It just dawned on me that ID is dead.
Dembski is off all radar. He doesn’t even show up in the search box at South Carolina bible college or whatever. The last post on the Design Inference is a year old.
Meyer’s book went up like a firework and came down with the stick.
Most of the static websites are moribund. UD has banned virtually all dissenters. The few brave enough to wander over to TSZ bail out after a couple of rounds. The biologic institute inflates its “selected publications” with publications that have nothing to do with the biologic institute and seems to be doing no more than pretending to produce output.
Bio-Complexity is moribund.
Behe doesn’t seem to have much to say.
The big guys won’t come out to debate. The small ones mostly won’t leave heavily censored sites. Even the UD newsdesk peddles 6 year old stories as “news”.
And all the threads are about religion. Or tossing coins.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before.
It’s dead.
Posted at “After the Bar Closes on Jan. 05 2014,16:37 by Febble (Elizabeth Liddle)
Does anyone feel like extending or disputing Lizzie’s analysis? What other burning topics are others bothered by? Climate change? Unchecked exploitation of finite resources? Habitat destruction and extinction? I guess many commenters were drawn to this blog by a shared scepticism over “Intelligent Design”. Do we have any other shared interests? Now that ID has declined into insignificance, has TSZ lost it’s raison d’être?
William J. Murray,
Example?
William J. Murray,
So what should evolutionary biology have done instead?
Although the link between (say) phylogenetic analysis or mathematical population genetics and societal norms is a decidedly tenuous one, by what measure did society start going downhill after 1859?
William J. Murray,
Excellent! I’m stealing that. Every time I can’t think of an actual argument, that’s what I’m gonna say. 🙂
William is on record at UD as saying that he accepts *everything* proposed about evolution bar the idea that random mutations are really random. That is his *only* point of dispute, in his own words. I can dig up a link if William choses to dispute this (but as noted below, he won’t as he probably contradicts himself daily without even realising it).
As such, he cannot give any examples as you request. He has none. He cannot have any!
I don’t however know how he can state such things and at the same time hold to his position of “everything but random mutations are not random”. He’s on record as accepting 99.9999% of “evolutionary biology’s” conclusions.
I expect it’s simply because it’s hard to hold all the various mutually exclusive positions together as consilience between them is not available. So the poor dear forgets his own position sometimes.
Kn,
Which evolutionary theory are you talking about? The one about random mutations and natural selection being responsible for all life as we see it? I am pretty sure that theory has been dead for decades, so what theory are you talking about exactly?
There are differences of opinion, yes, but at your level I’d suggest you don’t really need to worry about those.
Have you read “On the Origin of Species”? It’s a good place to start given you ask such a question.
Again, start with “On the Origin of Species”. Once you understand that argument you’ll be better prepared to understand the more advanced topics. Such as there being a little more to it then rm+ns.
Again, at your level, I’d not worry about such details. Once you have the basics down you’ll be ready for the more advanced versions of “the theory”.
Try to think about it like one of those Russian Dolls. The next level can only be understood if you understood the previous level. And when you get to the more interesting parts, that’s when you’ll be able to understand the debates that are happening between the experts in the field. There is no complete understanding of every aspect of evolution, no, but that is science for you.
But at your level, it’s basically settled science.
There’s no shame in not understanding something, the only shame comes when you are critiquing something you don’t understand and are unwilling to learn from your betters when your errors and misunderstandings are pointed out.
OMagain,
Actually, in case you missed it, we are dealing with KN’s level I understanding, seeing as how it is he who is making the claim that some “theory of evolution” has great explanatory powers. His complaint of ID seemed to be that is was just too vague to be of any use.
He therefore probably doesn’t need to your help to demonstrate just how vague his evolutionary theory is.
It does.
Then simply demonstrate the utility of ID. If you cannot then by demonstration you have made KN’s point for KN.
You seem to be avoiding the question. Have you read “Origin”?
Well, let’s put that to the test.
The ratio of males to females is generally 1:1.
The theory of evolution proposes an explanation for that.
