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  1. adam adam

    Whenever someone says something about imagination, they are making a comment about human psychology, not biology.

  2. I love it. It’s a very Darwinian point, too; it’s what Darwin’s point actually was in the passage about “organs of extreme perfection and complication” like the eye: that reason is more extensive than imagination, and can take over where it fails.

  3. Jim Thomerson Jim Thomerson

    A nice example of argument from incredulity.

  4. Cadra Cadra

    Old darwinian mantras. This is exactly why “evolutionary biology” can’t be the real science (as Popper before being senile correctly noticed). Firstly: the lack of any experiment that could prove that the eye could have evolved via random mutation&natural selection. There are as many speculations how an eye became to be as there are “evolutionary biologists”.
    Secondly: those who don’t believe in such naturalistic stories – how far fetched they might be – are accused of “incredulity”. Obviously the lack of persuasive arguments forced darwinists to use some medieval accusations as their main scientfific argument. Because darwinism is based on “imagination”.

    • Ian H Spedding FCD Ian H Spedding FCD

      Old creationist mantras. Popper recanted (not that he’s the last word on the philosophy of science) As for real science, how about an experiment that will prove the existence of your designer?

      • Cristian Pascu Cristian Pascu

        Old naturalist mantras. 🙂 Ontology is beyond what any scientific experiment can reach. At least as long there’s no ‘ex nihilo’ quantum operator. Like real ‘nihilo’, not Hawking’s nothing.

        The world looks like it is designed (Dawkins). Some think there’s a designer, some others don’t. I don’t science in any of the views, just intuition.

  5. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    Thank you Martin Cadra for a note of sanity in an insane Darwinian world. A designed universe is apparent to any rational student of the animate world. Why it was ever offered as a subject for debate escapes my comprehension. Everybody knows what happens when something is offered as a subject for debate. Debate teams spring up like mushrooms and the Babel begins, never to end. Real scientists don’t debate, they discover and reveal the truth to receptive minds of which there have always been far too few.

    The Biblical “Fundamentalista” and the Atheist “Darwinista” are both dead wrong . The truth lies elsewhere in a planned and now completed evolution. In my opinion, only extinction remains because that is exactly what the current facts demand.

    “A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable.”

  6. GHitch GHitch

    The dumb dog’s point, in the cartoon, is lame precisely because Nature has indeed no imagination, or mind at all!
    This isn’t hard.

    Arguments from complexity which are in fact arguments from statistical mechanics, are not arguments from incredulity.

    On the contrary. You want arguments from incredulity? Darwinian fundamentalism is full of it. – “There is no god and we are his prophets”
    Or like this one – “Since their is no god and no designer of any other kind either, it must be evolution. So, no matter data we actually find it must be made to fit the theory”
    That’s the Darwinian bull shit “argument” in a nutshell.

    The worshipers of chance and necessity have nothing to argue from because they do not understand the humongous problems for evolution caused by statistical mechanics applied to biological machines.

    • PhiJ PhiJ

      WHAT? Aaron is no dog. He is a mole!

  7. The sudden appearance of Davison in these parts must have given you a real “Crap! Bed bugs!” moment. And its never just one of ’em.

    Ancient American joke: a man complains to the hotel clerk about bed bugs. The clerk tells him there isn’t a single bed bug in the hotel. “Your right. They’re all married and have large families!”

    • Mike Haubrich Mike Haubrich

      So, Jim, what exactly are your credentials? How can you possibly dare to make fun of the great and terrible Davison? It is to laugh, to question your very sanity if you dare to mock the dear and wonderful JAD. He can see things that none else have seen: the marked end of evolution! It was teleological, after all, and we are clearly; clearly, he says in the “tele” phase. Evolution has reached its destination and we are it.

      Don’t make fun of JAD or he will find your blog and take it over should you ever start one.

  8. Cadra Cadra

    So we may preliminary conclude, that main Darwinian arguments regarding their “evolutionary science” are almost all on the cartoon:
    “we do publish in peer review”
    “our opponents lack imagination”
    “an argument from incredulity is non-scientific!”

    And now the venue is ready to start teeming with Harrison and like “knowledgeable evolutuionists” whose main goal is to make from the discussion another neodarwinian flame

  9. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    Who is Jim Harrison? I never heard of him. Does he have any credentials? Does he have a blog that would allow me to speak or is he a member of the “Darwinista” who are so out of touch with reality that they believe they already know the cause of the great mystery of organic evolution. There is nothing in Darwin’s Victorian fantasy that can account for anything beyond the elaboration of intra-specific varieties and subspecies none of which are incipient species and all of which are doomed to extinction without further change. That is my position because that is exactly what our present understanding demands.

