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Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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DB Roy
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism (or Dissent from Darwinism) is a statement issued in 2001 by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle, Washington, U.S., best known for its promotion of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design. As part of the Discovery Institute"s Teach the Controversy campaign, the statement expresses skepticism about the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life, and encourages careful examination of the evidence for "Darwinism", a term intelligent design proponents use to refer to evolution.[1]

The statement was published in advertisements under an introduction which stated that its signatories dispute the assertion that Darwin's theory of evolution fully explains the complexity of living things, and dispute that "all known scientific evidence supports [Darwinian] evolution".[2][3] Further names of signatories have been added at intervals,[4][5] and as of the August 2008 update, it contains 761 names. The list continues to be used in Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns in an attempt to discredit evolution and bolster claims that intelligent design is scientifically valid by claiming that evolution lacks broad scientific support.[6][7]

The claims made in the document have been rejected by the scientific community.[8][9] Robert T. Pennock says that intelligent design proponents are "manufacturing dissent" in order to explain the absence of scientific debate of their claims: "The "scientific" claims of such neo-creationists as Johnson, Denton, and Behe rely, in part, on the notion that these issues [surrounding evolution] are the subject of suppressed debate among biologists. " ... "according to neo-creationists, the apparent absence of this discussion and the nearly universal rejection of neo-creationist claims must be due to the conspiracy among professional biologists instead of a lack of scientific merit."[10] The statement in the document is described as artfully phrased to represent a diverse range of opinions, set in a context which gives it a misleading spin to confuse the public.[11] The listed affiliations and areas of expertise of the signatories have also been criticized.[1][12]

In their 2010 book Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, science and religion scholar Denis Alexander and historian of science Ronald L. Numbers tied the fate of the Dissent to that of the wider intelligent design movement:

After more than a decade of effort the Discovery Institute proudly announced in 2007 that it had got some 700 doctoral-level scientists and engineers to sign "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." Though the number may strike some observers as rather large, it represented less than 0.023 percent of the world's scientists. On the scientific front of the much ballyhooed "Evolution Wars", the Darwinists were winning handily. The ideological struggle between (methodological) naturalism and supernaturalism continued largely in the fantasies of the faithful and the hyperbole of the press.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scienti ... _Darwinism

We should remember that Ronald L. Numbers was a former-creationist whose father of a Seventh Day Adventist preacher and is considered perhaps the foremost scholar on the history of creationism. I read "The Creationists" (a book praised by both evolutionists and anti-evolutionists) in 1992 and found it incredibly enlightening.
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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If "The Creationists" has never been discussed here, it should be.
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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Flann wrote:And yet even among biologists there are a large number skeptical of neo-Darwinism,which has been the prevailing scientific orthodoxy for a long time now.
What is a large number? One out of 500? Check the numbers Flann, it's not large. It's miniscule.
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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DB Roy wrote:After more than a decade of effort the Discovery Institute proudly announced in 2007 that it had got some 700 doctoral-level scientists and engineers to sign "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." Though the number may strike some observers as rather large, it represented less than 0.023 percent of the world's scientists. On the scientific front of the much ballyhooed "Evolution Wars", the Darwinists were winning handily. The ideological struggle between (methodological) naturalism and supernaturalism continued largely in the fantasies of the faithful and the hyperbole of the press.[13]

A lot of what I'm seeing here in recent posts is an attempt to undermine the scientific credibility of scientists some of whom advocate I.D. Scientists like Sternberg and Loennig are highly qualified and do understand their subjects. The dissent from Darwin roll also does have very highly qualified signatories.

http://www.reviewevolution.com/press/DarwinAd.pdf

Besides these there are the advocates of the extended synthesis who are evolutionists not specifically I.D. advocates, and they have their own dissatisfaction with neo-Darwinism.