Does Intelligent Design?
If not, we can mark up one for “vague evolution theory” can’t we?
I await your answer.
OMagain,
Ooh, that’s a good one. They might be tempted to answer that it’s optimal to have a 1:1 sex ratio because that gives exactly as one male for each female.
But it isn’t optimal. For many organisms the population could grow faster if there were more females than males, as in those species males can fertilize more than one female. The 1:1 argument (due to Carl Düsing and also Darwin, but often mistakenly called Fisher’s theory) also predicts equal allocation of resources to pollen and to ovules in monoecious plants, another nonoptimal result.
And alchemy is significantly responsible for the development of modern chemistry. But modern chemistry survives and thrives quite well without it, and probably would hate arisen even if alchemy never existed. So, I don’t see the point of your statement.
Actually, I don’t think that the “Origin of Species” is a good place to start. I mean, it’s interesting for a whole bunch of historical reasons, but it’s not where the action is at.
I forget the books I read as a kid, but Blueprints, which I read in my undergrad intro to biology course, was a pretty good historical introduction to the discipline. Lately both Darwinism and Its Discontents and Living with Darwin seem like solid pieces of work. And then there’s Sober’s Evidence and Evolution for those who want a more advanced treatment.
I come to evolutionary theory through a somewhat more circuitous route, since I read Oyama’s The Ontogeny of Information in its first edition when I was a first (or maybe second?) year college student.
Ontogeny of Information was one of the first major works in developmental systems theory and it made a rather deep and permanent impression on me. Crucial to Oyama’s conception of evolution is that it consists, essentially, of “change in the distribution and constitution of developmental (organism-environment) systems” (Ontogeny of Information, p. 77).
I find that far more insightful than thinking about it in terms of random mutations winnowed by natural selection, which is unfortunately interpreted in terms of an Epicurean metaphysics, aka “materialism” (“chance” and “necessity”).
William J. Murray,
No evidence, William? You want evidence? That’s odd, since you said this:
“Why would I concern myself with evidence, when IMO “evidence” is only the mind arranging thought and matter to support what one already wishes to believe?” (William J Murray)
William J. Murray,
LOL
William said: “The truth is always troublesome for those that need to deny it.”
Besides the fact that you’re averse to mirrors (like all other ID-creationists), what is “the truth”, William? Remember now, you’re not concerned with evidence because, in your opinion, “evidence” is only the mind arranging thought and matter to support what one already wishes to believe, so how do you know what “the truth” is, and how should scientists go about finding “the truth” about evolution and anything else without concerning themselves with evidence?
Kantian Naturalist,
A list of books is not a theory Kantian.
OMagain,
What, like bees you mean? Or do you mean like Buffaloes having more sons when it rains? Or animals that change their sex depending on the temperature? Or hermaphrodites species?
A completely unguided, random swirling of dust explains all of these.
Yes evolutionary theory explains all of these of course. What doesn’t “evolutionary theory” explain would be a better question. Wouldn’t evolutionary theory also explain a grey, sexless sludge which covers the entire mass of the planet in toxic waste?
What utter stupidity, did you even think about this comment for more than a nano-second? No wonder Felsenstein thinks its brilliant, it requires no depth of curiosity whatsoever.
phoodoo,
Did the book you rely on (the bible) tell you that?
“unguided”
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
I always find it interesting to see the ID complaint that evolution explains quite different results (when the situation is quite different, of course), as if there is something wrong with that. Does that mean that if evolution didn’t explain the quite different results we see that they would believe it? Somehow I don’t think so, it seems that the real problem is that something as complex as the evolution of complex life really does have quite different results, depending on starting conditions and a host of selective pressures, and they don’t like that.
It’s like meteorology. My god, it explains fair weather and foul. How is solar radiation, fluids on a rotating earth, evaporation and condensation supposed to do all of that? Well, it’s complicated, but if you’re deadset against understanding you won’t understand. Meanwhile, evolution has no set results, only contextual ones, and it explains the non-portability of innovations in unrelated lines of most multicellular organisms, while ID “explains,” well, everything and nothing–including, according to them, the lack of intelligent reuse of ideas in unrelated lines (that don’t laterally transfer DNA much).
