Intelligent Design prof requires student to troll on 'hostile' websites.

The BBQ Pit
101

I only do that when there are more than a few nibbles of information in the sections.

punc eq is about the rate of speciation, not about how it works. Since speciation happens whenever two subpopulations are no longer able to breed, and is a gradual process (see ring species) there are many ways this can happen. Speciation can happen through size, through change in mating periods, or more gradual genetic drift through isolation of subpopulations. I know there is some controversy over if environmental stresses affect the rate of change of the genome, but none of this has much to do with the top level understanding of speciation. We’re talking evolution vs ID, not the details of various mechanisms

Missing links? How 19th century. You are aware that every “missing link” we find will produce two others?
As for examples of speciation, talk.origins has a bunch, and I remember that the population of rats used for biology experiments speciated - the ones kept on the West Coast drifting from the population on the East. What would you consider clear evidence of speciation?

The predictions I’m referring to are obviously not what a species will involve into, which is not something evolution is expected to predict. It is rather what we expect to find in the fossil record and in our genome, once we were able to decode it. For the best example, Darwin got the mechanisms of heredity totally wrong, but what we actually found matched the needs of evolution far better than what he guessed.
ID does predict one thing - there should be at least one structure that cannot evolve naturally. While we can’t prove there are no such structures, the probability of ID being correct goes down as we understand more and more structures, and find that none has this characteristic.

You appear not to understand the difference between writing fiction and offering scientific ideas. Sagan, whose plot revolved around these very advanced aliens, was showing their power. Perhaps it is no coincidence that he didn’t have the muddling in our genome, because it might excite the ID idiots. ST:TNG had a show where a message was found in our DNA. That wasn’t a scientific hypothesis, just so you know. There are plenty of scientists who know full well ftl travel is impossible but who put it in a story for the sake of the plot. In any case, I was unaware that ID these days included the intelligent design of natural constants.

I know plenty of scientists, and I’ve published plenty of papers and even have been on the editorial boards of a few journals, and if I were comparing him and you as examples of clear scientific though, I’d pick him every time. You’ve made so many obvious errors that my confidence in your grasp of this subject is not very high.

102

I see - that the term species, which is a human attempt to describe something that is a lot more fuzzy in nature - is arguable means that speciation is not proven? The term comes from before evolution was discovered or understood, so it is naturally imprecise. You need to go read Hayakawa or Korzybski about how the tag isn’t the same as the thing.

And philosophers can invent all kinds of ideas to illustrate a point. That doesn’t mean the ideas are true.

103

This. The “peers” doing the reviewing are picked by the journal, so a journal that wants the legitimacy of “peer review” but also wants to support ID picks reviewers who support ID. Respectable journals try to pick experts in the field who are acknowledged as such by the community at large (my cite: I have a PhD in biology, and have several bona-fide peer-reviewed papers to my name.)

As to “macroevolution”, the term is indeed used in legitimate scientific discourse, but relatively rarely: PubMed gives 179 hits for “macroevolution” and 341 for “microevolution” (and some of these are discussing ID), versus 248,024 for just “evolution”.

104

Again, you are displaying shocking amounts of ignorance and failure to think.

In the book, messages were found in numbers such as Pi. Numbers that reflect the very foundations of the universe. The aliens were attempting to find and decipher these messages – messages that could only have occurred through an intelligence influencing the fundamental physical laws of the universe, and it was strongly implied that this had happened at the time of the big bang. They were not “displaying their power” or any such nonsense. That is exactly an intelligent design scenario, and one that is not religious. Nozick’s experience machine was fictional; does that make it a worthless concept?

Your claims of having published “lots of papers” and “knowing science people” aside, you are still ignoring the essential fact that your hero of science, Mr. Carl Sagan, investigated the idea of ID in a creative, thoughtful, and logical manner. Of course, he was smart, and you… aren’t.

Oh, and we are (or at least I am) not discussing ID vs Evolution, like it’s some sort of three card fight nite. The two ideas are neither mutually exclusive nor even related. Try this: Being creates universe. Being sets up universe in such a way that natural selection (or Lamarckian selection, or whatever you want) causes evolution of life to occur. Evolution occurs. This is an intelligent design theory. Evolution is a fact in this scenario. QED, ID is not the opposite of evolution, except to morons who can’t separate christian fundie blather from serious thought.

