Does ID follow the scientific method?

MESSAGE 224 My mistake has not been fully recognizing the HUGE distinction you and others are making between the scientific method, and mere secularism. In the beginnings of the ID movement, it was rejected as science solely on religious grounds. It’s been fairly effortless for ID proponents to show the details of its work to be secular, (that’s some of what I’ve been doing in this thread, Dawn too) but the thread title uses the words scientific method, and that’s obviously being defined as a lot more than just a disconnect from religion. I’ll work on that. Much of what you seem to take exception to in my posts is my responses to evolutionist posters who are clearly trying to draw me off topic. It just seems to me that they shouldn’t be posting here either, but it’s your forum. Didn’t you move this thread to the Free For All forum so that it would have just a little more flexibility? I’ll abbreviate those types of responses from here on, but some I can’t resist. I’ll do that. You might want to just go ahead and do that anyway, because if you don’t this could turn out to be the biggest display of goalpost moving by evolutionists that EvC forums has ever seen._________________MESSAGE 91My fellow Kentuckian; Four lines? I can’t reduce it to just four lines, but I’ll make it as brief as possible - how about.....nine lines? Recent discoveries in the simplest forms of life now show that the initial information content in DNA and living proteins rather than being small must in fact be large, for any evolutionary process to work to begin with. Information in the cell could possibly arise in a top-down fashion (where intelligence is already present) rather than the emergent bottom-up fashion of Darwinism. The tracing of pathways towards new organization and machines, whilst obeying all the laws of thermodynamics, consistently shows that new machinery requires a pre-existence of intelligence from an outside source. The results of this testing can be applied to DNA, since the basic coding is the cause, rather than the consequence, thus the top-down approach gives another scientific paradigm (theory) for understanding the molecular machinery which is consistent with known thermodynamic principles.This appears to me (as a non scientist / I'll link below to where I condensed this from) to be a combination of two things that don’t go on in mainstream science; 1) a challenge to certain parts of evolutionary theory, and 2) an exploration into the origins of life, which the scientific community constantly assures us has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution. I suspect it worked for about....20 minutes after being tossed to the wolves, then the goalposts were moved.__________________MESSAGE 233 As I can equally assure you that biological studies within an ID framework can be done without violating the establishment clause of the first amendment, or following any religious rituals or doctrines. We’ll never believe each other, so there we are. But the least I can do is explain exactly why I don’t believe that all (evolutionist) scientists want to know everything about DNA sequences, even if that knowledge cripples their beloved naturalistic worldview. He knows, and I made clear, that Behe wasn’t the one suggesting such a vague and subjective test, it was Coyne and Orr who were suggesting it. Two scientists/authors that are in opposition to ID. He’s trolling, and practically no evolutionist on forums such as this would ever acknowledge it. Neither would most any of the big heavies in the scientific community, such as Dawkins, Myers, or Provine. I can tell by remembering their arrogant smirks in the movie Expelled. This kind of ridiculousness gets winks and nods from everyone in mainstream science — no one asks him where in any official description of ID he gets this nonsense. A specific function? A general hypothesis isn’t good enough? Here is a page full of general ones, I assume when they became public, the goalposts moved to a specific function. Chances are the Discovery Institute has it, but hasn’t released it to the wolves yet, because they know the goalposts will move to several specific functions. Then when there are several, there will never be enough.

A raggedy abbreviation by me no doubt, but it should get the idea across. I’m sure the goalposts have already been moved beyond it, but for a time, however short, it was the scientific method. __________________________MESSAGE 244 ID thought processes are diverse, and many ID proponents can think for themselves. They don’t have to blindly fall in line behind a leader like Richard Dawkins. New knowledge about the cell has come to light only in recent decades, and the ID movement is young. The atheist rabble making a lot of noise about Darwin in the late 1800’s is well documented.____________________MESSAGE 259 I'll take my medicine like a MAN, and this Thursday I'll give THANKS for it!

