Religions > Atheism > Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science"
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"david ford" |
| Date: |
09 Oct 2004 09:27:09 PM |
| Object: |
Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the
world - especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in
particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming
and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so
stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney
Spears. In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny
the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in
their own thought.
The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same
revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as
physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as
Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through
mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell
is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It's
a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands
of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of
communication and synthesis. The human body contains some 60 trillion
cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and
replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting
enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in
semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the
mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations
occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected
at the rate of a Google search couldn't beget the intricate interwoven
fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short
amount of time. Natural selection should be taught for its important
role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an
embarrassing cartoon of modern science.
What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right
questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous
theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design
theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is
hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the
concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including
science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired
all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx's
obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum
Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students
are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century
science; they're imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven
19th-century materialist myth.
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| User: "Dana Tweedy" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 08:28:11 AM |
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"david ford" <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote in message
news:dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com...
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer."
Snipping the rest:
Wow, a Creationist opposes evolution. What a surprise.
DJT
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 09:44:22 AM |
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On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 13:28:11 +0000 in episode
<eTaad.14067$gs1.3050@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net> we saw our hero
"Dana Tweedy" <reddfrogg@Nospam.com>:
"david ford" <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote in message
news:dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com...
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and is
a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek guru
of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why he is a
believer."
Snipping the rest:
Wow, a Creationist opposes evolution. What a surprise.
You gotta wonder what the creationist "take" on technology would be...
--
Mark K. Bilbo - a.a. #1423
EAC Department of Linguistic Subversion
Alt-atheism website at: http://www.alt-atheism.org
-----------------------------------------------------------
"Being surprised at the fact that the universe
is fine tuned for life is akin to a puddle being
surprised at how well it fits its hole"
-- Douglas Adams
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| User: "Chris Thompson" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 09:06:10 AM |
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(david ford) wrote in
news:dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the
world - especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in
particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming
Do you support this?
and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so
And this?
I would direct your attention to at least 25 years of articles in the
Journal of Wildlife Management, which attaind the nickname "Ducks, Deer,
and DDT" at my undergraduate institution. The role of DDT in eggshell
thinning was thoroughly established long ago. Oh, and the most
well-known case was ospreys, not Bald Eagles.
Are you so seriously desperate and stupid as to post this, thinking...I
cannot even imagine what you might be thinking.
stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney
You wouldn't classify this as a strawman argument, would you David? A
simple yes or no will suffice.
Spears. In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny
the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in
their own thought.
What a perfect demonstration of the domino effect. Start with a lie,
progress to a strawman, and finish with a non sequitur.
You are getting better at this.
Chris
--
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and
then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so
as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry
on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that
sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually
on a battlefield." --George Orwell, 1946, "Under Your Nose"
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| User: "Bobby D. Bryant" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 10:02:24 AM |
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On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 14:06:10 +0000, Chris Thompson wrote:
Are you so seriously desperate and stupid as to post this, thinking...I
cannot even imagine what you might be thinking.
Presumably he'll disavow having a point.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
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| User: "VoiceOfReason" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 09:52:30 AM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>...
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
Senior fellow in this context means senior propagandist.
Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the
world - especially in math and science.
His "solution" to education is to invoke pseudoscience and right-wing
politics. Hardly an effective solution. From the remaining article,
it's obvious he doesn't give a rat's ***** about education.
Our biology classes, in
particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming
and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so
stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney
Spears.
This is right-wing propaganda, not science.
In a self-refuting materialist superstition,
Lie.
teachers deny
the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in
their own thought.
The Darwinist materialist paradigm,
Try "scientific method." And of course we have to include
demonization of "That Evil Darwin(tm)"
however, is about to face the same
revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago.
Wishful thinking. I wonder if he's clueless enough to believe his own
speeches?
Just as
physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as
Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through
mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell
is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It's
a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands
of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of
communication and synthesis. The human body contains some 60 trillion
cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and
replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting
enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in
semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the
mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations
occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected
at the rate of a Google search couldn't beget the intricate interwoven
fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short
amount of time.
Cute analogy. Totally wrong, but cute.
Natural selection should be taught for its important
role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an
embarrassing cartoon of modern science.
Again with the demonization of "That Evil Darwin(tm)"
What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right
questions.
Any twit can ask questions. Science answers them. ID answers nothing
except a new underhanded way to illegally infuse creationism into
classrooms.
In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous
theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design
theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is
hierarchical and precedes its embodiment.
"Begins by recognizing" = a priori assumptions not based on
observation of evidence.
The concept precedes the
concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including
science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired
all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century,
And here comes more right-wing flag-waving:
from Marx's
obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum
Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students
are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century
science; they're imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven
19th-century materialist myth.
More accurately, they are learning the basics of science that were
determined long ago. This guy wouldn't know a scientific fact if it
danced in front of him.
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| User: "maff" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
13 Oct 2004 04:07:42 PM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>...
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
[...]
But he isn't even a Biologist, Christian fascist/ fundamentalist scum, David Ford.
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| User: "fencingsax" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 12:03:13 PM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>...
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the
world - especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in
particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming
and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so
stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney
Spears. In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny
the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in
their own thought.
The reason they are so behind, moron is because of people like you.
Other countries don't have religion in schools. They teach SCIENCE, a
science not watered down or changed by religion. Heck, even their
sex-ed is better because, for some strange reason, while they have no
official separation of church and state, they don't taint education
with blind faith.
(note: this is a generalization, but Godsdammit, this is just stupid.
