Posted on 05/28/2007 5:44:20 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
There is evidence for intelligent design in the universe." This does not seem like an especially radical statement; many people believe that God has revealed himself through creation. Such beliefs, however, do not conform to politically correct notions in academia, as Professor Guillermo Gonzalez is learning the hard way. An astronomer at Iowa State University, Professor Gonzalez was recently denied tenure—despite his stellar academic record—and it is increasingly clear he was rejected for one reason: He wrote a book entitled The Privileged Planet which showed that there is evidence for design in the universe.& nbsp; Dr. Gonzalez's case has truly distressing implications for academic freedom in colleges and universities across the country, especially in science departments.
Dr. Gonzalez, who fled from Cuba to America as a child, earned his PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington. By academic standards, Dr. Gonzalez has had a remarkable career. Though still a young man, he has already authored sixty-eight peer-reviewed scientific papers. These papers have been featured in some of the world's most respected scientific journals, including Science and Nature. Dr. Gonzalez has also co-authored a college-level text book entitled Observational Astronomy, which was published by Cambridge Press.
According to the written requirements for tenure at the Iowa State University, a prospective candidate is required to have published at least fifteen peer-reviewed scientific papers. With sixty-eight papers to his name, Dr. Gonzalez has already exceeded that requirement by 350%. Ninety-one percent of professors who applied for tenure at Iowa State University this year were successful, implying that there has to be something seriously wrong with a candidate before they are rejected.
What's wrong with Dr. Gonzalez? So far as anyone can tell, this rejection had little to do with his scientific research, and everything to do with the fact that Dr. Gonzalez believes the scientific evidence points to the idea of an intelligent designer. In fact, as World Magazine has reported, at least two scientists in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the Iowa State University have admitted that intelligent design played a role in their decision. This despite the fact that Dr. Gonzalez does not teach intelligent design in any of his classes, and that none of his peer-reviewed papers deal with the subject. Nevertheless, simply because Gonzalez holds the view that there is intelligence behind the universe, and has written a book presenting scientific evidence for this fact, he is considered unsuitable at Iowa State.
What is the state of academic freedom when well qualified candidates are rejected simply because they see God's fingerprints on the cosmos? Isn't the Academy supposed to be a venue for diverse views? Aren't universities supposed to foster an atmosphere that allows for robust discussion and freedom of thought? Dr. Gonzalez's fate suggests that anyone who deigns to challenge conventional orthodoxy is not welcome in the club.
In the future, will scientists who are up for tenure be forced to deny that God could have played any role in the creation or design of the universe? Will Bible-believing astronomers be forced to repudiate Psalm 19, which begins, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands"? Will faithful Catholics be required to reject the teaching of Vatican I, which said that God "can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason..." Just where will this witch hunt lead?
The amazing fact is that, even as many science departments are working overtime to forbid professors from positing that there is evidence for intelligent design in the universe, more and more scientists are coming to this conclusion. The Discovery Institute has compiled a list of over seven-hundred scientists who signed the following statement: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." The list of scientists who find good reason to doubt the strictly materialistic Darwinism that is currently scientific orthodoxy is growing every day.
It seems that many scientists and academicians who hold views contrary to Dr. Gonzalez have concluded that the best way to avoid debate about the evidence for intelligent design is to simply deny jobs to those who will not affirm their atheistic worldview. The fact that these scientists, who are supposedly open to following the evidence wherever it leads, have resorted to blatant discrimination to avoid having this conversation speaks volumes about the weakness of their position. They realize their arguments are not sufficient to defeat the intelligent design movement and they must, therefore, shut their opponents out of the conversation. All the evidence suggests that it is unjust that Dr. Gonzalez was denied tenure and that this ruling should be overturned on appeal. Nevertheless, what happened to Dr. Gonzalez is a reflection of the growing strength of the intelligent design movement, not its weakness.
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Ken Connor is Chairman of the Center for a Just Society in Washington, DC and a nationally recognized trial lawyer who represented Governor Jeb Bush in the Terri Schiavo case.
