12.31.05
Posted in The Eonic Effect, History, Evolution at 7:46 am by nemo
Reply to a reader on the eonic model.
The Eonic Effect Theory suffers from a high density of
jargonism: “Punctuated equilibrium,” “non-random evolution…”
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite answer your complaint the first time, and reacted wrongly. The Eonic Effect Theory isn’t a theory, but a periodization construct that explodes most theories.
What you are really saying is that the eonic material is difficult! Not really, although it seems so at first. However world history is a big subject, the logistics of study can be a problem.
Forget the complications of the model and simply look at the facts, using periodization.
Actually, since it contradicts conventional thinking and generates hostility for making a mockery of Darwin, the material is constructed like a time capsule with indestructible thoroughness, and represents an effort to settle the Darwin question once and for all by showing that something they would claim doesn’t exist, isn’t possible, does in fact exist, and most embarrassing of all, in visible history: a non-random pattern. What is that? A strong distribution or clustering of creative advances in a complex sequence, which follows a strange but definite set of rules. To say this is non-random means simply that it is clustered, against the odds. Chance would have favored a steady stream of innovators in each generation, and each geographical region. But the pattern defies the odds, is not random. It is more than the steady probability of human talents, or cultural day to day evolvings.
Look at the Axial Age. In a matter of centuries, a massive social/cultural advance occurs in rapid fire coordinated movement in five independent regions, across Eurasia. With equal rapidity the effect wanes, and the system slowly peters out and settles into its history as usual mechanics. The mysterious eonic effect goes silent for a few millennia, leaving those in its wake to proceed as best they can. In the Axial Age we see the theatre of Dionysos, a great flowering of art and culture.
Then come the Romans, within six centuries the theatre of Dionysos turns into the Roman Colliseum.
Most of the advances are lost. Democracy appears briefly, then vanishes. Science takes off, then peters out. The empire builders arrive. Survival of the fittest rapidly produces the domination of the Roman thugs. Finally even that falls apart.
We see the dilemma of natural selection. Over the long term, gangsters would win out.
The term ‘punctuated equilibrium’ was only intended to put a handle on it, momentarily, and was used on the frontpage of the website, but not in the book. It certainly looks like punctuated equilibrium, in the dictionary sense of those words, but the term is pre-defined by biologists, so perhaps it was a mistake to use it. The Axial Age certainly looks like people got punctuated, after which there was a sort of return to equilibrium.
So this non-random pattern falsifies Darwin’s claims for random evolution, at least for human history/evolution. No point in saying this is history, rather than evolution. You can’t have a pattern like the eonic effect anywhere near the descent of man, and still be talking nonsense about natural selection.
Historical evolution shows a mysterious driver, a truly awesome scale of intermittent transformations, in an exact pattern, with eerie timing.
We are so conditioned to Darwin, they we don’t realize how far off he was. Really upside down, and off the mark. Just flat out, idiot wrong.
This list may not be the place for this, although the connection with Kant, which is designed to be ultra basic, just a crumb from the Kant table, might help to put the issues in perspective.
There is a noumenal aspect to the issues. We can see the Axial Age. But we never see the mechanism behind it. We can detect it, its scale is awesome, stupefying, but it never shows its hand. We only see its effects, and then only with careful periodization study over the long-range. Then we can catch a glimpse.
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12.30.05
Posted in Evolution at 11:01 pm by nemo
I just discovered and am reading a very interesting book on the gene myth: What Genes Can’t Do, Lenny Moss, MIT, 2003.
It is very hard to properly grasp the history of evolutionary biology, in part because of the complexity of developmental questions that lurk behind, and aren’t explained by, the reductionist account of the twentieth century genetics paradigm. Most biologists don’t seem to grasp the point, and the histories of the subject simply delete anything not part of the standard narrative.
I have long suspected this situation, since reading Lenoir’s book on the teleomechanists, along with Lovtrup’s book on Darwinism, et al. But it is hard to get a grip on such a vast and marginalized subject. This work actually gives some clues to how the confusion arose and persists.
More remarkably it traces the whole history of biology back to eighteenth century, with an excellent account of Kant and Blumenbach, and the insights of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
Very interesting and important material.
