The Bathroom Wall

Johnny Davison,

Re #20913 & 15: Judging by the picture on your homepage you've probably got a few years on me, but not more than 20 or 30. For the record, I'm 63. You are ?

Robert W. Maurus

In the last 49 hours we have had a unsuspected mutation in the troll posts

DaveScot 128 words
John A. Davison 5438 words
DonkeyKong 0 words

This is a dramatic change from DaveScot's previous postings
numbers below are words per minute

1st 2nd 3rd 4th
DS 1.39 1.26 1.44 .04
JAD .95 2.31 1.44 1.85
DK 2.18 7.25 .60 0.00

Total # of words in comments for 39,221 making the troll ratio at ~14%
Still well worth the filtering so I don't listen to JAD's comments

They tell me I'll be 77 in June. What do I know anyway?

As for DaveScot, it seems that the establishment here has managed, by practicing some pretty shabbly tactics, like removing vowels and deleting whole posts, to convince him that he is wasting his time with you. I for one am sorry to see him go for reasons that need no explanation.

Apparently Wayne Francis has managed to count words, a remarkable demonstration of computer technology and a silent commentary on his intellectual powers. He can count words but he cannot read or comprehend them. Or is it that he will not read and comprehend them? The fact that he DOES NOT speaks volumes concerning his willingness to engage in the purposes set forth by the founders of Panda's Thumb.

John A. Davison, unfair as always, clearly unbalanced and judged to be senile, yet still not only unafraid to confront the Darwinian hoax but anxious to continue in that crusade against the forces of ignorance for the rest of his limited time on this planet. He has absolutely nothing better or more important to do.

John A. Davison, unfair as always, clearly unbalanced and judged to be senile, yet still not only unafraid to confront the Darwinian hoax but anxious to continue in that crusade against the forces of ignorance for the rest of his limited time on this planet. He has absolutely nothing better or more important to do.

— John A. Davison

In the last 49 hours we have had a unsuspected mutation in the troll posts DaveScot 128 words John A. Davison 5438 words DonkeyKong 0 words

Friday, March 18, 2005 · Last updated 4:49 p.m. PT

Republican leader apologizes for Holocaust remarks during stem cell debate

By REBECCA COOK
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- State House Minority Leader Bruce Chandler apologized Friday for remarks other Republicans made earlier in the week comparing embryonic stem cell research to the Holocaust.

In the interest of accuracy I did not describe Darwin's work as a hoax. I described Darwinism as a hoax. I feel that way about most isms, communism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, uniformitarianism, gradualism, mutationism, selectionism, biblical creationism, you name it. You see, like Albert Einstein, I am a Spinozan. While Christianity offers a fine ethic, it is obviously not often practiced, certainly not on this forum. Here the primary effort seems to be to protect, by whatever means that prove necessary, including post deletion, thread closure and personal denigration, the biggest failure in the history of science from the criticisms and exposures of some of the finest minds of two centuries.

John A. Davison

Thus piety motivated the research that eventually overturned the teleological view of nature.

Meaning is something everyone finds within themselves. It's not a "thing" that exists externally.

I admit I'm also a bit disturbed by the tacit adherence to Pravda.

In the interest of accuracy I did not describe Darwin's work as a hoax. I described Darwinism as a hoax. I feel that way about most isms, communism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, uniformitarianism, gradualism, mutationism, selectionism, biblical creationism, you name it. You see, like Albert Einstein, I am a Spinozan. While Christianity offers a fine ethic, it is obviously not often practiced, certainly not on this forum. Here the primary effort seems to be to protect, by whatever means that prove necessary, including post deletion, thread closure and personal denigration, the biggest failure in the history of science from the criticisms and exposures of some of the finest minds of two centuries.

— John A. Davison

While I will not claim that I know enough to comment on the technical details here, I have to admit I am amused by the use of Bertrand Russel quotes by John A Davison. Here is a little quote by Mr. Russel and how would it fit in with Mr Davison's arguments?

It appears that during those ages when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, Omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach his goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modem theologians do not tell us. Religion and Science (1961) p. 73

Taking modern science to be incompatible with a teleological view of nature = adherence to Pravda?

I don't think so. I wonder if we're all defining our terms the same way. The teleological view we're talking about, at least the way I read it, is Paleyism, which is what the ID movement wants to bring back.

They tell me I'll be 77 in June. What do I know anyway?

Am I to infer from this that the correct view of nature is one totally without meaning?

— luminous beauty

Meaning is something everyone finds within themselves. It's not a "thing" that exists externally.

Well thank you Zillinger. The picture is about 6 years but and I am aging rapidly from dealing with homozygous Darwinians.

As for Bertrand Russell, he is also the same man who accused president Kennedy of war crimes. Of course he was then ninety or so.

I like this one by Russell

"Ascertainable truth is partial, piecemeal, uncertain and difficult."

That is except for Darwinians.

John A. Davison

If the absence of teleology in nature implies fatal meaninglessness, we're screwed indeed. What does that have to do with the truth of the matter?

Religious conservatives are such relativists!

Mr. Davison:

Does your failure to respond to me in your last post mean that you're not willing to answer my question?

:)

Back in the Dark Ages, circa 1953, grammar school kids in California were shown nature films put out by the Moody Institute. The narration for these films had a theistic slant---the Moody Institute was a church outfit---but the quality of the photography was very good. The producers wanted kids to come away with a conviction that the clever adaptations depicted in the films were evidence of providence, but it wasn't hard to draw different conclusions. The point is, anything that makes children seriously interested in living things and motivates them to learn more real science undermines Creationism and Intelligent Design. There's a pattern here. The great naturalists of the 18th Century certainly believed that they were uncovering the hand of God in the works of nature. Thus piety motivated the research that eventually overturned the teleological view of nature.

— Jim

The vast majority of Americans believe that we are not here by accident and our lives are not meaningless.

Jan:

Even an accident can be meaningful.

I never said or intimated that life is meaningless. That's somebody else's take on things. The absence of a creator doesn't make automatically make life meaningless, and it's not obvious why the reality of a creator would guaranteee that it was meaningful.

I don't know about more recent Moody Institute movies. I saw lots of the old ones. It may in fact be true that they work as desired---they are, of course, sheer propaganda produced with the contempt for truth usual in fundamentalists---but if the films actually get people to learn real science, they will turn out to be counterproductive from the point of view of their sponsors since the serious study of living things inevitably leads to the realization that animals and plants were not designed by anybody. After all, as I wrote above, the folks who eventually worked out an evidence-based account of life began as believers in divine design until the facts changed their minds.

Socrateaser

I can't speak for what Spinoza may or may not have meant. I have said many times that Intelligent Design is a given without which there can be no rational discussion of anything in the universe. I cannot imagine why it is even being debated.

When you ask if my hypothesis involves a role for a Designer you have just proved that you do not know what the word "prescribed" means. Of course a Designer WAS mandatory. That does not mean that one is around at present.

"Let us not invoke God in realities in which He no longer has to intervene. The single absolute act of creation was enough for Him."
Pierre Grasse, page 166

I do not agree with Grasse that creation may have been a single act and I doubt if he would insist on that qualification. Leo Berg, for whom I have enormous repect, postulated "thousands of primary forms." Is anyone prepared to challenge him and if so on what grounds?

"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."
Montaigne

And as the Darwinians continue to demonstrate decade after decade, century after century, by the same author:

"We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled."

John A. Davison

The YECs have been at it for centuries now. The Anti-evolutionists for over one Century. A continuing "species" in the nature of the Evolution of Man that itself, persists.

In the overall scheme of things, they may win out, and the human race will of course go extinct as a result, for lack of it's own ability to adapt to reality, as an ENTIRE species.

Perhaps that is the way it will be after all.

I agree completely that God could easily say "Let there be..." and install the evolutionary process. The problem is with the evidence. It is lacking. I see the evidence for change over time as far as adaptation is concerned and change within a species. Our Creator did a marvelous job of creating each creature with just what was needed for survival. Every creature is stamped with Intelligent Design. If I had never met or heard of God, I would be able to see that. On the other hand, I do not see the evidence for the great leaps that evolutionist claim. The chances are overwhelmingly against a lizard becoming a bird or any other change of that nature. Anyway, I do not believe that those of you who are so adamant against having the words creation or intelligent design used in a classroom are being honest when you say, "God can direct creation through that mechanism". If you really believed that happened, would you be so angry at the mention of a creator. As for life having meaning if it is just random chance that we are here, I do not agree. If that is true, you and I are worth little more than the grass in the field. In a few generations, the VAST majority will be remembered no more. The good that we attempt often harms rather than helps those around us. Seldom a day goes by when we are not misunderstood by someone around us. Prisons, asylums, hospitals, nursing homes, hospice centers, & homeless shelters in every city around the world are full and still there are people who need care. Surely we are in a fallen state. It is only through the hope of a Savior who has paid a price and redeemed us that we find peace, hope, and a future. We gain our worth and dignity from the Creator who made us in His image and who taught us to love by first loving us. I do not think that I will ever by able to understand why some of you not only will not acknowledge that the world is full of evidences of a Creator, but the biggest mystery is why you seem to prefer that there be no higher power. How could anyone not want the love of God as shown to us by His Son? He came that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly. He came because He loves us and is not willing that any should perish. I owed a debt I could not pay, He paid a debt he did not owe.

According to Rupert, "Evolution is modification followed by natural selection - the modification may look random or accidental, but surely God can direct creation through that mechanism. It's a matter of belief whether you think 'random' is truly random or in fact the actions of a subtle deity. It doesn't affect what we see and how it works."

Rupert how are you using the words "random" and "accidental?"

When cells divide, the daughter-cell sometimes has a genome that is different than that of the parent-cell. When this happens, scientists tend to say the daughter-cell "has a new mutation." I would like a better understand of the kinds of events that cause "mutations." However, it is clear that events cause daughter-cells to be different than their parent-cells. At least I wouldn't understand what "an uncaused event" would be. Moreover, the phenomenon of daughter-cells with different genomes (than those of their parent-cells) happens frequently -- factoring in all organisms on earth, it might happen as often as 10% of all divisions. RNA-based lytic viruses average one new mutation per division. Humans average about 2 new mutations per sexual generation among coding genes and perhaps about 100 to 200 across the entire genome. Here is a link to the abstract of an article by Dr. John W. Drake, of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, on mutation rates that appeared in 1999 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10415476&dopt=Abstract

Although the vast majority of new mutations did not make the organism more likely or less likely to reproduce, some mutations immediately have helped some organisms reproduce. For instance, some strains of bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics. Although mutations that have immediately helped organisms reproduce are probably a small percentage of all mutations, one should keep in mind that "small percentage" is relative a term here. 3.8 billion years is a long time! In short, mutations that have enhanced an organisms' reproductive ability have occurred billions of times. Also, mutations that have not helped organisms reproduce (such as blue eyes in humans) have stayed present in a population. In fact, even mutations that might have made some organisms less apt to reproduce have stayed within a population over long periods of times. For instance, the mutation that causes tay-sachs(sp?) disease.

We do understand some of the kinds of events that cause mutations. Exposure to certain levels of radiation is an example. Elements like viruses getting lodged within the cell when it divides is another. And events that affect the mother (for instance, her diet) can cause her fetus to have new mutations. And probably mundane events such as the friction that occurs during cell-division. Abrupt movements probably also contribute. Maybe something as mundane as gravity. Also, a particular rate of mutation has helped some populations of organisms reproduce more frequently than other populations.

On a different note, billions of organisms and genetic sequences were caused by meiosis, sexual reproduction and genetic recombination -- or "MeSexRecomb." In fact, what we would identify as "sexual reproduction" has caused, or significantly contributed to, the existence of nearly every organism on earth with sex organs.

Sexual reproduction evolved perhaps between 1.5 billion and 600 million years ago. When organisms sexually reproduce, the offspring's genome is always different (sometimes with more nucleotides) than its mother genome and its father genome -- even if the offspring is born without one single new mutation. As most posters here know, in sexually reproducing organisms, a process called meiosis occurs. For instance, in the human male's testes, cells carrying the father's 46 chromosomes divide so that they have only 23 chromosomes. They are a mish-mash of the father's 46 chromosomes. This also happens with the mother. The offspring inherits the two clusters of 23 when a cell with the father's 23 fertilizes a cell with the mother's 23. The two clusters never blend. The fertilized cell divides, and the offspring is formed. The offspring has the two clusters of 23 in each of its cells. The two clusters stay separate -- but close together -- in the nucleus of each cell. When the fertilize cell divides (in, for instance, the uterus of the female), it sometimes "mutates" -- it sometimes results in a disanalogous daughter-cell. Sometimes a disanalogous daughter-cell gets copied over and over, and the offspring ends up having this mutation in all -- or most -- of its cells.

We know that, once sexual reproduction evolved, MeSexRecomb caused -- or contributed to -- the existence of nearly every sexual reproducing organism on earth. MeSexRecomb has some huge advantages over cell-division. In cell-division, the new organism has had a novel genome only about 10% of the time; however, in sexual reproduction, the offspring always has a novel genome. Every time. That is one reason we care so much about whom we mate with. We contribute half of the chromosomes; our mate contributes the other half. Another advantage of MeSexRecomb is that it enables organisms to develop in the womb of the mother before they are thrust out into the cold cruel world. Except in Star Trek, something as complex as the human brain could not have come about with mere asexual reproduction and mutation.

However, in sexually reproducing organisms, how much of the differences among organisms were caused by MeSexRecomb verses "division-mutation?" Has MeSexRecomb been the driving force? Or have MeSexRecomb and division/mutation been about equally important? I tend to think it has been the driving force. It always results in novel genotypes, and the differences that come from MeSexRecomb tend to be much more significant than the differences that come through division-mutation. In the former, you are adding two new clusters of genes every single time. And, remember, we are talking about massive lengths of time. None of us has a concept of 600 million years. Maybe the question is unimportant since we know that both processes (MeSexRecomb and division-mutation) have contributed significantly to the differences among sexually reproducing organisms. For instance, we know that MeSexRecomb has played the central role in causing the differences between the dogs at the big dog show at Madison Square Garden. However, the phenomenon of humans with blue eyes was most definitely caused during a cell-division.

The problem is with the evidence [for evolutionary processes]. It is lacking. I see the evidence for change over time as far as adaptation is concerned and change within a species.

The chances are overwhelmingly against a lizard becoming a bird or any other change of that nature.

I should add that, for sexually reproducing organisms, recessive genes have been a hugely important part of evolution. Some traits come to be only if the offspring inherits gene X from its mother and from its father.

According to Jan, "On the other hand, I do not see the evidence for the great leaps that evolutionist claim."

Jan, here is a link to some of the data that enable one to understand that all organisms on earth share a common ancestry: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
------

According to Jan, "The chances are overwhelmingly against a lizard becoming a bird or any other change of that nature."

Jan, first dinosaurs -- not lizards -- evolved into birds. Also, that a particular kind of event does not occur frequently does not enable us to justifiably believe that it never occurred. Sometimes events that don't happen often do happen occasionally. For instance, people win the lottery.

Also, I'm not surprised that once cells came into being that they evolved into neat things. We are talking about enormously long periods of time. People don't have a concept of 4 billion years. Also, there was lots and lots of water on early Earth. Water is key for life as we know it. The Sun is an amazing source of energy.

Also, here is an interesting excerpt from the intro to the physicist Richard Feynman's book Six Easy Pieces (a book that I highly recommend):

"Once, during a public lecture, Feynman was trying to explain why one must not verify an idea using the same data that suggested the idea in the first place. Seeming to wander off the subject, Feynman began talking about license plates. 'You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!'"

"Once, during a public lecture, Feynman was trying to explain why one must not verify an idea using the same data that suggested the idea in the first place. Seeming to wander off the subject, Feynman began talking about license plates. 'You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!'"

— Longhorn

Russell, Will you read ...

I have not heard any of you address the matter of all evolutionary activity ending at the same level for each different specie sic.

some are much further evolved than others

Here are a few other problems that your theory presents....

"Would you not agree that using this type of logic proves absolutely nothing? What has that got to do with whether or not a dinosaur became a bird as you say?"

I have seen various scenarios on different websites. Evolutionist do not seem to be in agreement on just how this random selection worked to produce all the many different species.

In much of the popular literature on evolution when the issue of "evolutionary mechanisms" is discussed, there is too much focus on "mutation" and not enough focus on what I'm calling MeSexRecomb. (I don't like the phrase "mechanism." What is a "mechanism?" But that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)

Obviously, there was a time when there was no sexual reproduction. Cells divided, and sometimes the daughter-cell had a different genome than that of its parent-cell. Sometimes with more nucleotides.

But once sexual reproduction evolved, it made a huge impact on life on earth. Sexual reproduction is amazing. It causes new genotypes and phenotypes every single time. And the difference between offspring and their parents tends to be much greater than the difference between a parent-cell and its daughter-cell. Look at those dogs at that dog show in Madison Square Garden. They are so darn different. And the most recent common ancestor that chihuahuas and Saint Bernards share is less than 5,000 years old. I suspect that much of those differences were caused by MeSexRecomb, because dogs are bread and dogs inherit half of their chromosomes from their mom and half from their dad. But that is not to say that "mutation" was not important. They were both important. It is just that MeSexRecomb gets overlooked.

In fact, in that list of scientists the Discovery Institute put out, it doesn't even mention genetic recombination! That's one more reason, that list is ambiguous. Where would we be without genetic recombination?! We wouldn't be!
----

It's also important to talk about the origin of new genes. Where did they come from?