Hello Thylacosmilus Recent discoveries in the simplest forms of life now show that the initial information content in DNA and living proteins rather than being small must in fact be large, for any evolutionary process to work to begin with. Information in the cell could possibly arise in a top-down fashion (where intelligence is already present) rather than the emergent bottom-up fashion of Darwinism. The tracing of pathways towards new organization and machines, whilst obeying all the laws of thermodynamics, consistently shows that new machinery requires a pre-existence of intelligence from an outside source. The results of this testing can be applied to DNA, since the basic coding is the cause, rather than the consequence, thus the top-down approach gives another scientific paradigm for understanding the molecular machinery which is consistent with known thermodynamic principles.This appears to me (as a non scientist) to be a combination of two scientific things that don’t go on in mainstream science; 1) a challenge to certain parts of evolutionary theory, and 2) an exploration into the origins of life, which the scientific community constantly assures us has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution. My responses to your four lines above were condensed from one on this list of peer reviewed work. A.C. McIntosh, Information and Entropy, about 1/3 down the page. A raggedy abbreviation by me no doubt, but it should make clear that his more detailed peer-reviewed article would clearly and thoroughly address every one of your four steps. How many phases of standards are in the scientific method? Are there bare minimums, medium level, and high level standards? This thread’s central focus is this; Message 15Most posters in this thread, yourself included, are posting here because they, like the scientific community in general, believe that the ID methodology does not follow the scientific method. Yet we haven’t seen any real attempt by anyone here from that position to concisely define exactly what the scientific method is. Shouldn’t the scientific method be clearly defined, with a commonly used, predictable, unchanging meaning? Most scientists, but not all? Why not all? A start for what? A political decision? A re-evaluation of what the scientific method actually is?Another central focus of the thread, contained in the above quote by the thread starter is teachable in the science classroom. In other discussions on forums such as these, I’ve been told that what is teachable in the science classroom isn’t political, isn’t a democracy, that it should be left up only to the scientific community, since they are the most qualified to know what science actually is. Don’t you think they should be able to provide a clear definition for what the scientific method actually is? Something unchangeable? Something with one phase, instead of three or more?

Hi Bluejay, hopefully this one will be more on topic than my last one about the research article by A.C. McIntosh, entitled "Information and Entropy. Okay. The price of tea in China is not to be confused with a butterfly's wings flapping in China. This price is scientifically derived from numbers only tangentially related to the actual price of tea in China, which we have found is profoundly more accurate than actual prices paid for tea in China. How this affects you, your child, or an acquaintance is derived, again, scientifically, by a patent-pending method we'd love to discuss, but can't, at this time. It has little to nothing to do with the technology behind the magic eight ball. A brief overview of the connections between the price of tea in China and these results (both the price and actual bearing on events) is as follows;In the 19th century the price for tea in England was the highest when the first ship with the newly harvested tea came in. So for the ship owners it was important to be as fast as possible back to England with the load, otherwise the cost of the passage was not to be recovered from the sale of the tea. Thus there were real races (the tea clipper races) where the sail ships managed to travel the whole distance from China to England in about 80 to 90 days.The difference in prices from the first load to the later ones was so high that the original price which was paid for the tea in China was quite unimportant. So the "price of tea in China" was something that really didn't matter for the ship owners. They had to have the tea in England as fast as possible. The following link should answer all of your questions about that hypothesis.http://www.yixingteapotsale.com/teaname.htm The price for wine tanks has climbed sharply in recent months. At first, it might appear that this spike in prices is nothing more than a symptom of the weak dollar and strong foreign currencies. In fact, the rising price for stainless steel is being driven by a surge in the commodity price of nickel.Nickel? Steel is just iron and a little carbon, while stainless steel has chrome too, right? Well yes, but it is more complicated than that. Steels can actually be alloys containing a wide variety of metals in addition to iron. The amount of iron contained in the human body would normally be enough to make a short nail. Excess amounts of iron in the body, or content of other alloys described above, can cause above normal intestinal gas. Additionally, it should be remembered that the amount of carbon in "steel" is really quite low, on the order of 0.03 to 0.08 percent. Even cast-iron, which has a much higher carbon content than steel, has a carbon content of only about two to three percent. In addition to carbon, stainless steels contain chromium and nickel. The two most common grades of stainless steel used in winery equipment are the 304 and 316 grades. The difference between the two is that 316-grade stainless has slightly more nickel than 304-grade. Stainless steel of the 316-grade also has a small amount (2 percent) of molybdenum in the alloy. Although 304-grade stainless steel is also used, most US wine tanks are fabricated from 316-grade stainless steel. The 316-grade of steel is an alloy that is specified by the theory of ASTM International (formally known as the American Society for Testing and Materials) as containing a defined amount of several elements including chromium, nickel, and molybdenum (see table below). Chromium must make up between 16 and 18 percent of 316-grade stainless steel by weight, nickel must be between 10 and 14 percent by weight, finally between two and three percent of the alloy must be molybdenum.While the price for all the component metals in 316-grade stainless steel have risen lately, it appears that the principle driver for the rise is in fact the steep increase in the price of nickel. During the past year, the commodity price for nickel, as recorded on the London Metal Exchange (LME), has risen from $3.80 to $7.13 per pound.Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what ‘off topic’ really means.

