nemesis_juggernaut writes:
For starters, you are quoting Judge Jones, not the people in question in taped deposition or on court transcripts.
If excerpts from the judge's ruling aren't sufficiently persuasive for you then here are the transcripts:
Dover Trial Transcripts at the ACLU
Secondly, I thought you were placing in question the expert witnesses, like Behe, not the school board members...Please explain to me what this one trial and the opinions of school board members have to do with the overall view of ID?
You seem to have forgotten the context of the discussion. Fallacycop said this about IDists avoiding mention of God:
fallacycop in Message 56 writes:
Come on NJ, we all know that the only reason the ID movement avoids talking about god as the intelligent designer is to dodge a high court decision that made creation science unfit for teaching at science classes
You replied that he was imagining things:
nemesis_juggernaut in Message 73 writes:
No, you've imagined this Bogeyman scenario so you can keep it out.
And I replied to you that such misrepresentations were by no means a figment of anyone's imagination:
Percy in Message 77 writes:
One of the revelations of the Dover trial was the very public way it came to light that Christians will lie under oath.
What I did was give an example showing that what you had called a "Bogeyman scenario" had already happened when Christians under oath in an American courtroom lied about the religious motivations of their ID efforts.
It is common knowledge that IDists attempt to disguise and otherwise hide the religious nature of the views they are attempting to characterize as science. Why one would attempt to deny the obvious is hard to understand. IDists are almost exclusively evangelical Christians, and ID itself is just a branch of creation science, whose failed efforts at moving religion into public schools already has a long public record. For people to believe that ID has nothing to do with God or religion would require illogic and amnesia on a massive scale.
nemesis_juggernaut writes:
Percy writes:
Judge Jones is a conservative Republican, a churchgoer, and a Bush appointee.
That's immaterial. What is that supposed to mean?
I was merely attempting to anticipate your response, which I assumed would be similar to that of the Discovery Institute in trying to dismiss the significance of the decision by denigrating the judge and his motives. For example, these are the words of Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute (from
Dover Intelligent Design Decision Criticized as a Futile Attempt to Censor Science Education):
"Judge Jones found that the Dover board violated the Establishment Clause because it acted from religious motives. That should have been the end to the case. Instead, Judge Jones got on his soapbox to offer his own views of science, religion, and evolution. He makes it clear that he wants his place in history as the judge who issued a definitive decision about intelligent design. This is an activist judge who has delusions of grandeur."
Moving on:
nemesis_juggernaut writes:
The point is that we have people claiming that ID is going to somehow undermine science. That's not possible because ID or evolution aren't branches of science.
There have been several other responses to your message, so concerning your misconceptions about science, branches of science and theories, I'm going to leave that aside for now in the hope that these are now remedied, but I'm glad to continue discussion about it if it proves necessary.
I don't believe your statement that people are claiming that ID is going to undermine science is accurate. Some may have made some statements that could be construed this way, but it would be a mistake to conclude this is the intended or key point. The objection to ID isn't that it would undermine science. Rather, the objection is that ID is not science. It is not science because of the way it is approached, which is revelatory in nature while ignoring key aspects of the nature of science and of the scientific method.
Behe, Dembski, Wells, etc have nothing to do with science?...etc...
Others have already addressed why what Behe, Dembski, Wells, Gitt, Baumgardner, Humphreys, etc, etc, etc, are doing with regard to creation science and ID is not science. Let me know if you think further discussion would be helpful.
Now, are they also lobbying their viewpoint? Yes, they are, just as Wallace and Huxley were lobbying in defense of evolution over a century ago. What's the problem with that?
The problem is that lobbying is their sole activity with regard to creationism and ID.
Genetics is the mechanism behind heredity.
You can't leave such an open-ended answer and expect that to speak to us. An answer of such brevity is almost as bad as Goddidit.
The term "brevity" cannot be accurately applied to a message board post of over a thousand words. I'm happy to explain the mechanisms behind evolution to any extent necessary. But I think the issue you're actually trying to raise is the lack of specificity we can achieve regarding past evolutionary events. It sounds like you want to know what, specifically and genetically, caused one lizard to evolve camouflage capability and another not. Whether or not an answer exists depends upon the level of detail you're seeking. Let me explain via analogy to geology.
There's a geologist doing soil analysis in a remote desert. The analysis indicates that a significant component of the soil must have come from a mountain range about a hundred miles away. This conclusion is reached because of similar mineral content and unique chemical signatures. But someone could claim, quite correctly though certainly also incredibly nitpickedly, that this is merely circumstantial evidence, and demand that they won't find the evidence credible unless the geologist can identify the particular weather systems, rainstorms, windstorms, etc., that eroded the material from the mountains and transported it to the desert. That evidence, of course, will never be found because evidence of such things just doesn't last very long. It's the same reason that there's no evidence in your yard today that will tell you what the temperature was at noon a week ago.
So what caused one lizard to develop camouflage and another not? The reasons are evolutionary. One lizard occupied an ecological niche where resemblance to objects common in it's environment would either provide protection from predators, or if it were itself a predator, would prevent it from being identified by potential prey. Or perhaps both, since even predators can be preyed upon. These selection factors would have caused lizards that better resembled leaves (or twigs or tree bark or whatever) to have a better chance of survival to produce more offspring, and the particular allele mix and any chance favorable mutations would increase in representation in the lizard population.
But why did another identical lizard population on the other side of the river not evolve the same camouflage capability? The reason is that things are never truly identical, including any chance events that might play a role. All we can know is that evolution took a different path there. The actual individual causative events can likely never be know. All we can do is look at the genomes of the two lizard populations and say, "Here at these gene positions are the differences that x million years ago gave one lizard population its chameleon capabilities."
nemesis_juggernaut writes:
Percy writes:
The answer to what I think you're actually asking is that the qualities that benefit a creature are enormously dependent upon the existing qualities of that creature, the nature of its genetic library, and the specifics of its environment. A chameleon might evolve the ability to resemble a twig if it lived in a forest but not in a desert.
How? Who does nature know what a twig is and that an animal masquerading as one would be a very successful predator if nature is not cognizant?
Nature doesn't know what a twig is or what camouflage is. Evolution is not a guided process. There is no knowing intelligence behind evolution. All that happens is differential reproductive success based upon each organisms individual characteristics. Those with characteristics that provide greater survival benefit are more likely to produce offspring, and more offspring, than others in their population.
Why would nature have selected something else when procryptism is markedly effective?
All solutions are not effective in all environments or for all creatures. Procryptic capability might work well for a lizard, but it wouldn't work very well for a prehistoric human. A lion's keen sense of smell is unlikely to be thrown off by the fact that a procryptic human exactly resembled a tree trunk. The same for a deer that a human is hunting. In fact, what humans have found most successful in hunting is to stay downwind of prey.
People like Behe and Dembski have already submitted many peer reviews on many subjects that don't directly mention Intelligent Design in the past.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here. Behe is widely published in the microbiology journals, but none of his published work is ID. Dembski's never been published in the scientific journals that I'm aware of. Has either ever submitted an ID article to a journal?
But now, they're branded. And whatever they submit for review will be met with hostility on an a priori basis, rather than a posteriori basis.
How can they get around that? Being that I see this whole debate is more of an ideological battle more than a question of how good the science is, it seems that no matter what happens, there will be this factor of bias.
But it isn't an ideological battle, not within science. It's only a question of doing good science. If you do good science you'll get published. True, they've poisoned the well by committing the significant
faux paux of taking their arguments public before sharing them with scientific colleagues, but if their science is good then it will eventually get published and it will gain adherents.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