  10. John Harshman John Harshman

    Hey, John! Look, you’ve found a couple of creationists! How often does that happen here? Can we keep them?

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Not usually, but yeah, they can post here so long as they adhere to the not-pissing rules.

  11. John you should call the pest control officer your blog has got vermin.

    • Who is “the pest control”? I hope it is not “knowledgeable evolutionists” from doctor Myers’ Pharyngula?
      Once John Davison and me had a great fun with those “knowledgeable evolutionists”. PZMyers himself had sent them on us. It was a time when we exposed peculiar behaviour of doctor Myers and his administration policy on the “One blog a day” venue .
      In doctor Myers opinion his “knowledgeable evolutionists” are able to “rip apart arguments of any creationist”. Unfortunatelly his guys haven’t the slightest idea about the complexity of human color vision (you can see the color, frequency of which doesn’t enter your eye for instance – despite Newton’s theory ). Neverthenless knowing nothing about color perception his followers know how the eye evolved!
      If you point out on their ignoration, you are accused of knowing nothing about evolution, or even the worst accusation in the eys of darwinists – from “the lack of imagination”!

      • Ender Ender

        It’s not fair to downvote this comment. He doesn’t believe that the frequency of colours of light enters your eye. How he believes this light-with-no-frequency gets to the eye is questionable but beside the point – if he doesn’t think that coloured light can enter your eye then he can’t possibly be expected to understand evolution. That’s just unrealistic.

      • John Harshman John Harshman

        I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose he means that you can see colors that don’t match any photons entering your eye. Which is true. The colors you see depend on the degrees to which your three types of receptors are stimulated, so you would see yellow if your red and green receptors are stimulated in a particular ratio. One way to do that is with yellow light, but the right combination of red and green light would do as well.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          It’s an old philosophical claim: the experience of colour depends upon the reception the uncoloured light waves (which are, after all, just energy waves, or in the older literature thought to be corpuscles). The empiricists of the 17th century called this a secondary quality. The primary quality was the physical (that is, extended in time and space and measurable) properties of a thing, while the secondary qualities were observer dependent.

      • Ender Ender

        That’s the most ass-backwards reference to qualia I’ve ever seen! Thanks for explaining what he was on about, I’d have never guessed.

        It’s still a ridiculous argument of course, as colour perception would evolve if it was beneficial, for example picking ripe fruit etc. The question of why qualia at all has not been answered, yet. But it will be.

  12. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    I am not a Creationist with a capital C, but any0ne who denies that one or more impersonal “entities” must have once existed is a damn fool. That is precisely the Darwinian position and it is unacceptable to any rational observer of the animate world. The atheist Darwinian believes that non-living matter can sp0ntaneously assemble into living, metabolizing, reproducing and evolving creatures to produce the advancing, perfecting sequence that the fossil record demonstrates beyond question. Oblivious to the several experimental proofs against spontaneus generation (abiogenesis) from Redi to Spallanzani to Pasteur, the Darwinian persists against all the evidence to believe in the ridiculous proposition that random change coupled with natural selection can account for the living world. No real scientist could ever reach that position. Accordingly, Darwinians are not scientists and never will be. All the available evidence pleads that not only was all of evolution Planned, but the Plan has reached completion with the contemporary biota. In other words and once again –

    “A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable.”

    Get used to it children. That’s the way it always was, still is and always will be. You may now return to the denigration of a named adversary by the cowardly pseudonymous blowhards with which this blog is so blessed. Your insults amuse me immensely. Please don’t stop and whatever you do don’t use your right name.

    It doesn’t get any better than this.

    I love it so!

    If I am the only person to believe that scenario, so much the better. I am delighted with position, supremely confident that no other explanation exists to account for the living world both past and present.

    • It would seem that The Immortal Bard anticipated your existence:

      a poor player
      That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
      And then is heard no more: it is a tale
      Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
      Signifying nothing.

  13. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    Woops!
    I left out ‘that’ between ‘with’ and ‘position’ in my last paragraph.

  14. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    Who says the designer must now exist? Not I. Henry Ford invented the automobile assembly line. Henry Ford is dead, the assembly line lives on.

  15. ckc (not kc) ckc (not kc)

    …well, you were worried about how many readers you had – now you know the downside of the solution. You probably won’t have to sweat the quantity of comment.

