Re: Pagano *still* refuses to understand how science works

T Pagano wrote:

> On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 20:15:05 GMT, John Harshman
> <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>>T Pagano wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On 14 Aug 2005 06:46:52 -0700, TomS <TomS_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> snip
>
>
>>>Pure nonsense.
>>>
>>>First, the US government funds the lion's share of all scientific
>>>research conducted in the US. I suspect it funds 80-100 percent of
>>>research conducted in the US academic institutions. There is no
>>>indication that any funding has been diverted to ID or that ID will be
>>>funded at the expense of any other theory.
>>
>>Yet. I just hope nobody tells the President or congress that they've
>>been funding Evilution all this time.
>
> Cute, but this doesn't defend the Pitt faculty from the ridiculous
> claim that "Science in the United States is under attack by our own
> government." "Science" isn't being conducted at the K thru 12 level
> previous background knowledge is still to be taught at those levels
> and the government hasn't diverted or altered its funding of modern
> secular science. Shame on them for such rhetorical nonsense.

Just because we're in the early stages of an ugly trend is no reason to
be unconcerned.

>>>Second, how does the introduction of intelligent design as a possible
>>>mode of causation to students K thru 12 attack science? It doesn't
>>>even attack the reining pet theory of neoDarwinism since it is NOT a
>>>historical theory of evolution or creation. But these faculty and
>>>post docs are terrified that everything they've been taught and
>>>believe could be brought down by some kindie-gardners who a few years
>>>later (by the spark of ID) might bring down their atheistic "world
>>>view" presupposition about nature NOT science crashing down.
>>
>>How could teaching nonsense in science classes fail to degrade the
>>teaching of science?
>
> Saying that ID theory is nonsense and demonstrating it is quite
> another. Harshman certainly hasn't demonstrated anything of the kind
> nor has he even presented anything resembling a rebuttal. Quite
> probably because he's never cracked open Dembski's, "The Design
> Inference," which passed Cambridge University Press peer review. He's
> not denied that he's argued from complete ignorance either.

Strictly speaking, books are not peer reviewed, and at any rate, that's
what you have to show Dembski is science? They print it, so it must be
true? I'll admit I've never read the book, and my views of Dembski are
based on his other writings and on summaries of his arguments by others.
So? Your near-total ignorance of the scientific literature doesn't keep
you from pontificating about science. Anyway, ID is not Dembski alone.

As for rebuttals of Dembski, the latest issue of Skeptic has a nice
introduction, with citations for many more. Check it out.

>>>This is the talking point of the orthodox mob, but none of the
>>>atheistic legions have shown that Dembski's theory is unscientific.
>>
>>It's up to Dembski to show that his theory is scientific. And in fact,
>>if you've forgotten, the DI does not recommend that their theory be
>>taught in schools, because they admit it's not yet ready for prime time.
>>(I would agree, but would remove "yet".)>
>
> Dembski has already demonstrated that his theory is scientific; it is
> no more or less scientific than is the methodology of SETI which is
> considered so.

Then you will be able to provide a rigorous definition of CSI, and a way
to objectively measure it or at least tell if it's present.

> His theory connects with reality and it is falsifiable. It searches
> for an observable characteristic "embedded" in objects, systems or
> events----complex specified information (CSI). If CSI is found it can
> be analyzed to determine whether or NOT intelligent design can be
> inferred. Such a special case methodology is already accepted in SETI
> and other investigative sciences. In SETI's methodology neither the
> nature of the intelligent agent nor its producibility-observability is
> relevent to the inference of intelligent design.

Nor does any concept of CSI have anything to do with SETI's methodology.
If it did, Dembski would be falsified right away. There have been many
false positives in the history of SETI, yet Dembski claims that his
methods will never produce false positives.

> ID theory prohibits law and chance from generating CSI. All critics
> must do to falsify ID is find an event whose causal history is known
> to be law-chance and also observe CSI.

This is impossible until Dembski presents an objective means of telling
whether something has CSI or not. Presumably, CSI is a quantitative
thing, so we should be able to tell whether the amount of CSI in, say, a
DNA sequence has increased or decreased as a result of mutation and
selection. But how would we do that?

> Lastly, since when has Harshman been taking advise and guidance from
> the Discovery Institute? Luckily for atheists they didn't take DI's
> guidance. Could you imagine if it was mandated to teach the
> shortcomings of evolution and the frauds instead of ID. You'd have
> so many doubters by the end of high school that neoDarwinism would
> collapse even faster than it already is.

