At Oscillations: How the College Board skews students toward Darwinism

_{Denyse O'Leary

January 27, 2020

Darwinism, Intelligent Design, science education}

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https://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Overthrown-Mechanobiology-Suzan-Mazur/dp/0578452669

Suzan Mazur, an independent journalist and author of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology, takes aim at the outdated Darwinism of the College Board university preparation system:

At Oscillations, she notes that the content of its biology course and exam framework devotes 24 pages or 22% to Darwinian natural selection and describes it in the “Essential Knowledge” section as “a major mechanism of evolution.” The College Board, she reports, explicitly says that: “The principles of natural selection and its components appear throughout the course.”

She sees this as a “catastrophe” (Suzan Mazur, “College Board & The Natural Selection Racket” at Oscillations) because “the evolution paradigm has shifted” and – following Eugene Koonin – natural selection is not taken seriously any more as an explain-all.

Is the stuff she identifies designed to insulate students from the ferment going on in biology or is just the outcome of educrats’ self-insulation…? Maybe both?

Mazur has got to be one of the best-connected people writing about evolution today. Her nose for haven’t-we-seen-this-show-before?, oh-not-THAT-again?, used-to-was, done-to-death, and this-will-wash-no-more is the outcome of having interviewed many movers and shakers (and maybe some slackers and fakers) and kept notes over the years. She should certainly be better known.

The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’ is also a good introduction to what’s changing in biology.

