Here's what Denyse O'Leary say on Uncommon Descent [Looking back: Why I think ID is winning] ...
Having reported news on the ID scene for about five years now, I could give a number of reasons why I think ID is slowly winning the intellectual battle, but let me focus on just one for now ...Poor Denyse. There are times when I really feel sorry for her.
31 comments :
Yes, a somewhat tenuous grasp of reality. I am sorry I clicked that link. That's the first time I read Uncommon Descent and now my brain hurts.
Once again:
Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.
Or does the troglodyte think that the way out of her cave is in the direction where it is getting even darker??
She says: "Not only should spontaneous generation be true if they are right, but so should magic, Magic, after all, is simply another name for sudden self-organization."
Isn't that really what creationism is supposed to be?
Yes, it really is quite sad. And this example isn't isolated - she's regularly making pronoucements that "Darwinism is dead" or 'Darwinism is toast" or such like. And she's convinced that the Altenberg 16 is an indication of this. Of course she completely ignored Massimmo Pigliucci's article on this and that the event really wasn't all that extraordinary and was just science as usual, and since he was actually one of the 16 I would regard him more of an authority than she is. But despite her claim that she's a journalist, she's never really got the hang of considering both sides of an argument.
I used to post comments on her blogs and used to try and be civil about it and engage with her. But I soon discovered that if you actually try and debate ID, she turns quite nasty in a hurry (I guess it must be her way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance I suppose). Of course now you can't even post comments, under some silly idea that the Canadian Human Rights Commission is going to go after her.
I guess she's been reading too much Ann Coulter or something, but she doesn't understand that the more shrill and hysterical she gets, the less anybody is going to take her seriously. But for entertainment value, she's hard to beat.
"That’s right folks - just toss the bedclothes into the air and they’ll come down in a perfect mitred-corner bed."
So after more than 5 years, she still doesn't understand evolution at all? Well there's a surprise...
"If the NS editors were right, we should see non-life evolving slowly into life all around us, but for some reason we don’t."
Actually, I think the NS editors are right, but seing as she just pulled that conclusion out of her ass, that's largely irrelevant to the issue.
How does their statement say anything about where (or when) to look for emerging life?
Creationism is magic per definition, evolution is only magic when you don't understand it.
ID proponents are not winning the intellectual war with scientists, but they are winning the hearts of minds of the general public.
The number of people in the US who do not believe in evolution is frightfully high, and may actually be growing.
Denyse O'Leary may be right for all the wrong reasons.8156
When you're a blithering idiot, the whole world is a wonderful mystery!
Yes, the bedclothes thing was the clincher. I'm kinda stunned that anyone still uses that type of arguments.
Hot tea down the nose.
Intelligent Design Theory is gaining on unguided evolutionism because the evidence for design is too much to be ignored.
Things have come so bad for the DOPs (Darwin Only Party) that they admit "huh....yeah, there is design but it is a bottom up design!"
Well, the evidence couldn't be ignored forever, now could it ?
Now all darwinists need to do is to find that natural force who is able to design living things from bottom up.
Good luck!
mats, we don't actually think that there is a bottom up design, rather there exists a bottom up process that results in complex structures that have the appearance of design.
And yes, we already know what is driving this process, its the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
@mats:
When you write of the "Intelligent Design Theory", what "theory" do you have in mind?
What does ID suggest happened? When? Where? How? Why? Or even: Who did the "designing"?
What is the difference between things that are "designed" and those that are not? Can you give even a tentative example of something that is not designed, or could not be designed?
Tom S.
Tom S raises an important point.
Once you assume that there is design present within nature then you cannot logically determine the difference between a designed and non designed natural object. An ant walking on the Rosetta stone will just see it as another stone yet any designer must have a mind exponentially greater in ability when compared to humans as the human mind is to the ant. How can we grasp the design implications for such an intellect? In such a scenario everything must be of possible design and as such ID claims of specified complexity etc are meaningless and any search for a means of identifying design is inevitably going to be fruitless.
Its a point that should be put to IDiots more often (I don't think I've ever heard them try to answer it).
Prof. Moran, I see the Discovery Institute is mentioning your name again (no link provided, on purpose). If they don't like you, you must be alright.
mats: Intelligent Design Theory is...
Michael Medved, who gets paid by the Discovery Institute, says "The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory."
George Gilder, co-founder of the Discovery Institute, says "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."
Why do you disagree with the Discovery Institute on this rather important point?
I'm an atheist opposed to ID. I accept the synthetic (ie modern) theory of evolution. But there are puzzles to be solved and until they are I'm afraid science and biology exist in a state of some embarrassment.
We need to be able to explain the first appearance of life on earth convincingly and we can't at the moment. We know roughly when life got started here but we don't know how. That's a big problem because it allows creationist/IDers to argue, absurdly, that "God did it". Ignorance is their only defense.
Also, I continue to find the question of the timing of the advent of life on earth interesting. Why did it occur only once or at a given time on earth? Why, in fact, does it not continue to occur, with "new" life arising to compete the evolved forms? I suppose the answer is ecological. No more room at the inn now. But is this so? Maybe we just haven't looked hard enough in the right places yet? It would be a total vindiction of a naturalist, non-supernatural, non-ID understanding of life if we were to find discernable biochemical processes of origination occurring now. Not "spontaneous generation" of course, but biochemical processes occurring under definable conditions. Barring that, of course, we should be able to replicate in the laboratory the processes on the early earth that gave rise to life.
I find it strange that given the importance of the question concerning the origin of life on earth that more resources aren't put towards finding an answer.
In Darwin's day, speciation was "the mystery of mystery". Darwin began the processes of edning the mystery. Now we know a great deal about speciation. Today the mystery of mysteries is the origin of life on earth. We need a new Darwin or group of Darwins to demystify that question and deal the coup de grace to the creationist/IDers.
