- Over the last month, UD has been down more often than it has been up. In addition, Barry and News have been AWOL, leaving the keys to the kingdom to a pompous, arrogant, sermonizing narcissist. My apologies. That was uncharitable. It appears that Gordon Mullings, the Montserrat messiah, has been left to clean up after the party.
If UD does go the way of the dodo, I worry about Bornagain77 and Kairosfocus. Two individuals whose entire meaning for existence appears to be centred on their UD personas. Hopefully they have other outlets for their “sky is falling” rants.
Just a quick comment here. Gender is far from binary, it is SEX that is binary. But sex and gender are very different things. Biologically, sex refers pretty strictly to gamete size, and to the very different investments the sexes must make as part of reproduction.
There was someone on reddit who argued that religion is like masturbation. People have a drive to understand their universe and a drive to reproduce. And masturbation satisfies the drive to reproduce without actually reproducing, while religion satisfies the drive to understand without actually understanding anything.
Now, that is something you would never get away with at UD. Another thing that was not tolerated was spelling god with a lower case G. Or talking about homosexuality. Or suggesting that ID is just a rebranding of scientific creationism.
Don’t forget the Supreme Court and a large number of federal judgeships that have also been “captured.” While politics can turn on a dime, that legacy will be with us for decades. I don’t believe there is a single justice among the new “Trump Majority” that has a science background–political science doesn’t count………… 😉
I’m fairly certain that a science background disqualified any candidate for consideration by the Heritage Society. It would threaten the possibility that a nominee might decide a case on the actual merits rather than the ideological goals. That is, they might misunderstand the proper role of the judiciary.
I remember reading somewhere that it was The Federalist Society that connived with Trump to ensure a steady supply of candidates with impeccable conservative credentials for the bench.
SeverskyP35,
The Federalist Society is the current right-wing gatekeeper for judicial nominees, but Flint’s point is well-taken. When I was in law school in the early 80s, the FS was just getting started. Scalia and Bork were both still law professors instrumental in its founding as a law student club which ultimately morphed into one of the most powerful legal lobbies going. And, of course Reagan was their incarnation. They claimed that he could literally walk on water, which is a good thing because he sure as hell couldn’t act…….
I mean, seriously, can you imagine the conservative Trumpsters on the Supreme Court wrapping their collective minds around natural selection. These are the folks that took the watered-down Intro to Geology (math-free) as their science requirement freshman year of college. No disrespect to actual real geologists who were taking advanced calc and p-chem, of course….
This is just a suggestion, but it would be interesting to start a thread on this site to discuss recent articles that appear in Evolution News now that UD is dead and there is really nowhere else to comment. UD generally would pick up these articles eventually for comment.
For example, Ann Gauger is currently running a series on why Catholics should reject evolution and embrace “the design argument.” I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.
Just a thought……
chuckdarwin,
I think that is a great idea. You are very welcome to start an OP. You just need to click on the “plus” sign in the black bar above the penguins and choose “post” from the drop-down menu.
Alan Fox,
I see a black bar below the penguins (not above) but no plus sign ???
That’s what I see as well. The wide black bar below the penguins has no plus sign or other indication of how to initiate a thread, and there’s nothing above the penguins at all. Could it be browser-specific?
I have a narrow black bar above the penguins which shows The Skeptical Zone, some icons and to the right a gray plus sign and then New.
Maybe you can start by telling us what you were smoking when you came up with that “natural selection” nonsense, Chuck Darwin.
That’s so awful, not one person can explain how it’s supposed to work. Let alone prove it. Despite assurances “it makes perfect sense” – yeah, right.
And did your cousin-wife know you were stoned so bad? Epic!
Did you try Coynes or Pandas? I’m sure they won’t dare cancel you. Because you tell “the truth”, that’s why.
… said a guy that clings to “evolution” – the most absurd fairy tale.
… said a dude that neither will admit his myth is bogus, nor can defend his story with anything that makes the least scientific sense.
Since the UD shutdown is such an event around here, I checked out Biologos and Peaceful War. It turns out they’re no longer active forums, and they’re barely alive with once in a long while zero-interest posts. I guess that’s what happens when you suppress dissent.
Coyne, on the other hand, employs two cats to explain “why evolution is true”. Deranged…
While Panda allows a tiny bit of dissent to keep them rabbids enraged and engaged I guess.
That’s because the cats know more about evolution than some humans who comment about it.
I’d be interested in that too. And sometimes Evolution News picks up things that are actually interesting.
That’s what I’m seeing too, when I’m logged in. I use Firefox.
Maybe not everyone has permission to make new posts?
Genuine dissent is always welcome. “You people are all stupid”, repeated endlessly, is not dissent. It’s noise.
Yes, that may be the problem.
Alan made some changes in how this works, so I hope he will look into this.
