Why do some groups get blacklisted for the minority of extremists within?

Great Debates
41

Since I brought the topic up, I might as well, belatedly, explain it.
The zoo hypothesis is basically a resolution of the so-called Fermi-paradox (if life is ubiquitous, where are all the spacemen?) saying that we were basically set up in isolation for all the other aliens to study as they passed by our vicinity. You can read more about it here.

Keep up the good fight against ignorance all ye fighting against the lies of Creationism (cretinism?). Lord Ashtar, you may wish to check out the many resources available that throw Behe’s Black Box theory back into the garbage bin where it belongs. A good starting point is this review from the famed www.talkorigins.org archive. Many of us on this board are familiar with dealing with those who would like to have an alternative to evolution for whatever reason, and we hope to be able to offer as many resources available for setting the record straight.

Basically, denying evolution’s existence is tantamount (in my mind) to arguing the Earth is the center of the solar system or arguing that the world literally has four corners. Sure there are errors in the measuring of the exact shape of the earth (there’s a science called geodesy that specifically deals with such things) or its position (we still make corrections to orbital parameters), but that doesn’t mean that the theories behind “heliocentricity” or “earth-roundness” any less true.

42

Just a question. Is Lord Ashtar satisfied with what seems to be the consensus answer to his question, "Why do some groups get blacklisted for the minority of extremists within? "

That consensus, I think, is that the majority of a particular group is culpable if the extremist fringe of the group is not denounced by the majority, regularly and strongly instead of sporadically and half-heartedly.

43

Sure, why not?

44

So, if someone else’s ideas conflict with yours, then they must be wrong?

See, this is the problem that I have with most scientists, and a lot of religious people for that matter. “It conflicts with what I know to be right, therefore it must be wrong.” For a message board that is supposed to fight ignorance, is surprises me that comments like this go unquestioned. IMHO, nobody’s ideas belong in “the garbage bin”.

The only way anyone is going to learn is to read other people’s ideas and consider them. You may have done this, and you also may have concluded that Behe is wrong. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But what I think you may have done is read what some other people have to say about it and decided that since what they say fits what you believe to right, decided that they are right and Behe is wrong. Isn’t this the worst kind of ignorance?

45

No, but if it conflicts with the preponderance of evidence, then it is most likely wrong.

**

You apparently don’t know much about Behe’s work, either (I’m sensing a pattern here…). Behe’s “ideas” are entirely ad hoc, and therefore have little, if any, scientific value. You have been provided with links to reviews wherein the details of Behe’s ideas are more thoroughly debunked. Once a theory has reached the status of “untenable”, where, besides the garbage bin, do you think it should go?

**

And how is this different from you reading what others wrote and deciding them to be right, since they fit your beliefs? Or not having read them, even, and believing the same thing? Ignorance flows both ways.

46

Yeah, I suppose so. I was hoping for more of a discussion about why this happens, and why people are more willing to immediately believe the extremists than do a little research into it and draw up their own conclusions. I would say this is just because people are lazy and don’t want to be bothered. They would rather be told what to believe than to come up with their own ideas.

I suppose this could also be blamed on the media. For example, we rarely see the pro-lifers who are marching, trying to change things in a civilized and completely legal manner. Instead, we usually only hear about the ones who bomb the abortion clinics and kill the doctors. You hardly ever see Arabs on TV who are settling down for one of their daily prayers facing Mecca. Instead, we hear about buses being blown up in Jerusalem, killing 20-30 people. We hardly ever hear about the hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of times a year that a law abiding gun owner uses his gun to protect his family, possessions, and property. However, whenever some deranged and obviously mentally sick teenagers decide to walk into school and kill 8 or 9 classmates and a couple of teachers (a terrible tragedy, no doubt), there are stories about it on the news for months telling us about how we need stronger gun laws and we need to “think about the children” (keeping in mind that what they did was already highly illegal).

