Your excuses for unacceptable scholarly practice that would flunk you out of any Arts Ph.D. program are duly noted.
“Unacceptable scholarly practice” = reading an article that is intended for publication in a scholarly journal and assessing its claims based on whether it addresses the evidence as accepted by scholarly consensus of the field.
You think?
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If you have read his papers you have read his books. Basically the same thing.
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No, apparently that is “unacceptable scholalrly practice.” According to @Eddie, if you’ve read all of Roger Penrose’s publications in peer-reviewed physics journals, but never read his pop-sci book “The Road to Reality,” you are not qualified to comment on his research.
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No, that’s not my position.
Most of Denton’s works on evolution (as opposed to his work on the genetics of retinal cancer) are not “research” as normally understood, but interpretive works. They mainly report on existing research and attempt an intellectual synthesis. Even his BioComplexity articles are like that.
Yes, some of Denton’s ideas in his books are also found in his BioComplexity articles, but there is more extensive discussion in the books. And the BioComplexity articles are now 7 years old, and he has published much else since then. If one wants to know what Denton thinks currently, one should be reading his newer works. He has a string of publications from 2016 through to the present, and those are the ones to consult to find out what his latest position is.
But even from the BioComplexity articles alone, you have no excuse for calling Denton a creationist, since they clearly presume the reality of evolution and dispute only certain accounts of how it works. And since you read Denton’s articles so badly on that point, there is no reason to give you the benefit of the doubt when you give a garbled summary of their ideas and pretend to have refuted him.
But enough of this. You aren’t interested in really engaging with Denton’s thought as if it might be true – you’ve already decided that it must be ID and creationist rubbish – and since reading with openness to the idea that an author might be correct is the minimal condition for seriously considering the thought of any author, there is no point in this inquiry. To the extent that you’ve looked at Denton at all, you’ve approached him with a colossal chip on your shoulder, assuming that he writes garbage and that it’s just a question of how to prove that assumption.
Are you under the impression that such writing is not published in the peer-reviewed literature? If so, you are incorrect.
Or, one could ask someone who HAS read those books if there is anywhere in them where Denton discusses the concerns raised here. As I have.
Guess what answer I receive.
Maybe you don’t actually understand the objection being raised here?
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Eddie, your abject failure to engage with the scientific literature is glaringly evident.
We have many such papers in real science. We call them reviews, or secondary literature.
In the fields in which I work, they are not counted as productivity when assessing scientific productivity when considering grant or tenure evaluations.
Among colleagues, the most common thing said about authoring reviews is, “That was so stupid of me to get suckered into that by that editor.”
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Or maybe you don’t understand the fundamental requirement of scholarship that one must never render a verdict on work that one has not read.
Where is that written?
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I’m not. I am rendering a verdict on the Denton’s BIO-Complexity paper.
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its like asking: if most cars engines use fuel why some of them have engine that use electricity?
No, it’s not like asking that at all.
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Wrong. There are no underlying structural laws that cause vehicles to have petrol engines.
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what do you mean?
I mean that you are wrong - asking why sharks don’t have pentadactyl limbs is not like asking why electric cars don’t have petrol engines, because the former is relevant to Denton’s concept of underlying structural laws, and the latter is not.
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im not sure what denton refer to but i do have several explanation for why sharks dont have this structure. so or so remember that it will mean nothing from ID perspective since the burdon of proof isnt on the ID side.
Michael Denton’s position is that the reason the fins of whales are shaped like they are is that there exist deeply embedded natural laws in living things that make the evolution of such structure inevitable.
Neither he, nor anyone else AFAIK, is suggesting this is the process by which car engines arise. So your objection is meaningless.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with ID Creationist theory if you wish to discuss it.
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Then you should have asked, instead of assuming you had something relevant to say.
Feel free to start a thread on that. This one is about Michael Denton.
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What about polydactyly? It happens as a rare mutation in lots of species and as a regular thing in some ichthyosaurs, not to mention the early tetrapodomorphs with 7 or 8 fingers. Shouldn’t that be impossible by Denton’s hypothesis? I suppose he could explain the early tetrapods as the form somehow not having settled down yet. But the others?
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Something which I have only recently learned, somewhat to my embarrassment: Polydactyly is a dominant trait. That most of us have five fingers and toes is the result of recessive genes. I wonder how that would fit with Denton’s idea.
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