Increasing Skepticism Among Secular Scientists?

_{Barry Arrington

April 16, 2019

Intelligent Design}

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The plain truth from the literature, conferences, expert perception, and a bit of anecdote for color, is that current Neo-Darwinism is far from the untouchable theory it is lauded to be. Not only this, but it has serious and increasing skeptics and challengers from within the secular scientific community.

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The plain truth from the literature, conferences, expert perception, and a bit of anecdote for color, is that current Neo-Darwinism is far from the untouchable theory it is lauded to be. Not only this, but it has serious and increasing skeptics and challengers from within the secular scientific community
A Christian law student rehashing standard creationist/ID anti-evolution tropes in The Federalist? I'm shocked - shocked I tell you - to see such a thing.Seversky_{April 16, 2019
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April 16, 2019 at 7:47 am I think independent writer Suzan Mazur (Oscillations) deserves a great deal of credit for moving the questions out of the irrelevant sinkhole of whether Jesus loves Darwin. Starting with her 2010 book, The Altenberg 16: An exposé of the evolution industry (a group of evolutionary biologists and philosophers concerned about the future of the discipline, who met to talk about what Darwinism was doing to it), she went on to write honestly about the 2016 effort by the Royal Society to rescue the discipline from the Dead hand Royal Society: Public Evolution Summit. We live in a time where everybody gets cosmetic makeovers but real shakeups are harder than they used to be.
This is such a weird take on the state of affairs. As long as there has been a modern synthesis there have been calls from people like r Kevin Laland "extend" the synthesis. In a few cases (e.g. evolutionary development) these have turned into profitable areas of research that have taught how life has evolved. These have been accepted into mainstream evolutionary thinking. On the other hand, structuralists and niche constructionists and the likes that Mazur writes about have never demonstrated the power of their ideas. As a result, they remain on the fringes of evolutionary biology, spending more time complaining about being kept out that doing research. And, of course, none of this has the first thing to do with ID or othe forms of creationism.Mimus_{April 16, 2019
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Once you get them to stop bashing caricatures of ID, and instead tell us how to test the claim that, for example, nature invented eyes/ vision systems (Nathan Lents in "Human Errors"), do they start to realize the folly of their position. But only after you show that their attempts do not deal with the actual question- evidence for relation is not evidence for a mechanism. Over on Peaceful Science they have a difficult time with this. They also don't seem to understand the very nature of science that the onus is one the people who make a claim to be able to test it. Joshua Swamidass thinks the people who make the claim have to falsify it- maybe he means try to. He thinks ID fails cuz he sez no one has tried to falsify the design inference. However, Dr. Behe's first book was about exactly that! He couldn't find any evidence in the scientific literature that demonstrated blind and mindless processes could produce the likes of any bacterial flagellum; cilia; blood clotting, etc. He tried to falsify the claim these structures we intelligently designed. He was so amazed at his finding that he wrote three books about it. Scrutinizing Our Own Hypotheses- something neither Joshua nor evolutionists ever do. Otherwise they would have to reject the concept that non-telic processes produced life and its diversity. They also continue to conflate ID with religion and Creationism. And Joshua has the gall to say that he understands ID.ET_{April 16, 2019
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My point is that the honest scientist doesn’t need to start with any kind of metaphysical belief, if he wishes to keep metaphysical beliefs out of science. I seriously doubt this. Metaphysical beliefs may be unconscious, unobserved, unacknowledged, but none of us live without them. Not scientists or anyone else. Indeed, the belief that science can be practiced sans metaphysical beliefs can properly be identified as a metaphysical belief. Certainly the presumption that all things have natural explanations is as pure metaphysics as it is possible to get. There is no conceivable scientific method capable of establishing this proposition. I don't care what your own MB's might be, in the abstract. (I'll get to the personal later.) If they differ from mine, fine. If that means your conclusions about politics, science, the Beatles, and crop rotation in the 14th century, also differ from mine? Fine. All I ask from you is that you accord me the same courtesy, and not try to use the violent power of the State to force me to pay perverts and freaks to hold my children hostage and teach them things I know are wrong and inimical to their well-being. On the personal level, if we discuss metaphysics, I will try earnestly to convince you of certain basic truths of our existence, in the hope that it will both (A) improve your chances of a long and healthy life, and (B) make you a safer person for others to share this world with, thus improving their chances of a long and healthy life. But the choice, as always, will remain yours.ScuzzaMan_{April 16, 2019
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OT: After realizing that God is really real way back when, I remember the same reaction, that a journalist recently had at a Stephen Meyer talk, hitting me like a ton of bricks one time:
A Journalist (response) at Stephen Meyer’s Dallas Speech - April 15, 2019 Excerpt: "What If God Is as Real as a Heart Attack? At some point during this talk, I felt a gear turn in my head. Then a shudder went through the whole Rube Goldberg, sending all the mismatched parts of my mind into frantic motion. What if God is real?",,, https://evolutionnews.org/2019/04/a-journalist-at-stephen-meyers-dallas-speech-recalls-his-own-remarkable-response/
bornagain77_{April 16, 2019
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From an ID perspective we need to go back and try to understand what Darwin was trying to do. He was trying to explain the appearance of design and purpose in the natural world without invoking design or a designer. To do so he had to start with the fact of apparent design and then try to explain how organs and organism’s evolved unguided without any kind of plan or purpose. So far nobody has been able how this occurred except when it comes to minor trivial evolutionary changes. At present no one has been able to explain so called macro-evolutionary change which according to the fossil record appears to occur in bursts and spurts with no evidentiary clues as to how such changes occurred. What that leaves the modern Darwinist with is a metaphysical belief which has no real scientific support behind it. If you disagree with that assessment pick an example of some organism or organ and explain empirically step-by-step (citing experiments and natural world observation) how it naturally, gradually and accidentally (not intentionally) evolved. Just claiming that it somehow could have evolved naturally is not an empirical or scientific explanation, it’s a metaphysical one. To be clear I do think that natural changes due to natural selection and/or genetic drift etc. does explain micro evolutionary change but micro evolutionary is not sufficient to explain the kind of change required by Darwin’s original theory which was purported to explain all evolutionary change. My point is that the honest scientist doesn’t need to start with any kind of metaphysical belief, if he wishes to keep metaphysical beliefs out of science. All he needs to do is to look critically and objectively at the theory and see if it can explain what it purports to explain. From what I know from my own investigation is that Darwin’s theory doesn’t, but I am neither a scientist nor an expert.john_a_designer_{April 16, 2019
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I think independent writer Suzan Mazur (Oscillations) deserves a great deal of credit for moving the questions out of the irrelevant sinkhole of whether Jesus loves Darwin. Starting with her 2010 book, The Altenberg 16: An exposé of the evolution industry (a group of evolutionary biologists and philosophers concerned about the future of the discipline, who met to talk about what Darwinism was doing to it), she went on to write honestly about the 2016 effort by the Royal Society to rescue the discipline from the Dead hand Royal Society: Public Evolution Summit. We live in a time where everybody gets cosmetic makeovers but real shakeups are harder than they used to be. I put it down to academia being much too large and entrenched these days. Too many time-serving mediocrities in relation to people who are genuinely curious about how the world works. Also, the role of independent writers in publicizing actual but unpopular changes is often overlooked, in favour of the noise made by grandstanding puff arts who take the credit. I am not, of course, referring to the Third Way scientists, who are more often taking the heat. I mean that, if rethinks are forced upon the discipline, people will be shoving forward to take the credit who did much less than Mazur accomplished via her many interviews with life scientists and others who see past Darwin.News_{April 16, 2019
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