Re: The Reasonable Minority

chris thompson wrote:

On Jan 2, 11:11 am, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Evopeach wrote:

On Jan 1, 7:37 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Evopeach wrote:

On Jan 1, 10:20 am, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Evopeach wrote:

On Dec 31, 10:42 am, richardalanforr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Dec 31, 2:13 pm, Evopeach <keaton1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Normally I would do some snippings, since this was already over 300
lines, bu to make my point...

You know what is truly funny? That you couldn't counter a single one of
John's responses so you're forced to add hat meaningless one-liner. IOW,
you haven't got ***. But then you proved that longs ago with Gish
gallops and goalpost shifting, not to mention descending into insult
when you couldn't counter points and then erroneously claiming you won
the debate.

Well there are several points of agreement in his opwn words...no need
to dicuss those.

The idea that the particular records should show all the major groups
is a strawman fallacy ...mammals missing LOL!

What on earth do you mean by this? That there are mammals in the
Precambrian?

The truth remains that pre-cambrian writ large shows no remotely close
ancestors to essentailly all of the complex animals that proliferate
the Cambrian deposits in the several sites now known.

No, this is flatly false. We have a number of taxa with the
characteristics we would expect of an ancestor of Cambrian animals in
the Precambrian.
We had a conference in Leicester earlier this year to mark the 50th
anniversary of the discovery of complex animals in the Precambrian.
You can even read the abstracts here:http://www.charnia.org.uk/saturday_school_2007.htm

Your information seems to be at least 50 years out of date. What do
you think that tells you about the reliability of your sources?

RF

Thus the old
TREE was discarded and relaced by the BUSH and worse yet its
upsidedown...in Gould's and others opinions leaving evos with a theory
of gradualism never confirmed and now discredited and a magic act
called PE.

Why not read about what punctuated equilibrium *actually* proposes
rather than the garbled and distorted version you get from the sources
you are using?

I hate to remind the egos here that Walcott was undoubtedly one of the
most respected evolutionary paleontologists of his day and never
finished high school. So either it is not necessary to have training
in any advanced math, physics, chemistry, etc. to be one of the most
prominent evos of the last century or it is possible for a talented
individual to enter a field, study it, self educate in required
discliplines perhaps with mentors, and yet make extraordinary
contributions.

Quite so. I've done so myself, and have published several papers,
contributed to and helped to run conferences and helped PhD students,
and all without any formal qualifications in the subject.

And thus dimissal of people outofhand due to the lack of biology
degrees, not being a degreed paleontologist, is quite arrogant,
superficial, and historically laughable.

Nobody has dismissed anything I've done on the basis of my lack of
formal qualifications in the subject. My research has been treated in
exactly the same way as that of anyone else, and judged on the merits
of the evidence and argument I present.

So you are on my team that its OK for talented people to read, study,
work in and publish on evolution even though they are not degreed in
the precise discliplines. This is real progress.

No it isn't. That's where everyone here has always been. What we tend to
complain about is people publishing on evolution even though they have
not read, studied, or worked in it. You, for instance, seem to know
little or nothing about evolution, but you still know it's wrong and
that biologists are idiots. This annoys those of us who are biologists,
especially.

Its very much consistent with the fact that hundreds of good,
contributing scientists, none of them Darwinian evos, by definition
are documented here http://home.earthlink.net/~claelliott/chron1790.htm.

We can agree that nobody before Darwin was a Darwinian, but I fail to
see any point in that fact.

So we know that doing real science, good scientific outcomes right
here in America absent any evolution education and in a society
dominated by theism, creationism, and religious instruction in public
schools.

That wasn't actually a sentence, but I believe you're still talking
about that list of 18th century scientists. Sure, it's possible. But
doing evolutionary biology in such a context would be difficult, and
that's what we're talking about, isn't it?

Sort of catches your team up short in their logic and points to an
irrational paranoia, dishonesty, and misrepresentation of science
prima facia.

No, I don't think so, and I can't tell why you think so based on what
you have said here.

No I don't think all biologistst are idiots. I do think there are
plenty who are not so closed minded about ID and are in the
"reasonableminority".

In this you are wrong. You wildly overestimate the number of scientists
who are at all sympathetic to ID, and those few are hardly reasonable.

