evolution
stcynic | March 5, 2004In the conversations with Ilona, one point has come up repeatedly and I wanted to address it in more detail. This is the question of the role of naturalism in science. Ilona, and Rusty as well, fail to understand the distinction between methodological naturalism(MN) and philosophical naturalism(PN). This is not surprising, because the literature of IDCs and mainstream creationists ignores the distinction completely. Phillip Johnson, in particular, is maddening in his tendency to equate the two. But there is a very big difference between the two. Science employs MN despite the fact that a…
loom | March 4, 2004Probing the origins of humanity is actually a lot like being a dentist. The bones of our hominid ancestors tend to fall apart, leaving behind a smattering of shards. But teeth, made of enamel, can do a better job of withstanding the ravages of time. And teeth--particularly those of mammals--are not just tough but interesting. Mammals--us included--have several kinds of teeth, each of which is covered with distinctive bumps, cusps, and roots. All those details vary from one species to another. So even if you find a fragment of a tooth, you may be able to figure out what species it belongs to.…
stcynic | March 4, 2004Ilona has responded to my latest response in two places. First, in a comment in response to that post, and second in a post on her own blog. Rather than posting response and counter-response as in past entries, I'm going to try and just subdivide this into the issues under dispute so that they'll be easier to follow.
Issue 1: Is she conflating evolution with atheism/materialism and presuming they are essentially synonymous?
I said in my first response to her that she is doing that. Her reply then:I have to think about this. Perhaps I do think that way...never looked at it from that…
stcynic | March 4, 2004Rusty from New Covenant has replied to my post replying to his post in response to comments at the end of my post. Did you follow that? Drugs help, I promise. The upshot of the whole thing, and the issue under dispute, is that Rusty thinks it's "inconsistent" for anyone who accepts evolution to be true to take any moral position on any question. He manages to reach this conclusion through one major misunderstanding (the same one that Ilona has in her responses to me over the last few days) and one major non-axiomatic assumptions. Let's get right to the fisking:
He begins:Ed over at Dispatches…
stcynic | March 3, 2004Ilona of True Grit has replied to my response to her comments left on my blog. This time she is replying on her blog. This is her second reply to me, and I think two things are becoming clear and they are the two reasons why I think she fails to make compelling arguments. First, she has a very shallow understanding of the scientific method. Second, she isn't really arguing against evolution, she's arguing against atheism. Which is fine, but since I'm not an atheist, and since evolution and atheism are not the same thing, it's a fairly irrelevant argument to me. Let's get to the specifics. She…
loom | March 2, 2004I was puzzled by an article in today's New York Times called "Researchers rewrite first chapter for the history of medicine." William Honan, the reporter, announced that "an art historian and a medical researcher say they have pushed back by hundreds of years the earliest use of a medicinal plant." Until now, he wrote, the oldest evidence dated back to 1000 BC, but now researchers had discovered a picture 3500 years old showing a Greek goddess overseeing crocus flowers being made into medicines.
This painting will certainly tell historians a lot about medicine in ancient Greece, but the…
stcynic | March 2, 2004Gary Petersen of Country Keepers has responded to my post concerning him yesterday. In that post he claims that my reference to evidence that the earth is 4.55 billion years old "just doesn't stand up to a sound, thorough evaluation." He further states:I believe the evidence found in the world speaks more clearly to a young earth created in six literal days several thousand years ago than it does to a old earth that evolved its way to present day form over billions of years.
This is a statement I will gladly challenge. I think it might be informative to examine the arguments over the age of…
stcynic | March 2, 2004Sunday's New York Times had a fascinating article about the growth of local citizens groups to fight the ever-increasing challenges to evolution in public schools. I found this of particular interest because I co-founded one of those groups, Michigan Citizens for Science, 3 years ago. We are building on the incredible work done by Jack Krebs, Keith Miller and their colleagues in Kansas Citizens for Science, who successfully fought off the now-famous attempt by creationists to gut the Kansas science standards of evolution and big bang cosmology in 1999. That was followed by Ohio, where…
loom | March 1, 2004In my last post, I wrote about how our genes work in networks, much like circuits made of elements wired together in various ways. As genes are accidentally duplicated, mutated, and rewired, old networks can give rise to new ones. It's pretty clear our ancestors could have never become particularly complex if not for this sort of network evolution. As they acquired nerves, muscles, and other tissues, animals needed to organize more and more genes into new circuits. But in saying this I don't mean to imply that single-celled microbes, such as bacteria, live without gene networks. Far from it.…
stcynic | March 1, 2004As a follow up to my fisking of Bill Federer's nonsense about Darwin and racism, here's an interesting new article. There is a new edition of Darwin's Descent of Man being published with a forward by Jim Moore and Adrian Desmond. The two Darwin biographers argue that one of the reasons why Darwin was so firm in his belief in evolution was that he saw it as a way to fight against slavery, which he abhorred:The academics say that the biologist's work was driven by a desire to prove that because all races were descended from the same ape ancestors, none could be superior...