According to Ernst Mayr,

"A bacterium has about 1,000 genes. A human has perhaps 30,000 functional genes. Where did all these new genes come from? They originate by duplication, with the duplicated gene inserted in tandem in the genome next to the sister gene. Such a new gene is called a paralogous gene. At first, it will have the same function as the sister gene. However, it will usually evolve by having its own mutations and in due time it may acquire functions that differ from those of its sister gene. The original gene, however, will also evolve, and such direct descendents of the original gene are called oorthologous genes. In homology studies only orthologous genes may be compared.

"Additions to the genome come not only by the duplication of single genes, but sometimes through the duplication of groups of genes, whole chromosomes, and entire chromosome sets. For instance, a special mechanism, involving the kinetochores, can lead to a duplication of chromosome sets in certain orders of mammals, leading to variable chromosome numbers in these orders. Lateral transfer is another way for addition to the genome" (What Evolution Is, p. 108-9).

Most scientists include gene duplication under "mutation." Some don't. I don't think it's important -- except pedagogically. Sometimes it is better to spell things out. And by separating "gene duplication" from "mutation," maybe we can better help people understand evolution.

Some genomes consist of more base pairs than do others. Here are some numbers:

1. Bacteria have .004 X 10(9) That is supposed to be 10 to the ninth power

2. Yeast .009 X 10(9)

3. Fruit Fly .18 X 10(9)

4. Newt 19.0 X 10(9)

5. Human 3.5 X 10(9)

6. Lungfish 140.0 X 10(9)

7. Flowering plant (Fritillaria) 130.0 X 10(9) (What Evolution Is, p. 38).

Some of those number are out of date. Also, it's interesting that newts, lungfish and certain flowering plants have more base pairs than do humans. Of course, many of those base pairs aren't "coding."
------

It's also important to talk about what scientists call "Natural Selection." I often don't like when that phrase is used because it seems to not be as good as some other language in terms of getting people to understand evolution. So, I'll just spell out what Charles Darwin seemed to mean by "Natural Selection": That some organisms have reproduced more times than some other organisms contributed significantly to the existence of every organism to live on earth subsequent to the first primordial cells.

What reason is there to believe that vayring levels of reproductive success contributed signficantly to the existence of each organism to live on earth subsequent to the first primordial cell(s)?

First, all organisms to live on earth descended from a single-celled microorganism that lived about 3.8 billion years ago.

Second, organisms have been reproducing (either via cell-division or sexual reproduction) for about 3.8 billion years. When cells divide, the daughter-cell often is different --- in terms of genotype and phenotype -- than the parent cell. When organisms sexually reproduce, the offspring is always is different --- in terms of genotype and phenotype --- than either of its parents.

Finally, some organisms have reproduced more times than other organisms.

I have not heard any of you address the matter of all evolutionary activity ending at the same level for each different specie. Would you not expect one variety to be far ahead of others? If that is true, then also, would homo sapiens all be equal on this evolutionary ladder? It would appear to me that the very nature of evolution would mean that some are much further evolved than others, but then we would get into the matter of equality...oops. How do you deal with that?

Here are a few other problems that your theory presents. Are not the words "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" a basis for justice in America? Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments?

Whether you admit it on this web-site or whether you do not, you are advocating radical change in many more areas of our lives than just education when you want to do away with the concept of a Creator. You cannot teach children that there is not Intelligent Design in our Universe and no evidence of a Creator and then expect them to live their lives as if there is a higher power to whom they are accountable. We must be reasonable. If you are going to insist that children be totally deprived of any knowledge of Intelligent Design, then society will have to accomodate the outcome of that decision.

And by separating "gene duplication" from "mutation," maybe we can better help people understand evolution.

Jan writes:

"Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments?"

Actually even the most traditional of the founders would have wondered about the Judeo part of your comment---Judeo-Christian is a distinctly modern phrase that has about as much business appearing in an 18th Century context as microwave popcorn. Anyhow, many of the founders were Enlightenment types who (horrors!) were self-proclaimed citizens of the world and free thinkers. it's hard to imagine modern fundamentalists having anything to do with a modern version of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or even that Freemason Washington. Religious orthodoxy has only been promoted as the basis of the Republic since we underwent an ideological counterrevolution, which can be conveniently labelled the enmerdement.

Mr. Davison:

I think you have me confused with someone who wishes to pick a fight with you. I was merely browsing the neighborhood and I came across a site where the entire world is locked in an apparent struggle to the philosophic death over whether or not evolution is a reasonably accurate presentation of the development of life on Earth.

I have no idea what your position is, other than what you tell me here, so for you to suggest that I have just proved that I don't know what "prescribed" means, is a bit premature (and frankly, unnecessarily nasty), because even now, I haven't a clue as to what you are talking about.

Regarding Spinoza -- you brought him up, not me -- describing yourself as aligned with his philosophy, so it seemed pretty fair for me to ask you if you believed in a designer, because Spinoza's philosophy rejected a designer.

However, the remainder of your post now reveals to me that you take a designer as a given, therefore I take you at your word as to your position, regardless that you may have previously mischaracterized yourself as a "Spinozan."

So, now, to my next question: Is this self-evident designer a supernatural entity, not subject to the physical properties of this universe, or is the designer, as Arthur C. Clark would have said, so advanced that his/her/it's technology is the practical "equivalent of magic?"

:)

Re "Except in Star Trek,"

I hope nobody gets their info on evolution from there. I like the show(s), but in some episodes that involved evolution, they got it totally wrong. Either they didn't bother consulting a biologist, or they ignored what advice they got.

Henry

Jan writes " Are not the words "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" a basis for justice in America? Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments? "

Jan apparently doesn't realize the use of the term "Creator" reflects the deism of the founding fathers, not the Christian God.

Well Jan lets examine your question" Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments?

1st Commandment: I am the Lord God who brouaht you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other Gods before me.

Is that a Law Jan? No.

2nd Commandment: Remember the Sabbath and keep it Holy.

Is that a Law Jan? No.

3rd Commandment: Do not make unto me any graven images.

Is that a Law Jan? No.

4th Commandment: Do not take the name of the Lord in vain.

Is that a Law Jan? No.

5th Commandment: Honor thy father and mother

Is that a Law Jan? No.

6th Commandament: THou shall not murder.

Is that a Law Jan? Yes!!! Of course that law is hardly unique to Judeo-Christian ethics.

7th COmmandment: Thou shall not commit adultery.

Is that a Law Jan? No.

8th Commandment: THou shall not steal.

Is that a Law Jan? Yes!!! Of course that law is hardly unique to Judeo-Christian ethics.

9th Commandment: Thou shall not bear false witness.

Is that a Law Jan? Yes!!

10the Commandment: Thou shall not covet.

Is that a Law Jan? No.

See lets see, out of the 10 commandments, only 3 are actual laws.

Yes I can see why you say our laws are based on them.

Jan said,

Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments?

You mean the commandments that explicitly condone slavery?

Let's take a look at the 10th commandment, shall we?

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife,
nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that
is thy neighbour's.

So amongst the possessions that we should not covet are our neighbors' manservants
and maidservants. If they are not slaves, then what are they? If manservants/maidservants
are not slaves, but instead are hired help (i.e. employees), then does not the 10th commandment
forbid me from offering my neighbor's manservant/maidservant a raise to come work for me? Are
you seriously suggesting that this should really be part of the foundation of our nation's legal
system?

10the Commandment: Thou shall not covet. Is that a Law Jan? No.

Jan asks:

Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments?

In fact, no. The source of the American legal system is not "natural law" or the Ten Commandments (and which ten is an interesting question itself). Nor, in fact, is our legal system based solely, or even primarily, on the Constitution.

Our legal system is based primarily on English common law. Common law is law made by judges, arising from the generalization of principles announced to decide particular cases. The majority of what we think of as the law, and what governs most legal decisions, is either common law or codification (i.e., legislative re-enactment) of common law.

This is what I hate about those who decry "activist judges making law." It shows vast, vast ignorance about the law, ignorance that could easily be cured by reading a general introduction to the law or (heaven forbid!) asking a lawyer. Judges make law all the time. They're supposed to make law. They're authorized to do so. Truth be told, our legal system would come to a screeching halt if they didn't.

Socraateaser

It is Dr. not Mr. Davison.

My mistake was to assume that someone who participates in a discussion on evolution might be expected to have some familiarity with the publications of those with whom he is trying to communicate.

I also do not believe for a moment that Spinoza's philosophy rejected a designer as I don't think he even broached the subject of the harmony in nature in those terms.

As far as i am able to tell the Designer is dead or at least not active. I also object to the term supernatural. Everything in nature is (or was) by definition natural or it wouldn't have been there. That is why I, like Einstein again, have rejected metaphysics along with all the rest of philosophy.

I regard it as insane to arbitrarily assume that certain matters are unknowable. I foresee no obvious limits to what may prove to be knowable. We certainly have yet to even scratch the surface of the causes and properties of even the simplest living systems. To think otherwise, as the Darwinians most certainly do, is arrogant.

Maybe you are correct. Maybe I am not a Spinozan. It is only what I am not that is significant anyway. I can tell you that I am most certainly not a Darwinian, not one who would deny design, order and purpose in the universe when we see that all around us everywhere we look. I am not one who would claim, as Gould did, that "intelligence was an evolutionary accident," or one who could accept Dawkin's "Blind Watchmaker" or "Selfish Gene" or "Climbing Mount Improbable." How anyone can escapes me.

Now, having rejected all of the previous and I have, and if you are correct in saying I am not a Spinozan, I guess I am in pretty sad straits, wandering around in some sort of intellectual no-man's-land. Well I am having a great time of it and I have no complaints as long as I can continue to present my heresies in refereed journals and on forums like Panda's Thumb.

"isn't all of philosophy as if written in honey? Something may appear clear at first, but when one looks again it has disappeared. Only the pap remains."
Albert Einstein

John A. Davison

To correct John in 20449,

1. Biological variation and selection is a phenomenon of the present. Numerous similar organisms are at present: a. just barely speciated, sterile hybrids (horses and donkeys) b. Not speciated but widely variant (dogs) c. Intensively varietised and not all hybrids are viable (brassicas). Biological variation in the past also consisted of the formation of subspecies and varieties. No new species, let alone genera were born to mothers that did not recognize their offspring.
2. The purposeful role of obligate sexual reproduction is unknown and unknowable, due to persistent absence of highly speculative purposer. An undeniable feature of it is the rapid dispersal of new variants within the breeding population. Oh, yes! So extremely anti-evolutionary.
3. Allelic substitution reasonably occurred in the past much as it does now. Ubiquitously present and capable of modulation of body shape and structures at least as great as that achieved in dog breeding. To deny any role is of similar magnitude as denying the role of water in protein structures, and a waste of a good tool to understanding.
4. Numerous genetic changes occur in individual organisms as a result of exposure to numerous agents in the environment. This occurs presently and is rather well described. Virually any type of mutation or gross chromosomal rearrangement can be induced by agents presently and previously available in the environment. There is no reason to suspect that it did not occur in the past, nor to imagine that it could not.
5. No data. No creator or tinkerer suggested or demonstrated. No evidence offerred of any deity that does not have a clear anthropic source.
6. The vast majority of contemporary creatures are a hodge-podge. Almost any example organism can be made by selective breeding to resemble its ancestors less than a dog does a wolf. It has not been disproven that further such selection for a different feature would result in organisms yet more different. The immutability of current species is not demonstrated. Present variations in gene sequences appear to be random within the broad constraints that some bases in some sequences are more easily mutated than others by various agents, and more or less well repaired/tolerated.
7. Evolution is irreversible in the way that any chemical reaction is irreversible in fine detail. The egg is not reassembled, big deal. Predetermined, preprogrammed -- by who? Where did they publish? No statement of intent that I can see. Not so sure about finished either. Variation and selection are still going on, major variations of genomes continue to be thrown up, usually as disease states. Presumably the milder ones propagate like human chromosomal rearrangements. Hard to say they absolutely will not be cumulative in the future.
8. The primary role of allelic substitution is unknown. Primacy implies purposeful design, and I don't see enough of that. The outcomes of allelic variation are clear in simple cases and awesomely powerful in extended cases (plant breeding etc). Allelic substitution has been demonstrated to generate greater fitness in response to changing environments, which is not exactly regressive.
9. All of the following are known to occur, and with one exception, to have profound and exemplary effects on organisms structure, metabolism, diet, resistance to disease, capacity to compete/survive:
a. Allelic mutation, including point substitutions, insertions, deletions and truncations.
b. Natural selection is of course slow, but very hard to say it does exist, since we have modeled it with artificial selection which has as pointed out before been used to drastically alter numerous aspects of a large number of model and domestic organisms, including size, the relative sizes and capacities of various organs, the capacity to tolerate novel toxins and disease resistance.
c. Genetic drift, which is demonstrated in model systems to permit a neutral allele (not even advantageous!) to enjoy high representation in a population in less than 100 generations.
d. Population genetics is a human discipline. The majority of biological evolution precedes the development of this field.
e. Competition for scarce resources almost uniformly favours by selection those organisms that can either successfully obtain more of, or use less of, such resource.
f. Frail, weak or small examples of a species die in stiff competition, yet thrive in isolation. Isolation is thus demonstrated as a means of allowing new variants to survive.

In other words, except for a couple of booboos, JAD has listed more demonstrable means of evolution (biological change within lineages, over extended time periods), most published with photos, than most neo-darwinists would bother with.

I think the apples are sweet, John. You would seem to be munching on rocks. No need to thank me for correcting your knowledge of undergrad biology.

Get with the pogrom JAD, you may have a pet theory, it may even be fully compatible with existing knowledge, it may even be correct with respect to contribution to evolution, I may even like parts of it, but you are yet to demonstrate that the existing paradigm is clearly untrue in any experimental respect. The relative importance may vary, but not much.

Rustopher.

Does it bother any of the ID/Creationist crowd that the Catholic Church made its peace with Darwin around 1951? I had always thought that the CC had an edge over any “Creation” Research group in theological sophistication. Or is there another agenda at work here? Perhaps, as crass as it may seem, MONEY! Some obscure American prophet said something to the effect that ‘A sucker is born (reborn, perhaps) every minuite.’ Wish they’d send me some tithes. America held out such promise to the world. Now all we can offer is fear and darkness of mind and spirit. What further proof of evolution does anyone need?

I have always wondered - in private - what would happen to the sciences here if the Wedge were to succeed. Even for one such as myself who studied biology in the memorising mode in high school 25 years back in India it is clear to see how evolution is the unifying principle of biology. In those days I had what was an advanced curriculum (v.detailed explanation of protein synthesis and speciation) but just that. A few years later high schoolers (about 20 years ago) had already started working on Drosophila for simple experiments. Today looking around I see how very different biology instruction is. In India (and I expect in China, Europe, Japan, and most of the US Catholic school districts; and the more progressive public ones) evolution is taken for granted as the unifying principle. All the tools that biologists and scientists who work downstream of them use are evolutionary. So even if one of them has trouble acknowledging the validity of the theory, the tools used will not change. So today the "scientists" (that group of 300 who express "dissent") may decry evolution but continue to work within its principles in ways obvious and many not so obvious. If Dissenter A takes a flu shot, he is benefiting from the successful application of the principles of evolution. When Dissenter B cites a peer's paper to further his own research he is acknowledging the validity of evolution. How long will this go on before some "dissenter" decides that evolition being the "orthodoxy" or "19th century science" is useless and takes the bold step of using his crackpot principles to do "science". In modern times the only known example of such large scale lunacy is the adventures of Lysenko that are said to have set Soviet agriculture back by a few decades. What is the worst that could happen? How fast is it happening?

The United States isn't old England. Judges are not authorized to make law in the United States. That power is delegated to the legislative branch.

I think one of the more useful functions of PT comments is to show how much of the opposition to evolution (and similar anti-science positions) is facilitated by misunderstandings or confusion about what it actually is. For example, Jan's posts, regardless of their political or philosophical merit, show little understanding of the theory (levels? ladders?). Of course, if evolution is further marginalized in the schools and squeezed out of science museums, I'm not entirely sure what can be done about this.

It would be depressing if popular science education on this topic ends up reduced to sporadic direct-mail campaigns - "Have you heard about the magic of EVOLUTION?" . .

-Dan S.

I think one of the more useful functions of PT comments is to show how much of the opposition to evolution (and similar anti-science positions) is facilitated by misunderstandings or confusion about what it actually is. For example, Jan's posts, regardless of their political or philosophical merit, show little understanding of the theory (levels? ladders?). Of course, if evolution is further marginalized in the schools and squeezed out of science museums, I'm not entirely sure what can be done about this.

It would be depressing if popular science education on this topic ends up reduced to sporadic direct-mail campaigns - "Have you heard about the magic of EVOLUTION?" . .

-Dan S.

sorry about the double-posting! - I got a message saying the original one hadn't gone through . . .

Evolution does not HAVE an "ending" species or process. Thos who understand Evolution realize that it is an ongoing process that continues today. To say that we, or any other species currently alive is an "ending" species betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the process itself.

"Lizard" and "Bird" are current terms, for current forms. Both evolved from very early reptiles which split into two distinct branches. Those who stayed "cold blooded" reptiles and became the "Lizards" of today, and those who became the "warm blooded" Therapods (T-Rex, Velociraptors, etc,) and evolved into modern day "Birds".

Their genetic make goes all the way back to these early reptiles, perhaps 200 million years, and can be seen by the fact that current "Bird" feet skin still shares the same genetic composition of the scales of the "Crocodile".

Fancy that!

We now know that "Man" has existed in six distinct forms, five of which have gone extinct, leaving "us".

What "we" may yet become, remains to be seen. If we continue to remain so ignorant that we ignore this, reject it, and further stifle our own evolution in the process, we will surely go extinct ourselves and become....well....NOTHING but....GONE!