Sorry guys. Above the penguins, not below. Click the grey plus sign, choose “post” from the drop-down. Everyone, when logged in, has permission to compose a post. Contributors need an admin to publish for them. New authors can publish themselves. Anyone who publishes regularly can request change of status from contributor to new author.
aleta,
My bad. See previous comment.
ETA: The black bar above the Penguins is only there when you are logged in.
Nonlin.org,
I never had any problems being censored or barred from UD. Just like it would appear you are posting pretty freely at TSZ. But I didn’t attack the commenters, with, for example junior high gutter humor like “cousin-wife” or “stoner” references, just their ideas. I can’t say that that courtesy was ever reciprocated. I think a good case can be made that that is a major reason UD has now gone the way of the dinosaurs…..
??? I am logged in – how else could I post this? But I see no black bar above the penguins, no plus sign, no drop down menu. Above the penguins I see the name of the site, the motto, and a search box. What am I missing?
Here’s another interesting website I stumbled on. I’m not sure it is still active. Some of you maybe already knew of it….
http://www.arn.org/index.html
Flint,
Logging in with my test account (same permissions level as you), the black bar is right at the top of the page. Starting from the left, on it you should see a dial icon (click for access to dashboard). The plus sign is to the right of it and should take you to the text editor. PM me if that doesn’t work.
Below is a capture of the area of my screen with arrows pointing to the options for starting a new thread.
CharlieM,
Found it. Thanks….
Oh, ***that*** black bar! 🙂
Cat whisperers? No? Then your comment explains why UD had to shut down, and why tsz might be next.
But maybe I am wrong. Can you explain how “natural selection” would work? Are you aware of, and can you address the main objections against “evolution”?
I very much doubt that. They shut down the inconvenient voices all the time. Just ask Joe.
Humor is not “attack the commenter”. And the reference was to someone else’s crazy idea if you haven’t figured it out. Unless… Are you truly a reincarnation of Darwin? No? Then as far as your ideas, you have yet to show any worth addressing.
I don’t know how to post a screenshot. Above the penguins there is the name of the site, beneath that is the motto “I beseech you…” to the right of these is a small box that says search. And that’s all.
Below the penguins is a thick black bar that says home, about this site, rules, and so on. No black bar, no dial icon, no plus sign.
Ah, thanks to Charlie, I found it!. Thanks, Charlie.
I didn’t even know that bar was part of the site. I confused it with my favorites bar.
OK, serious response. There is a difference between dissent and inconvenience. If you do nothing but shout insults, or if you post porn, or if you spam the site with ads, these are NOT dissent. Joe wasn’t banned because people disagreed with his viewpoint. It was because he broke these rules.
You are still posting here because, by and large, you stay within the guidelines. You should understand that if you endlessly repeat “evolution is a fairy tale”, without any more substance to back it up, eventually people won’t pay attention to you.
As a start, you should try to distinguish between evolution and evolutionary theory. Evolution is basically a very large collection of observed changes in organisms over time. We know organisms change over time. So how does this happen? What causes these changes? Do they show any identifiable pattern? Is it possible to propose a pattern based on observations, and then test that proposal with additional observations?
Tests of evolutionary theory are fairly wide-ranging. We can do what’s called “artificial selection” to breed for traits we desire, and in the short term this is effective – consider everything from dogs to corn. However, artificial selection has limits, and those limits are the genetic variation already in the organisms. In the very long term, the proposal is that there are sources of truly novel variation, such as copying errors or cosmic rays (or other types of radiation). So far, scientists are very limited in the amount of novel variation they can introduce.
Another test is genome sequencing, to try to identify ancestry and branching events in the past. Also, to test morphological changes with genetic changes looking for a common ancestor of two organisms. The cumulative result forms a logical tree, and the theory says that at least for multicellular organisms, this has always and will always be the consistent pattern. Note here, of course, that exceptions to this pattern would necessitate modification of the theory.
So evolutionary theory is a model that proposes an explanation of how and why organisms change over time. Like any model, it’s a simplification and necessarily incomplete. There are still many questions about evolution that the model does not explain. This is made more difficult by the fact that speciation is both local and rare, for most species occurring not just beyond human lifetimes, but beyond the existence of humanity at all.
But this isn’t true of everything that evolves. The covid virus is evolving faster than appropriate vaccinations can track.
Finally, I should mention that this theory has been repeatedly challenged, and has undergone repeated refinement, for over a century. In the course of this process, the model is an increasingly close fit to observation, and suggests further observations. If you wish to identify problems with this model, that’s perfectly valid dissent. But by now, calling evolution a fairy tale is like calling the moon a fairy tale. You need to support your position.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/supreme-court-patent-case-science-the-justices-misunderstand-molecular-biology.html
It used to have a forum years ago where the moderation was reasonable enough to allow some critical input but there were a couple of crashes and the content never resurrected. I interacted there a bit (I seem to remember Sal Cordova) but I’d forgotten about it and didn’t realize ARN was still going. Nowhere to comment now unless I missed it.
