Are you bothering the pet atheists yet again?
What exactly do you think you can prove to an Atheist?
That they are making unsupported claims and putting them into science textbooks based on unsupported consensus.
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The model of mutation and selection is supported by the observation of a phylogenetic signal, as explained multiple times already.
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You are wrong about that. Science text books record scientific ideas.
What you and I know about Evolution does not represent Science or Scientific Views.
Surely you have come to terms with this by now?
Chris:
With due respect, I must point out a tension within your answer. You admit that you do not have professional qualifications in the field of evolutionary mechanism:
But then you strongly assert your own opinion regarding current discussions of evolutionary mechanism:
How can you know whether or not I’m overemphasizing regarding a field in which you have just admitted you have nowhere near specialized knowledge?
How can you know this, unless you have checked the summary in Wikipedia against the writings of the specialists in evolutionary theory themselves? How do you know it isn’t a poor or slanted summary? You’ve just admitted that you aren’t an evolutionary theorist yourself.
More generally, “Wikipedia” is a red flag for me. I don’t form my opinions of anything theoretical based on Wikipedia. The articles are all written by anonymous or pseudonymous individuals, and 90% of the time by individuals without advanced academic qualifications in the fields they are writing about. It’s not a trustworthy source. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically wrong, but it’s not a trustworthy source. If you want a broad view of evolutionary theory, why not read one written by one of the leaders of evolutionary theory? In their day, Mayr, Gaylord Simpson, and others wrote such summaries, and later Gould wrote his masterful The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I haven’t read all of the latter massive tome, but I’ve read large chunks of it, and Gould is evidently extremely well-informed on the history of development of evolutionary theory. There must be a few people out there today like Gould. Why not find them and read them? I have my eye on a book by Andreas Wagner which looks interesting, and am going to try to pick up. I would trust the judgment of someone like that more than the judgment of some person with an unknown agenda who is writing a Wikipedia article.
(Incidentally, I would flunk any student who used Wikipedia as a source for anything. Even where Wikipedia is right, it should never be used as a source. It can be used as an introduction, but all sources cited as evidence for anything should be sources by identified authors.)
Note the phrase you use: “Professionals in biology” – rather than “professionals in evolutionary theory”. The two aren’t synonymous; otherwise every “professional in physics” would be a “professional in cosmology” or a “professional in quantum theory” or the like. I have noted that except for Glipsnort, none of the people you have named here are professional evolutionary theorists, i.e., scientists whose main area of research and publication is evolutionary mechanisms. That doesn’t mean that they don’t know anything at all about evolutionary mechanisms, of course, but it does mean that their view of the current state of opinion regarding evolutionary mechanism has no more authority than, say, the view of an expert in thermodynamics has regarding string theory or inflation theory. An expert in thermodynamics will of course know something about other areas of physics, but will not pretend to be up on current debates in the specialist literature outside of his area.
I propose an experiment, Chris. I will name you ten theorists who hold university positions in evolutionary theory and do research in that area. You write to each of those theorists, and ask them what, in their view, is the main contribution of each of the scientists you named to their subject-area. I think you will find that most of the evolutionary theorists you write to haven’t even heard the names of any of the biologists you’ve named (except Glipsnort), let alone read any papers published by them in journals which cover evolutionary mechanism. Are you game to try the experiment?
Gee, and Swamidass assures us that “the model of mutation and selection” was “falsified” or “replaced” (Joshua has used various words at various times) 40 years ago by the theory of neutral drift. I think you guys need to get your act together.
Drift is part of the model, too. Yet another example of the strawman I am talking about.
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Come on there, Eddie… you have such a nice house of silica …
Aren’t you spending a little too much time throwing stones?
As usual, @Eddie, you don’t know what you are talking about.
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Hi Eddie -
As I am about to explain, you have so vastly misrepresented my stance and the information in this thread that I do not feel in the least respected.
You have removed key context from my post and from the posts that followed. For the sake of anyone who might not have read carefully, I repeat what I stated:
I know my limits, so I asked those more knowledgeable than I to correct any mistakes I might have made. I was not asserting my own authority. Consequently, there is no tension.
Why did you omit that important context, Eddie?
But that was not the only serious omission you made. Can you seriously claim that you did not read the posts by members of the scientific community before you posted “with due respect”?
Steve Schaffner agreed with my post. He has co-authored several key papers in primate evolution.
T_aquaticus, a biologist, also agrees with my post.
And John Mercer, a molecular biologist, agrees with me.
And as I am writing, Art Hunt chimes in to support what I have written.
You don’t want to believe what I say about biology? Fine. If you want to claim that you respect the opinions of the scientific community, you should start giving due respect to what @glipsnort , @T_aquaticus and @Mercer, and @Art say.