I do realize that a myriad of factors are involved, but in this case
he doesn't deserve, anything all that complex)
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| User: "pz" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
09 Oct 2004 09:35:26 PM |
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In article
<dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>,
(david ford) wrote:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Gilder is a flaming idiot. Read the article wrapped around that
little quote from him; it's much more informative.
You're also behind the times. I criticized Gilder's nonsense weeks
ago:
<http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_sanctimonious_bombas
t_of_george_gilder/>
--
pz http://pharyngula.org/
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| User: "Richard Forrest" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 04:31:07 AM |
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pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-AFED19.21411709102004@individual.net>...
In article
<dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>,
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Gilder is a flaming idiot. Read the article wrapped around that
little quote from him; it's much more informative.
You're also behind the times. I criticized Gilder's nonsense weeks
ago:
<http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_sanctimonious_bombas
t_of_george_gilder/>
Ah! That explains David's interest in Gilder. David is an expert on
sanctimonious bombast.
RF
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 10:10:13 PM |
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(Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410100134.7a49063b@posting.google.com>...
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-AFED19.21411709102004@individual.net>...
In article <dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>, (david ford) wrote:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Gilder is a flaming idiot. Read the article wrapped around that
little quote from him; it's much more informative.
You're also behind the times. I criticized Gilder's nonsense weeks
ago:
<http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_sanctimonious_bombas
t_of_george_gilder/>
Ah! That explains David's interest in Gilder. David is an expert on
sanctimonious bombast.
3 illustrations, Dr Forrest?
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| User: "Richard Forrest" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
11 Oct 2004 04:48:00 AM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410101916.1d6de0c5@posting.google.com>...
richard@plesiosaur.com (Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410100134.7a49063b@posting.google.com>...
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-AFED19.21411709102004@individual.net>...
In article <dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>, (david ford) wrote:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Gilder is a flaming idiot. Read the article wrapped around that
little quote from him; it's much more informative.
You're also behind the times. I criticized Gilder's nonsense weeks
ago:
<http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_sanctimonious_bombas
t_of_george_gilder/>
Ah! That explains David's interest in Gilder. David is an expert on
sanctimonious bombast.
3 illustrations, Dr Forrest?
Virtually everything you post, David.
Just look at your responses on this thread alone.
Nothing but quotations which don't address the subject under
discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
RF
RF
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
12 Oct 2004 02:17:43 PM |
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(Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410110153.310edb32@posting.google.com>...
(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410101916.1d6de0c5@posting.google.com>...
(Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410100134.7a49063b@posting.google.com>...
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-AFED19.21411709102004@individual.net>...
In article <dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>, (david ford) wrote:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Gilder is a flaming idiot. Read the article wrapped around that
little quote from him; it's much more informative.
You're also behind the times. I criticized Gilder's nonsense weeks
ago:
<http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_sanctimonious_bombas
t_of_george_gilder/>
Ah! That explains David's interest in Gilder. David is an expert on
sanctimonious bombast.
3 illustrations, Dr Forrest?
Virtually everything you post, David.
Just look at your responses on this thread alone.
Nothing but quotations which don't address the subject under
discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
"'That is all very well,' you may say. 'It seems to be true that
natural selection can turn moths black in industrial areas, can
keep protective coloration up to the mark, can produce resistant
strains of bacteria and insect pests. But what about really
elaborate improvements? Can it transform a reptile's leg into a
bird's wing, or turn a monkey into a man? How can a blind and
automatic sifting process like selection, operating on a blind and
undirected process like mutation, produce organs like the eye or
the brain, with their almost incredible complexity and delicacy
of adjustment? How can chance produce elaborate design? In a
word, are you not asking us to believe too much?' The answer
is no: all this is not too much to believe, once one has grasped
the way the process operates. Professor R. A. Fisher once
summed the matter up in a pithy phrase-- 'Natural selection is a
mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of
improbability'."
from
Agree with J. Huxley's "no"?
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0405271915.6b9b6ce1%40posting.google.com
[Robert G.B. Reid, _Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished
Synthesis_ (1985), 2-3. Reid is/was with the Department of
Biology, University of Victoria, Canada. From the introduction,
the 2nd half of a paragraph.]"Also, while the period of history
occupied by Darwin's own life had been discussed a number of
times, the period of disaffection after his death and before the
resurgence of neo-Darwinism had been dealt with only
fragmentarily. It was a mystery to me how Darwinism could have
been submerged [from about 1900 to 1935] so totally and
yet come back so strongly [certainly by 1959 it had made a
big comeback]. Although neo-Darwinism could be experimentally
tested, and satisfied the need for quantification and reduction,
characters of a mature science that had been conspicuously absent
from biology, it was by no means clear that the basic premise of
natural selection had been scientifically justified in the
process, and the redefinition [by Dobzhansky in 1937] of
evolution as frequency changes in the distribution of alleles in
populations seemed to be an attempt to save selection theory at
the expense of the phenomenon it purported to explain. The
strength of polemic and level of invective [don't forget the
threats of violence against Wickramasinghe] employed by
evolutionists suggested a skeleton in the cupboard. Certain
views expressed in the Darwinian era had become conventional
wisdom. A remark to a colleague about Darwin's priority evoked a
verbatim quotation from T.H. Huxley. My colleague, believing
that he was giving his own considered opinion, had produced an
epistemological diamond that had survived generations of mental
digestion to emerge as bright as ever. The question that this
posed was not the value and longevity of Huxley's ideas, but how
much of our total 'knowledge' of evolutionary theory consisted of
received aphorisms."
historical background to rise and fall of the Synthetic Euphoria; 1936
A. Franklin Shull
http://www.google.com/groups?selm=b1c67abe.0403271329.1e569adf%40posting.google.com
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| User: "Richard Forrest" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 01:58:44 AM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410121123.230fd4@posting.google.com>...<snipped>
David, you can post the whole Encyclopedia Britanica if you want. But
it would be nothing but quotations which don't address the subject
under discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
RF
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| User: "Hiero5ant" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 09:39:43 AM |
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"Richard Forrest" <richard@plesiosaur.com> wrote in message
news:892cb437.0410132305.53a191fc@posting.google.com...