  16. Jim Thomerson Jim Thomerson

    In the 1600’s, Jan Baptiste von Helmont, the “father of biochemistry” published a recipe for spontaneous generation of mice. Take a dirty pot, add some gain and dirty rags and place it in a dark corner for a couple of weeks. And some mice will be spontaneously generated which are indistinguishable from those produced by mouse mating. (No, it was a different experiment which earned him his appellation.) So long as one accepted this as factual, one need not think of evolution. So the work of Redi, Spallanzini, and Pasteur, which showed that living things do not spontaneously arise under today’s conditions, was, in fact, necessary to set the stage for evolutionary thought. Although biologists recognized that origin of life was an important question, they didn’t know how to study the matter, and just stopped thinking about it. This went on until the work of Oparin, “Origin of Life on Earth” published in 1936, and followed by Haldane, and others, with the understanding that living things originated in the distant past under conditions very different from those of today. At this point in time we do not know how living thing originated, but we know that they did. If we think they originated as as supernatural event, outside the purview of science, then we cannot study the phenomenon. However, if we think they originated as the result of natural events,: chemistry, physics, and contingency, then we can study the matter and learn things in the process, even if we are wrong in our basic assumption.

  17. D. Goldreich D. Goldreich

    Nice! Be sure to hover your mouse over the comic at the site, and check out the great alt text.

  18. TheOtherJim TheOtherJim

    John Davidson and flock,

    If you and ID really have something new and exciting to share, please do. The last I heard is was something similar to “Behe cannot imagine how a 20 amino acid sequence can evolve due to a mis-understanding of probabilities and sampling, therefore something far more complicated must have existed beforehand to make the 20 aa sequence. Let’s ignore the fact that the odds of some creator spontaneously poofing into existence are purely insane.”

    Otherwise, please be quiet. You’re ruining a rather nice dinner party with your insane rabble.

  19. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    By the way you degenerate swine, I copied my last message before I sent it, the one you didn’t dare let appear . You will find it on my webpage on the “Evolution is finished thread.”

    • ckc (not kc) ckc (not kc)

      …degenerate swine – it’s good to work this into a convincing argument – the linchpin, so to speak.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      No comments have been blocked, although I haven’t check the spam filter lately. But how did JAD find out I was degenerate?

      • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

        And now I am able to check, no such post was submitted to this site, so either JAD is technically incompetent, or he is not telling the truth.

      • Ian H Spedding FCD Ian H Spedding FCD

        …or both.

      • I went to the trouble of going to JAD’s blog in order to read the post that he didn’t post here. I would say at a rough estimate that it was micturating, defecating and vomiting on the carpet after having disembowelled a virgin on it first.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          You did this so we wouldn’t have to. A major sacrifice, and we are all grateful.

      • J. J. Ramsey J. J. Ramsey

        “But how did JAD find out I was degenerate?”

        He found someone with the same energy level as you? 😛

  20. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    It doesn’t get any better than this. You run a great blog here Johnny.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      First and only warning for tone. You are pissing on the carpet now (see comments policy).

  21. Brian Brian

    Hey look! There’s posters who have less ability to present coherent thoughts than I! Group hug!

  22. John Harshman John Harshman

    I’m waiting for Davidson to make an argument so we can see if it’s a good one. Hint: “John, you ignorant slut…” isn’t an argument.

  23. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    John Harshman whoever that is. I never heard of him.

    The evidence for my thesis is overwhelming and most of it has been published in peer reviewed journals. Since I am no longer welcome to either the “Fundamentalista” or the “Darwinista”, both of which “groupthinks” I have rejected, I now present our science on my weblog – “Proceedings of the Natural History Society of South Burlington Vermont.” a journal of which I am the Editor. It is modeled after the journal in which Gregor Mendel published his 1868 paper which marked the birth of Genetics. Mendel too knew that his work would not be accepted by the contemporary botanical journals of his day, so he did what I have now done and for the same reason. His journal – “Proceedings of The Natural History Society of Brunn (Austria),” of which he was an Editor, permitted him to present findings that would otherwise be unavailable to the scientific commmunity. I am doing exactly the same thing and for the same reason. All the derogation, insulting, deletion, banishment and pseudonymous cowardice that characterizes this blog and so many others, proves only what we have long known to be true.

    “A doctrine which is unable to maintain itself in clear light, but only in the dark will of necessity lose its effect on mankind with uncalculable harm to human progress .”
    Albert Einstein

    I dare John Wilkins to allow this message to appear.