105

I agree that ID does not have to be religious - though it is in the Dembski/Discovery variant. But I disagree that ID needs to be extra-natural in any sense. In Behe’s version, the design could be god or it could be aliens. It could be easily done through manipulation of DNA which we can do already. Like I said, we have intelligently designed a lot of stuff - why do you think the non-religious version involves something extra-natural? It doesn’t even have to involve the creation of life.

As for the Dembski version, if you define god as supernatural then it is supernatural, if you don’t it isn’t. We’ve had this discussion many times already.

106

It’s hard to imagine legitimate research on ID because it’s hard to formulate an ID research question. Hence it’s hard to imagine accomplished scientists who have done research on ID and are ID specialists. It’s like establishing a peer reviewed geology journal by young earth creationists. I mean, it’s EXACTLY like that.

107

No, not really. He’s just opposed to epistemology and the scientific method and abusing reason and logic in order to argue that “materialism” is bad and that woo is good. He’s done this before. And yes, macroevolution is as ‘proven’ as anything else in gravity.
As Sagan pointed out, evolution (micro and macro) is a fact, not a theory. What evolutionary biology creates theories to do is to explain the mechanisms of evolution but evolution, just like gravity, is a 100% pure fact.

In fact, arguing that ID is equally valid to actual science because evolution isn’t “proven” since macroevolution isn’t but microevolution is (:rolleyes:) is just standard Creationist deception. It’s like arguing that pixies cause things to fall to the ground since we don’t know whether quantum gravity is an accurate hypothesis or not.

Well, no, it isn’t. Because much like Creationists aim at destroying the scientific method and “materialism”, so too does ivn ,and he’s using their exact same patterns of dishonesty and deception, misleading arguments and linguistic sleight of hand to attack actual science.

Fair enough: religious, spiritual, magic, whatever. The point is that it is fundamentally anti-scientific when it masquerades as a scientific theory. If it’s a matter of faith then there is no problem at all, but when it attempts to supplant actual scientific endeavor there’s a problem. That is, as long as we’re talking about the type of entity that ivn made up, that is totally “unverifiable either way”.

Yes, but it’s a religious/spiritual/whatever question, and not a scientific one. People are free to have faith in whatever they want that’s ‘beyond’ Universe, but attempting to slip that into science is fundamentally dishonest.

Well, if it’s real, then it’s testable, verifiable, falsifiable, etc… It has to have actual, physical means that it uses to work its will on Universe. “It magiced up some stuff” is not a scientific theory. If there is some sort of Designer, either it effects Universe via measurable, actual ways… or its effect is totally untestable, undetectable and unverifiable. In other words, it is exactly the same as something that doesn’t exactly exist.

Yep, but at the point where speciation occurred with one species being able to exist on one type of food and another on another, we’d be talking about cladogenesis.

Meanwhile, Ivn, you are truly relentlessly, violently stupid, aintcha?
And as predicted, you’ve now engaged in the opening stages of the Gish Gallup.
And you’re actually stupid enough that you just quoted a cite that showed that there was evidence for speciation as a ‘dishonest’ claim that there was evidence for speciation.

Since you’re engaging in the Gish Gallop, I’ll unfortunately have to point out how you’re lying on numerous sub-points that are nested into larger points that you’re also lying about.

The quote you cited, out of context? Did not in fact refer to some claim that speciation is not a universal concept with clear proof. Rather, that the Biological Species Concept breaks down wrt certain species like asexual organisms. Yet again you demonstrate that you can quote something and totally lack even a fundamental understanding of what it’s actually saying.
In fact, except you’re either too stupid or too dishonest to relate accurately, the fact is pointed out that the BSC does apply quite validly in some cases and it’s only its universal applicability that’s in question, and in those cases where it properly applies, “it provides a reasonably unambiguous test that can be applied to possible speciation events.”

As I might have guessed, yet again rather than engaging in the actual substance of a cite you just demonstrate you’re an intellectual poseur who doesn’t understand what’s actually going on, can’t engage with actual facts, and resorts to slinging idiotic dishonesty when caught at being a fucking yapping moron. Rather than showing how any of the provided examples of speciation aren’t, in fact, observed examples of speciation you engage in this Gish Gallop of trying to pile distortion upon distortion. Go figure.

Seriously, eat your computer you stupid little shit, and go to some other website that isn’t dedicated to stomping out the virulent, willful ignorance that you trade in. Just go away already.