Larry, I appreciate that you give me reasons to keep visiting your blog.:)
Why did it occur only once or at a given time on earth? Why, in fact, does it not continue to occur, with "new" life arising to compete the evolved forms?
You don't think it could have something to do with the way life competes with other life for resources, so that life that has a headstart may have altered the conditions that allowed it to arise in the first place? Or the many winner-take-all steps that current life has gone through (development of enclosed cells, development of protein synthesis, etc.) Or the several mass extinctions through which current life has managed to survive, but competitors may not have?
We don't have all the answers to the origin of life, but we are in a position where there are a great many possibilities, rather than not having any viable possibilities.
But there are puzzles to be solved and until they are I'm afraid science and biology exist in a state of some embarrassment.
It's not embarrassing, it's EXCITING. ID and related forms of psuedoscience are science-stoppers: "God did it" is an answer that can lead to no further questions. But if we ignore such foolishness and focus on the real world and learning about it, we can ask interesting questions and try to answer them, leading to more interesting questions.
So we can't say exactly how life got started. That's not a problem, that's an opportunity. And your associated questions about timing and multiple origins and the role of ecological competition (and I like the response involving mass extinctions) are symptoms of that opportunity!
Having reported news on the ID scene for about five years now, I could give a number of reasons why I think ID is slowly winning the intellectual battle, but let me focus on just one for now ...
Let me focus on the real reason Denyse thinks this. She wouldn't recognise an intellectual battle if it came up and bit her on the ass.
...
Juvenile, I know. But, heck, the woman's "writing" is pure embarrasment - again and again and again...
thebrummel writes:
"So we can't say exactly how life got started. That's not a problem, that's an opportunity. And your associated questions about timing and multiple origins and the role of ecological competition (and I like the response involving mass extinctions) are symptoms of that opportunity!"
I agree completely, but biochemists and others, as a scientific community, aren't committed to addressing the question (certain important individual initiatives notwithstanding).
At the next international biochemistry convention, the assembled should pass a motion resolving to move the "origin of life" to the very top of the agenda. It should become the major research focus in every biochemistry department in the world.
The answer to the creationist/IDers is not argument but discovery--science that tells us how life began.
At the next international biochemistry convention, the assembled should pass a motion resolving to move the "origin of life" to the very top of the agenda. It should become the major research focus in every biochemistry department in the world.
I look forward to your donation of the funding that will be needed by that research.
"It should become the major research focus in every biochemistry department in the world."
Why? We aren't talking about some impossibly rare miraculous event. All the indications are that life developed soon after the earth cooled so it is probably a fairly simple process given the correct geochemical conditions. The discovery of those conditions will probably the factor that reveals the process, at least how it occurred here on earth.
Roger that Martin. Geochemical conditions had to have been extremely important. For anyone interested in that aspect, an extremely good group of articles was published in Elements magazine in 2005 [Vol. 1, No. 3] covering the importance of geochemistry and mineralogy to the origin and evolution of life. Perhaps we will never have the answer to the origin of life, but I don't see it being solved without a concentrated multidisciplinary approach from science (geology, biology, chemistry, physics).
WKM
On a second note, maybe what she meant to say was "ID is slowly whining"? That certainly has some truth to it. :P
There's a "Part 2" that she posted yesterday following the same topic... and it is as equally shallow and cliched
Yes, I just saw "Part 2", and it's just as absurd as Part 1. Now she's rambling on about multiverses and fine-tuning - and that without evidence of multiverses Darwinism couldn't ever happened. Nobody is saying there is evidence for multiverses, or that multiverses are needed to explain life - it's just interesting speculation that scientists like to do. Of course that's completely lost on her. She seems clueless about how science is actually conducted.
I suspect that that the problem is that even though she likes to call herself a "science Journalist" she probably reads very little mainstream science - but instead seems to scour the Internet for every fringe and pseudo-scientific crackpot that supports her presuppositions. And not just science to - she seems drawn to every crackpot historian out there too. Look at the way she fawns over Weihart and his ideas about Darwinism and the Holocaust - yet, she never once mentions any opposing views, as a real journalist would do. What a hack.
For a journalist that is not only unprofessional, but it is utterly intellectually dishonest.
This line made me laugh out loud: "Life forms, I was told, self-assemble gradually from their component parts via natural selection, without design or purpose, just the way the Corvette had."
The Corvette? What Corvette?
That was a real "Sixth Sense" moment.
"I see stupid people, but they don't know they're stupid. They only see what they want to see."
On a related note, I found this blog through the Discovery Institute website (long story). Nice to see you around, Larry. I remember you fondly from t.o.
"It should become the major research focus in every biochemistry department in the world."
martinc responds:
"Why? We aren't talking about some impossibly rare miraculous event. All the indications are that life developed soon after the earth cooled so it is probably a fairly simple process given the correct geochemical conditions. The discovery of those conditions will probably the factor that reveals the process, at least how it occurred here on earth."
Why???!!!
Because it is an enormous hole in our knowledge. Isn't that enough? How did life on earth begin? God did it. That's as good an explanation as any at the moment, notwithstanding your exculpation of ignorance. Should we remain ignorant?
The greatest embarrassment in biology is our lack of understanding of the origination of life on earth. It is the dirty secret of biochemistry. All this fulminating against superstition and yet biochemists have no answer and INSIST ON NOT LOOKING FOR ONE! "We know the answer so we don't have to find it," they say. That's even more arrogant than the IDcreationists, who at least have a Holy Book to go on. Biochemists deserve to be laughed out of court for lack of evidence.
intelligent design is winning?
i am not surprised, its is after all the only logical
deduction given the evidence available today.
Darwin is dead? Of course he is.
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