    P.S. This message will be presented on my weblog whether Wilkins has banished me or not. I’m betting he won’t let it appear here.

    • bob koepp bob koepp

      You lose.

    • If you play the Galileo-Gambit you lose! As Bob correctly pointed out you just lost!

    • Chris Chris

      ““Proceedings of the Natural History Society of South Burlington Vermont.” ”

      That is priceless.

    • Susan Silberstein Susan Silberstein

      John Harshman: we know who he is. We have eaten pizza with John Harshman. You are no John Harshman.

  24. The only responses so far are denigrations. Obviously neodarwinian posters miraculously “adhere to the not-pissing rules” whatever they write. Everyone can check that it were them who started denigration, not professor John Davison.

    Professor John Davison proposed that evolution is finished. His conclusion is based on the observation of prominent paleontologists or even darwinists.

    There is no need to ridicule this opinion – or better fact – unless you proposed some arguments. Preliminary we only see the most peculiar argument in science – that of “lack of imagination” and awkward mockery which “adhere to the not-pissing rules”.

    • thonyc thonyc

      As I’m neither a Darwinist nor a neo-Darwinist perhaps you would be so kind as to explain what these labels mean and to whom exactly they apply?

  25. John Harshman John Harshman

    Didn’t I just say that “John, you ignorant slut…” isn’t an argument?

  26. Chris Chris

    “His conclusion is based on the observation of prominent paleontologists or even darwinists.”

    Being a peeping tom is no way to overthrow evolutionary theory.

  27. bob koepp bob koepp

    Well, for those who request arguments, the “limited imagination” hypothesis has actually been borne out when put to the test. As just one example that should be familiar, those who insisted that a bacterial flagellum could not have evolved in a step-wise fashion were shown to be insufficiently imaginative, at least within the constraints of biological thinking. I added that qualifier because some of the same people have demonstrated quite remarkable powers of unconstrained imagination.

    • One should perhaps observe in real science “limited imagination”. I remeber reading fantastic stories about origin of mimicry by professor Richard Dawkins – predators in the dawn in forests culdn’t tell apart imperfect mimimcs etc…

      Nowadays it is well established fact that mimicry patterns on butterfiles wings aroused at once to be effective (see some latest papers by Frederick Nijhout). Of course darwinists are afraid of the concept of saltationism, so they use in the case of mimicry orwelian newspeak : “mutation with great phenotypic effect”.

      There were many articles in pre-war scientific journals proving uneffectiveness of butterflies mimicry. Even in the 50thies they can be found in peer-reviewed. As by miracle such articles have disappeared since 1980 .

      As in the case of imperfect mimics – in the case of butterflies I haven’t heard about persuasive ones – I doubt there are organisms having something like half-flagellum. I expect them existing only in darwinian “imagination”.

  28. GHitch GHitch

    Omg, such deep intellectual barter here.
    No wonder.
    Hubris, diatribe and idiocy underlie all Darwinism and are ubiquitous whenever Darwhiners are to be found horded together.

    One comment that I find might be worth looking at and that is so materialist typical:

    If we think they originated as s supernatural event, outside the purview of science, then we cannot study the phenomenon.
    However, if we think they originated as the result of natural events,: chemistry, physics, and contingency, then we can study the matter and learn things in the process, even if we are wrong in our basic assumption.

    This is bad reasoning based on either ignorance or incredulity, or possibly badly phrased thoughts.

    The 1st phrase implies that Newton, Pascal, Maxwell, and several 100s of other scientists that founded so-called “modern” science, could not have founded modern science!
    They were virtually ALL staunch creationists who clearly believed the “originated as a supernatural event” view of life and the universe.

    So, how utterly ridiculous is any statement that implies they were in fact unscientific??!!

    But this is the new atheist propaganda, ubiquitous in the halls of academia these days and taken as an a priori qualification of all science!!

    But even Einstein was, at the very least, a deist!

    Furthermore: the origin of any phenomenon can be conceived of and therefore examined in some way -no matter what the perceived nature of that origin.

    To say it cannot be is simply to claim that we do not have the right tools -yet, or worse, that we’re already assuming no such tools will ever exist.

    Thus it assumes both too much and too little; Too much of whatever “super-nature” really means and too little of how such could eventually be studied.
    It lacks both imagination and realism.

