate just so stories to try to ‘explain away’ how a sophisticated molecular structure, machine, or organism, may have come to be, or why a observation in molecular biology, or the fossil record, or etc.., does not fit a basic prediction of neo-Darwinian theory.

   EVOLUTIONARY JUST-SO STORIES
   Excerpt: ,,,The term “just-so story” was popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 book by that title which contained fictional stories for children. Kipling says the camel got his hump as a punishment for refusing to work, the leopard’s spots were painted on him by an Ethiopian, and the kangaroo got its powerful hind legs after being chased all day by a dingo.
   Kipling’s just-so stories are as scientific as the Darwinian accounts of how the amoeba became a man.
   Lacking real scientific evidence for their theory, evolutionists have used the just-so story to great effect. Backed by impressive scientific credentials, the Darwinian just-so story has the aura of respectability.
   Biologist Michael Behe observes:
   “Some evolutionary biologists–like Richard Dawkins–have fertile imaginations. Given a starting point, they almost always can spin a story to get to any biological structure you wish” (Darwin’s Black Box).,,,
   http://www.wayoflife.org/datab.....ories.html

   “Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination”
   Dr. Michael Behe – 29:24 mark of following video
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?f.....fM#t=1762s

   “Being an evolutionist means there is no bad news. If new species appear abruptly in the fossil record, that just means evolution operates in spurts. If species then persist for eons with little modification, that just means evolution takes long breaks. If clever mechanisms are discovered in biology, that just means evolution is smarter than we imagined. If strikingly similar designs are found in distant species, that just means evolution repeats itself. If significant differences are found in allied species, that just means evolution sometimes introduces new designs rapidly. If no likely mechanism can be found for the large-scale change evolution requires, that just means evolution is mysterious. If adaptation responds to environmental signals, that just means evolution has more foresight than was thought. If major predictions of evolution are found to be false, that just means evolution is more complex than we thought.”
   ~ Cornelius Hunter

   “When their expectations turn out to be false, evolutionists respond by adding more epicycles to their theory that the species arose spontaneously from chance events. But that doesn’t mean the science has confirmed evolution as Velasco suggests. True, evolutionists have remained steadfast in their certainty, but that says more about evolutionists than about the empirical science.”
   ~ Cornelius Hunter

   Here’s That Algae Study That Decouples Phylogeny and Competition – June 17, 2014
   Excerpt: “With each new absurdity another new complicated just-so story is woven into evolutionary theory. As Lakatos explained, some theories simply are not falsifiable. But as a result they sacrifice realism and parsimony.”
   – Cornelius Hunter
   http://darwins-god.blogspot.co.....uples.html

   Darwin’s (Failed) Predictions: An Interview with Cornelius Hunter, Part I and II
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....21311.html
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....21321.html
2. 2
   wallstreeter43 says:

   April 20, 2015 at 3:04 pm

   It it when Darwinists started to guard Darwinian evolution like a sacrad cow that I started having doubts about evolution . The way they avoided any critique of the theory caused me to look further into it which eventually caused me to leave the theory of unguided evolution and eventually I landed here on this forum.

   All I here from them on other theiries is that science is always open to criticism which is why it grows , but when it comes to Darwinian evolution it’s an untouchable fact .

   This is dogma , not science
3. 3
   bornagain77 says:

   April 20, 2015 at 3:13 pm

   Also of interest to Dr. Wells observation is how the word evolution itself is illegitimately used in these papers to attribute credit to Darwinism where none is due:

   “Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin’s theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.,,, In the peer-reviewed literature, the word “evolution” often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for “evolution” some other word – “Buddhism,” “Aztec cosmology,” or even “creationism.” I found that the substitution never touched the paper’s core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.”
   Philip S. Skell – (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
   http://www.discovery.org/a/2816

   At the 7:00 minute mark of this following video, Dr. Behe gives an example of how positive evidence is falsely attributed to evolution by using the word ‘evolution’ as a ‘narrative gloss’ in peer-reviewed literature:

   Michael Behe – Life Reeks Of Design – video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdh-YcNYThY

   Evolution Rarely the Basis of Research: Nature’s “Evolutionary Gems” Just Narrative Gloss – podcast
   http://intelligentdesign.podom.....3_56-07_00

   Rewriting Biology Without Spin By Ann Gauger – Jan. 12, 2014
   Excerpt: It’s a funny thing—scientific papers often have evolutionary language layered on top of the data like icing on a cake. In most papers, the icing (evolutionary language) sits atop and separate from the cake (the actual experimental data). Even in papers where the evolutionary language is mixed in with the data like chocolate and vanilla in a marble cake, I can still tell one from the other.
   I have noticed that this dichotomy creates a kind of double vision. I know what the data underlying evolutionary arguments are. By setting aside the premise that evolution is true, I can read what’s on the page and at the same time see how that paper would read if neutral, fact-based language were substituted for evolutionary language.
   Let me give you an example.,,,
   http://www.biologicinstitute.o.....thout-spin