Yes, “explaining anything and everything” is a problem for a purported cause. That’s why ID is dead, at least if it could ever be said to have been alive.
Glen Davidson
acartia_bogart said:
Of course you don’t, because you’re categorically misplacing your attention. ID is the foundation that the entirety of modern science rests upon, not just historically, but fundamentally – meaning, the philosophy that provided the grounds for the expectations which led to the methodology and principles to follow was all ID.
Take away the expectation of what we should find based upon a god of logic, math, a universal law-giver, efficient and elegant in principle, and you don’t have anything resembling modern scientific research.
If you begin with with the concept of a universe that just happened to form out of nothing by chance, you probably get no more technologically advanced than the ancient greeks. That’s pretty much what the historical record shows happens wrt science in non-monotheistic,unenlightened cultures.
That chemistry grew out of alchemy is irrelevant to that point. Science still uses and depends on the ID heuristic, not the “chance” heuristic. Even natural laws are not available under the materialistic viewpoint; good thing we came up with those before the materialists were in power or I’m sure Newton’s work would have been ridiculed and banned from academia.
Nonsense.
Something like ID may have been a starting assumption. But it was not a foundation. Science is not built on it. Remove any semblance of ID, and science still stands.
WJM:
More “stolen concept” nonsense, William?
Natural laws are just an expression of observed regularities in nature. Would you care to explain why you think regularity is impossible under materialism?
Quantum Mechanics is a probabilistic theory. The Bohr v Einstein debate was never about theism, but the fact that Bohr was right kills William’s argument.
On Newton, poor William is also way out of date, of course. Newton was wrong.
William J. Murray,
The more desperate you get, the more grandiose (and ridiculous) are your claims.
Are you going to answer the questions that I have asked you?
Allan Miller,
We are geeting in details here.
I don’t think they say the sediment layers were turned to stone by simple addition of mass. . or rather your just saying what yEC would say except we speeded up the final result of weight/mass.
why not?
Everyone must say the weight on whats below turned the sediment, uniquely, into stone.
Its an option that the speed of the weight from the segregated flows depositing their loads did add heat and thus the water disappeared within same sediment loads. something like that.
its not just forth days. The pressure would be fantastic from swaying the water depths about. Even five miles means nothing compared to such great pressure.
The big point i’m making is that all must account for how the sediment turned to stone.
So it must be from weight on top and then heat etc helping to squeeze the water out. So yEC can speed up the process.
Robert Byers,
“So yEC can speed up the process.”
In your imagination, but not in reality.
Mark one for “unproductive evolutionary theory” and zero for “Intelligent Design” then.
So, one-nil. Do you want to have another kick at the ball or do you think nobody noticed your misdirection?
Remind me again why you are an ID supporter? It’s the old “anything except godless evolution” right?
You do realize you are on a level with Robert Byers don’t you? You are just better at phrasing your thoughts is all, other then that, just another YEC poking holes in something they don’t understand.
Yes, from reading the Bible that sounds exactly like the God described in there.
What I find odd is why it took so long? I noted the word “modern” in there. Given that you’ve presumably had this god of logic and math from the very start, why did computers take so long to pop up? What took “modern science” so long? Was there a specific quote of heretics to burn before your deity allowed science to progress?
Care to share your thoughts on that William? If you have any….
Putting your self into the same catagory (the royal “we”) as Newton should give you extra points on the crackpot scale.
William, name one single thing you have contributed to science.
Just one damm thing. Then you can use “we” in the same sentence as Newton.
Until then you are just standing on the shoulders of giants, pooping down their shirt collars.
I look forwards to reading your paper on this topic. Or is *that* it, lol?
So what William appears to be saying is:
no Jesus = no science.
Praise de lard!
Explain the Dark Ages in that context then.
I think that you see things as very simple when they are in fact very complex. It partly explains why you support ID I think.
