New category for religious attiitude toward evolution:secularism

Religious attitudes towards evolution go by various names--theistic evolution,creationism ,New atheism, accommodationism, agnosticism , etc. Now I propose a new category ,secularism, that represents the complete absence of any religious attitude towards evolution (even agnostics have some kind of attitude towards the relationship between religion and evolution). I always wanted evolution and intelligent design to be like that

READ MORE

LSEA repeal effort fizzles

Louisiana's Senate Bill 70, which would have repealed the state's antievolution law, was shelved on a 5-1 vote by the Senate Education Committee on May 26, 2011, despite the wide support for it from the scientific and educational communities — including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Louisiana Science Teachers Association, and forty-three Nobel laureate scientists. Harold Kroto, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, was quoted as comparing a vote against the repeal to "requiring Louisiana school texts to include the claim that the Sun goes round the Earth."

I think it is a result of a growing distrust of scientists

READ MORE

Sadly, the New Orleans Cty Council favors repeal of LSEA

See this article on the NCSE blog.

However ,at the end of the day, the majority of thepublic still favors teaching both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. Who on the New Orleans City Council represents these people? No one.

Yeah,yeah, yeah, I have heard the trite expression, "science is not a democracy," a million times , But the New Orleans City Council is supposed to represent a democracy.

The supercilious trolls here will of course applaud this action. But suppressing reasonable scientific criticisms of evolution is extremely anti-science. and anti-intellectual. Being forced to confront these criticisms enhances our understanding of evolution and biology in general. If these criticisms raise doubts of the validity of evolution theory, well,that's too bad, isn't it? People who think that evolution theory has no weaknesses are not inclined to seek such weaknesses or study them. Consider co-evolution, for example. Many people just dismiss it as mere "mutual evolutionary pressure," presenting no special problems. But these people don't understand co-evolution at all. The articles in this blog's two post label groups on Non--ID Criticisms of Evolution (see left sidebar) show that co-evolution is much more complicated than this.

READ MORE

Are scientists and scientific societies "protestng too much" against "critical analysis"laws ?

The NCSE website says,

Support for the effort to repeal Louisiana's antievolution law is mounting. The American Institute for Biological Sciences, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Cell Biology, the Louisiana Association of Biology Educators, the Louisiana Science Teachers Association, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the Society for the Study of Evolution together with the Society of Systematic Biologists and the American Society of Naturalists have all endorsed Louisiana's Senate Bill 70, which if enacted would repeal Louisiana Revised Statutes 17.285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008

Additionally, the Repeal Creationism website — run by Zack Kopplin, the Baton Rouge high school student who is spearheading the repeal effort — now lists the endorsement of a number of prominent scientists and educators: Francisco Ayala, Niles Eldredge, Susan Epperson (the plaintiff in the 1968 Supreme Court case Epperson v. Arkansas, which established the unconstitutionality of bans on teaching evolution), Paul R. Gross, Lawrence S. Lerner, Kenneth R. Miller, Neil Shubin, John Sulston (the forty-third Nobel laureate to support the repeal effort), and Tim White.

Certainly many laypeople must think that the real reason for scientists' opposition to these "critical analysis" laws is a belief that many scientific arguments against evolution are good, not a fear of the introduction of religious ideas into science classrooms. Those fears are adequately addressed by disclaimers in the laws. This opposition to these laws is creating a backlash of heightened public distrust of scientists.

READ MORE

Why isn't heliocentrism as controversial as evolution?

There are two reasons--(1)heliocentrism is far more credible than evolution; (2)heliocentrism is based on what is seen to be happening now, whereas evolution theory is mostly based on circumstantial evidence of events that no one was here to witness.

And we can forget about the flat earth theory, a popular Darwinist straw man -- this has been exposed as a gigantic hoax.[1][2 ]

Awake! magazine, published by Jehovah's Witnesses --often critcizes evolution theory , but the criticisms I have seen there were mostly based on science -- usually incredulity that evolution could produce things of such great complexity or sophistication. In fact, there is a regular column titled, "Was It Designed?" I never saw the following arguments against evolution: (1)that it is wrong solely because it conflicts with the Bible ( though Awake! might incidentally point out that the theory conflicts with the Bible) ; or(2)no one was here to see evolution take place.