    “Outside the purview of science”?
    What is that? Methodological Naturalism?
    If so one can only laugh or cry that “science” has been defined in such a way as to deliberately interdict anything we don’t really understand yet!
    What is the purview of science, really?

    Let’s put it this way:
    Suppose life really was designed by a or many intelligent being(s)?
    Q: Could you, under your definition of science, detect this?
    A: If it cannot (as you claim) then it is lame, inefficient, insufficient and can never lead to the facts!

    If “life, the universe and everything” really was planned, designed and created, and your definition of science prohibits all but matter and energy then your science can never discover the truth.
    Thus your science is indefensibly and indeed irrationally exclusionary.

    If your idea of science thus a priori excludes all possibility of any extra-, hyper- or super- “natural” (as we understand natural) existences, then you’re applying an non rational limitation to your ability to understand the origin of the universe – i.e. you’ve already shot yourself in the head.

    In your case, you think you’ve shot your opponents in the head but in fact you’ve merely debilitated your own lame, prejudiced view of “science” irrationally, while it is your opponents that gave it right! Not limiting the abilities of research to nothing but matter and energy.

  29. bob koepp bob koepp

    GHitch – Yes, to claim that a research program which employs only non-teleological hypotheses entails the non-existence of teleological processess is to embrace a basic logical error. And, yes, there are many working scientists who make this mistake. They are in need of remedial education in basic logic. But those who wish to introduce the design hypothesis need to provide a method for reliably distinguishing between products of design and products of a process of natural selection. Without such a method, their hypothesis is empirically empty. They, too, are in need of remedial education in basic logic.

    Now, what was it you said about hubris?

  30. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    Thank you Gary Hitch and Martin Cadra for introducing a modicum of rationality on this Darwinian dog and pony show. It is refreshing to find others capable of offering constructive and deeply challenging commentary on the Darwinian fairy tale. Our reward will be banishment if we persist so I say let’s get on with it. Let Wilkins do what Myers, Dawkins Elsberry and others did long ago. Let him also banish the critics of the Darwinian hoax. I am extremely proud to have been banished from more weblogs than any other real scientist in the history of the internet. I’ve even been banished three or four times (I can’t remember for sure) from Dembski’s Uncommon Descent. To be banished here will be just one more merit badge to pin on my white laboratory coat as the most effective critic of the Darwinian horror story presently still alive which at 83 will probably be not for much longer!

    It doesn’t get any better than this.

  31. Bob O'H Bob O'H

    Oh damn – just catching up on my blog reading, and find I’ve missed Fluppy the Wonder Whelk’s latest appearance.

  32. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    I copied that one on my weblog too. Johnny, if you keep letting us hold forth, we will make you the most famous Darwinian in the history of the internet, one oblivious to reality, dedicated to his own demise as a reputable figure in the world in which he finds himself.

  33. GHitch GHitch

    Bob O’H:

    You are one lame-brained twit of Darwinian dupe if ever there was one – as we’ve often witnessed over at UD.
    Get a brain huh.

  34. John A. Davison John A. Davison

    Oh wonderful. Another Darwimp has arrived in the person of Robert O’Hara, perennial resident of Scientopia and After The Bar Closes, two more Alamos of Darwinian damn foolishness. This is even better than I could have imagined. I attract devout worshippers of the Great God Chance like meat attracts flies. They follow me around anxious to add their insults to the others I invariably evoke. Thank you Bob O’H. Incidentally, I dedicated an essay “An Essay on Insults” to Bob along with Mark Chiu-Carroll and Paul Zachary Myers two of the most disgusting character assassins I have ever encountered. You can find it on the “new essays” button on the top of my web page. Be sure to enjoy it along with all the other material you will find there.

    Who is next? Don’t stop. Where is Alan Fox? He is usually first in line to ridicule me, usually by referring to my age. Pile on folks. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.

    Don’t tell me there is no God. He has delivered you into my hands!

  35. GHitch GHitch

    bob koepp said:

    … But those who wish to introduce the design hypothesis need to provide a method for reliably distinguishing between products of design and products of a process of natural selection. Without such a method, their hypothesis is empirically empty. They, too, are in need of remedial education in basic logic.

    Well I must admit this is possibly the 1st time any Darwinist fessed up to lame Methodological Naturalism’s most glaring flaw.

    Nevertheless, to pretend that the ID community has never presented such a method is indeed hubris and most likely mere denial.

    That methodology is well known in any forensic science.
    Denying its use in biology is yet another a priori mark of Darwinian materialism’s irrationality. That method is detection of intelligent input through the presence of algorithmic informational structures.