No waffling there! If the decay rates change, orbits change which has NOT been observed.
YEC’r: Decay rates show the earth to be old therefore decay rates have to vary.
Scientist: What is your evidence that decay rates change?
YEC’r: The earth is less than 6000 years old.
and for further honest rebuttles to that talkorigins link coldwater provided and exposure of the problems with, and assumptions that accompany, radiometric dating, http://www.trueorigin.org/dating.asp#Excuses%20for%20anomalies
woops- here’s the dating age problems link http://www.trueorigin.org/dating.asp
From you link a silly false statement:
“An important feature is that the moon always keeps the same face towards the earth.[3] If different parts were visible at different times, the moon’s brightness would depend on which part was pointing towards the earth. Then the 29½ day cycle would be far less obvious.”
Read it and you will see how dumb they write!
Scientists: Decay rates show the earth to be old therefore decay rates can’t vary.
ID’er: What is your evidence that decay rates don’t change?
Evo scientist: The earth is wicked old.
You can quit posting the links. I will not take value in a site that publishes that the moon was put in the sky so we would know when to plant crops! Everyone knows that all cultures used the sun to track seasons!
Besides, look at this rediculous statement. Only a moron would believe this!
“An important feature is that the moon always keeps the same face towards the earth.[3] If different parts were visible at different times, the moon’s brightness would depend on which part was pointing towards the earth. Then the 29½ day cycle would be far less obvious.”
Your link addresses a few known problem with a couple of methods. The problem is that there are dozens of radiometric methods, whose ranges overlap. Some overlay with other methods, such as tree rings.
All in all, there are lots of overlapping dating methods.
Fixed.
YEC'r searches bible for explanation. Alas! There it is. God changed the time of sunrise!
mmm yes, but you’ll read sites that print flat out lies all day long as long as those lies agree with your beliefs
[Evo scientist: The earth is wicked old Decay rates are based on fundamental principles. If decay rates were changing, planetary orbits would be observed to change. This has not happened. No evidence that decay rates have changed has ever been observed.]
Ah—— A nice slight of hand there- Noone said decay rates ‘are changing’ that isn’t even relevent to what we’re discussing! Please post relevent points
“THE OUTER PLANETS are very interesting. Something seems to have disturbed their original uniform orbits. Uranus has a clockwise rotation with it’s axis tilted 90 degrees to the plain of the elliptical (the earth is 23.5 degrees). One of Neptunes moons, Triton, also rotates clockwise. The most outer planet Pluto crosses inside Neptune’s orbit now and again. It is believed[6] that Pluto was originally a satellite of Neptune and some cataclysmic event ejected Pluto from it’s orbit and reveresed to motion of Triton according to Graham Fisher.”
Orbits are uniform only if the orbiting object is alone in its orbit.
Not the case in real life.
Relevance?
On the contrary!!! It should suggest even more aggressive research be done, since there is no CLEAR fact as to what directs the action of the cells!
The assumption or invisible entities twiddling with things could have been invoked at any time and any place in science, bringing curiosity and research to a halt.
...I'm not sure I follow but let me interject it would be tragic if research came to a halt since we don't have a clear observable answer. All we have now is speculation, conjecture, and theory. I don't have the answer and neither does science yet, but I'm all 100% behind science to research to find these answers.
[Using dogs, horses, cows, chickens, and any other domestic animal as an example of natural selection is a poor choice because human selection is focused on a specific trait not a new species.]
"Noone used any specific trait manipulation when doing the experiments on fruit flies- the experiments also mimicked millions of years due to the intensity of testing, and random mutations were allowed to run their course through the experiments- all they produced were more fruitflies with altered information that was already present- the gene mistakes resulted in more legs, antenae where they weren’t suppsoed to be, shorter wings etc. but in the end, they were still fruitflies with mutations.
What makes you believe that an insect with all other features identical to a fruit-fly but has four instead of two wings is still a fruit fly?
What is the definition of species?
Could the four winged insect still interbreed with a fruit fly? Would it want to?
