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| Date: 2006/09/27 03:22:00, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
This topic has become very relevant lately due to Coral Ridge Ministries' release of the movie and book Darwin's Deadly Legacy.
As Elsberry shows here, it's just about anything considered bad that's linked back to Darwinism. Only democratic, free-market economics being based on the Bible goes free. But let's see ... I don't know much about Italian and Spanism fascism; but I do know they were based on nationalist ideas. The same with German Nazism. In Mein Kampf Hitler writes about Nature as a Godess with an eternal will, a different will for each species and each human race. It's not purposeless evolution, but rather intelligent design. Karl Marx accepted darwin's theory of evolution as the history of nature, but rejected its relevance for human society. Charles darwin was building faily directly on Thomas Malthus' claim that it was unavoidable that populations would grow faster than food supply. Any Marxist would say that it is social organization that prevents an equally efficient increase in food supply. As for social Darwinism, this is a very odd fellow. It's generally used for Herbert Spencer's laissez-faire liberalism, where the only task of the state was to protect the weak against the strong, while allowing the strong free enterprise. Not exactly the same as fascist totalitarianism or Marxist planned economics. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/10/02 06:13:28, Link |
| Author: pwe |
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I have started reading Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, and I am posting the review on my blog, as I read along. Part 1 is here. Richard Weikart is a fellow of the DI-CSC and besides that a professor of history. He participated in Coral Ridge Ministries' Darwin's Deadly Legacy. After have read around 100 pages of the book, my impression is that Weikart is rather selective in his quoting and presentation. He also views 'Darwinism' (by which he means Darwin's theory of evolution as presented in The Origin of Species) against the 'Judeo-Christian worldview', a humanist variety of Christiany. It's not that Weikart blames the holocaust on Darwin or on Darwinism; his claim rather is that Darwinism was part of the intellectual background for the holocaust. On its own, this is a rather uninteresting statement - because, how could it fail to be true? No, my problem with Weikart is the way in which he contrasts evolution and creation, almost as if this is a clearcut dividing line. Figuring out from Hitler's Mein Kampf whether Hitler was an evolutionist or a creationist is impossible, even meaningless, because he anyway operates with nature as a deity that has endowed each human race with its own purpose. If it wasn't because of Weikart's participation in Darwin's Deadly Legacy and his fellowship of the DI-CSC, I wouldn't have had all that much against his approach. But as the case is, I find him consciously manipulating cheers - pwe |
| Date: 2006/10/05 06:31:02, Link |
| Author: pwe |
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Just for the record: C'est finis! All six parts - phew! It'll take a long time. before I'll do anything like that again vheers - pwe |
| Date: 2006/11/28 09:10:50, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
According to the article SETI and Intelligent Design, the SETI project isn't searching for any messages:
So, the SETI project is not looking for any "obviously 'designed' message", just something that's not known to have been produced by a natural source (all known natural radio sources are broad-band) and which produces a Doppler effect. That is, the search isn't directed towards search for intelligence directly, only for something that is not known to have been produced naturally, and which might originate from a planet. That's all. Complex living systems have been encountered here on earth; they are even produced naturally. Ok, maybe some invisible hand might have a rôle in the production of an embryo, but as far as empirical science can tell, it's all natural. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/11/28 09:43:48, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Oh, well, how about this: the creator set up initial conditions that would causally lead to the intended goal. Somewhat like writing a program, starting it and going to sleep. The program will run to its end without needing any further interaction. Just too bad that the creator is running the program on a Microsoft operating system, so the program is hanging there with a "general failure"  - pwe |
| Date: 2006/11/29 07:13:42, Link | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Author: pwe | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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George Gilder, a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, gave May 1, 2004, a speech to The Philadelphia Society at their national meeting in Chicago, Illinois. The text of the speech is avaiable as Market Economics and the Conservative Movement. According to this article, Gilder said:
So, for Gilder, "findings in science and technology" have political implications. The term 'ordered liberty' rhymes with 'designed randomness', doesn't it? But what then are those findings?
