... the new book is important because it puts to rest a Darwinian myth, an icon of the evolution debate, namely...that there is no debate, about evolution or intelligent design!
In the neo-Darwinian scenario for the origin and diversity of life, the digital functional information for life would have had to begin at zero, increase over time to eventually encode the first simple life form, and continue to increase via natural processes to encode the digital information for the full diversity of life.
An essential, falsifiable prediction of Darwinian theory, therefore, is that functional information must, on average, increase over time.
Of course, no one I've referred to endorses Dylann Roof's murderous rampage. I don't doubt that they are all sincerely mortified by the association, however unintended, with such unapologetic, undisguised evil.
I mention this at all not to blame them for Roof's crime, in any way, but simply to note -- because the mainstream media covers it up -- how certain ideas tend to hang together.
The racial elements in Charles Darwin's writing, the eugenicist implications, are often brushed aside as ugly but incidental, a mere byproduct of his time and place. Yet the myth of European superiority over inferior dark peoples continues to percolate in some evolutionary thinking, a century and more after the close of the Victorian era. It seems to have found an eager student in a disturbed young man named Dylann Roof.
It's the first point on the list that I want to discuss. The link takes you to a brief description of how Intelligent Design Creationism uses the scientific method to prove that gods played a role in the history of life. Here's how it works ...
One day after he announced he was leaving the Conservative caucus to better defend his religious beliefs, Nanaimo-Alberni MP James Lunney attempted to do just that from his new seat in the corner of the House of Commons reserved for independent MPs.Imagine that! He was unable to convince Parliament that making fun of his silly beliefs is wrong! This is exactly how the Canadian public SHOULD deal with people who act like kooks.
But despite his best efforts, he was unable to convince House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer that the "cyberbullying" and "crowd-shaming" that he claimed to have experienced after questioning the science behind evolution constituted a breach of his parliamentary privilege.
Speaking to CBC News Power & Politics host Evan Solomon on Wednesday evening, Lunney said that he was tired of seeing his faith community bullied.Freedom comes in several forms. If you live in a free society then you have to be prepared to accept criticism of your most cherished beliefs. You can't hide behind religion to protect you when you act like an IDiot. Pointing out the stupidity of a Member of Parliament is not bullying
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Lunney described evolution — or, as he calls it, "macro-evolution" is "a theory in crisis."
"Scientists are not able to speak their mind on that — at least half of them who feel this way, they're gagged by an old construct," he argued.
"There's a whole generation of kids being taught that what they're taught in Sunday School or in church is garbage, it's wrong, it's false, and it's simply a form of bullying that's no longer acceptable. It's not scientifically tenable, it's a disservice to science… it's not freedom of religion if your views are put down by your peers."
This notion, however, is mistaken. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution, in the Darwinian sense of undirected (unintelligent) process of random heritable variation and natural selection, is the process by which populations of living things change over time without intelligent agency causing or guiding the process. When the process of change in populations is guided by intelligence, it is called artificial selection -- breeding.Shhhh. Don't tell Michael Behe who wrote a whole book based on resistance to antimalarial drugs.
Of course I'm not the first to point this out. Charles Darwin, in the Origin of Species, made exactly the same argument. In his first chapter, he discussed artificial selection -- animal husbandry and breeding of plants. In subsequent chapters he developed an argument that in nature, changes in population are accomplished by natural selection, without intelligent agency. Darwin distinguished artificial selection from natural selection -- he distinguished breeding from evolution, and of course his theory of evolution is a theory of natural selection, not a theory of animal husbandry or plant breeding, which had been practiced for thousands of years and to which Darwin contributed nothing.
Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is artificial selection. Antibiotics are intelligently designed by medical researchers, deliberately administered to patients by doctors, who understand that there are some bacteria that are not sensitive to the antibiotic and that have the potential to proliferate. Actually, the administration of antibiotics that kill some but not all of the bacteria in the patient is quite deliberate, because there are huge populations of beneficial bacteria (e.g. in the gut) that should not be killed since they are necessary for health.
On Wednesday, Mr. Nicholls stood behind his comments.Here's how the views of Rick Nicholls are covered in the Toronto Star: Tory MPP Rick Nicholls says he doesn’t believe in evolution .
“[Ms. Sandals] was very flippant in her response to my colleague and I gave a flippant response back to her,” he said, adding that evolution “is one’s personal belief set.”
Within an hour, he followed up with an emailed statement saying he’d been given a talking-to by PC House Leader Steve Clark: “I acknowledge that my comment is not reflective of Ontario PC Party policy,” he said of his anti-evolution remarks.
"What is it that especially disqualifies me for the job that I’m doing? Is it that I’m a woman? Is it that I’m a mother? Is it that I have a master’s of education? Is it that I was a school council chair? Is it that I was the minister of education?" Ms. Wynne thundered. "What is it exactly that the member opposite thinks disqualifies me from doing the job that I’m doing? What is that?"Not a good day for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.