Should there be a black bar?
Joe wasn’t banned, he was doing the banning. It seems the rules include “don’t disagree too much with Joe”. Who are you kidding?
This is patently false of course. Organisms give birth to other organisms that are their own entity. There is no change over time unless you talk about aging. “Descent with modification” is thus illogical.
What you’re saying here is that tests of evolutionary theory always fail. This is what I’ve been harping about more recently in the Couvier vs “evolution” story.
That won’t work either as you need to presuppose “evolution” true for all this. Again, clearly explained in my most recent OP.
Forget about ‘simplification’ and ‘incomplete’. The problem is that the model fails in its very core. Not on the “nice to have” fringes. Let’s be honest about that. Where were you when this has been explained over and over again?
Any virus is a manufacturing output of the cell. It is an object made by cells. Not at all something you want to talk about when arguing for “evolution”. If anything, you might want to talk about the cell that makes the virus.
Refinement is not the right word. Having failed over and over again, proponents keep coming with more and more desperate claims just to keep going. Two of them that I analized are “drift” and “punctuated equilibrium”. Read.
This is a totally gratuitous claim. The observation is “no evolution”. Not in the fossil record, not in the lab, and not in logic. And, extrapolating the past, it will always be so.
And the moon is a myth. You know perfectly well nobody has ever even seen it, and all that space program stuff is a conspiracy. There is no moon. So much for the fake field of astronomy.
The rest of what you write is no more valid than that. I refuse to believe that you are making a good faith effort to discuss anything, since all you ever do is lie through your teeth, and then lie about lying. I don’t know what entertainment you get out of it, but have fun.
Ann Gauger at ENV helpfully tells us what “Intelligent Design” is and isn’t. I think most of us know what ID is not but I have been asking for a positive definition or hypothesis at UD and never got a sensible answer. Could this be it?
In short, god did it.
I almost choked on my Ensure when she talked about ID having several models for mechanisms and that they are each being tested. I must have missed those. Whenever I asked about mechanism at UD I was always told that ID is not about the mechanism.
The sad thing about Gauger’s article, aside from being a blatant exercise in Catholic apologetics on a “science” blog, is that ID has been around for close to 30 years and Discovery Institute “fellows” are still trying to explain what it is. And I speculate that if you put ten ID proponents in a room together, they’d come up with ten different definitions. What’s that old metaphor about trying to nail Jello to the wall…… 😉
I had read at Panda’s Thumb, some time back, that Gauger’s MO was “scientific” in that she would start with the testable claim that “if evolution is true, we should see X when we perform test Y.” So she would do the research, at which she is very competent, and discover that X is not seen. She argues that this is a serious flaw in the theory of evolution. Other biologists countered that her initial setup was faulty, in that it should read “if my understanding of evolution is true…” and that she is testing a claim the theory of evolution does not make, or that the theory, properly understood, predicts exactly what she finds!
I think this is a common pattern among actual ID researchers.
Didn’t Axe do an experiment where he lysed a bunch of cells and then watched to see if they would reassemble? I don’t recall the exact details. But it just sounds like the tornado in a junkyard argument.
Flint,
Isn’t the term “ID researchers” an oxymoron?
There is such a thing as market research, and apologetics is a form of marketing. So I guess it isn’t an oxymoron.
I would say no. The Discovery Institute and the biologos people and others really have done research. Austin has done good geology, for example, but hasn’t been able to discover the young earth. Gauger and Axe have done competent science, unfortunately “disproving” what nobody claimed to be the case.
But consider these people in comparison to Mormon archaeologists searching for the Nephites and the Lamanites. They have actually admitted that there is no such evidence, and that Joseph Smith made it all up! Think about this! The LDS church has admitted that their scripture is almost surely fictional! Which doesn’t interfere at all with their faith in their rules for living.
Now, imagine creationists doing such honest research, instead of endlessly proving their conclusions, which they use as their premises. The LDS church has considerable substance even without the historical fictions, but creationists have nothing but the fiction. If they admit this, what would they have left?
And that’s a typical “evolution” argument : “you just don’t understand evolution” blah blah.
Well, if that’s the case, because “evolution” is sooo hard to understand, then you should stop indoctrinating the young.
Flint,
Unhinged.
So Flint, was that checkmate or what? We don’t need to conjure Freud-fraud to see that you got it and are throwing a tantrum because you have no answer. And here’s the instant replay just for fun :
Evolution isn’t at all hard to understand, except by people like you who have a powerful vested interest in not understanding. As Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Imagine what would happen to creationist “scientists'” salaries if they “discovered” what even grade school kids understand.
Most people are capable of noticing that they are not identical to their parents – indeed that they are different in a great many ways. You might try thinking about that, if you can.