And how is that relevant to ordered liberty?:
That is, order (= low entropy, when order = high predictability) furthers creativity (= high entropy). Sure, in a predictable economic environment you can better allow investments in creativity, because an immediate return of investments isn't needed. It's a question of calculated riscs, just to come up with yet another way of saying 'ordered liberty'. The better you can calculate the riscs, the more riscs can you allow yourself to take. Besides the finding that information is disequilibrium, what more findings can Gilder mention?
What Gödel demonstrated is that no first-order system capable of producing the whole numbers with a finite number of axioms can prove all true statements about the whole numbers. That is, any such system "is necessarily dependent on premises beyond itself". And it is beyond me, how that sustains the theme of ordered liberty of transcendent order under God. Luckily, Gilder has the power to enlighten us:
That any theory needs additional ad hoc hypotheses when applied to the real world is hardly surprising these days. And I still don't see, what Gilder means by 'order'. Are there some additional premises that he has left out?
Who has claimed that the world began in a primordial soup? There seems to be some equivocation here, doesn't there? Anyway, Gilder appears to forget that there also is the rightist biblicism; the belief that each and every true statement can be derived from the Bible, although the Bible is finite. And how do we know that a false statement doesn't slip in, while we interpret the Bible? Now, Gilder doesn't go there. Instead he recommends budget deficits as the solution to the economic problems:
Gilder's semantic leaps can be somewhat hard to follow, so let's try to make the logic a bit more explicit. Information is surprise. If you live in an area, where there's a 90% probability of rain on any one day, you won't be surprised, if the weather forecast tells you that it's going to rain the next day. Neither is this much information, because it's what you would have expected, even without the weather forecast. If the weather forecast tells you it's going to be clear and sunny the next day, there's more surprise and more information, because it's contrary to expectations. Now, Shannon's entropy measures the average surprise, it measures so to speak uncertainty. And a decrease in uncertainty is an increase in information.If you know everything, that is, if you have no uncertainty, you cannot gain any new information.The concept of entropy is also used in thermodynamics and here refers to the uncertainty of the microstate of a thermodynamic system given a certain macrostate. Let's assume we have two equally big containers, A and B, connected through a valve. Assume A to be filled with air molecules and B to be completely empty. This is a system in disequilibrium, because there is an ueven distribution of molecules. The macrostate is given by the combined volume of the two containers and the total energy of the air molecules. The microstate could be defined as the number of molecules in either container. At first, there is no uncertainty regarding the microstate: all air molecules are in A. If we open the valve, air molecules will start moving from A to B. Pick out an air molecule at random (equal probability for all molecules), is it in A or is it in B? At the very beginning we would be very surprised, if it were in B, because it takes time for air molecules to move - perhaps not much time, but we are measuring really quick here. That is, at the beginning, we can be pretty certain that a randomly chosen air molecule will be in A. With time, however, uncertainty will increase, as more molecules move from A to B. At equilibrium, half of the air molecules in A and the other half in B, the process grinds to a halt. Air molecules will still move around, and an air molecule may move from A to B, but it's equally likely that an air molecule moves from B to A. At the start we have maximum disequilibrium and no uncertainty. When equilibrium is reached we have maximum uncertainty. Since, for Shannon, information is negation of uncertainty, there is more information in a system in equilibrium (because there is more uncertainty) than in a system in disequilibrium (because there is less uncertainty). Let's say that all people in a society have the same number of dollar bills. Pick a dollar bill at random, who owns it? We here have a system in equilibrium - everybody has the same number of dollar bills - and we have maximum uncertainty, since the probability is the same for each person to own the dollar bill in question. Now, let 10% of the population own 90% of the dollar bills, and 90% of the population own 10% of the dollar bills. That's disequilibrium, and we won't be much surprised. if a randomly chosen dollar bill belongs to someone in the richest 10% of the population. Now, of course, what Gilder is after is that money makes the world go around. The rich people can't use all their money for consumption; maybe the richest 10% of the population will spend 90% of their money on investments and even charity. Investments means production, and