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message
news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410121123.230fd4@posting.google.com>...<snipped>
David, you can post the whole Encyclopedia Britanica if you want. But
it would be nothing but quotations which don't address the subject
under discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
I picture a man waking up every morning, finishing his coffee over the
newspaper, and heading down to the local library, where he picks a stack of
books and journals from the biology section literally at random. The next
several hours are spent cribbing passages that, taken out of context, appear
to show that evolution is untenable, then returning home to sprinkle them in
talk.origins threads like some manic creationist Johnny Appleseed, along
with a liberal dose of URLs that link either back to one of his previous
random quotemine posts, or to the results of random google searches for the
terms "evolution" and "IS NOT!!" Lather, rinse, repeat.
Judging from the sheer quantity of his posts, I have to imagine that he
spends several hours each week in those cathedrals of learning, to no other
purpose than to not learn anything, so he can post to t.o. and not make any
point. I'll freely concede that I spend more time on the internet in general
and in t.o. in particular than is probably good for me. But my own guilt
over the comparatively small amount of time I waste here means that I can't
be irritated by David's tactics. I can only be moved to pity. If Ford or
Nando or Glenn would commit to spending a fraction of the hours per week
they spend poring over real science to cut and paste random exerpts actually
*learning* about science -- heck, if they would just do this with the
responses to their own posts -- they could by this time have amassed several
credit hours of free education and a deeper respect for the natural world.
What really compounds this tragedy is that these people aren't isolated
kooks with perpetual motion machines and livejournal pages. There is a
concerted, highly-organized and well-financed political movement in which
they are unpaid conscripts, the stated aim of which is to make sure that
millions of schoolchildren are forced to divert their time with this kind of
antilearning. What a colossal fucking waste.
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| User: "Richard Forrest" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 02:03:38 PM |
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"Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote in message news:<_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>...
"Richard Forrest" <richard@plesiosaur.com> wrote in message
news:892cb437.0410132305.53a191fc@posting.google.com...
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message
news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410121123.230fd4@posting.google.com>...<snipped>
David, you can post the whole Encyclopedia Britanica if you want. But
it would be nothing but quotations which don't address the subject
under discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
I picture a man waking up every morning, finishing his coffee over the
newspaper, and heading down to the local library, where he picks a stack of
books and journals from the biology section literally at random. The next
several hours are spent cribbing passages that, taken out of context, appear
to show that evolution is untenable, then returning home to sprinkle them in
talk.origins threads like some manic creationist Johnny Appleseed, along
with a liberal dose of URLs that link either back to one of his previous
random quotemine posts, or to the results of random google searches for the
terms "evolution" and "IS NOT!!" Lather, rinse, repeat.
Judging from the sheer quantity of his posts, I have to imagine that he
spends several hours each week in those cathedrals of learning, to no other
purpose than to not learn anything, so he can post to t.o. and not make any
point. I'll freely concede that I spend more time on the internet in general
and in t.o. in particular than is probably good for me. But my own guilt
over the comparatively small amount of time I waste here means that I can't
be irritated by David's tactics. I can only be moved to pity. If Ford or
Nando or Glenn would commit to spending a fraction of the hours per week
they spend poring over real science to cut and paste random exerpts actually
*learning* about science -- heck, if they would just do this with the
responses to their own posts -- they could by this time have amassed several
credit hours of free education and a deeper respect for the natural world.
What really compounds this tragedy is that these people aren't isolated
kooks with perpetual motion machines and livejournal pages. There is a
concerted, highly-organized and well-financed political movement in which
they are unpaid conscripts, the stated aim of which is to make sure that
millions of schoolchildren are forced to divert their time with this kind of
antilearning. What a colossal fucking waste.
What I find particularly pathetic about David's approach is his
blunderbus approach to his use of quotations. He seems to post
anything which might be relevant to his argument without any
comprehension of meaning, and fails to understand the fact that many
of his quotations even as presented, let alone in their actual
context, undermine his point.
RF
.
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 09:37:56 PM |
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(Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410141109.4d2e2f43@posting.google.com>...
What I find particularly pathetic about David's approach is his
blunderbus approach to his use of quotations. He seems to post
anything which might be relevant to his argument without any
comprehension of meaning, and fails to understand the fact that many
of his quotations even as presented, let alone in their actual
context, undermine his point.
You forget that he has no point.
Benyus, Janine M. 1997. _Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature_
(NY: William Morrow and Company, Inc.), 308pp. A paragraph on 6:
When we stare this deeply into nature's eyes, it takes our breath
away, and in a good way, it bursts our bubble. We realize that
all our inventions have already appeared in nature in a more
elegant form and at a lot less cost to the planet. Our most
clever architectural struts and beams are already featured in
lily pads and bamboo stems. Our central heating and
air-conditioning are bested by the termite tower's steady 86
degrees F. Our most stealthy radar is hard of hearing compared
to the bat's multifrequency transmission. And our new "smart
materials" can't hold a candle to the dolphin's skin or the
butterfly's proboscis. Even the wheel, which we always took to
be a uniquely human creation, has been found in the tiny rotary
motor that propels the flagellum of the world's most ancient
bacteria.
The fact that many of intelligent humans' [Benyus]"inventions have
already appeared in nature in a more elegant form" doesn't make sense
except in the light of the belief that biology's 'inventions' came
into existence via non-intelligence-directed-at-every-level processes.
