Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

Change is the right word.

Like it was for Obarmy. Fancy winning an election on a slogan of Change when there is nothing anybody can do to stop change. Not for a micro-second.

Lets assume that extinction wasn't such a driver of "tweaking", natural selection would, no doubt, produce an AIDS virus that would proliferate but WOULD NOT ultimately destroy its hosts.

Yes, it is a valid instance of intelligent design ... and you can neither deny the existence of the intelligence, nor the act of design.
So, the ID is not 'without evidences' ... as you are trying to present it.


What about your evidences. Take for example the Cyanobacteria. The only evidence that they can represent is that they have existed by that time ... only this and nothing else. They are neither evidencing evolution of the species nor the winding off of the big bang theory. They are not even evidencing that they are the main cause for the slight outbalance in the CO2 cycle having lead to the reduction of CO2 in the air in the next 150-200 MN years.
What is more, they are not evidencing that they are the origin of the later organisms.
All in all they are just A-nother brick in the wall (the system of the pseudo-scientific misrepresentation of the things).

That's certainly not evidence. Its circular.
Q." How do you know that the planet was Intelligently Designed??"


A.Because the Intelligent Designer said so.

Youd get chewed up in cross.

It is circular because you put words into Herald's mouth designed to make it circular. That's circular.

The correct answer, as you know, or you should do after having been informed of it many times over the years, is "We don't. Nobody does."

Which leaves a rhetorical struggle between those who are sure there is ID and those who are sure there isn't. And despite having very tempting arguments, assuming they are superficial as they are when personal, your side is getting pissed on. And will continue to be.

Perhaps you enjoy getting pissed on.

Oh--that's alright then.

And surely extinction is an important driver of adjustments. The large mammals that roamed what is now called America 15,000 years ago went extinct.

I assume that the average American organism considers him or herself to be a bit more than a tweak of the people who hunted those mammals to extinction.

Not that Andy Warhol did mind you.

for 15 minutes he did.

May I get a sample of your brain tissue?

What do you want? Blood?

Indeed change is a better description, but there are long term trends, such as cephalisation, which led some philosopher like Bergson or Teillar de Chardin to see progress in Darwinian evolution.

IMO the cephalisation trend leads to intelligence. The emergence of species with greater and greater info analysis and prediction capacities was bound to happen provided the system was allowed to evolve long enough without massive disruptions from, say, big meteorites clashing in or some other global catastrophes.

Id take that one step farther back by saying that the road to everything (evolutionarily speaking) had to pass through bilateral symmetry.Several body plans were tried during the Vendean and bilateral seemed to win out as being the most successful. Radial symmetry is usually reserved ONLY for water life , even after this body style showed the development of a "head"

BTW Teilhard was an old fraud who, based on his own needs (whatever they were)used some of his own skullduggery to keep the
legend of "Piltdown Man" alive .Ich Suchte Adam (1954) HE provided Dawson with hunks of "treated' jawbone ostensibly from "Eoanthropus dawsoni"

Construction and destruction are linked, if this is what you're pointing out. BTW, there are HIV strains who don't kill their host, or very slowly. These strains are probably the oldest. They enjoy a strong advantage over more deadly strains in an environment where most sex happen within faithful couples, or between people wearing condoms, because in such an environment a deadly strain could die with its host before being transmitted to a new host a bit too often. This advantage is reduced or nil in more promiscuous cultures.

A Darwinian argument can thus be made that the sexual liberation of the 60's helped randomly-appearing deadly HIV strains survive, develop and propagate. This should please Spendi.

just like the Spanish flu morphed into a less virulent form that didn't use the hosts own immune system to kill.

HIV is generally subclinical among the initial hosts like monkies

There's zero evidence of that. Teihlard was more likely a victim of the fraud than a co-perpetrator. He's involvement was very short and minor. I respect Gould as a scientist but his police credentials are unimpressive.

