Further update: Eigenstate has run for cover.
The genesis of this post was the StephenB’s accusation that eigenstate refused to concede the law of noncontradiction: “For you [i.e.,eigenstate], the law of non-contradiction is a “useful tool” except on those occasions when it reveals the poverty of your non-arguments, at which time, it can be safely discounted. That position alone renders you unfit for rational dialogue.”

Surely not, I thought to myself. No one can argue logically and at the same time ever deny the law of noncontradiction, because the law of noncontradiction underlies ALL logical arguments. So I put this post up to give eigenstate a chance to refute StephenB’s accusation. I know eigenstate came back onto this site after I put up this post, because he commented on another string after this post went up. Yet he refused to answer the question. I can only conclude from this that StephenB is correct. Eigenstate and his ilk are not acting in good faith. They feel free to spew their nonsense, but when they are confronted with a challenge they cannot meet they run away. He is not, as StephenB points out, fit for rational dialogue, and you will not see him on this site again.

Another update: At another site Eigenstate says he responded here, which is an outrageous lie. At that same site he up an idiot’s answer to the question which is not worth responding to. Suffice it to say it was neither “yes” nor “no.”

This offer may be time limited. Today is the highest of the Darwin holy days.

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From James Barham:

Human Nature Watch 6: Ritalin Gone Wrong:

Two days ago, in “Human Nature Watch 5: Is Depression Good for You?,” I reported on a surprisingly level-headed and humane article in The New York Times challenging our newspaper of record’s standard Darwinian-reductionist line on human nature.

Today, I am delighted to report on another recent article that speaks sensibly about medicine and human behavioral problems. I hesitate to announce a new trend on the strength of a couple of articles. But if trend there is, I welcome it wholeheartedly.

Perhaps we should all write letters to the Editor to encourage whoever it was who decided to buck the dominant reductionist narrative line at the Gray Lady by publishing these two excellent pieces.

The new article is called “Ritalin Gone Wrong” … (Jan. 29)  More.

Some of us wouldn’t waste much time on the Gray Lady down, but exposing the “drug store” approach to failure in school is overdue.

and

Morals and Money: Seems celeb economist Paul Krugman is not pleased with a new book on social inequality.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist and regular New York Times op-ed columnist is intensely irritated by all the attention accorded by the press and the punditocracy to Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart (Crown Forum, 2012).

Today, Krugman pushed back against Murray in a column whose title, “Money and Morals,” I have adapted for mine.

Murray’s controversial thesis, you will recall, is that the widening income inequality in America is the result of an even more yawning gap in moral values between managerial-class and working-class Americans.

Murray’s new book is a stunning synthesis of studies showing that poorly educated, low-income, white Americans have fallen into a social pathology consisting of falling educational levels, declining marriage rates, sky-high illegitimacy rates, waxing criminality, waning industriousness, and—to cap it all—rapid secularization.

Their upper- and middle-class counterparts have avoided most of these plagues, or else—as in the case of the divorce rate—fallen prey to them to a lesser degree. …

More. Not only is Krugman not pleased, but no one will be – if they need to make a living off the problem.

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Tom writes,

“Chomsky Contra Darwin”

MIT emeritus professor Noam Chomsky made his name in the field of linguistics over 50 years ago. Some are put off by his left-wing politics, but he’s worth studying for other reasons. Less well known than his political views are his criticisms of Darwinism.

Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, in a section titled “Chomsky Contra Darwin,” wrote that there have long been “signs of Chomsky’s agnosticism — or even antagonism — towards Darwinism.” To some, Dennett said, Chomsky “even appeared to be a ‘crypto-creationist,’ but that didn’t seem very plausible especially since he had the endorsement of Stephen Jay Gould.”

Dennett added:

If Darwin dreaders want a champion who is himself deeply and influentially enmeshed within science, they could do no better than Chomsky.”

Dennett also saw that Chomsky has been “unwaveringly hostile to artificial intelligence.” For example, Chomsky has said of the chess playing “abilities” of computers:

What’s going on with the chess is about as interesting as the fact that a front end loader can lift more than an Olympic champion — weight lifter or something. You know, these are just not interesting questions.