productions means products that can be sold and purchased. Charity means a sure ticket to heaven for the giver and money that can be used for purchasing products for the receiver. A budget deficit for the state, such as through lowering taxes, means more money to the tax payers, and with a bit of luck, increasingly more, the more they paid in tax. But for the system to work, there must actually be some production, which in turn means there must be some purchase - if no-one buys anything, production will also soon stop. So purchase is actually equally important, and therefore purchase-capable people are needed. The rich can't simply thrive on selling to themselves, because they can't spend all their money on consumption, if they also need to invest money to keep up production. Gilder knows quite well that spending money is needed to keep the show going, though he sees low tax rates as an integral part of government spending:
So, low tax rates increase the surprises of entrepreneurial creativity, and somehow that leads to the defense and national security necessary to defend ordered liberty. That is, somehow it is all tied up with military technology, and, of course, anyone familiar with military triumph knows that it is all a question of surprising the enemy. Just read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, if in doubt. Yet, Gilder sees no problem in a purchase deficit:
Maybe so, maybe not so. But Gilder claims it is so:
But if the foreigner purchases an apple, the apple will be removed from the US, and the payment for the apple will be deposited in the US. The difference between a stock asset and an apple is that the purchaser doesn't get anything immediately from the asset, but hopes he can sell it some day for more than he gave for it. Where is that capital increase going to come from? If no-one buys anything but stock assets, there can be no production, and money will be only worth their waste paper value. A material production somewhere is needed in order for those money to really have any value - they can't be woth more money otherwise. Of course, the value of money can be measured in non-material goods - the US is taking up big loans in China, and the Chinese government buys a more friendly tone towards violations of humans rights in China and a lowered US support of Taiwan for those loans. Still, the money can't be used for anything good in the US, if there is no production there. Gilder, of course, knows this, and sees entrepreneurial creativity as the solution:
An what's more:
Sure, the good fortune of others is always your own; you need rich buyers. This is why the biggest untapped market is always the poor. cheers - pwe |
| Date: 2006/11/30 08:19:50, Link | ||||||
| Author: pwe | ||||||
Hi; Yes, it's quite funny, and the reason for my demise might have been that I - just as an example og how dissidents were treated - mentioned John A Davison whining over at Brainstorms, because DaveScot had banned him from UD. Ok, John is banned from just about everywhere, but Dembski is the only one that I know of that has whined about treatment of dissidents. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/04 10:50:34, Link | ||||||||||||||||||
| Author: pwe | ||||||||||||||||||
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Denyse O'Leary has on her ARN blog, The ID Report, a five part series on Why is tech guru George Gilder not a Darwinist? The second part, Life as architecture of ideas or information, is particularly interesting. George Gilder is co-founder of the Discovery Institute, a born-again Christian, and he likes glass-fiber cables, so all in all, he is indeed a tech guru. O'Leary starts out with:
We'll ignore that it is 'Alan Turing', and only pick up the notion that it is not the material implementation that matters. It's a funny thing with anti-evolutionists: that they believe that all evolutionists are materialists, and that therefore anyone who is not a materialist must be one of their heroes. My point in this post is to show that by that reasoning, Richard Dawkins must belong right up there with Allan Turing as an ID hero. O'Leary continues:
Yes, we understand this concept quite easily; but, may we ask, is O'Leary aware that 99% of all clay tablets found deal with economic transactions: so and so much grain is paid in tax, so and so much silver is paid in for some goods, and so on. Transactions describing movements of material objects. And without some material embodyment, the architecture of ideas in a computer is of little use. But ok, we live in the Age of Information, and we have known that for some time, so what is O'Leary's real point? Of course, that 'Darwinian materialism' must be provable wrong. To this purpose, O'Leray quotes Gilder for the following:
What Darwinian materialism? Unfortunately, materialism can refer to quite a gamut of ideas (ironic, ne'est-ce pas?); but usually implies something about the primacy of matter over ideas, whatever happens to be meant by 'ideas'. For instance, in Marxist historical materialism, the word 'materialism' refers to primacy of material production over the ideology; that is, the organization of material production causes ideologies rather than the other way around. This is obviously a very different kind of materialism than Democritus of Abdera's dictum, "There is nothing but atoms and space, everything else is only an opinion". O'Leary shortly after writes:
Yes, of course, but who doesn't know this? And anyway, Gilder in the quoted passage gets things wrong. There is quite a difference between whether something is determined and whether it is known to be determined, and even if it is known to be determined, whether the entire causal chain is known. If I flip a coin, I have reason to believe that it is fully determined whether it lands heads up or tails up; there is not some fairy that manipulates it underways. Yet I cannot predict the outcome, except statistically. If I receive an e-mail, the content of that e-mail is fully determined; it doesn't randomly change just because I open and read it. Whether it is information for me or not is a different matter, so O'Leary and Gilder are confusing knowledge and determination. Quoting Gilder, O'Leary writes:
If information is something that can only be picked up by a mind, how can information regulate "the flesh and the world"? And, as for the Gospel of John, it was the Word of God, not just any old word. And a paragraph later:
So, it's the word by any other name; but how does that relate to Darwinism? After having supplied the above quote, O'Leary turns rather mysterious:
Of course, the letters of an alphabet doesn't tell me, what to write; but the letters in for instance O'Leary's post tell me, what to read, don't they? And how is the 'small' difference between the number of nematode genes and human genes (which is 50% of the number of nematode genes) related to, what is really happening? Yet another Gilder quote:
It was for some time thought that proteins were the carriers of inheritance, and with the discovery of DNA, it was still discussed, which had which rôle. With Francis Crick's Central Dogma the discussion ended with DNA being the carrier of inheritance, and proteins being encoded in DNA. O'Leary writes that there are four DNA code letters, A,C,G,T. However, these do not encode anything; we need three of them to make, what's called a codon, the actual letter of the DNA code. There are therefore 4*4*4 = 64 different codons, a 64 letter alphabeth. Each codon either encodes an amino acid or is a stop code. There are 20 amino acids, so 64 letter alphabeth of DNA is actually translated to a 21 letter alphabeth, of which the 20 letters, the amino acids, are used in proteins. It is therefore not possible from a protein to reconstruct its gene (the sequence of codons that encoded it), and therefore proteins cannot precede DNA. So, contrary to O'Leary's statement above, that "what is really happening is not happening in the genes", Gilder follows the general trend by claiming that DNA is the provider of information. Perhaps O'Leary has misunderstood Gilders statement that "DNA is a neutral carrier of information, independent of its chemistry and physics"? A statement that by the way is not quite right, but let's just ignore that. O'Leary does not make a distinction between DNA and genes, while Gilder does not mention genes. However, the way he refers to DNA, he clearly means DNA patterns, not the individuals DNA molecules. This, interestingly, brings Gilder in exact line with the atheist Darwinist materialist Richard Dawkins, who back in 1986 published The Blind Watchmaker. On p. 127 of said book, Dawkins writes:
That is, while DNA molecules are material, genes = DNA patterns are not, though each concrete instance needs to exist in a material form. For Dawkins as for Gilder, the DNA molecules are carriers of information, an information that is the DNA pattern, which itself is neither physical nor chemical, but apparently, in a Platonistic sense, an idea. An entire genome must therefore, for Dawkins, not be something physical and chemical, but "its architecture of ideas." Maybe the ID people should study Darwinists a bit more closely, before they run out and claim to have refuted Darwinist materialism? - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/04 11:25:23, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Umm. could be. Lehigh's Department of Biological Sciences has this little disclaimer:
So, he is a professor of the department, but he is indeed considered to be a 'heretic'; the rest of the faculty members regarding intelligent design as not scientific. And, by the way: have you noticed it's a fine full moon to night? (at least as seen from here, where I sit) - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/05 11:27:13, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
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In Part Four, The hierarchy of information vs. "nothing but", of Denyse O'Leary five part series on George Gilder, there is an interesting little detail. O'Leary writes:
So, instead of just forcing our things on other people, we also have to force our ideas on them. O'Leary continues:
See, things are not that simple. To metabolize lactose, an ingredient in milk and other dairy products, you need the enzyme lactase, an enzyme produced, for obvious reasons, by young mammals, but usually not by adult mammals. For humans, the production generally cease between the ages two and five. This is called lactose intolerance (Wikipedia article). Northern Europeans (and people elsewhere of Northern European origin) with their long tradition of living on dairy products have very few lactose intolerant people, whereas among African Bantus 89% are lactose intolerant, and among Native Americans 100% are lactose intolerant. So, it's not just a question of giving people the idea that milk is healthy, because maybe it isn't. It is not possible from O'Leary's short story above to see, if the milk was cow milk or plant milk, and if it was cow milk, whether it had been treated with lactose catalysing bacteria or another process with the same purpose. But all in all, it is possible that the milk powder was thrown away, becayúse it really wasn't healthy. It's not just a question of ideas, lactose intolerance is real, not hysteria, and lactose tolerance is due to a mutation that is most widespread among Northern Europeans. So whether O'Leary likes it or not, she has unknowingly touched upon a subject that favors the evil Darwinists rather than the good IDists. Source - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/05 11:46:52, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
But what then was 'Darwinism' to Stalin and Lysenko? It's near impossible to figure out, what people mean by 'Darwinism', although I have spent some time trying. According to Richard Weikart, Hitler was a 'social darwinist'. Usually, 'social Darwinism' refers to laissez-faire liberalism, which is for a minimal state, whose only rôle is to protect the weak against the strong. Hardly descriptive of a totalitarian ideology as Nazism. Anyway, Darwin wasn't opposed to the idea that environment played a rôle; his pangenesis theory of inheritance stated that germ cells contained information from the entire body, even such as was due to environmental influences on the individual. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/06 07:14:18, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Yes, Lysenko was primarily against Mendelian genetics - which was considered to be similar to believing in fairies, since genes could not be seen back then. Interesting that Lysenko was against chance. That moves him into line with the IDists, doesn't it? - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/06 11:41:37, Link | ||||||
| Author: pwe | ||||||
Thanks for the link Here's another quote:
Well, you gotta hand it to them: when they are funny, they are really funny. Now we only need some joke about William Dembski saying, "I am the Last Paleyan". - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/06 11:48:11, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Oh, sure they would The Creator had designed you Kristine of all people to be evangelist of postmodern estrangement in exactly your congregation.See, we aren't really maladjusted, the apparent maladjustment is part of the design (and anyway, why isn't it ebverybody else that's maladjusted?) - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/07 07:12:25, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Umm, I thought that simplicity was the trademark of intelligence. If you can do everything from scratch, why bother with making things complex? If you fine-tune constants of nature as you like and make up any natural laws you like, why make things complex? - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/07 07:54:46, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Well, I have read some chapters of the book, and for a layman like me, they appear to point at real problems. But then again, I am a layman, so what do I know? And the book is hosted by Lambert Dolphin, who claims that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics was part of the curse of the creation caused by Adam and Eve's eating of the forbidden fruit. And that the expansion of the universe is due to rebellious angels that abandoned their job of keeping the stars in place. So, basically we are given the choice of still accepting prebiotic evolution or giving in to complete make-believe. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/07 08:08:16, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Thanks for the link And indeed it is fascinating. I noticed this passage:
And I thought that an intelligent designer didn't need to practise - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/09 05:44:00, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Well, Dembski is just trying to be constructive - you haven't lost until you think you have lost. Quoting Dembski from the linkeed thread:
Note "ID’s intellectual vitality", Dover's only a flesh wound, you know ____ ETA: Michael Behe's trying to cover up for Dover as well according to the PT: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/12/behe_reveals_th.html - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/09 05:58:14, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
VMartin, do you know that only prokaryotes use frame shifts? Eukaryotes do not. Is this behavioral difference encoded in DNA or is it not?