Darwin caused a…
stcynic | March 1, 2004Rusty has posted another response on Junk DNA. It's a few days old but I'm just now getting around to answering it. If you're following along, you'll find Rusty's original post here and my response here. The basic assertion up for dispute is Rusty's test for creationism:Further research will reveal function for so-called Junk-DNA sequences. Although considered by evolutionists to be a closed case, the Creation Model predicts that currently held scientific opinion on this issue will eventually concede that function is inherent in the Junk-DNA sequence. The failure of this test would be a…
stcynic | March 1, 2004Rusty from New Covenant has replied to my post on the religious right lowering its expectations, but more specifically to a comment I made at the end. I ended the post by saying, "The culture war isn't going well for the religious right. Another victory for true decency." Rusty responds:True decency?
Why is it that Darwinists continue to hold on to ideas such as decency, morality, justice, and rights? Actually, what I should ask is: Why do inconsistent Darwinists continue to hold on to such ideas?
Let me say a couple of things. First, I hate the term "darwinist". I am no more a "darwinist"…
stcynic | March 1, 2004Ilona from the True Grit blog has left a rather long and detailed comment on a previous post of mine. I thought it would be better to answer it in its own post since that one has slid down the page. You can view her comment at the bottom. The disagreement began when she said, in a previous comment,Just a short comment to say that while you make a good point on the eye argument and its weakness, you stepped into the evolutionists great weakness: the "they probably" part of your reasoning. Both arguments in the "they probably" sort of premises are mainly in the realm of opinion and not in that…
stcynic | March 1, 2004Gary Peterson of Country Keepers has joined Jerry Falwell in blaming gay marriage - and every other thing they don't like that's going on - on evolution. Like Falwell, Peterson is quoting Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who published a letter on their website with a scare list of allegedly horrible things going on and concluded:Friends, the above are just a few samples of things happening in America and other Western nations. Ive said this before, but I want to say it againperhaps a little more bluntly, for Im so burdened for this nation.
The major reason America (and the West) is losing its…
loom | February 29, 2004As biologists figure out more about how life is, they can then figure out how it got to be that way. First there were genes. Mendel noticed that somehow the wrinkles on wrinkled peas could be transmitted down through the generations, even if some of those generations had no wrinkles at all. It turned out that the wrinkles were the result of a gene; a different version of the gene produced smooth peas. For much of the twentieth century, evolutionary biologists worked out how changes in genes produced evolutionary change. A mutation that alters one position in a gene (or chops out a whole chunk…
stcynic | February 27, 2004Tim Sandefur has a "guest blogger" making entries on his blog by the name of Matt Dunn. Dunn is a dentist and no doubt a very bright guy, but he has been making comments about evolution that I can't help but respond to. It began with this post about a dentist's convention he attended and the keynote speaker referring to the design of the jaw as evidence for Intelligent Design (ID):I asked Dawson if he could expand on his creator reference. He obliged by offering a philosophical comment: The more you understand about the human masticatory apparatus, the harder it becomes to remain an atheist…
loom | February 26, 2004Apologies for the long radio silence. Travelling and the obligatory pre-travelling frenzy shut down the blogging assembly line for a couple weeks. Having wrapped up my west-coast jaunt (thanks to the great crowd that came out for the CSPAN taping at Stanford), I can write a bit about some of the new science that has caught my eye.
Crouching on top on the pile are howler monkeys. Howlers have become frequent visitors to the Loom, much to my surprise. For some reason they've recently started to have a lot to say about evolution--particularly, as odd as it may seem, about the evolution of our…
stcynic | February 23, 2004In a recent posting, Rusty answers me once again on the issue of testability. He proposes an actual test for both creationism and evolution. This is what he says:But in the strictest sense of the term testability, a falsifiable prediction must be made in order for a scientific theory to be considered valid. Fair enough. So, although I am not associated with Reasons to Believe, I think I can make the following testable prediction from their model:
Further research will reveal function for so-called Junk-DNA sequences. Although considered by evolutionists to be a closed case, the Creation Model…
stcynic | February 20, 2004One of the principle arguments made by Intelligent Design Creationists (IDCs) is often referred to as "irreducible complexity" (IC), coined by Michael Behe of Lehigh University and the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. The argument is essentially that at the molecular level there are systems with multiple components that must all be present in order for the system to function. As Behe said in his book Darwin's Black Box,An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an…
stcynic | February 19, 2004Stephen Meyer and John Angus Campbell of the Discovery Institute had an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sunday concerning the recent flap over evolution in the science curriculum in Georgia. In a way, you have to admire how skillfully the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has mounted the ongoing public relations campaign, with a boatload of clever catchphrases and the language of inclusion and reasonableness. But that is all the more reason to respond to them and show the reality behind the word games. They begin simply by briefly discussing the recent controversy, then say:…