You suggest that it is the group’s fault for not speaking up against the extremists clearly and often enough. I suggest that people are just generally lazy and don’t want to make a decision on their own, so they just believe the first thing they are told. I would like to think that I have been a good example of a reasonable, intelligent person who happens to believe in an origin of life that sounds suspiciously like creationism. However, I don’t fit directly into that mold. But, since I say that I believe God had a hand in it, immediately I hear, “You believe in a bunch of lies and misstatements.” Indeed, perhaps I was misinformed about some of the aspects of the science of evolution, but I wasn’t all wrong, was I?

Besides, if you are willing to listen, you will hear these groups speaking up against these extremists all the time.

47

The discussion of Behe illustrates the ad hoc, reactive nature of much creationism. As far as I know, Behe, whatever other faults he may have, has never denied that humans are descended from non-humans and have common ancestors with other living primates, mammals, etc. Yet it often seems the case that creationists are willing to band together in ways which suggest they hardly know nor care what they do accept, they just know that, whatever else, evolution must be wrong. Thus, old Earth, day-age, gap theory creationists accept young Earth, six-24-hour-day creationists as being on the “same side” against the “evolutionists”, when in fact there are huge gulfs between the two “creationist” camps–almost as great as between either of them and modern geology, biology, and astronomy, scientifically speaking; and young Earth, six-24-hour-day creationists will cite the work of an “Intelligent Design” directed evolutionist like Behe, when in fact he is (despite the major problems in his work) closer to evolutionary biologists than he is to the young Earthers. To the extent the “Intelligent Design” camp is willing to make common cause with the young Earthers, I think that says something about the I.D. camp as well, to get back to the original topic of this thread a bit.

It’s as if there were a group of people out there called “anti-Keplerians”, which included Flat Earthers (Earth is a flat disk, with the sky a solid dome), Geocentrists (who believe in a spherical Earth at the center of the Solar System and cosmos), Tychonians (believing that all the other planets orbit the Sun, and the Sun then orbits Earth), and a handful of “maverick”–and almost certainly wrong–meteorologists who have decided to dabble in astronomy and who believe that Earth’s Moon was a separate Sun-orbiting planet until 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 years ago, when it was captured by Earth. And the Flat Earthers cheerfully cite the work of the Recent Moon Capture camp, because hey, it’s “anti-Keplerian”, and that’s all that matters…and what does it say about the proponents of the Recent Moon Capture theory (over and above the scientific merits of R.M.C.) that they don’t have a problem with being lumped in with Flat Earthers and Geocentrists?

48

What you may see to be a “preponderance of evidence” is not necessarily a preponderance of evidence. If I were to show you a scientific poll that said that black men are mentally inferior to white men and were genetically predisposed to violence, would you believe it? Why or why not? There certainly seems to be a “preponderence of evidence” there. I mean, a scientific poll was conducted, and it was conducted scientifically. How can it be wrong? (Please note, I am making a supposition here. No cite will be provided.)

While I am certainly not an expert on his work or the field he studies, I have read the book (have you?) and have also examined the cite which JS Princeton offered. I see a few logical flaws in Robinson’s attempt to present logical flaws in Behe’s work. For example, he uses Behe’s example of the mousetrap as an irreducibly complex system saying that he can remove the wooden plank from the bottom by stapling the whole thing to the floor. The floor is simply taking the place of the wooden plank, just like Behe said. That’s like saying that you can keep a person alive without food, while giving them an IV. Besides, Behe’s example is being overanalyzed in my opinion. He’s saying that a mousetrap is not an example of an irreducibly complex system, which seems to be true, since he can take the parts and recreate the entire system and still leave one part out. But in doing so, he does not prove that irreducibly complex systems do not exist in nature. The reviewer is nitpicking (which, granted, is something a good scientist should do) but he’s missing the spirit of Behe’s ideas.

Besides, that’s one man’s opinion against another. Were Galileo’s ideas immediately accepted when he presented them?

Actually, it may not be coming out properly, as I am still new here and still learning how to properly articulate my ideas in this forum. However, my ideas are not without merit. I had actually been questioning pure creationism for a while, and have come up with a few ideas of my own which incorporate my belief in God with the possiblity that evolution may, in fact, be true. Whether it is or not doesn’t really affect my belief system one way or the other, so I don’t usually give it a whole lot of thought.