For centuries, evolutionists have been trying to figure out why people commit crime.Early theories blamed the shape of someone's skull. Modern observations point to the effects of social background, climate or even legalised abortion. Only this week, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke dismissed the theory that crime is driven down by locking more people up in prison.But according to Ian Marsh, author of Theories of Crime, all these efforts to understand what pushes crime up or down will never quite crack the question."You can't expect any experiment to determine why some people embezzle funds, others beat up their wives and others like a good punch-up on a Saturday night," he says. A lecturer at Liverpool Hope University, Mr Marsh says certain patterns do merit attention. Criminologists emphasise people's home environment as a key factor, along with differences in upbringing.It sounds sensible that people who don't get on at school or get good jobs might turn to crime but that doesn't explain why someone with a lot of money commits fraud Before I go on, think back about six weeks. Where were you on Labor Day, that bittersweet end-of-the-summer holiday? If you had the day off, did your thoughts turn, for a moment, to the labor movement the day is named for, to which we owe not only for a well-timed three-day weekend, but more importantly, for workers’ rights as they exist today? If you ate food that day, did you think about the people who helped produce it? I was in San Francisco that weekend, attending Slow Food Nation, where I had the good fortune to meet and interview Lucas Benitez and Melody Gonzalez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, whose Campaign for Fair Food has persuaded some of the largest corporations in the food industry to agree to a price increase of a penny a pound for tomatoes, allowing for a modest raise for the farmworkers of Immokalee, Florida (where 90% of the US supply of winter tomatoes are grown), whose wages have languished, stagnant, since the 1970’s. As Benitez, a farmworker himself, points out in the video below, today’s tomato pickers get paid between 40 and 45 cents per 32 pound bucket, which means that to earn $50, a worker has to pick 2 tons of it. For Burger King, the Goldman Sachs-owned chain that signed with CIW last May at the US capitol building (but only after months of protests, a blog scandal and allegedly spying on CIW’s partner group, the Student/Farmworker Alliance) the penny-a-pound increase amounts to an estimated $250,000 dollars per year. To put that in perspective, Eric Schlosser’s November 07 op-ed Penny Foolish pointed out that n 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year.No one knows what the future holds, but as our economic system hovers over the proverbial rock bottom, it seems like a good time to revisit our policies, both national and personal, when it comes to the scientific method. What is the value of a tomato, and why? What (from fertilizers and pesticides to labor to transport) went into it, and does its price reflect those inputs? Or has a market driven by speculation and subsidies installed a false cap on that price, creating a decidedly unsustainable system that benefits CEOs over citizens, puts the squeeze on smaller businesses and leaves the laborers to pick up the slack?If you’d like to help support the Coalition in their campaign for fair food, visit their Take Action page

Sincerely appreciated. That really doesn’t matter. Despite the uproar over intrusive pat-downs for some airline travelers, the policy will not change heading into the holiday travel season, the head of the Transportation Security Administration said.
"Clearly, it's invasive; it's not comfortable," John Pistole said of the pat-downs in an interview Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union with Candy Crowley. This year marks the first Thanksgiving in which travelers will get molested before they get to their uncle's house. But he said the agency was trying to strike the right balance between privacy and security to protect the nation from potential terrorist attacks, such as the failed bomb plot last Christmas by a man who authorities said had explosives hidden in his underwear. Upon investigation it was discovered that the standard skidmark was only average in length, unlike the longer ones found generally found on standard, predictable underwear terrorists. The TSA this month began more aggressive pat-down hypothesis, including checking sensitive areas such as the groin and breasts, for signs of weapons or explosives on some travelers. The searches have sparked outrage, as has the TSA's alternative greater use of full-body scanners that the American Civil Liberties Union has said amounts to a "virtual strip search." In San Diego, a man refused to be patted down by airport security and some people are calling him a hero. I don't mind being patted down by airport security, but I don't like it when the guy says, 'Now you do me.' Bunny rabbits? Sorry , the wolves came first. Two rabbits were being chased by a pack of wolves. The wolves chased the rabbits into a thicket. After a few minutes, the girl rabbit turned to the by rabbit and said, "Well, do you want to make a run for it or stay here a few days and outnumber them? " No, we're not changing the policies, said the boy rabbit. "We know through intelligence that there are determined people, terrorists who are trying to kill not only Americans but innocent people around the world. I just can’t get it up with that on my mind.An Internet-based campaign has called for airline passengers to refuse the full-body scans on Wednesday, the busy travel day before Thanksgiving, opting instead for pat-downs, which could cause huge delays at airports.Asked Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation" if she would submit to one of the new pat-downs, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that she would not submit to a pat-down, to which Bill Clinton said, 'Tell me about it.'" But Clinton said Obama administration officials were trying to find the right way to respond to terrorists "getting more creative about what they do to hide explosives in, you know, crazy things like underwear." "I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And, you know, sometimes, we don't calculate it correctly. The degree of lethalness in explosives in underwear doesn’t necessarily correlate with the length of the skidmark.President Obama said Saturday that he had asked his counter-terrorism team each week if the measures were "absolutely necessary, and if the measures of the skidmarks were absolutely accurate.