Could you fix the quote in your comment? It looks like you are responding to me.
Behe didn’t do any of the scientific research cited in the book. If you think I am wrong, then please cite the peer reviewed primary papers used by Behe where he was one of the authors.
There isn’t a problem because you are pointing to a difference between living species, not a difference between ancestors and descendants. If you want to make these claims, then you are going to need the ancestral and descendant genomes directly on either side of this transition.
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Sorry T your line of argument here is meaningless to me. You are simply nit picking as an ad hominem strategy.
You are making a requirement based on unavailable evidence. Don’t you know we see through this nonsense.
I didn’t know that the quote was deleted. Sorry for that. I’ll try to do better next time. But having been sincerely saddened by @Faizal_Ali’s vitriolic portrait of Behe (according to him, the biological community see him as at best a pathetic and ridiculous figure) I intended to show him that one can be a respected biologist and have esteem for Behe and his work.
You mean the sequence divergence that occurred over a period of 600 million years? That’s all Gpuccio is “measuring”. The fact that the sequences become increasingly different with time.
You’re saying this is somehow a problem for evolution(you’d expect something else?), for reasons that are far from obvious. What else do you imagine should have happened if evolution was really true?
It isn’t meaningless to the rest of the scientific community.
I didn’t say anything about Behe’s character. He would agree with me that he didn’t do any of the scientific research detailed in the book. I was correcting your claims, not Behe’s.
This relates to the larger picture of ID. It doesn’t produce any original scientific research. Instead, it takes potshots at the research that other scientists do. This is what happens when you are arguing for a God of the Gaps.
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The ID argument is based on unavailable evidence.
Sorry Bill but all of science has the requirement claims must be supported by positive evidence. It’s not our problem your ID-Creationist beliefs have zero positive evidence to offer.
Aww, I made you sad. So sorry.
Well, you sure showed me, didn’t you? To try create the impression that Behe is anything other than a laughing stock among the people of whom he purports to be their peers, you had to go dredge up an article that had been deleted, and then take a quote out of context to misrepresent the author’s message,
I couldn’t have proven my point any better myself if I’d tried. Thanks!
ID wants the argument to be limited to a hard stop, but this limitation is exactly what is being challenged. Disputing the legitimacy of the argument is not to change it, misapprehend it, misrepresent it, or set up a straw man. No one is obliged to color within the ID lines just because ID arbitrarily refuses to consider the contextual picture.
Let us use the human mind as a test bed. Present to any number of human minds that many scientists hold that life arose and developed unguided on its own. Then ask these minds, “what is the alternative explanation?” I do not believe there will be many challenges to the expectation that these minds will reference God somewhere in the great majority of responses. The test bed reveals there is wide recognition that design in nature implies God.
No one disputes that humans can make stuff, and stuff that humans make is recognizable as such precisely because we do the making. Design in nature is fundamentally different because people can not make natural law or are endowed with supernatural abilities. The most distinctive attribute associated with acts of creation is omnipotence, sovereignty over nature itself. There is no human analog for this, but it is essential to the process ID advances. Designing is essential to design, and a designer is inherent to designing. You can raise the flag that these are straw men, but others do not have to salute it.
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It’s funny to imagine any other area of human investigation operating like ID-Creation does. 
Detectives: Yep, the victim was murdered. We don’t care who did it, or or when, or what weapon was used, or what a possible motive is. We did our job, now off for a pint!
FAA Investigators: Yep, the plane crashed. We don’t care who was flying it, or when it crashed, or what factors (i.e. weather, mechanical failure, pilot error) were involved. We did our job, time for a nap!
Archaeologists: Yep, we found a piece of pottery. We don’t care who made it, or when, or how, or where the raw materials came from, or how it fits with other known artifacts in the area. We did our job, time to do Sudoku!
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Yes. By the way, re: the FAA Investigators: the reason the plane crashed is that it was flown by cdesign proponentsists, who, once it was airborne, announced that piloting does not concern itself with landing; it is involved with FLYING. What comes next cannot even be thought of, must less asked.
This thread is going in very unhelpful directions. I don’t see the value in a perpetual ID bashing train. Of course, I also disagree with ID but this isn’t helping anything.
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Point taken but can you think of anything that would help ID? The only thing I can think of is some intellectual honesty from the ID camp. Sadly that doesn’t seem to be an option with the professional ID crowd.
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Yes I can. Building trust with their base would help immensely.
Doesn’t trust start with honesty? Being honest with yourself and with the evidence as well as with your potential conversation partners?
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It would not be necessary were ID not on a perpetual science-bashing train. I really think we have to be very careful. Of course, when respectable ideas are raised, respect should be given. When the same repeatedly-debunked nonsense is chattered decade after decade, when the DI is publishing books like Foresight by Marcos Eberlin, which make it clear that the DI actually has no scientific mission at all, and so on, someone has got to be honest and say so.
Otherwise, you get, as I have suggested earlier, the “level tones” problem. If a man says the earth is flat, rejects a considerable volume of evidence to the contrary and makes, over the course of many years, the same repeatedly-debunked arguments and fails to come up with evidence bearing upon the issue, we give a very false impression if the next time he pops up, we scratch our chins and speak in level tones and say that, well, yes, that argument for the earth’s flatness DOES seem very reasonable, and IS a point of view worth considering, but here (for the 1000th time; but politeness will preclude our pointing it out) is why I disagree. There is a difference between politeness and farce.
I think that there may be people in ID whose views deserve serious and level-toned response. But mostly the field is occupied by the Dembskis, Meyers, and Wellses. Behind them is an army of people who are less artful: Bethell, Eberlin, Leisola, Luskin, et al. Their TACTIC is to demand to be treated politely as they say things which they must know are false, so as to create the wholly false impression that their views have at least some scientific credibility.
Bear in mind: most DI works boil down, at some point, to the contention that the scientific community is being dishonest to the public, selling the lie of evolution. Meyer creates the impression that biologists and paleontologists are all in the middle of a great crisis: privately facing the reality of ID, but publicly denying it even as the floodwaters rise. Wells tells people that the examples given in the textbooks are basically lies told by biologists to sell evolution. If you allow the people who emit this toxic stuff to be treated as though they have a place at the table, they will tear off the table leg where they are sitting and beat you with it. Let us not do what Krushchev said the capitalists would do; let us not sell them the rope.
The impression I have is that because there is an ethical commitment to honesty in the scientific community, you underestimate the role of outright, malicious, ill-willed deception in ID advocacy. But a good survey of the literature shows that this is not the exception, but the rule.
Sure. But if you do that at the cost of treating ID nonsense seriously, you build trust with their base by building the credibility of ID with the public. That’s not a trade worth making. It’s like building market share by cutting your prices to lose money on sales; as soon as you want to “cash” some of that credibility by showing them how badly mistaken their views are, they will walk away.
It is true that confrontation will not “convince” the ID advocates. They have a financial interest, or a self-assessed theological interest, in not being convinced of anything. But when you are trying to prevent fraud, the best method is not to see what you can work out with the con man; it is to educate his victims.
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Thank you Puck for so eloquently expressing what I (and I suspect most pro-science people involved in these discussions) think about ID in general and the DI in particular. There’s really no way to sugar coat it - the DI is an organization of professional liars who think the ends (control of society by their Christian religion) justify the means (the brutal non-stop dishonesty in attacking science and pushing their alternative pseudoscience).
I for one will not sit idly by and let them drag down science education in the U.S. just to achieve their political goals. Not on my watch.
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