The United States isn't old England. Judges are not authorized to make law in the United States. That power is delegated to the legislative branch.

— Faireth Ken

Kenneth Fair, would you please give us your source for American government studies? I would like to know where you were educated and exactly what text you studied.

Clarification: By "creation" I intended special creation, as oppossed to guided evolution from a common ancestor. Therefore, creation and evolution are mutually exclusive.

— Michael Finley

Whatever problems it poses for you, you'll have to deal with it. Meanwhile, let's agree that our interpretation of the data should not be prescribed by what we think is best for this, that, or the other society.

It would be depressing if popular science education on this topic ends up reduced to sporadic direct-mail campaigns - "Have you heard about the magic of EVOLUTION?" . .

Dr. Davision:

I apologize for the faux pas in failing to recognize your academic achievement (Dr. v. Mr.). I do not apologize for failing to recognize your theory of the development of life. It is, after all, not one of which a non-scientist such as myself would likely be aware.

However, I have now managed to stumble upon your "Manifesto," and after reading it, I have more questions:

1. For arguments sake, would you be satisfied if your theory of "instantaneous speciation" (or some hybrid, thereof) were to be confirmed, simultaneous with the absolute rejection of a "designer?"

2. As I understand it, Darwin stated a means of absolutely falsifying his theory of natural selection. I have read statements by others who claim that his test has, so far, withstood the passage of time. I have no idea whether this is actually true or false, however, I suspect that if it were false, it would be reported by the general media. Do you have a test that would absolutely falsify your theory? If so, what is it?

:)

[Puts quarter into vending machine, gets handful of troll food...]
Jan wrote:
"I have seen various scenarios on different websites. Evolutionist do not seem to be in agreement on just how this random selection worked to produce all the many different species."

Sure. That's *science.* There is debate over the exact details. You don't seem to be very familiar with the basic ideas of evolution, by the way. That's fine, but it would be cool if you went and read up about it.

"I have not heard any of you address the matter of all evolutionary activity ending at the same level for each different specie. Would you not expect one variety to be far ahead of others? If that is true, then also, would homo sapiens all be equal on this evolutionary ladder? It would appear to me that the very nature of evolution would mean that some are much further evolved than others, but then we would get into the matter of equality . . . oops. How do you deal with that?"

Nobody seems to quite understand what you mean; additionally, there are rhetorical flourishes that suggest this is not an honest question. Nevertheless: as pointed out, the "evolutionary ladder" is not a currently accepted concept or metaphor. There do not appear to be a series of specific steps on a single path for species to take (ie, no reason to expect modern toads to evolve into lizards at some future time). It's not even all that useful as a depiction of past events - the image of a branching bush or tree often is more accurate. As pointed out already, "further evolved" isn't really a useful concept - in the absence of any specific goal that science can determine, all you can tell is how much something has or hasn;t changed from an ancestral form.

Different populations of H. sapiens show variation, although this is not a topic I am an expert in. As we can identify no clear goal, we can't really speak of "further evolved," although some groups seem better adapted for, say cold climates and less sunlight while others seem better adapted for warm cliimates with lots of sun. You seem to be trying to imply that evolution suggests or requires racism. That is not correct. Again, statements like "It would appear to me that the very nature of evolution would mean that some are much further evolved than others suggests you have an incomplete understanding of evolutionary theory. It would be both courteous to us, and more useful to your cause, if you reseached this matter further. Aside from www.talkorigins.org and other such sites, there are numerous books available in your local library or bookstore.

"Here are a few other problems that your theory presents. Are not the words "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" a basis for justice in America? Did we not found our legal system on the Judeo Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments? "

Regardless of the merits of these claims, this is not relevent to the scientific discussion.

"Whether you admit it on this web-site or whether you do not, you are advocating radical change in many more areas of our lives than just education when you want to do away with the concept of a Creator."

While I do not believe in a Creator, I have no desire to do away with this concept, nor would I want to convince anyone that they were wrong to hold this concept. More importantly, evolution does not in fact do away with the concept of a Creator, anymore than medicine does. While I don't personally believe this, there is nothing to stop you from believing that God created evolution. There is no scientific evidence for this, but no reason to assume that science would be able to find any.

" You cannot teach children that there is not Intelligent Design in our Universe and no evidence of a Creator and then expect them to live their lives as if there is a higher power to whom they are accountable."

No one intends to teach them this, *especially* not in school! Your concerns on this matter result from a confusion about the nature of evolutionary theory and science in general. Science has yet to determine any evidence for these things, and doesn't get to just assume them, for much the same reasons that day-to-day financial decisions are usually made without the assumption that the Lord will provide. Science classes and other such presentations make the most sense if they reflect actual & current science, just as religious sermons, etc. make the most sense if they deal with religious matters. I wouldn't expect the Bible to tell us much about the details of wildlife preservation, for example (that's science); however, many people may reasonably see it as setting out our responsibilities in this matter.

" We must be reasonable. If you are going to insist that children be totally deprived of any knowledge of Intelligent Design, then society will have to accomodate the outcome of that decision."

Who on earth is insisting that?? That would be entirely unconstitutional!!! Anybody who wishes to raise their child so that they have whatever degree of ID knowledge has both my blessings and (more importantly) the law on their side. All we ask is that folks stop insisting that it be put into public school biology classes without adequate scientific support, which no one seems to have at this point. (Actually, all we ask is that it isn't put into into public school bio classes without, etc. - folks have every right to insist.)

Again, possible consequences (whether likely or not) are not relevant to the scientific argument. If it turned out that chicken soup actually made colds worse, it would have horrible consequences for the status of Jewish folk medicine, not to mention the reputation of Jewish mothers and grandmothers worldwide, but that wouldn't really make a difference in terms of the science, the fact that chicken soup is yummy, or people's overall feelings towards Jewish mothers or grandmothers, individually or in general. I might want to belive that certain organic farming practices are much more productive than conventional ones, based on my feelings about agriculture, but if they're not, they're not, y'know, nor does that mean that organic farming is necessarily 'wrong.' Does this make sense to you?

"Anyway, I do not believe that those of you who are so adamant against having the words creation or intelligent design used in a classroom are being honest when you say, "God can direct creation through that mechanism". If you really believed that happened, would you be so angry at the mention of a creator. As for life having meaning if it is just random chance that we are here, I do not agree. If that is true, you and I are worth little more than the grass in the field."

Dust in the wind . . . All we are is dust is . . . oh, sorry. I just start singing sometimes . . .
You certainly don't have to agree. I'm not cluttering up PT with more of my useless babble on this subject, but if you would like to see part of my argument being discussed by someone with similar view as you, feel free to visit
http://www.greatestpursuits.us/gp/weblog/comments/discussing_the_logic_of_morals_with_dan
I do wish more people would acknowledge, however, that there are people who do see meaning in life despite having pro-evolution views. In other words, that it's clearly *possible,* at least for some, even if perhaps ultimately misguided or something . .

Jan, will you read the 3rd chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes? Or not. Your choice. But yeah, it might be cool to read some good up to date stuff on evolution, etc. - I really liked Darwin's Ghost or Chance in the House of Fate . . .

And anyone, why can't I markup my comments? What am I doing wrong? Is it all just random chance?

-Dan S.

"Would you list the five species of homo sapiens who have become extinct . . ."
Not of H. sapiens - there's only one species of those, by definition!
I assume he's talking about Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, Homo however they're counting Neadertals nowadays, um . . . does H. ergaster count? I haven't paid much attention over the last decade . . . And then there were various australopithecines, etc.

" . . .along with the place where the massive numbers of skeleton remains are being kept? We should have at least as many remains of these races of peoples as we have of dinosaurs. Right? . . ."
Um, probably not. More dinosaurs, for longer, in more places. Not races, species. We have some bones, not near as many as we would like . . ."

"It becomes the a very large problem when men interpret as Hitler did ..."
Yeah, Hitler sucked. Ya think anti-semitism started with Hitler? But let's not get into that. Any sick, twisted wacko can take *anything* and twist it to justify *anything.* So?

"As for the website to which I was directed in order . . ."
Sorry, I posted about how you should research it before I realized you currently were.
You seem to highlight a lot of theories, thinks, thinking, etc. Of course you know that a scientific theory is different from a vernacular, regular English theory, and science is all about best-idea-so-far-works-as-far-as-we-can-tell-seems-pretty-likely, not received Truth, and all that jazz . . ..

I will spend a little time there this week.
Enjoy. However, whoever, whyever, the world is unquestionably an amazing place.

" A look at the constitution would help you see that [it is based in Judeo-Christian ethics]."
No. Just no. At least, not in any way that I can tell, except the most banal and general sense. Most of the constitution is fairly dry procedural stuff. What bits are you talking about?

"slavery . . . was not written into our constitution."
Unfortunately, it was. Frickin' 3/5 compromise! Franklin actually threw his weight behind the anti-slavery movement just before he died . . .wish we could've fixed that at the beginning . . . .

GWW says
"On the other hand, a direct-mail campaign that said "Imagine a world science is banned" would be a good start."

That is a very nifty idea. Hear, hear!

Jan wrote" Kenneth Fair, would you please give us your source for American government studies? I would like to know where you were educated and exactly what text you studied."

Jan I'd like to know where you studied and waht classes you took. Cuz I'm trying to figure how sombody who seems to know something about the Decalogue didn't know what only three of them are laws.

So where did you study Jan?

Or were you just spoonfed by your local preacher?

"slavery . . . was not written into our constitution." Unfortunately, it was. Frickin' 3/5 compromise!

(No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.)

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

(Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.)

Aside from www.talkorigins.org and other such sites, there are numerous books available in your local library or bookstore.

— Dan S.

Darwinism has survived because it is the only acceptable position for a mentality that denies a Creator in any form. It is the mentality of chance and randomness. It's primary spokespersons have been declared atheists like Dawkins, Provine and Gould. In case you haven't noticed, the general media is hardly objective in political matters and Darwinism is very definitely political.

Darwin very definitely did not present a means to falsify his hypothesis and please do not dignifiy it with the word theory. His entire thesis is based on the gradual slow accumulation of changes that could not conceivably be observed in the course of ones lifetime. That assumption renders the entire model untestable and accordingly unscientific. What complicates matters is the undeniable fact that true speciation and the formation of the higher categories cannot be demonstrated at present. I have repeatedly asked for a demonstration of two extant species one of which can be proven to be the ancestor of the other. Even the most strenuous attempts by man to perform such transformations under laboratory conditions have met with dismal failure. All attempts to generate true species through artificial selection of allelic mutants has done nothing but reduce the viability of the terminal products. The experimenter has always had to terminate his efforts with such qualifications as "incipient species." Well, like it or not, incipient species are not species. The experimental tests which I have advocated have never been attempted. They involve not the aquisition of allelic differences through selection but the restructuring of the genome without the introduction of any new information. The sort of mutations involved in this system are not allelic but structural rearrangements such as inversions, translocations and fusions.

The semi-meiotic hypothesis postulates that any such structural rearrangement occurring in any chromosome will automatically be produced in homozygous configuration in one half of the products of that semi-meiotic process. I first presented this hypothesis in 1984. It has yet to be even recognized in the professional literature. I have clearly described both the means and the conditions for the testing of this hypothesis in frogs.

The Darwinians don't even test their own hypothesis of gradualism any more as they have tired of failure. They now just asume that the gradualist position must be true even though that flies in the face of everything we know from both the fossil record and both plant and animal taxonomy.

I have presented my arguments in several published papers and I am not prepared to recapitulate that literature here on this or any other forum. That is what refereed journals are for. Online versions of all my papers except the original 1984 paper are avilable. What is most revealing is the fact that I have been instrumental in presenting very little of the significant literature that was mine alone. My conclusions have rested largely on the insights of my many distinguished predecessors, not one of whom was a Darwinian. I have been driven to the conclusion that evolution WAS an endogenously driven process which was in no way caused by the environment in which that evolution took place but nevertheless served to produce organisms that were adapted to that environment.

My current view is that evolution WAS planned, prescribed, predetermined and now finally more or less completely executed with contemporary man the terminal irreversible product.

The Darwinian paradigm is worthless as an explanation for organic evolution and it must, and soon will be, abandoned as a meaningful instrument of organic change. A summary of my position is presented in my latest paper "A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis," due to appear in the next issue of Rivista di Biologia, probably this summer.

John A. Davison

Katarina -

Don't steal them! They're library books! [tone of shocked horror] That's worse than dog-earing pages!
And anyway, that would be like pulling down campaign signs for a candidate you don't like, but worse (even if the candidate is Sen. Santorum, I struggle to remind myself). Freedom of speech and all . . .

The best thing I can think of is going the misshelved route - arguing they should be shelved with religion instead of bio. Don't know if the ALA (www.ala.org) or anyone else has a position on this - will try to find out.
Perhaps try quietly discussing your concerns with library staff, for a start?

Dan S.

Thanks for giving me a little direction with the web site. I browsed through it, still need to read more. It is against their policy to rate any book on its merit, as I understand it so far.

For now, I will make a list of the books filed incorrectly, and go from there. If I were to write a letter, I wouldn't want to reveal my identity. We live in the Bible Belt of the Midwest and my children will go to school here. I don't want them to be labeled. Also, I really do not have any credentials, I am just a humble undergraduate student majoring in Biology.

LOL You all make me laugh....

"How will we compete against a billion Chinese people who won't deny basic science?"

Let me list the ways in which this is silly.

1) America, the most dominant country in the world, the most christian country in the world, the richest country in the world, the most scientifically advanced country in the world. That America, has to fear from a country that I have lived in but you have probably never visited....Because in your imagination china is somehow superior.

We are the strongest BECAUSE of what we are not IN SPITE of what we are. Do you think 4 PHDs make 1 Einstein? Do you think that smart is a genetic thing and 4 times the people would have 4 times the smarts? Then why are India and China not the intellectual superpowers of the world? Why are the Christian or historically Christian countries dominant while the non-christian countries are not? Surely the 1.2 billion in China are less to fear than the 5 billion not in china and not in the USA...
How about the USSR? Oh my bad that prediction is already disproven so you have moved to another one....

2) As an engineer I have a better understanding of science than those of you who have never actually tried to build something very complex. When building a complex system one learns very quickly that the obvious is almost always false on closer inspection and often the dominant factor in a process is one that no outsider no matter how bright would have guessed it to be. This is something that many scientists who focus on a single process never fully internalize.

For example, America's success may be precisely because religious people are in some way more able to do science (again dig deep here as this is probably not an obvious point to you). As such the ratio of lower mental food chain to higher mental food chain is maintained at a point that for some reason has outperformed the world since the start of this country. We had the first military submarine in the world when we were still a colony for pete sake. What have your chinese been first at in the last 1000 years? Your natural bias towards those who agree with you being right with no further proof than your ego is shining bright today...Hell even modern EVOLUTION was created by DARWIN who was raised a Christian.

I suspect that the reason that religious people make better science judges is because they are willing to believe the silly knowning that it is silly. Creationists believe God created life and their goals are only to find the mechanism. They have no motivation to start inventing LUCA and making silly statements about evolution BEFORE all the data is in. Why? Because they have no invested need for God to have acted in a single instance and are open to the idea that several lifeforms were created rather than just one. Because of this the believer has less bias relative to what happened because God can do either way, the athiest NEEDS LUCA the believers don't. Because the believers, beliefs are more flexible they can more easily imagine alternative outcomes because their belief is already invested in something "silly".

Evolutionists on the other hand don't have this basic moral foundation and are compeled to make silly statements like the one about China that involve complexity far beyond their actual comprehension, prediction or testing. AND THEN THEY BELIEVE IT AS FACT UNAWARE THAT THEY ARE HAVING A RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND THEY WOULD CALL IT SCIENCE AND TRY AND FORCE YOU TO BELIEVE THEIR VERSION OF IT, as was common in athiest USSR, likewise China is NOT open to the truth regarding democracy's superior performance.

That is why on a very basic level, even the ignorant creationists who don't understand where the weaknesses in your argument are, even the least among you, are part of a greater machine that has outperformed your kind for thousands of years. And China, USSR, EU, etc etc etc will not change the outcome because the fundemental value of belief in a all powerful god is a pro-science enabler.

Wow! You seem awfully angry.

Anyway, although you didn't directly respond to either question, my interpretation of your answer is that:

1. No, you would not be satisfied if your theory were to reject the existence of a designer, and

2. You dispute that Darwin ever authored a means of falsifying his hypothesis of natural selection, and, you are not interested in describing to me a means by which to falisfy your semi-meiotic hypothesis.

I'm not really in a position to technically argue your positions with regard to answer #2. I am still in the learning phase, and I have insufficient background to make a credible argument.

As for #1, I don't share your notion that the existence of a cosmic designer is a logical imperative, but, if your biological theories were confirmed, and Darwin's falisfied, I would certainly accept your contribution to science as being landmark.

I would be interested in reading some of your other scholarly work. If you will provide me with some references/links, I would appreciate it.

Thanks for the chat.

DK, your attempt at denigrating Chinese science rings hollow. You're talking about a nuclear-bomb-equipped superpower which puts more graduate students into engineering and physics each year than the U.S.

How long the U.S. can hold an edge over China is a matter of discussion, but if we fail to teach the best science, the Chinese will eclipse us sooner, not later.

Which gets back to one of my favorite questions: In 1957, the wacko right wing in America claimed it was "godless communists" who had hamstrung American science. Now it's the right wing.

Whose side are you really on, DK?

If we Christians lack the moral foundation to suit you, DK, stuff it.

