Posted on 12/03/2005 5:28:45 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
TO read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.
...
Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.
On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
you can try babbelfish
on the other link,
""Just as chaos seemed to be incoherent randomness before the chaos theory was discovered, so evolution seemed to depend on chance alone. Thorough fossil studies of prehistoric skull-face relationships convinced Dr. Malassé that a hidden trajectory exists, leading from Australopithecus over Homo erectus to Homo sapiens (bypassing Homo neandertalensis) -- a finding reminiscent of the discovery of hidden patterns underlying apparent chaos. Such hidden trajectories lead to an understanding how chance activity can gradually become goal directed, simply by the nature of the evolutionary process, that eliminates more and more choices as its product becomes more complex.""
He does.
I sneaked a peek at the end of the Book.
That's an inadvertantly smart move - you won't have any takers since all three points are not only not "indisputably true," they are ignorant bullshit.
No, at least two things wrong here.
1) There is no proof that something with a high "specified complexity" cannot be the outcome of evolution. I have no idea that such a statement is provable at all, but it's never been done.
2) Assume, as though it were possible, that 1) were proven true. At best, the demonstration that some biological system were "specifically complex" would tend to falsify ToE. How would it be evidence for ID? ID "theory" does not predict that "specifically complex" things exist, so how could finding such a thing count as evidence for ID?
That heresy to activist antievolutionists. There are plenty of examples right here in this thread of vehement rejection of this as even a possible view. And yet it probably what the majority of Americans actually believe.
Don't hold back, Ed ...
Easy. How many species have occured from a single common ancestor since the last mass extinction? You do the math.
400 million years is still a significant stretch of time in evolutionary terms. Heck, our split from chimps was a little more than 1% of that time.
You're simply sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting la-la-la to avoid facing the fact that lack of descendent species of sharks directly falsifies a prediction made by TOE.
In true science, when evidence falsifies a theory, you re-work the theory. In evolutionary theory, you attack the messenger, bury the evidence and pretend it never happened.
I don't think there's anything rabid about it but if people are going to go out of their way to demonstrate how deliberately ignorant they are and feign proud of it then, it's perfectly natural for educated folks to dismiss and even poke fun at them. It's one thing to deliberately teach superstition, myth, and pig-ignorance to your own children but when people start pressing elected school officials to force it into science class, you've crossed a line and can expect to pay the consequences!
The similarity is that when you mock ID you are accused of mocking religion.
How and why does "the lack of descendant species of sharks" falsify the TOE? (If you can demonstrate this, get ready for your Nobel Prize).
And why do you use "millions" when your little Fantasyland world only started 6000 years ago? Just being another garden variety religious hypocrite?
Don't get so uptight and emotionally involved. ID scientists are not going to come to your house and raid your refrigerator.
The fear of learning something which might jeopardize the existence of currently accepted notions isn't new.
fyi
DEVASTATING MATH PROBABILITIES
The possibilities of it occurring by chance are devastating.
"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 1050. Such a number, if written out, would read:
480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 1050 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence (and even that gives it the benefit of the doubt!). Any species known to us, including the smallest single-cell bacteria, have enormously larger number of nucleotides than 100 or 1000. In fact, single cell bacteria display about 3,000,000 nucleotides, aligned in a very specific sequence. This means that there is no mathematical probability whatever for any known species to have been the product of a random occurrence—random mutations (to use the evolutionist's favorite expression)."—I.L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong (1984), p. 205.
"This means 1 / 1089190 DNA molecules, on the average, must form to provide the one chance of forming the specific DNA sequence necessary to code the 124 proteins. 1089190 DNA's would weigh 1089147 times more than the earth, and would certainly be sufficient to fill the universe many times over. It is estimated that the total amount of DNA necessary to code 100 billion people could be contained in ½ of an aspirin tablet. Surely 1089147 times the weight of the earth in DNA's is a stupendous amount and emphasizes how remote the chance is to form the one DNA molecule. A quantity of DNA this colossal could never have formed."—R.L. Wysong, The Creation-Evolution Controversy, p. 115.
"Nowadays computers are operating within a range which is not entirely incommensurate with that dealt with in actual evolution theories. If a species breeds once a year, the number of cycles in a million years is about the same as that which one would obtain in a ten-day computation which iterates a program whose duration is a hundredth of a second . . Now we have less excuse for explaining away difficulties [via evolutionary theory] by invoking the unobservable effect of astronomical [enormously large] numbers of small variations."—*M.P. Schutzenberger, Mathematical Challenges in the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (1967), pp. 73-75 [an address given at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology Symposium].
http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/08dna04.htm
No resemblance? Au contraire....the backbone of both "theories" rests on the existence of a creator.
Okay, so I just accepted his premise ...
"Okay, so I just accepted his premise ..."
His argument fails whether you accept his premise or not.
You mean like the following "scientists:"
Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu, Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, who used basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."
PUBLISHED IN: Polar Biology, vol. 27, 2003, pp. 56-8.
And the ID scientists are free to come over and raid the refrigerator. Every one of them. As long as they're actually involved in scientific research, of course, and not just writing books designed to part the credulous from their money.
I think you explained it quite well in your "observation". One person being too stupid to figure something out doesn't give evidence that someone else designed it.
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