Comments

Andrew:
This is a philosophical distinction.
No, it isn't. Why do you think that we don't consider every death to be murder? Why is it that no one thinks that every rock is an artifact? It's all science, Andrew. And it has to o with knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships
There are many different versions of ‘nature’ that differ from yours.
Such as?ET_{January 29, 2020
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"There is a difference between existing in the physical world, ie nature, and being produced by the physical world." ET, This is a philosophical distinction. There are many different versions of 'nature' that differ from yours. Andrewasauber_{January 29, 2020
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See also: the Nature of NatureET_{January 29, 2020
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Unbelievable. Both exist in the physical world. Both were created by intelligent agencies. Neither one was produced by nature, acting freely* (Del Ratszch in "Nature, Design and Science") There is a difference between existing in the physical world, ie nature, and being produced by the physical world.ET_{January 29, 2020
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Hate to beat this dead horse some more but... ET, The defintion you gave upthread "the physical world" should exclude beehives and stonehenge? What else? Andrewasauber_{January 29, 2020
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seversky:
It seems there are some here at UD who haven’t caught up with what is currently understood as the theory of evolution in biology.
There isn't any scientific theory of evolution. So your post is just nonsense.ET_{January 29, 2020
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Andfrew:
So when beez make beezhivez that’s not a production of nature?
No, it is a production of the bees. Nature cannot make beehives.
You still keep deliberately missing the point. ‘Nature’ and ‘Natural’ fail as science.
THAT is total nonsense. Perhaps you should read Newton's Principia...ET_{January 29, 2020
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Acartia Eddie:
Sorry, but I have never been banned before.
Not as "Ed George". But you have been banned when you posted as Acartia and William spearshake. IP addresses can be changed by using a VPN.ET_{January 29, 2020
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@32 Seversky
Perhaps because when he (Larry Moran) says “Why I am not a Darwinist” he doesn’t...
Hehe. How can Larry Moran (a naturalist) know anything?
... the naturalist claims to know an external physical cosmos billions of light years in extent, and yet, his materialism forces the conclusion that he cannot know the external physical world at all – only images or neural patterns inside his own brain.
https://strangenotions.com/naturalisms-epistemological-nightmare/Truthfreedom_{January 29, 2020
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At post 32 Seversky addresses the fact that Moran claims that he is 'not a Darwinist". He quotes Moran's own words,
Darwinism refers to evolution by natural selection. But a “Darwinist” is not just someone who accepts the fact of natural selection, it’s more than that. It’s someone who prefers this explanation to all other possible mechanisms of evolution.,,, "I am not a Darwinist,"
I suppose that Seversky is trying to claim that Moran does not explicitly reject Natural Selection outright. But as I pointed out in post 2 of this thread, in Moran's promotion of what is termed 'neutral theory', he has, for all intents and purposes, rendered natural selection itself null and void of any true explanatory power:
Mimus, you might also want to look up some of the prominent promoters of what is termed ‘neutral theory’, i.e. Graur and Moran for example. A theory in which selection is rendered, for all practical purposes, null and void, in that they hold selection is apparently incapable of eliminating the vast amounts of junk DNA that they postulate must exist in DNA in order to make some type of naturalistic evolution feasible. - per post 2
The following article by Moran goes into a bit more detail as to exactly why Moran rejects Natural Selection as a major player in evolution
Revisiting the genetic load argument with Dan Graur - Larry Moran - July 14, 2017 Excerpt: I've discussed genetic load several times on this blog (e.g. Genetic Load, Neutral Theory, and Junk DNA) but a recent paper by Dan Graur provides a good opportunity to explain it once more. The basic idea of Genetic Load is that a population can only tolerate a finite number of deleterious mutations before going extinct. The theory is sound but many of the variables are not known with precision.,,, Let's look at the first line in this table. The deleterious mutation rate is calculated using the lowest possible mutation rate and the smallest percentage of deleterious mutations (4%). Under these conditions, the human population could survive with a fertility value of 1.8 as long as less than 25% of the genome is functional (i.e. 75% junk) (red circle). That's the UPPER LIMIT on the functional fraction of the human genome. But that limit is quite unreasonable. It's more reasonable to assume about 100 new mutations per generation with about 10% deleterious. Using these assumptions, only 10% of the genome could be functional with a fertility value of 1.8 (green circle). Whatever the exact percentage of junk DNA it's clear that the available data and population genetics point to a genome that's mostly junk DNA. http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2017/07/revisiting-genetic-load-argument-with.html
In what should be needless to say, if you believe that Natural Selection is incapable of removing the 90% of the genome that you believe to be junk, then you cannot possibly believe, as Darwin believed, that “natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing…every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good.”
“natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing…every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good.” - Charles Darwin