    Nothing is more obvious in the genome than profoundly organized, prescriptive and indeed “formal” informational structures.
    That’s why even the Nobel org called DNA a “book of instructions”.

    Instructions cannot arise without intelligence.

    Given that we already know that such information cannot arise by any stochastic process, the design inference is not only warranted but necessary.

    You and all materialists are in dire need of reading, and hopefully understanding, the work of David Abel et al. over at http://lifeorigin.info/

    There is simply no such thing as encoded instructional (algorithmic) information without intelligence. The very definition of “encoded information” prohibits it.

    As Abel states:

    Prescriptive sequences are called “instructions” and “programs.” They are not merely complex sequences. They are algorithmically complex sequences. They are cybernetic. Random sequences are maximally complex. But they don’t do anything useful. Algorithmic instruction is invariably the key to any kind of sophisticated organization such as we observe in any cell. No method yet exists to quantify “prescriptive information” (cybernetic “instructions”).

    Nucleic acid prescription of function cannot be explained by “order out of chaos” or by “order on the edge of chaos” [163]. Physical phase changes cannot write algorithms. Biopolymeric matrices of high information retention are among the most complex entities known to science. They do not and can not arise from low-informational selfordering phenomena. Instead of order from chaos, the genetic code was algorithmically optimized to deliver highly informational, aperiodic, specified complexity [164]. Specified complexity usually lies closer to the noncompressible unordered end of the complexity spectrum than to the highly ordered end (Fig. 4). Patterning usually results from the reuse of programming modules or words. But this is only secondary to choice contingency utilizing better efficiency. Order itself is not the key to prescriptive information.

    The depth and level of coding and indeed structural engineering genius displayed in the genome is more than enough to convince any unbiased mind that a level of genius unimaginable to man was at work in its design.

    To go on pretending that the genome displays no design is not only mere denial but patent lunacy.

    Why in the world did Dawkins have to invent -out of thin air as usual- designoids?!
    Obviously it is precisely because the impression of true design is so clear and intuitive to any unbiased mind.

    Being the unspeakable reprobate that he is it obliged him to come up with yet another of his fallaciously conceived pseudo-explanations to protect his insecurities on the existence of a supreme being.

    Once again, Abel states,

    In physics, no empirical evidence exists, not even an anecdotal account, of Chaos, Catastrophe, maximum Complexity, order or pattern ever having produced sophisticated algorithmic function or cybernetic organization of any kind. A pulsar signal has abundant order and pattern. But it doesn’t DO anything useful. It contains no meaningful or functional message. It knows nothing of decision nodes or choice contingency. In biology, no rational or empirical justification exists for attributing linear, digital, encrypted, genetic recipes to stochastic ensembles OR to physical laws in any amount of time. Yet thousands of peer-reviewed papers exist in the literature on “self-organization.” How can denial of self-organization possibly be correct? The answer is that all of these papers are universally misdefining what is being observed. Self-ordering phenomena are being observed, not self-organization. But self-ordering phenomena do not measure up to the task of genetic programming.

    Thus Dr. Davison and so many others are right about Darwinists and also about claims that whatever evolution that actually occurred was necessarily programmed in from the start and has nothing to do with the imaginary unguided Darwinian RM + NS.

    Get over it.

    • TheOtherJim TheOtherJim

      I think you are confusing our analogies and metaphors for describing the genome with how it actually works. It is not a “code”, a “cookbook” or “instruction manual”. It is chemistry. The template dependence is the basis of copying and therefore evolution, but the whole thing is a complicated little test-tube reaction. There is a lot of complex chemistry in the universe that does not beg a designing force. The genome and it’s expression are no exception.

  36. bob koepp bob koepp

    Ummm…. judgments about what is “clear and intuitive” don’t make the grade as a “reliable method” in the 21st century, any more than judgments about what ideas are “clear and distinct” did in the 17th century. Operationalize your criteria for distinguishing between products of selection and products of design… then we might have something to talk about. But handwaving I can get at any parade, and from pretty girls!

  37. bob koepp:
    But those who wish to introduce the design hypothesis need to provide a method for reliably distinguishing between products of design and products of a process of natural selection.

    I am afraid that “natural selection” is entirely based on darwinian “imagination”. It is a conservative force which just removes extremities. It has nothing common with evolutionary sequences.