Darwinists' insistence that religion is the only reason for questioning evolution theory is very disingenuous.

READ MORE

Is evolution theory science -- or a worldview?

The NCSE website says,

NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Christopher Wills's The Darwinian Tourist: Viewing the World Through Evolutionary Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2010). The excerpt, chapter 1, takes a dive in Indonesia's Lembeh Strait as the chance to introduce the concept of common descent. Wills writes, "Surely no two organisms could be more dissimilar than the ingenious and graceful water-breathing cuttlefish and its clumsy air-gulping human observer. But in fact, even though present-day cuttlefish are expert shape-shifters and we are not, we had a common ancestor. And, at the time of that common ancestor, a far more astonishing shape-shift took place, one that had enormous evolutionary consequences."

WHAT? "A far more astonishing shape-shift"? I thought.that Darwinists believed that evolution was gradual.

The NCSE continues,

The publisher writes, "In The Darwinian Tourist, biologist Christopher Wills takes us on a series of adventures — exciting in their own right — that demonstrate how ecology and evolution have interacted to create the world we live in. ... With his own stunning color photographs of the wildlife he discovered on his travels, Wills not only takes us to these far-off places but, more important, draws out the evolutionary stories behind the wildlife and shows how our understanding of the living world can be deepened by a Darwinian perspective. ... The reader comes away with a renewed sense of wonder about the world's astounding diversity, along with a new appreciation of the long evolutionary history that has led to the wonders of the present-day."

Darwinists are always talking about how evolution theory enhances their wonder at nature and their belief in God (for those of them who believe in God). But believing that living thing are too complex to have evolved can have the same effects! Also, "our understanding of the living world" can also be "deepened" by criticisms of evolution theory.

Also, it is amazing that Darwinists can talk so casually and matter-of-factly about things that are very controversial. Also, Darwinists often talk about evolution theory with a fervor resembling that of bible pounding, holy rolling evangelists.

READ MORE

Browsing the archives

This blog has 1270 posts. I suggest that visitors here --especially new visitors ---select a topic of interest to them from the list of post labels in the left sidebar of the homepage, and then browse the posts under that topic. I often do this myself sometimes ---I am surprised at how much well-researched stuff there is on this blog. There are many trolls that scoff at this blog out of sheer jealousy-- because they are unable to write a blog anywhere near as good as this one.

READ MORE

How about"intelligent evolution"?

Or maybe we could call it"non-random evolution"? A more popular name is"frontloading." PZ Myers discusses frontloading in the preceding post, and tacitly admits that it is a possibility, despite his denial.


Another blogger on Panda's Thumb,Jack Scanlan, says,

(quoting article)--

ID predicts that the prevalence of functional protein folds with respect to combinatorial sequence space will be extremely small.

This prediction is related to the irreducible complexity one above, in that it could be invoking IBE as its justification. But if not, it doesn’t fare any better. What Jonathan is referring to is the work of Douglas Axe, a pro-ID biochemist who has conducted experiments that, he and the ID movement claims, prove that protein evolution is impossible. Thinking clearly about this for a while leads one to a single question: irrespective of the legitimacy of Axe’s conclusions about his research, why would ID predict that protein evolution is impossible? Life could have been designed by a Designer with the ability to evolve - this possibility is at least as probable as the opposite scenario, that life was designed not to evolve. But without any knowledge about the Designer, how can one scenario be given more probabilistic weight than the other? This prediction, like the others above, doesn’t follow from ID.(emphasis added)

The statement, "Life could have been designed by a Designer with the ability to evolve," -can be considered to be a description of frontloading. An alternative to frontloading is instantaneous creation. If there was neither frontloading nor instantaneous creation, then we know that life must have evolved by random mutations, and what Scanlan erroneously calls the "opposite scenario" - that life was designed not to evolve --becomes an impossibility.

Also, why is it necessary to know anything about the Designer in order to determine the probability of frontloading?

Also, even frontloading presents special problems in the case of co-evolution of mutualism (interspecies co-dependence) -- there often needs to be a way of simultaneously triggering mutations in both kinds of organisms.

