Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Wandel, the article has, to a high level of parallel presentation, described most all of the arguments made by the IDers and wannabees herein. The "code arguments" have been discussed and dismissed several times herein and in other similar threads. One thing she missed was an old lead in that RL used to make, in that "all this evidence and scientific discovery can be viewed several ways" HOwever RL and others, never made the connections to explain these other POVs.

The attempt at downplaying "mere" science as rooted in aterialism is one of spendis favorite places to go when hes done flitting about.

I don't call it "mere" science. And there is nowhere else to go than materialism for those who deny emotions and the psychosomatic realm. Not all scientists do that but atheists do.

I read today that atheism requires a much stronger faith than any form of intelligent cause does. And written by someone whose name was not Amanda and whose qualifications far outmatch those of any "journalist". I'm not in favour of putting education into the hands of any Amandas and particularly cut and paste Amandas who hold their position by forces we know not what.

And I don't flit about. I can only assume that you are so habituated to the cheap smear that it must be a constant characteristic of your whole conversation. It's a pity you can't practice the skill at any higher level than that of a public bar.

The arguments may have been dismissed to your satisfaction but that doesn't mean they have to everybody's. We will have to see if wande produces any letters to the editor which dispute the banal assertions made in the styleless and pointless article. It's tone of complacent and misplaced superiority alone disqualify it from the attention of any serious person.

We can see the size of her shoes. We don't need telling again. You simply cannot move on. You return to the same old cliches and generalities you started out with years ago.

The basic tenets of atheism are that there is nothing but atoms and void with no meaning or purpose in anything, that all you have are ideas derived from subjective perceptions of things which have nothing to do with the things themselves and that imagination consists of rearranging the ideas in the same way that mixed up jigsaw pieces are rearranged to make a pleasing and satisfying picture. The method Darwin used. Such a view could never have led to the mathematics of dynamic space and extension on which all modern real science is based nor to double-entry book-keeping on which leverage is founded.

We need something to keep science as our instrument and prevent it becoming our master and that something is religion.

spendi, You've done it again in your very first sentence. Who denied emotion? Please show us the way?

Trying to make believe that you even know what youre talking about.? That statement makes no sense at all.
Unlike you who relishes in the more expensive smear. WHy waste capital when you neednt, thats what I think


Afetr posting that statement, you then flitted about and landed in a discussion about noless than 4 separate subjects with little or no connections .
You are your own worst evidence, know that?

Spendi's tone of complacent and misplaced superiority alone disqualify it from the attention of any serious person.

We are here to humor him.

If all the ID crowd have are bullshit arguments, no wonder they need faith.

- - - Bad Parody Approaches - - -

Spendi's here all week.
Try the veal, its delicious.

The atheist has to. Unless you define emotions as physical/chemical states of the brain in which case they are reflexes.

You're the atheist. Not me. Was it a style choice you didn't know the implications of?

So, spendi, you can tell by the parent who doesn't cry at their child's funeral that they are atheists?

Thank you. I hope viewers appreciate it.




I used "skinflint" and "prosaic" somewhere today. Your viewers must feel really complimented by your face-saving remark. That's what anti-IDers think of you all my dear readers. And the kids in the classrooms.

Whether there are hidden reserves of the expensive smears being squirrelled away for a rainy day we will have to guess about.

You must have read my post as a duty then as I did the article by Amanda. I certainly wouldn't have read it in a dentist's waiting room.

Says who? The great Spendi? PFFT.

Style choice? Where do you dredge up this hilarity?

<waits for spendi to release another mind fart>

Okay-- I'm off to the pub.

Who is in favour of an America consisting of 300,000.000 atheists with all traces of religious superstition eradicated?

Ask that at the pub, spendi. I'm sure they're already immune to your inanities.

Yeah, and build schools on all the land wasted on churches.

Is that all Xeno? Not very original is it? They did that in Ancient Rome from time to time.

I was thinking about 150,000,000 atheist females with no sense of shame or sin.

I asked you lot. There's nobody in the pub promoting atheism or Darwinism. If there was I would ask them but I would change the number to 60,000,000.

First, Lamarckism isn't automatically opposed to Darwin nor all facets of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Modern biologists are fully open to and already accept all kinds of epigenetics, including the heritable parts (talking about multicellular organisms for a moment). They're often the people doing the research, plodding along with good scientific work like their colleagues. However, the importance is inflated precisely because people are buying into crap science journalism and press release hype. I hope Sean Carroll hasn't been convinced by it, but I can understand why a non-biologist would be taken in precisely because of the media that comes out. There is certainly quite a bit to learn about heritable epigenetics, however those shouting "revolution!", like I said before, are inflating the importance of their own research or merely repeating a meme, as it were.

Don't get me started on Gould and PE. It's very interesting and much of it rigorously scientific, and then there's how Gould actually sold it to the media and in his books. The speed at which P.E. occurs is on a small geological time scale, but still a huge 'everyday' time scale. There's far more than epigenetics that provides robust examples of powerful, yet 'simple' in the underpinnings, phenotypic change, so certainly no mechanism is missing. Gould would have agreed, as he often claimed his P.E. to be not just compatible with, but more in line with, Darwin's ideas.

I've met Behe as well, and been to his talks (along with other IDers). I found him committed to defending ID, but not to basic academic rigors (including basic logical consitency), despite knowing *very well* that they are expected. I certainly didn't speak to him for very long, but there was something that night that I see repeated in him *all the time*: he brings up his old, admittedly refuted (acknowledged previously by HIMSELF) examples. They are *always* attacked during the later discussion, at which point he gives a pitiful attempt at defense and often simply drops the point. I'm not talking about the kind of contradiction you just shrug off: he openly admits that something is a bad argument, then he uses it again. He either lacks confidence in his points (which is not how he presents himself), or he's such a moron that I can't believe he got tenure.

I don't doubt that he's sincere in his belief in God. I don't doubt that he's sincere in thinking that the complexity of the cell is evidence for a "designer". I doubt that he's sincere in his arguments and how he presents himself, also from personal experience and seeing how he acts at other talks and online.

Moving on from that little rant, I fully agree that the type of reasoning you listed for Austen is very prevalent. Behe uses it himself: many of his arguments are so terrible because he's already a True Believer™. However, he's intelligent enough to admit when he's wrong (sometimes), yet he goes back on those admissions all the time. And if you actually *see* how he responds to people who disagree with him or raise issues, you can see him faltering. He's a moderately nice person, so you can see when he's lying. One only needs to read the Dover trial transcripts to get some of an idea of how he acts.

You might be thinking of horizontal gene transfer, which is definitely a refinement of the tree of life. Genetic drift is a mechanism of evolution where neutral alleles change in frequency within a population due entirely to chance.

The cool thing about genetic drift is that while the immediate effects and causes are essentially random, those parts of the chromosome could potentially be 'turned on' later and have an entirely novel impact. I suppose I should note that, as it's largely random, genetic drift is fairly non-Darwinian, at least as far as the term is concerned: it does not involve natural selection.