You would certainly have a lot of confused students. My question, which
you ignored, is why *you* are not paying attention to the DI's (and
Dembski's) position. Why do you want ID taught when they don't? Or
perhaps you don't want ID taught. Maybe you only want "the shortcomings
of evolution" taught. In which case that just goes to show that there is
no science in ID to teach, doesn't it?

>>>In other words the letter is political rhetoric not scientific
>>>criticism.
>>
>>Of course it's political rhetoric. That's all you can really do in a
>>letter to the editor. Then again, ID itself is nothing but political
>>rhetoric.
>
> In the number of lines they took to introduce rhetorical nonsense
> (which Harshman has yet to defend) they could have produced at least
> one nail in the coffin showing ID to be unscientific or faulty. All
> that scientific brain power at Pitt and they chose political rhetoric?
> I wonder if even one of them has read Dembski's, "The Design
> Inference?" I know Harshman hasn't.

There's really no point in getting technical in a letter to a newspaper.
There point is indeed a political one: ID is not science, and it's not a
current controversy in science. The IDiots have succeeded in convincing
much of the public that there's some big argument about ID among actual
biologists, and it's quite useful to dispel that notion.

>>>>The discipline of science has established methods by which hypotheses about
>>>>how the natural world works can be carefully tested against observable reality
>>>>and refined if necessary.
>>>
>>>This is nonsense as well and they know it.
>>>
>>>First, historical modeling of unique non recurring events which were
>>>neither observed nor susceptible to experimental
>>>reconstruction-----like the emergence of life, the diversity of life
>>>and the very emergence of the cosmos------have only limited
>>>accessibility to the scientific method. At best investigators can
>>>hope to determine what empirical consequences might be observable now
>>>assuming the truth of the theory. But even this doesn't eliminate the
>>>possibility of numerous other theories which might entail these same
>>>consequences.
>>
>>Such as...?
>
> I'm not a theorist, but I don't have to be.

Typical ID response. When you have nothing, deny a need to have anything.

> It is a well known fact
> that observations regardless of their number always underdetermines
> the true explanation. Logically speaking this means (1) that the true
> theory cannot be deduced from the observations and (2) the
> observations may well fit an infinite number of theories whether we
> can produce them or not. But this misses the point.

That's for sure. If we took that seriously, it would be an argument that
all observation is useless, and we can never know anything. I wonder
why you even brought it up.

> The Pitt letter implies that theories can only be admitted to science
> which can be "carefully" and by implication "directly" tested against
> observable reality. But in historical investigations and modeling of
> unique non recurring events of earth prehistory one often CANNOT test
> against "observable reality." Those events have passed and cannot be
> experimentally reproduced. Harshman seems to think this fact is a
> shield used by IDers and creationists. It is nothing of the sort; see
> below.

Note that you have a nice bait-and-switch here, from "testing" to
"experimentally reproduced". Once again you have no clue about science.
Your addition of "directly" to the requirements for tested is a nice bit
too. Historical events have consequences. Different historical events
have different consequences. And events can be tested by examining their
consequences. That's now historical sciences work. In fact, that's how
all sciences work. The only difference is that in some cases we can
specifically arrange the events we want to observe the consequences of,
and in others we have to look for them in nature.

>>At any rate, all you have here is a slightly polished
>>version of the "Were you there?" taunt used by the most ignorant of
>>creationists. You're quite wrong. We can do science to investigate
>>historical events, including the history of life and the cosmos.
>>Experimental science and observational science are not as different as
>>you claim.
>
> The "were you there?" argument of creationists is the "second" edge to
> the secular "sword" that a failure to directly observe an intelligent
> agent acting (in the case of ID theory) necessarily eliminates the
> theory which introduces the agent as UNscientific. The Pitt faculty
> argues that ID theorists fail to connect the theory directly with
> "observable reality." In effect the Pitt faculty answers Harshman's
> question with "you must be there."

No. You misunderstand, as usual. No requirement to "be there" exists or
has been suggested. All you need is a way to tell, based on its
consequences, is whether an event involved an intelligent agent or not.
Absent such a way, ID is not science.

> Creationists have pointed out that if "we must be there" to directly
> observe every force, initial condition. intelligent agent and
> ancillary event in order for a theory introducing those elements to be
> considered science then virtually all of the historical sciences
> (evolutionary biology, abiogenesis, cosmology) would be non science.

