It can’t improve as a scientific theory if it isn’t one to begin with. You can’t even come up with and test a hypothesis.
That whining is pure baloney. We are challenging you to come up with real hypotheses. Only then will you see if any of them can grow into a real theory.
Can you even advance a single ID hypothesis, even one that you have no plans to test?
Can you not see that if Behe was still a scientist, he’d be doing functional assays on the ApoB variants instead of producing rhetoric at churches?
ID is not a scientific theory, however, that doesn’t stop ID believing scientists from doing science. @swamidass is a Christian doing excellent science. So is @art@nlents and Lenski and I don’t know what their religious beliefs are or aren’t. You don’t have to be a devout atheist to be a good scientist.
Science is neutral on the question of God or Intelligent Designer.
What are the chances that some real names are attached to these essays? How can one properly give credit except to the whole crew, as things are at the moment?
Paul, because the loudest voices in the room get the most attention, I often forget that the DI also has some smart and thoughtful people like you among its ranks. For that, I apologize for some of my broad-brush smearing of the DI in the above comments. I’ll never understand why the org doesn’t see how much damage people like Klinghoffer and Egnor do to their image and reputation, especially when ready alternatives exist, but please know that when I make fun, which I know is not me at my finest, it is never directed at you or Anne. I wish you the best and I hope the weather is as nice wherever you are as it is in NYC - get out and enjoy it if you can! Peace.
You are, without a hint of irony, whining about not being taken seriously as a scientist in a thread that highlights Behe’s choice of rhetoric over testing his hypothesis. That behavior makes absolutely no sense, except as a scam or a delusion.
You keep claiming that there is some entity called “ID Theory” when no such thing exists. Do you think that citing a nonexistent theory represents serious scholarship?
There’s nothing foolish about my question.
If my question makes you feel uncomfortable or angry, instead of calling me the fool, perhaps you should consider actually coming up with a testable hypothesis instead of spinning yarns about others preventing you from doing so.
What are you afraid of? Being wrong? That’s an integral part of science.
What you just wrote about me was false. Understand now why I cite Proverbs 26:4?
Your questions don’t make me uncomfortable or angry. Your questions are tedious. I have repeatedly explained here (not in this thread, but at this site generally) that the very last place I would float an ID hypothesis is on an internet discussion board. The proper venue for any such proposal is a scientific journal, but only after that same hypothesis has survived critical scrutiny from trustworthy colleagues, who will not try to hold a pillow over the baby’s face until it stops moving.
Your questions are foolish because they are repetitious, ill-informed (look up the early Earth instability of RNA’s chemical constituents, for instance, on your own – you shouldn’t need me to pull together the relevant literature for you), and badgering, in the sense that you don’t really want an answer. Tone is revealing, and your tone is that of a hectoring skeptic.
I am not afraid of being wrong. I am afraid of wasting my time.
No, it wasn’t. The fact that you told the truth 15 years ago:
“Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem.”
doesn’t provide cover for blatant contradiction of it today:
A thing needs to exist before it can be improved.
I’m sorry, but so is your pretense that there’s any ID theory. Perhaps you could come up with some new material, like a testable hypothesis?
I would refer you again to:
There’s no more basic criticism than the observation that you’ve failed to engage in hypothesis testing…
Which is why I challenged you to offer one that you aren’t interested in testing, not float one you’re interested in.
No, that’s not the way it works.
The way we real scientists do it is that we test the hypothesis and publish the hypothesis with the testing, often including modifications of it. We rarely subject it to scrutiny before testing it.
I don’t see how any real hypothesis can be killed by anything but empirical testing. Do you think that your “ontogenetic depth” fiasco was some kind of hypothesis?
Are you cryptically offering up a hypothesis? If so, it wouldn’t require that I look anything up.
I’m not denying that there can be ID hypotheses. There’s one right up there that Behe won’t test.
My point is that until you are formulating and testing hypotheses, you are and have been wasting your time. You even realized that 15 years ago.
Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’-but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.
I’m sure he took immense flack for this. He does not claim there is an ID theory.
Nope; just paradoxical, and even ironic. Put down the pillow, and let the baby be. What harm has it done? If the central heuristic insight of ID is that it’s not illegitimate to bring deliberate engineering principles into the analysis of what life is, and how it operates, then you’d have to also shut down deliberate attempts at bioengineering and nanotechnology.
You don’t t want to be a “science stopper,” do you?
Thanks for the honest, and slightly risky, correspondence, @Paul_Nelson.
May your tribe increase!
I have a better one: ID is the 45-year-old living in his parents’ basement. You’re arguing that because he was honest about his career prospects 15 years ago but has done nothing since, that it’s just fine for him not to be today.
What does that nonsense have to do with Nelson’s honest assessment 15 years ago, while he falsely claims that “ID theory” exists 15 years later?
Well, if my answer really was nonsense to you, you’ve already stopped thinking like an interdisciplinarian scientist. Go ahead and go back to your own version of basement living.
Or more likely it was nonsense, like your claim that both sides are interpreting the same evidence.
If you disagree, then I suggest that you explain your syllogism so that others understand it. You never tied the “If…then” together in any logical way. We use engineering principles, and engineering itself, all the time in the study of biology.
You also didn’t address my question about its relevance, if any, to the fact that Nelson told the truth about the nonexistence of ID theory 15 years ago, but has returned to pretending that “ID theory” exists today.