I will readily admit, there have been some points brought up in this thread that have forced me to fine tune my personal beliefs on this subject. I have concluded that it is completely possible to believe in both creationism and evolution. Drawing from an earlier analogy I made, comparing the eternal argument of creationism vs. evolution to the Republicans and Democrats, I believe both sides have a few things right and a few things wrong. I believe there to be a middle ground.

49

—I had actually been questioning pure creationism for a while, and have come up with a few ideas of my own which incorporate my belief in God with the possiblity that evolution may, in fact, be true.—

Most people who work on evolution believe in God.

—I have concluded that it is completely possible to believe in both creationism and evolution.—

Well, it is completely possible to believe anything: belief is not what’s under question here. What’s under question here is whether a particular view has the weight of evidence behind it, and if a legitimate case can be made for it being true.

—Drawing from an earlier analogy I made, comparing the eternal argument of creationism vs. evolution to the Republicans and Democrats, I believe both sides have a few things right and a few things wrong. I believe there to be a middle ground.—

This, if you know nothing else, you should know is a terrible mistake. When it comes to matters of preference, desire, and moderation, it may be true that one should look to a stable middle. But this sort of rule of thumb is NEVER a good idea in matters of truth. Truth is not found at any epicenter of whatever views you can gather. Truth of the sort we are discussing, indeed, has NO relation to what anyone believes: it could lie anywhere on the present spectrum of beliefs. Consider what silly places this sort of view could take you: the spectrum of beliefs out there, and thus “the middle ground” could be entirely different tommorow: but that wouldn’t change what is or is not true! Likewise, one could change the truth simply by becoming an extremist: thus shifting the “truth” closer to your side.

Truth needs to be considered on the evidence, not with any rule of thumb based on a spectrum of beliefs out there.

—What you may see to be a “preponderance of evidence” is not necessarily a preponderance of evidence. If I were to show you a scientific poll that said that black men are mentally inferior to white men and were genetically predisposed to violence, would you believe it?—

That depends on what we were talking about. If it were a poll asking people if this was there opinion, not only would I not believe it, but I would point out that it is not even directly relevant to the question of whether the claim is true or not: the poll would be a pure example of ad populum!

If, however, the poll was actually on the data, then I certainly would be willing to consider it’s truth, despite the nasty implication (your question is somewhat loaded with that implication). Though I would note that one poll is hardly in the slightest a “preponderance of evidence” for the claim being made. Nor does it tell us much about where the differences, if real, might come from.

50

Why are some people so willing to accept creationism without doing a little research into evolution so the know what it really consists of?

This, from someone who earlier had claimed to have, “… put some personal time and thought into it, and believe that creationism is simply the more plausible of the theories.”

The theories being evolution & creationism. How much actual time did you spend looking into today’s actual theory of evolution before you mentioned it in this thread?

Hard to argue with this.

If they don’t want to be lumped in with the loonies, I shouldn’t have to listen all that hard. After all, it is well known by those who advertise products that you have to repeat, repeat, repeat.

Your performance re the theory of evolution demonstrates that perfectly. You have been directed to, and been given, authoritative information about the actual theory which doesn’t seem to have penetrated very far in yet.

51

I completely agree. I believe that anyone who is constantly looking for a middle ground in all debates is simply being wishy-washy and noncommittal. However, in this case, I decided that I believe the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes. There are several subjects on which I am in extreme, EG: abortion (against), the death penalty (against), and sex before marriage (absolu-frickin’-lutely! :smiley: ). Sorry I couldn’t think of a third major debate for which I am in the extreme, my coffee has yet to kick in this morning.

52

A scientific poll is evidence about what people’s opinions are, not about the facts of the issue itself.

53

You are pulling our leg, n’est pas?