2) As an engineer I have a better understanding of science than those of you who have never actually tried to build something very complex. When building a complex system one learns very quickly that the obvious is almost always false on closer inspection and often the dominant factor in a process is one that no outsider no matter how bright would have guessed it to be. This is something that many scientists who focus on a single process never fully internalize.

2) As an engineer I have a better understanding of science than those of you who have never actually tried to build something very complex. When building a complex system one learns very quickly that the obvious is almost always false on closer inspection and often the dominant factor in a process is one that no outsider no matter how bright would have guessed it to be. This is something that many scientists who focus on a single process never fully internalize.

Katarina -
no rating on merit is a pretty much a good thing - once you start banning books or even slapping big "this is complete BS" stickers on them, it gets ugly. Of course, critical thinking is an important part of that implicit bargin, and we're not always doing that great there . . .

One thing you could do is look at the copyright page of the books, which usually will have a Dewey Decimal number, to see if the book is shelved where that indicates it should be.
I would guess that YEC silliness would definitely be in the 200s or so, but Darwin's Black Box, at least according to the Philly Free Library, is in the 500s. I think the best you can hope for is that outright non-science would be shelved appropriately.

Remember, we don't want to run around restricting learning and information, even if we think quite reasonably that it is complete bullpucky.

2) As an engineer I have a better understanding of science than those of you who have never actually tried to build something very complex. When building a complex system one learns very quickly that the obvious is almost always false on closer inspection and often the dominant factor in a process is one that no outsider no matter how bright would have guessed it to be. This is something that many scientists who focus on a single process never fully internalize.

Here is the list of books filed incorrectly at my library:

Darwin on trial
by Johnson, Phillip E., 1940- Washington, D.C. : Regnery Gateway ; Lanham, MD : Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, c1991. c1991.

Defeating Darwinism by opening minds
by Johnson, Phillip E., 1940- Downers Grove, Ill. : InterVarsity Press, c1997. c1997.

What is creation science?
by Morris, Henry Madison, 1918-
El Cajon, CA : Master Books, c1987. c1987.

Shattering the myths of Darwinism
by Milton, Richard, 1943- Rochester, Vt. : Park Street Press, 1997. 1997.

Icons of evolution : science or myth? : why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong
by Wells, Jonathan.
Washington, DC : Regnery Pub. ; Lanham, MD : Distributed to the trade by National Book Network, c2000. c2000.

Katarina -
no rating on merit is a pretty much a good thing - once you start banning books or even slapping big "this is complete BS" stickers on them, it gets ugly. Of course, critical thinking is an important part of that implicit bargin, and we're not always doing that great there . . .

One thing you could do is look at the copyright page of the books, which usually will have a Dewey Decimal number, to see if the book is shelved where that indicates it should be.
I would guess that YEC silliness would definitely be in the 200s or so, but Darwin's Black Box, at least according to the Philly Free Library, is in the 500s. I think the best you can hope for is that outright non-science would be shelved appropriately.

Remember, we don't want to run around restricting learning and information, even if we think quite reasonably that it is complete bullpucky.

Encouraging the library to buy (or donating yourself, if appropriate) up to date, nifty books about evolution (as in the Dover situation, kinda) is probably the best thing to do; however, find out what policies the library has on donated books, first. Good luck!

Geez, DK is in fine form tonight. I'm actually getting kinda fond of him, in a way . . .

Katarina -
no rating on merit is a pretty much a good thing - once you start banning books or even slapping big "this is complete BS" stickers on them, it gets ugly. Of course, critical thinking is an important part of that implicit bargin, and we're not always doing that great there . . .

One thing you could do is look at the copyright page of the books, which usually will have a Dewey Decimal number, to see if the book is shelved where that indicates it should be.
I would guess that YEC silliness would definitely be in the 200s or so, but Darwin's Black Box, at least according to the Philly Free Library, is in the 500s. I think the best you can hope for is that outright non-science would be shelved appropriately.

Remember, we don't want to run around restricting learning and information, even if we think quite reasonably that it is complete bullpucky.

Encouraging the library to buy (or donating yourself, if appropriate) up to date, nifty books about evolution (as in the Dover situation, kinda) is probably the best thing to do; however, find out what policies the library has on donated books, first. Good luck!

Geez, DK is in fine form tonight. I'm actually getting kinda fond of him, in a way . . .

I'm having problems posting this, and don't see it when I open up the page elsewhere, but if it turns out that I've posted this 7 times, sorry!

-Dan S.

Sorry for the triple post. Sometimes strange things happen here. Guess when the page says "error", I should assume that it will eventually accept my post anyway.

Dan S.

All the books I listed in my most recent comment are in the 500s. But so are all the evolution books. I don't understand why that is the case.

To my library's credit, they do have good up-to-date evolution books. I can donate Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God," as someone has apparently stolen it.

Thank you for your effort, Dan.

If anyone else has advice for me, please e-mail me, as I do not wish to clutter up the comments section.

Your concerns on this matter result from a confusion about the nature of evolutionary theory and science in general.

— Dan S

I thought about stealing the anti-evolution books, but this would be out of character.

— Katrina

" The remarks and the venom that people spew along with the contradictions that are so evident are my concerns"
People are posting for different reasons, out of different concerns, and with different backgrounds. I don't know how many folks here are involved in K-12 science ed. in any meaningful way. Also, both the form and the forum (internet discussions in general, I mean) tend towards more heat then light, sometimes unpleasantly so. I certainly don't agree with all of the remarks every single person on "my side" has uttered. You seem to fear that there is a plot by scientists to teach innocent children that there is no God and life is meaningless. That is not the case - jusst because you think that actual science has certain philosophical implications( which most of your co-religionists reject) doesn't mean that is the case; indeed, the constant insistence by certain parts of the anti-science movement that evolution=no god/meaning seems to me simply bizarre and self-defeating, rather like insisting that if the earth goes around the sun, then we might as well toss out the Bible! Why not use this energy towards helping people deal with all this?

As John Brewer, member of the Unitarian Fellowship of Lawrence, KS, said
"Religious doctrines wedded to yesterday's natural philosophy do not make good ambassadors for faith."

Many pro-science folks, on other hand, fear there is a plot by anti-science forces to hamstring the teaching of evolution and possibly much of science in general (geology, etc), by removing evolution, implying that it is a mere scientific hunch, forcing it to share equal (and very limited) time with currently nonscientific theories, creating a climate where science teachers and Imax theater people alike are self-censoring themselves in an effort to avoid controversy. That kinda *is* the case, though. This explains, if not necesarily excuses, a lot of the venom.

"One person suggest misfiling them on the shelf. Why would you feel the need to hide or steal them?"

I **certainly* don't condone hiding or stealing creationist books in a library, and I don't think Katarina really does either. I did *not* advocate misshelving them, but advised her to see if they were in fact classified as being in another section, ie religion, instead of science - in other words, suggesting that she try to have them *correctly* shelved according to what the books themself said, if that was the case. The idea was that these books might be misrepresented by being shelved where they were. You can come up with your own analogies about fiction being in nonfiction (if written so that the difference wasn't immediately apparent), or etc.

Why feel the need, though? Basically 'cause your side is trying to destroy our side and replace it with theology (whether or not you personally have this aim), while our side is trying to make sense of the world, have no intention of hurting your side, and in fact are somewhat puzzled why your guys keep saying that if modern science isn't completely wrong then we've completely discredited you and your entire worldview, when the experience of millions would suggest this is in fact not the case.

Russel your inability to read my links is telling . . .

— Donkey

For me science is about ...

Is it that you don't want to admit that the reason evolutionists are trying to brainwash kids is because evolution fails the most basic tests of science? Namely evolution fails to follow the scientific method for the majority of its claims. What are you running from Russel?

As a resident of North Carolina's tech-savvy triangle area, I support the Dover residents who want to replace science with religious "Intelligent Design", in Dover schools. Also I support them in their effort to cast doubt on evolution and other fundamentals of basic science. If they succeed, their kids will just be less competition for scientifically literate people like myself. thanks Steve Story

Jan,

OOps, I made a rather dumb statement about stealing the books from my library. It was a joke, I would never do such a thing. I just don't think they belong next to the evolution books, because while the evolution books are backed by decades of credible research, the books that attempt to challenge evolution only misrepresent a fraction of the available evidence without actually providing their own.

Anyone capable of critical thinking, and who devoted some reading hours to that section, would come to that conclusion on their own.

I just cringe at the thought of someone wanting to learn something about evolution for the first time, going to the library and seeing the garbage mixed in with books that belong in that section. I would not re-shelve them on my own, certainly, but if you read my whole comment, I was asking Dan whether he thought I should write a letter requesting they be re-shelved. However, he pointed out to me that it is not up to the individual library, and it appears they were shelved correctly all along. I am still confused by this.

I am still unclear about how the library categorizes books, and why, but I will look into it next week.

Re "Guess when the page says "error", I should assume that it will eventually accept my post anyway."

Or bring up a fresh copy of the thread in another browser window to see if your post is there or not. ;)

Henry

Jan,

Also, FYI,

I am not a regular here. I only started posting comments in the last two weeks or so. In addition, I am considered a semi-troll on most days, since I bring up faith and religion in most of my comments, and people here like to keep the discussion on-topic (mostly) and on-science (mainly).

Finally, I am just a bored housewife browsing the internet. I have no advanced degrees, and do not plan on teaching evolution anytime soon, at least unless my church lets me do a Sunday School class, in which case I would love to reveal ID as bad theology.

So as you can see, I pose no threat to the children, and neither are my views representative of everyone who wants to teach children evolution, and especially my bad jokes.

Jan:

The issue of extinct "men" in prior forms has indeed been proven by the very fissil remains you ask for, in the same manner that the existence of "Dinosaurs" is equally evident by THEIR fossil remains.

To answer you question, I'll take up, for now, the issue of the Neandertal. A "man" race, who hunted, gathered, built home family dwellings, used fire, made clothing, made jewelry, and held burial rituals for their dead. As did the other races of "man" that went extinct.

No apes engage in this level of societal sophistication to this day tho some are learning American Sign Language as a means of communication even to thero own young. Perhaps you have a different definition of what determines "man". Religious, sociological or what exactly?

Neandertal wnet extinct about 25k years ago and DNA analysis now shows that this "man" in NOT our ancestor and never was. But is Neandertal any less of a "man" for not being so?

As recently as 800 years ago, the Romans believed that the Planets Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury were indeed actual "GODS" that they worshipped as what they believed to be true entities.

Then along came this Jew guy named Jesus that was a simple carpenter who had a peacful philosophy that 200 years later wound up having an entire Religion founded in his name. (Not sure he would have approved, but that's another issue.)

But even this "Christian" Religion insisted for centuries that the Earth was the Center of the Universe. To suggest otherwise, (Like Copernicus and Galleleo) was hierecy and resulted in persecution and (then) lawful confinement.

So now we have a persistence of the same dogma, (based in fear) that says Evolution cannot be so because the releigious say it defies "God". But it is "men" who say this, not the evidence itself.

The evidence does not dispute "God" any more than the evidence for an Earth that rotates around the Sun.

Maybe "God" IS working full time. But if this is so, (and no one is saying it ISN'T), this supreme being is most certainly causing life on this Planet to evolve in the manner we see very clearly, and the evidence for it quite irrefutable.

Whether the "Supreme Being" is actually CAUSING this or not is the only thing that is not proven either way.

Re "Guess when the page says "error", I should assume that it will eventually accept my post anyway." Or bring up a fresh copy of the thread in another browser window to see if your post is there or not. ;)

Would you list the five species of homo sapiens who have become extinct along with the place where the massive numbers of skeleton remains are being kept?

We should have at least as many remains of these races of peoples as we have of dinosaurs. Right? We should be taught about their culture, their religion, and at least try to determine the reason for their becoming extinct.

It becomes the a very large problem when men interpret as Hitler did and decide that a generation of "racially pure" children can be produced by ridding the world of those considered inferior.

What we teach children is important. Teaching facts should not harm our children. Indoctrination on the other hand is often extremely harmful. We should always be careful that we do not cross the line between fact and our personal interpretations of those facts.

As for the website to which I was directed in order to allow me to 'understand' that evolution has been proven, I only had time for a quick look. It will take days to read the material, but I see a few red flags here:

macroevolution depends upon the Punctuated equilibrium theory

Species selection and species sorting theories claim[b/] . . . that make it [more or less likely that certain species will exist . . . think that the processes . . . is thought to be of a different calibre and process than microevolution

1) America, the richest country in the world,

the most scientifically advanced country in the world.

We are the strongest BECAUSE of what we are not IN SPITE of what we are. Do you think 4 PHDs make 1 Einstein?

2) As an engineer I have a better understanding of science than those of you who have never actually tried to build something very complex.

religious people are in some way more able to do science (again dig deep here as this is probably not an obvious point to you).

For the sake of argument, let's say I'm justified in believing that OJ did it. And clearly he fired at least some of the shots.

Re #21249, posted 03-20-2005 20:00

ROFL

Henry

Obviously, no one shot Ronald and Nicole. I mispoke. Also, I'm uncomfortable using the OJ case as an example because it is so politically charged. But I used it because everyone is so familiar with it.

I predict that we will recover a virus whose growth in species B is measurably improved, and that that improvement will be associated with mutation(s) in its genome. What does Intelligent Design predict?

— Russell

" However, he pointed out to me that it is not up to the individual library, and it appears they were shelved correctly all along. I am still confused by this."

I'm not a library person, though (except in terms of time spent in them!) so don't take my word for it. I think the vast majority of public libraries use the Dewey Decimal System, but there might well be exceptions, especially in specific situations. I really just don't know how they handle it - in these cases they may well just be going by the book, so to speak. I'm sure it's the Library of Congress that classfies books, giving them dewey decimal (532.5 etc . . .) and lc (QH375 etc, mostly college/university libraries . . .) numbers. If you're really curious, hunt down a friendly library science listserv or something - they might be more helpful . . . And maybe check/drop off a note with the library staff, if you think that would be alright . . .

I would guess the idea at whatever level it is, the idea is hey, they address biological science, so they go in there. I don't really mind *that* - it's the thought of all the channels of public science education getting tuned to the same static-chocked metaphorical frequency that worries me . . .

Lonhhorm - I think that Jan is seizing on quotes with any apparent indication of less-than-total-certainty - 'theory,' 'think,' etc. But I may be wrong.

So, how do we help Imax movies stand up to scary focus group members and disgruntled op-ed letter writers?

religious people are in some way more able to do science

The follow-up study reported in "Nature" reveals that the rate of belief is lower than eight decades ago. The latest survey involved 517 members of the National Academy of Sciences; half replied. When queried about belief in "personal god," only 7% responded in the affirmative, while 72.2% expressed "personal disbelief," and 20.8% expressed "doubt or agnosticism." Belief in the concept of human immortality, i.e. life after death declined from the 35.2% measured in 1914 to just 7.9%. 76.7% reject the "human immortality" tenet, compared with 25.4% in 1914, and 23.2% claimed "doubt or agnosticism" on the question, compared with 43.7% in Leuba's original measurement. Again, though, the highest rate of belief in a god was found among mathematicians (14.3%), while the lowest was found among those in the life sciences fields -- only 5.5%. http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/atheism1.htm

Gosh, Dave! What a valuable prediction! Wow. Does ID have more like that?

Re "But dinos lived for tens of millions of years. I forget the exact number, but I think 300 million years."

Geological Time Scale

Looks like the Mesozoic covered about 180 my.

Henry

At any rate, the fossil data is strongly supportive of common descent. Nearly all known organisms are very similar anatomically to some known organisms that are older than them.

Katrina

Observations are agnostic. No theory "owns" the evidence. So when you say that ID provides no evidence of its own that's not correct. All the evidence that neo-Darwinism uses can be used by ID as well. Indeed such evidence MUST be used. Any theory must attempt to explain the observations.

Re "But dinos lived for tens of millions of years. I forget the exact number, but I think 300 million years." Geological Time Scale Looks like the Mesozoic covered about 180 my.

Longhorm

There are no specimens of 3.5 billion year old bacteria. Their existence is entirely hypothetical based upon presumed residues. As with just about everything to do with evolution more than 1 million years ago there are no intact specimens and no DNA to analyze. Keep that in mind. And there has been no major evolutoin in the last 1 million years. Not a single new higher taxa has emerged in many millions of years. John Davison will tell you that evolution has stopped. I'm not convinced it has stopped but there's no compelling evidence that it's still going on either.

Someone once asked me what was the most difficult forensic investigation I was ever involved in: it was determining if the tears in the rectum of a female murder victim were the result of sodomy by some large object, or the result of tearing from animal claws when her carcass was being ravenged by coyotes. (The coyotes use their paws to press aginst soft tissue while they tear with their teeth).

Here's a prediction involving work I'm doing right now. We took a virus that grows well in animal species A, and poorly in animal species B. After serially infection of species B with the virus, I predict that we will recover a virus whose growth in species B is measurably improved, and that that improvement will be associated with mutation(s) in its genome.

— Russell

There are no specimens of 3.5 billion year old bacteria. Their existence is entirely hypothetical based upon presumed residues.

As with just about everything to do with evolution more than 1 million years ago there are no intact specimens

And there has been no major evolutoin in the last 1 million years.

John Davison will tell you that evolution has stopped.

I'm not convinced it has stopped but there's no compelling evidence that it's still going on either.

Observations are agnostic. No theory "owns" the evidence. So when you say that ID provides no evidence of its own that's not correct. All the evidence that neo-Darwinism uses can be used by ID as well. Indeed such evidence MUST be used. Any theory must attempt to explain the observations.

— DaveScot

Observations are agnostic. No theory "owns" the evidence.

So when you say that ID provides no evidence of its own that's not correct.

All the evidence that neo-Darwinism uses can be used by ID as well.