"As for speciation noone is arguing that a particular species can lose information to hte point where they can no longer breed with any others except for those within their own sub species- speciation is not macroevolution- sparrow subspecies will always be sparrows, and never bats or whatever other species evolution says sparrows evolved from or into.
You state this as if you know for sure it is the case, yet in none of our discussions have you ever come up with a measurable, predictable reason for macro evolution to not accumulate to such a degree that we in our taxonomic wisdom decide to classify it as another species/genus/family/etc..
[It is only when the fitness function is changed do we see large changes.]
"Large species specific natural selection changes that HAVe to work on the information that is already present, and has never occured in new organs, new systems, that we can show.
Come off it. You talk as if this 'need' for new information and its impossibility is a given yet you cannot even come up with a definition beyond 'it looks like more information'. How about you come up with a concrete method of identifying, measuring and evaluating information before you make the wild assed assertion that 'it just can't increase'.
When you have come up with a way of measuring information in an organism then we can talk about whether or not it can increase. Until then you are talking out of your hat.
[No matter our intent, the effect of our selection is identical to natural selection, both select and remove traits based on criteria external to the organism.]
"What governs naturalism when ‘deciding’ (for lack of a better word) which mutations it will hand onto and which it will dump?
Selection does not decide anything. The environment sets general conditions for an organism with a specific trait (morphology) set to survive. In an environment where organisms have to eat to replicate any environment where there is no food will cause the organism to go extinct, any environment which has no atmosphere will cause all organisms which have to breathe to die off. An environment which provides little danger and little food will support those organisms where the number of offspring is balanced by food availability. In this case fewer offspring to support would favour those having smaller litters. In an environment where danger abounds as does food it would be advantageous to have high numbers of offspring at one time.
Every population, and we are talking population not just a single member, has a wide range of mutations, most of those result in morphological changes too small to be affected by the current environment or of such a type that simply is not selected for or against. It is only when that environment changes, - a weather change, food availability, influx of new predator or competitor, or some geological upheaval which changes some or all of them - that the neutral mutation becomes either deleterious of beneficial.
We have already gone through this.
"How come all the scientific experiments have never produced anything close to an evolving macroevolutionary new organ or system in a species?
Because new organs are not necessary to produce a new species. Because where we can end up is contingent on where we start. It is much easier to modify a simple system to become more complex than it is to take a complex system and make it into a completely new complex system (I suspect you would be satisfied with nothing less than a total change, unreasonable as it is). A lot can be accomplished by taking a general simple system, duplicating the system and then through progressive changes in different directions end up with two systems which look nothing alike. However you seem to be asking that we take a complex system and make it into another complex system.
We have not tried to manipulate a species through incremental morphological changes into a new species, all we have done is examined how much a phenotype is changed by different types of changes in the genotype and developmental cycle.
[The eye is one of the best examples of the development of complex systems from simple beginnings through incremental changes.]
"You have your opinion on the matter of course, but we’re finding out through more careful study, that there were no ‘simple beginnings in so called primitive species, and we’re finding out that what was once thought to be ‘primitive eyes’ are turning out to be very complex, and we see NO lead up to even these primitive eyes- ..."
This is nonsense. We see organisms with nothing more than a light sensing cell, organisms with nothing more than a group of light sensing cells in a shallow cup, organisms with a group of light sensing cells in a less shallow cup and so on. It is this pathway between a simple light sensing cell and, for example, the Octopus's eye that is important, not the cherry picking of complex eyes from some putatively simple organism, which is relevant. How complex the organism is has little bearing on how complex a specific trait can be.
How about you try to define complexity? Without knowing what is complex or not we can't even have a discussion about what constitutes a simple/complex organism and a simple/complex trait.
"...I didn’t design my wquestion to be unanswerable, we simply do not have evidneces that show an evolving eye. What we do have are expamples of eyes of unique species that were fully formed and functional- what we don’t have, are examples of eyes that were not functional while they waited around for assembly some million years or so.
Not at all. The simple fact that eyes are fully functional at many different degrees of effectiveness shows that they do not, nor have they ever, needed to pass through some imaginary nonfunctional state.