Gould had nothing to do with the bit of forensics of which I spoke. He only did a brief summary article in 1989 of work that predated his article by at least 3 decades. As we know Kenneth Oakley L G Clark and J Weiner did the forensics on several facial bone specimens that were "hooked up by chemical treatment" as to represent one individual . These specimens were actually collected by Woodward Dawson, AND Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , and Arthur Keith (another but important member of the group). The skull segments and jawbone were all treated with K Dichromate to artificially "age them" and, in their submission to the Bulletin of the British Museum, Oakley presented "all the evidence for a perfectly executed and carefully prepared fraud".The one who had the most training in the application oof Dichromate "dye" was, of course teilhardThere was the fact that Teilhard did digging at a site with Dawson and Woodward . AND there was a single artifact (a tooth) that Teilhard supplied to the entire reconstruction of the "Eoanthropus face"
Oakley, in his article did not openly implicate the main trio (and Keith) as the perps in print but the entire story was well known because Teilhard had submitted one of the skullcaps with his own initials on the sample (UNDER the dichromate"sheen"., which was applied by one of his expertise, and of course, there was the tooth.
.
This was in 1953.
In Frank Spencers 1990 book Piltdown,A Scientific Forgery, Spencer presents several detailed account of how several earlier workers had implicated Teilhard as being one of the key perps in the hoax.
Among the earlier "anti-Teilhard' critics was Louis Leakey who considered the available field data and the "found canine tooth" that was supplied by Father Pierre. Leakey had interviewed Tielhard ( who was claiming innocence to the fraud to the public ).
Leakey claimed that Teilhard (and this was a few months before his sudden death), had all but admitted to being a key partner in the hoax.
In Teilhard's defense, he claimed that(many years after the deaths of the other perps), Dawson showed Teilhard a different site than the Piltdown dig. So his "canine" which was married with the loer jawbone of Piltdown, wasn't even from the correct site. So Teilhard implied that he was , also a victim of the hoax.Thhat did not make sense at all. Even if it were a wrong site, how then , could Teilhard "marry" the tooth to the jaw? DID HE SUPPLY THE ORIGINAL JAW?

Spensers book is much more a dispassionate assembly of the "preponderance of evidence'' against several of the cast of characters and the data surrounding the case. Teilhard is only one whose looked at under a scope

Gould was only one of many who implied that the priest wasn't practicing his vows . Was Teilhard merely trying to become a media sensation?

Teilhard found the canine during a brief visit to Dawson, who organised a joint search and instructed Teilhard to search in a particular area of the site. It is quite possible that the canine was planted there by Dawson himself, in order to butress his claim. Teilhard left soon thereafter and never saw the tooth fited on the jaw. He was not involved in the 'discovery'of the jaw, which took place months before.

There's been many theories but there's no conclusive evidence against Teilhard. I think he was duped like the amateur he was at the time. He was 32, and older palantheologists were also duped.

I think SPencers more reasoned discussions have layed open the very questions that you cant rectify.
Whence the tooth? Teilhrd also presented the second segment of a "frontal section of skull' that was also treated with the dichromate and "married' with the whole specimen
Teilhard was the one who volunteered the information about the Barcombe Mills v Piltdown sites , why?
Teilhrds "semi" admission to Louis Leakey, (although he didn't implicate himself directly, Leakey was convinced as to what he was said. This was recounted to Phillip Tobias,research Director of uni of Witwatersraand. LEakey wanted to publish re: Teilhard's involvement and was talked out of it by his wife. (Spenser didn't hold back though)

Remember, much of the leadership "apologetics" over the priest were by his relatives .
I think its a "conspiracy theory" that I find interesting and the evidence against the man, compelling.
Too many other personalities have presented us with first hand evidence . I hadn't read Gould's article in Nat History, but I did read this first hand evidence by Herbert Wendt (he interviwed Oakley), Spencer, Oakley, and the text from the interview of Teilhard by Louis Leakey as told by Phillip Tobias (it was a disclosure made by Tobias after Leakey's death in 72)

I have no reason to suspect all these people with their first hand accounts

In Leakey's interview with Teilhard, Leakey recounted that Teilhard stated that Dawson wasn't the "leader". Even if Teilhard was not in the core of the hoax, he was deep in it with his own "first hand knowledge"

It didn't please me at all. It caused pubs to wash all the glasses after every pint which resulted in us all getting as many doses of soap as pints consumed and an increase in the price.

In an article about Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Joseph Ratzinger wrote--