Table of Contents for Benyus's book
1 Echoing nature: why biomimicry now?
2 How will we feed ourselves? farming to fit the land: growing
food like a prairie
3 How will we harness energy? light into life: gathering energy
like a leaf
4 How will we make things? fitting form to function: weaving
fibers like a spider
5 How will we heal ourselves? experts in our midst: finding
cures like a chimp
6 How will we store what we learn? dances with molecules:
computing like a cell
7 How will we conduct business? closing the loops in commerce:
running a business like a redwood forest
8 Where will we go from here? may wonders never cease: toward a
biomimetic future
bio-inspired readings
index
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 09:43:31 PM |
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"Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote in message news:<_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>...
"Richard Forrest" <richard@plesiosaur.com> wrote in message news:892cb437.0410132305.53a191fc@posting.google.com...
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410121123.230fd4@posting.google.com>...
<snipped>
David, you can post the whole Encyclopedia Britanica if you want. But
it would be nothing but quotations which don't address the subject
under discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
I picture a man waking up every morning, finishing his coffee over the
newspaper, and heading down to the local library, where he picks a stack of
books and journals from the biology section literally at random. The next
several hours are spent cribbing passages that, taken out of context, appear
to show that evolution is untenable, then returning home to sprinkle them in
talk.origins threads like some manic creationist Johnny Appleseed, along
with a liberal dose of URLs that link either back to one of his previous
random quotemine posts, or to the results of random google searches for the
terms "evolution" and "IS NOT!!" Lather, rinse, repeat.
Judging from the sheer quantity of his posts, I have to imagine that he
spends several hours each week in those cathedrals of learning, to no other
purpose than to not learn anything, so he can post to t.o. and not make any
point. I'll freely concede that I spend more time on the internet in general
and in t.o. in particular than is probably good for me. But my own guilt
over the comparatively small amount of time I waste here means that I can't
be irritated by David's tactics. I can only be moved to pity. If Ford or
Nando or Glenn would commit to spending a fraction of the hours per week
they spend poring over real science to cut and paste random exerpts actually
*learning* about science -- heck, if they would just do this with the
responses to their own posts -- they could by this time have amassed several
credit hours of free education and a deeper respect for the natural world.
What really compounds this tragedy is that these people aren't isolated
kooks with perpetual motion machines and livejournal pages. There is a
concerted, highly-organized and well-financed political movement in which
they are unpaid conscripts, the stated aim of which is to make sure that
millions of schoolchildren are forced to divert their time with this kind of
antilearning. What a colossal fucking waste.
LOL.
.
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| User: "silly british kniggit" |
|
| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon ofmodern science" |
15 Oct 2004 08:32:01 PM |
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Hiero5ant wrote:
"Richard Forrest" <richard@plesiosaur.com> wrote in message
news:892cb437.0410132305.53a191fc@posting.google.com...
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message
news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410121123.230fd4@posting.google.com>...<snipped>
David, you can post the whole Encyclopedia Britanica if you want. But
it would be nothing but quotations which don't address the subject
under discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
...............
Maybe we should take up a collection and hire a "temp" from an
escort-service to get him laid. If nothing else, this might show him
that there are better things to do with his life than mining quotes...
.
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| User: "pz" |
|
| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 12:36:47 PM |
|
|
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>,
"Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
--
pz http://pharyngula.org/
.
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| User: "david ford" |
|
| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 09:48:30 PM |
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pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-E67861.12431414102004@individual.net>...
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>, "Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
[PZM]"intelligence" never did anything. Wholly-blind processes-- now
those can do "miracles."
.
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| User: "maff" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
15 Oct 2004 02:05:12 AM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410141855.2bd8148d@posting.google.com>...
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-E67861.12431414102004@individual.net>...
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>, "Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
[PZM]"intelligence" never did anything. Wholly-blind processes-- now
those can do "miracles."
So mindless Christian fascists/ fundamentalists did it, Christian
fascist/ fundamentalist scum, David Ford?
.
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| User: "AC" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
15 Oct 2004 10:36:14 AM |
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On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 02:48:30 +0000 (UTC),
david ford <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote:
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-E67861.12431414102004@individual.net>...
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>, "Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the image
of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it. But
the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than half a
century old, tells me that he actually looks them up himself. The sheer
volume of them, however, tells me how much time in any given week he must
put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
[PZM]"intelligence" never did anything. Wholly-blind processes-- now
those can do "miracles."
Resorting to strawmen now, David?
--
Aaron Clausen
mightymartianca@hotmail.com
"My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a
whitish fluid they force down helpless babies." - WC Fields
.
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
15 Oct 2004 07:25:57 PM |
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AC <mightymartianca@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<slrncmvrvs.2ge.mightymartianca@aaronclausen.alberni.net>...
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 david ford <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote:
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-E67861.12431414102004@individual.net>...
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>, "Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the
image of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it.
But the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than
half a century old, tells me that he actually looks them up
himself. The sheer volume of them, however, tells me how much time
in any given week he must put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
[PZM]"intelligence" never did anything. Wholly-blind processes-- now
those can do "miracles."
Resorting to strawmen now, David?
Not that I know of.
Monod, Jacques. 1971. _Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural
Philosophy of Modern Biology_, translated from the 1970 French edition
by Austryn Wainhouse. (NY: Vintage Books), 199pp. On 138, the first
two paragraphs of the chapter "The Frontiers":
WHEN ONE wonders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the
past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of
structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective
teleonomic performances of living beings, from bacteria to man,
one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all
this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery
presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare
winners from among numbers drawn at utter random.