From the jacket:
The idea of the gene has been a central organizing theme in contemporary biology, and the Human Genome Project and biotechnological advances have put the gene in the media spotlight. In this book Lenny Moss reconstructs the history of the gene concept, placing it in the context of the perennial interplay between theories of preformationism and theories of epigenesist. He finds that there are not one, but two fundamental-and fundamentally different-senses of “the gene” in scientific use: one the heir to preformationism and the other the heir to epigenesis, “Gene-P,” the preformationist gene concept, serves as an instrumental predictor of phenotypic outcomes, whereas “Gene-D,” the gene of epigenesis, is a developmental resource that specifies possible amino acid sequences for proteins, Moss argues that the popular idea that genes constitute blueprints for organisms is the result of an unwarranted conflation of these independently valid sense of the gene, and he analyzes the rhetorical basis of this conflation,
In the heart of the book, Moss uses the Gene-D/Gene-P distinction to examine the real basis of biological order and of the pathological loss of order in cancer, He provides a detailed analysis of the “order-front-order?’ role of cell membranes and compartmentalization and considers dynamic approaches to biological order such as that of Stuart Kauffman. He reviews the history of cancer research with an emphasis on the oncogene and tumor suppressor gene models and shows how these gene-centered strategies point back to the significance of higher level, multi- cellular organization fields in the onset and progression of cancer. Finally, Moss draws on the findings of the Human Genome Project, biological modularity, and the growing interest in resynthesizing theories of evolution and development to look beyond the “century of the gene” toward a rebirth of biological understanding,
Selection:
Read the rest of this entry »
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12.29.05
Posted in Evolution at 11:58 pm by nemo
I have been reading Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape and find all the material on physics fascinating, and all the material on Darwinism mostly irrelevant. I can recommend reading this book, but don’t be taken in by the stuff on Darwin. It is all an afterthought. I was waiting for the punchline: some connection between the Lanscape concept and Darwinian evolution. But it never happens, save in a bald insertion of a dogmatic Darwinism, tacked onto his physics discussion. Nothing in the argument says anything whatever about evolutionary mechanisms. However, Susskind seems uncommonly fair on the Anthropic principle, and states his objections even as he shows how expectations of explaining it away have so far not succeeded. Why not the same openness on Darwinian natural selection?
I think that the resemblance pointed to, however, between the Landscape and the ‘potential space’ of evolving organismic forms is of value. But the same question lingers: the fact of evolution, and the mechanism. Anyway, disregarding the asides on Darwin, the material here gives some important updates on the rapidly shifting status of physical theories and the string theory pilgrimmage. But don’t let Susskind pull the wool over your eyes on Darwin. The real state of affairs is explained with admirable clarity by Susskind early on: physicists are in a Perils of Pauleen situation with the Anthropic issues, which is probably appropriate, since here is a case where the net equivalent of ID is tabled in actual physical theories, leaving the hope we may be able to get some real insights and maybe even some answers.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 9:34 pm by nemo
Horse’s mouth time at the Economist, always nice to get ideological tidbits from the source. Gads, Spencer worked here. It has a long survey on evolution with a short editorial, The story of man.
Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Modern Darwinism paints a more flattering portrait of humanity than traditionalists might suppose
IN THOSE parts of the planet that might once have been described as “Christendom”, this week marks the season of peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. A nice idea in a world more usually thought of as seasoned by the survival of the fittest. But goodwill and collaboration are as much part of the human condition as ill-will and competition. And that was a puzzle to 19th-century disciples of Charles Darwin, such as Herbert Spencer.
The ideology of Spencer/Darwin, as the two prime Social Darwinists (usually, as here, this is fobbed off on Spencer), the original ‘grubby Whigs’, is so transparent that an ideological twist is needed: the impossible requirement is to make selfishness the basis of explanation, and then save the paradigm by making this explain altruism. Tinkering with with population genetics, Hamilton produced this miracle of mathematical legerdemain. Matt Ridley, cited in the article, and a writer at one point for the economist, summarizes all this in his The Origins of Virtue. Calling people ‘grubby Whigs’ would seem egregious ad hominem but actually, as a technical term in the study ideology–well, bear with me. Nothing personal.
This post goes straight into my ‘Critique of Evolutionary Economy’ category.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in The Eonic Effect, Evolution at 12:46 am by nemo
New book by Dennett in February: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Sounds like more of the tiresome ‘god gene’ nonsense. The blurb below from Publisher Weekly says, Dennett explores religion as a cultural phenomenon governed by the processes of evolution and natural selection.
