That’s enough for me to know this conversation is going nowhere.
Didn’t you in fact start it in that direction?
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Trying to get agreement to an unsupported claim by making it a condition of discussion is a pretty low trick. Abandoning the topic because it didn’t work only makes it clear that you can’t support your claims.
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In order for a dialog to have any real meaning, we need to start with a shared reality. Anytime a creationist or ID proponent claims that evolution has been falsified, we aren’t operating in a shared reality. Such a conversation will go nowhere by default.
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What conversation did you want to have? The notion that Axe or anyone else “disproved evolution” is laugh-out-loud stuff, but if you want to discuss Axe’s work and its place in biology, that is reasonable and doable.
Or did you want to discuss the circumstances at the end of his postdoc? It’s hard to tell because you wrote “kicked out of his lab by the exact sort of people who populate this board” which suggests you are interested in labeling and sorting people. That doesn’t seem worthwhile at all, to me.
But if you have coherent questions, and can ask them as an adult, the conversation need not “go nowhere.”
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If the DI cut Axe’s funding, that should be the end of the story.
My understanding is that most research biochemists without funding don’t have a job for long (at least not as a biochemist).
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No. The DI continued funding him, after his departure from Alan Fersht’s Centre for Protein Engineering, when he moved to the Babraham Institute, also in Cambridge.
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Is that mentioned anywhere? I don’t see it. Do you?
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I can’t rule that out but I haven’t seen any reliable evidence for it (or anything beyond the New Scientist article). In the absence of evidence I can’t come to any firm conclusion on the matter - and I should not be expected to.
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I stand corrected! - I will edit.
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Luckily for Axe, there are plenty of religious clown colleges that will give endowed chairs to mediocre biologists with no publication record to speak of, but who are good at apologetics.
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Yes, but then I’ve always thought that the most easily distinguishing feature of Biola was their focus on apologetics. I’m not sure that even most other “religious clown colleges” feature it quite so prominently. They started as the Bible Institute Of Los Angeles – and it often seems that they still see themselves that way.
I’m sure this is a common question, but how does one distinguish between Guided Evolution (ID) and Unguided Evolution (CD)?
Hello @Thacker , and Welcome back! :hat:
One doesn’t. 
It’s usually the case that these should be indistinguishable, at least among Old Earth and Theological Evolution folks. ID proponents maintain there is a distinction, but cannot (or will not) test it.
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Good question. I suppose it’s a little bit like trying to distinguish models of weather where little invisible angels are pushing the air and water molecules around, from those where it’s just the sun’s rays that makes water evaporate and pressure rise.
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Just wondering, how would they be distinguishable? It seems to me we distinguish ID creations from Naturally formed creations daily… generally using probabilities. Like this very post, sure… its possible a random letter generator might have, by pure chance, generated every single letter in this post, but we both know, that’s not what happened, right?
It seems odd this hasn’t been explored, rather assumed like a religious dogma that no-gods-allowed must be the default position? I mean, we have countless examples of ID guiding the evolution of machines, specifically systems which are highly reliant on informational management. Perhaps I’m missing something, hopefully the Naturalists have some explanation?
And thx for the welcome back, 
Hello Rumraket, so, would you say one cannot determine, with any reasonable certainty, what is or is not a product of Intelligence? And, if we can, what metric would you use in that assessment?
Mountains of evidence. Science is more about prediction than retrospective explanation.
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In terms of recognizing designed objects, written language, etc., this is all done through learned pattern recognition, not probabilities. We are taught to recognize and distinguish objects and language typically during our formative years.
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