While one's conviction may be restored by a detailed review of
the accumulated modern evidence that this conception alone is
compatible with the facts (notably with the molecular mechanisms
of replication, mutation, and translation), it affords no
synthetic, intuitive, and immediate grasp of the vast sweep of
evolution. The miracle stands "explained"; it does not strike us
as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, "What this
professor says is far more incredible than what we poor
Christians believe."
Gray, J. 1954. Book review _Nature_ 173: 227. Gray was a zoology
professor at Cambridge.[a] One paragraph, and the last third of the
succeeding paragraph (the bracketing is Gray's):
Darwinian orthodoxy demands implicit faith in the efficacy of
natural selection operating on chance mutations. Subscribe to this
and all doubts and hesitations disappear; question it and be
forever lost. The case for orthodoxy can seldom have been stated
with greater cogency and enthusiasm than by Dr. Julian Huxley in
"Evolution in Action". A few readers, perhaps rather pagan in
their outlook, may think it a little strange that, if the case is
quite so strong as they are asked to believe, it should still be
necessary to argue the merits of natural selection with almost
evangelistic vigour.
....No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the
inherent improbability of orthodox theory; but most biologists feel
it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to
think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a
sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler's skepticism: "...there must
have been a little cheating somewhere in these accidental
variations [mutations] before the eagle could have become so great
a winner". How far the heathen will be converted by Dr. Huxley is
difficult to say.
[a] Gertrude Himmelfarb, _Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution_ (NY:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959), 480pp., 419.
Butler lived from 1835-1902.
According to the Synthetic Euphoria, mutations in organisms' DNA
sequences is the raw material natural selection works with to proceed
with blindwatchmaking, yet mutations are routinely observed to result
in _cancer_ and genetic diseases, not the arrival of novel body
structures and organs having new functions. Could someone please tell
me how exactly the neo-Darwinian mechanism is compatible with the fact
that mutation routinely causes cancer and disease? Refs to the
literature would be great.
.
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| User: "Richard Forrest" |
|
| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
16 Oct 2004 02:03:00 AM |
|
|
(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410151632.58c19327@posting.google.com>...
AC <mightymartianca@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<slrncmvrvs.2ge.mightymartianca@aaronclausen.alberni.net>...
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 david ford < > wrote:
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-E67861.12431414102004@individual.net>...
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>, "Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the
image of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it.
But the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than
half a century old, tells me that he actually looks them up
himself. The sheer volume of them, however, tells me how much time
in any given week he must put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
[PZM]"intelligence" never did anything. Wholly-blind processes-- now
those can do "miracles."
Resorting to strawmen now, David?
Not that I know of.
Monod, Jacques. 1971. _Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural
Philosophy of Modern Biology_, translated from the 1970 French edition
by Austryn Wainhouse. (NY: Vintage Books), 199pp. On 138, the first
two paragraphs of the chapter "The Frontiers":
WHEN ONE wonders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the
past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of
structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective
teleonomic performances of living beings, from bacteria to man,
one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all
this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery
presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare
winners from among numbers drawn at utter random.
While one's conviction may be restored by a detailed review of
the accumulated modern evidence that this conception alone is
compatible with the facts (notably with the molecular mechanisms
of replication, mutation, and translation), it affords no
synthetic, intuitive, and immediate grasp of the vast sweep of
evolution. The miracle stands "explained"; it does not strike us
as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, "What this
professor says is far more incredible than what we poor
Christians believe."
Gray, J. 1954. Book review _Nature_ 173: 227. Gray was a zoology
professor at Cambridge.[a] One paragraph, and the last third of the
succeeding paragraph (the bracketing is Gray's):
Darwinian orthodoxy demands implicit faith in the efficacy of
natural selection operating on chance mutations. Subscribe to this
and all doubts and hesitations disappear; question it and be
forever lost. The case for orthodoxy can seldom have been stated
with greater cogency and enthusiasm than by Dr. Julian Huxley in
"Evolution in Action". A few readers, perhaps rather pagan in
their outlook, may think it a little strange that, if the case is
quite so strong as they are asked to believe, it should still be
necessary to argue the merits of natural selection with almost
evangelistic vigour.
....No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the
inherent improbability of orthodox theory; but most biologists feel
it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to
think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a
sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler's skepticism: "...there must
have been a little cheating somewhere in these accidental
variations [mutations] before the eagle could have become so great
a winner". How far the heathen will be converted by Dr. Huxley is
difficult to say.
[a] Gertrude Himmelfarb, _Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution_ (NY:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959), 480pp., 419.
Butler lived from 1835-1902.
According to the Synthetic Euphoria, mutations in organisms' DNA
sequences is the raw material natural selection works with to proceed
with blindwatchmaking, yet mutations are routinely observed to result
in _cancer_ and genetic diseases, not the arrival of novel body
structures and organs having new functions. Could someone please tell
me how exactly the neo-Darwinian mechanism is compatible with the fact
that mutation routinely causes cancer and disease? Refs to the
literature would be great.
Why bother? You never read any references anyway.
Why not start by reading the whale references I gave you some time
ago? The recent Nature paper should be easy to get hold of.
RF
.
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| User: "david ford" |
|
| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
16 Oct 2004 07:42:49 PM |
|
|
(Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410152309.bb3522f@posting.google.com>...
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410151632.58c19327@posting.google.com>...
AC <mightymartianca@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<slrncmvrvs.2ge.mightymartianca@aaronclausen.alberni.net>...
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 david ford <dford3@gl.umbc.edu> wrote:
pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-E67861.12431414102004@individual.net>...
In article <_hwbd.253$9f1.236@trndny05>, "Hiero5ant" <vze4knfn@verizon.com> wrote:
What I find especially depressing about Mr. Ford's posts is the
image of his life that they unintentionally reveal.
We've all seen quotemining before, enough to become inured to it.
