tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post4025045196722570572..comments2024-03-27T14:50:47.345-04:00Comments on <center>Sandwalk</center>: Debating Darwin's DoubtLarry Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05756598746605455848noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-8022953849953191052015-07-23T11:08:15.687-04:002015-07-23T11:08:15.687-04:00Nick writes: Luskin then raises the idea that inte...Nick writes: <i>Luskin then raises the idea that intelligent design could correlate some characters, and this could cause above-null CIs.</i><br /><br />Yeah, or a supernatural being could anti correlate the characters, or randomly scramble them, or get rid of genetics and grow babies in magical cabbage patches.Diogeneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15551943619872944637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-62783267753511275912015-07-23T11:04:53.313-04:002015-07-23T11:04:53.313-04:00At the link above, one of the best pop-level revie...At the link above, one of the best pop-level reviews is by John Harshman himself, who reviews I think 5 chapters in detail, until he is too disgusted to continue further.Diogeneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15551943619872944637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-60491895461826575242015-07-23T11:02:09.924-04:002015-07-23T11:02:09.924-04:00Surprisingly, we have video showing
what happens ...Surprisingly, we have video showing <a href="https://youtu.be/aopdD9Cu-So" rel="nofollow"><br />what happens when Berlinski contacts water.</a><br /><br /><br />Diogeneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15551943619872944637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-8376838613588750512015-07-22T18:10:39.281-04:002015-07-22T18:10:39.281-04:00Yeah, not sure if any of it is new whining though....Yeah, not sure if any of it is new whining though.NickMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04765417807335152285noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-91654850402364239982015-07-22T17:46:39.583-04:002015-07-22T17:46:39.583-04:00I'm particularly fond of the one "trait c...I'm particularly fond of the one "trait change" that would enable whales to evolve a waterproof skin. All I can say is that it must look pretty messy when Dr Berlinski takes shower.christine janishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14520766623263222808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-63831836142545845852015-07-22T16:54:13.639-04:002015-07-22T16:54:13.639-04:00Nick, did he whine about my National Review assess...Nick, did he whine about my National Review assessment, too? :)John Farrellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18280296574996987228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-64178827551227169282015-07-22T14:44:05.291-04:002015-07-22T14:44:05.291-04:00A chapter by Berlinski? Oh joy! I wonder if he w...A chapter by Berlinski? Oh joy! I wonder if he will re-iterate his stupidity about 50,000 'trait changes' being to few to account for evolution fo whales from cows...nmanninghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14767343547942014627noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-48235438903678010042015-07-22T01:29:19.873-04:002015-07-22T01:29:19.873-04:00If you think those books are great, you'll lov...If you think those books are great, you'll love it when I quote.mine you too...<br />...let's see...<br /><br />Robert Byers said, Wednesday, July 22, 2015 1:10:00 AM<br /><br /><i>ID thinkers are [...] clearly wrong</i><br /><br /><i>This is great touching God under [...] the balls [...] The more [...] the better. the more [...] the better</i><br /><br />There you go. How do you like that?Dazzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07619622297229101066noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-60970617284957533112015-07-22T01:10:57.495-04:002015-07-22T01:10:57.495-04:00Saying these ID thinkers are not scientists or don...Saying these ID thinkers are not scientists or don't do science is clearly wrong.<br />Its profiling them before a public that has not read their stuff. <br />Who judges when science is done? Does one need a diploma? if science is investigation then thats all that defines if its science. The merits of the investigation! Who judges that? The opposition that strongly cares? <br />ID thinkers have won their science spurs and you are facing their lances once more.<br /><br />Why are the reviewers so qualified? This is a great issue touching on God, religion, and civilization. Reviewers easily are under the influence to stop creationism's rising tide. Especially from ID scientists.<br />I don't accuse but I don't trust reviewers in these things.<br />Let the readers do the thinking and creationism carry the ball to greater audiences. The more books the better. the more controversially the better.<br />The truth welcomes attention.<br />Its good summer reading I'm sure.<br /><br />Robert Byershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05631863870635096770noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-33531487167329202492015-07-21T23:25:59.722-04:002015-07-21T23:25:59.722-04:00I was going to say, one of the few new bits is (I ...I was going to say, one of the few new bits is (I think) Luskin's chapter 9, "Cladistics to the rescue?" The key flaws include:<br /><br />(1) Continuing to think of "lobopods" as a coherent group, which results in pointless arguments about e.g. whether lobopods are "closer" to arthropods than anomalocarids. Earth to Luskin: lopobods are a paraphyletic grab-bag. Living arthropods, onychophorans, and tardigrades all descend from lobopods, as do anomalocarids. Phylogenetically speaking, then, all of these groups are *within* the lobopod group. <br /><br />(2) The Luskin chapter contains a fair bit of discussion about how different the anomalocarids are from true arthropods, contradicting Meyer/Luskin's previous arguments (repeated in this new book, in other chapters!) about how it was totes OK to lump anomalocarids in as just another thing in the arthropod group!