There are no specimens of 3.5 billion year old bacteria. Their existence is entirely hypothetical based upon presumed residues.

Katarina

Well I'm certainly not jealous. I'm an accomplished inventor and self-made millionaire. I retired from Dell Computer Corporation 5 years ago at age 43. Now I do whatever I feel like doing. At this moment I'm on my yacht getting blasted as a reward for a good day's work tinkering with this and that. Don't be presumptious.

Dave, here is another link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/305816.stm

Yeah, Russell, ID does have more predictions.

It predicts that no matter what you do with a virus it will still be either a live virus or a dead virus when you're done with it. The common thread is it will still be a virus. That's because mutation/selection isn't capable of producing:

1) novel body forms
2) novel tissue types
3) novel organs

I'm an optimist so I believe that someday you will see the light.

However, there have been finds of specimens that are about 1.5 billion years old that are sort of in between cnidarians and bacteria. The problem is that the specimens did not carve out strong markings, so we can't be sure that they are the remains of organisms. My understanding is that scientists are debating the issue.

DaveScot said: That's because mutation/selection isn't capable of producing:

1) novel body forms
2) novel tissue types
3) novel organs

Why not? What's the barrier?

We know that radically different body forms, tissue types and organs (even within one individual) are controlled by genes, which are subjecct to mutation and selection.

What is your evidence of any barrier that stops these genes from doing their job? What research results support your claim of such a barrier?

Observations are agnostic. No theory "owns" the evidence. So when you say that ID provides no evidence of its own that's not correct. All the evidence that neo-Darwinism uses can be used by ID as well. Indeed such evidence MUST be used. Any theory must attempt to explain the observations.

That's because mutation/selection isn't capable of producing: 1) novel body forms 2) novel tissue types 3) novel organs

So, we are overwhelmingly justified in believing that "mutation/selection" is "capable of producing" those things, because we are overwhelmingly justified in believing that they did.

Longhorm - yeah, yeah, yeah... there were what looked like microrganism remains in a meteorite from ancient Mars found in the Antartic ice pack. Spare me the conjectures.

I'll make you a deal. If you stick to just the facts, I will too.

No, none of those things have been observed happening due to mutation selection. The mechanism of evolution on those scales is entirely conjecture. It may not be the responsible mechanism. I think it's unlikely that mutation/selection is the whole story. It's premature to rule out intelligent design which is a BIG tent. The neo-Darwinian view presumes that design is either not possible (an extraordinarily ignorant view from my high perch) or is somehow "not science" for reasons only pedants will argue are valid.

Plus there's different flavors of ID. I'm not saying any version of ID is true. I'm saying some version of it might be true and mutation/selection as the primary mechanism of evolution is not a fact, is not observed, and isn't even what Darwin proposed was the primary mechanism as he reckoned it was heritable acquired characters the same as Lamarck.

There are no predictions made by ID independent from evolutution.

— Ed Darrell

I agree completely that God could easily say "Let there be . . . " and install the evolutionary process. The problem is with the evidence. It is lacking. I see the evidence for change over time as far as adaptation is concerned and change within a species.

Our Creator did a marvelous job of creating each creature with just what was needed for survival. Every creature is stamped with Intelligent Design. If I had never met or heard of God, I would be able to see that.

On the other hand, I do not see the evidence for the great leaps that evolutionist claim. The chances are overwhelmingly against a lizard becoming a bird or any other change of that nature.

Anyway, I do not believe that those of you who are so adamant against having the words creation or intelligent design used in a classroom are being honest when you say, "God can direct creation through that mechanism". If you really believed that happened, would you be so angry at the mention of a creator.

As for life having meaning if it is just random chance that we are here, I do not agree.

If that is true, you and I are worth little more than the grass in the field. In a few generations, the VAST majority will be remembered no more. The good that we attempt often harms rather than helps those around us. Seldom a day goes by when we are not misunderstood by someone around us.

Prisons, asylums, hospitals, nursing homes, hospice centers, & homeless shelters in every city around the world are full and still there are people who need care. Surely we are in a fallen state. It is only through the hope of a Savior who has paid a price and redeemed us that we find peace, hope, and a future. We gain our worth and dignity from the Creator who made us in His image and who taught us to love by first loving us.

I do not think that I will ever by able to understand why some of you not only will not acknowledge that the world is full of evidences of a Creator, but the biggest mystery is why you seem to prefer that there be no higher power. How could anyone not want the love of God as shown to us by His Son? He came that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly. He came because He loves us and is not willing that any should perish. I owed a debt I could not pay, He paid a debt he did not owe.

Bravo Jan. Sorry I missed your postings. I don't have time to keep up with all of it.

you appear to have assumed that most evolution supporters are atheist

— Ed Darrell

Dave,

I wasn't talking about scientists. About 86% of Americans claim to be Christian. 83% of Americans want their kids to learn evolution, according to Gallup -- including a healthy portion of creationists who see no problem with learning what the important ideas in the world are.

Most Christian groups have no truck with evolution. Most Christians, world wide, are Catholic. The Popes' opinions on evolution are well known. In the U.S. the next largest Christian denomination is Methodist. Methodists have a statement specifically noting they have no difficulty with evolution. Similar statements are available from the mainstream Protestant sects, except the Southern Baptist Convention.

Any way it's sliced, evolution supporters don't come out to be atheist as a majority.

Then we get to the cancer and infectious disease wards, where supporters of evolution climb to 100% regardless of religious affiliation . . .

Disraeli claimed it was Mark Twain who said there are "lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics." Twain must have known a lot of creationists.

Please play by the rules.

Well I'm certainly not jealous. I'm an accomplished inventor and self-made millionaire. I retired from Dell Computer Corporation 5 years ago at age 43. Now I do whatever I feel like doing. At this moment I'm on my yacht getting blasted as a reward for a good day's work tinkering with this and that. Don't be presumptious.

— DaveScot

It predicts that no matter what you do with a virus it will still be either a live virus or a dead virus when you're done with it. The common thread is it will still be a virus.

Russell,

Now there's a new one - endogenous retroviruses are really people.

Congratulations. I think you crossed some sort of line there.

When will you publish?

Katarina,

A background in logic is what's needed and lacking in most of the dopes here. I presume you don't have one.

That's because mutation/selection isn't capable of producing: 1) novel body forms 2) novel tissue types 3) novel organs

— DaveScott

Now there's a new one - endogenous retroviruses are really people. Congratulations. I think you crossed some sort of line there.

no matter what you do with a virus it will still be either a live virus or a dead virus when you're done with it. The common thread is it will still be a virus.

Darrell,

Nice straw man you have there.

Not one single time have I ever advocated not teaching a child about evolution or the neo-Darwinian theory thereof.

Please play by the rules.

Next!

Russell,

A leach attached to man's leg is still a leach. A virus attached to a man's genome is still a virus.

Next!

JimBob,

I have answered the body type question many times. Here's what I mean by body types:

http://tolweb.org/tree/

See the seven pretty pictures in the tree? Those are novel body types.

Next!

Comment #16458 Posted by John A. Davison on February 16, 2005 01:54 AM . . . You better keep your traps shut about my sources or I'll turn you all in to the FBI as security risks. Of course you have made that quite impossible haven't you with your cowardly anonymity. What a collection of losers . . .

— John A. Davison

DaveScot,

You blow me over with your simple, yet arrogant logic. A leach attached to a man's leg will not be attached to that man's offspring's leg. However, a virus that is attached to our genome becomes a part of us, and is passed down through many generations. If you refuse to see the difference, there is no logic that can help you.

Sorry, I wrote that response to DaveScot before the comment by Wayne Francis was posted. I figured since this was the Bathroom Wall, and all.. but feel free to delete my last comment to DaveScot.

Katarina what you do is up to you. I'm just done reading their post myself. I'm providing number to others to show how much time is wasted. This doesn't even count the responses they get which has at times been over 25% leading to almost half of PT either being trolls or the feeding of them.

You are free to respond if you want.

A virus attached to a man's genome is still a virus.

Allelic mutation and substitution through natural or artificial selection never had anything to do with organic evolution. Those sorts of mutation are all that the distinguish the various varieties of dogs, goldfish or any other domesticated forms that man has tinkered with for centuries. Dogs are still wolves, goldfish are still asiatic carp and pigs are still pigs. Trust me.

I am certainly not the first to insist that evolution is over. Try Robert Broom in the 30's, Julian Huxley in the 40's, Pierre Grasse in the 70's and Davison for the last twenty years. You Darwimps just insist on studiously avoiding all the really significant literature on evolution.

Furthermore Mendelian (sexual) genetics never had anything to do with evolution either because that kind of genetics deals only with the reassortment of alleles, which, as I have repeatedly indicated, are nothing but errors on what Pierre Grasse called "the 'magnetic tape' on which the primary information for the species is recorded."

Speciation clearly WAS related to restructurings of an otherwise unaltered genome, a process which requires absolutely no new information and results in novel expressions from previously silenced genes and gene families as well as the silencing of old ones. These matters are not conjectural as they have already been demonstrated. Evolution, a phenomenon of the past resulted largely if not entirely from the restructuring of the chromosomes in such a way as to result in what has, for over half a century now, been recognized and described as "position effects."

William Bateson recognized this in 1914 when he described evolution as:

"an unpacking of an original complex which contained within itself the whole range of diversity which living things present."

He also had the good sense to use the past tense long before Robert Broom, Julian Huxley and Pierre Grasse.

Ten years later in 1924, Bateson once again displayed his insight when he confided to his son Gregory:

"that it was a mistake to have commited his life to Mendelism, that it was a blind alley which would not throw any light on the differentiation of species, nor on evolution in general."

Well folks, that is my free lecture for today, presented as usual in a giant empty auditorium. You may now return to the safety of the Darwimpian groupthink,

John A. Davison, pathologically unfair, clearly unbalanced to the point of certifiability, yet still not only unafraid of Darwimpianism but gleefully enjoying these God-given opportunites to expose it as the most hideous hoax ever foisted off on humankind in recorded history.

"We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled."
Montaigne

Ed,

This is my favorite source for past and current polling data on a wide range of issues.

Polls on evolution are in the science topic here.

The numbers don't surprise me at all but they might surprise you.

Quite frankly, Ed, it's pissing into the wind trying to keep stickers like Cobb's out of textbooks. All that's doing is inflaming a super-majority of voting age adults that don't just question neo-Darwinism like me but are positively convinced it is wrong. It's just a matter of time until they exercise their political power. The judiciary branch isn't the ultimate decision maker - the voters are the ultimate decision makers. A super-majority can change the constition. Pretty cool how that works, innit?

Even better - polls on teaching evolution/creation

http://www.pollingreport.com/educatio.htm

NY Times 11/04 65% favor teaching creation and evolution together.

That is the majority that I fall into although I don't think more than a single minute needs to be spent on the creation side. The Dover statement is perfect at one minute, one time, just to make students aware that skeptical scientists exist albeit relatively small in number. If there were more I'd suggest spending more than a minute on their disagreement. What I'm more interested in is the presentation of neo-Darwinism in a more critical light starting with a clear distinction of where direct observation ends and extrapolation begins.

http://tolweb.org/tree/ . . . See the seven pretty pictures in the tree? Those are novel body types.

— DaveScot

One last word.

You censored dissent.

When we censor dissent do not be suprised.

I personally reaised the following very real scientific issues and never heard any cogent reply.

1) Evoluion has poor adherence to the scientific method first by not predicting future events and second by not predicting unknown past events except in rare and localized instances.

2) Evolution is not honest about the vast improbabilities involved in evolution. Were you to tell students the numbers your brainwashing would be void.

3) Natural selection by its very nature cannot be falsified and as such is not science

4) abiogenesis cannot be falsified any more than it has been so by its very nature is not science. 50 years of failed predictions and even evolution has disowned it. Abiogenesis is a nessary part of evolution as without it you need an extra creation mechanism which may have explained evoluion more easily than random change.

5) LUCA is as much an article of faith as God in that there is 0 scientific support for its direct existance. The evidence that does exist argues against it due to minimum size and diversity of life.

6) Events that rely on randomness to have happened once cannot be disproven. You can calculate the odds and demonstrate that they are very near exactly zero. But quantom theory currently tells us that everything macro is possible, even energy conservation is a trend and can be violated on occasion, to be fair quantom doesn't tell us what macro events are impossible and we assume that abiogenesis is possible or ape-> human etc. AS such scientific theories that rely on unlikely enough events cannot be disproven in human timescales and as such are not science within those timescales.

7) Evolution is the primary religious belief of athiests. Athiests need LUCA, athiests need a single abiogenesis event. It is only in the light of this that it becomes clear why believer scientists, as opposed to the wackos you guys like to point to, have chosen to oppose you. Non-literal christians, which are the majority, don't need a 7 day creation, unlike a typical evolutionist my faith is untouchable by the outcome of evolution and I am free to follow the data WHERE EVER it leads. But as a believer in science I am saddened by the inability of the evolution camp to be honest when they teach evolution in school.

8) Evolution makes its limited predictions regarding currently unknown data via the shotgun method where the majority of its predictions have been false. This makes it easy for a evoltuion adhearent to not realize that what they claim as prediction is really random. For example, genetic evidence did not pan out as planned. Shotgun predictions and limited matching of predictions is evolution's calling card.

I have enjoyed my time at panda's thumb. It has given me a very good understanding on how evolution dogma works and how best to defeat it. The aspects of evolution that are valid science do not bother me personally as I beleive in science. But if you could remove your athiest blinders you would see that you argue at least in part out of religious ferver.

I have begun mailing the school boards with a variation of the above. I have already sent this to all the dissenting members of the Kansas board. What you have all missed is that the average person is not as dumb as you would like to believe, they can see that your position is straining to believe things that are not demanded by the data, eg LUCA. They can see that you are not teaching that evolution and bigbang are the only backwards science fields and all others process future predictions as opposed to predictions regarding future information that occured in the past. This is fact and not some religious ferver as you will paint it.

The average person may not understand where you paint over the gaps of logic in evolution or how large those gaps are scientifically. But the average person is a very good judge of how a person in denial acts. The typical evolutionists is in denial regarding the weaknesses of evolution. When faced with those weaknesses you react emotionally with appeals to authority as opposed to real scientific responses.

See you in court =)

Someone mentioned plate tectonics as a process that's based on extrapolation of actual observations because it works too slowly to see the larger changes. I didn't have time to respond when I read it.

Here's my answer.

If continental plates exhibited, as Richard Dawkins so aptly phrased it, an overwhelming appearance of design, then it would be a fair analogy with evolution. The fact of the matter is that the earth's crust doesn't have an overwhelming appearance of design. It's just a simple matter of rigid, broken plates floating around and colliding on a molten fluid substrate. The machinery in a living cell is so far removed from that it's absurd to compare them or the processes which drive each.

Right, Dave. And one is about biology, the other about geology, so obviously the analogy is totally bogus.

Actually, the whole point of the analogy was to show how sometimes science necessarily does involve extrapolation. In regard to making that point, the whole "design" thing is just a red herring.

But back to the crow banquet: I made the point that theory of evolution (you know, mutation/selection) makes a specific and - at least for me - useful prediction about an experiment in progress. (Yes, DonkeyDong, a future result). I asked what ID predicts. All I got was a whole lot of trollery, the point of which, to the extent that there is any, seems to be to obfuscate the fact that ID doesn't make any predictions. Why, oh why, is anyone taking it seriously?

It's just a simple matter of rigid, broken plates floating around and colliding on a molten fluid substrate. The machinery in a living cell is so far removed from that it's absurd to compare them or the processes which drive each.

— DaveScot

Ah yes, it's different because it has the "appearance of design". For 20 years the ID movement has tried and failed to come up with an algorithm which can certify that.

I personally reaised the following very real scientific issues and never heard any cogent reply.

— Donkey Kong

This is my favorite source for past and current polling data on a wide range of issues. Polls on evolution are in the science topic here. The numbers don't surprise me at all but they might surprise you.

Quite frankly, Ed, it's pissing into the wind trying to keep stickers like Cobb's out of textbooks. All that's doing is inflaming a super-majority of voting age adults that don't just question neo-Darwinism like me but are positively convinced it is wrong. It's just a matter of time until they exercise their political power. The judiciary branch isn't the ultimate decision maker - the voters are the ultimate decision makers. A super-majority can change the constition. Pretty cool how that works, innit?

Longhorm - yeah, yeah, yeah . . . there were what looked like microrganism remains in a meteorite from ancient Mars found in the Antartic ice pack. Spare me the conjectures.

No, none of those things have been observed happening due to mutation selection.

The mechanism of evolution on those scales is entirely conjecture.

It's premature to rule out intelligent design which is a BIG tent.

The neo-Darwinian view presumes that design is either not possible (an extraordinarily ignorant view from my high perch) or is somehow "not science" for reasons only pedants will argue are valid.

Plus there's different flavors of ID. I'm not saying any version of ID is true.

I'm saying some version of it might be true and mutation/selection as the primary mechanism of evolution is not a fact, is not observed, and isn't even what Darwin proposed was the primary mechanism as he reckoned it was heritable acquired characters the same as Lamarck.

It is perfectly true that a prescribed evolution, in other words an intelligent designed one, has no predictive value since the phenomena with which it has been concerned are no longer in operation. Just as ontogeny is a predetermined self-regulating, self-limiting and self terminating process, so has been phylogeny. The primary predictive value for ontogeny is the 100% certainty that it will terminate in death. The comparable predictive value for phylogeny that it will end with extinction and already has for millions of species, less than one tenth of a percent of which are still extant. Neither ontogeny nor phylogeny has predictive value. Neither does pregnancy and for the same reasons. It too is prescribed, self regulating, self terminating and it too ends, in case you haven't noticed, typically after 9 months.