I am all for seeing religion in a natural context. But the hype about religion and natural selection just goes on and on, and on. Without getting into any spiritual claims whatever, it is nonetheless the case that RELIGION is not NOT due to natural selection.
Something much more complex is going on, as we can see from the Axial Age. This requires extracting the Axial Age concept from its current confusions.
See also, Evolution of Morality–At Close Range
From Publishers Weekly
In his characteristically provocative fashion, Dennett, author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, calls for a scientific, rational examination of religion that will lead us to understand what purpose religion serves in our culture. Much like E.O. Wilson (In Search of Nature), Robert Wright (The Moral Animal), and Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), Dennett explores religion as a cultural phenomenon governed by the processes of evolution and natural selection. Religion survives because it has some kind of beneficial role in human life, yet Dennett argues that it has also played a maleficent role. He elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to protect future generations from the ignorance so often fostered by religion hiding behind doctrinal smoke screens. Because Dennett offers a tentative proposal for exploring religion as a natural phenomenon, his book is sometimes plagued by generalizations that leave us wanting more (”Only when we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects of religion can we formulate defensible policies for how to respond to religions in the future”). Although much of the ground he covers has already been well trod, he clearly throws down a gauntlet to religion.
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12.28.05
Posted in History at 11:37 pm by nemo
Another review of Stark’s Victory of Reason.
Trying to annex the idea of progress to Christianity just doesn’t work. It is true that this religion tills the soil, so to speak, and carries an eschatological ancestor of the idea. To fully understand the complexity of the question is a long study. One good place to start is Norman Cohn’s Chaos, Cosmos, And The World To Come, an excellent study of the history of Zoroastrianism, with a clear recognition that primordial ideas of progress find a deep source in the legacy of the brilliant Zarathustra. But the overall picture is not easily told in soundbites, for there is, for example, Edelstein’s study of the gestation of the idea of progress among the ancient Greeks. One problem here is that there has been a postmodern attack on all ideas of progress, as, once again, a modern innovation becomes a conservative hand-me-down. Bury’s classic is a good place to start in the study of the idea as it was up to a generation ago among liberal thinkers. There are a dozen good studies of the idea of progress in that vein beside which this conservative trick or treat could not last long.
In any case, the eschatological predecessors of the idea of progress do not explain its modern transformation. What ever happened to Lowith’s critique? Conservatives used to ridicule the idea of progress as a degeneration of theistic historicism.
Let’s take back the idea from Stark: the modern idea of progress finds is real birth during the battle of the Ancients and Moderns, as the Moderns began to sense, for the first time in centuries, that society was beginning to surpass the heights of antiquity. Modernity had ‘progressed’, and the evidence was increasingly apparent to all.
So Stark’s claims are simply misleading, to say the least.
Read the rest of this entry »
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12.27.05
Posted in Evolution at 11:27 pm by nemo
In my email:
The New York Times, 25 Dec. 05, provides Jon Meacham’s critical review of
Rodney Stark’s controversial interpretation of the role of Christianity in
world history. It is accompanied by a link to the text of the first
chapter:
chapters/1225-1st-stark.html?pagewanted=1>.
You can find my short review at Amazon.com. Here’s a breathtaking piece of sophistry:
To fully appreciate the nature of theology, it is useful to explore why there are no theologians in the East. Consider Taoism. The Tao is conceived of as a supernatural essence, an underlying mystical force or principle governing life, but one that is impersonal, remote, lacking consciousness, and definitely not a being. It is the “eternal way,” the cosmic force that produces harmony and balance. According to Lao-tzu, the Tao is “always nonexistent” yet “always existent,” “unnamable” and the “name that can be named.” Both “soundless and formless,” it is “always without desires.” One might meditate forever on such an essence, but it offers little to reason about. The same applies to Buddhism and Confucianism. Although it is true that the popular versions of these faiths are polytheistic and involve an immense array of small gods (as is true of popular Taoism as well), the “pure” forms of these faiths, as pursued by the intellectual elite, are godless and postulate only a vague divine essence-Buddha specifically denied the existence of a conscious God. The East lacks theologians because those who might otherwise take up such an intellectual pursuit reject its first premise: the existence of a conscious, all-powerful God.
This would indeed leave a lot of Buddhists shaking their head in wonder.
Don’t say such nonsense, they will get so fidgety they will try to take over Washington.