Morton Hunt, in his admirable compendium The Story of Psychology, noted the irony that Chomsky is a leftist; for the central thesis of his theory, “advanced in Syntactic Structures, is that certain aspects of linguistic knowledge and ability are innate, not learned.” It’s a doctrine “that leftists, liberals and behaviorist-trained psychologists considered mentalistic and reactionary.”

B.F. Skinner had argued in Verbal Behavior (1957) that language evolved by a series of reinforced grunts. The child says “eek” and the parent “reinforce” this by saying “good,” thereby encouraging improved versions of such utterances. Behaviorism, which dominated the field of psychology in the mid decades of the 20th century, in effect expanded Darwinian ideas into psychology. Animals pressing levers in Skinner boxes showed how it could be studied. “Stimulus” and “response” roughly corresponded to the evolutionist’s “mutation” and “selection.”

To psychologists, the good news was that behaviorism sidestepped the mind, which could not be observed directly. But the relationship between the mind’s “inputs” — sense perceptions — and its “outputs” — behavior – gave scientists a way of studying the mind indirectly.

“Every native speaker of a natural language is capable of producing and understanding infinitely many sentences that he has never heard or spoken before.”

Chomsky’s best known response to Skinner’s book came in a 1959 review in the journal Language. Here is one paragraph:

It is simply not true that children can learn language only through “meticulous care” on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful differential reinforcement, though it may be that such care is often the custom in academic families. It is a common observation that a young child of immigrant parents may learn a second language in the streets, from other children, with amazing rapidity, and that his speech may be completely fluent and correct to the last allophone, while the subtleties that become second nature to the child may elude his parents despite high motivation and continued practice.

David Berlinski described his encounters with Chomsky at Princeton in the 1960s. In Black Mischief, Berlinski records Chomsky as saying at one point:

“Every native speaker of a natural language is capable of producing and understanding infinitely many sentences that he has never heard or spoken before.”

The claim that there is nothing special about humans or the human mind has been one of the great dogmas of our time, and one that directly descends from Darwin: We are animals, and no more elevated than other animals, even if in our conceit we are disposed to think otherwise.

That dogma has been challenged by Chomsky, who has argued that language demonstrates a gulf between animals and humans that seems unbridgeable. Not for him the sentimental effusions of Jane Goodall raptly listening to chimps from her hideaway in the African bush.

The nothing-special-about-humans dogma has also been challenged, more recently and in a negative way, by environmentalists who insist that there is indeed a gulf between humans and the rest of nature. For we are the merciless wreckers of natural habitat. Nature, although red in tooth and claw, is innocent at heart. We, on the other hand, are guilty as sin. Therein lies a curious echo of the story of the Fall in Genesis, in which the majority of environmentalists surely do not believe.

A recent book, Chomsky Notebook [Columbia U Press, 2010], updates some of the linguist’s views on Darwin. He says, for example, that the claim that natural selection leads us “to the truth” about the world is “quite unconvincing.” Natural selection is unproblematic, he continues, but only as long as we recognize how little we are saying when we repeat the slogan:

“organisms could not survive long enough to reproduce if they were so poorly adapted to their environment that they could not survive long enough to reproduce. This is undoubtedly true but not very informative.” [p. 103]

To put it mildly. Chomsky here rephrases, in language that is if anything less polite than usual, the old accusation of tautology leveled against Darwin’s claim that natural selection means that “the fittest” survive; fitness being defined in terms of survival. Jean Bricmont, a professor in France, said to Chomsky in the same Notebook:

There is a new intellectual trend in the social sciences loosely called ‘Darwinism,’ whose supporters have been very disappointed by your attitude. On the one hand, they were grateful to you for having brought back the issue of human nature into the intellectual debate. They applauded your criticism of behaviorism, for example. But you seem to refuse to take the next step, which is to admit that human nature has been shaped by evolution and that the only known mechanism that drives evolution is natural selection.

Chomsky replied that he does not “admit” but insists that human nature has been shaped by evolution. “What alternative is there? That it is created by some divinity?” Chomsky won’t go that far. But he also won’t “’admit’ that ‘the only known mechanism that drives evolution is natural selection. . . . There is no point in worshipping at a shrine that every biologist knows to be that of a false god.”

Chomsky … assumes that all life must be interpreted within a naturalistic framework. But he also sees that the standard Darwinian account of how life developed within that framework looks inadequate.