I can see why Seversky (and Moran) would want to preserve some type of explanatory power for Natural Selection since, without Natural Selection, Darwinists are basically stuck with chance alone as a explanatory principle, As Austin Hughes explained 'Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance.'
Austin Hughes and Neutral Theory - Laurence A. Moran - June 19, 2017 Excerpt: Originally proposed by Motoo Kimura, Jack King, and Thomas Jukes, the neutral theory of molecular evolution is inherently non-Darwinian. Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance. http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2017/06/austin-hughes-and-neutral-theory.html
In short, with Natural selection being tossed to the side, by neutral theory', as the explanation for the 'wonderful design' we see in life, Darwinists did not accept such a devastating finding as an outright falsification for their theory, as they should have done, but instead are now reduced to arguing that the 'wonderful design' we see in life is, basically, the result of pure chance with natural selection now playing a very negligible role if any role at all. Even Richard Dawkins himself finds the claim that chance alone can build such wonderful design we see in life to be 'absolutely inconceivable'. In the following video Dawkins states that the 'appearance of design', “cannot come about by chance. It's absolutely inconceivable that you could get anything as complicated or well designed as a modern bird or a human or a hedgehog coming about by chance. That's absolutely out.,,, It's out of the question.,,,'
4:30 minute mark: "It cannot come about by chance. It's absolutely inconceivable that you could get anything as complicated or well designed as a modern bird or a human or a hedgehog coming about by chance. That's absolutely out.,,, It's out of the question.,,, So where (does the appearance of design)) it come from? The process of gradual evolution by natural selection.” Richard Dawkins - From a Frog to a Prince - video https://youtu.be/ClleN8ysimg?t=267
Contrary to what the proponents of neutral theory may want to believe beforehand, with natural selection out of the way as the supposed 'designer substitute' for explaining the 'appearance of design' that we see in life, then the explanation for that 'appearance of design' in life does not automatically default to pure chance, as they want to believe, but instead the explanation defaults to intelligent design. As Richard Sternberg states in the following video, (a video which found natural selection to be grossly inadequate for explaining the fixation of mutations in a genome), “Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer — or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that’s out of the way — if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence — then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.”
“Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer — or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that’s out of the way — if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence — then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.” Richard Sternberg – Living Waters documentary Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics – Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson – (excerpt from Living Waters video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0csd3M4bc0Q
Verse:
Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
bornagain77_{January 29, 2020
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@30 Ed George
Sorry, but I stopped reading your complete posts.
So you are commenting on things you admit you do not read. A waste of time then.Truthfreedom_{January 29, 2020
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Ed George claims that "I found most of them (your posts) to be irrelevant to the topics being discussed." And yet, in this very thread, my posts were directly on the subject of natural selection which is directly relevant to what was discussed in the OP:
"At Oscillations, she notes that the content of its biology course and exam framework devotes 24 pages or 22% to Darwinian natural selection and describes it in the “Essential Knowledge” section as “a major mechanism of evolution.” The College Board, she reports, explicitly says that: “The principles of natural selection and its components appear throughout the course.” She sees this as a “catastrophe” (Suzan Mazur, “College Board & The Natural Selection Racket” at Oscillations) because “the evolution paradigm has shifted” and – following Eugene Koonin – natural selection is not taken seriously any more"
Moreover, Ed George blatantly disregards his own criteria of 'staying on the topic being discussed'. For example, in kf's recent thread entitled "Thoughts On The Soul", a thread which was discussing an article by John C Wright about the soul, Ed George, in his very first comment on the thread, tried to derail the topic of the thread with a reference to "Plato and Same-Sex Sexuality". A topic which had absolutely nothing to do with the topic that kf had just opened the thread with. kf admonished Ed George thusly,
EG, again, you would divert a key issue into what is now manifestly an obsession on your part. https://uncommondescent.com/philosophy/thoughts-on-the-soul/#comment-691433
Thus Ed George's standard of being "relevant to the topics being discussed" apparently only applies to others and not to himself. The real reason that Ed George continually refuses to engage ID arguments in any forthright and substantial manner is that he simply can't refute the arguments in any meaningful way. but he can only nitpick at the edges of the arguments, if he chooses to engage the arguments at all, (his 'non'-exchange with Upright Biped being a prime example). This is not the tactic of someone who is trying to honestly search for the truth of a matter but is the tactic of someone who has a disingenuous intent. As to Ed George's claim that he has never been banned from UD before. I don't care whether he has been banned or not. I will seek to have him removed if he continues his trollish behavior towards me and/or towards others. Period! You can rest assured on that,bornagain77_{January 29, 2020