Could you be more specific here? Is it like Richard Dawkins making a distinction between DNA molecules and DNA patterms? - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/11 11:14:26, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Well, but bacteria do not interpret their genome at will, so what's your point? Of course, on its own, a genome means nothing, it carries no information (except the information about its particular sequence of base pairs), so where do the interpretative rules reside? - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/11 11:53:02, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Not necessarily a few centuries The way I read Crandaddy, he is more into phenomenology than into "ghost-in-the-machine" thinking, so only about one century. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/12 06:49:58, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Ok, but from whence then the first zygotes? Do you suggest that all species have a different origin? - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/14 10:18:18, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
I am aware that some Russian (and other) linguists for some reason assumed biological evolution and language evolution to follow the same rules. But language is learned, while you don't learn your biology. Two peoples interacting with each other will tend to adopt words from each other. Nut whales didn't learn to swim by taking lessons from fish, or did they? Apparently the problem is due to a non-Darwinian idea of evolution anf inheritance. See for instace my article about Johann Gottlieb Fichte for an example of, what the linguists are arguing against. I know that some Darwinists claim that biological inheritance and cultural inheritance can be described similarly, e.g. in a cladiogram; but I think they are wrong. I live near an airport, but believe me: I don't have wings  - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/14 10:30:02, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Thanks for the link, Jason Here's the end of the article:
Well, let's see some output from that lab, before we decide how it'll function. That you can be a creationist and not get too dirty in lab is as correct as it is that you don't do much in that lab in the first round. The 2nd Law of Laboratorydynamics states that the more you work, the dirtier you get, and that's impossible for the IDists and creationists to circumvent. - pwe |
| Date: 2006/12/21 10:54:47, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Yes, UD is the only blog in the known blog universe, where the number of posts in a thread can cecrease over time. Wonder if there is some scientific explanation for it. It's against the SLoT, isn't it? - pwe |
| Date: 2007/01/03 09:04:40, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
 - Thanks for the info.From the ad for the game:
So, the team with the most rubber brains wins. Guess, which team that would be. - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/11 06:50:48, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Sure, we know shit, when we smell it, and guys, aren't we smelling shit right now?
I always try to tell my project leader that ;) - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/15 11:14:28, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
1. Analogy -- how do you measure "[h]ow similar is the phenomenon to something known to be designed"? Isn't that rather subjective? For the average ID-guy, a bacterial flagellum may be the spitting image of the motore+screw of their toy boat, but for the rest of us, the analogy may be a wee bit less striking. 2. Discontinuity -- gee, I dunno how this could be done, and I'm a genius, so it's as irreducibly complex as can be. 3. Rationality -- purposeful, as judged by who? Humans are notoriously bad at guessings ieach other's purposes, so whakes anyone think we can guess purposes elsewhere? 4. Foresight -- Doesn't Mike Gene know that's undecidable? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/22 10:39:53, Link |
| Author: pwe |
| Oh, what a lovely article, Kristine |
| Date: 2008/01/26 04:27:08, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
You don't say? I have a question, though. Which of the twins is Mike Gene and which is William Dembski? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/26 06:15:19, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
It is also worth noting that, while Darwin here writes about 'civilised' and 'savage' human races, in the very next chapters he claims that no soch division can be made (on physiological traits, and that's what we are dealing with, when we talk about the theory of evolution) The distinction between 'civilised' and 'savage' races or nations was not Darwin's invention, but part of the general thinking in Europe. The idea of black Africans as link between gorillas and Caucasians as promoted here is also rejected by Darwin later. The main point in the passage quoted by Wesley is that, if the black Africans become extinct, that link will be missed; that is, we are dealing with a missing link in the making. Therefore, we may assume, such events also occurred in the past, so no need to worry about missing links: they do not disprove Darwin's theory! It can get rather annoying to have to explain this over and over and ... and over, but creationists are extremely thick-headed, so maybe if we wrote it on a sledge-hammer, then we could ... - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/26 06:21:48, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