Wait a minute! it was Behe who said that a mousetrap was an example of an irreducibly complex object that consisted of:

"(1) a flat wooden platform to act as a base
(2) a metal hammer, which does the actual job of crushing the little mouse

(3) a spring with extended ends to press against the platform and the hammer when the trap is charged

(4) a sensitive catch that releases when slight pressure is applied

(5) a metal bar that connects to the catch and holds the hammer back when the trap is charged (there are also assorted staples to hold the system together)"

Now it is clear that Behe meant that a separate, flat, wooden piece was an irreplaceable part of a mousetrap. Any other interpretation is rewriting Behe which is a foul. Furthermore, the existing floor, which was never intended to be the base of a mousetrap, being put to a different use as the “flat wooden platform” is exactly what evolutionary processes do all the time.

And in fact the “platform” doesn’t have to be wood. It can be any material and the moustrap parts stuck with adhesive. If adhesive holds the parts of a B-2 together, one can certainly be found to glue a mousetrap to concrete, or steel, or plastic.

Why drag this in? Replacing parts in a mousetrap isn’t “like” anything but exchanging parts.

“Overanalyzed?” Would you prefer a slapdash critique? Robison (not Robinson) didn’t say he was proving that no irreducibly complex structures exist in nature. What he was saying is that Behe’s example isn’t irreducibly complex.

The Catholic Church leadership didn’t accept them, but I’m not sure that such scientists as there were at the time had all that much opposition to them. Newton accepted Galileo’s ideas only about 50 years after, and doubtless would have done so sooner had he been born sooner. And of course the argument that “Galileo’s ideas weren’t accepted” doesn’t lead logically to the idea that just because an idea isn’t accepted initially it must be right.

Obviously.

And leaving out all of the other extant creation myths from other cultures?

So do you claim that the dust did give humans DNA that is much like that of champanzee’s which were independently created? You claimed that you didn’t reject a common ancestry for animals other than man because Genesis merely said they were created all at one time. But you claimed that man was separately created. Then you say that it is possible that by pure happenstance human DNA is like that of an ape. Did God allow that to happen just to fool us into thinking that maybe chimpanzees and humans had a common ancestor?

I’m starting to think there is some confusion in here somewhere.

54

Lord Ashtar, if you want to talk specifically about IC, then we can talk about it. Basically there is an appeal to ignorance going on in Behe’s work that smacks of all-or-none-ism. It’s as though Behe were saying to us that because we cannot give a detailed explanation for how, say, the eye evolved therefore it must have been designed. This is a jump to conclusions if I’ve ever heard one. It’s a typical God-in-the-gaps argument that dares us to not look into subjects too deeply in order to prove the point that science doesn’t have all the answers (something no one has ever claimed science has except for those panning the established science that goes on).

The fact of the matter is, Behe’s IC arguments have been dug up from the garbage bin. It is fundamentally not “his idea”. He has, perhaps, entered some new evidence in support of this idea, but IC is an argument from Paley and was rightly abandoned by scientists back in the late 19th and early 20th century as being untestable and without much teeth to it. To wit, if I offer an evolutionary explanation for one attribute, the IC-proponent simply switches to another attribute that hasn’t been explained and definitively states that the mousetrap-like (or watch-like) qualities of said attribute cannot be explained by a mechanism of natural selection with no ability to prove such a thing other than appealing to aesthetics and ignorance. This is not science. Indeed, It’s a game of gotcha.

Also, when I refer to the “garbage bin” I’m refering to the place where all scientific ideas that are disproven end up going. Along with the particulars of Paley’s IC are ideas of the Ptolemic universe, spontaneous generation, heavier objects necessarily falling faster than lighter objects, and the myth of no new nuerogenesis. All of these ideas were at one time held to be fundamentally true about nature and all are now debunked. Some are more recently debunked than others. In fact, along with IC is Darwin’s original theory of evolution which was incorrect in its assumption that physical mutations of the parent were necessarily passed on to the child (we know this now to be overly-simplistic and incorrect).