Considering that creationists (including you) seem to believe that all
the historical sciences are non science, that's a curious thing for you
to say. But you misunderstand the criticisms in just the same way as you
misunderstand the science, despite it having been explained many times,
including in this post.

>>>Second, the "Chicken Little" faculty and post docs fall by their own
>>>sword. The transformational claims of the neoDarwiniam theory have
>>>never been observed or recontructed in the laboratory. The modern
>>>secular orthodox claim is that such an historical transformational
>>>process proceeds too slowly to be observed. That means that the
>>>transformational claims of neoDarwinism can NOT "be carefully tested
>>>against observable reality..." Where are the Pitt letters to the
>>>editor about excluding the transformational claims of neoDarwinism?
>>
>>Nowhere, because your objection rests on false premises and on
>>misunderstanding of what "observed" means. But we've been over this many
>>times before.
>
> Creationists cannot directly produce, observe or explain supernatural
> forces therefore any theory which introduces such forces regardless of
> whether there are empirical consequences which can be observed has
> been deemed unscientific.

No, that's not the reason, unless we use a reasonable definition of
"observe" that is not the one you like.

> In the case of ID I am left to presume that
> because ID theorists can't produce the intelligent agent (the
> sufficient cause) that therefore the theory is necessarily not
> science. Such reasoning should cause similar "handicapped" secular
> theories to be eliminated. For example:
>
> The transformational explanations of neoDarwinism is admitted to be
> unobservable and the mechanism is as mysterious. It has never been
> observed and the fossil record shows stasis as the rule not
> transformism.. Yet not only are the forces and mechanisms a mystery
> but they are disconfirmed by the only historical evidence we
> have---the fossil record.

You keep saying this, but it's absolutely false. The fossil record is
only a minor part of the historical evidence we have. The bulk of
historical evidence lies in the bodies of extant organisms. At any rate,
your interpretation of the fossil record is bizarre and requires that
you ignore most of the data.

I will note again that your attempt to equate the states of
"neoDarwinism" and ID is quaint, considering that you consider ID to be
science and "neoDarwinism" not to be.

> The forces holding some cosmic singularity
> together and the forces causing them to rapidly expand are not even
> proposed to obey the laws of nature as we know them yet Big Bang is
> not considered unscientfic.

Yes, simply because its consequences are observable, and it is therefore
testable against other theories. That's how those historical sciences
work, and that's the basic principle you steadfastly refuse to understand.

>>Your usual response is to run away and pop up again,
>>somewhere else and later, making the same claims. We know the
>>"transformational claims of the neoDarwinian theory" are correct because
>>(mostly) of the nested hierarchy of life that you keep trying to ignore,
>>insist doesn't exist, or explain away as a "common designer", depending
>>on your mood.
>
> One would think that your weak defense of Isaak's nonsensical index
> item of only a few weeks ago should have disabused you of this line of
> defense. Never claimed that the hierarchical arrangement of
> bioligical entities didn't exist. Harshman has such a short memory.

Hah! You have both claimed that it exists but means nothing for
evolution and that it's arbitrary. Sometimes in the same post. Your
attacks are lame, and you never answered the responses.

> Nested hierarchy was a finding of Linnaeus not Darwin as he attempted
> to study the relationships between biological entities through a
> man-made (Linaeus's) classification scheme.

There you are again. Is nested hierarchy a finding, or is it man-made?
Make up your mind. Does it have objective existence apart from our
minds? If it doesn't, how do you explain the recurrence of the same
hierarchy over and over from different genetic data. If it does, what is
your explanation for its existence?

Of course Darwin didn't discover nested hierarchy. He explained it.

> Furthermore law and
> chance tend to result in continuous linear arrangements not
> discontinuous hierarchical ones.

That's nonsense. A simple simulation would show you otherwise. All
that's needed for a nested hierarchy is 1) descent with modification; 2)
branching; 3) extinction. All of which are clear characteristics of life.

> Finally neither Darwinism nor
> neoDarwinism predict or require such arrangements. In fact due to the
> explanation of the fine gradations between species over time as
> explained by neoDarwinism one would NOT expect to find any
> discontinuities. Yet discontinuity is the rule.

Once more you forget extinction. It need not even be extinction of
populations, just extinction of genotypes. This happens within
populations by drift, if nothing else, and we call that coalescence.
Since molecular evolution never stops, populations that are prevented
from interbreeding *must* diverge. There's no way out of it.

> snip. more to follow if time permits.

If it's more like this, no need to bother.

.

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