Such statements on the Tao, while they may reflect the confusions of some who claim to be Taoists, totally miss the point, which strongly resembles something that resurfaces in a figure such as Kant.
The point is that people become entangled in words and concepts, those verbal idolatries, and can’t clear their consciousness. Such Taoist sentiments are almost commonplace in traditions of meditation, but never appear in Christianity.
Stark’s claim that the study of rational theology somehow seeded the Western victory of reason is so bizarre it is hard to figure who would think that way. Answer: closed minds in closed Southern Baptist Universities, egged on by rightwing thinktank money.
Why not go back to the source of ‘Western’ rationality, as with the Greeks, before the Christians completely wiseacred the whole thing.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:03 pm by nemo
The Chicago Law School Faculty Blog has a good analysis of the problems in the Dover ruling. In an essay full of interesting points, here’s this:
The court argues that ID does not follow the ground rules of science because it is not “testable” or “falsifiable.” Like most writers on the subject, the court invokes the image of science associated with Karl Popper – a view still endorsed by many scientists but rejected for good reason by most philosophers of science.
It is a strange paradox that modern science has impoverished philosophies of science, Popper being far less watered down than most, with cryptic roots in Kant via Schopenhauer disguised from public view. Because he still has some life left in him, he tends to be the ‘take me to you leader’ candidate, his falsification criterion somehow a allowing one to get a handle on scientific methodology, most failing to realize the curious aspects of this.
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Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 10:44 pm by nemo
Quote of the Day: From Robert Reid’s Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis, Cornell,1985, page 1.
One hundred and twenty seven years have now elapsed since Darwin and Wallace (1858) formulated the theory that evolution had occurred largely as a result of natural selection.2 Although one prominent Darwinist found the centenary of the theory an occasion for remarking that ‘a hundred years without Darwin is enough’, the hypothesis of Darwin and Wallace had become the most deeply entrenched of biological doctrines, and the confidence of Darwinists had been further stiffened by the revelations of molecular biology: admiration of the founder reached euphoric levels.3 My under- graduate career as a student of zoology began in that centennial year , and Darwinistic confidence and euphoria saw me through a number of zoological problems that did not quite seem to fit the Darwinist mould; but this was probably because of inadequate data requiring further research. Dissenters who claimed that Darwinism was not enough, or indeed quite wrong, were not to be taken seriously; vitalism, Lamarckism, mysticism and senility were recurring conditions in every generation of biology. On occasions when I was called upon to teach a fragment of evolution theory to first year biology students I thought my failure to understand selection theory fully was the result of the specialisation of the subject beyond my simple comprehension. Confident that every aspect of natural selection was for the best, I little knew that it had long been criticised for just that Panglossian felicity.
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Posted in Evolution at 10:16 pm by nemo
Dawkins and Dennett respond to Dover ruling.
This is from Dennett who still wasn’t satisfied with the judge’s ruling:
I have not read the scientific experts’ testimony, and I wonder if Judge Jones has slightly distorted what they said. If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there is one, it (He?) needn’t have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care of all that.
Dennett is completely obsessed with his ultra narrow view. I am not theistic/atheistic, and have to bemoan this idee fixe about natural selection and atheism. It has made Darwinism metaphysically suspect, and quite rightly driven those who see through these tactics to attack the theory systematically.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:06 pm by nemo
A review of Dennett’s Freedom Evolves discusses his effort to juggle freedom and determinism (in the context of natural selection). As such arguments go, it seems reasonable enough. The real question here is to claim that natural selection has evolved all this. What has it evolved? Noone has conclusively demonstrated a model of freedom, and yet in advance it is claimed that natural selection can explain all the variants.
The conventional arguments against both free will, on the one hand, and scientific materialism, on the other, rests on the belief that in a deterministic universe there is simply no room for freedom. If every state of the universe has been determined by a previous state then in what way could any act be said to be ‘free’? Is it not simply the inevitable outcome of a series of causal links that goes all the way back to the Big Bang?
Not so, says Dennett. Such a view confuses determinism and inevitability. Suppose I’m playing baseball and the pitcher chucks the ball directly at my face. I turn my head to avoid it. There was, therefore, nothing inevitable about the ball hitting my face. But, a sceptic might say, I turned my head not of my own free will but was caused to do so by factors byond my control. That is to misunderstand the nature of causation, Dennett retorts. What really caused me to turn my head was not a set of deterministic links cascading back to the beginnings of the universe - though that certainly exists - but my desire at that moment not to get hit by the baseball. At a different moment I might decide to take a hit in the face, if by doing so I help my team win the game.