Do you really expect that some organism would have to be incompletely formed or partially functional if evolution is true? Didn't we already go through your ideas of a partially formed wing where I showed that at all stages the morphological changes are more than a little useful?
Pointing out eyes that show loss of information and became uselss through ‘natural pressures, and claiming, based on personal opinion, that it was an evolving eye, does nothign to advance the eye evolution theory- Again The earliest eyes in the fossil records are proving to be quite advanced, fully formed, and quite useful- opining about ‘light sensitive patches’ in later species is really nothing more than an opinion with nothing to back it up.
You can't even define information, how the heck can you even discuss whether it can be increased, decreased, changed or if it is even relevant to biology? Yet you lecture me on 'opinion'?
You assert that information cannot increase. You assert that it can only decrease. You assert that information is a necessary attribute of life. Yet you cannot define it, nor can you measure it, nor can you compare the 'information content' of one organism against another.
Now, based on the above assertions, you are claiming that all the eyes we see simpler than,... our own I suppose, are the result of the degradation of information in the organism. Tell me, how is it that you can make such universal claims for information without knowing what it is, or how to measure it?
"The answer isn’t unanswerable- the answer is “We don’t know for certain how the eye evolved- some folks have personal opinions, others dissagree, but at htis point, nothign concrete is known... oh... and you’re right- it would seem silly for all the seperate highly specific parts and chemicals and protiens of hte eye to sit around waiting for the eye to develop while millions of years rolled by- one would think that if htis were true, then the fossil records would be full of examples of completely eyelss creatures, creatures with half formed eyes, creatures with 3/4 formed eyes and so forth- not just a couple of anectdotal examples here and there that are seperated by millions of years while thousands of examples of fully formed eyes suddenly show up in the earliest fossil records”
What is a 1/2 formed eye? A 3/4 formed eye? How well do eyes fossilize?
Met any bacteria with fully formed complex eyes lately? How about adult Tunicates? Where did you get the idea that all fossils show evidence of eyes?
"See? That wasn’t so hard.
[Lack of good grammar and spelling are viewed as a sign of illiteracy.]
"And then there are those of us who know better and couldn’t give a crap about being anal on an informal forum and who concider content the improtant issue- either the content stands on it’s own m,erits or not- becoming obsessive about spelling, and trying to sidetrack a thread’s issues by trying to equate spelling with IQ is a lame DC tactic, one that likes to sidestep issues and attack people’s characters and pretending it means more than a hill of beans. Kids engage in those kinds of accusations and tactics- but I see you and JS are having fun in your little circle jerk-"
Why are you saying this to me? I said nothing about spelling what so ever. Perhaps you should retract this statement and send it to whomever you are really responding to.
Really? Dr Gonzalez authored nearly 70 peer-reviewed papers (21 papers since 2002), co-authored a major college level astronomy textbook, his work led to the discovery of two new planets, his research was featured in Science, Nature, and the cover of Scientific American. He discovered the ‘Galactic Habitable Zone’ and was issued a $58,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation that paid 25 percent of his salary at Iowa State for three years. Furthermore, ISU endorsed his research by administering the grant.
I believe your statement is unfounded and I stand by my statement. I do believe Dr. Gonzales has been treated unfairly due to preconceived beliefs of others.
I’m collecting Empirical data.
"For Making Genetic Networks Operate Robustly, Unintelligent Non-design Suffices," by Garrett Odell. It is a program on the Science Forum of the Research Channel (Dish Network Channel 9400). The original lecture was 2006, at the University of Washington.is online here.
[What makes you believe that an insect with all other features identical to a fruit-fly but has four instead of two wings is still a fruit fly?]
What makes you think it isn’t?
[Could the four winged insect still interbreed with a fruit fly? Would it want to?]
We know thaT OF COURSE SPECIATION TAKES PLACE- srry cps locvk. However it is still the same species- We never find it mutating beyond the fruitfly species despite replicating supposedly millions of years through the experiments
[Come off it. You talk as if this ‘need’ for new information and its impossibility is a given yet you cannot even come up with a definition beyond ‘it looks like more information’.]