It's also clear that ID is an immerging field of study with some quite
intelligent people interested in exploring what might be learned about
life's mechanisms and opportunities for advancement.

Not that I can tell. There doesn't seem to be anyone doing actual
scientific research in ID. There are a very few who make an attempt at
it, Siegfried Scherer being the only one I know of. Though in fact he's
more of a creationist.

It will rise or fall based on the younger generation of scientists and
their activities, particularly the infusion of knowledge from other
discliplines by such with multi-discliplinary educations and
experiences. The entrenched interests on the extremes will resist all
cooperation (ICR, AIG, etc., has no truck with DI for instance).

This is all your fantasy, I'm afraid. ID is a political and religious
movement only, not a scientific one.

That's why some 40 IDEA clubs and growing worldwide are so frightening
to the establishment...." let's squelch any threat to our dogma and
enterprise"... the evo rallying cry.

On the contrary. We are simply worried about a political movement that's
trying to prevent real science from being taught, and trying to
miseducate the public.

I have no objection whatsoever to teaching and practicing evolution
and I am thankful for the advances in medicine, etc. made possible by
the biological community writ large. But I dispise the lack of
respect, personal vendettas, untoward attacks on anyone who disagrees
with the completeness of the theory in explaining the totality of
life, its mechanisms, processes, origins, and altenate explanations
for what is termed "apparent design".

I too am opposed to personal vendettas. Lack of respect, however, is
sometimes appropriate. Nobody thinks that current evolutionary science
is complete, but none of the IDers have made any contribution towards
improving it.

The prominent theologian Torrance wrote elequently on the value of
both reigion and science, necessity for cooperative relationships,
understanding, complimentary truths, and the evidentary contributions
of one to the other.

His essay written with elegant language, well cited quotations, etc.
is easily the most scholastic treatment of Eintein and God trhat I am
aware of in the literature.

http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/torrance.htm

One of histories greatest and most original thinkers had much so offer
on the subject of religion and science.

I'm very skeptical that religion has anything to contribute to science.
The specifically religious way of knowing, i.e. revelation, is
antithetical to science. I don't think that essay had much to say about
any evidentiary contribution of religion to science.

I'm betting you didn't read it at all because if so you would see
Einstein's clear views on the necessity of a religious humility before
God in all scientific endeavor of consequence.

It's not clear what Einstein meant by "God". At various times he
identified himself as a Spinosan, a pantheist, not a Spinosan, not a
pantheist, and an atheist.


Not quite correct. Einstein apparently never claimed he was an
atheist:

"Throughout his life, he was consistent in deflecting the charge that
he was an atheist. "There are people who say there is no God", he
told a friend. "But what really makes me angry is that they quote me
for support of such views."

--Isaacson, W. 2007. Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon &
Schuster, NY. p389.

Then again,

"I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit
priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies
about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and
have always been an atheist." [Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr, July
2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein
to convert from atheism. Article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic
magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]

(That was the statement I was referring to. Now of course that
self-identification was qualified by "from the viewpoint of a Jesuit
preist", but who's to say that isn't a valid viewpoint?)

and

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions,
a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a
personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the
unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our
science can reveal it." [Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein:
The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton
University Press]

and

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is
a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the
crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due
to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious
indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility
corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of
nature and of our own being." [Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr.,
Sept. 28, 1949, from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine,
Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]

And plenty more here:
http://www.celebatheists.com/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein

Einstein's views about God are hard to understand and even harder to
encapsulate in a single word.

The citation on that section is as follows:

Calaprice, 214; Einstein to Hubertus zu Lowenstein, ca 1941, in
Lowenstein's book _Toward the Further Shore_ (London, Victor Gallancz,
1968) 156.

This in no way supports any of Peaches' ludicrous claims about
Einstein's religiosity or beliefs in God.

Chris


Certainly his God was not a person who cared
about humans. It seems to me that he meant nothing more than a wonder at
the universe and a respect for its complexity. Humility in this context
means a willingness to be shown wrong, which is certainly a good
attitude for any scientist.

If you're claiming that no atheist can be a good scientist or perform a
scientific effort of consequence, you'll have to back that up with
something. Even if Einstein had made such a claim, by the way, that
wouldn't make it true.

What does any of this have to do with evolutionary biology?



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