Interesting Reading

As the result of a somewhat insensitive and politically incorrect comment I made about evolutionary anthropology here, I have been immortalized for a few minutes at scienceblogs.com. My comment was as follows: “The methods and concepts of evolutionary anthropology often consist of making up stories, presenting them as facts, and arriving at silly conclusions.” Apparently this comment struck a nerve, because the author of the article (linked below) launches into a brilliant explanation about how studying tooth enamel reveals so much about human evolution. He makes my point much more effectively than I. I’ll leave it to UD readers to be the judge. http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2006/03/14/what_teeth_can_tell_us_about_h/#more

Was reading the new novel “Sunstorm” by Author C. Clarke and I noticed something “interesting”.

“Okay,” Toby said. “So a rogue planet fell into the sun. It’s an astonishing thing to happen, but not unprecedented. Remember Comet Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter in the 1990s? And–with respect–what does it have to do with Lieutenant Dutt and her theories about extraterrestrial intervention?”
Eugene snapped, “Are you such a fool that you can’t see it?”
Toby bit back, “Now look here–“
Siobhan grabbed his arm. “Just take us through it, Eugene. Step by step.”
Eugene visibly fought for patience. “Have you really no idea how unlikely this scenario is? Yes, there are rogue planets, formed independently of stars, or flung out of stellar systems. Yes, it may happen that such a planet could cross from one system to another. But it’s highly unlikely. The Galaxy is empty. To scale, the stars are like grains of sand, separated by kilometers. I estimate the change of a planet like this coming anywhere near our solar system as being one in a hundred thousand.
“And this Jovian didn’t just approach us–it didn’t just fall near the sun–it fell directly into the sun, on a trajectory that would take it directly toward the sun’s center of mass.” He laughed, disbelieving at their incomprehension. “The odds against such a thing are absurd. No naturalistic explanation is plausible.”
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Judge Darrell White on Cobb and Dover: http://www.americanvision.org/articlearchive/03-01-06.asp.

I know quite a few medical doctors. Some are researchers, some limit themselves to private practice, and some do both. These are men and women of all ages and specializations. Not thousands or even hundreds of them – but maybe 30 or 40. Mind you, this is only one data point from a small sampling of physicians, but it is a good one: not one of these fine people believes in Darwinian Evolution. One told me that “Any physician who doesn’t see intelligent design in even his most troubled patient is either blind or stupid or just not paying attention.” Here is an example of one doctor who is neither blind or stupid – he is paying close attention and Read More ›

Steve Rueland writes More of What We’re Up Against. Unfortunately Steve fails to assign the proper blame here. What he’s up against is a high school science teacher that failed to teach the letter writer the basic laws of physics. These are your schools, Steve. We’re trying to wrest control of the science curriculum from your ilk for failures of exactly this kind. You cannot call fairy stories of time and chance being able to create life and all living things “science” and then expect the same students to believe real physical science. Once they know science teachers tell fairy stories and pretend they’re as factual as gravity they lose all trust in science teachers. We can spoonfeed this stuff to you, Stevey, if you’d stop making faces and spitting it out.

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California School District Adopts Policy Allowing Scientific Criticisms of Evolution

Last night, the Board of Trustees of the Lancaster School District in southern California voted unanimously to adopt a “Science Philosophy” policy permitting teachers to present scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution. The policy had been supported by the groups Integrity in Academics and Quality Science Education for All.

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The Need for Heretics
Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Commencement Address, given at the University of Michigan, December 18, 2005

When the Princess Rosalba was baptized, in Thackeray’s story, “The Rose and the Ring”, her father, King Cavalfiore of Crim Tartary, gave a banquet, and all the royal guests came with fine clothes and expensive presents and flattering speeches. Then at the end of the line of guests came the Fairy Blackstick, an ugly old lady with a long nose, carrying nothing in her hands but a plain black stick. She waved her stick over the baby and said, “As for this little lady, the best thing I can wish her is a little misfortune”. The King was furious and ordered his servants to remove the Fairy Blackstick from the hall. But of course the magic was done, and the Fairy Blackstick’s present turned out to be more valuable than all the other presents put together. I will tell you at the end how the magic worked.

