Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Pretending That Darwinism is Sophisticated (and Difficult-to-Understand) Science in Order to Deflect Challenges (or, Mickey Mouse Pretends to be a Scientist)

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Mickey MouseIn DonaldM’s post (‘Analyze and Evaluate’ Are the New Code Words for ‘Creationism’) discussion ensued about high school students and challenges to orthodox evolutionary theory.

One of the ploys of Darwinists is to pretend (and especially to try to fool young students into thinking) that evolutionary theory is like real science (mathematics, chemistry, physics, or electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, software, or other engineering disciplines) — when it is not. It’s Mickey Mouse stuff pretending to be hard science, and is not difficult to understand and therefore not difficult to challenge.

The Darwinist lobby would like us to believe that young people are neither sufficiently intelligent, nor sufficiently sophisticated, nor sufficiently “educated” to appreciate the fact that all challenges to orthodox Darwinism have been refuted. These innocent young victims of the enemies of science must be protected by the intervention of the courts, so that they are not exposed to any dissent (no matter how justified by evidence or logic), otherwise they might start believing in a flat earth and astrology.

It is true that young students who have yet to learn algebra would have a hard time with partial differential equations, but it is not true that young students can’t grasp the problems with orthodox evolutionary theory. It is not hard to figure out that the fossil record, with its various explosions and consistent pattern of discontinuity and stasis, presents a challenge for the Darwinian gradualism claim. It is not hard to figure out that complex information-processing machinery and the information it processes present a problem for the random mutation/variation and natural selection hypothesis. (All young people nowadays are familiar with computers and software and know that computer programs can’t write themselves through random accidents.) There is nothing difficult at all about understanding the claims of Darwinian theory or the perfectly legitimate scientific and evidential challenges to it.

The Darwinian mechanism is 19th-century Mickey Mouse speculation, passed off as “science.”

As Denyse put it: “Darwinian evolution, as a concept, is in ruins. That much is obvious. However the history of the world happened, that wasn’t how.”

So, let’s at least let young people in the public schools know that no one knows for sure how all this came about, and let them evaluate, think about, and consider the options, rather than attempt to coerce them into thinking that they are too stupid to think for themselves, and must be told by authorities what to think about the most important, ultimate issues in their lives: where they ultimately came from, and why they exist.