However, it seems to me that you are appealing not to IC as a tenable theory, but rather as a philosophical construct. It’s as though because we don’t know everything you feel comfortable in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. True, appealing to God on some level is not necessarily untenable. This is why the most honest of scientists are agnostics with respect to creation (while prehaps maintaining theistic holdings in their spiritual lives). What you have failed to demonstrate then is why you are opposed to evolution. A truly honest IC-proponent would have to admit, Deist-like, that God could have somehow used the mechanisms of evolution for some over-all plan. This is an unprovable hypothesis, though, and so remains outside the survey of science.

FWIW, Behe’s claims that biochemical evolution is not studied are false. There are plenty of scientists working out the biochemical evolution of various mechanisms. Again, you can find them all on talkorigins. I hope you had a chance to delve more deeply into the site I gave you. Robison does a good job scratching the surface of why Behe is wrong, and he does it cursorly because of limitations of space. You criticize him for being illogical but fail to convince me you have a good understanding of what his argument is. The response Behe gives in the link is a bit flat, if you ask me, but you didn’t refer to that, so I’m at a loss as to what you’re exactly trying to prove with your arguments against the review and in support of Behe.

It seems to me that while accusing me of not reading Behe (in fact, I read the book when it first came out in 1996), you have yourself not read the resources countering your offer of an objective claim for creationism very carefully. Let me remind you, the reason you offered Behe was because you thought it was an intellectually tenable argument against evolution. MOst of us in this forum, and certainly anyone who’s been involved in the creation/evolution “debate” all heard of Behe before. We have all dealt with the mounds of disinformation that are offered by various creationist clearinghouses. There are plenty of resources out there that allow you to ask the “what about this?” question you offer as your counters to evolution and patiently explain the evidence. In short, your inquisitiveness is to be commended, but your refusal to accept evolution (since we’ve offered you the resources) is puzzling if you truly are as open-minded as you submit.

I am willing to admit that there is a subtle, deeper point that creationists sometimes skirt around that is valid… and that is a point about the philosophy of science. It has nothing to do with the paradigmatic approach to evolution that is denounced by fluff-and-strut creationists as being ungodly. If you are truly interested in the problems of science and epistemology, then that’s a whole other can of worms. But then your quarrel isn’t really with evolution: it’s with science in general and the scope of your arguments are beyond the discussion of the paradigm. Science is defined by what the paradigm is at the moment (you can tell I’m a Kuhn fan) and the rest is just fringe. Oh, sometimes the fringe does good things, but the majority of the fringe is in the garbage heap and will remain there.

I’ll tell you why I get snippy over these issues. It’s because there are so many people out there that have their crackpot ideas and will waste your time in trying to get you to consider them. The amount of time that has been wasted in explaining that humans HAVE gone to the moon or explaining that the geologic time scales ARE on the correct order of magnitude is truly sad. This is basically because there is a large contingent of people out there who do the intellectual equivalent of stubbornly thrusting their fingers into their ears and dancing about while screaming at the top of their lungs in order to avoid hearing the evidence for theories that conflict with their cherished beliefs. The problem is they latch on to impressionable minds and bring them down with them. Before you know it, there’s a whole group of so-called “creation scientists” who spend their life publishing gotcha-tracts, religious missives, and pan the scientific establishment for mistakes that the scientific establishment admits to making! It’s all very frustrating for those of us who have had a decent education in the areas of the natural sciences.

I’m sorry about the rant, it just gets extremely frustrating sometimes, and we all have emotions. I will admit that Behe is perhaps closer to having a respectable opinion than nearly every other so-called “creation scientist” I’ve come across, but as he is fundamentally not approaching the subject scientifically, only through an appeal to ignorance, I must tell the IC-complaint against evolution exactly where it can go.

55

David Simmons makes some fabulous points, onto which I shall now tack my own.

First of all, the problem with the middle ground argument is that creation/evolution is not an either or proposition. If you want to introduce Genesis creation into the mix of acceptable theories then you also have to accept Hindu myths of creation, turtles all the way down, pansmeria, zoo hypothesis. Oh gee, I could go on. The point is, there are plenty of things that are not as scientifically tenable as evolution that maybe, perhaps, explain certain details of the origins of the species a bit better (after all, saying God made them that way, and that’s that leaves little room for debate), but just because something pretends to explain everything doesn’t mean it actually has demonstratedly done so.

