Hi Cpxxx,
Originally posted by cpxxx
First off, Seagoon admits himself that he is a biblical creationist. Thus it is in his interest to cast doubt on Darwinian evolution. If ID does this so much the better. Later he and his faithful can see off ID and the field will be theirs.
A few points need to be made about this and a few other related misconceptions.
First off, Intelligent Design and Biblical Creationism are entirely different. And I am far from being a proponent of ID as it has developed in the scientific community. True, the Biblical Creationists and the ID proponents both share a belief that the theory of evolution does not and can not explain the "origin of species" but there most of the similarities between the two end. ID is a theory that can be held by anyone not absolutely convinced that a) there is no possibility of an architect (or architects) who could have created the universe or whose faith in Darwinian evolution is so unshakeably established that no evidence to the contrary will even be entertained. A believer in ID could be an 18th century deist, a monotheist, a polytheist, a platonist, or any one of thousands of other varieties of worldviews and religions. As such, while ID is conveniently caricatured (because it plays well in the media and the academy and amongst the intelligentsia) as ignorant "Christian Fundamentalism" in a sophisticated package, one doesn't need to even be a monotheist or even a Christian, much less a bible believing evangelical to believe it. For instance, how many billions of
non-evangelicals have walked the face of this planet who would subscribe to the statement "I believe the world was created" without being willing to say "I believe Jesus is the only Begotten Son of God."
Personally, I have no real interest in getting people to simply believe that life is the result of intelligent design, my interest is in the Designer and His message to His creation, which the ID proponents are not interested in and unless they find it imbedded in a DNA helix aren't going to discuss.
Secondly, and this is another major point of difference between ID and Biblical Creationism, both the ID proponents and the Neo-Darwinians are both looking at what they consider to be evidence and coming to different conclusions. For instance the fossil record doesn't "prove" Darwinianism, quite the opposite in fact. Darwinians always assumed they would find "transitional life forms" showing the development of one species into another. They haven't, and in fact, recent digs particularly in the Cambrian strata in China are showing that the classic Darwinian tree, which went from a single common ancestor to all life to increasing diversity is actually upside-down. There was a sudden "explosion" of life in the Cambrian period, and much less diversity afterwards, in other words, there are fewer and fewer lifeforms as one goes up the tree not more and more. The fossil record tells us that species became extinct, but it doesn't tell us new ones evolved from the existing ones. All the assumptions, taken on faith, by Darwinian scientists in the 19th century have failed to pan out in the fossil record, so a new paradigm is necessary if science isn't to become an irrelevant fossil itself.
Also the idea that ID is scientifically lazy, couldn't be further from the truth. Two scientists look at a fossil one says "evolved obviously - even though I can't tell from what" while the other says, "no, the evidence would indicate design but I don't know who designed it, how, what it did, and so on, but I intend to find out." Scientific inquiry, experiment, and all the other things related to the the scientific process are still required in both cases, what is different are only their presuppositions.
Now I haven't discussed biblical creationism in any depth, because the original article and the ID discussion are only at best peripherially related to it, and that only by caricature and straw-man argument of the
"all conservatives must be Nazis because none of them are communists" variety. If some one wants an explanation of biblical creationism and why it is dependent on facts of an entirely different nature - for instance, the Biblical Creationists don't start with Fossils, or Organisms, or DNA as both ID and Darwinian proponents do (but they don't start with naked fideism either) - I'd be willing to do that, but it really isn't related to ID and certainly not to the persecuted scientist whose plight started this discussion. As far as that is concerned, Sternberg himself is critical of biblical creationism.
Then there was the moth extant in the North of England. They were camoflaged to blend with tree bark. Mostly light coloured. The occasional dark mutation did not last long because birds could see it on a light coloured tree. Then the industrial revolution came and blackened the tree with soot. Guess which coloured moth survived?
If that does not of itself prove actual evolution. Then nothing will.
Welcome to "Legends of Neo-Darwinianism." Cpxxx, the study you've cited was done by a fellow by the name of H.B.D. Kettlewell in the 1950s and is still making its way into college and high-school text books. The conclusions (along with some questionable practices in the study such as pasting dead moths in locations they wouldn't normally frequent) have been analyzed and discussed at length. But what is never mentioned is that the moths were not an evidence of macro-evolution at all, just normal fluctuations in the peppered moth population. In years when the lighter moths were particularly subject to bird predation, the dark moths predominated naturally, but the interesting thing is that the moth population always returned to the "normal" DNA encoded standard. In other words, the darker strain became predominant for a while, but the standard strain never went away, and indeed the population always returned to normal balance. Also, you never had the moth turning into something other than a peppered moth or anything in the DNA helix that would allow for it. We don't even see the beginnings of such a change.
- SEAGOON