And here's an article from Scientific American about smart non religious skeptics of Darwinism.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cro ... evolution/ This link is faulty. Google, Scientific american, dubitable Darwin

How do you think we got here D.B.?
Last edited by Flann 5 on Wed Jun 08, 2016 5:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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Flann wrote:A lot of what I'm seeing here in recent posts is an attempt to undermine the scientific credibility of scientists some of whom advocate I.D. Scientists like Sternberg and Loennig are highly qualified and do understand their subjects.
Read the article I posted regarding Loennig regarding peer review. It isn't we who undermine his credibility.
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Interbane wrote:Flann wrote:
A lot of what I'm seeing here in recent posts is an attempt to undermine the scientific credibility of scientists some of whom advocate I.D. Scientists like Sternberg and Loennig are highly qualified and do understand their subjects.




Read the article I posted regarding Loennig regarding peer review. It isn't we who undermine his credibility.
I read the articles Interbane. It was more of an ad hominem than anything else. Do you dispute the essential and documented fact that induced mutations in crops and plants over 50 years did in fact reveal this recurring pattern of limitations phenotypically and in the mutations themselves?

The article you linked stated that Loennig's article was cited four times, all by Loennig himself. I checked and there were thirteen scholarly citations from his article, with three by Loennig.

Scanlan talks about polyploidy which he doesn't even spell correctly. This is mainly found in plants. It is also found to a much lesser extent in animals and humans.

There are advantages and disadvantages with polyploidy. The higher you go to animals the more it tends towards deformities and lethal outcomes.

What is evident is that editors of scientific journals can have their own particular biases and hobby horse dogmas.

That was the real lesson of the whole dinosaur to birds debacle. We saw the same thing with the global warming' peer review' monopoly, which Bill Nye was so enthusiastically defending.

I'm not saying that peer review is not a valuable process, but it can be distorted towards particular slants of editors of at least some scientific journals at times.


I also checked Loennig's scientific qualifications which I could only find in German unfortunately. Suffice to say that he was a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute specializing in genetics and plant breeding.

The linked article which he co-authored has 110 scholarly citations for example.
http://forest.mtu.edu/faculty/joshi/pub ... gement.pdf


And here's Sternberg's C.V. http://www.richardsternberg.com/biography.php

The insinuation that they don't really understand their areas of expertise is patently false
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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Do you dispute the essential and documented fact that induced mutations in crops and plants over 50 years did in fact reveal this recurring pattern of limitations phenotypically and in the mutations themselves?
There's a reason I mentioned the peer review.

Did Loennig take the mutant offspring, replicate them into a parent body, and irradiate them to see if the variation applied to offspring as well? And if so, did he then take the offspring and repeat the process? Or did he simply study how far a single species could mutate within a single generation?

How close were the species to a node in the phylogenic tree? The diversity of life we see around us is often highly specialized, and unable to mutate "backwards" to previous forms. But if you take an organism near the node, the phenotypes are generic enough for vast variation. For example, a Tiktaalik or Protungulatum donnae.

Were the species he tested already tetraploidal, or were they haploid? Higher levels of polyploidism are known to be incredibly unstable. You can only fold paper so many times.

Polyploid speciation is the fastest type of speciation. We have a large number of examples of polyploidy speciation for that reason. But that doesn't mean we don't have examples of the other types of speciation.

Did you know that many organisms you see all around you are polyploidal? Meaning, polyploid speciation happened at some point back down the trunk of many organisms phylogenic tree. A large number of fish are polyploidal, and polyploidy is nearly ubiquitous in plants.

In what way do you see this type of speciation as invalid, seeing as it was the cause of much of the current diversity around us?
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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Interbane wrote:There's a reason I mentioned the peer review.

Did Loennig take the mutant offspring, replicate them into a parent body, and irradiate them to see if the variation applied to offspring as well? And if so, did he then take the offspring and repeat the process? Or did he simply study how far a single species could mutate within a single generation?
You ask a lot of questions about the whole crop and plants mutation project,Interbane. It's worth remembering that the entire project was predicated on neo- Darwinian premises.

It was a pretty much global commercial project over decades with vast amounts of money invested in it's success,
You can be sure they explored all known avenues to try to ensure commercial success. It failed dismally.