<br /><br />(3) Luskin has finally discovered the concept of a null distribution for the Consistency Index (CI)! It's only taken him about 2 years! Now, finally, having learned about it, he can dimly see the problem with his/Meyer's old tactic of squinting at some published CI value and declaring it "high" or "low" without any consideration of what the null distribution is. So, his new argument is that the null hypothesis of random distribution of characters is silly. To that I say -- why? That is precisely what one is claiming if one claims the data have no cladistic tree structure, which is precisely what these turkeys have been telling their readers for years now. (Except Berlinski; he admitted at one point that there is tree structure in the data, which is not made up.) <br /><br />Luskin then raises the idea that intelligent design could correlate some characters, and this could cause above-null CIs. This is true enough, but such structure in the data, when the designers are humans, is very limited -- all of this was thoroughly discussed years ago by Doug Theobald in his discussion of natural versus artificial hierarchies, in his 29+ Evidences for Common Ancestry FAQ, a resource which Luskin, Meyer et al. still lack the courage to engage with in any detail: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#nested_hierarchy<br /><br />If Luskin specified a quantifiable model for ID that specified what parameters are to be learned from the data, and generated distributions of data (or CI or other statistics) from the model, then he'd have some shot at progressing in an anti-frequentist direction. But good luck with that -- IDists rarely say anything specific enough about their designer to be subject to empirical test.<br /><br />As for going beyond frequentist null-hypothesis rejection, us phylogeneticists got there years ago. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods are now dominant in the field (although only just starting in fossil invertebrate studies like the Cambrian; almost the last frontier for this area). For the sake of simplicity, I focused on parsimony/cladistic methods in my critiques of "Darwin's Doubt", and as a result of that, plus the IDists' systematic naivety and amateurism, cladistics is almost all that gets talked about in the IDists' replies. But if they would like tests of common ancestry in a fully likelihoodist or Bayesian framework, where null hypotheses do not have to be assumed at all, we've got that covered. Doug Theobald did that already (also), in his 2010 Nature paper testing common ancestry. We could do it for Cambrian morphology data matrices too, although it would take a couple of weeks of full-time work and thus a grant or a graduate student. Of course, the IDists just summarily rejected that work as well, so I'm not sure what the point would be.NickMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04765417807335152285noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-90413287035211463982015-07-21T21:37:22.763-04:002015-07-21T21:37:22.763-04:00At least they get a lot of sales to the guys who w...At least they get a lot of sales to the guys who write bad reviews.Petrushkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02343702725399620404noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-70044033890595292242015-07-21T19:06:41.748-04:002015-07-21T19:06:41.748-04:00Blargh can't do this on my phone. Will be a bi...Blargh can't do this on my phone. Will be a bitNickMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04765417807335152285noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-18608152875308403272015-07-21T19:06:00.366-04:002015-07-21T19:06:00.366-04:00I downloaded the kindle book. There isn't much...I downloaded the kindle book. There isn't much new, mostly it's from the DI blog, one newish bit was Luskin on my critique, but he still gets cladistics wrong, along with somNickMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04765417807335152285noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-63650005772784043652015-07-21T19:04:20.114-04:002015-07-21T19:04:20.114-04:00Why should it matter if Darwin had doubts? Why sho...Why should it matter if Darwin had doubts? Why should it matter if he really did have a death-bed conversion? (He didn't) Why should it matter what he thought? His work is in print, his evidence can be tested, his ideas can be confirmed or refuted. Debating Darwin is about as useful as debating Copernicus.<br /><br />Dave BaileyThe Rathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02487724361976424018noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-60264512464939083802015-07-21T18:49:02.752-04:002015-07-21T18:49:02.752-04:00And an assemblage of various reviews and other com...And an assemblage of various reviews and other commentary here:<br /><br />http://darwinsdoubtreviews.blogspot.comJohn Harshmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06705501480675917237noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-47722538308283285332015-07-21T17:09:49.083-04:002015-07-21T17:09:49.083-04:00Also look at Aaron Baldwin's review on the Ama...Also look at Aaron Baldwin's review on the Amazon site.<br /><br />http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3E06SO1WP1QBA/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0089LOM5Gchristine janishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14520766623263222808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-83792184525202752602015-07-21T15:53:08.998-04:002015-07-21T15:53:08.998-04:00For those of you who don't know, OgreMkV aka S...For those of you who don't know, OgreMkV aka Smilodon's Retreat wrote a great series of blog posts systematically dissecting all of Meyer's quote mines of authorities, showing how Meyer's source says something *different from* or *the opposite to* what Meyer says they said.Diogeneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15551943619872944637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37148773.post-53603427362426503932015-07-21T14:47:20.518-04:002015-07-21T14:47:20.518-04:00Unless Meyer spends all of his writing on the subj...Unless Meyer spends all of his writing on the subject apologizing for all the quotemines and lies about peer-reviewed research (including Marshall's), then it's not worth the paper it's printed on. <br /><br />I should note that I talked with Marshall (sadly) after his radio debate with Meyer. I had mentioned that I found an article where Meyer directly lied about what Marshall had said in the paper. OgreMkVhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15941141613861549098noreply@blogger.com