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PeterA @ 20 - I'm honestly struggling to see what's grammatically incorrect about that clause, can you explain? On PavelU, my suggestion is just ignore him. His posts aren't obnoxious, and they're easy to scroll past.Bob O'H_{January 29, 2020
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Bornagain77 @ 2
In fact, Moran has claimed right here on UD, a couple of times that I’m aware of, that he is emphatically ‘not a Darwinist’ since he rejects natural selection as a major player in evolution. Just how random chance, all by its lonesome, can produce the overwhelming ‘appearance of design’, minus selection as the supposed ‘designer substitute’, Moran never explains and is apparently left for others to figure out.
Perhaps because when he says "Why I am not a Darwinist" he doesn't mean random mutation without natural selection. No one does.
We all know about evolutionary biology, but what is "Darwinism?" Ernst Mayr has an entire chapter devoted to the question ("What is Darwinism") in his book One Long Argument (Mayr, 1991). At the end of that chapter he says After 1859, that is, during the first Darwinian revolution, Darwinism for almost everybody meant explaining the living world by natural processes. As we will see, during and after the evolutionary synthesis the term "Darwinism" unanimously meant adaptive change under the influence of natural selection, and variational change instead of transformational evolution. These are the only two truly meaningful concepts of Darwinism, the one ruling in the nineteenth century ... and the other ruling in the twentieth century (a consensus having been reached during the evolutionary synthesis). Any other use of the term Darwinism by a modern author is bound to be misleading. I agree with Mayr on this point. Darwinism refers to evolution by natural selection. But a "Darwinist" is not just someone who accepts the fact of natural selection, it's more than that. It's someone who prefers this explanation to all other possible mechanisms of evolution. This is the point made by Stephen Jay Gould in his famous 1982 Science paper, "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory." (The Gould quote about semantics in the left sidebar is from that paper.) Gould defines modern Darwinism as … If we agree, as our century generally has, that "Darwinism" should be restricted to the world view encompassed by the theory of natural selection itself, the problem of definition is still not easily resolved. Darwinism must be more than the bare bones of the mechanics: the principles of superfecundity and inherited variation, and the deduction of natural selction thereform. It must, fundamentally, make a claim for wide scope and dominat frequency; natural selection must represent the primary directing force of evolutionary change. Richard Dawkins is a Darwinist and Daniel Dennett is a Darwinist. I am not a Darwinist. I prefer a modern pluralist view of evolution as I explain in Evolution by Accident. I am not a Darwinist, just as most of my colleagues in the Department of Physics are not Newtonists, and most of my friends who study genetics are not Mendelists. All three of these terms refer to the ideas of famous men (Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel) who made enormous contributions to science. But in all three cases, the modern sciences have advanced well beyond anything envisaged by their founders. Call me an evolutionary biologist.
It seems there are some here at UD who haven't caught up with what is currently understood as the theory of evolution in biology. There are also some here who have commented on the incoherence of worldviews founded on false premisses. Believing that their version of "Darwinism" represents the current state of evolutionary biology is arguably just such a false premiss so what does that say about their worldview?Seversky_{January 28, 2020
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BA77
If you are going to resort to basically insulting me instead of ever engaging any of the substance of my arguments, I will seek to have you banned from UD. (as you have been banned numerous times before under various handles for the exact same type of trollish behavior).
Sorry, but I have never been banned before. You should stop believing everything ET says. If you doubt me, feel free to ask the moderator. I’m sure he/she can check IP addresses.Ed George_{January 28, 2020
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BA77
Care to point out where any of my links in post 12 criticizing natural selection are ‘nonsense’?
Sorry, but I stopped reading your complete posts after I found most of them to be irrelevant to the topics being discussed. If this has changed, I will try reading them again.Ed George_{January 28, 2020
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Ed George @25: The difference is huge: BA77’s contributions are very informative, interesting and make sense. PavelU’s comments make no sense and only show that the guy has no idea what the papers he cites are saying.jawa_{January 28, 2020
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Ed George, Care to point out where any of my links in post 12 criticizing natural selection are 'nonsense'? If you are going to resort to basically insulting me instead of ever engaging any of the substance of my arguments, I will seek to have you banned from UD. (as you have been banned numerous times before under various handles for the exact same type of trollish behavior). As to PavelU's repeated 'nonsense', is does not take long to see where the papers that he cites do not support the claims he makes for them; For instance, he claims that "This paper explains the evolution that led to the vertebrates:" Yet in the actual conclusion of their paper we find that their findings merely "raise the possibility" that they may have an explanation for the evolution that led to the vertebrates:
Conclusions Our data raise the possibility that the origin of stylopod and zeugopod lies much deeper in gnathostome evolution and that variation in meis and hoxa11 expression has played a substantial role in the transformation of appendage anatomy. Moreover, these observations provide evidence that the Meis/Hoxa11 profile considered a hallmark of stylopod/zeugopod patterning is present in Neoceratodus.