Comments
Punkeek, as the Eldredge/Gould notion is known, was nothing more than recogniton that in the "past" evolution took place in spurts. It sure isn't doing it now is it. They offered nothing in the way of mechanism. It was little more than a gimmick to bring attention to the authors both of whom were atheist Darwinians to the core. Eldredge is still a Darwin worshipper of the first water as everybody knows. It is hard to believe isn't it? Not at all. They were "born that way."JohnADavison
April 14, 2009
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jerry, when you have time, could you respond substantively to the question I had about your view of punctuated equilibrium? I followed up in [96] above, as did Dave W in subsequent comments.David Kellogg
April 12, 2009
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John, Look hereAlan Fox
April 10, 2009
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Please all visit my weblog and especially the Why Banishment? thread where I continue to expose the sordid business that is still taking place on Scordova's thread. It is a sad commentary on the present status of Uncommon Descent as a venue for honest dialogue.JohnADavison
April 10, 2009
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Who is Orly or for that matter who is Alan Fox?JohnADavison
April 10, 2009
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I love to answer questions!>/blockquote> Orly?
Alan Fox
April 10, 2009
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Thank you Gil for permitting me to hold forth, something fellow "author" Salvador Cordova, "scordova," is loathe to do. I don't have anything further to contribute to this thread unless someone has questions. I love to answer questions!JohnADavison
April 9, 2009
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Stephen In order to appreciate the extent to which I am being deleted at Scordova's thread you can visit the "Why Banishment" thread on my weblog where I have copied every comment that I transmitted to that thread which appeared however briefly for others to read. I have never seen such a policy implemented before. It strikes me as a sort of suicidal masochism to practice discrimination in such a flagrant manner. Maybe that is a good thing!JohnADavison
April 9, 2009
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woops, Scordova not CordovaJohnADavison
April 9, 2009
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Thanks Stephan Henry Proulx. You are welcome to participate on my weblog. I will be eighty one in June and anyone who thinks he has plenty of time left at eighty one is a damn fool. I have been perfectly civil here. I have attacked only the Darwinian fairy tale and not the poor souls who still believe it. Christ had it right - "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do." The tough part is the forgiving. I do my level best but it is not easy when you have been banished from nearly all their isolationist, protectionist, intellectual bastions. I am currently being deleted wholesale at Cordova's thread. Drop by and see for yourself. It is very revealing.JohnADavison
April 9, 2009
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By the way, my name is Stephan Henry Proulx, a Quebecois currently living in Taiwan, that 'coutry' caught in the vise of politics. Fascinating place.Oramus
April 8, 2009
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John A. Davison, This may not mean much coming from a novice/amateur but I am a fan and admire your tenacity. I know the old adage 'you can catch more flies with honey' doesn't work with ND proponents. Their shtick as all about slice n' diceing of data; ie trimmin' puzzle pieces to make them fit. Talk about irony! They design an explanatory model to fit a non-designed paradigm; a desing that looks like a picasso, or one of those splash the paint on the canvass masterpieces. BUT, a word to the wise, stick it out without the rancour. Keep sloggin' it out point-by-point. You'll get more mileage in the long-run. (and don't worry about time; you've got lots more of it I'm sure).Oramus
April 8, 2009
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I am still waiting for a response to the challenges I presented in #90 and #91. Isn't there a "true believer" in the crowd here? Apparently not. Not even Allen MacNeill? What will his students at Cornell think about that I wonder? "I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." General Ulysses S. Grant It doesn't get any better than this.JohnADavison
April 7, 2009
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Can you provide a quote from Gould or Eldredge that supports this? Can you even provide a quote from MacNeill that supports this? I think you can’t. It shouldn’t be hard. The original PE paper is available online, along with a number of other of Gould’s works on PE.
I would like to see citations supporting your contention as well, jerry. I could find nothing like it in Gould and Eldredge’s papers. I’d also like to see where Michael Lynch supports that idea as well. (sorry about the lousy formatting in the previous post)Dave Wisker
April 7, 2009
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Can you provide a quote from Gould or Eldredge that supports this? Can you even provide a quote from MacNeill that supports this? I think you can’t. It shouldn’t be hard. The original PE paper is available online, along with a number of other of Gould’s works on PE. I would like to see citations supporting your contention as well, jerry. I could find nothing like it in Gould and Eldredge's papers. I'd also like to see where Michael Lynch supports that idea as well.
Dave Wisker
April 7, 2009
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jerry [92], you are incorrect. I have read the Gould and Eldredge papers, and they do not describe PE as you do. Nor can I find anything from MacNeill that describes PE the way you do. To recap, your claims is that PE involves “changes that happen out of sight in unused parts of the genome.” You write that in PE, “[a] very small number of these changes suddenly become functional and this is when a new species or genera are born.” You even write that “This is the essence of punctuated equilibrium.” Can you provide a quote from Gould or Eldredge that supports this? Can you even provide a quote from MacNeill that supports this? I think you can't. It shouldn't be hard. The original PE paper is available online, along with a number of other of Gould's works on PE.David Kellogg
April 7, 2009
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I offer this summary of my experience here at Uncommon Descent along with an invitation for all to participate in my weblog where the ony prerequisite is full disclosure of ones identity. http://jadavison.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/why-banishment/#comment-1775 #454JohnADavison
April 7, 2009
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Sotto Voce, Forget it. Prolonging this discussion about spacetime is futile from my perspective. Thanks.Mapou