Prof. Bricmont then inquired: “So why not use adaptive thinking in order to guess what elements human nature might contain?”

Here he was inviting Chomsky to propose some “just-so stories,” in which evolutionists are encouraged to invent plausible scenarios that seem to account for adaptation.

“How could anyone object?” Chomsky replied. “Those who find such thinking helpful for their guesses should by all means proceed that way. The task is both too easy and too hard. Too easy because there are innumerable guesses that quickly come to mind in any interesting case — say the evolution if human language. Too hard because we know much too little to be able to evaluate the guesses.”

Which is an excellent criticism of just-so stories. These, by the way were introduced into psychology in a big way by the more recent field called evolutionary psychology, in which, for example, either monogamy or rape can be said to be adaptive, depending on preference.

Summarizing, one can say that Chomsky, like almost everyone else in the secular academy, assumes that all life must be interpreted within a naturalistic framework. But he also sees that the standard Darwinian account of how life developed within that framework looks inadequate.

Others within the academy who must deal with Darwinism may find themselves in the same position but less willing to say so openly. No divinity permitted is the strict rule within the biology departments. Yet life in all its (irreducible) complexity is out there, and it got there somehow. At the same time the Darwinian cupboard seems bare. Life is adaptive when it adapts, and it’s extinct when it doesn’t adapt. (That’s pretty much it. Any further questions, class?)

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Even if your academic discipline isn’t in the natural sciences, you needn’t worry — there is a program which is specifically geared towards those with a background in social sciences, humanities, law or theology!

Below are the details and information you need to APPLY.

———————————–

Details here:

“The Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute announces two intensive 9-day seminars for college students during the summer of 2012.

The CSC Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences will prepare students to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design (ID). The seminar will explore cutting-edge ID work in fields such as molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, developmental biology, paleontology, computational biology, ID-theoretic mathematics, cosmology, physics, and the history and philosophy of science. The seminar will include presentations on the application of intelligent design to laboratory research as well as frank treatment of the academic realities that ID researchers confront in graduate school and beyond, and strategies for dealing with them. Although the primary focus of the seminar is science, there also will be discussion of the worldview implications of the debate over intelligent design. Participants will benefit from classroom instruction and interaction with prominent ID researchers and scholars. Past seminars have included such speakers as Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, Richard Sternberg, Robert Marks, Scott Minnich, and Bruce Gordon. The seminar is open to students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the natural sciences or the philosophy of science. Applicants must be college juniors or seniors or already in graduate school.

Do you have a commitment to truth and to following the evidence where it leads? Do you have the desire, the vision and the determination necessary to breathe new purpose into the scientific enterprise and influence its self-understanding in ways that will benefit both science and humanity? Apply to become one of a select group of students participating in this exciting workshop.

Admission Requirements: You must be currently enrolled in a college or university as a junior, senior, or graduate student. Required application materials include (1) a resume/cv, (2) a copy of your academic transcript, (3) a short statement of your interest in intelligent design and its perceived relationship to your career plans and field of study, and (4) either a letter of recommendation from a professor who knows your work and is friendly toward ID, or a phone interview with the seminar director.

Room, Board, and Travel Costs: Students selected for these seminars will be provided with course materials, lodging and most meals. Travel assistance will also be provided up to a specified amount.

The C.S. Lewis Fellows Program on Science and Society will explore the growing impact of science on politics, economics, social policy, bioethics, theology, and the arts during  the past century. The program is named after celebrated British writer C.S. Lewis, a perceptive critic of both scientism and technocracy in books such as The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. Topics to be addressed include the history of science, the relationship between faith and science, the rise of scientific materialism, the debate over Darwinian theory and intelligent design, evolutionary conceptions of ethics, science and economics, science and criminal justice, stem cell research and abortion, eugenics, family life and sexuality, ecology and animal rights, climate change, the impact of evolutionary theory on theology, the coverage of science controversies by the newsmedia, legal and public policy conflicts over science education, and the relationship between science and the arts. Participants will benefit from classroom instruction and interaction with prominent researchers, writers, and scholars, such as Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Wesley J. Smith, David Klinghoffer, Jonathan Witt, Jonathan Wells, Jay Richards, and John West. The seminar is open to college/university students who intend careers in the social sciences, humanities, law, or theology.

