Well there are a LOT of problems here.
1) So long as you use the bullying tactics of calling anybody who disagrees with you of being a "fanatic" or "invincibly ignorant" instead of supportign your assertions this "horse" remains very much alive
2) Piltdown had very little to do with a "subjective promotion of materialistic Naturalism". There are many reasons why the fake managed to survive (notably the reputations of the scientists involved, and the second specimen - which ruled out an error).
3) Punctuated equilibria has absolutely nothing to do with explaining away specimens that don't fit into the tree of life - and I've never seen any attempts to use saltation to do so either. The fact is that if there was no such pattern evolution would not have been proposed in the first place. The patterns of taxonomy formed one of Darwin's main pieces of evidence.
4) Your comments make it quite clear that you don't understand Dembski's Explanatory Filter and that you write of correct explanatiosn as "nonsense" or a "strawman". Too bad for you.
For an event E to pass the third decision mode of the Explanatory Filter, it is therefore not enough to know that E has small probability with respect to some probability distribution or other. Rather we must know that whatever probability distribution may have been responsible for E, it wasn't one for which the probability of E was either an HP or an IP event
(William Dembski _The Design Inference_ CUP 1998 p 41)
So it is necessary establish an upper bound of the probabilities, as I stated. And for Dembski's argument it is necessary to establish a firm boundary between SP (Small Probability) and IP (Intermediate Probability) events. While in _THe Design Inference_ Dembski allowed the use of local bounds practically all writing - including Dembski's - uses the Universal Probability bound which is supposed to represent an absolute limit instead.
As stated in ISCID's Encyclopdia :
In order for an event to meet the standards of Dembski's theoretical notion of specified complexity, the probability of its happening must be lower than the Universal Probability Bound which Dembski sets at one chance in 10^150 possibilities.
http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Specified_Complexity
(Specified complexity is eseentially another name for an event which passes to the "design" node of the Explanatory filter)
The Executive Director of ISCID is - William Dembski
(
http://www.iscid.org/about.php)
5) Actually you did not ASK how many degrees were based on writing about Piltdown - you wrote:
quote:
Does anyone here know how many degrees were 'earned' by writing a thesis/dissertation on the Piltdown skull and its evolutionary role? Does anyone here know how many of those granted degrees were retracted when the skull was discovered to be a hoax? For all I hear about Kent Hovind's "dubious degree", what of the Piltdown cases - why weren't those degrees immediately retracted from their "learned recipients"?
Looks like a rhetorical question to me - and certainly you are assuming that there were such degrees, that there was adequate reason for revoking them and that they were not revoked. Yet there is no evidence that any of these are true. Indeed the only factual information you provide is that a large number of articles was written (which included newspaper and magazine articles). Doubtless the information was distributed (there were scientific papers written and published) but that is far from enough to actually write a dissertation. A dissertation is supposed to be original research and repeating someone else's findings will not do.
And if you had read the talk.origins FAQ you would have seen other problems - Piltdown was not considered a major find by all scientists for those forty years !
In the period 1930-1950 Piltdown man was increasingly marginalized and by 1950 was, by and large, simply ignored. It was carried in the books as a fossil hominid. From time to time it was puzzled over and then dismissed again. The American Museum of Natural History quietly classified it as a mixture of ape and man fossils. Over the years it had become an anomaly; some prominent authors did not even bother to list it. In Bones of Contention Roger Lewin quotes Sherwood Washburn as saying
"I remember writing a paper on human evolution in 1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could make sense of human evolution if you didn't try to put Piltdown into it."
6) Rather than asking why you keep posting it would be better for you to ask yourself why you keep making an assertion you are obviously incapable of defending.
!
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