Thus they admit in the abstract that "little is know(n) about the evolution of this patterning mechanism" that supposedly led to evolution of vertebrates, (which is certainly NOT a minor confession on their part), and in the conclusion of their paper they admitted that they merely raise the possibility that "meis and hoxa11 expression has played a substantial role in the transformation of appendage anatomy." If you think raise the possibility is an adequate explanation of anything you are deluding yourself. In other words, it is the usual Darwinian storytelling and is a far cry from any actual hard science that would have actually demonstrated how the transformation of one species into another species, (say a mudskipper into a lizard), is even remotely feasible. Darwinists simply don't have any such substantiating evidence now, nor, in my honest opinion, will they ever have any substantiating evidence in the future that the transformation of one species into a brand new species in possible. Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply are not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand how any particular species my acquire its particular shape and/or form. The failure of the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than DNA itself. In the following article entitled 'Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics', which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description."
Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics - December 9, 2015 Excerpt: A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable,,, It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, "We knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and Gödel in the 1930s," added Co-author Professor Michael Wolf from Technical University of Munich. "So far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description." http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html Darwinism vs Biological Form - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w
Simply put, the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution is dead in so far as EVER giving us a adequate explanation as to how any particular organism may acquire its basic shape and/or form.bornagain77_{January 28, 2020
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"Para-digms they are a-changin'! "Seversky_{January 28, 2020
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Ed George
How is this any different than BA77’s posted links?
Bornagain77 's links are teleological (goal-oriented), the result of logical thought processes. They relate to the topics being discussed. And they are really interesting, by the way. PavelU's ones are random garbage. See the difference?Truthfreedom_{January 28, 2020
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Jawa
I’m sick and tired of seeing this guy posting his nonsense and the moderators letting him get away with it.
How is this any different than BA77’s posted links?Ed George_{January 28, 2020
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"” the physical world including all living things as well as the land and the oceans” Does this include interplanetary space? Stars? Galaxies? Emotion? Calculation? Possibility? Potential? Andrewasauber_{January 28, 2020
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"We know that Stonehenge wasn’t produced by nature because it exhibits many signs of work/ intention. " ET, So when beez make beezhivez that's not a production of nature? Beezhivez exhibit many signs of work/intention. You still keep deliberately missing the point. 'Nature' and 'Natural' fail as science. They cant be defined very well. Andrewasauber_{January 28, 2020
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PeterA, Good catch! But that’s a common mistake. C’mon, be gracious. At least the statement seems to denote certain level of honesty. :)pw_{January 28, 2020
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PeterA, I’m sick and tired of seeing this guy posting his nonsense and the moderators letting him get away with it.jawa_{January 28, 2020
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PavelU, The journal you took that paper from seems to need basic grammar editors: This statement in the abstract has a basic grammar error: “little is know about the evolution of this patterning mechanism.“ If they do so bad with basic English grammar, what can we expect about their dealing with more difficult issues ? :)PeterA_{January 28, 2020
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This paper explains the evolution that led to the vertebrates: https://evodevojournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13227-018-0099-9PavelU_{January 28, 2020
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Andrew thinks that all dictionaries are wrong because they all use the word "nature" in their definition of "natural". But I digress. Nature is defined as " the physical world including all living things as well as the land and the oceans". That means anything existing in that physical world is natural. Then there are the forces of nature. They seem to be limited in what they can create. We know that Stonehenge wasn't produced by nature because it exhibits many signs of work/ intention. We know that humans weren't produced by nature because all living organisms also exhibit many signs of work/ intention. We know this due to our knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships.ET_{January 28, 2020
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Anyway, why would you conclude that Stonehenge is not Natural? Humans are Natural. Why is what Humans assemble not Natural? Andrewasauber_{January 28, 2020
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"Natural means “existing in or produced by nature”. ET, One of the first rules of definitions is that you should not use the word or a variant of the word you are trying to define in the definition. That results in circular reasoning which logical coherence excludes. Andrewasauber_{January 28, 2020
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