khan
Posts: 1554
Joined: May 2007
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| Quote (oldmanintheskydidntdoit @ Feb. 03 2012,08:20) | I'm convinced.
Timaeus' first started to post, as far as I can tell towards the end of 2007.
| Quote | It depends on the meaning of “chance”, a term whose exact meaning has been debated at least since Aristotle.
“Chance” could mean the occurrence of an event which could just as well not have happened, but did, yet, once having happened, sets in motion a chain of events. In that case, Gould would be right: Mutation A, which set in motion the changes which ultimately produced mammals, might never have happened, and therefore mammals might never have been produced, or might have been produced later or earlier, by a chain of events beginning with Mutation B or C, and even then the exact types of mammals that emerged might have been different, because they were emerging in different environments and therefore would have been subject to different selective pressures.
“Chance”, on the other hand, might be a term which merely covers up our ignorance of causes. It might be that perfectly mathematical mind with infinite computational speed could predict every event from the Big Bang forward, to the precise instant, including the emergence of life and of man, but that our finite human capacities cause us to attribute many of the key evolutionary events — “random mutations” as we call them — to “chance”. “Chance” in this meaning does not really exist; it is only the human interpretation of a deeper necessity. In that case, Gould would be wrong: life would have had to evolve exactly the way it did, when it did, to the last detail.
Thus, unless Gould gives a clear account of the relationship between “chance” and “necessity”, and whether only one of these, or both of these, actually operate as causes in nature, his statement is intellectually arbitrary, and he has no right to affirm it.
I note, however, that precisely if Gould is right, then evolution cannot be predicted as a mathematically necessary outcome of the original condition of the universe, and therefore cannot be “proved” in the way that theories are “proved” in mathematical physics. His version of evolution is decisively a “historical” theory, depending completely on contingent events, and contingent events can only be verified by historical means. In the case of evolutionary events, their remoteness in time and the lack of any direct evidence about their causes (i.e., evidence from intact DNA hundreds of millions of years old) means that neither the fact of these ancient contingent events, nor the Darwinian mechanisms behind them, can ever be verified. Darwinism thus becomes at best a “likely story” devised to explain the apparent fact of common descent. In my view, it has no higher scientific status than that. |
Then the next day:
| Quote | On the question of formal qualifications:
Can someone correct me if I’m wrong? I believe that the only degree that Darwin ever completed was a degree in the humanities. I know he started medical studies, but he dropped out. I think he studied theology also, and he may have graduated, but I think he dropped out of that, too. But I don’t think he ever passed a university exam in biology proper (or whatever it would have been called then — zoology, botany, etc.), despite the fact that he was on the way to becoming one of England’s greatest naturalists when he was still an undergraduate. So when the foes of ID scream loudly that Dembski or Berlinski are “not qualified” to talk about evolution because they are philosophers or mathematicians rather than biologists, a delicious retort is available to us. But as I say, I’d like to be corrected if I misunderstood what I read about Darwin’s academic curriculum vitae.
More generally, I find the anti-ID side hypocritical about qualifications. They’re glad to take help from Ruse or Forrest, who aren’t scientists, or from Matzke, whose highest degree, a Master’s, is in Geography, but they are the first to point out any supporter of ID who is “not qualified” to criticize evolution because his or her degree isn’t in biology. They thus switch back and forth between “credentialism” and “respect for actual knowledge, no matter how acquired”, as it serves their turn. So they can demand that Behe answer grad students like Matzke and Abbie Smith, and not hide behind his credentials, but at the same time they can dismiss the arguments of Meyer, Johnson, etc., without answering them, by pointing out a lack of biological credentials. They make note of Dembski as “not a scientist” but a mathematician, but praise the blogs of Rosenhouse, whose Ph.D. is also in Math and appears to know much less about biology than Dembski. And on the Amazon blog, the only anti-Behe writer with a Ph.D. in biology, Levin I think his name is, who frequently criticizes IDers for lack of knowledge of basic biology, accepts without hesitation the biologically ignorant “help” of a lawyer and a “paleobiologist” (who by his own admission has no graduate degrees and will not point to a single one of his refereed publications). The double standard, or rather shifting standard, in all of this is obvious.
(If any Darwinist is reading this, I double-dog-dare him to reply and say EITHER that Matzke and Ruse and Rosenhouse are unqualified scientific quacks who have no business speaking about Darwinism vs. design, OR that it’s the argument, not the formal training, that matters, and therefore that Dembski and all the other “non-scientists” who support ID deserve a hearing, regardless of their degrees, on the basis of the arguments they offer.)
