Ah, apparently I didn’t. But what is your objection to mainstream science? What attracts you to the so-called “third way”?
No, I know who Denton is. That’s why I’m not interested in his views on the origin of flight.
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Define or specify the “mainstream science” that you think I object to, and I will better be able to answer your question.
Mainstream sciences rejection of Intelligent Design. You object to this, right?
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For what it’s worth, i have some structuralist leanings as well. So I’m right there with Denton, G. Wagner, A. Wagner etc.
What exactly do you mean by this?
I’ll hold off answering you, Joshua, until I get John Harshman’s answer. I don’t think he necessarily had the rejection of ID in mind when he spoke of mainstream science – I think he had some positive rather than negative notion of what mainstream science affirms – and I’d like to know what he had in mind.
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Evolution is a process (descent with modification); Darwinism is an explanation of how evolution works, an explanation which emphasizes natural selection. My remarks were not intended as criticisms of evolution, but of the vacuousness of many “selectionist” explanations of evolutionary outcomes.
This sounds an awful lot to me as if, no matter what you find out about the cave creatures, their eyes or lack of eyes, the relevant genes, etc., you don’t intend ever to give up the hypothesis that whatever happened, happened due to natural selection. You intend to find some way to “tweak” the particular problem results so that natural selection remains the correct explanation. That’s hardly the textbook model of “testing scientific hypotheses and sometimes falsifying them” that we were all taught as the proper scientific approach.
She didn’t actually do the underlying work that established the relationships. She certainly championed the idea but if you read the names of the authors on the actual research papers…
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Well, rejection of ID is certainly part of mainstream science, but that isn’t what I had in mind. Are you in fact an ID fan? I do have a positive view of mainstream science, but here I was thinking more of what it isn’t than what it is. What it isn’t is the supposed “third way” that invokes all manner of mechanisms that are either nonexistent or probably unimportant. Shapiro is a case in point, but “epigenetics” is a more prominent example. I don’t see Gunter Wagner as being outside the mainstream. Do you?
Don’t you want to be more measured on this? Epigenetics is a real thing, but not when it is presented as Lamarkianism. Most the third way mechanisms are real, but mislabeled and of legitimately debated significance.
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That’s why I put quotes around “epigenetics”, by which I mean non-genetic inheritance between generations as a real evolutionary mechanism. I’d say that some of the third way mechanisms are real; not sure I’d go as far as “most”; one would have to count.
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What an excellent reminder!!
Yup, our rejection of geocentrism is just about power, and has nothing to do with discernment, knowledge or truth. 
Really? Cmon.
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“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
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No - the nutty minority in that case was, according to Galileo’s letter, just him and Kepler. It was the mainsteam which Galileo termed “the abuse of the multitude.” Whether he was right is, of course, a matter of seeing what the geocentric majority said, because some of their arguments were about the heliocentrists’ lack of good evidence and explanatory power. Some of it, though (including, sadly, that often trotted out from the Reformers), was based on the accusation that the Copernicans were simply trying to gain fame by overturning science that had been established for centuries.
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That’s not at all what I meant. You are being far too granular than what I had intended. What I was praising was the reminder that, sometimes, the nod to “mainstream” leans upon group-speak rather than evidence. So, if I (for instance) am to make a claim about a topic that is controversial, then it is better to make an evidentiary claim than to rely upon what’s considered to be the standard convention (to defer to the “mainstream.”)
There was once a time when to reject geocentrism was “fringe.” Not because it was false, because in characterizing it as such maintained a position of authority for some. So, truly, it becomes easier to dismiss a dissenter by characterizing him or her as such. The fringe dissenter will never come around to agreeing with the mainstream opinion when treated this way. This is why I think it is a good reminder.
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@swamidass Yeah, what he said. 
Which, being made mundane, means “25% of the time the majority is right.”
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I’ll assume that reply wasn’t intended as anything other than humor, and no actual point was implied.
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So when you said “No - forget the ID, but the language of “mainstream”, in every example I can think of, is about power, not knowledge or truth,” you just meant “sometimes”, not “every time”. Perhaps you can see why that didn’t come through.
When I brought up “mainstream science” it wasn’t intended as an argument against the ideas I called “nuts”, merely as registering my opinions. I would be happy to discuss specifics if there’s anything you would like to focus on.
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