To assume any role for the environment in the emergence of life and its subsequent evolution is a figment of man's imagination totally devoid of experimental or observational evidence. That is why I have proposed the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis. Thanks for not listening. You never do.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for neo-Darwinism, the biggest and most long-lived hoax in the history of civilization.

"Science commits suicide when she adopts a creed."
Thomas Henry Huxley

John A. Davison, genetically incapable of being fair, rejoicing in his senile dementia, yet slowly but surely, oblivious to the dastardly attempts by his adversaries to ignore him, continues bravely, methodically and with gleeful malice to destroy every single element of the Darwimpian fairy tale.

No, none of those things have been observed happening due to mutation selection.

The mechanism of evolution on those scales is entirely conjecture.

It's premature to rule out intelligent design which is a BIG tent.

The neo-Darwinian view presumes that design is either not possible (an extraordinarily ignorant view from my high perch) or is somehow "not science" for reasons only pedants will argue are valid.

Plus there's different flavors of ID. I'm not saying any version of ID is true.

I'm saying some version of it might be true and mutation/selection as the primary mechanism of evolution is not a fact, is not observed, and isn't even what Darwin proposed was the primary mechanism as he reckoned it was heritable acquired characters the same as Lamarck.

Dave, that some organisms have reproduced more times than some other organisms contributed significantly to the existence of every organism to live on earth subsequent to the first primordial cells, because:

1. All organisms to live on earth descended from a single-celled microorganism that lived about 3.8 billion years ago.

2. Organisms have been reproducing (either via cell-division or sexual reproduction) for about 3.8 billion years. Cells tend to divide many times per years. Organisms tend to sexually reproduce many more than once per years. When cells divide, the daughter-cell often similar to but not identical to --- in terms of genotype and phenotype ---- than the parent cell. When organisms sexually reproduce, the offspring is always is always somewhat similar but never identical --- in terms of genotype and phenotype --- than either of its parents.

3. Some organisms have reproduced more times than other organisms.

That is why I have proposed the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.

JimBob

There's at least seven novel body plans. I don't really care if it's seven, seventy, or seven hundred. The point is the different body plans are at or near the phylum level not the species level. While there's widespread disagreement I believe 50 or so phyla (most of the modern phyla) appeared in very short order during the Cambrian explosion.

That is why I have proposed the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.

Wayne Francis

Thanks for confirming that a few neo-Darwinism critics stimulate most of the discussion at Panda's Thumb. Without us this blog would deteriorate into a nepotistic mutual admiration society that few would bother giving a second glance.

But I already knew that before you started counting words.

There's at least seven novel body plans. I don't really care if it's seven, seventy, or seven hundred. The point is the different body plans are at or near the phylum level not the species level. While there's widespread disagreement I believe 50 or so phyla (most of the modern phyla) appeared in very short order during the Cambrian explosion.

I would have put this in the X-chromosome thread but for s(o)m(e) r(ea)s(o)n the thread had to end. {thanks d(o)nk(e)y k(o)ng)}

Maureen Dowd decided to humorize the X-chromosome paper. The link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/opinion/20dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1111440961-XMl/K6+XZX58IW/BTYhD2g

Sincerely,

Paul

Comment #21263 Posted by Longhorm on March 20, 2005 10:03 PM Einstein never built something complex. Or Carl Sagan.

Einstein held several patents for inventions, most notably in refrigeration. Carl Sagan may have had technical input into several space probes, though he may not have actually done any hands on engineering.

It is perfectly true that a prescribed evolution, in other words an intelligent designed one, has no predictive value since the phenomena with which it has been concerned are no longer in operation. Just as ontogeny is a predetermined self-regulating, self-limiting and self terminating process, so has been phylogeny. The primary predictive value for ontogeny is the 100% certainty that it will terminate in death. The comparable predictive value for phylogeny that it will end with extinction and already has for millions of species, less than one tenth of a percent of which are still extant. Neither ontogeny nor phylogeny has predictive value. Neither does pregnancy and for the same reasons. It too is prescribed, self regulating, self terminating and it too ends, in case you haven't noticed, typically after 9 months.

Comment #21403 Posted by Ed Darrell on March 21, 2005 02:18 PM Yeah, it's possible that God will curse America, and that America will stop teaching evolution. But last time we got close, the Soviets put up a satellite, and people woke up to the educational damage, and fixed it.

Einstein certainly did not have the technical acumen of an Edison or a Tesla, but he was no slouch. ;^)

Sincerely,

Paul

Comment #21195 Posted by John A. Davison on March 20, 2005 02:43 PM The semi-meiotic hypothesis postulates that any such structural rearrangement occurring in any chromosome will automatically be produced in homozygous configuration in one half of the products of that semi-meiotic process. I first presented this hypothesis in 1984. It has yet to be even recognized in the professional literature. I have clearly described both the means and the conditions for the testing of this hypothesis in frogs.

Comment #21283 Posted by DaveScot on March 20, 2005 11:45 PM Katarina Well I'm certainly not jealous. I'm an accomplished inventor and self-made millionaire. I retired from Dell Computer Corporation 5 years ago at age 43. Now I do whatever I feel like doing. At this moment I'm on my yacht getting blasted as a reward for a good day's work tinkering with this and that. Don't be presumptious. Comment #21302 Posted by DaveScot on March 21, 2005 02:20 AM Bravo Jan. Sorry I missed your postings. I don't have time to keep up with all of it.

Comment #1 Posted by Ed Brayton on March 23, 2004 06:24 AM Testing the comments. Nice job on the initial post, Wes.

— Ed Brayton

can't post

Why have I been banned from posting?

I wish

Get a load of this crap. Terri Shiavo and the Discovery Institute, plus the Free Republic, all on one page:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1366816/posts

Katarina,

Re "Well if there is no target, does that put in peril the belief that both evolution and creation can be true (i.e., God using evolution as a tool for creation)? I am having trouble putting the concepts together, so if anyone has thoughts on it please let me know."

I have some thoughts. Perhaps God's "target" was to have the universe produce an intelligent life form. In that case, the target would not depend on details like how many fingers, or how many and which amino acids, how many and which bases in the dna, what arrangement of organs, what proteins get used and where, or on what planet said life form arose. So the more general sense of "creation" doesn't imply that evolution had to search for any particular protein or other "target".

Re "But for one who wants to believe creation and evolution are compatible, it is not easy to get past the hurdle of so many false starts."
See above paragraph. :)

Henry

Comment #21393 Posted by Andrea Bottaro on March 21, 2005 01:04 PM evilgenius: that's actually an interesting point, because it turns out that dogs, as the result of selection, are significantly better than any non-human primates in their ability to understand and communicate with humans. See for instance this paper. Even more strikingly, it was recently shown that similar, though less marked behavioral changes could be quite rapidly (in a few decades) selected in foxes, and were accompanied by morphological changes similar to those observed in dogs (short muzzles, floppy years, etc), suggesting some behavioral and morphological traits are either genetically linked, or the result of a common set of pleiotropic genes (i.e. genes that influence more than one phenotypic trait). Cool, uh?

— Andrea Bottaro

I have a question (rhetorical I guess). Why do ID proponents get away with BOTH claiming that the unspecified "intelligence" could be either a god, or aliens, AND that scientists are against ID because of some "philosophical materialism" conspiracy?
Aliens or other nonsupernatural "intelligent designers" would not be attacked by such a conspiracy, would they? Even if scientists were engaging in some sort of societal coup to overthrow religion they wouldn't have a problem with aliens designing everything. So if the IDers are not talking only about a God (theirs), how can they bring up the "materialism" charges? But I guess on the "ID illogicalities" list that entry comparitively is not so bad.

As a native and resident of Kansas as well as a student of Biology I just thought I would relate my experience regarding the state school board mess. Last November Kathy Martin, then running for the state board for my district, came and gave a presentation to Kansas State University. During her presentation she talked about her two campaign planks. One was that she intended to reexamine whether it was really necessary in all cases for the public schools to comply with federal requirements for federal funding. The second was teaching intelligent design in schools. And wonder of wonders, she had a handout! I have one and will attempt to recreate it below. The right side (top) is typed on the original, the left (below) is handwritten then photocopied, and I have left out her address and phone number because I feel she probably wouldn't want it publicly disseminated.

www.IntelligentDesignnetwork.org
www.reasons.org
www.AnswersInGenesis.org
www.icr.org
www.reviewevolution.com
www.discovery.org

www.ksde.org
Mrs. Kathy Martin
(Home address, etc.)
martinkathy@yahoo.com

Afterward she took questions, so I asked her if she had opened a scientific journal in the past 30 years. She said "No." I thought this odd because she was in charge of the K-12 science education in a school district.

Later I discussed with her her view of the "historical sciences" such as geology, biology, etc. She believes that these are not real sciences and that there is no way to tell, for example, whether or not the age of the earth is older than 6,000 years - I asked her this specifically.

I'm sorry if you were expecting a point to this post, there isn't one, except to say that Mrs. Martin was elected to the board and is now one of the members fighting for ID in the schools.

Answers in Genesis. If you can't trust their scientific opinion, whose can you trust? I think Ken Ham has a Masters degree in education or something.

It's nice to have her email address, of course, but why bother using it? Just look past your monitor and talk to your wall. Easier on the carpal tunnel, but with the same rhetorical effect. And look on the bright side, your wall won't say things like "My granpappy weren't no monkey!", or call evolution a religion, so it's better on your mental health.

I have left out her address and phone number because I feel she probably wouldn't want it publicly disseminated.

Later I discussed with her her view of the "historical sciences" such as geology, biology, etc. She believes that these are not real sciences and that there is no way to tell, for example, whether or not the age of the earth is older than 6,000 years - I asked her this specifically.

John Davison asked me to relay to y'all that he has been banned from Panda's Thumb.

Thanks Dave but it turns out they can't do anything right. After telling me I cannot post, they then allow me to post.

Paul Flocken asks why I didn't test my own hypothesis, another propaganda ploy. It would never occur to someone that perhaps I could not test my hypothesis. In order to test the semi-meiotic hypothesis one must have at his disposal female frogs know to carry chromosome rearrangements (paracentric or paricentric inversions or translocations or fusions) in heterozygous form. That material was unavailable to me.

The situation was further complicated when I was evicted from my laboratory. A friend of mine in another college provided me with laboratory space from which I was also evicted on the order of his dean who was obviously in cahoots with the dean of my own colege. You see, the administration of the university decided that I was not a useful member of their faculty. To this day there is no record at UVM that I ever taught there (for 33 years). I am not considered as an emeritus professor although I masquerade as such and for damn good reasons.

I finally decided to resign when I discovered that they were going to detenure me, a step which I had always thought was impossible. The Provost, who resigned the same day I did, awarded me 104,000 dollars as a partial compensation for the way I had been treated. He left to become the President of Montana State University, where he is today.

Now I suppose this revelation will be interpreted as some sort of paranoid rant, but I can assure you that it is factually correct but very incomplete. If I were tell you the whole truth I am confident you wouldn't believe me. After all, you don't believe me when I instruct you that evolution is finished, that allelic mutations and natural selection had nothing to do with it and Darwinism is a pipe dream. Why should you believe anything else that I say?

John A. Davison, still arbitrary, bigotted and unfair, teetering on the edge of insanity, yet somehow still holding forth gamely, in the face of insurmountable odds, by proposing the only conceivable hypothesis to explain the diversity of life on this planet - The Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.

And yes, it has no predictive value just as the score of a football game has none once the game is over.

Davison,
Your paper was published in 1984 and according to your website your were still a member of the university at least as late as May 25, 2000. Across sixteen years you never once thought to try this research, especially in the mid-eighties when it would still have been a fresh, revolutionary, and exciting thing for you? Come on. You had the chance to overturn the Modern Synthesis. That's a Nobel at the very least. Wouldn't that have been a significant attraction to try. Persecution at UVM might have stood in the way but, again, your website indicates it began in the nineties. Why did you really squander 7 years?

Paul

PS
It seems odd that a university that ousted you would still give you webspace.

Simply ask DaveScot why we couldn't have evolved from some early great apes if by his definition he's only concerned with 1) Novel Body plan 2) Novel tissue types 3) Novel organs since we don't have any of those that any other great apes do . . . .for that matter we don't have any compared to most vertebrates.

— Wayne Francis with an as yet undetermined appendage

Paul Flocken,

Perhaps if you can elaborate on the perceived contradiction?

Rest assured there is none in any case.

Longhorm

"No person has observed a quark, and I'm sure quarks exist."

That's called faith, my boy.

Welcome to the Church of Darwin. Leave the facts at the door on your way in. It's all based on faith.

Henry J,

Thanks for the thoughts. That could work if we think of "His Image" as something spiritual or intellectual, or the way that we relate to our environment. It certainly makes sense.

The threat from China today is real. When the local university held commencement in December the local paper announced the number of graduates at 900. The most popular degree earned, Business: 168. The least popular degree, Physics: 2.

— Paul Flocken

"No person has observed a quark, and I'm sure quarks exist." That's called faith, my boy. Welcome to the Church of Darwin. Leave the facts at the door on your way in. It's all based on faith.

DaveScot,

Did your boat take you to Fantasy Isle? Your last comment is such a complete load of delusional Republican rubbish! Do you really think medical and environmental research will come to a standstill because the current administration's leader is an ignorant cowboy?

You really must have a lot of time on your hands to come up with this stuff.

Comment #21229 Posted by Jan on March 20, 2005 05:47 PM Katrina wrote: I thought about stealing the anti-evolution books, but this would be out of character. Books on creation appear to be such a threat to you. One person suggest misfiling them on the shelf. Why would you feel the need to hide or steal them? If your theory is sound and your science so obvious, why do you feel so threatened that you would go to such measures. And you wonder why anyone would be concerned about evolutionist controlling the education of our children!

If you haven't already, check out talk origins Post of the Month: February 2005 by Ron Okimoto, especially the concluding paragraph about ID.
The Jigsaw

Henry

Posted by John A. Davison on March 17, 2005 04:16 PM [...] Phylogeny, [...] proceeded with no reference to the environment in which it has taken place, [...] Of course that is just my opinion. John A. Davison

Time to quell some idle speculation:

1) no, I'm not dead.
2) no, I have not given up my belief in intelligent input.
3) no, I have not returned to my home planet.
4) No, I have not moved to Mount Athos.
5) no, my computer is not broken.
6) no, I'm not in prison.
7) no, I'm not in a mental hospital.
8) no, I have not been banned from this forum.
If you have any interest in knowing where I am, look here:

http://charliewagner.blogspot.com/2005/03/wheres-charlie.html

Regards, Charlie Wagner

Have faith charlie. Don't be frustrated. One day we'll all get smart enough to realize you single-handedly revolutionized biology. Nelson's Law will be carved in granite over the entrance to Caltech's biology building. You should spend your time deciding if you prefer boston to pasadena, or maybe princeton. It's but a matter of time.

What makes you think there was one designer? What makes anybody so sure that life originated only once? What makes you guys know anything about evolution except that it did happen and it isn't happening now. That is about all I am willing to admit too. Now when it comes to what I know DIDN'T have anything to do with evolution I know a whole lot more. This is just off the top of my head and I am sure it is not complete as my memory is fading fast. The following at best can involve subspeciation or the formation of varieties and had absolutely nothing to do with the emergence of novel life forms.

1. Allelic mutation.
2. Selection, atificial or natural.
3. Obligatory sexual reproduction.
4. Mendelian genetics.
5. Long periods of time.*
6. Population genetics.
7. Founder effect
8. Isolation.

* Like every other known genetic change, those producing new life forms took place with time constants on the order of seconds or less. That is only one of several reasons that I am convinced evolution is finished.

How do you like them apples?

John A. Davison, homozygous at the unfair locus, delighted to be regarded as unbalanced by the denizens of Panda's Thumb (what more could a man want?) and fiercely unafraid, even salivating with unrestrained glee to have the God-given privelege of being instrumental in the demise of the biggest hoax in the history of mankind.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill:

Never have so many been so magnificently screwed by so few.

"We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled."
Momtaigne

Incidentally the university froze my webpage long ago. They apparently didn't care for my piece entitled. "What it means to be an antiDarwinian at the University of Vermont."

I have squandered none of my time but have spent it very wisely except for the periods when I have been wasting it on forums like EvC, brainstorms and Panda's Thumb. Even that has proven productive in making me realize just how absurd the Darwimpian view of evolution really is. I have grown to know my intellectual enemies very well. Thanks for all the help.

John A. Davison

Incidentally the university froze my webpage long ago. They apparently didn't care for my piece entitled. "What it means to be an antiDarwinian at the University of Vermont."

I have squandered none of my time but have spent it very wisely except for the periods when I have been wasting it on forums like EvC, brainstorms and Panda's Thumb. Even that has proven productive in making me realize just how absurd the Darwimpian view of evolution really is. I have grown to know my intellectual enemies very well. Thanks for all the help.

John A. Davison

Have faith charlie. Don't be frustrated. One day we'll all get smart enough to realize you single-handedly revolutionized biology. Nelson's Law will be carved in granite over the entrance to Caltech's biology building. You should spend your time deciding if you prefer boston to pasadena, or maybe princeton. It's but a matter of time.

— steve

I have squandered none of my time but have spent it very wisely except for the periods when I have been wasting it on forums like EvC, brainstorms and Panda's Thumb.

Charlie, have you picked up the Genuine Telecasts v.1 yet? Check it out on eBay. There's a nice 3 DVDR compilation of nearly all of Dylan's TV performances up to "We are The World". There's a volume 2 from as well but that is far less interesting.

In other news, John Davidson and DaveScot are lying sacks of donkey dung.