I did check with biologists. Right here in this thread. In full, public view.
Speaking of tension… You have spent hundreds of hours writing hundreds of posts defending a biochemist who writes popular books about evolution that are uniformly dismissed by evolutionary biologists such as @NLENTS and Richard Lenski. And yet you opine that a Ph.D. biologist in academia like T_aquaticus is unqualified to speak with authority?
Apply the same standard to Behe that you apply to @T_aquaticus, my friend.
Having admitted the expertise of Steve Schaffner to speak on the subject in the thread, will you actually listen to him? Before you wrote your “due respect” post, he had already written this:
If you had really paid attention to what @glipsnort wrote, you would not have tried to launch a diversionary attack on my credibility. It is a common tactic of those who know they have lost an argument to try to shift focus to some irrelevant point. As Carl Sandburg says,
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
The biologists have overwhelmingly refuted you and agreed with me. Why are you pretending that they have not addressed the subject, Eddie?
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Actually, I only have a bachelors, but I have worked with plenty of PhD’s if that counts.
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You apparently did not read what I wrote, Chris. Except for Glipsnort, not one of the people you asked is an expert on evolutionary mechanism, regularly attends conferences on evolution, works in the field of evolutionary theory, etc. Your indignation is out of place, because it is based on careless reading of my objection.
So because Glipsnort says something, that is the final word on evolutionary theory? His take on the field is automatically the right one? Are you aware that his main area of expertise is population genetics, not evo-devo, self-organizational theory, paleontology, or any other the many branches of biological research that make up evolutionary theory? Why should I take the point of view of one population geneticist as an accurate representation of the whole field of evolutionary theory? Especially since I am convinced that population geneticists have tunnel vision when it comes to the subject of evolution, always seeing the subject through the eyes of their own narrow sub-disciplinary filter?
Are you willing to take up my challenge? If I give you the names of ten professional evolutionary biologists teaching at top universities – none of them ID theorists, and most of them atheists or agnostics, and therefore having no bias that would favor supporting me – I bet that if you write to them and ask them what is the contribution of the people here to current views on evolutionary mechanism, none of them would have even heard of any the biologists posting here, except possibly for Glipsnort. And I bet that they would all agree that none of the people posting here are “big guns” in the field of evolutionary mechanism. Will you take me up on the challenge, or not?
Be careful they bite. 
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If it is that important to you, Eddie, you should pursue it yourself.
Four trained biologists, three of whom have Ph.D.s, have agreed with me and rejected your stance. Essentially what you are saying is that there are even greater experts than the experts who have already spoken in this thread, and there is a non-zero probability that they will stun the crowd and pronounce 3 Ph. D. holders to be badly misinformed about the central theory of their field. IMHO the probability is infinitesimal that you are right and 3 Ph.Ds with long publication records in biology are wrong. The burden of proof in this situation on you, not on me.
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Dollars to donuts that none of them would be much familiar with the evolution of 3’ end processing mechanisms. Which would make @Eddie’s challenge pretty meaningless.
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But except for Glipsnort, with no publication record in the field of evolutionary mechanism. You keep forgetting that, conveniently. And it’s evolutionary mechanism that we are talking about.
This all started, Chris, because you were, in essence, trying to bully me. I said I accepted descent with modification, and I did not deny any particular account of evolutionary mechanism, but said that I suspended judgment. You were not satisfied with that. You want me to display obeisance, to prostrate myself before not only descent with modification, but with whatever you personally consider to be the current account of evolutionary mechanism. Your determination to get submission from me, suggests an unhealthy need for conformity to authority on your part.
Well, I suppose most of the biologists would agree with @Chris_Falter here. So perhaps he is an example of a non-expert who is correctly representing the views of the experts. Knowing Chris, that is in fact what is going on.
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Joshua, note that you approve of Chris when he speaks of:
Well, I have a question regarding this “large consensus,” which I have placed under a New Topic. If there really is such as “large consensus,” and if Chris really is “representing the views of the experts,” then he should have no problem answering my question under the new topic. Nor should you, or the other biologists here.
I’m not an evolutionary theorist. Sometimes I’m a population geneticist, one who happens to have wandered into studying recent human evolution for part of his career. Sometimes I’m other things – these days I’m mostly trying to figure out how to track closely related malaria parasites. Population genetics does overlap with evolutionary theory, however, and I do try to have a reasonable working knowledge of current evolutionary biology (and I’ve heard a lot of talks on that subject, and read more than a few papers.)
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What is a “professional evolutionary theorist” any ways? Is this something different than a biologist that deals with aspects of evolutionary biology in our professional work?
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