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daniel morgan said...
Conspiracy theories exist for every avenue of life, from organized religion to the government's role in 9/11 to etc.
Where are the "hard facts" to support such assertions? There should be a lot...particularly considering the number of Ph.D. biologists who already have tenure (think Behe, who, although a biochemist, is still teaching and tenured at Lehigh U), whose careers are not tied to academia, those who are retired, or those whose genius is so well-established that unorthodox views at this point matter very little (nobel Laureates, say)...
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i) To begin with, professional reprisal can take many different forms. Even if you’re a tenured prof., what if you want to apply for another tenured position at a more prestigious institution?
What about getting your stuff published in refereed journals once you have an invidious reputation as a “creationist”?
What about being passed over for honorific positions like chairing the dept. or being the president of the such-and-such society?
ii) But…hey…if you think I’m being conspiratorial, why don’t you try a little social experiment of your own—like those sting operations in which an undercover journalist poses as someone else.
Why don’t you pretend to be a creationist? Tell all your student friends and professors that you’ve come to have grave misgivings about Darwinism, historical geology, and modern cosmology.
Start a creationist blog. Write scathing reviews of Dawkins and Dennett. Write glowing reviews of Dembski and Behe.
Recycle the YEC arguments of Kurt Wise and John Byl.
Be sure to tell all your colleagues about it.
When you apply for a doctoral program, be sure to inform the committee members during your interview that you applied because you’re an ID theorist or—better, yet, YEC—and you want to get some credentials under your belt so that you can promote YEC with the benefit of a scientifically respectable resume.
Try this out for a year or two, then report back to us on your professional prospects. I’m sure the job offers will be pouring in from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, MIT, Cornell, Caltech…
Continuing:
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The other thing you should note is that the number of chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and physicists on the DI's list hugely outweighs the number of biochemists, molecular biologists, or life scientists generally.
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1.So you’re saying we should discount Dawkins’ extensive use of computer simulations? Thanks for the tip. I’ll file that for future reference.
2.BTW, what’s so bad about subjecting hypothetical, evolutionary pathways to bioengineering specifications?
3.Are chemistry and biochemistry that easy to partition?
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There is no good reason for that, and in fact, it should be pointed in the opposite way, if the evidence for evolution were in fact on the side of creationism. The more you know about evolution, so to speak, the weaker it would get, and the fewer Ph.D. biologists would accept it and research it.
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Isn’t this rather simplistic? I mean, isn’t evolutionary theory a very interdisciplinary field of study?
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In the end, it isn't a "my list is bigger than yours", it's "why is my list bigger than yours, and what do all of yours have in common (orthodox Christian/Jewish faith)?" What commonalities can be drawn among the first sample group? The second?
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Is that a fact? Please tell us the religious affiliation for each of the over 600 signatories on the list:
http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/
Steve,
ReplyDeleteI find it humorous that in the other thread, on the Anthropic Principle, you deride me for appealing to the "purely hypothetical". Here, you seem to think it quite valid.
When you apply for a doctoral program
I'm already in one.
1.So you’re saying we should discount Dawkins’ extensive use of computer simulations? Thanks for the tip. I’ll file that for future reference.
Of course genetic algorithms are fine. But not all computer scientists work with them, do they?
And, it is an empirical observation that when engineers attempt to use these algorithms to support ID, they don't fare so well.
2.BTW, what’s so bad about subjecting hypothetical, evolutionary pathways to bioengineering specifications?
? Nothing. I didn't say that, did I? Find me some people who work in fields outside of relevance to evolution who do this, who don't consult with evolutionary biologists and biologists generally to guide their work.
3.Are chemistry and biochemistry that easy to partition?
No. However, I know more than a few chemists (I work in the inorganic division of my university's chemistry dept) who are absolutely clueless about the concepts of protein folding, enzyme kinetics, the chemistry of nucleic acids, how metals interact with biomolecules, etc. I have had a few people on my floor who know I work in biochemistry come ask me those questions when they run across them in their work. It's just not stuff you learn in standard chemistry courses.
Now, that said, are my friends able to quickly pick up on these things, given their backgrounds? Yes! Could they easily integrate some knowledge of biochemistry into the principles of general chemistry they've learned? Yes!
I got bachelors degrees in both by simply tacking on 18 credits to a BS in Chem: microbio, w/lab, a few biochem courses, w/labs, and presto! I'm a biochemist and a chemist, with minimal effort.