Isn't it funny how Davidson is so freaking paranoid that every other day he wonders if he's been banned? What an idiot. It's no suprise that he and Lying David Scott Springer find themselves on the same page of the Who's Who in the World of Creationist Nutjobs.

Did you know that Davidson and Springer used to snort imported dirt from Mt. Ararat with John Barbour and Skip Stephenson while watching Sarah Purcell with a camera hidden in the ladies bathroom at the network studio? Yup, it's true. That's where David Springer got his brilliant idea not to cite any non-patent prior art in his crappy patents and to bray like a jackass on his alumni page about his "waterfront property"!

And did you know that Springer's kids laugh in his face when Springer he tries to explain his crank theories about alien beings designing life on earth? I talked to them yesterday and they said that Springer and Davison and some guy named "Donkey Kong" are getting ready to board "The Sea Finch" cruise for "male pseudoscisence hacks". Allegedly it's all booked up and bound for the shores of Galapogos sometime next week. Sadly (for us), they will have Internet access the entire time but hopefully they'll be too busy oiling their bald empty heads to protect them from sunstroke.

It's all true folks. Is there any reason to doubt any of this?

Everyone knows that aging male pseudoscientific cranks love to hang out and flex their muscles for each other. Why do you think they organize conferences in warm places and troll around Internet sites looking for comraderie?

Don't worry, Springer. I won't tell the wife.

Not one for reasons even a moron should be able to understand. I regard UVM as a blight upon the face of academe and an international embarrassment to the cause of science. The reason it has no endowment is because it has never produced products willing to acknowledge their financial success to the experience provided by the four years they spent inside its ivied walls, most of which was spent dinking and smoking pot. It still ranks as one of the top ten party schools in the nation or did the last time I looked. Not too long ago it was numero uno. It also has one of the highest in state and out of state tuitions in the nation, a sure sign of its economic bankruptcy, that in one of the poorest states in the union. Most of our high school graduates go elsewhere for their college education. It is a disgrace when a state university cannot serve its own youth.

John A. Davison

Has anyone else started imagining how their posts sound when Wayne Francis' computer reads them? ;)

Has anyone else started imagining how their posts sound when Wayne Francis' computer reads them? ;)

As I already declared on RBH's (Mr. Avida's) thread about throwing in the towel, DaveScot and myself OWN Panda's Thumb. Get used to it folks. You should all throw in the towel as you have lost big time. The sad part is that you don't recognize it.

Now listen to me Scott Paige, it is Davison, not Davidson. Write that down.

Anyone who considers Vermont to be one of the top party schools in the nation is even more out to lunch than his earlier posts have let on. The last time you checked? When was that? 1862? Trying to compare UVM to ASU or ANY southern school when it comes to "partying" is ridiculous in the extreme. The only embarassment at UVM is you John.

You should all throw in the towel as you have lost big time.

Mr Davison,

If you believe that evolution happened then I'm a bit curious as to how species can develop in PEH without the intermediates which you posit (a) are necessary for Darwinism and (b)are (you say) not found and, furthermore, not to be found.

That is, how does PEH explain the fossil record in which complexity appears over time? Assume we have an amoeba with everything pre-programmed for it to become eventually a chimpanzee, then how did that happen in practice in PEH? Or am I misunderstanding your hypothesis?

Either way a response would be appreciated.

Owen Hargreaves

You should all throw in the towel as you have lost big time.

Heddle:

I'll tell you what. You show me when, in accordance with my original post, and not the muddled clarifications subsequent, that a photon never interacts with a PMT as a particle, and a photon never interacts with a prism as a wave, then I'll recant. It was all that nonsense subsequent to that post about the duality of waves/particles that led to the dispute. But, I'll tell you, any time I've ever experienced a photon interacting with a PMT, it has always been as a particle, which was the sole, only, mono, point of my post. Since that is true, then my original post stands, let all the jarheads argue about the nature of "duality." And you can debate "spin" all you want. But spin was not the point, the mere fact that a photon interracts as a particle with a PMT all the time, was my one and only point. See my original post #20343.

Granted, I was unclear when I tried to elaborate to those who may not know QM, but the fact remains that a photon-PMT interaction is a a particle. and a photon-prism interaction is as a wave. You brought up spin, how do you explain that to someone who thinks of spin, in terms of a basketball, baseball, or planet? That has nothing to do with the QM term, spin. So I will concede that I oversimplified the state of a photon prior to interaction as wave/particle duality, but you must do the same and concede that a photon only interacts as a particle on a PMT. Thus, verifying my original point, in my original post, #20343.

OwenHargreaves

For starters do not ascribe to me the judgements of scholars the stature of Otto Schindewolf.
I have never denied intermediates of a sort. What I and others have denied is any gradual transitions between discrete species. The vast majority of all plant and animal species appeared suddenly in the record and disppeared later, typically unchanged. There is one glaring possible exception to this generalization. That has to do with the obvious orthogenetic tendency for many lines to undergo substantial increases in size which nearly always terminate with extinction. That was true for the ammonites, the trilobites, the dinosaurs, the Titanothores and representatives demonstrating this orthogenesis can be found in virtually every phylum. Coupled with this suicidal tendency is the development of bizarre terminal morphologies which seem to have been nonadaptive. There is no way that these innately driven scenarios can ever be reconciled with Natural Selection, that cornerstone of the Darwinian myth.

I have neither a responsibility nor the capacity to explain how a prescribed evolution was effected. It is at present a mystery exactly as is ontogeny. What is not a mystery is the total failure of the mutation/selection model to explain anything about evolution beyond the questionable production of subspecies and varieties. I have arrived at my conclusions by the elimination of the two major hypotheses that have historically been offered to explain evolution, Lamarckism and Darwinism. They are both experimental and observational failures.

I have presented my conclusions in the manuscript "A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis" which will appear this summer sometime in Rivista di Biologia. I have only extended and generalized the conclusions independently reached by those of my many distinguished predecessors not one of whom was a Darwinian. Until you are thoroughly familiar with their writings and the evidence they have produced there is no point in trying further to communicate with you.

This not meant to be either arrogant or argumentative. It simply represnts my conviction that the Darwinians have deliberately avoided their critics for reasons which I conclude are ideological rather than scientific in nature. It is a scandal and Darwinism is a hoax perpetuated by a groupthink mentality congenitally incapable of hearing what Albert Einstein called "The Music of the Spheres."

"I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific reasearch."
Albert Einstein, from "On Cosmic religion," a worship of the beauties and harmony of physics that became the common faith of physicists.

John A. Davison

Posted by jeff-perado on March 15, 2005 03:36 PM DaveScot quotes Dembski: Dembski wrote: Intelligence acts by changing probabilities. Then DaveScot responds: This is very, very far from being silly, Wesley. It is silly. Probability function collapse has nothing to do with intelligence. Take for example light photons. They have a probability of being a wave or a probility of being a particle. If a randomly selected photon happens to hit a charged plate of a photomultiplier tube, its probability collapses to 1.0 of being a particle. However, if this photon passes through a prism instead, then its probability function collapses to 1.0 of being a wave. No intelligence was required to collapse the probability function, it was merely dependent on the surface it lands on. Again no intelligence needed there. You then backtracked and said well some probability function collapses don't require intelligence, but some do, and you invoked a term, "anticipation" to distinguish. I still fail to see where you are trying to go with that. For even if complexity and information increase as being to sole product of intelligence, you still fall short, even adding some new term. For example, consider a snowflake. It is quite complex, unique, and is a major increase of information from it constituent parts, namely water vapor. The water molecules have no information contained in them that guides the snowflake-making process, over its molecular configuration and its inherent dipolar nature (and this is constant for all water molecules) Yet, a snowmaking machine set up on a mountainside of any ski resort can make snow. Are you claiming that this snow machine is an intelligence, like humans are an intelligence? DaveScot: How were the meaningful results obtained? By an effective method. Dave, I'm disappointed in you, would you like to prove that statement true? Because I can prove it false. Can you possibly conceive of an ineffective method that failed to produce its intended result, but succeeded in producing the observed goal instead? That's entirely possible, thus making it a ineffective method for one result but effective at some unintended result.

John A. Davison is pretty sure about his "science". Wonder what the residents of Vermont think of his campaign.

http://www.uvm.edu/~jdavison/platform.html

Good lord, John, what happened?

Only four years ago you were lookin' buff and turning on all the guys and gals with your all-American good looks.

http://www.johndavidson.com/john.html

Now you're lookin a wee bit tired, shall we say.

Perhaps a cruise on the Sea Finch will be just the thing for you. My advice is to try not to party too hard with DaveScot -- that guy's a wild man once he gets a couple shots in him.

Good luck with the nude musical.

Scientific American tends to ask whether global warming is scientificially supportable as an assertion, which is the wrong question. A better question is, would scientists support steps to alleviate global warming if the cost of those steps were subtracted from scientific funding across the board?

— flint

Typically, rather than address the questions dealing with evolution, the discussion degenerates on the spot into the sort of garbage just offered by shiva And GWW (aka Scott L. Paige). Is it any wonder I have no respect for any of you. You are nothing but a bunch of ignorant unfulfilled morons who, never having had an original idea in their lives, naturally gravitate toward others of the same ilk into a communal groupthink devoid of any curiosity about anything and sustained only by one another. You are a collective caricature of yourselves, a monument to man's ignornce, a living, breathing demonstration that there are far more horses asses than horses.

John A. Davison

Comment #21543 Posted by shiva on March 22, 2005 08:24 PM John A. Davison is pretty sure about his "science". Wonder what the residents of Vermont think of his campaign. http://www.uvm.edu/~jdavison/platform.html . . .

— shiva

Comment #16749 Posted by Wayne Francis on February 17, 2005 11:28 PM ... Oh JAD . . . How did your run for Governor? I'm sure others here would love to hear about your run for political office.

— Wayne Francis

Happy Birthday Panda's Thumb!!!!

Welcome to the Panda's Thumb!

looking forward to a good 2nd year.

Wayne

way off-topic but ...

An article in NY Times about hypomania (mild manic) led to www.newpath4.com. It's a refreshing change of pace from Creationism and ID. The gentleman has thought up a steam-nitrogen engine that is so efficient that it defies gravity. There's also a car that runs on compressed air harvested from the shock absorbers when they go over bumps in the road.

Air Bear wrote in #21557

"An article in NY Times about hypomania (mild manic) led to www.newpath4.com. It's a refreshing change of pace from Creationism and ID. The gentleman has thought up a steam-nitrogen engine that is so efficient that it defies gravity. There's also a car that runs on compressed air harvested from the shock absorbers when they go over bumps in the road."

Thanks for the www.newpath4.com link. It's pretty fun to read through. He does have a leg up on the ID crowd since he does make some definite testable predictions.

I didn't arrive at Panda's thumb to answer silly questions which I have already answered in my papers. I came to prove once and for all that Darwimpianism, like political liberalism, has a solid genetic basis exactly as Gilbert and Sullivan proclaimed before the dawn of the twentieth century. I have been eminently successful due largely to the the spontaneous inputs from Wayne Francis, Scott L. Paige, P.Z. Meyers and RBH (Mr. Avida). Of course there have been many others too numerous to mention and I apologize if you didn't make my short list.

We are all helpless manifestations of a predetermined evolutionary history in which we are the terminal products. Some of us have been luckier than others as the prescribed gene families have reached their present arrangements. I am humbled and grateful to number myself among the more fortunate ones who is not hamstrung with intellectual bigotry as those I mentioned above so clearly are.

Since I know how much you all loathe my use of quotations:

"Every boy and every girl,
That is born into the world alive,
Is either a little liberal,
Or else a little conservative."
Gilbert and Sullivan, Iolanthe

"Our actions should be based on the ever-present awareness that human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are just as causally bound as the stars in their motion."
Albert Einstein

"Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics and it springs from the same source...They are creatures that can't hear the music of the spheres."
ibid

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
Winston Churchill

Panda's Thumb is crawling with all the above.

'An hypothesis does not cease to be an hypothesis when a lot of people believe it."
Boris Ephrussi

As for the mindless attacks by the members of Panda's Thumb, I offer the following:

"There is nothing mnore exhilarating than to be shot at without result."
Winston Churchill

In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that he did not also limit his stupidity."
Konrad Adenauer

As for myself:

"First make yourself unpopular, then people will take you seriously."
Konrad Adenauer

"I have always felt that a politician* is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents."
Winston Churchill *substitute evolutionist

"Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
ibid

Have a nice smug, aimless, pointless, mutationist, selectionist and, of course, Godless Darwinian day.

John A. Davison

I assosiate living life to the max with bad things, because this is the general way of non-Godly people. I live my life to the max! Now in answer to you're final question about the porn site, [emily_angel_21] I have no idea! God says that I can not indulge in lusts of the flesh, I'm not into that stuff. The adress was a fun one I made up when playing a joke on my friend.

I'm truly sorry John, but Dogbert has copyrighted all of your statements and you won't be able to post here anymore...

Matthew is correct when he says people who post here are too smart. It creates a barrier for the young and poorly educated. I wish there were a site that defends evolution, which wasn't so.. well, prickly. Am I telling lies? This sweet guy is trying to save your souls, and all you can do is point to his spelling errors. C'mon.

BTW, I think I have a case with the library mis-shelving creationist literature right alongside science books about evolution. I will contact Barbara Forrest and see where it goes from there. Thanks for your advice, Dan S.

JAD said, "We are all helpless manifestations of a predetermined evolutionary history in which we are the terminal products."

That sounds like an unattributed paraphrased theft of something Mark Twain said about a clam - or was it the final coat of paint on the Eiffel Tower?

This sweet guy is trying to save your souls, and all you can do is point to his spelling errors. C'mon.

DaveScot is not a tender young mind. But I still am! I could use some digestable sound bites, as you write, myself. I have a heck of a time trying to keep up with PT! Otherwise what would I be doing here on the Bathroom Wall? (no offense intended)

Bob Maurus

I think you will find that to be a Davison original. Try this one on for size.

"Liberals* have been completely vanquished. Acually they lost the war of ideas long ago. It's just that now their defeat is so obvious that even they've noticed."
Ann Coulter * substitute Darwimps for liberals as the two are virtually synonymous anyway as I have demonstrated time and time again.

Katarina

If you are still a tender young mind, why are you still spouting Darwimpian pablum? I'll tell you why. It is probably because like every other student you have been conned into believing in the biggest hoax in recorded history. It is known far and wide as Darwinian evolution. That is the kind of evolution that never existed except in the minds of a couple of Victorian mystics who happened to have shared a common reading experience with Thomas Malthus and Charles Lyell.

"He that I am reading seems always to have the most force."
Montaigne

"Study Nature, not books."
Louis Agassiz

John A. Davison

For matthew and Katarina;

Have you checked out the list of "Evolution Resources" links on the Panda's Thumb homepage? You'll find reading material on evolution at just about every reading level, as much as you want. Enjoy.

Rt

Someone should post the Crackpot Index somewhere on this site permanently:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

That way, we could keep score on our resident trolls. I know it's written for physics, but it's easy to adapt, and most of it is generally applicable anyway.

It should probably be a daily score, or truly ludicrous numbers will be reached very quickly. JAD uses the first half of number 34 in virtually every post, while Donkeykong does the same with the second half.

Katarina If you are still a tender young mind, why are you still spouting Darwimpian pablum?

"A leach attached to man's leg is still a leach. A virus attached to a man's genome is still a virus."

'Attached to'?

Is this not the same individual that stated that one need only have a foundation in logic - which the 'dopes' here do not - to understand the issues?

A clear example of how a supposed (but undemonstrated) background in 'logic' does not prevent someone from making a jackass out of himself. A freshman biology major would not make so asinine a statement.

But then, Dave Springer is no biology student.

Regarding comments 21603 and 21606 and Behe's record at Lehigh:

I've moved over here so as to not distract from Ian's most excellent contribution. There's another twist to Behe's record and ID that I don't recall being mentioned. By all (well, at least some) accounts, Behe was a steady contributor to the research literature, at least until his foray in ID. Since then, little research , and nothing explicitly ID-supportive, has come from his lab. If we grant that Behe was and is competent, then this suggests (to me at least) that the field of ID itself is pretty bereft of scientific merit. A capable researcher would have, in the time since DBB came out, been able to coax some sort of data into publishable form.

Again we see Davison's paranoia.

I am not GWW. Never was, never will be. In reality, John, there is more than one person that sees your 'science' since about 1986 for what it is. So please do not continue to assume that everyone that points out the shallowness of your pseudoscience is me.

IMAX theaters in Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas have declined to show the film, said Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for Stephen Low, the film's Montreal-based director and producer. "I find it's only in the South," Serapiglia said.

Evolution is a beautiful idea, Katarina. I'm in physics, not biology, but I think it might be the coolest idea in science. If you read OTOOS, you'll be amazed at how he glimpsed it through nearly impossibly messy data.

what is with this?

http://nytimes.com/2005/03/23/science/23gene.html?hp&ex=1111640400&en=8f3d930c9f478eac&ei=5094&partner=homepage

That's called faith, my boy. Welcome to the Church of Darwin. Leave the facts at the door on your way in. It's all based on faith.

Re "Evolution is a beautiful idea, Katarina. I'm in physics, not biology, "

Well, I'm in software engineering, and find both physics and evolution fascinating. :)

Henry

I can hardly believe that Scott Paige is not the Great White Wonder when Paige already has at least six aliases to his credit already. Besides when dealing with a groupthink it really makes little difference who ones adversaries are anyway. Darwimps all think alike and always have.