108

I’ve program chaired several conferences, and edited several special issues of journals, so I have more of an insider view than you. The journal doesn’t pick the reviewers, the editor does. There is a conference which more or less randomly assigns reviewers to papers based on profiles - which is why I get wildly inappropriate papers from this conference.
While it is nice to pick the top guys as reviewers, everyone else wants to do the same thing, so your requests get rejected or the top guy doesn’t do the review or gives a two word review. (“Very good” - not too helpful.) There are some reviewers who give everything 9s and some who give everything 2s. A conference I’m involved with gives the reviewers’ average scores on the review summary sheet so you can tell how this paper relates to the norm. So, you try to pick a variety of people who know about the topic, will actually deliver the review, and who will provide some significant comments on the paper. You build up a collection of good reviewers over time, who you do reviews for also. I hope you volunteer to do reviews - it is one way we pay back our field. BTW, often grad students, though they may not have a good historical background in an area, read a paper more carefully than professors, since reviewing is new and exciting to them.

Trust me, I’ve read thousands of reviews. The ones which directly contradict each other are the most fun.

109

The difference here is really that you are using the ID proponents’ definition of “intelligent design,” that it’s some kind of scientific theory, and the rest of us (I think almost all of it) are looking at the historical and cultural associations of the term–it was created by Creationists to sneak religious dogma into school text books, there is basically no serious school of ID in the sciences, the practitioners and adherents are theologians and ministers, etc.

110

FinnAgain, let me point out one thing to you. I know I shouldn’t respond to trolls, but you need to have it driven home.

Where did I ever espouse a belief in “demolishing materialism”? Where did I claim ID (or, since you don’t understand the difference, creationism) was science? Are emotions or ethics “testable”? Are they not “real”? Are those things not “useful”?

You are assigning me a whole set of beliefs that I do not hold, because you are incapable of distinguishing between what you think I am saying and what I am actually saying.

You are, furthermore, a terrible debater whose only tactics are to call people stupid or crazy, and insist that you are right, and then engage in the crass hypocrisy of calling them liars as you concurrently argue irrelevant side issue and ignore the big stuff. You might impress on campus at your community college or tablegamer session, but when it comes down to it, you are nothing more than a yapping dog that thinks if it barks loud enough and long enough, it will be the alpha.

You use “talking points” as some sort of proof that someone is wrong, yet you bust out the “Gish Gallop” and other talking points of your own, and assign me strawman ideals that you think you can knock down.

I’m not going to respond to your continuing frenzy of tl;dr google dumps and unimaginative insults; like Twain said, you shouldn’t teach pigs to read. You may, if you wish, declare yourself the victor. I will continue to disregard you as the lightweight zealot that you are.

But the fact remains that you are as much a liar and a fool as those you try to take down, except that, like the teabaggers or birthers or dittoheads, you lack even the grace to acknowledge that you are a hypocrite of the finest water, and that all you can do is parrot your own set of talking points.

111

Objective observer here, Ivan. It’s you, not him.

112

I think if he read Science and Sanity his head would asplode.

Yes, but the point is that an hypothesis about how life on Earth came about is not, in fact, a theory of biological evolution. If ID just posits that aliens designed earthlings then that’s essentially no different from the Scientologist claim that we were shipped over in airplanes and dumped into volcanoes, or what have you.

To the extend that ID posits a Designer behind the process of biological evolution itself, it’s necessarily extra-natural. After all, “aliens designed us” does not address what biological processes lead to the evolution of the aliens, which any true evolutionary theory must at least suggest to do. Otherwise it’s turtles all the way down.

No, poseur, for fuck’s sake when you demonstrate this shocking level of ignorance you really should stop this embarrassing routine of your pretentious claims to basic competency. You don’t even know the difference between a untestable pseudo-hypothesis and an actual theory.

And go figure, in order to make your claim you need to totally ignore the actual ID that we’re discussing. Ya know, in this thread?
IDiot.

113

I’ll admit I haven’t gotten around to reading the book, only saw the movie, which did not have that part. No matter - fiction includes interesting concepts which can be developed into interesting plots, but that doesn’t mean the concepts are even close to being true. Eric Frank Russel used stuff from Charles Fort for interesting fiction, but that doesn’t mean Fort was right (though it is hard to tell if Fort believed in what he wrote.)

If he was so smart, why didn’t he get tenure at Harvard? However, Sagan was smart, and I’m pretty sure he’d call you a nitwit.

Go back and read what I wrote, if you can clear the spittle from your screen. As I said, Behe specifically says he accepts evolution. The fundamentalist version of ID, which is the version taught in the class which is the subject of this thread, does not. (Except maybe micro.) That is either from a deistic creator or from purely natural causes. Why do you think websites supporting evolution are considered “hostile.” So, if you are talking about ID, please distinguish which flavor you’re referring to.