April 6, 2009
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Mapou, I don't know if you're still reading this, and even if you are, I doubt anything I say will change your mind. Still, here goes nothing. Anyway, I notice you still have not given me a clear definition of change that illustrates its incompatibility with GR. Here's the closest you've come:
ime is an abstract evolution (change in physics) parameter. It is derived from change. Change is just nature correcting an imbalance, i.e., a violation of a conservation principle. The reason that time is not a variable in physics is that changing time is self-referential. Velocity in space is given as v = dx/dt where dx and dt represent distance and interval. Velocity in time must be given as dt/dt which is nonsense. It’s that simple.
I must admit I have a hard time parsing any of this. But I think I know what you're getting at. You think that change must be what McTaggart calls "A-series change". The simple variation of a physical quantity with respect to a temporal parameter is insufficient; the temporal parameter must itself somehow change or "flow". I just do not see the motivation for this metaphysics. I am yet to see any argument for why my offered definition of change is not adequate for capturing all observable temporal phenomena. A physical property of a body changes when it takes on different values at points on the body's worldline parametrized by different proper times. To move is to occupy different spacetime positions at different proper times. In response you say something like, "But relative to what does the proper time itself change?" Well, proper time itself is the standard of change, so the only answer to this question is trivial: Proper time changes relative to itself at a rate of 1 sec/sec (no meta-tau here). You say this is "nonsense", but it's not. It's merely a consequence of selecting proper time as the parameter for change. An analogy (due to Tim Maudlin): Let us assume the dollar is the international standard according to which the value of currencies is measured. So the value of the Euro is 0.75 Euro per dollar, the value of the Indian rupee is 50 rupees per dollar, and so on. Now suppose someone asked, what's the value of a dollar? The answer is trivial: 1 dollar per dollar. But this is not a nonsensical answer. It's perfectly correct. It expresses the fact that the dollar is our standard for currency exchange. Similarly for proper time. I suspect this won't satisfy you, because you are looking for a more robust metaphysical sense in which proper time changes. But why do we need it? What observable phenomena are you thinking of that cannot be accounted for in the framework I have suggested? Take an ordinary case of change: coffee changing from hot to cold from tau=0 to tau=10. I have a perfectly good explanation of this process. From the four-dimensional perspective, we have a worldline, one end of which is hot and the other end is cold. Near this is another worldline, representing the observer, with a watch measuring proper time. Simultaneous (in the observer's rest frame) with the point at which the observer measures tau=0, the coffee is hot; simultaneous with the point at which the observer measures tau=10, the coffee is cold. The observer sees the coffee change from hot to cold. None of this makes any reference to the proper time changing relative to some meta-proper time. I recognize that connecting the physical theory of time we get from GR with our subjective experience of the passage of time is not easy, but while I could not tell you what the connection is (since I do not know how consciousness works), you haven't given me any argument that demonstrates the incompatibility of GR with our subjective experience of time.Sotto Voce
April 6, 2009
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David Kellogg, You are behind the times and are spouting the Darwinist version of PE not the Gould and Eldredge version. I can only go by what they write and which Allen MacNeill confirms. It must be disheartening to go to the ID people to find out what the evolution debate is about. Here, we are not in some mental straight jacket that is imposed on materialist sites. You see we believe materialism explains a lot but not everything so we are free to explore all the possibilities even the exaptation of non coding DNA. The PE people realized that wandering off to a secluded place to do evolution is so dated. They always knew they had to have a science based explanation for this peculiar phenomenon. So the exaptation of non functional mutations became the poster child for sophisticated thinking. David, do catch up and you can be a hero at the other sites where you roam as you subtlety bring the other ignorants up to speed. I am looking out for your future.jerry
April 6, 2009
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Indeed, no one here is remotely interested in anything I have to say. I might as well not be here but I am as I will continue to establish as long as I am able. I challenged a comment by Joseph in my message #81, but Joseph chooses, like Allen MacNeill, to pretend that I do not exist. Shame on you Joseph and Allen MacNeill as well. No guts, no glory! "I'm an old campaigner and I love a good fight." Franklin Delano Roosevelt I love it so!JohnADavison
April 6, 2009
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I notice that the challenge I presented in message #79 goes unanswered. Surely there must be a Darwinian here who is willing to respond to this frontal assault on the Darwinian fairy tale. Apparently it won't be Allen MacNeill since he has already banished me from his weblog and declared here that he will never again recognize my existence. That is a curious position for a leading exponent of neoDarwinism to take on a neutral forum such as Uncommon Descent. Maybe one of the other "true believers" will do what he cannot bring himself to do. Incidentally this is not the first time that my challenge has gone unanswered. It has gone unanswered for years. While I am at it, here is another one to be ignored. Show me any two extant true species and provide convincing evidence that one is the ancestor of the other. Incidentally, that does not preclude the remote possibility that one IS ancestral to the other although I regard that as extremely unlikely. The chronic failure to provide such evidence is one reason that I am convinced that evolution is finished. We are not witnessing evolution in action, but rather the terminal twigs on a tree that is no longer growing and is about to become extinct as all real trees eventually do. Ontogeny remains the best model for phylogeny with the death of the individual corresponding to the extinction of the species. Ergo - "A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."JohnADavison
April 6, 2009
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Anyway Clive, thanks a million for at least letting me speak eventually. That is more than Allen MacNeill is willing to do at his blog where I have been summarily banished, just as I have at Pharyngula, Panda's Thumb, EvC, After the Bar Closes, ARN and a host of other weblogs too numerous to recall. Darwinians ar not very tolerant are they?JohnADavison
April 5, 2009
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Seversky, "Since when have “electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, software, or other engineering disciplines” been sciences?" These are sciences.Clive Hayden
April 5, 2009
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JohnADavison, Gil didn't put you into moderation, I did. No reason to be upset with him about being moderated.Clive Hayden
April 5, 2009
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Stephen Jay Gould and his colleague Ernst Mayr down the hall at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology were both homozygous at the Atheist/Darwinist locus. They were hamstrung at conception, doomed to contribute nothing of substance to our understanding of either ontogeny or phylogeny. It is hard to believe isn't it? Not at all. It is now settled science.JohnADavison
April 5, 2009
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Now that jerry's followed up (thanks again!), I'd really love to hear from Gil about the question I posed in [54].David Kellogg
April 4, 2009
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jerry [80], thanks for getting back to me. I haven't read the book you mention in #49, but I have read the comment to which you link, and I've read a lot of Gould. Specifically I am confused about the supposed importance to PE of "changes that happen out of sight in unused parts of the genome." You write that in PE, "[a] very small number of these changes suddenly become functional and this is when a new species or genera are born." You even write that "This is the essence of punctuated equilibrium." I just think that's totally off-base. The essence of PE is the isolation of a subpopulation, usually in a signficantly different environment, whic allows for relatively rapid (in geologic tiem) speciation -- but this still may be a long time! Exaptation is not the sudden emergence of functionality. Exaptation is the jerry-rigging of new functions from previous functionality, which may be redundant. Further, although Darwin didn't use the word, he talked about the idea in the Origin. From Chapter VI:
Two distinct organs sometimes perform simultaneously the same function in the same individual; to give one instance, there are fish with gills or branchiæ that breathe the air dissolved in the water, at the same time that they breathe free air in their swimbladders, this latter organ having a ductus pneumaticus for its supply, and being divided by highly vascular partitions. In these cases, one of the two organs might with ease be modified and perfected so as to perform all the work by itself, being aided during the process of modification by the other organ; and then this other organ might be modified for some other and quite distinct purpose, or be quite obliterated. The illustration of the swimbladder in fishes is a good one, because it shows us clearly the highly important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely flotation, may be converted into one for a wholly different purpose, namely respiration. The swimbladder has, also, been worked in as an accessory to the auditory organs of certain fish, or, for I do not know which
No description of PE that I've ever read has referred to "changes that happen out of sight in unused parts of the genome" which "suddenly become functional."David Kellogg
April 4, 2009
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David RinC Kellogg, "I don’t this is a good representation of punctuated equilibrium at all. Where are you getting this view? Not from Gould, I think." From Gould worshippers and confirmed by Allen MacNeill. See my comment #49. Did you miss it? It has been made before. The all powerful force is not adaptation (Darwin,) but exaptation (Gould.) I think Michael Lynch has written a lot of papers on something similar. Will we refer to the anti ID crowd in the future as Gouldists once they realize Darwin is dead and a new king is being trotted out. "The King is dead, long live the King."jerry
April 4, 2009
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Sotto Voce @71, I had to make an effort to reply to your message. You just don't know how many times I have heard these arguments. It gets tiring after a while but here goes. You wrote:
I have repeatedly offered a perfectly coherent sense in which motion can take place in a spacetime manifold, and you have studiously ignored it. I repeat again: a body is moving (in spacetime) if it occupies different spacetime points at different proper times.
This is where you are mistaken. A body occupies every point in spacetime for its entire life. Read the quote I offered to madsen above from Professor Geroch.
Far from denying that any body can move, GR essentially tells us that every body moves through spacetime (although the story is a little complicated for photons). Please tell me why you think this is problematic.
It is problematic because GR specifically does not tell us that. This is the reason that all those famous physicists who claim that GR allows time travel are full of it. I am talking about famous people like Stephen Hawking and David Deutsch. It's the ultimate in crackpottery and fame is no excuse for it. It makes the crackpottery even damaging because famous people have a bully pulpit.
And just asserting that this isn’t change is not sufficient. Explain what you think change is in clear physical terms and why this does not fit your definition.
Time is an abstract evolution (change in physics) parameter. It is derived from change. Change is just nature correcting an imbalance, i.e., a violation of a conservation principle. The reason that time is not a variable in physics is that changing time is self-referential. Velocity in space is given as v = dx/dt where dx and dt represent distance and interval. Velocity in time must be given as dt/dt which is nonsense. It's that simple. So please, do not give me spit out the nonsense that one can use proper time to parametrize coordinate time. As I wrote on my website, if you think that a second time can be used to prove that change can occur in time, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. If you use tau to show a change in t, you must be prepared to show how tau can change as well. Why? Because time is time. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If t can vary, so can tau. To show a change in tau one would need a meta-tau, and a meta-meta-tau for the meta-tau, ad infinitum. And no, you cannot use t to parameterize tau because that would be circular. The expression dt/dtau does not show that t can change. It is just a ratio of two different temporal intervals measured by two different clocks. That's all.Mapou
April 4, 2009
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