It’s noted that you did not critique the actual proposed explanation, only your straw-man version of it.
The only person you are fooling is yourself, you do realize that right?
Hi, guys, just trying to sort out a glitch. Testing.
Actually ID is supposed to be that way, it’s design and not a glitch.
Can log in now. I see plugins are disabled so I assume you or someone is working on stuff. I’ll not mess!
Can anyone explain anything with ID? Phoodoo, William Murray, Robert Byers?
Can anyone use it to explain any biological feature? Ain’t that the “living” of a scientific theory?
Holy cow. Lizzie sighting.
Keith asks:
Why would I attempt to explain a position I never posited?’
davehook said:
It would if Bohr himself wasn’t using the very ID-rooted principles and methodology that Einstein used – indeed, that virtually all modern sceintists use. You seem to think that I’m making an argument that chance and probability are not useful in science, or useful in making scientific explanations. That’s not what I said. I said, they are not useful as a grounding paradigm for science that provides a context and heuristic for research, inferences and conclusions.
Theism by itself is also not enough; it takes a specific form of enlightened monotheism to provide a framework for the kind of scientific progress we’ve enjoyed.
The equivocation between the epistemological and genealogical senses of “grounds” hasn’t been clarified.
Arguably, this conception of God was just as much a consequence of the scientific revolution as it was a cause of it. The emphasis on God as an efficiency-maximizing mathematician results from the rise of the mathematical conception of nature once people like Galileo and Descartes realized that one could apply mathematics to physics. To the best of my knowledge, they did not infer from their theology that one could apply mathematics to physics.
Actually, no. It was the ancient Greeks who came up with the idea of the universe as fundamentally ordered by a rational mind. This is, in fact, the Big Idea of ancient Greek philosophy. It’s a constant theme that runs from the Presocratics (Anaxagoras) through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and down to the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and through them into Christianity.
By contrast, the idea that the world as we observe came into existence by chance and necessity together was an innovation of the Epicureans, and it was the rediscovery of Epicureanism in the 15th century that started the backlash against Thomism that led to the Scientific Revolution. More precisely, the Scientific Revolution resulted from a creative synthesis, unthinkable in antiquity, between Neoplatonic Christianity and Epicurean naturalism. But I think we’d have to get into political economy (the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, the decline of “Christendom” and the rise of the nation-state) and other factors to understand why the modern conception of nature and of mind took off as it did.
In short, theology alone isn’t sufficient to understand how and why the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe and not in China (which was, it must be emphasized, just as technologically advanced as Europe at the time. It wasn’t until the 18th century, I believe, that European technology really began to outpace Chinese technology).
William,
No, it does not.
And that statement as exactly the same amount of supporting evidence that yours does.
William,
Are you sure? Perhaps you used to take that position but no longer do. Are you keeping track?
William J Murray:
What does “ID-rooted” exactly mean?
It’s very usual to see ID promoters throwing ambiguous complex words and many times one almost has a clue of what they try to say. But it’s hard to debate when you are kind of guessing what the other is saying. “Specified” is one such example. “Organized” is another.
And “ID-rooted” would be another example. What is a methodology “ID-rooted” exactly like? What is a “ID-rooted” principle? What’s “ID-rooted” evolution?
KN said:
Yes, indeed. People like Galileo and Descartes – and Newton, and Bacon – who realizedyou could apply mathematics to nature. To realize a thing, favorable conceptual grounds for that realization must exist. Otherwise, like in so many other cultures throughout history, conceptual connections are never made nor lead to scientific theories and models.
William,
What an interesting idea. Will you be formally developing this idea, drawing in support from historical resources, first party accounts and creating a body of work that supports this idea?
Or is it just a claim you are making on a message board that you are expecting people to just accept?
I ask again. Explain the Dark Ages in light of this claim.
KN said
William responded:
KN, William does not “learn” as others do, he just continues on correction or no correction.
William,
That and the free time to do more then just find enough food to live.
Your overly simple conception of history is laughable.