This view resembles (distantly) the Schopenhauer option in the wake of the Kantian deliberations here. You can’t escape Kant by declaring yourself a materialist.
The spontaneous effort to invent ‘two levels’ or aspects to the issue of decision or interruption in relation to a causal series is simply another variant of Kant’s Third Antinomy.
Here the eonic model carries out explicitly the type of ‘two level’ partition these authors are groping for:
We have, not freedom, but optionality or ‘free action’, i.e. not necessarily ‘free will’, but interuption in a causal series. At the other level we have an historical system that acts through this field of behavior via ’self-consciousness’, which is the one concept that is compatible with determinism and freedom.
Self-consciousness.
So we have, roughly, a version of Dennett’s option that is non-Darwinian.
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12.24.05
Posted in Evolution at 12:57 am by nemo
The question of evolution is a kind of permanent crisis. And yet there is no mystery to the chronic debate. The crux of the conflict, and the reasons for it, were clearly outlined by the philosopher Kant. The Darwin debate is a specimen case. His basic insight was to point to the metaphysical character of the philosophies of divinity, soul, and free will. This works in both directions. Darwin’s theory by claiming to explicate the nature of man via natural selection crosses the tripwire on all three questions, thus to join the Christians permanently stuck in this bedlam.
Total amnesia, and rank scientific arrogance, surrounds this reality. It is evidence of an impoverished scientific education geared to producing technical specialists, and no more.
Bad enough for Darwinists to flounder in all this. But to make it a question of law in a court, is both dangerous and silly.
What is needed is a realization of the limits of science, and a little humility given the clear lesson of history here.
So the Dover ruling should be challenged at once. But, please, not by the ID group. Their confused efforts simply feed the Darwin illusion.
A true theory of evolution is hard to come by, and a little humility and a genuine commitment to science, yes, science, would keep Darwinists out of this endless round of arrogant presumption.
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Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 10:36 pm by nemo
Darwin’s theory is highly buffered now in our minds, and we hardly think directly about its meaning. Too often Darwin propaganda boobs trumpet the crocodile tears version about how we need to be brave and face the new reality Darwin revealed to us…. and other total baloney.
We seldom grasp anymore the massive harm done by Darwin’s incorrect thinking and bad theory. Here’s the disatrous way it affected Nietzsche (whose views on Darwin were complex, there have been a number of studies, most of them vitiated by the authors’ own Darwinian thinking).
…before Darwin’s simple but fundamental discovery it had been difficult to deny that the world seemed to be following some course laid down by a directing agency; after it, the necessity for such a directing agency disappeared, and what seemed to be order could be explained as random change. ‘The total nature of the world,’ Nietzsche wrote in Die frohliche Wissenschaft, ‘is. . . to all eternity chaos’ (FW 109), and this thought, basic to his philosophy, arose directly from his interpretation of Darwin.
From Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, 1999.
The problem with this perspective is the failure to realize the falseness of Darwin’s thinking on random evolution. Nietzsche was misled here. What a disaster! Think of the cascading misunderstandings resulting from this chain of confusions.
————–
On another issue, I was stunned to find at the end of the book cited the following bit on Nietzsche’s plagiarism of his Holderin essay. The author seems to think it doesn’t matter! It matters a lot.
Long after the present book was published, an American’ scholar demonstrated that most of Nietzsche’s essay on Holderlin was lifted word for word from a volume in a popular series of ‘modem classics’ (Moderne Klas iker: Deutsche Literaturgeschichte der neueren Zeit in Biographien, Kritiken und Proben, Cassel, 1853). This revelation inspired solemn and sensorious com- ment, and a quantity of schadenfreude was uncorked when it was observed how highly the essay had been commended by some famous commentators
who had been unaware it was a product of plagiarism. (It also emerged that the Moderne Klassiker text plagiarized by Nietzsche was itself in large part lifted without attribution from a biography of Holderlin by C. Schwab and a critical analysis of his work by Alexander Jung.) None of this is to my mind of great consequence: any youth can commit an act of folly, and an expert in any subject can be caught out if he has not been alerted. It is more interesting to reflect on what might have happened to Nietzsche if the deception had been detected, as it easily could have been. Would he have been expelled? And if so,
what would have happened to him then? Or was cribbing quite common at Pforta in Nietzsche’s day?