    Darwin recommended not to speculate much about “natural selection”, because it is too various to be understand. So nowadays wee see that profesor Dawkins is ranting against “group selection” which is according to profesor EOWilson “established fact”.

    No wonder – both professors have obviously a bit different “imagination”.

  38. John Harshman John Harshman

    So here’s a problem. One seems to attract more, and they all post interminable stream-of-consciousness screeds that say nothing of interest, thus making your blog hard to search for real content. How does that work? How did they find you in the first place? Figuring that out might at least be interesting.

    And I retract my request to keep them. Regular creationists can be cute, but these guys are just boring.

    • GHitch GHitch

      John Harshman said:

      …and they all post interminable stream-of-consciousness screeds that say nothing of interest, …
      … Regular creationists can be cute, but these guys are just boring.

      I love this “response”.

      We all know that in any on line debate when the materialist starts claiming that his opponent is posting “screed”, “nothing of interest”, is “boring” and most especially when they start calling you “cute”, they’re feeling cornered and they know not what to answer.

      Instead of admitting their confusion, and inability to refute, they then use the standard atheist “evade and run tactic” as Harshman just did.

      Not one of you has a clue about biosemiotics, algorithmic information theory, statistical mechanics or even just good old honesty.

  39. bob koepp bob koepp

    Darwin based the notion of ‘natural selection’ on a direct analogy to the process of artificial selection. So your fear that it’s “entirely based on darwinian ‘imagination’” is unfounded. Please back up your assertion about Darwin’s recommendation “not to speculate much about ‘natural selection,’ because it is too various to be understand.” As someone trained in the History of Science, I require chapter and verse citations for such claims. I await your instruction…

  40. John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

    Okay. here’s the situation. A pouting young child comes into the room, urinates on the floor, and says “I dare you to ban me from this living room!” Okay then. I ban him. Davison can now feed his martyr complex, but only on his own site (which he continually tried to promote by putting it in the comment body, rather than the header field where it should be. I deleted the comment “links”).

    The only other person who had previously been banned was actually an “evolutionista”, so Davison is my first creationist (not counting the mabus spammer). GHitch, you may stay, as you have not yet descended into personal invective. I will keep an eye on you.

    There is no party line one must adhere to on this blog, but I absolutely insist upon polite behaviour. If you come here, evacuate your bladder and then act all surprised when you get treated like a toddler, tough. Go play elsewhere; it’s no loss to my readers.

  41. Brian Brian

    So John, does this spike in readership work for you?
    I’d be interested in reading how JAD thinks it’s beyond doubt that evolution has stopped. The basic argument, as I’m not that smart nor do I have a long attention span.

    Something like:

    P1) Evolution is undeniable due to the fossil record.

    P2) One day, zapp, an undeniable event stopped natural selection in its tracks.

    C) Therefore, evolution by natural selection (and genetic drift to keep Larry Moran happy and upset Richard Dawkins) has stopped in its tracks.

    I think P2 will be the tricky one.

  42. Brian Brian

    Oh, you’ve banned him. Now I’ll never find out how evolution has been stopped.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      I think he needed to be more explicit in step 2, and that he never would be…

      • Brian Brian

        It’s a Darwinista (nice word, I can imagine you in your garish military regalia, self-awarded medals and dark sunglasses, convening la Junta Darwinista with Comandante Dawkins and, Capitán Myers . Screeming Darwin hasta la muerte! Arriba Darwin! Bajo diseño inteligente! Viva la revolución Darwinista!, but I digresss) conspiracy I tell you Generalisimo Wilkins.

        I think I found a photo of you enjoying your despotic spoils:
        http://www.pen-dragon.de/jpg/table/brett-junta-g.jpg

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          I would never wear that moustache.

  43. John Harshman John Harshman

    To satisfy all our curiosities, why don’t you invite him to explain (briefly, and without invective) his theory and the evidence for it. If, as I suspect, he’s incapable of doing anything briefly, or without invective, the you don’t allow the post.

    I too would like to know the evidence that evolution has stopped. Is it something more than “for billions of years, all manner of new groups appeared, but there haven’t been any major new innovations in the past thousand years”, as I suspect, it won’t take long.

    Oh, and by the way, plate tectonics has nearly ground to a halt too. In the past 180 million years, the Atlantic ocean has expanded by thousands of miles, but now it’s only expanding by a few centimeters per year.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Tell you what, John. You do that for your blog… or go visit his.