But the obscurity and originality of his quotes, some of them more than
half a century old, tells me that he actually looks them up
himself. The sheer volume of them, however, tells me how much time
in any given week he must put into this practice.
That's the appealing virtue of creationism. Instead of intelligence
and knowledge, all you need is persistence. You can succeed in the
complete absence of the first two attributes.
[PZM]"intelligence" never did anything. Wholly-blind processes-- now
those can do "miracles."
Resorting to strawmen now, David?
Not that I know of.
Monod, Jacques. 1971. _Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural
Philosophy of Modern Biology_, translated from the 1970 French edition
by Austryn Wainhouse. (NY: Vintage Books), 199pp. On 138, the first
two paragraphs of the chapter "The Frontiers":
WHEN ONE wonders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the
past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of
structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective
teleonomic performances of living beings, from bacteria to man,
one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all
this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery
presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare
winners from among numbers drawn at utter random.
While one's conviction may be restored by a detailed review of
the accumulated modern evidence that this conception alone is
compatible with the facts (notably with the molecular mechanisms
of replication, mutation, and translation), it affords no
synthetic, intuitive, and immediate grasp of the vast sweep of
evolution. The miracle stands "explained"; it does not strike us
as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, "What this
professor says is far more incredible than what we poor
Christians believe."
Gray, J. 1954. Book review _Nature_ 173: 227. Gray was a zoology
professor at Cambridge.[a] One paragraph, and the last third of the
succeeding paragraph (the bracketing is Gray's):
Darwinian orthodoxy demands implicit faith in the efficacy of
natural selection operating on chance mutations. Subscribe to this
and all doubts and hesitations disappear; question it and be
forever lost. The case for orthodoxy can seldom have been stated
with greater cogency and enthusiasm than by Dr. Julian Huxley in
"Evolution in Action". A few readers, perhaps rather pagan in
their outlook, may think it a little strange that, if the case is
quite so strong as they are asked to believe, it should still be
necessary to argue the merits of natural selection with almost
evangelistic vigour.
....No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the
inherent improbability of orthodox theory; but most biologists feel
it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to
think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a
sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler's skepticism: "...there must
have been a little cheating somewhere in these accidental
variations [mutations] before the eagle could have become so great
a winner". How far the heathen will be converted by Dr. Huxley is
difficult to say.
[a] Gertrude Himmelfarb, _Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution_ (NY:
Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959), 480pp., 419.
Butler lived from 1835-1902.
According to the Synthetic Euphoria, mutations in organisms' DNA
sequences is the raw material natural selection works with to proceed
with blindwatchmaking, yet mutations are routinely observed to result
in _cancer_ and genetic diseases, not the arrival of novel body
structures and organs having new functions. Could someone please tell
me how exactly the neo-Darwinian mechanism is compatible with the fact
that mutation routinely causes cancer and disease? Refs to the
literature would be great.
Why bother?
Why indeed.
You never read any references anyway.
Agreed.
In the
subsection "THE THEORY" in the article "The Genetics of Adaptation: A
Reassessment," H. Allen Orr and Jerry A. Coyne, _The American
Naturalist_ 140:727, 729 (1992), opening the section:
"The primary theoretical argument for micromutationism, which is
often the only authority cited to support this view (e.g. Dobzhansky
1937, p. 26) is the brief discussion in the second chapter of
Fisher's _The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection_ (1958). Fisher
offered a mechanical analogy, arguing that adaption involves
'conformity of parts.'
break inserted. Each component of an adapted organism, like that of
a complex machine, must successfully interact with many other parts.
It is obvious, he argued, that any random change in a finely tuned
machine is likely to worsen its functioning, especially if the change
is large. A random change in a reasonably well-focused microscope,
for example, will almost always worsen the focus, but an extremely
small adjustment is far less likely to harm the focus and may even
improve it.
break inserted. Fisher formalized this argument with a geometrical
analogy. If the arrangement of parts conferring the highest fitness
is represented by the center of a sphere, the species' present
position can be represented by some point on the sphere's surface.
Any displacement inside the sphere improves adaptation while any
movement outside worsens it. Fisher shows that a trivially small
displacement in a random direction has a 50% chance of entering the
sphere and improving the adaptation while much larger displacements
have a negligibly small chance of entering the sphere.
end of paragraph; pg. 729: Additional theoretical support for the
importance of micromutations is provided by Lande (1983) . . . . In
summary, Lande's model is more realistic than Fisher's because it
allows major and minor genes to compete with each other during
adaptive evolution. It does, however contain features that may
unrealistically lower the probability of evolution by major
mutations. It is surprising that Fisher's and Lande's models provide
the main theoretical support for the polygenic view of adaption."
Can you believe that last sentence? Darwin used a substandard
analogy to make his case (minor changes, e.g., in color and size,
occur in a few years, therefore new eyes and limbs and organs can
develop naturalistically over many many years), and the Darwinian
creed is still making use of rotten analogies. I got a real kick out
of "Fisher formalized this argument with a geometrical analogy."
article's entire 5th paragraph: "Here we review this evidence. We
conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-
Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental
evidence supporting it are weak, and there is no doubt that mutations
of large effect are sometimes important in adaptation."-_American
Naturalist_ 140:726 (1992).
Nothing like ditching neo-Darwinism for a little out-and-out
saltation in Dame Nature to paper over the gaps in the fossil record
and to get around the problem of how new organs and limbs and
structures and eyes and body plans can arise through the gradual
accumulation of errors appearing in DNA. Just have new eyes and
limbs appearing in classic Goldschmidtism style. Problems solved.
Theory of evolution triumphant.