As for the more general question of autodidacts, that’s not really our main concern here, but for what it’s worth, my impression of autodidacts is that they can be either (1) very impressive, thoughtful individuals who are more worthy of a hearing than many Ph.D.s (I believe that Lincoln, Franklin, Montaigne, Rousseau and Socrates were largely self-taught), or (2) very brittle, combative, picky individuals, frequently concerned more about being “correct” (catching people out on little slips of grammar or arithmetic or historical fact) than about getting to the philosophical heart of a subject, and frequently rather manic hobbyists for some pet cause, be it Ayn Rand, Bacon wrote Shakespeare, atheism, or the like. The latter sort are often verbally very fluent and in a fashion erudite, but the fluidity tends to remind one of diarrhea, and the erudition frequently smells of pedantry, or of facts memorized without deep understanding. The latter type also often write with a cocksure arrogance that many scholars with a greater degree of formal education would eschew; it’s almost as if they feel second-class due to lack of degrees and have to make up for it with bravado. I’ve encountered many such people on listserv groups and I see them blogging on Amazon against Behe etc.
So I’ve found autodidacticism a mixed blessing for the world. Some people aren’t harmed by it at all, and can even become more creative and less hidebound thinkers because of it, whereas other people are so stubborn, contrarian, and lacking in humility by nature, that they desperately need formal education to break down their intellectual pride and teach them well-mannered intellectual discourse. Thus, just as the internet makes a healthy autodidacticism possible, it makes the unhealthiest kinds of autodidact even more insufferable then ever.
T. |
And this too from slightly earlier:
| Quote | Carl Sachs wrote:
“In philosophy departments, critics of materialism of all stripes flourish very well — and not just in ‘Christian’ colleges and universities.”
Mr. Sachs must be from a different neck of the woods than mine, if he’s seen many philosophy departments where critics of materialism “flourish”. My experience of philosophy departments is quite different. They are stacked with people like Dennett and Pennock and Ruse and Forrest, who will hire only people like themselves.
In such an environment, it may indeed be possible to criticize the cruder forms of materialism, like that of Richard Dawkins, but almost always the replacement position is just a more refined form of materialism. The only teleologies allowed are immanentist, and even those are well to the left of such quasi-spiritual immanentisms as Aristotle’s. And increasingly, philosophy faculty are not interested in metaphysical problems at all (e.g., teleology vs. mechanism, soul vs. epiphenomenalism), but concentrate on offering deconstructionist and nihilist accounts of everything, including the very possibility of metaphysics. I doubt that this anti-rationalism is an improvement on the old materialisms of Lucretius and Marx and Freud, from the point of view of most ID supporters.
In my experience that, after biology and perhaps some of the social sciences, the philosophy departments at most modern universities are the main bastions on campus of materialism, relativism, and atheism. You’ll find riper prospects for Platonism among the theoretical physics faculty, and riper prospects for Aristotelianism among the political science faculty.
Of course there are exceptions. Certain Catholic universities, obviously, maintain philosophy departments where positions other than the materialist are treated as live options. And there are Protestant analogues. And in rare cases, a big-name university may tolerate a non-materialist philosopher, if he’s absolutely colossal in stature and will bring in top graduate students. But I know of very few non-denominational universities who would hire, for example, a Plato scholar who upheld the Platonic-Pythagorean doctrine of the soul as “true”.
Also, in my experience, the number of Religious Studies Ph.D.s who succeed in getting positions in Philosophy departments, in positions directly related to the subject of religion, such as Philosophy of Religion, is about equal to the number of elephants who can dance on the head of a pin. This is so even when the Religious Studies grads in question have written dissertations on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, etc. Three guesses why most Philosophy faculty feel this antipathy towards Religious Studies grads!
Finally, if a young Ph.D. published an essay in a refereed philosophy journal, arguing for Intelligent Design along Dembskian lines, I think we can safely say that such a person would put in quite a few years as a taxi driver before being hired in the Philosophy department of a mainstream secular university.
Behe’s advice to young biologists who support ID — “Until you have tenure, keep your head down and your mouth shut” — applies equally to any young philosopher who would dare to argue that materialism, phenomenology, deconstructionism and positivism are all erroneous, destructive, and evil, and that traditional Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism or Vedanta is “true”. Such a teaching applicant would be told condescendingly by the Philosophy Chair to go teach in a seminary (and probably, under the Chair’s breath, to go to hell.) |
Using google you can search a site for a specific term, then filter that down to a specific date range.
http://tinyurl.com/72uqrqm....72uqrqm
2007-2008 there.
So yeah, if this guy is not Dembski then he's his long lost twin.... |
Dr Dr sounds a lot like Rodney Dangerfield.
No Respect
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"It's as if all those words, in their hurry to escape from the loony, have fallen over each other, forming scrambled heaps of meaninglessness." -damitall
That's so fucking stupid it merits a wing in the museum of stupid. -midwifetoad
Frequency is just the plural of wavelength...
-JoeG
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