Albatrossity2
Posts: 2780
Joined: Mar. 2007
|
GilD had an opinion piece on UD yesterday, arguing that | Quote | | ...formal academic training is not required to figure out how stuff works, or to be qualified to recognize when claims such as the blind-watchmaker hypothesis have been artificially isolated from the critical scrutiny and evidential standards usually applied to objective scientific claims. |
He based this on his own anecdotal history | Quote | | My three college degrees are in foreign language, literature, and music. I now earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace research and development, with specialties in navigation and control software for precision-guided airdrop systems, and most recently in explicit finite-element analysis of dynamic systems. I became interested in software engineering when I discovered artificial intelligence in the mid-1980s, and am the primary author of two world-class AI programs. I am almost completely self-taught in all disciplines outside of those represented by my college degrees. |
Naturally, this is followed by the yessirs, including nullasalas, who rants about the uselessness of universities, which are essentially unchanged for the past few hundred years. That's amusing; I thought that these guys loved stasis...
But to get back to Gil's point, and why it is pointless. Note that Gil's self-taught skills have actually allowed him to do something. I assume that his computer programs work; his skills have allowed him to produce products which justify his wages in the industry. I presume that a trained computer programmer could look at Gil's output and see that he knows what he is doing; his work could withstand review by an expert.
This is obviously a different situation than the one he tries to convince us is analogous. ID critics who are verbally sniping at biology from the sidelines, but who have yet to produce anything of value, and whose few "products" (the Nixplanatory Filter and a bunch of books) have withered under the scrutiny of those who are trained in the relevant disciplines, are not analogous to his productive career in a field where he had no university training.
So Gil, if you're reading this, you need to understand the difference between walking the walk and talking the talk. If undereducated amateurs want to be taken seriously, they have to DO something, and that something has to be of good quality. That's true in computer programming, as you know, and also true in biology. Simply saying that your ideas are better is not going to get you much respect from those whose ideas you are criticizing. The respect will be earned when those ideas bear fruit in the form of new drugs, new therapies, new crops, or other biologically relevant output. Until then, your status on the sidelines of biological research is all too well-deserved.
--------------
Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
- Pattiann Rogers
|
