11.24.08
Muddle, darn muddle and statistics
Probability, Statistics, Evolution, and Intelligent Design
This essay at talk.reason is, to me, another sign of the destruction wrought by Darwinism, here, upon the minds of young geeks forced fed with Darwinian boilerplate to the point that they fail to grasp statistics, although they think they are experts.
Statistics is a treacherous, perhaps fragile, subject. It clearly can’t withstand the Darwin debate. I fear it has been sacrificed on the altar of Darwin orthodoxy. The work of Dembski, for which I hold no brief, and using advanced postgraduate level statistics, can’t be that bad, and it is simply not appropriate as a target of the irate and vulgar diatribes to which it has been subjected.
It is proof of the agenda of the Darwin defenders frantic that exploitation of such advanced math might seem convincing to amateurs (a tactic that seems to have succeeded to some degree in the Bible Belt). This frantic reaction shows that the average biologist has less knowledge of statistics than Dembski, and need a huddle followed by a team cheer to calm themselves down as this clever but ultimately futile tactic from the ID group.
Dembski’s argument, which he has restated without the spurious use of advanced math, simply refines the basic perception of design, no more, no less. It is not proof of anything, at best a plausibility argument, at worst a distraction due to semantic obscurity of the term ‘design’.
Nothing that Dembski has claimed is, in the final analysis, anything more than what Fred Hoyle claimed, without using the term ‘design’:
Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle on the theory.
The point is that Darwin’s natural selection is implausible. What more can be said?
For a horde of science adolescents to go apoplectic on this shows they have been trained as attack dogs, not scientists.
Scientists have twisted themselves into pretzels, as statistical idiots, trying to deny the obviousness of this classic statement by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. But it is the key to the challenge to natural selection, forget design arguments.