   Biologists Are Getting to Be Less Reticent About Using the Phrase “Design Principles” – November 28, 2014
   Excerpt: The word “design” appears 24 times in the paper. “Selection” appears twice, in the phrase “selective pressure” (one of them is just a repetition from the Abstract). Any form of the word “evolution” appears just once:,,,
   We see, therefore, that “design” references outnumber evolutionary references eight to one. We also find “machine” or “machinery” four times, “coding” or “encoding” 15 times, “information” (in terms of information to be processed) five times, “accurate” (in terms of sensing accuracy) 11 times, “precision” 29 times, “efficient” four times, and “optimal” or “optimum” 28 times. Taken together, these design words outnumber evolution words 40 to 1.
   Do the three passing references to evolution/selection add anything to the paper? One would expect to see it in the final Discussion section, but instead, we find these references to design:,,,
   The paper would lose nothing if its three passing references to evolution/selection were left on the cutting-room floor. All these scientists could do was look at the end product and decide, “Yep, it’s fit. It’s optimal.”
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....91531.html

   related quotes:

   “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, and physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.”
   Marc Kirschner, Boston Globe, Oct. 23, 2005

   “While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superflous one.”
   A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, Introduction to “Evolutionary Processes” – (2000).
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9znyGQo2QE

   “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.”
   Francis Crick – What Mad Pursuit (1988)

   And whereas biological research receives, to use the late Dr. Skell’s words, ‘no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution’, Intelligent Design provides beneficial guidance to biological research:

   How the Burgeoning Field of Systems Biology Supports Intelligent Design – July 2014
   Excerpt: Snoke lists various features in biology that have been found to function like goal-directed, top-down engineered systems:
   *”Negative feedback for stable operation.”
   *”Frequency filtering” for extracting a signal from a noisy system.
   *Control and signaling to induce a response.
   *”Information storage” where information is stored for later use. In fact, Snoke observes:
   “This paradigm [of systems biology] is advancing the view that biology is essentially an information science with information operating on multiple hierarchical levels and in complex networks [13]. ”
   *”Timing and synchronization,” where organisms maintain clocks to ensure that different processes and events happen in the right order.
   *”Addressing,” where signaling molecules are tagged with an address to help them arrive at their intended target.
   *”Hierarchies of function,” where organisms maintain clocks to ensure that cellular processes and events happen at the right times and in the right order.
   *”Redundancy,” as organisms contain backup systems or “fail-safes” if primary essential systems fail.
   *”Adaptation,” where organisms are pre-engineered to be able to undergo small-scale adaptations to their environments. As Snoke explains, “These systems use randomization controlled by supersystems, just as the immune system uses randomization in a very controlled way,” and “Only part of the system is allowed to vary randomly, while the rest is highly conserved.”,,,
   Snoke observes that systems biology assumes that biological features are optimized, meaning, in part, that “just about everything in the cell does indeed have a role, i.e., that there is very little ‘junk.'” He explains, “Some systems biologists go further than just assuming that every little thing has a purpose. Some argue that each item is fulfilling its purpose as well as is physically possible,” and quotes additional authorities who assume that biological systems are optimized.,,,
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....87871.html

   Systems Biology as a Research Program for Intelligent Design – David Snoke – 2014
   http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/.....O-C.2014.3
4. 4
   ppolish says:

   April 20, 2015 at 4:49 pm

   Last week’s wonderful PBS NOVA asks “Is math discovered or invented?”. Like God, it’s discovered duh:) Goes off the rails when monkeys slash materialism are obligatorily brought into the discussion, but quickly gets back on track with the discoveries by assorted flaming theists. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/p.....stery.html
   So, is math Father, Son, or Holy Ghost? Yes!
5. 5
   arkady967 says:

   April 20, 2015 at 5:36 pm

   And -the definition of a Scientist is someone who has concluded that Darwinism is a fact. So, if you haven’t come to that conclusion, which is also a litmus test for ideological competence, you simply don’t have anything to say worth hearing.
6. 6
   Graham2 says:

   April 20, 2015 at 10:30 pm

   All these comments from a movement that doesn’t do science, hasn’t produced anything.

   On a website that spends all its time in theology.
7. 7
   tjguy says:

   April 21, 2015 at 6:29 am

   Graham2 @6

   All these comments from a movement that doesn’t do science, hasn’t produced anything.

   Whatever you think of ID is irrelevant. The problems of Darwinism and the problematic loyalty at all costs towards the hallowed paradigm of Darwinism by “scientists” remain whether ID sinks or swims.
8. 8
   Silver Asiatic says:

   April 21, 2015 at 7:53 am

   You tend to comment on theology quite frequently, Graham. I guess we want to keep giving you something to talk about. 🙂