it’s up to you.
It’s up to me, what I want to discuss whith whom.
If someone asks me politely or at least respectfully, I’m intended to answer.
Otherwise it’s appropriate to “squint, furrow one’s brows, and then shrug”.
The Panda’s Thumb web site crashed several years ago. The opening posts were eventually restored but the comments were not.
if you argue with a linguist about a linguistic issue, e.g. grammar, telling him that you’re able to talk in English, would he regard that as an argument?
An important task in my thesis is to analyze discussions.
The first step is reading both parties and get some background information. Then you try to paraphrase as exactly as possible the content of both articles (or a series of back and forth). If one party talks past the arguments of the other, it doesn’t count if it’s correct about other issues.
Just a proposal:
Take
Doolittle, R.F. (1997) ‘A Delicate Balance’ Boston Review February/March 1997
and Behe’s answers
Behe, M.J. (1997) ‘Michael Behe’s Response to Boston Review Critics’
in IIRC the next issue of Boston Review (and quite a lot more in the book mentioned below).
If you don’ find these articles I can send you copies or links (you can also try Wayback Machine).
I’m cocksure that Behe ist right about his reply. It’s utmost irrelevant where Behe errs concerning other issues.
You find quite a lot of like exchanges in
Behe, M.J. (2020) ‘A Mousetrap for Darwin. Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics’ Seattle, Discovery Institute Press
Just for the record: I agree that Behe has zero arguments for ID. But many, many against insufficient critiques of his arguments.
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That’s what we are doing. You repeatedly present rhetoric as more important than empirical evidence.
And by the way, “theory of science” is yet another term that makes no sense in the context of doing useful science.
Really? Who did admit to failure?
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of couse. As long as you get your articles published that’s not an issue.
But that doesn’t qualify you as an expert concerning theory of science.
Are you sure that your competence regarding theory and philosophy of sciene matches mine 
Tell me which sources of theory of science you’ve read. Have you ever published anything concerning these issues? Does your name appear in the acknowledgments or biblography of a book or an article concerning theses issues?
But not evidence.
The first step should be to examine the evidence, not hearsay.
I’ve already read them. More importantly, I’m familiar with the relevant evidence, which you appear to ignore completely.
The evidence itself is not a mere issue.
Agreed. So why not focus on the deceptions?
I disagree, based on the evidence that you and Behe are ignoring.
Science is not a fashion show. Expertise comes from education and research, not from prominence, nor, technically, even from publications. Something tells me genuine expertise in philosophical matters is not decided in this way either. It does feel rather odd that someone who seems to have some stake in it would still be so contemptuous of the philosophy of science.
Edit:
Now that I think about it, I guess there is no lab work in philosophy. So how much someone contributed to the field ultimately is decided by how far their writings reached and what prominent names recognized their existence. Maybe philosophy is more of a popularity contest than one of theoretical merit or technical utility. In that case Mercer’s sentiment would be wholly justified. As scientists we have more important things to do – even when merely yapping on the internet – and you went out of your way to prove that point.
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Sometimes it is, but such cases tend to be superceded by evidence.
I’ve worked in quite a few fields. The aspects you’re missing here are productivity and impact, measured first by publications, but more accurately (but never perfectly) by the h-index:
Ahh.Based on this, I went back and found a Wayback archive from a few months after it was posted:
This now shows 401 comments (apparently all in tact).
A little URL-editing also enabled me to disentangle the German-language ‘rebuttal’ out of Nick’s (now-broken) auto-translation:
http://www.evolutionslehrbuch.info/index2.php?artikel=teil-4/kapitel-09-04-r01.html
Which in turn led to an unbroken link to the PDF Nick mentioned:
http://www.evolutionslehrbuch.info/teil-4/kapitel-09-04-r01.pdf
Which gets us slightly closer to what Thomas was alluding to.
Ahh I see what is going on here. I read Doolittle and Behe’s response now. Basically Behe’s response comes down to stating that just because we can construct an evolutionary history of some trait/system using phylogenetic methods (homologous proteins, in this case), this doesn’t show that natural selection was involved in fixing the intermediate steps in the inferred history, and as such he argues he is perfectly reasonable in being incredulous about the proposed scenario being evolvable through natural selection. And so the system, he argues, he is perfectly reasonable in inferring is IC and can’t have evolved through natural selection.
This is a smoke and mirrors response. The fact is that the only reasonable conclusion from the inferred history of the homologous proteins is that the system evolved by natural selection, because the alternative, that time and again the intermediates drifted to fixation and weren’t preserved (or even favored) by selection but just somehow still managed to stick around such they could later be elaborated upon again, without losing functions to accumulating deleterious mutations in the mean time, is basically absurd.
I guess one could now argue we’re just assuming natural selection to explain what we see, but how is that really different from assuming gravity operated when craters on the moon formed billions of years ago? This isn’t an unreasonable assumption. The contrary is the unreasonable one. In fact it’s insanity.
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Well done and thanks for that. The comments section was usually the most interesting part of PT. Unfortunately, only the first page of comments displays for me
Ack! I “checked” by checking the first and last pages – which appeared in tact – so I stupidly assumed that all the pages in between were also in tact. Mea culpa.
It is very slow. Anyway, reading old PT comments seems a bit decadent during the current political climate.
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Yes, I’m aware that number and impact of publications are a metric of some sort of merit, and in particular the larger community knows one by one’s papers well before they know one by any other means. What I’m suggesting is that genuine expertise is not (or should not be) a merely social attribute measured merely by how many articles have one’s name on it.