Also, it is hypocritical of Scanlan to condemn ID proponents for allegedly using a"best explanation"argument when this argument is so often used by Darwinists.

Afso, I feel that it is not necessary for scientific theories to make predictions ---making good explanations is enough. When there is too much pressure to make predictions , a lot of explanations are redefined as predictions. A lot of this redefinition is what I call contrived serendipity -- as in"well,well,well, looky here.Our theory explains this too. We predicted that our theory has great explanatory power."

Yet another fallacy is that evolution theory should not be criticized without offering a reasonable alternative explanation in its place. If the result of criticizing evolution theory is being left with no explanation at all, that would merely be the same situation that Thomas Edison found himself in when he was accused of not making progress in his efforts to invent a practical electric light: "I've made lots of progress -- I now know lots of things that won't work."

BTW, Scanlan also says,

(Note that I won’t be touching on the two astronomical/cosmological predictions Jonathan gives, as they don’t have anything to do with biological intelligent design, which is what I focus on. Cosmological ID and biological ID are not related and shouldn’t be conflated, as doing so makes things confusing.)

Not related? Has Scanlan never heard of the "fine-tuned universe," the idea that physical matter and physical constants appear to be specially designed to make life possible (as discussed in the book The Privileged Planet)?

It is apparent why I was kicked off of Darwin's Thumb and other Darwinist blogs --- because I make too much sense, and I don't feel I am immodest in saying so. In contrast to those blogs, I often bend over backwards to accommodate dissenting comments, complaints to the contrarry notwthstanding And remember, unlike many other bloggers , I have to answer most dissenting comments myself (thanks, Jim Sherwood and a few others,for helping me).

READ MORE

Sleazy PZ Myers begs the question about truth of evolution

Sleazy PZ Myers wrote,

If we were looking for evidence for evolution, we might as well stop here. The existence of gene families, for cryin' out loud, is evidence for evolution. This paper is far beyond arguing about the truth of evolution — that's taken for granted as the simple life's breath of biology — but instead asks a more specific question: when did all of these genes arise? And they have a general method for estimating that.

(emphasis added)

So there you have it --brazenly begging the question.

BTW, "for crying out loud," also a favorite of Fatheaded Ed Brayton, is a minced Christian oath, where somene starts to say , "for Christ's sake."

PZ alsosays

One of the creationist summaries is by an intelligent design creationist. He looks at the paper and claims it supports this silly idea called front-loading: the Designer seeded the Earth with creatures that carried a teleological evolutionary program, loading them up with genes at the beginning that would only find utility later. The unsurprising fact that many gene families are of ancient origin seems to him to confirm his weird idea of a designed source, when of course it does nothing of the kind, and fits quite well in an evolutionary history with no supernatural interventions at all.

Well, PZ, if these genes are of ancient origin and not the result of random mutation, then how did they get there in the first place? PZ is really talking through his hat here. He has no credibility at all.





BTW -- the paper that PZ discusses is just a big just-so story.

READ MORE

The"bad design"argument against ID

Ironically, proponents of Intelligent Design try to stick to scientific arguments whereas the critics of ID often resort to arguments of a religious or theological nature. One of the favorite such arguments of ID critics is that a good, benevolent, unerring, and all-powerful "intelligent designer" would not have made the bad designs that we often see in nature. The appendix is often cited as an example. However, I think that the overall design is so bad that it might be better to just start over with a clean slate. Let's start with immortality. I have thought that immortality would be as terrifying as death -- we would keep doing the same things over and over again until the boredom became inbearable --- so maybe a lifespan of, say,10,000 years would be better But then I thought that there are some things that I never tire of doing, and there are so many things to do in the world that by the time I finished doing all of them and had to start over doing old things again, those old things will be so far in the past that I will have forgotten them and they will seem like new things again, so I will never get bored. So I have concluded that good design would include immortality.

READ MORE

Is Intelligent Design a belief system, or a scientific field of study?

It can be either. ID can be the belief that living things are too complex to have evolved by Darwinian mechanisms or to have spontaneously appeared in the first place. It can also be the study of the extent to which that belief can be scientifically supported. Too many people ignore or fail to see this difference. Also, it is extremely unscientific and anti-intellectual to assume in advance that that belief cannot be scientifically supported.