The point I was making is there are more than a few chemists, especially inorganic and physical chemists, who don't know squat about biology and biological chemistry. Therefore, when they weigh in on topics outside their area, contradicting experts inside that area, I'm not terribly surprised.
Isn’t this rather simplistic? I mean, isn’t evolutionary theory a very interdisciplinary field of study?
Perhaps it is simplistic, but that doesn't render it false. Evolutionary Biology is a Ph.D. area of study. It has its own title, with people who just study that, as Inorganic Chemistry does. What I would expect to see, if people assured me that there was some "issue" within inorganic chemistry, say, that the ground state of Chromium really doesn't have a half-filled 3d shell, (electron config [4s]1[3d]5 instead of the predicted [4s]2[3d]4) I would expect the inorganic chemists to be the ones "in the know" about it. I would expect that when I talked to them, they would admit, from their specialized and extensive knowledge, that the popular myth is either true or false.
Why should it be otherwise? Why would we expect chemists who never fool with metals (like Cr) at all to know more about them than those who specialize in them? Wouldn't we see a sort of "distribution effect" as we move away from that specific area, in terms of credibility in neighboring professional areas? I would think that logical: organometallic chemists and physical chemists are right behind inorganic chemists, then organic and biochemists, then analytical chemists...etc., in terms of credibility w.r.t. the question.
Is that a fact? Please tell us the religious affiliation for each of the over 600 signatories on the list:
Well, without going through all 600, I found that the only 2 people from UF who signed the list were both Evangelical Christians, just from looking at their websites.
I am not implying that every single person on the list certainly is of one of the Abrahamic faiths, but if you want to take a wager, I'll post my wager right here on the web: when we move from sample 1 -- those who don't 'dissent from Darwinism' to sample 2 -- those who do, I will wager that the correlation of Abrahamic faiths (a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim) goes up by a minimum of 0.3 (30%), which is a significant statistic (p<0.05), given the prevalance of those faiths generally, and the relative lack of those faiths within scientists generally (about 40% believe in God, and Nature, 1997).
I'd wager on it. Would you? (hypothetical, not a real challenge to put up money)
Now, that doesn't mean that ID is false, but it certainly means something. Behe himself said on the stand in Dover, PA, quote:
"By intelligent design I mean to imply design beyond the simple laws of nature. That is, taking the laws of nature as given, are there other reasons for concluding that life and it's component systems have been intentionally arranged...
In my book, and in this article, whenever I refer to intelligent design, I mean this stronger sense of design-beyond-laws...
What if the existence of God is in dispute or is denied? So far I have assumed the existence of God. But what if the existence of God is denied at the outset, or is in dispute? Is the plausibility of the argument to design affected? As a matter of my own experience the answer is clearly yes, the argument is less plausible to those for whom God s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God's existence...
(next)
...Christians live in the world with non-Christians. We want to share the Good News with those who have not yet grasped it and to defend the faith against attacks.
Materialism is both a weapon that many antagonists use against Christianity and a stumbling block to some who would otherwise enter the church. To the extent that the credibility of materialism is blunted, the task of showing the reasonableness of the faith is made easier, although Christianity can live with a world where physical evidence of God's action is hard to discern, materialism has a tough time with a universe that reeks of design..."
So what does this mean? How many people in the 2nd pool are materialists? I'll wager 0%. I'll wager it right here and now, and anyone who can find a single physicalist among those 600 Ph.D. scientists I will bet a little cash with. Typically, in a pool of 600 Ph.D. scientists, you'd have a hard time finding <50% materialists, I'd say. But in this pool...
Now, there is an inference we can draw about that observation -- if the "design" of the universe is a natural phenomenon, there is no good reason for this. If the "design" of biological organisms is from a material designer, then why oppose materialism? If design is detectable, and it is part of science, why must materialism be opposed? They are the ones who assert, over and over, that ID can't tell us "the identity of the (D)esigner". But, somehow, it can tell us that (I)t isn't made of matter?
Come on, Steve. You're too smart for games.
PS: I meant to provide a link to support my assertion about the failure of engineers to falsify the assertion that genetic algorithms modeling RM/NS produce ample evidence for the adequacy of the model.
ReplyDeleteThat link is here and this one too. Dave Thomas' personal stuff is at the NMSR page.
These debates tie directly in to Dawkins' program WEASEL, so I suggest if you want to invoke his work again, you familiarize yourself with the arguments against its validity, and how Dave Thomas dispatched them.
I also meant to link, in the other thread, to support that Dembski's "Explanatory Filter/UPB/CSI" is flawed.
See this recent review of Dembski's freshest IT article (from 7/04).