Imagine, if you will, a hiring interview. If in my application I mentioned that I am fluent in some language advantageous for the job, a recruiter who appreciates the trade they are tasked to hire me for will also know it. If I lied about my knowledge of that tongue, it should take them seconds to expose that. Not only will they have no need for me to provide a certificate, nor would my certificate ultimately outweigh my practically demonstrable skill.
Likewise, while we may struggle to tell the difference between an expert and a charlatan in fields we are ourselves unfamiliar with, the moment someone speaks about a field we do know, it becomes obvious whether or not they are our peer rather quickly, and at no point do we need nor would it help to know if or how many papers they had a part in, how prestigious the journals were wherein they appeared, and how many peers cited them between then and now. In many cases such metrics may reflect someone’s expertise, and I’m sure when the goal is to staff a research group (if we stick to the job interview analogy) it will matter. But it is not, I’m sure we can agree, what actually amounts to the robust understanding of a field we mean to assign to someone, when we call them an ‘expert’.
Actually, no, but the correlations are very high. You need to consider that when one gets into real science, the grizzled department chair often knows far less about the specific field of a postdoc applying to that same department for an assistant professor position.
If you’re doing good experiments, you are the first person ever to learn something. That’s where the thrill is, not in having more expertise than someone else. The best scientists are always seeking to collaborate with others who have different expertise to do something new. I don’t think this is generally the case in philosophy.
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What metric would you suggest instead? I think you’re not grasping that top-level scientific training is an apprenticeship, with only a minor didactic component at the beginning. In graduate-level courses, it’s far more important to teach students how to read papers from the primary literature than to feed them scientific facts. That’s what journal clubs are all about.
I should add that interviews for faculty positions consist of the candidate giving a seminar, with relentless 30-60 minute meetings with other department faculty. Almost universally, those consist of the faculty member describing his/her own research, with the candidate’s expertise judged primarily by the incisiveness of the questions s/he asks of the faculty member. Your linguistic example simply doesn’t fit this context.
but, as others already told, just the first page. So I couldn’t discuss about that there.
The original article of Scherer appeared here:
Scherer, S. (2009) ‘Makroevolution molekularer Maschinen. Konsequenzen aus den Wissenslücken evolutionsbiologischer Naturforschung’ in: Hahn, H.-J.; McClary, R.; Thim-Mabrey, C.; (Hrsg.) ‘Atheistischer und jüdisch-christlicher Glaube: Wie wird Naturwissenschaft geprägt? Forschungs-Symposium vom 2. bis 4. April 2008 an der Universität Regensburg’ München, Books on Demand S. 93-148
There are some other editions, e.g. the one here mentioned already
Scherer, S. (2010) ‘Die Entstehung des bakteriellen Rotationsmotors ist unbekannt. Ergänzung und Aktualisierung zum Abschnitt IV.9.4 “Entstehung einer molekularen Maschine durch Evolution?” von “Evolution – ein kritisches Lehrbuch” Stand: April 2010’ URL: http://www.evolutionslehrbuch.info/teil-4/kapitel-09-04-r01.pdf, letzter Zugriff: 17.10.2010
but also
Scherer, S. (2010) ‘Zur Evolution des Bakterienrotationsmotors. Ist ein tragfähiges Modell für die Entstehung des bakteriellen Rotationsmotors bekannt?’ URL: http://www.wort-und-wissen.de/sij/sij171/sij171-1.html, letzter Zugriff: 10.04.2012
There is also also a rebuttal of Scherer’s article, written by a chemist, a molecular biologist and a theologian which has also a degree in biology (in that order)
Neukamm, M.; Beyer, A.; Peitz, H.-H. (2014) ‘Zur Evolution des “Bakterienmotors”. Die Entstehung bakterieller Flagellen ist erklärbar’ URL: http://www.ag-evolutionsbiologie.net/pdf/2013/Die-Evolution-bakterieller-Flagellen.pdf, letzter Zugriff: 06.03.2014
They write in the acknowledgment:
Für kritisches Gegenlesen und viele hilfreiche Hinweise sei Thomas WASCHKE herzlich gedankt.
Google Translator turns that into:
Many thanks go to Thomas WASCHKE for critical proofreading and many helpful suggestions.
I alluded to the mis-reading of an article of Bugge by Doolittle.
Do you agree that that critique of Doolittle was abysmal
I tend to agree with the rest you wrote up to a certain degree. A detailed discussion would be very tricky, because that’s a meta-discussion concerning sovereignty of interpretation.
Don’t forget that Design was generally accepted by the founders of modern science. That changed (for good, telling from my standpoint as non-interventionist naturalist), but that could change. Think about who is responsible for Trump being president in the US again.
ID is in a kind of catch-22: It would have to be accepted for their arguments getting at least discussed objectively, but they are not regarded in earnest because that isn’t the case,
And, most important, it’s a weapon in a culture war. There isn’t much interest in objectivity as long as “my country, right or wrong” rules. On both sides, of course.
Just one example I could elaborate about. Some say that ID is a direct follower of Paleys ideas. Sober showed that, interpreting Paley as a certain kind of argument (IBE) was quite valid before Darwin. If you can refute Darwin’s mechanism, there is a certain weight in arguing that Paley’s argument has some merit again. Behe argues that the direct darwinian pathway, which defeated Paley, isn’t valid. So you have to argue that newer theories ('indirect pathways) are able to do what Darwin’s doesn’t.
I think so, but a little like Russell about the ontological argument: You see at the first glance that it doesn’t hold. But it’s very difficult, to proof that.
If you got ‘weasel’ to finish with the usual target string, then you didn’t implement IC.
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