From AD's blog:
I couldn't have said it better myself - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/26 08:51:17, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Why do we ALL need to have a photo of Casey Luskin? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/27 06:54:13, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Ummm, a labelled elephant? Does sound as an act of intelligent design, it sure does. Poor elephant :( Anyway, I don't think Behe's right -- it's just that the arguments don't really work, unless you have to have drink a lot of champagne already. - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/27 07:16:44, Link | ||||||
| Author: pwe | ||||||
Thanks Bob for the tip :) In the thread My view of the End Times, JAD responds:
Oh, the horror, the horror -- where can we run and hide from those scarlet As? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/29 08:55:10, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Yes, they are a weird lot, aren't they?Who has the blackest box? Charles Darwin was in The Origin of Species not too concernes with giving details about the mechanism of variation. In the Conclusion he wrote something about use and disuse of organs and subsequent modifications to other organs. Later he developed the pangenesis theory that was picked apart by Francis Galton. However, Charles Darwin at least tried to come up with a gray box, and that box has become a whiter shade of pale since then due to RESEARCH. THe Disco Kids, including Behe, employ the black boxiest black box that has ever black boxed this or any other known or unknown planet and its surroundings, namely intelligence. Intelligence is a quantity (or is it a quality?) capable of doing ANYTHING -- you imagine it, intelligence can do it. But intelligence does not have any parts, no internal workings or anything else, it is not subject to any kind of scientific analysis. So who should have a black box shoveled down their throats? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/29 09:16:00, Link | ||||||||||
| Author: pwe | ||||||||||
Add to that the beginning of Sal's post:
Professor Davison, anyone we know? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/30 10:47:07, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Offensive? Au contraire mon frère. This natural born super genius writes about genetics:
Isn't that just right? Of course, any change is an imperfection, and the imperfect will suffer righteously in hell! - pwe |
| Date: 2008/01/30 10:56:34, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
However, if you had served us this one: The Big Bang; the Age of the Universe; and Red Shift I would have had to kill you  Here we read:
Except that it's the other way around. The universe was thought to be fairly static, when Hubble discovered the redshift af distant galaxies, which in turn made the Roman Catholic Priest Georges Lemaître come up with the Big Bang theory. But then again, what do you expect from a creationist? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/05 04:23:46, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
It's just that the creationist definition of 'science' isn't quite the same as the one used by scientists. According to the Bible astrologers and necromancers should be killed (why is it that an all-loving god is so happy abound having people killed?), but maybe astrologers and necromancers just have their own definition of science? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/12 10:55:13, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Is it ok for anyone to join the fun? I have made a couple of blog posts about William Dembski and might like to add the icon to them. - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/13 02:21:01, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
[quote=Albatrossity2,Feb. 12 2008,17:01]
Good point. But then again -- he makes us laugh, and we need to laugh, so ... - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/13 02:25:53, Link | ||||
| Author: pwe | ||||
Ummm, well, I wonder if Sal knows that Bishop George Berkeley critizised differential calculus and yet claimed that the mind of God heard the sound of falling trees in the wood, when nobody else heard it (or something like that). - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/13 10:17:16, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Looks fine. Now I only need to find out, what a DoucheBag Is - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/13 10:20:15, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Is there anything in particular you want to talk about? - pwe |
| Date: 2008/02/19 06:43:15, Link | ||
| Author: pwe | ||
Kristine is always a day late -- and so am I Tillykke med fødselsdagen! - pwe |
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