      • John Harshman John Harshman

        But I don’t have one. I parasitize yours. And his doesn’t have that requirement of brevity and politeness.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          Yes, but I am disinclined to allow him any more air than he already grasps for himself, and not on my blog at any rate.

    • Bob O'H Bob O'H

      JAD has written a couple of papers – I’m sure you can find the links on his blog. Experiments with giving JAD space to explain his stuff tend to end poorly.

  44. I would but I am obviusly banned, because I challenged nonsense of “natural selection” – which is obviously the most revered idol here.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      Obviously not.

  45. GHitch GHitch

    bob koepp | February 1, 2011 at 7:32 am | Reply

    Ummm…. judgments about what is “clear and intuitive” don’t make the grade as a “reliable method” in the 21st century, any more than judgments about what ideas are “clear and distinct” did in the 17th century. Operationalize your criteria for distinguishing between products of selection and products of design… then we might have something to talk about. But handwaving I can get at any parade, and from pretty girls!

    Are you completely incapable of reading or what?
    Your response amounts to this – “I didn’t understand a word you or Abel said, but I did catch a couple of words that I think I may latch on to to whine over”.

    Great tactic there.
    Maybe you should go learn something about hand waving since that’s what you just did rather than responding to a valid argument that you obviously don’t understand.

    • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

      First and only warning for tone. Keep it polite.

  46. GHitch GHitch

    VMartin,

    You’re right of course about selection.
    It is Darwin magic wand.
    But in reality its just a simple filter that weeds things out. Selection is a garbage disposal. Garbage disposals don’t engineer anything.

    David Berlinski said, concerning the current crowd of materialist Darwinians, that “there is not a first class intellect among them” and as we see here this is still more than obvious.

    No less than Frederick Hoyle wrote the following:

    “Because the old believers said that God came out of the sky, thereby connecting the Earth with events outside it, the new believers were obliged to say the opposite and to do so, as always, with intense conviction. Although the new believers had not a particle of evidence to support their statements on the matter, they asserted that the rabbit producing sludge (called soup to make it sound more palatable) was terrestrially located and that all chemical and biochemical transmogrifications of the sludge were terrestrially inspired. Because there was not a particle of evidence to support this view, new believers had to swallow it as an article of faith, otherwise they could not pass their examinations or secure a job or avoid the ridicule of their colleagues. So it came about from 1860 onward that new believers became in a sense mentally ill, or, more precisely, either you became mentally ill or you quitted the subject of biology, as I had done in my early teens. The trouble for young biologists was that, with everyone around them ill, it became impossible for them to think they were well unless they were ill, which again is a situation you can read all about in the columns of Nature [magazine].”

    –Sir F. Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution
    And,

    “The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

    Nonsense of a high order is ubiquitous in Darwinian circles, and in circles they continue to run.
    Anything but the truth for that they cannot endure.

    • John Harshman John Harshman

      Yes, yes, we’re all ignorant sluts. Fred Hoyle said so, David Berlinski said so, you say so, and what I tell you three times is true. But can you present a coherent argument for or against some idea? Can you do so without calling anyone an ignorant slut? If the answer is “yes”, please demonstrate. If the answer is “no”, just go away.

    • If I were you I would be embarrassed if I had to base my arguments on a quotation from an ignorant, pompous fool like Berlinski but you seem to match his intellectual level perfectly.

      • Brian Brian

        Wasn’t Fred Hoyle an astronomer? I think I’d prefer a dentist to work on my pearly whites than a veterinarian, though I’m sure the vet would be familiar with mammalian dentition. Why should I prefer an astronomer to an expert biologist?

      • Hoyle supported a form of panspermia i.e. that live originates in outer space and was brought to earth by meteorites etc. As such he was an outspoken opponent of the theory of evolution and is thus a hero for bunny brain and his friends above.

      • Brian Brian

        I’ve seen people do this before. Something like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But consider, if Hoyle is correct, then life still is natural and originated in the universe. No creation required. So, it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.

        • John S. Wilkins John S. Wilkins

          IDevotees love Hoyle because he “shows something is wrong with Darwinism” where Darwinism is supposed to include terrestrial origins. Ultimately we will settle on a mix: the elements (monomers and possibly even polymers of life) came from space, but life evolved here. How this undercuts Darwinism, is unclear.

      • John Harshman John Harshman

        Don’t forget, they also love Hoyle for a) declaring that Archaeopteryx is a fake, and for b) reinventing some equations of population genetics (apparently without ever having heard of population genetics) and then declaring that there was some kind of problem with natural selection.

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