PC MPPs sat ashen-faced as Liberals heckled them and applauded Ms. Wynne.
Speaking up for the importance of science to society is our only hope [my emphasis, LAM], and scientists must not shy away from engaging with the public, even on the most polarizing science-based topics. Scientists need to speak clearly with journalists, who provide a great vehicle for translating the nature and implications of their work. Scientists should also meet with members of the public and discuss what makes each side uncomfortable. In these situations, scientists must respond forthrightly to public concerns. In other words, there needs to be a conversation, not a lecture.Isn't that insightful? Here we are in 2015 and nobody ever thought of that before now! Can you imagine how much better off we'd be if scientists have only started speaking up 40 years ago, or even 10 years ago?
I agree with those scientists. We are part of the problem because we are not doing a very good job of educating students in the ways of science. The long term solution is to do a far better job of teaching about science. We should not be graduating students from university who reject evolution and climate change. We should not be giving out degrees to students who fall for pseudoscience gobbledegook like homeopathy and astrology. If we do that then we are not doing our job as educators and survey results like these are not going to change in the forseeable future.
- Only 16% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the general public rank U.S. STEM education for grades K-12 as above average or the best in the world. Fully 46% of AAAS scientists and 29% of the public rank K-12 STEM as “below average.”
- 75% of AAAS scientists say too little STEM education for grades K-12 is a major factor in the public’s limited knowledge about science. An overwhelming majority of scientists see the public’s limited scientific knowledge as a problem for science.
The public's perceptions of scientists' expertise and trustworthiness are very important, but they are not enough. Acceptance of scientific facts is not based solely on comprehension levels. It can be compromised whenever information confronts people's personal, religious, or political views, and whenever scientific facts provoke fear or make people feel that they have no control over a situation. The only recourse is to have genuine, respectful dialogues with people. Good venues are community clubs, science museums, science fairs, and religious institutions. Working with small groups is more effective than working with large groups.Perhaps he and some other scientists can sit down in small groups with Republican members of Congress and change their minds. Maybe you could do it in their churches. (Remember to be respectful when dialoguing with John Boehner.) Meanwhile, I believe that's not the "only hope." I think educating our young people is a better investment in time and effort even though it won't pay off for a generation.
1. I say "we" because the same problems exist in Canada.
2. Maybe Alan Leshner should have a little chat with Elizabeth Pennisi.
Don't expect a revolution overnight. We are in this for the long haul, recognizing that it can take time for the truth to slip past the checkpoints that the Darwin lobby sets up to keep the public uninformed. In the end, though, I'm optimistic because the fundamentals of ID -- the science underlying the inference to design in nature -- are sound. The truth will win out, though it may tarry in doing so. Or to put it another way, the tide of ID is already well on its way in. We need to focus on telling people about it.They'd better hurry. There's only three years left.
Tour signed Discovery's Scientific Dissent from Darwinism years ago when the National Center for Science Education asserted that only a handful of scientists doubt Darwin's theory. Our list of dissenters started at 100, then grew to 800. At that point we stopped inviting people to sign it because their names on the list were used by Darwinists to persecute them professionally. Some lost their jobs.Maybe we should consider the possibility that that a synthetic organic chemist is not an expert on biology? Naw, that would require the application of skepticism [How to use selective hyperskepticism to debate Darwinists].
However, Tour doesn't seem to have been hurt. Is that possibly because chemists are more open-minded than biologists? Or is the dirty little secret about Darwinism -- that it has more public advocates in science than private believers -- becoming more apparent?
Scholars have long acknowledged that scientific revolutions, along with their paradigm shifts, happen in human history. Yet rarely do we have an opportunity to witness such a shift first hand or to have such a clear and careful explanation of one. William Dembski's painstakingly detailed explication of the shift from the material age to the information age in science and philosophy is a brilliant and rare example. As both a philosopher and a mathematician, Dembski is metaphysically and methodologically able to delineate this shift, having previously written in both areas as well as developed a statistical method for inferring intelligent causation.I'd like to welcome Mary Poplin to the land of IDiots. I think she'll fit right in.
This book extends his earlier work and asks the most basic and challenging question confronting the 21st century, namely, if matter can no longer serve as the fundamental substance of reality, what can? While matter was the only allowable answer of the past century to the question of what is ultimately real (matter's origin, on its own terms, remaining a mystery), Dembski demonstrates there would be no matter without information, and certainly no life. He thus shows that information is more fundamental than matter and that intelligible effectual information is in fact the primal substance.
John G. West is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (DI), and Associate Director and Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs of its Center for Science and Culture (CSC), which serves as the main hub of the Intelligent design movement.The video was posted to YouTube on Aug. 14, 2014 and it is copyrighted by the Discovery Institute. I learned about the video from a post on Evolution News & Views (sic) [Coming to Grips with the Truth About Social Darwinism].