READ MORE

"Children's crusade" seeks repeal of Louisiana "academic freedom" law

Mascot Zack Kopplin, a mere high school senior, is being paraded as a co-leader, if not the main leader, of a campaign to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, in order to give the false impression that this is a grassroots campaign and not something driven by evil godless college professors.{1]

Zack's blog says.{2] .

The LSEA ”employs code language like ‘critical thinking’ and ‘teaching the alternatives’ in order to pretend to be promoting something noble,” wrote Zack Kopplin in the Huffington Post earlier this year.

Zack lied-- the term "alternative(s)" appears nowhere in the LSEA, obviously because creationism is one of the most obvious alternatives to evolution.

Zack gives the usual "the-sky-is-falling" arguments about LSEA "killing jobs." Many tech companies are not into biology at all. Very few tech businesses use evolution at all, and those that do use microevolution, not macroevolution. Even creationists accept microevoultion.

How many oil-drilling companies are leaving Louisiana because creationists do not believe in modern geology?

When considering locating in Louisiana, companies would consider things like tax breaks and infrastructure, not the LSEA.

There are 64 parishes(equivalent to counties) in Louisiana -- so far only two have tried to introduce creationism in the public schools.

Where are Louisiana's tech-field professors? Why aren't they saying that they want tech companies and tech societies to come to the state, LSEA or no LSEA?


In 2008 LSEA was passed unanimously by the Louisiana state senate, was passed by the state House by a vote of 93-4, and was signed by the governor.[3] I think that the government would look very foolish if it repealed the law.

READ MORE

The different kinds of design

There is not just "intelligent design." There is also"unintelligent design."Some people may interpret "unintelligent" as meaning resulting from random causes --e.g., Darwinian evolution. But a better name for that woud be "non-intelligent design" or"non-sentient design."(however,"non-intelligent design" can be misinterpreted as meaning "bad design" resulting from stupidity or carelessness).."Unintelligent design" can also mean bad design. Bad design can result from stupidity or carelessness, or even deliberateness(as by an evil creator who wants us to suffer from bad design). So I think that design should be divided into two categories: "sentient design" and "non-sentient design" ---both types can be good or bad. And the overall term shouldbe "apparent design."

Bad design has been used as an argument against so-called "intelligent design"---so I think the term "sentient design" should be used instead. And the study of "sentient design" is not the same as creationism -- it could just be the study of the extent to whicht things give the appearance of being sentiently designed

READ MORE

Darwinist snow-job consisting of esoteric high-falutin gobbledygook

An abstract of a scientific paper said,

A scenario for the evolution of a simple spherical multicellular organism from a single eukaryotic cell is proposed. Its evolution is based on environmentally induced alterations in the cell cycle, which then, by the Baldwin effect, become autonomous. Further patterning of this primitive organism--a Blastaea, could again involve environmentally induced signals like contact with the substratum, which could then become autonomous, by, perhaps, cytoplasmic localization and asymmetric cell division. Generating differences between cells based on positional information is probably very primitive, and is well conserved; its relation to asymmetric cell division is still unclear. Differentiation of new cell types can arise from non equivalence and gene duplication. Periodicity also evolved very early on. The origin of gastrulation may be related to mechanisms of feeding. The embryo may be evolutionarily privileged and this may facilitate the evolution of novel forms. Larvae are secondarily derived and direct development is the primitive condition as required by the continuity principle

The problem with critics of evolution theory is that they are too dumb to understand this stuff.

One of the advantages of evolution theory was the elegance of its simplicity --natural selection operating on random mutations. Now it looks like the evolutionary process itself is so complex that it was "intelligently designed" ---so we are back to the idea of ID

READ MORE

True morality comes from self-interest,not religion,science, or the evolutionary process

There is a big debate going on as to whether morality originated in religion,science or human evolution. None of these , I believe -- I believe that morality is based on the self-interest of creating a better society for ourselves as well as others. If we all followed the Golden Rule -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you --the result would be a better society for everryone. To me,the bigger question is whether science created immorality - as in the Darwin-to-Hitler link.

READ MORE