stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (deejay @ Dec. 17 2006,23:54) | Steve, I’m enjoying it while it lasts as well, but there’s only so much enjoyment I can derive by looking down on the creationists and their ways. One good thing that has come out of all the lurking I’ve done here is that I finally got motivated to pick up the Origin of Species, which I picked up used from my local bookshop when they didn’t have The Blind Watchmaker in stock. I figure my time is better spent seeing what Darwin had to say on the issue of evolution than checking in daily to see what Dembski or DaveScot thinks about it. Quick question, though, for which I don’t remember your answer: do you think Behe is smart enough to know he’s a con artist? With him, I see someone who just can’t recognize that his demand for demonstrated step-by-step mutation models complete with fitness scores to support evolution is a world, and do I mean a world, more stringent than the standards he’s content to put forth to support ID. I think he’s fallen in love with the fact that he was chosen by divine Providence to spread the gospel, but other than that, he does seem to have some level of integrity about him.
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On who is smart enough, not smart enough, it's hard to tell. I'm just guessing. Probably if you asked me at different times I'd give you different answers. If I had to round up my thoughts on the matter, here goes.
Dembski: Snake oil salesman. Probably knows, much of the time, that the jig is up, but that's no reason to be honest about it and stop raking in the royalties and free plane tickets etc. Dembski's path is pretty much the one laid out in Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Started off thinking he had something big, and by the time he realized otherwise, his 'revolution' was putting bread on his table.
Behe: A Heddle-type figure. He's got some integrity about him. He's not the shameless huckster Dembski is. He's been put through the wringer and he's tired and he just wants to get back to imagining the Hand of God in the little ribosomes. When he makes those impossible demands he's just lashing out at people who he thinks are being mean to his great idea. Doesn't think that he's wrong, but isn't going to entertain the possibility by doing any silly experiments which might flop.
Salvador, Casey Luskin, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, AFDave, Troutmac and a few others: In Lewis Black's subtle formulation, they're "Stone-cold &%$#-nuts". Those guys are like little wind-up toys. Machines for endless loops of creationist prerecordings, and they have that deep down dumb american fundiness. Too dumb to know how dumb they are. Paul Nelson's the smartest of the group. He came up with a new jargonny term, Ontogenetic Depth or something like that. Basically a metric-free metric of how designy something is, I understand. Haven't seen that before.
Davetard: May believe, may not, doesn't really matter, he's just a power junkie. He likes lording over people and has a miserable personality. Family probably hates him if he acts like this in real life.
Dave Heddle: Basically a smart guy when the topic's not religion. Remembers enough about how science is done to know that ID ain't it. When the topic is religion, he abandons all reason and believes in completely dysfunctional philosophical arguments. Mostly Harmless.
I was also motivated to pick up Origin of Species by Panda's Thumb. Following these discussions on a message board is really not the same as learning something comprehensively. You'll learn more science in a more coherent way reading one chapter of a college biology or geology textbook than reading all the AFDave thread, for instance. And about OoS, I was pretty stunned. The evidence, as Darwin reviews it over several chapters, is so murkey and noisy, that I can say for a fact I would not have had the brains to figure out what he did. If people want an idea how painstakingly hard science can be, they should read that book. I don't remember who said this, but once ideas are developed and arranged all neat and perfect in a textbook, you can no longer see how godawful messy and unclear it was when it was figured out.
EDIT: not that the guys on the AFDave thread have been incomplete or in any way inadequate, but running through a lot of expert literature is just going to mostly go over people's heads. It's what you do when you refute people, but it's not how to teach a bulk of info to amateurs.
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