Evolution: Natural selection vs. Godly guidance

Hi shadow71 and welcome to the forum. Just a brief point on a minor side issue; Dennett is primarily a philosopher rather than a scientist. His specialities include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Obviously, he writes a great deal about cognitive and evolutionary science, but I do not feel that he is a fair exemplar of "a scientist".Neither is Dawkins a typical example of "a scientist". Dawkins is actually not the most remarkable research scientist. His great strength has always been the communication of scientific ideas, rather than discovering them himself. Also, he is far better known these days for his atheism than his science. This is far from typical of scientists as a whole, most of whom prefer to... well, do science, rather than write polemics against Christianity.The vast majority of scientists do not concern themselves with people's religious beliefs. Dennett and Dawkins do (and it would be fair to describe their zeal for de-conversion as "evangelical") but they are very far from being typical of scientists as a whole. You shouldn't let them colour your image of the average scientist.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi shadow, Anyone is free to submit to an academic journal. Sadly, when ID advocates do submit papers, they tend not to mention the "designer" who they claim is so evident. If the ID lobby want to have their "design hypothesis" taken seriously, they need to present it in peer-reviewed literature, not by innuendo but in unambiguous terms. They choose not to do so. They can only blame themselves. That's exactly the effect that Meyer is striving for; he wants to make ID look like proper science. It's an illusion though. He's just trying to bamboozle you with pseudo-science and bad maths. They are held to exactly the same standard. Both must be falsifiable. Your own suggestion about God guiding the process of selection suffers from this problem., it's not falsifiable.A world where God (or some other supernatural entity) controls selection, in just such a way as to exactly mimic natural selection, cannot be distinguished from a world where selection is simply natural. The two scenarios are impossible to tell apart. Such propositions, whilst arguably of philosophical interest, are of no use to science. The scientific method simply cannot be brought to bear upon such unfalsifiable ideas.Your idea about guided selection and much of the ID lobby's arguments for a designer are unfalsifiable and they are spectacularly unparsimonious to boot. They don't conform to the scientific method. That's why scientists have no time for them. It's not atheistic zeal, it's just a product of how the scientific method works.I respect scientists, just like yo do. that's why I listen to them when the vast majority say that ID s a waste of time.Mutate and SurvivePS; Your messages would probably come across as more effective if you were to use quote boxes and other nifty coding functions. Quote boxes certainly make a post easier to read. There are helpful tips here and in Posting Tips. Or you can use the "Peek" button to show messages complete with codes, so you can take a look at what others have done in their posts.

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Well I guess I've got a question for you; what the heck has theoretical physics got to do with the origin of life?Oh and nice one with the quote boxes, but the second tag should read [/quote]. It won't work without the "/" symbol to end the code.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Okay, I've been busy, so the conversation has progressed some since I last posted, but nonetheless... Firstly; yay! Quote boxes! Thanks shadow! However, I disagree with you here. We already have the ground rules for scientific inquiry. They are well known and easy to find.1: Observation/Question
2: Hypothesis/Prediction
3: Experiment
4: Conclusion (tentative)
5: Publication/Peer Review
6: Repetition
and if that repetition continually provides the same conclusion,
7: Consensus (still tentative, but less so as evidence accumulates).Now one could spend a lifetime finessing that definition of the scientific method (and indeed, philosophers of science do just that) but those are, more or less, the ground rules. ID fails to meet just about every one of them. Here is how ID functions;1: Conclusion; Jesus loves you (not tentative).
2: Observation; Gee, lots of stuff is really complex!
3: Conclusion; See 1.
4: Publication; Popular press only. Peer review is such a pest!
