Just as ontogeny terminates with the death of the individual, so evolution is now terminating with the extinction of the species, in all probability, all the species. Trust me but of course you won’t because you can’t unless you happen to have been “prescribed” to do so. Such minds seem to be as scarce as hen’s teeth.

“A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable.”
John A. Davison

Here are some detailed scientific explanations for Circumhorizon arcs (aka fire-rainbows) and of course some more pictures of other occurences and other athmospheric phenomenon.

Cheers,
Tb

Sorry, I guess I didn’t make it clear enough that I was facetious with my post. I was just pointing out the similarity between sagebrush gardner’s strategy, in response to civilized anti-ID comments, to “revise or cull the weak [arguments] and advance the strong ones”, and the Darwinian mechanism of selection that leads to gradual elimination of the weak arguments and the preponderance of the perceived strong arguments.

I deliberately avoided any reference to random vs. design. Clearly, nobody would deny that developing a new idea/argument would appear as an act of design.

Or would they? (And now I am no longer facetious)

At least in my mind, the process by which the human brain generates a new concept/idea is at least to a certain extent a random event (Associations can come and go; we’ve all had “brilliant” ideas during a wake moment in the middle of the night, never to have them again). One certainly can argue about the probability with which a new idea about something would come up in a person’s mind, depending on the complexity of the situation and the extent to which this idea might conform to an individual’s knowledge of the situation (I call it his/her “personal database”). With some people, it may come immediately after being confronted with a problem, it may occur to several people independently, and to other people it may never occur. So this idea is an act of creativity that the ID folks would most likely categorize as an intelligent design.

As I just argued above, one could also call “coming up with an idea” a potentially random event.

And please note, in the context of this argument, I refrain from categorizing everything as a random event (even if in certain cases I am philosophically inclined to) since I am not interested in a flame war. If anybody wants to comment, please stay with this specific situation. Any psychologist (from both sides of the ID divide) around to shed light on that?

“It is interesting how conditioned some people are to atribute intelligence and design to random chance.”

Just so. Johnson has even coined a term for this. He calls it “Berra’s Blunder,” after the writer who tried to demonstrate how evolution works by comparing it to the changes in Corvette designs over the years.

“By implication, the second part meant coming up with stronger arguments to replace the weaker ones. If that is not mutation, followed by natural selection, to strengthen survivability of the argument…”

No, it is not mutation followed by natural selection. Arguments are created by intelligent design not mutation and not random chance. It is interesting how conditioned some people are to atribute intelligence and design to random chance.

surely your are parodying a darwinistas response. I’m sure you realize that, according to ID, the principles of design detection should be Universal. However, whether or not something “looks” designed (according to our pathetically limited human paradigm) may be merely coincidental. This makes Dawkins’ “its not a duck, just looks/smells/acts/walks and quacks like one (oh, and it lays eggs too)” argument all the more interesting.

Also, I must request that you be yellow carded for the “Knotted Hanky” comment. Not fair to bait Jews and Christians if the theologians/philosophers among us are not allowed to eviscerate such arguments(?) in response.

I think where you and JD disagree is the use of the ‘stronger arguments’. You are saying that new arguments are stronger. While that is correct, those new arguments are coming from intelligent agents – people. I think JD’s arguments are that in nature you aren’t going to find the majority of mutations being beneficial. And, in fact, according to Sanford (quoting Kimura), most of the mutations are nearly neutral, and deliterious. So, to take that example further, assume an argument is made in pro-ID fashion – some of the points will be good, and some will be bad. But, you can’t take out just the good arguments – you have to select out at the whole organism (in this case the entire “posting”), and you are left with both the good and the bad. The next thread will then have another decent argument, but probably a couple of more that are alittle less sound. Eventually, you are going to fill the genome (thread) with slightly, less sound arguments, and it will eventually be incomprehensible – probably like my posting is right now and then go extinct

thats the point Bill, he doesn’t want to find anything comparable in his own discipline. He wants God out of his discipline entirely. But, he has found a friend in physics – he gets to push God into an arena he doesn’t have to worry about.