Occam's Aftershave
Posts: 5287
Joined: Feb. 2006
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I like this Dr. Swamidass guy. 
In one concise post he manages to point out the IDiots are pitifully and willfully ignorant about actual evolutionary theory and its evidence.
| Quote | You forget with whom you are speaking. This is my area of expertise. I do not assess the field by reading pop culture books. I read the primary literature. I have 20 years of experience in science and have read thousands of papers on this topic, from every viewpoint and side of the issue. If I say something exists that you do not know about, maybe, just maybe, I am right.
It turns out that there are hundreds of mathematical modeling papers published each month that are directly relevant to this discussion. This is vast area of work, that is mathematically rigorous and has consistently produced knowledge about how biological systems function in the present, not just the past. My specific expertise, by the way, is just one relatively small subfield in a gigantic discipline. I can only smile when you say: “This is nonsense. I am sorry. They have no math!!”
My meta-question is, how is that you do not know about a vast body of work that is directly relevant to the questions you find most important in science? Remarkably, I linked directly to several papers in this area in my article, and so did VJ, but somehow you missed them. My best guess is that only a tiny tiny fraction of this work has made its way into pop culture, and the part that has is very watered down and simplified. If this is your only way of thinking about science, through the processed and prepackaged thoughts of Dembski, Meyers, Axe, Behe, and Denton, of course you would not know about this world. |
He also chides them for being so lazy and tells them specifically what they need to do to get ID taken seriously.
| Quote | So here is the deal. If you want ID to be taken seriously. You need end the silly polemics. This is not an argument to be won with words. It is an exposition of mathematics.
Any one of these papers, ID theorists could:
1. Get the same data as the paper (it usually all freely available).
2. Build an alternate, precise mathematical model for design.
3. Fit the data (using less parameters) better than the current evolutionary models.
4. Test the implications of that model on the behavior of biological systems today.
5. Instead of a book, publish two or three papers on that effort (I do not care the reputation of the journal if the actual science is good).
Now you have one story. Get your friends together. Multiply this times 1000, so there is a body of rigorous work full of interesting stories. Police yourselves, and shoot down the bad models that fail, and come to a consensus together about what consistent design principles (mathematically speaking) explain the data with fewer parameters than strictly evolutionary models. At this point, maybe 10 years from now if you begin in haste, and are fortunate enough to be right, you might then have the seed of scientific argument. Of course, if you are right, it will grow even further from there.
You will certainly have grown the ID culdesac into a community of researchers larger than you can count.
I’m sure, at this point, you protest. This seems hard. And difficult. And long.
Yes. It is. Science is hard, difficult, and long.
But it is grand. Come meet me here. |
The man wore out three pairs of kneecaps kicking them in the ass. 
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"CO2 can't re-emit any trapped heat unless all the molecules point the right way"
"All the evidence supports Creation baraminology"
"If it required a mind, planning and design, it isn't materialistic."
"Jews and Christians are Muslims."
- Joke "Sharon" Gallien, world's dumbest YEC.
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Forget that messy evidence stuff. If your intuition tells you life is Designed then by golly life is Designed! Because hey, everyone knows evolution couldn't produce all this complex stuff by accident.