114

Well, since you seem to agree that ID isn’t science, I don’t know what you’re all arguing about.

115

I wasn’t aware of anyone, even on the SDMB, who read that book besides me. I read it in high school when I had plenty of free time. motivated by the A. E. van Vogt books.

I’ve not noticed anything from Behe about origins. Now, if ID is more or less rational than Scientology would be an interesting Dumb and Dumber debate.

As for Dembski, ID is just lipstick on the Creationist pig.

I haven’t read Darwin’s Black Box, but does he say anything about this or does he just give examples of irreducible complexity? One confusing thing is when these changes were supposed to have happened. Were they at one point in time or over millions of years, or the result of several supposed visits? It’s clear that Behe means god, but has to finesse it to have a prayer of being published, and so he hasn’t been very clear on this stuff.

If you say the beginning of life, and the development of intelligence, is a very low probability event, it is somewhat more plausible to posit intervention, since if there is one evolved race and 100 designed ones it is more likely we are a designed one. However it seems to me that the natural beginning of life is looking more and more plausible, so I don’t see the need for a designer or seeder.

116

No, actually, you are using it that way. If you are confused by the terminology, fine. Come up with a name for a set of ideas that include some sort of sentient intervention in the creation of a universe that doesn’t have religious connotations. Maybe we’ll call it Nonrandomism.

Nonrandomism, then, is only the idea that the design of the universe was in some way shaped by an intelligence. I never claimed, and do not claim, that it is a testable scientific theory – though it absolutely could be testable depending on the specifics of your theory. But the testability of such an idea (let’s avoid even the word hypothesis), does not influence its usefulness. It brought us skepticism, after all.

So it should be obvious that nonrandomism does not conflict with science, or require religious views, or is completely irrational. It’s simply a thought model that might (or might not) have some explanatory power. And given that it’s counter, Randomism (that the universe and its properties were established by random chance), is also unverifiable and untestable, I see no reason to consign one view to that of a lunatic fringe, while the other view is the rational and obviously true view.

The trick is just in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Creationism, or ID if you must, is one form of Nonrandomism. There are other forms that don’t have the same problems as creationism. And those can be useful intellectual tools, to those who are not too invested in their own set of beliefs to use them.

117

It’s very difficult not to lower myself to your level in composing this reply.

Let me just inform you, as a writer of fiction myself, that you can make any damn thing seem real. Dragons. ESP. Fairies. Aliens. Government conspiracies. Djinn. A world where the South won the civil war. Anything.

To assume that writing a fiction story even slightly implies that the author believes the contents of it are true… Well, that’s a great deal of stupid in a small amount of space. Though I do suppose it’s a natural extension of the moronic belief that any given old holy book must be literally true, rather than a collection of myths and stories…

By which you mean, everybody who is an active proponent of the idea, right?

IN its most abstract form, ID is like solipsism; you can’t disprove it, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe in it, and there’s no evidence anywhere that supports it, and it’s completely useless as a theory in every possible way. It predicts nothing, provides no useful information, and contributes nothing to any discussion.

The only reason to believe in solipsism is because you desperately want to be importanter than you have any reason to think you are. ID is the same way - the only reason to believe in it is because you desperately want to believe in something that you have no reason to think is true.

That is, if we’re talking about abstract intelligent design, which virtually nobody does, because frankly as a theory it’s a useless waste of time. No, people who push for ID do put it in opposition to evolution, explicitly. You’ve done so yourself in this thread. And at this point it stops being a useless but harmless theory, and turned into a load of bullshit. When you have to deny reality and obseravle facts (like, evolution), then you have abandoned the realm of harmless mental masturbation and entered the realm of being a lying shitbag.

Possibly the kind of lying shitbag who claims that smarter and more educated men than themselves are showing shocking amounts of ignorance and failure to think.

118

Funny, that was exactly what I protested – people lumping all flavors of ID into one giant bag of “wrong religious nutters”. And I did not claim any form of ID was true – you’re putting words in my mouth because of your knee-jerk reaction to the words “intelligent design”. Truth value aside, it can still be useful. Just like Newtonian physics is useful, even if not absolutely true.

Capiche?

119

ID useful?

I have seen Newtonian Physics used before in architecture, simulations and gaming. What are the equivalent useful things that we get from ID?

120

I’ll bite. How can it be useful?

I mean, other than as a tool to destroy the public education system and thereby indirectly increase the apparent plausibility of whatever harebrained religion a person prefers?