Evidence for the integrity of the Discovery Institute

[Sam (Sam Foerster)]

I doubt there is anyone here as unable to use the tools of the discussion board as I am.
For example, I don’t even know how to do the @name thing such as here,

@Faizal_Ali

@Eddie

nor do I know what it means attach the @ symbol and to give it a background highlight. Faizal and Eddie, I don’t mean to notify you of this example, I just scrolled up to find the first example I could find.
What I do mean to highlight is how disingenuous comments seem such as,

@Tim

I think Roy was referring to this post of Sam’s, which quotes this post of mine 262 posts previous to it, without context.

@John_Harshman

@Roy

True, but ‘elsewhere’ for his first comment was 250 posts earlier

The “elsewhere” that’s actually relevant was only a couple of posts above.

@Roy

True, but ‘elsewhere’ for his first comment was 250 posts earlier, so visible only with the forum equivalent of high-powered binoculars.

How utterly disingenuous that seems to claim I’ve deleted anything or to actually have attempted to hide the context. Even I, incompetent user of the tools of this board that I admit to being, realize that the up arrow next to the ‘quoted’ text takes one to the quoted text. Hands up if you didn’t realize that.
And yet I’ll not be surprised that no one will concede even to this.
Could there be a more partisan discussion board? Pathetic. There is no wonder that in the piece I linked to above, that Joshua Swamidass was unable to contradict, Gunter Bechly. (That is no slag on Josh. How does one contradict something so obviously true)
I’d take issue however with Joshua’s “We’re scientists we really want to engage.” You’d never know it by the interaction I’ve had.
Even Gunter Bechly’s, “You would have to improve this channel in terms of moderation.”
It actually pains me (as I’d think it would Josh) to point out even one of his own moderators posts,

@Dan_Eastwood

Just popping in to note

doesn’t address my comment (the one that reopened the topic after being dormant for nearly 2 months)
Why not address the comment that reopened the discussion? Here is is again,

@Sam

@Tim

(who surely understand their own work better than some ID-Creationist apologist).

What is one to make of a statement like that? Is that supposed to represent reason? Sounds ridiculous. So no one can build upon the understanding of the work of those that come before? It would seem to fly in the face of Sir Isaac Newton’s, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

In reading the linked article from,

@Tim

A blatant example of this is Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, where one of Meyer’s cited sources, Charles Marshall, in a review for Science concluded that the book is “compromised by Meyer’s lack of scientific knowledge” (among other flaws).[1]

I was heartened to see the author, Charles Marshall state,

“As scientists, we have learned how to make ideas dance with reality, and we expect them to be transformed in the process. We typically add to what we already know, often showing along the way that old ideas are incomplete or, occasionally, and wrong. And so we collectively build an understanding of the world that is accurate, reliable, and useful.”
I don’t see Marshall’s “so we collectively” as excluding some or any “ID-Creationist apologist”. as seems the straightforward meaning of the comment I was initially addressing,

@Tim

(who surely understand their own work better than some ID-Creationist apologist).

@Tim

I would demur at “impossible”

If you would demur at impossible, how about your “surely understand”. That surely doesn’t seem to be that sure.

I (a non-scientist) drop in here once in a while to get a flavor of the discussion on the so-called “Peaceful Science”
Surely even you vaunted scientist can over-state your case even if heaven forbid you could not be wrong and corrected by a

@Tim

ID-Creationist apologist

or even just a member of

@Dan_Eastwood

the DI and its affiliated researchers

Does one never wonder what an agnostic like David Berlinski finds useful at the DI. Certainly it is not to be schooled in apologetics.
I’ve listened to Meyer with Michael Shermer, and Behe, Douglas Axe, and Gunter Bechly with Joshua Swamidass, and David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens. I’d certainly say that in each case the abhorrent member of the DI performed as well or better than their opponent.
As Hitch himself once said, https://youtu.be/rY5Ste5xRAA?t=5169
I don’t know what I think about the specific issue he is talking about, but can his view on consensus be more obvious? Consensus (whatever threshold that requires) demonstrates consensus. That’s all. Certainly not truth.
Need one look further than the wagon’s circled on the origins of Covid? The partisan furvor gets so stirred that Apoorva Mandavilli, a reporter for The New York Times spouts,
“Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today,”
and it takes the rather contrarian Glenn Greenwald to question,
“Can someone explain to me why it’s racist to wonder if a virus escaped from a Chinese lab, but it’s not racist to insist that it infected humans because of Chinese wet markets? If anything, isn’t the latter more racist?”
That there is a consensus here is not in doubt. That questioning it can’t be tolerated is clear by the lack of the slightest acknowledgment of the validity of my challenge to,

@Tim

(who surely understand their own work better than some ID-Creationist apologist).

I’ll continue to be an infrequent visitor, but it is unlikely that I’ll resist the urge to occasionally drop in to observe and chuckle at the continued “consensus”.