You write as if Loennig is somehow ignorant of polyploidy when he specialized in genetics and plant breeding. There is research going on into this subject and whether it produces anything worthwhile remains to be seen.

It seems that Scanlan brought up polyploidy to try to rescue a dire outcome for neo-Darwinism. If mutations are so ineffective can polyploidy rescue the situation?

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/10/do ... 90311.html
Interbane wrote:How close were the species to a node in the phylogenic tree? The diversity of life we see around us is often highly specialized, and unable to mutate "backwards" to previous forms. But if you take an organism near the node, the phenotypes are generic enough for vast variation. For example, a Tiktaalik or Protungulatum donnae.
Tiktaalik is over-hyped but I expect you won't thank a creationist for explaining why.

http://creation.com/gaining-ground-the- ... -tetrapods
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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Flann wrote:You ask a lot of questions about the whole crop and plants mutation project,Interbane. It's worth remembering that the entire project was predicated on neo- Darwinian premises.
Sure. So what?
It was a pretty much global commercial project over decades with vast amounts of money invested in it's success,
You can be sure they explored all known avenues to try to ensure commercial success. It failed dismally.
I can be sure they explored all known avenues? No, I can't. The only way I could be sure of that is with proper peer review. What I'm sure of is that the paper was written by an ID advocate. His motivation was not purely commercial.

Mutagenesis is successfully used for commercial ends all the time, moreso now with the anti GMO movement. If Loennig failed dismally on the commercial side, why don't the others?

http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/10/2817.full

"Exploiting natural or induced genetic diversity is a proven strategy in the improvement of all major food crops, and the use of mutagenesis to create novel variation is particularly valuable in those crops with restricted genetic variability. Historically the use of mutagenesis in breeding has involved forward genetic screens and the selection of individual mutants with improved traits and their incorporation into breeding programmes. Over the past 70 years, more than 2500 varieties derived from mutagenesis programmes have been released, as listed in the IAEA/FAO mutant variety database, including 534 rice lines, 205 wheat lines, and 71 maize lines (http://www-infocris.iaea.org/MVD/). Although this approach has clearly proved very successful, there are limitations imposed by, for example, the difficulty of identifying a small number of individuals with novel phenotypes within a large population, or by the genetic redundancy present in many plant species as a result of gene duplication and polyploidy, such that many mutations have no detectable effect on the plant."
You write as if Loennig is somehow ignorant of polyploidy when he specialized in genetics and plant breeding. There is research going on into this subject and whether it produces anything worthwhile remains to be seen.
What I wrote wasn't for Loennig, it was for you. There's no doubt he understands it far better than I. But that doesn't justify the assumption that his experiments took into account the problems with mutating higher level polyploids. Assumptions don't work. Thus peer review.
Tiktaalik is over-hyped but I expect you won't thank a creationist for explaining why.
I wasn't using the Tiktaalik as an example of a transitional species, which is what that article argues against. I mentioned the Tiktaalik as an example of a creature near a node in the phylogenic tree. The available variation is huge. Compare this to a periodic cicada, whose phenotypic portfolio(including odd lifecycle behavior) ensure it can go almost nowhere but where it's already at. Or, extinct.
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Re: Useful scientific resources to silence fools

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I found this website amusing:

http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/origin_ ... ts_02.html

It's an attack on endosymbiosis developed by Lynn Margulis. It's not a bad attack, I suppose, but the author attacks it as though any an all evolutionists believe it when, in fact, few do. The website is "Darwinism Refuted" and I wonder if the author understands that endosymbiosis is not Darwinist or neo-Darwinist, that Margulis was a staunch opponent of neo-Darwinism. The site gives a decent synopsis of Margulis's work:

This hypothesis was put forward by Lynn Margulis in 1970 in her book The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells. In this book, Margulis claimed that as a result of their communal and parasitic lives, bacterial cells turned into plant and animal cells. According to this theory, plant cells emerged when a photosynthetic bacterium was swallowed by another bacterial cell. The photosynthetic bacterium evolved inside the parent cell into a chloroplast. Lastly, organelles with highly complex structures such as the nucleus, the Golgi apparatus, the endoplasmic reticulum, and ribosomes evolved, in some way or other. Thus, the plant cell was born.