Admission Requirements: You must be currently enrolled in a college/university, seminary, or law school as a junior, senior, or graduate student. Your field of study should be in the social sciences, humanities, theology, or law. Required application materials include (1) a resume/cv, (2) a copy of your academic transcript, (3) a short statement of your interest in the program and its perceived relationship to your career plans and field of study, and (4) a letter of recommendation from a professor or a phone interview with the seminar director.

Room, Board, and Travel Costs: Students selected for these seminars will be provided with course materials, lodging and most meals. Travel assistance will also be provided up to a specified amount.

Application Deadline: Applications will be accepted until April 13, 2012, although earlier applications may receive priority consideration. Questions or requests for more information should be directed to cscseminar@discovery.org.

Application Procedure: All applications are required to be submitted online at http://www.tfaforms.com/227931 .”

In the seventh chapter Rescher addresses the implications of the argument he has been developing for the contrasting explanations of evolution and intelligent design in which evolution is conceived as an instrumentality of intelligent design. However, “Intelligent design is not the moving cause of evolutionary development but rather its consequence.” (p. 75) Here Rescher draws the key distinction between being intelligently designed and being designed by intelligence, the difference between having the appearance (“as if”) of intelligent design and being the artifact of an intelligent designer. Rescher’s claim is that to view natural processes as rational is not to personify nature but rather to naturalize intelligence. Nature must be regular enough that living beings can detect regularities in their environments and thus have a selective value for intelligence. This implies a central role for information and for learning, a role, which Rescher notes, was suggested by James Mark Baldwin.

Intelligent Design Theory, in contrast, assumes an intelligent agent of some sort, perhaps a deity, because it assumes that natural selection cannot produce intelligent agents. “Being intelligently designed no more requires an intelligent designer than being designed awkwardly requires an awkward one. Being intelligently designed is a descriptive feature of the product, not a claim about the producer in the mode of production” (pp. 84-5). Rescher admits that his position reflects an updated neo-Platonism though he contends that this position still has potential relevance. But he contends that his emphasis on emergence is not reductive because although the emergence of novelty may arise from lower-level interactions, the new phenomena are not explained by the lower-level but rather by the function of the higher level. “The sort of evolution at issue is emergentist. It brings into existence new forms of being which carry emergently new modes of process in their wake.” (p. 88)

Some of this is downright puzzling to a layperson, for example, from Rescher:

“Being intelligently designed no more requires an intelligent designer than being designed awkwardly requires an awkward one. Being intelligently designed is a descriptive feature of the product, not a claim about the producer in the mode of production” (pp. 84-5).

But the two attributes, “intelligent” and “awkward,” are not similar in character: Only an intelligent designer could be awkward. We don’t think of a glacier scattering rocks as “awkward.”

Also, the second sentence does not seem to follow from the first. “Intelligently designed” means – at minimum – that a product’s form or attributes require a level of information that we only experience as an outcome of intelligence. So intelligence is the only quality we can attribute to the designer as a direct result of studying the product.

Consider the recently publicized. Neanderthal cave paintings of seals: It’s not the quality of the art that made them an “academic bombshell” but the demonstration of an intelligence that many scholars did not credit the Neanderthals with.

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This is unintentionally hilarious.  In the post I criticized scientists who appeal to authority instead of evidence and logic.  DrREC, a scientist, responds by . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . an appeal to authority!  Beautiful.  Thank you REC.

I will grant that Dr. Liddle’s statement summarizes fairly what scientists should do, but I am astonished that anyone – much less someone who has been around the scientific block a few times as Dr. Liddle obviously has – would believe that is what scientists actually do. Every single scientific revolution, from Newton to Einstein, was met with vociferous opposition by the scientific establishment with a vested interest in the status quo. Indeed, I have previously noted on these pages that scientists often hold to the prevailing orthodoxy with a hidebound obstinacy that would make a mediaeval churchman blush.

Appeals to authority? If I had a dime for every every time I’ve heard “the overwhelming consensus among scientists is [fill in the blank],” I could retire comfortably today. Provisional conclusions? Give me a break. Tell that to the next Darwinist who gets red in the face, stamps his feed and yells “Darwinism is a fact, fact fact!”