To wit, we can take Galileo as a good jumping off point. Copernican planetary dynamics was not accepted by the Catholic Church because it conflicted with their beliefs, but it also didn’t explain nearly as well the small deviations in orbits nearly as well as the complex Ptolemeic model did. It took Kepler’s laws to really pin down the exact nature of the orbits, which occured after Galileo. Now, Galileo was right, and he had the evidence that he was right, but that didn’t convince those who were only interested in the fact that their solution explained everything nearly perfectly. Never mind that it was hopelessly complicated and appealed to epicycles and wierd things that were totally unexplainable. God’s hand was what kept the heavens spinning around the earth, and that was the end of it. The moons of Juipiter would have been a dastardly thing to explain as being in Ptolemeic modeling, but no doubt such a thing could be done. There comes a point, though, in science, when you have to use common sense.

If you look at the evidence from biology and ask yourself the question, what does this evidence point to? What do you suppose the answer will be. Well, Lord Ashtar, you may not have had the chance to fully explore, for example, the www.talkorigins.org archive, but if you do and come up with a better explanation, let us know.

56

**

Lord Ashtar, you’re out of line. JS Princeton gave you no reason whatsoever to suggest that he was rejecting Behe’s ideas simply because they conflicted with his own. You did the same kind of thing to me in the other thread, but I let it slide. Is it too much to ask that you wait for someone to actually screw up before you start criticising them? (And, FWIW, this is the kind of thing I get from creationists fairly frequently.)

As for Behe, two of his lies are thoroughly covered at www.talkorigins.org (specifially, his claim that there’s a “thundering silence” in the scientific literature on questions of how IC systems originated, and his claim that biochemistry textbooks don’t talk about evolution.)

I read the first few chapters of DBB but lost interest, because I, as a molecular biologist, found it to be just too full of dishonesty. (I plan to read the rest later so I can critique it on my webpage.) It’s frightening to me that even people who disagree with Behe’s anti-evolution stance are willing to congratulate him on writing a good book on molecular biology for a popular audience, since he’s willing to lie outright about the facts in order to prove his points. Specifically, he made the claim that tubulin monomers are covered in “needles” that fit precisely into “holes” on adjacent monomers. The simple fact of the matter is that those needles simply do not exist. Behe needed a convenient lie to make his argument look more impressive, and he knew that laymen such as yourself wouldn’t know how blatant his lie really is.

As for the shared ancestry of humans and apes, I have a few questions:

  1. What about pseudogenes shared between humans and apes?

  2. What about retrogenes shared between humans and apes?

  3. Why does the physical arrangement of genes and pseudogenes in the human hemoglobin cluster correlate with their positions in the phylogenetic tree of the cluster?

57

Just out of curiosity, what would it take to convince you that humans and apes share an ancestor?

58

—Then you say that it is possible that by pure happenstance human DNA is like that of an ape.—

Let’s be clear: it isn’t just the useful genes that are similar, but also the genes that don’t actually ever code for any expressed proteins (i.e., they aren’t used to build anything). Both apes and humans, for instance, have sequences in their DNA that originally came from newts, but are never expressed in the lifetimes of either humans or apes. So it is not simply that we are similar to apes in certain respects that make our genes similar: we are are also similar in the sense that we carry the same remnants of past evolution in our genes: sort of like “tool marks” that demonstrate past functions that are no longer used today. The same “genetic history” evidence that ties apes to previous animals ties us to them as well.

59

Nobel laureate Christian DeDuve went into what Aptos speaks of at some length in his book Vital Dust and I had forgotten about it. The book is a tough read and parts of it are beyond the background of the non-specialist, but a lot of it is understandable and well worth reading.

60

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there’s always (koff koff) my Molecular Genetics FAQ:

http://psyche11.home.mindspring.com/molevol2.html