"When all think alike, no one thinks very much."
Walter Lippmann

It is not "my science," but that of some real scientists like Berg, Goldschmidt, Grasse, Bateson, Broom and Schindewolf among many many others. Those who perpetuated the Darwinian myth have never been scientists and I defy anyone to identify a single contribution of substance that can be identified with any one of them. Start with their most recent spokespersons, Provine, Gould, Dawkins and Mayr and work your way backward. There has never been a real scientist in the Darwinian camp. Most of them have voluntarily cemented themselves to their endowed chairs at otherwise distinguished places like Harvard, Oxford and Cornell to spend the rest of their useless lives writing endlessly concerning something they know absolutely nothing about. Or worse, like Gould proselytizing on Public Television with such insane pronouncements as "Intelligence was an evolutionary accident."

What I find really amusing is when members of Panda's Thumb can arrogantly inform me that I don't understand what is in the undergraduate biology curriculum. Of course they are absolutely right because it is all hogwash, pure ideological drivel which I rejected when I was a graduate student. It is no wonder that our young scientists are still convinced of the Darwinian myth. That is all they have ever been exposed to. Darwinism is a scandal, an intellectually criminal offense perpetrated and perpetuated by generation after generation of homozygous liberal atheists, like nearly all white cats, stone deaf to the truth, which is that evolution has been a planned and largely executed phenomenon in which chance played virtually no role whatsoever.

My primary goal has always been to resurrect those whom the Darwinians have had to ignore in order to maintain their silly fairy tale. That has been a most revealing experience for me and a source of great personal satisfaction to be able to reinstate them in the evolutionary scenario. All one has to do to find out who the real evolutionists have always been is to examine the index of Mayr's "The Growth of Biological Thought" or Gould's "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." There you will find them all, either conspicuously absent or dismissed with a wave of the imperial Darwinian wand.

As for logic, anyone who is so weak-minded as to assume the living world is logical has already exposed himself as a fool.

There now, I feel somewhat better. Thanks for not listening. You never do.

John A. Davison

John A. Davison, what do think happened? I don't think I have time to read your papers. Could you just give me a quick sentence or two? Or maybe provide me a link to one of your papers?

Thanks.

what is with this? http://nytimes.com/2005/03/23/science/23gene.html?hp&ex=1111 . . .

One other point. People sometimes say: "Well, since most new mutations do not help the organism reproduce, evolution is no more plausible than not."

Well, sure. Mutations that have helped organisms reproduce are probably a small percentage of all mutations. But keep in mind what "small percentage" means. 3.8 billion years is a long time! Mutations that helped organisms reproduce have occurred billions of times. Analogously, the percentage of days that there has been golf-ball sized hail somewhere on planet earth is probably a smaller percentage of all the day in earth's history. But earth is 4.6 billion years old. There probably have been billions of days in which there has been golf-ball sized hail somewhere on planet earth.

On a different note, even mutations that have made some organisms less apt to reproduce have stayed within a population over long periods of times. For instance, the mutation that causes tay-sachs disease.

That's called faith, my boy. Welcome to the Church of Darwin. Leave the facts at the door on your way in. It's all based on faith.

It is a fact that a self-replicating molecule evolved into all the multicellular organisms to live on earth. According to Ernst Mayr, the late Harvard biologist:

Astronomical and geophysical evidence indicate that the Earth originated about 4.6 billion years ago. At first the young earth was not suitable for life, owing to heat and exposure to radiation. Astronomers estimate that it became livable about 3.8 billion years ago, and life apparently originated about that time, but we do not know what this first life looked like. Undoubtedly, it consisted of aggregates of macromolecules able to derive substance and energy from surrounding inanimate molecules and from the sun's energy. Life may well have originated repeatedly at this early stage, but we know nothing about this. If there have been several origins of life, the other forms have since become extinct. Life as it now exists on Earth, including the simplest bacteria, was obviously derived from a single origin. This is indicated by the genetic code, which is the same for all organisms, including the simplest ones, as well as by many aspects of cells, including the microbial cells. The earliest fossil life was found in strata about 3.5 billion years old. These earliest fossils are bacterialike, indeed they are remarkably similar to some of the blue-green bacteria that are still living" (What Evolution Is, p. 40).

It is a fact that self-replicating molecules that were on earth 65 million years ago evolved into all the organisms to live on planet earth.

I wonder if somebody should point out that there's a big difference between "not listening to" and "strongly disagreeing with"?

Oh well.

Henry

Comment #21685 Posted by Henry J on March 23, 2005 09:12 PM I wonder if somebody should point out that there's a big difference between "not listening to" and "strongly disagreeing with"? Oh well. Henry

— Henry J

Comment #16458 Posted by John A. Davison on February 16, 2005 01:54 AM ... You better keep your traps shut about my sources or I'll turn you all in to the FBI as security risks. Of course you have made that quite impossible haven't you with your cowardly anonymity. ...

— John A. Davison

Relax Wayne

It is not good to get so exercised. Did you really think that I could possibly care enough about you that I would waste my time calling up the FBI? You flatter yourself.

DS is not my idol and I am not his. We trade insults in our email exchanges. Bright people do that. On the important issues I suspect we are in fundamental agreement. Some of these are:

1. Both ontogney and phylogeny were front loaded and still are.
2. Chance had very little and perhaps nothing to do with evolution.
3. Allelic mutations are anti-evolutionary.
4. Natural selection, serving only to maintain the status quo, is also anti-evolutionary.
5. Darwinism is anti-intellectual.
6. Darwinians (Darwimps) are genetically impaired.
7. Bible thumping Fundamentalists (Fundies) are genetically impaired.
8. Ann Coulter is a beautiful genius.

Now I can't guarantee that DS agrees with all these, but I am sure he is quite willing to respond and perhaps add to the list if he should choose.

How do you like them apples? Who is next?

John A. Davison, still as miserably unfair as ever, unbalanced by virtue of majority opinion and not only unafraid but revelling in the opportunities that forums like this one afford him to expose his intellectual adversaries for what they continue to demonstrate about themselves, monumental ignorance, perfect orthodoxy and unfailing devotion to the greatest hoax in the history of science.

Steve,

Sorry, I did not understand your reference to OTOOS. Could you help?

Everyone,

I don't know if anyone here cares, but to give you an update, I wrote to the NCSE abuot my concern with the way my local library catalogues and shelves some creationist and evolution books together in the same category. I got a response, and I will give you the highlights.

"The point of cataloging is to indicate what the book is about, not to endorse the book as treating its topic competently, thoroughly, or honestly. Thus a creationist book on, say, the fossil record is-- and ought to be-- cataloged with the mainstream scientific books on the fossil record. A book on creationism in general, however, is likely to be cataloged as creationism, part of the religion section."

"(That is not) to say that the present systems of cataloging are sacrosanct... For example, a Minnesota librarian named Sandy Berman, who's legendary in cataloging circles, recently successfully lobbied the Library of Congress to introduce "intelligent design" as a LC descriptor, which enables people to find works advocating, describing, and criticizing intelligent design creationism more easily."

"What's more important than cataloging, though, is collection development....
It is at the level of collection development that we encourage people to work with their local librarians, rather than wrangle with them about cataloging, for which they probably lack time, resources, and interest."

However, she did mention that one of the books on the list, What Is Creation Science, seems to be mis-cataloged, just judging by the title. It is published by Master Books, a publisher that turns out many other creationist books, but usually doesn't bother to provide suggestions to the libraries about cataloging becasue they don't expect the libraries will acquire them in the first place.

As Dan S. suggested before, I agree with the idea of "supply" rather than "wrangle about cataloging," so I went ahead and donated my Unintelligent Design and Deeper than Darwin, for now, and will look at some philosophy of science books to donate as well (though it's hard to give them up). In my opinion, everyone who supports evolution here should donate at least one good science book to their libraries.

I have an exam in calculus today, wish me luck!

Hello- I'm sorry if this is not posted correctly as I am quite new to this. I am a science teacher (high school) and former cultural anthroplogist currently engaged in discussion with a fellow faculty member who is a creationist. He has recently raised the usual red herring of "why there aren't more transitional fossils" and as I'm fairly informed on evolutinoary theory I can give him the usual theoretical responses, but he likes specifics and wants to talk T. rex. He is concerned that "all T. rexes look alike; where's the variation" My understanding is that there are only about 30 T rex fossils and most are grossly incomplete. I'm wondering if anyone can telll me specifics about

1) Intraspecific variation among T. rex fossils
2) Degree of species variation within the T. genus (i think there are 3 species?)
3) Transitionals to other taxa

I appreciate it greatly. And thanks for all the GREAT work you all do. We NEED you out here.

There are no predictions made by ID independent from evolutution.

So you're saying ID makes the same predictions as "evolution" and uses the same empirical evidence as "evolution". Think hard Ed. What logical conclusions may we reach from that?

Best story detailing why evolutionism is in for a slight setback.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/living/religion/11174394.htm

Just to be kind of pedantic about it, any real theory would necessarily make at least some predictions which differed from the predictions of evolution. IDiots don't really understand how science models work, and say, well, ours just makes all your predictions, but additionally, it differs in certain untestable ways. Usually science-oriented people reject this, and say, that's not good enough. But I think it's better to say wait a minute, that's not just inadequate, it's not true. ID doesn't make any predictions. Dembski can say their predictions comport with evoluton's all day long, but they don't have any to comport. It doesn't make any predictions whatsoever. There's no theory.
IC was an attempt to make a theory, but they could never get the thing to stand on its own feet. CSI died during birth too. Recognising design is an imperfect set of heuristics which generally has survival value. It goes wrong all the time. Look at that old Martian photo of what appears to be a monument in the form of a human face. The entirety of ID 'research' has been to try to turn an imperfect heuristic into a reliable algorithm. If they could ever do this, they'd have a real scientific theory on their hands, but they can't.

Novak notes that congressional voting on the Schiavo matter moved outside normal partisan lines. But not since Vietnam, he says, have his colleagues in the mainstream press staged such a heated debate at such a fine dinner party. At THE HOWLER, we don't doubt Novak's account, and we think you should ponder what it means. According to Novak, the Schiavo matter has his mainstream press colleagues more upset than anything since Vietnam! Translation: They didn't care this much about Iraq. They didn't care this much about Bush's tax cuts. They don't care this much about Social Security. They didn't care this much about the Bush-Gore election---the election which totally changed our politics---or about that crackpot book by those Swift Boat Veterans. No---more than all else, they care about this. It's a confession we find most illustrative. Who are the opinion leaders of your mainstream Washington "press corps?" As we've told you for years and years, they're a gang of perfumed millionaires, and no, they don't give a good goldarn about Bush's budget follies. Indeed, because they're multimillionaires, they gain from everything Bush has done in that area, and no, they don't care if you don't. But there's one thing these people still aren't---they still aren't a group of Christian conservatives. They get upset when the Christian right takes the stage. They don't care much about anything else. Not since the days of Vietnam has your powered press corps been so upset! They were willing to roll with Iraq---and with Bush's endless gifts to the rich. This is the one thing that gets them upset. We think you should ponder that deeply.

IDiots don't really understand how science models work, and say, well, ours just makes all your predictions, but additionally, it differs in certain untestable ways. Usually science-oriented people reject this, and say, that's not good enough. But I think it's better to say wait a minute, that's not just inadequate, it's not true.

1. Both ontogney and phylogeny were front loaded and still are.

2. Chance had very little and perhaps nothing to do with evolution.

3. Allelic mutations are anti-evolutionary.

4. Natural selection, serving only to maintain the status quo, is also anti-evolutionary.

Katarina, OOTOS==On the Origin of Species

OOPS. Katarina, OTOOS==On the Origin of Species

Someone quoted Mayr from his book "What Evolution Is."

You notice that this is a declaration which assumes that evolution is in progress. For starters that is wrong as evolution is finished. Now he could have said "What Evolution Was," but that's no good either because nobody knows for sure what evolution was except that it happened. His title could have been "What is Evolution?," but that too is no good as I and others have pointed out that it isn't going on any more. Actually the only rational title for his book would have been "What Was Evolution?, and that book would have been filled with blank pages.

You see phylogeny is a huge mystery except to men like Ernst Mayr who, in another of his many books, defined himself as "a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinian."

The very title of Mayr's book discloses that he never had a clue about evolution. Neither did Gould or Provine or Dawkins. Everything on which their many books are based is fictional, without any verification either in observation or experiment or the undeniable testimony of the fossil record, the final arbiter of reality.

Our certain knowledge about evolution is represented almost entirely by what we know was NOT involved. It is all negative but negative information is very important in serving as a guide to the truth. I won't bother again to list all the things that we know had absolutely nothing to do with evolution as I have already done that too many times right here on Panda's Thumb and elsewhere.

I discovered a long time ago that there is a surefire way to identify a real scientist. Scientists ask questions. Pierre Grasse asked three of them in a single paragraph as I posted some time ago. Otto Schindewolf even included the word question in the title of his last and most important book, "Basic Questions in Paleontology." I can't recall Mayr ever asking a question unless it was one that he had a ready made answer for. So much for Ernst Mayr and neo-Darwinism generally.

John A. Davison, demonstrably unfair, clinically unbalanced and still unafraid of anything including the unvarnished demonstrable truth that Darwinism, in all its manifestations, is an illusion, a scandal and a hoax.

You notice that this is a declaration which assumes that evolution is in progress. For starters that is wrong as evolution is finished.

Davidson, when you've got a second, could you refresh me memory? Did That's Incredible precede Real People or did you, Fran and Kathy just rip Real People off? I think the statute of limitations has run out so you've nothing to worry about if you admit it.

And do you remember the episode of That's Incredible where that guy caught a bullet between his teeth? Awesome. Were you involved in any of the frauds that were aired?

Does anybody have an idea about what % of creatures have colour vision?
Also do all apes have colour vision? If not, which ones do?

Wayne,
Yeah, they do get monotonous. Plus I don't really have a knack for communicating with somebody who thinks the validity of an argument can be judged by whether they like or dislike the conclusion.

steve,
"Just to be kind of pedantic about it, any real theory would necessarily make at least some predictions which differed from the predictions of evolution."
Yep. If it doesn't add to understanding of stuff, then it's just adding assumptions that aren't needed or used for anything. Not to mention that if ID is assumed, then ad-hoc assumptions have to be added to explain why standard evolution theory works at all. And that kind of negates the alleged purpose of the thing.

Henry

"A Fermilab press release reports that the expansion of the universe may be explainable without the need for dark energy or a cosmological constant. Apparently, ripples from inflation in the early universe may account for the observed expansion rate of the universe." http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/archive.html (it's under "March 16". The Panda's Thumb software is not capable of posting the actual link to the press release.)

I found the discussion of the probability of a coin flip, before and after the fact, to be quite humorous. I only dabble in probability theory, but let me point out that there is "probability", and "conditional probability".

Consider this question: what is the probability that a family with two children has two girls? If all you know is that the number of children in the family is 2, and all possibilities are equally likely, then the probability the two children are both girls is 25%.

Note that we already started with a condition: the number children in the family is 2.

Now, consider this question: given that a family with two children has 1 girl, what is the probability that it has 2 girls? The answer now is 50%.

Finally, consider the last question: given that a familly with two children has two girls, what is the probability that it has two girls? Wow, by amazing coincidence, the "probability" is 100%!

Exactly my point, Jim.

Posted by Longhorm on March 23, 2005 08:34 PM [...] There probably have been billions of days in which there has been golf-ball sized hail somewhere on planet earth. [...]

Longhorn's definition of evolution is children having genetic differences from their parents. I really don't know what more to add, so I won't.

The only prediction that can be made about a process which is finished is that it is extremely unlikely to start up again.

"This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts."
Winston Churchill

How do you like them apples?

Who's next?

John A. Davison, unfair to the point of total intolerance, unbalanced by any reasonable criterion and still unafraid of all who are so transparently deluded as to see evolution going on all around them in a kind of Darwimpian delirium tremens.

Get some help.

Posted by John A. Davison on March 25, 2005 05:52 AM [...] The only prediction that can be made about a process which is finished is that it is extremely unlikely to start up again. [...]

I can't help you. It is not what I am trying to say. It is what I have said that seems to be the problem. I have said that evolution is finished, a conclusion which I, like others, have reached because of the absence of facts to the contrary. If you or anyone else chooses to ignore that conclusion there is nothing that I can or will do to dissuade you. You have that right.

It is my considered opinion that evolution is finished except for minor changes which will never lead to new life forms. I intend to remain of that opinion until undisputed facts force me to abandon it.

John A. Davison

Posted by John A. Davison on March 25, 2005 06:36 AM [...] evolution is finished except for minor changes which will never lead to new life forms. I intend to remain of that opinion until undisputed facts force me to abandon it. John A. Davison

Comment #21578 Posted by Katarina on March 23, 2005 07:38 AM This sweet guy is trying to save your souls, and all you can do is point to his spelling errors. C'mon.

For the curious who may not already know.
Pascal's Wager

Paul

Paul,

You are right, of course. Thanks for making the point.

Comment #21846 Posted by Jim on March 24, 2005 11:13 PM ... Now, consider this question: given that a family with two children has 1 girl, what is the probability that it has 2 girls? The answer now is 50%.

I never begged a question in my life. I never heard of such a thing. I am a physiologist not a beggar. Physiologist are scientists that are concerned with how things work which is why I rejected Darwimpianism years ago. It simply doesn't work and never did.

Jim, I'm afraid Steve is right but it doesn't really matter because probability and chance never had anything to do with evolution anyhow. Get used to it. Darwimpianism is a cruel hoax.

John A. Davison, etc. etc. etc.

I beg your pardon? So, the other child has 66.6% chances of being male? Could you explain the rationale behind this assertion?

Oh, I see... a matter of definitions. OK, ignore my previous comment.