5; Conclusion; Still the same as 1.For ID to be taken seriously, it must adhere to the scientific method. It doesn't so it isn't. It really is that simple. Anyone who disagrees should provide details of those ID experiments and peer reviewed publications that directly address design.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi Shadow, Never mind, neither am I and given his modus operandi, it's hard to believe that Behe is a scientist either. I would suggest that Edge of Evolution is not really a scientific work, it is a work of religious apologetics, disguised as science.The Steps you outline completely fail the test of the scientific method. Specifics of malaria resistance aside, this does not read like an observation, it reads more like an assertion, or, as my little satire had it, a conclusion. Perhaps Michael Behe cannot account for malaria resistance, but that does not mean that a naturalistic explanation cannot exist. Behe however, is not interested in natural explanations. In fact, he is keen to ignore them, preferring to insert his deity as a pseudo-explanatory mechanism.Behe's whole style is to seek gaps in scientific knowledge and insert a God-of-the-gaps wherever he can. He is not answering scientific needs, but his own emotional need for God to have a place in biology. This is bad science and even worse theology. Worse, this gap does not even appear to be a gap; natural selection is perfectly able to explain malaria resistance. Behe is wrong in his claim, he is wrong in his method and he is wrong in his conclusions.The rest of your steps are just restatements of the same claim; that evolution cannot explain complex biology. Look back at what you wrote; You are just making the same assertion over and over. There is no experiment here, none at all. Behe has his conclusion right at the start, just as I said. This too is wrong. To suggest that if theory A is wrong, then theory B must be true is illogical (it creates a false dilemma). Some other mechanism might be sufficient to explain these observations through natural means, but Behe is simply not interested. He doesn't want to know the truth. He wants to remain ignorant, so that he can use this poor logic to insert his own preferred explanation - the Christian God. What he is in fact doing is deifying his own ignorance.Scientists find a puzzle in nature and they set about trying to solve it.Behe finds a puzzle and he has no interest in solving it (even where real explanations already exist). He prefers to write another popular press book about how this puzzle provides yet another temporary refuge for his puny Gap God. It's not science, it's apologetics. PaulK has already addressed this, but I have to say, I doubt this.Do you really think that major molecular biology journals would turn down Behe's work on the designer? I don't. I think that if Behe tried to publish a paper entitled Evidence for an Intelligent Designer in the Cell or some such, the academic journals would nearly bite his hand off. They would be only too eager to take a look at Behe's work, mostly because he has been so coy about submitting it and because they would take such relish in taking it apart.Instead, Behe does what all ID advocates with PhDs do; he publishes work that could be interpreted as supporting ID (or not) but without ever having the balls to come out and explicitly mention the designer or the direct evidence for a designer. He just dances around the topic, vaguely touching upon potential evidence in his papers, but then making wild and unsupported assertions in his popular works. That is what the ID lobby are depending upon. They hope to bamboozle you with lots of complicated talk about mathematics and cell biology and dazzle you with their PhDs. It's a cheap trick. They're just telling you what you (and they) want to hear and dressing it up with some sciencey-sounding jargon. Don't sweat it, I'm not out to hammer you over the head with this, I just disagree. You come across as a perfectly nice and intelligent person, just (in my humble opinion) a little misled by ID propaganda. Actually, even Michael Behe strikes me as a perfectly nice man. He's charming, affable and clearly intelligent. And he has a cool hat. He's just a little too eager to insert his religious convictions into science and that is something that ought not be tolerated.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi Shadow, I wil say it again; if Behe were to unambiguously submit his evidence for design to a major peer reviewed journal, they would jump at the chance. Nothing would please Behe's critics more than to publish his evidence. It would be hilarious.Nothing is stopping Behe from publishing his evidence except for the fact that he hasn't really got any science to offer and he knows it. Not true. A number of Behe's claims have been falsified. His claim that the human blood clotting system was "irreducibly complex" was proven wrong for example, right in front of his face, at the Dover trial. His claim that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex was likewise demolished. This doesn't seen to worry Behe or his supporters as much as one might hope it might, given that honest scientists are supposed to discard falsified notions. He is rejected because he cannot or will not (probably both) provide evidence for his theory. If you want to be taken seriously as a scientist, you have to do science. When it comes to ID, Behe refuses to play by the rules. He wants to rush straight ahead to pushing his junk science in the classroom, without ever having done the groundwork. No wonder he is rejected. But there is a huge difference. Einstein's ideas had predictive power. They made predictions which could be tested against observation. Those observations matched the predictions, thus providing strong evidence for Einstein's hypothesis.What predictive power does Behe's work give us? What observation would support or falsify his claims? A hypothesis about the origin of life can be tested. One can set up the experiment and attempt to replicate the event, to create new life. This may not demonstrate exactly how life actually formed, but it at least tells us that it is possible in principle.Behe doesn't even offer us this much. His claims cannot be tested or falsified. they have no predictive power. they have never been presented for peer review and they are clearly intended as religious apologetics. Are you really still wondering why he is not taken seriously?Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod