Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwinism — Fear of Exposure, and a Philosophy Frozen in the Past

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The real source of the antipathy and vitriol directed toward the ID movement is Fear Of Exposure.

The fight against academic freedom is rooted in the worry that Darwinism’s weakness will be revealed…
[…]
The teaching of evolution today in public schools is frozen in the past where it is based largely on a mid-20th century understanding of biology. Research in the biological sciences has moved far beyond that understanding because of the hopeless inability of Darwinian principles to explain the complexity observed in living things.
[…]
There is a revolution under way in the biological sciences. A whole new field of biology called “Systems Biology” has emerged during the past 10 or 15 years. This revolution is just as profound for the biological sciences today as the transition in physics was from classical physics to quantum physics and relativity in the early part of the 20th century.
[…]
In this exciting new field, research is guided not by Darwinian principles but by design principles because design principles are needed to explain design-like features.

Comments
Check the respones from the evos to Joe Renick column. Same old same old. Great column, btw.tribune7
April 5, 2007
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Janice, You have hit the nail on the head with Galileo. Pretty much his entire research programme was seeking to defrok Aristotle. Another major implication of Aristitle's cosmology was that the natural place of all (earthly?) things was the center of the earth and the more massive the object, the more earnest is the desire to be there. What was Galileo's primary research while under house arrest? The motion of falling objects wrt their mass. Galileo wasn't anti-church or anti-christian or anti-bible, he was anti-Aristotle in a pro-Aristotle world. In the same way, ID isn't anti-science, it's just anti-materialism in a materialistic world.The Scubaredneck
April 4, 2007
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Dogmatically teaching evolution theory to students by spoonfeeding and brainwashing them is unscholarly and anti-intellectual.Larry Fafarman
April 4, 2007
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I've been reading on the banning of Copernicus' magnum opus in 1616. Lakatos said it was because his heliocentric hypothesis was considered pseudoscience so I had to try to find out why. Koestler says nothing about that in "The Sleepwalkers". But (and thank God for Google) it turns out that the philosophers (scientists) of the day were convinced Aristotelians. They believed that nothing moved unless something kept pushing it. They also believed that the earth was in the centre, not because it was, as we think these days, the "centre of the universe" and therefore important, but because it was at the centre of the universe and therefore filthy and corrupt. The devil himself was thought to reside in the centre of the earth - the foulest pit imaginable. So because Copernicus said that the earth could be seen as moving "in the heavens" his ideas could be seen as going against the geocentric notions of The Philosopher (aka Aristotle). For that reason they were judged by the scientific (natural philosopher) bigwigs of the time as absurd and foolish. Doubt Aristotle? After Aquinas has made him acceptable and therefore we interpret the Bible according to Aristotle's ideas? No way. That is what Galileo was up against. Geneticists in the USSR in Lysenko's time would have been better off arguing with a 17th century Pope than against Stalin and his mob of thugs. All those geneticists would have had to say is that particulate inheritance was a working hypothesis and the Pope would have let them get on with their work. Once they'd demonstrated that, indeed, characteristics really are inherited rather than acquired the Pope would have made it his business to see that any relevant Biblical passages were appropriately re-interpreted. Not so with the Stalinists. They just murdered the dissidents. So, fear of exposure? Yes. But also morbid attachment to a metaphysical idea that acts only to restrict what science can consider - if science is regarded as a quest dedicated to discovering how things in the world actually work rather than as a quest to make observations fit a predetermined world view.Janice
April 4, 2007
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