As we have seen, this thesis of the evolutionists is nothing but a work of fantasy.


The author gives several rebuttals to endosymbiosis. The first two are:

1- If chloroplasts, in particular, were once independent cells, then there could only have been one outcome if one were swallowed by a larger cell: namely, it would have been digested by the parent cell and used as food. This must be so, because even if we assume that the parent cell in question took such a cell into itself from the outside by mistake, instead of intentionally ingesting it as food, nevertheless, the digestive enzymes in the parent cell would have destroyed it. Of course, some evolutionists have gotten around this obstacle by saying, "The digestive enzymes had disappeared." But this is a clear contradiction, because if the cell's digestive enzymes had disappeared, then the cell would have died from lack of nutrition.

2- Again, let us assume that all the impossible happened and that the cell which is claimed to have been the ancestor of the chloroplast was swallowed by the parent cell. In this case we are faced with another problem: The blueprints of all the organelles inside the cell are encoded in the DNA. If the parent cell were going to use other cells it swallowed as organelles, then it would be necessary for all of the information about them to be already present and encoded in its DNA. The DNA of the swallowed cells would have to possess information belonging to the parent cell. Not only is such a situation impossible, the two complements of DNA belonging to the parent cell and the swallowed cell would also have to become compatible with each other afterwards, which is also clearly impossible.


#1 is a defense of "survival of the fittest" which is the very hallmark of Darwinist thinking. # 2 at least implies a n agreement with the basic tenets of Darwinism:

(1) Individuals within populations are variable.
(2) Variation is heritable.
(3) Organisms differ in their ability to survive and reproduce.
(4) Survival & reproduction are non-random.

We can shorten those 4 tenets into a single statement that evolution is essentially a variation in gene frequency.

In other words, cells can't suck traits from another cell but rather must already have those traits. How does it get those traits? It inherited them and the author admits as much by saying "it would be necessary for all of the information about them to be already present and encoded in its DNA". Now I am not interested in whether this refutation is right, only that the author resorted to Darwinism to refute it. Strange for an anti-Darwin website to rely on Darwinism but the truth is, Darwinism is so basic that to reject it causes tremendous amounts of logical and philosophical acrobatics to get around it. But what they really end up doing is disguising the Darwinism.

An analogy is that using Darwinism to explain how lifeforms adapt is like using the concept of friction to explain fire. If you deny that friction is necessary, you either have to disguise how the friction takes place or come up with absurd explanations relying on largely ad hoc arguments while the friction argument is universal. You might say that a a house fire was not caused by friction. You would be wrong. Suppose it was a lit cigarette, how was it lit? By a match or a lighter which require friction. What if he lit it using his gas stove? Same thing. I have one so I just blow on the jets and they flame up. The collision of air molecules with the gas is enough to ignite it (causes the energy stored in the chemical bonds to be released) and that's friction. Suppose it was an electrical fire. Still friction. The insulation breaks down with age and the electrons moving through the conductor creates heat (friction) and which leaks through the breaks in the insulation which causes the fire. What if the furnace caused the fire? Same thing. The pilot light was lit with a match or lighter or, in modern furnaces, the pilot is now piezoelectric which is creating electricity through pressure (which creates friction). What about acid and chlorine together and they ignite? That's friction! The two chemicals were MIXED and that mixing creates friction. Well, Darwinism is as fundamental to understanding life as friction is to fire. Remove it and you either have to sneak it back in or you have to rely on magic--and good luck with that.

The author's own statement is a refutation of ID because, as Dawkins said, in order for God to create DNA, he had to be as complex as the DNA and if this complexity cannot be the result of a natural process then God's complexity was designed but that designer also had to have a designer, etc etc etc.
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