"We applaud the burgeoning emphasis on change in regulatory genes as
the stuff of morphological evolution . . . . We do not see how point
mutations in structural genes can lead, even by gradual accumulation,
to new morphological designs. Regulatory changes in the timing of
complex ontogenetic programs seem far more promising-- and
potentially rapid, in conforming with our punctuational
predilections."-S.J. Gould and N. Eldredge, "Punctuated equilibria:
the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered," _Paleobiology_ 3:138
(1977).
Why not start by reading the whale references I gave you some time
ago? The recent Nature paper should be easy to get hold of.
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| User: "Richard Forrest" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
17 Oct 2004 05:01:35 AM |
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(david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410161649.2a5b0229@posting.google.com>...<snipped>
According to the Synthetic Euphoria, mutations in organisms' DNA
sequences is the raw material natural selection works with to proceed
with blindwatchmaking, yet mutations are routinely observed to result
in _cancer_ and genetic diseases, not the arrival of novel body
structures and organs having new functions. Could someone please tell
me how exactly the neo-Darwinian mechanism is compatible with the fact
that mutation routinely causes cancer and disease? Refs to the
literature would be great.
So your logic is as follows:
Some mutations are observed to have damaging effects on the organism.
Therefore all mutations are damaging.
See the flaw?
<snipped>
<snipped quotations>
I'm surprised you refer to an short review article by Orr and Coyne.
Why not refer to their book 'Speciation' (Sinauer Associates 2004,
ISBN: 0878930892).
To quote from a review of the book "It gives special emphasis to
topics that are either controversial or the subject of active
research, including sympatric speciation, reinforcement, the role of
hybridization in speciation, the search for genes causing reproductive
isolation, and mounting evidence for the role of natural and sexual
selection in the origin of species."
(http://www.sinauer.com/detail.php?id=0914)
Why not get hold of a copy and read it?
Oh, and yes, speciation is more complex than simple natural selection.
My personal view is that saltation events do occur, though rarely, and
I am writing a paper on the evidence for such events in the fossil
marine reptile record.
Nothing like ditching neo-Darwinism for a little out-and-out
saltation in Dame Nature to paper over the gaps in the fossil record
and to get around the problem of how new organs and limbs and
structures and eyes and body plans can arise through the gradual
accumulation of errors appearing in DNA. Just have new eyes and
limbs appearing in classic Goldschmidtism style. Problems solved.
Theory of evolution triumphant.
So what is your alternative theory which explains the fossil record?
How can it be studied? It's easy! GodImeananintelligentdesigner did
it!
The problem with this 'theory' is that it can explain ANYTHING.
If pink and blue unicorns suddenly materialised in the middle of
Trafalgar Square and danced a quadrille - Easy:
GodImeananintelligentdesigner did it.
I'm very familiar with the fossil record, and have spent a lot of time
in the field collecting fossils. My observation would be that, given
the scarcity of fossils generally, and vertebrate fossils in
particular it's amazing just how good a record we have. The
interpretation of that record is hampered by the scarcity of people
who are actively studying the record. There are many specimens sitting
in museum stores gathering dust because there simply are not enough
qualified researchers able to work in them. I'm working on material
collected in the 19th century which has never been published and in
some cases never been catalogued!
The processes of fossilisation mean that fossils are rarely formed,
and when they are formed do so in a limited range of environments.
This means that the record is very unrepresentative of the range of
organisms which lived in the past. There is a huge over-representation
of shallow marine faunas, and huge under-represenation of terrestrial
faunas. Within the shallow marine faunas themselves there is an
over-representation of hostile environments - anoxic conditions in
particular - in which good preservation of fossils can occur. The
record is highly selective, and because of this the chance of finding
good evolutionary sequences is very low.
This satisfies my intellectual curiosity as a researcher into that
record. I'm quite happy to work on fossils with the knowledge that
there are huge gaps in the record, and see not theoretical problem in
explaining those gaps.
So what is your explanation for the patchy nature of the fossil
record, and what evidence can you produce to support your explanation?
"We applaud the burgeoning emphasis on change in regulatory genes as
the stuff of morphological evolution . . . . We do not see how point
mutations in structural genes can lead, even by gradual accumulation,
to new morphological designs. Regulatory changes in the timing of
complex ontogenetic programs seem far more promising-- and
potentially rapid, in conforming with our punctuational
predilections."-S.J. Gould and N. Eldredge, "Punctuated equilibria:
the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered," _Paleobiology_ 3:138
(1977).
And this illustrates what exactly? I know what Gould and Eldridge are
saying, and the paper I am writing on onotgeney and heterochrony in
the sauropterygia deals with the subject of regulatory mechanisms at
length. I don't think that you have any understanding of the subject
however.
Why not explain in your own words how Gould and Eldridge are posing
problems for evolutionary theory in this quotation.
Why not start by reading the whale references I gave you some time
ago? The recent Nature paper should be easy to get hold of.
So why not read the Nature paper and give us your penetrating
insights? Please note that a form of argument which goes as follows
does not hold much water:
[DF]Gould etc. wrote something which could be interpreted as argument
against the occurence of transitional forms in 1982.
[RF] Here are some papers published in the 1990's and 2000's which
demonstrate the occurence of forms which could be regarded as
tranistional
[DF]Someone else wrote something which could be interpreted as
argument against the occurence of transitional forms in 1945.
[RF] What about the papers published in the 1990's and 2000's which
demonstrate the occurence of forms which could be regarded as
tranistional
[DF]Someone else wrote something which could be interpreted as
argument against the occurence of transitional forms in 1895.
etc etc etc.
RF
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
14 Oct 2004 09:30:46 PM |
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(Richard Forrest) wrote in message news:<892cb437.0410132305.53a191fc@posting.google.com>...
dford3@gl.umbc.edu (david ford) wrote in message news:<dford3-b1c67abe.0410121123.230fd4@posting.google.com>...