Symantics- you have not shown information resulting in one species KIND becoming another KIND. We have extensive scientific records of species including all subspecies, yet nothign showing that species becoming another species KIND- why? Because the information can vary wildly within a species KIND due to mutational forces workign on the info already present, but it can not produce the necessary NEW unique to other species KINDS- not sure what you find so confounding about this? You can argue that rearrangement of informaiton that is already present is ‘new’ information, but extensive rearrangement of gene code has NEVER resulted in a species that showed information present in another species KIND
[Because new organs are not necessary to produce a new species.]
Symantics- you are arguing a truth for near relatives, but not distant relatives which, if everythign originates from a single source, would have had to develop NEW organs which would have meant NEW gene information which the species simply did not have- no amount of gene manipulation through mutations, through reshuffling etc could produce this information.
[A lot can be accomplished by taking a general simple system, duplicating the system and then through progressive changes in different directions end up with two systems which look nothing alike.]
ALL the information is still present in both species- Altered? Yes, NEW information resulting in NEW organs? NO!
[We have not tried to manipulate a species through incremental morphological changes into a new species]
Oh YES they did- if htere was any truth to mutations causing the necessary NEW ifnromation that can advance a species KIND beyond it’s own KIND, then the simulated millions of years mutations conducted on the fruit fly should have produced this information- it didn’t- all it did was manipulate the information already present, caused many mistakes, and produced monsters-
And by the way, where are all the freaks fossils that must have happened when when a single species turned into millions through gene manipulations? There are non- The fruit fly experiments showed that gene manipulation caused a vast amount of freakish offspring. Instead, what we find in the extensive fossil records are almost entirely normal fossils. Are you to suggest that random mutaions when produced en mass to account for the vast variety of species we have today didn’t create freaks- lots and lots of freaks- an amount so vast that we couldn’t help but stumble across them all the time? Are you going to suggest that the mutational process of the past was more directed and specific than our present day experiments?
[This is nonsense. We see organisms with nothing more than a light sensing cell, organisms with nothing more than a group of light sensing cells in a shallow cup, organisms with a group of light sensing cells in a less shallow cup and so on. It is this pathway between a simple light sensing cell and, for example, the Octopus’s eye that is important, not the cherry picking of complex eyes from some putatively simple organism, which is relevant. How complex the organism is has little bearing on how complex a specific trait can be]
Agads- you missed the point entirely- Trilobytes are soem of hte oldest psecies around and yet have highly complex eyes- your examples of ‘light sensitive ‘patches’ shows more loss of information than it does gain of information- and by the way- it is a HUGE evolutionary leap from ‘light sensitive patches’ to complete complex eye structures. I ask again, where are trhe examples of all the components inplace but non-functional? Stating that the species ‘evolved eyesight’ by showing creatures with ‘light sensitive patches’, and setting htem next to creatures with ‘primitive eyes’ is ignoring the immensity of steps between ‘light sensitive patches’ and complex eyes” and takes a tremendous amount of priori faith to beleive.
[Now, based on the above assertions, you are claiming that all the eyes we see simpler than,... our own I suppose, are the result of the degradation of information in the organism.]
No sir- Created fully functional eye systems came in all shapes, forms, and complexities.
[You assert that information cannot increase. You assert that it can only decrease. You assert that information is a necessary attribute of life.]
Back to the information again- you are misrepresenting what I’ve said. Information can increase- obviously, a third human arm would be increase obviously- what we know though is that increases do not- can not result in new organs that a species KIND is not coded for- extensive testing has proven htis out fairly exhaustively.
[Why are you saying this to me? I said nothing about spelling what so ever. Perhaps you should retract this statement and send it to whomever you are really responding to]
Gladly- I respond rapidly to many people who love to jump all over the ‘creationsit’ with petty rhettoric and insults- obviously I made a mistake and replied to someone else in the wrong post. Although you and I dissagree on key issues, I have enjoyed and appreciated the civility with whioch you have responded and questioned me.
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