I am grateful to the University of Michigan and to you, President Coleman, for giving me the privilege of talking at this celebration. I find it strange that I should be talking here. In this company I am the Fairy Blackstick. You students are proud possessors of the Ph.D. or some similar token of academic respectability. You have endured many years of poverty and hard labor, and now you are ready to go to your just rewards, to a place on the tenure track of a university or on the board of directors of a company. And here am I, a person who never had a Ph.D. myself and fought all my life against the Ph.D. system and everything it stands for. Of course I fought in vain. The grip of the Ph.D. system on academic life is tighter today than it has ever been. But I will continue to fight against it as long as I live. In short, I am proud to be a heretic. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of you may fill that role.

I will tell you briefly about three heresies that I am promoting. The first of my heresies says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing in their own models.

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http://www.db.avvenire.it/avvenire/edizione_2006_03_21/sfoglia/30.pdf

Lewis Wolpert is among the most fanatical of British Darwinists — one might say that Darwinism is his religion. How does such a religion evolve by mutation and selection? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-534-2087237-534,00.html

Final Update: I found one press report saying Waggoner did indeed send a letter of apology. I’m not sure why news.google.com didn’t return this story. Regular google.com did. That’s good enough for me. Waggoner is off the hook as far as I’m concerned. However, in this press report the superintendent says the reason she was placed on paid leave beginning 1/31/06 had nothing to do with the parental complaints. It appears Mark Young had no reason to complain about the parents after all and neither did I have reason to complain about Waggoner.
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Paul Nelson writes: Could Sahotra [Sarkar] provide any experimental evidence, from any vertebrate group, that developmental pathways for whole organ systems (such as the gut) varied as significantly as his selection story requires? No — the usual term for such variation is “embryonic lethal.” Faced with data that refute the neo-Darwinian account of homology, Sahotra told a Tall One …. No problem for Sahotra, however. Natural selection, he said, simply preserved the adult anatomy — keep a tube — while allowing the developmental pathways to vary. Where’s the puzzle? Evolution triumphs again. The charitable description for that explanation is “ad hoc.” The accurate description is the steaming organic matter, suitable for fertilizer, produced by the nethermost regions of a male Read More ›

DaveScot recently offered a post entitled “Biologists Are Not Design Experts” in which he commented about Darwinian (i.e., blind-watchmaker) evolution apologists who propose that those in other disciplines should keep their noses out of Darwinian evolutionary theory, presumably because these would-be naysayers are not experts in blind or (as Phillip Johnson so eloquently puts it) comatose watchmaking.

In reply to a commenter, DaveScot retorts: “Keep in mind this [Dave’s original post] is a response to a Panda’s Thumb article saying scientists ought to stay within their expertise. They of course are directing it specifically at mathematicians like Dembski and Berlinski telling them to butt out of biology, plus non-specifically to any of the scientists on the Dissent from Darwinism list that aren’t biologists. I’m just giving them a taste of their own medicine.”

The problem is that Darwinian evolutionary theorists (and their spinoff cohorts in evolutionary sociology and psychology, who really should seek medical or other counseling to put them back in touch with reality) have lost touch with the rest of the scientific community.

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Here is a weblink to the video coverage of the 6 of 20 colleges represented in the final round of the James Madison Cup debate competition. The debate topic was ID in the public schools: Madison Cup Debate.

Interestingly, most of these youthful debaters wanted to argue for the affirmitive (ID should be taught in public schools), but there were not enough slots, so some pro-IDists were forced to argue the negative. It was my impression the audience was sympathetic to ID, but I’ll let you be the judge.

The winners with #1 listed first:
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Students pushing for intelligent design

I thought it appropriate to post on ID in Ireland given that it’s St. Patricks Day.

Secondary pupils in Northern Ireland are spearheading a campaign to introduce a scientific concept, banned in the United States, into the curriculum.

Students from both secondary schools and some of the province’s most prestigious grammar schools claim that so-called intelligent design will give a “more balanced view of how the world came into being”.
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