<snipped>
David, you can post the whole Encyclopedia Britanica if you want. But
it would be nothing but quotations which don't address the subject
under discussion.
Tell me, do you do this out of ignorance, thinking that they support
your position, or from dishonesty in the hope that any creationist
lurkers (and Glenn, of course) are stupid enought to think that you
have made a valid point?
Benyus, Janine M. 1997. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
(NY: William Morrow and Company, Inc.), 308pp. Benyus is an
evolutionist. A paragraph on 219:
If the system proves practical, Birge believes holographic memory
could play an important role in robot vision, artificial
intelligence, optical correlators, and other areas starved for
complex pattern-processing capabilities. "This is an area where
we could completely blow away semiconductors," he says. "We're
going to be able to have the equivalent of twenty million
characters of associative memory on a single film. You simply
couldn't build a semiconductor associative memory with that many
connections." And yet, I think to myself, an associative memory
with many, many more connections has already been designed, and
it's balanced on the stalk of my neck at this very minute.
The human brain is an organ far more powerful and versatile than any
computer humans have ever made. The immensely complex human brain
doesn't make sense except in the light of the belief that it came into
existence via totally-non-intelligence-directed-at-every-level
processes.
Tomlin, E.W.F. 1977. "Fallacies of Evolutionary Theory" in _The
Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About
the Unknown_, Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith, eds. (NY: Pocket
Books), 443pp., 228-34. The author info reads, "Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. A full-time writer and editor who has combined
for many years a career in the public service with authorship of books
on philosophical and literary subjects. Former British Council
Representative and Cultural Attache in Turkey, Japan and France and
Professor of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Nice. Has
a strong interest in the philosophical implications of the Life
Sciences." On 231, the last half of a paragraph:
Granted, only man _behaves_ in the explicit sense; but since such
behaviour or conscious activity, guided by thematism, entails the
use of organic tools, these tools themselves must have been
developed according to some form of thematism. They cannot have
come into being by a series of mutations due to mechanical faults
of copying: and the same applies to the brain and the nervous
system. These organs are the means whereby higher evolution is
directed: to describe [I think he wants 'to ascribe'] their
development to the play of blind forces is to suspend rational
judgment and to betray the cause of science. It is legitimate to
go further and to call it, with Karl Stern, "crazy". Stern adds:
"I do not mean crazy in the sense of slangy invective but rather
in the technical meaning of psychotic. Indeed, such a view of
the history of the world has much in common with certain aspects
of schizophrenic thinking".
Stern, _The Flight from Woman_ (1966), 290.
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| User: "david ford" |
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| Title: Re: Gilder: "Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science" |
10 Oct 2004 09:42:56 PM |
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pz <pzmyers@pharyngula.org> wrote in message news:<pzmyers-AFED19.21411709102004@individual.net>...
In article <dford3-b1c67abe.0410091832.2168f840@posting.google.com>, (david ford) wrote:
Gilder, George. Gilder publishes the _Gilder Technology Report_ and
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Here "The technogeek
guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why
he is a believer." From
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution.html?pg=5
Gilder is a flaming idiot. Read the article wrapped around that
little quote from him;
I did.
it's much more informative.
You're also behind the times.
Nothing new there.
I criticized Gilder's nonsense weeks
ago:
<http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_sanctimonious_bombas
t_of_george_gilder/>
My reply:
PZM http://pharyngula.org
PZM 09/26/04
PZM Sunday, September 26, 2004
PZM The sanctimonious bombast of George Gilder
PZM
PZM Yesterday, I was reading a good article in the October 2004
PZM issue of Wired: "The crusade against evolution", by Evan
PZM Ratliff. It gives far more column space to the voices of the
PZM Discovery Institute than they deserve, but the article
PZM consistently comes to the right conclusions, that the
PZM Discovery Institute is "using scientific rhetoric to bypass
PZM scientific scrutiny." Along the way, the author catches
PZM Stephen Meyer red-handed in misrepresenting Carl Woese
PZM (by the clever journalistic strategem of calling Carl Woese),
PZM and shows how the DI's favorite slogans ("Teach the
PZM controversy" and "academic freedom") are rhetorical abuses
PZM of the spirit of the ideas behind them. It's darned good stuff.
PZM I should probably say more about the good article, but I'm
PZM still picking magma out of my ears after reading a one page
PZM insert in the article — a ghastly, ignorant broadside by
PZM George Gilder that prompted a personal eruption. I've
PZM calmed down now, so I can tear it apart more delicately than
PZM I might have yesterday.
PZM
PZM I'm still a bit peeved at the fool, so I'm going to remonstrate
PZM against him first—but maybe later I'll say more about the
PZM Ratliff article.
PZM
PZM "Biocosm
PZM The technogeek guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent
PZM design and explains why he is a believer."
PZM
PZM Here's the start of
PZM our problem. Gilder can actually be called a "technogeek
PZM guru", that is, somebody with some amount of credibility
PZM among people who like technology. He doesn't deserve it.
PZM He's a con artist. He's a glib slinger of five-dollar words, but
PZM he really doesn't understand the concepts beneath them.
PZM When I read his babbling version of biology below, it's clear
PZM that he has about the same depth of understanding of the field
PZM as your average sixth-grader—in other words, he can crib
PZM from the encyclopedia.
PZM
PZM "Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar
PZM in the world — especially in math and science. Our biology
PZM classes, in particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda
PZM about global warming and the impact of DDT on the
PZM eggshells of eagles while telling just-so stories about the
PZM random progression from primordial soup to Britney Spears.
PZM In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny the
PZM role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly
PZM in their own though | | |