What else have most biographers left out?
Still another interesting bio of Nietzsche: Zarathustra’s Secret, Joachim Koehler, Yale, 2002, about Nietzsche’s probable but quite hidden secret homosexual existence (no problem in my mind, save the pre-Freudian secrecy), along with interesting evidence of Freud’s ‘borrowings’ from Nietzsche (!). Freud was always very defensive about this influence from Nietzsche (It should be pointed out that Schopenhauer ought to be included here, since the basic idea of the unconscious Nietzsche got from that philosopher, something Nietzsche did not disguise).
Longer selection from Hollingdale:
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Evolution at 9:38 am by nemo
John West in USA Today calls the Dover ruling a Pyrrhic victory.
It’s a phrase proponents of Darwin’s theory might do well to ponder as they crow over the decision by a federal judge in Pennsylvania “permanently enjoining” the Dover school district from mentioning the theory of intelligent design in science classes.
The ruling invites challenge even for those who don’t care for ID, which is confusing the issue. It is hard to predict the future here, since Darwinists are now as entrenched as ever, and once again have gotten away with the same old shennanigans. And many who have reservations about Darwin’s theory will be intimidated, especially in the academic world. To give legal status to a theory as weak as natural selection is so outrageous that one can only wonder how soon the case will be done over/appealed.
Efforts to mandate intelligent design are misguided, but efforts to shut down discussion of a scientific idea through harassment and judicial decrees hurt democratic pluralism. The more Darwinists resort to censorship and persecution, the clearer it will become that they are championing dogmatism, not science.
Looking carefully at the ruling is an unsettling experience. This decision borders on fraud in the way it finally attempts to micromanage the details of evolutionary theory. The judge gets down to cases on natural selection and rules at that level. That can’t be right. We all know this is more ‘expert’ baloney, given the deceptions of Darwinists in this vein. Thus the court has arguably been manipulated into a fraud.
Therefore, we need a correctly conducted trial in which the whole record is made clear: there is plenty of expert testimony possible on the limits of natural selection. Part of the problem is the way the claims of Behe became center stage. Hardly a single critic of Darwin over the past century was ever cited. There were dozens of opportunities to expose the limits of Darwinism, and all we got was what the judge rightly called the ‘contrived dualism’ of ID vs. natural selection.
It would be nice if such a trial simply dropped the ID issue and focussed on the issue of Darwin’s theory, without challenging ‘evolution’ as such, the fact of evolution.
The public deserves to know it is being manipulated by distortions and propaganda.
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12.22.05
Posted in In the News, Evolution at 5:18 pm by nemo
Due to various distractions, I was a bit delayed in a response to the Dover ruling, perhaps just as well: food for thought. This one will be around for a while. This deserves a webpage essay, but some early thoughts are ‘par for the blog’. Looking at a print out of the ruling I was surprised, despite the great interest, and surface plausability of the court’s judgment, by the way in which the ruling left itself open to some fatal counterattacks.
I had little sympathy with the attempt to invade class room, but have equal objections to the domination tactics of biologists here.
Darwinists are fortunate in their opponents. This case was so badly pursued by the IDM (intelligent design movement) as to be a softball pitch to its opponents. That disguises the vulnerability of Darwnists on a score of points. The court was handed an easy demonstration of the religious tactics, ‘concealed’ out in the open, behind the school policy, and thus it was easy to show the violation of the relevant precedents pertaining to the Establishment clause, etc.
But the question of science in the ruling leaves a hole a mile wide in the decision. Here is the intro to the main section on the science aspect.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in In the News, Evolution at 8:36 am by nemo
Welcome to post-ID challenges to Darwin. In a way, it is a relief to have the ruling over Dover challenge the ID steamroller. The ID gang has provoked their own defeat, but that doesn’t change the deeper issue.
The decision, which was much too strong, might clear the air for the Darwin debate. But the decision is, in a way, incoherent, inevitable in such a confused debate. The possible absurdity of the Dover ruling can be seen if consider a passage from the Introduction to Ridley’s well-known text Evolution. Note the use of the term ‘design’ in quotation marks.
Adaptation is another of evolutionary theory’s crucial concepts. Indeed, one of the main aims of modem evolutionary biology is to explain the forms of adaptation that we find in the living world. Adaptation refers to “design