Replacing Darwin Made Simple

[Chris_Falter]

@thoughtful

One of the reasons mainstream evolutionary biology is bonkers to me as it stands, is that it’s not consistent at all! There is no one theory that everyone subscribes to.

One of the reasons mainstream physics seems bonkers is that it’s not consistent at all! There is no one theory that everyone subscribes to. Quantum theories come in many flavors, none of which can be reconciled with relativity!

Plus, how can something be both a wave and a particle at the same time! Make up your minds, you confused physicists!

And what’s this about an electron passing simultaneously through 2 slits? Everyone knows that’s impossible!

And the equations? Oh, the equations! Why, it would take many years of advanced math that no layperson could possibly undertake, much less work through, to understand those equations.

Just like what @thoughtful said about biologists: if If those physicists can’t explain their work in a simple way that I as a curious layperson can understand—that leaves out all the fancy math and complexity and difficulties at the frontiers and obvious contradictions like wave/particle duality—then I must conclude the discipline is bonkers.

File under “irony”

EDIT: My point, @thoughtful, is that in a scientific discipline of sufficient complexity, it can appear bonkers to the layperson who reads some of the papers without having gone through the time-consuming, math-intensive acquisition of background, research methods, and general contours of evidence used in the field. I.e., the background that is assumed knowledge in the papers that the layperson might happen upon. That’s true of biology, physics, climate science, virology, etc., etc.

Your statement illustrates how a really intelligent and curious person might get waylaid when they don’t go through the years-long, math-intensive, lab-laden process of acquiring the background needed to understand the papers that scientists cite.

[Faizal_Ali]

@thoughtful

But you did criticize the content so at least he is getting that feedback if he wants his arguments taken seriously in the mainstream community he can see where he needs improvement.

What he needs to do to be taken seriously is simple: He needs to accept and admit he is wrong and stop making claims that are just plain ridiculous and for which he will never find supporting data because no such data exists.

[dsterncardinale]

@thoughtful

he can see where he needs improvement.

If he cared he’d have gone through peer review. If he was interested in being a real scientist engaged in the project of developing and testing hypotheses, these books wouldn’t exist.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@thoughtful

One of his audiences is mainstream biologists and he’s just needs more lab data to back him up

Commendably, you have referenced a decent number of mainstream journal papers over the years, and you have an idea of the centrality of that communication channel in science. What you have never referred to is such a paper by Jeanson. That is no fault of yours. Jeanson has never published any ideas concerning mutation rates, heterozygosity, or speciation in a forum that would reach a mainstream scientific audience. Maybe a paper titled I’m Greater than Darwin would not make it through peer review, but one focused on genetic clock data could find a home. Sanford and Carter have managed the odd journal publication, and have even been cited on occasion.

Curious, I went to the AiG biography page to check this out. From there I went to Pubmed to see if there is anything more, but just the same three journal papers came up.. Judging by the dates and the AiG biography, these seem to be related to his graduate work, so he has contributed no research since. Note that AiG considers three to be several:

While at Harvard, he was actively involved in adult stem cell research and published several peer-reviewed papers in secular journals in his field.

Irrespective of his popularity on the creationist circuit, is it not fair to say that Jeanson does not have an mainstream audience because he has abandoned the field? He is not ignored so much as he is not there to ignore to begin with.

@thoughtful

Yes, it is frustrating that AIG doesn’t make lab work a priority.

I do not believe AiG even makes lab work so much as an afterthought. AiG is looking for talent. Over one hundred jobs on offer - Exhibit Artists, Marketing Coordinators, Guest Services, Bible Curriculum, you name it - except do you see any lab work positions?

[John_Harshman]

@Tedinoz

Perhaps, but an article by Jeanson was covered this week by @Joel_Duff on his YouTube channel.

Please cite the article and the YouTube video in such a way that we can find both of them. And you might provide a hint about what this article has to do with his response to critics. What boot? What other foot? So far I have no idea.

[Dan_Eastwood]

It seems to me that anyone interested in replacing Darwin and the theory of evolution should be spending their time trying to produce results that work. For all the fuss some make over evolution, no one has come up with any better ideas that actually do something useful. Until that happens, Jeanson and others are apologists, not scientists.

[T_aquaticus]

@Puck_Mendelssohn

Now, there are people who are so heavily inclined to be charitable that they’d give someone like Jeanson a pass – they think it would be kinder to think of him as a complete moron than to think of him as a liar.

Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

[Joel_Duff (R. Joel Duff)]

@John_Harshman

@Tedinoz

Perhaps, but an article by Jeanson was covered this week by @Joel_Duff on his YouTube channel.

Please cite the article and the YouTube video in such a way that we can find both of them. And you might provide a hint about what this article has to do with his response to critics. What boot? What other foot? So far I have no idea.

I think this is in reference to my look at how ICR has taken a position of denying natural selection is real: https://youtu.be/x6qps6rDwzc
I don’t critique Jeanson here, here in fact I give him some credit for defending natural selection as a real mechanism that can drive changes in organisms over time. But I do note that Jeanson at the time was willing to critique other YECs in the YEC literature with whom he was working with at the time. He explored a variety of topics at ICR and changed his mind on a few things but since coming to AiG he seems to be nothing but a prize specimen that Ken Ham can pull out and trot around as proof that AiG has real scientists and is doing real research. I’m convinced Ham doesn’t understand much of anything that Jeanson says (just watch their interviews together). But it doesn’t matter, Jeanson says what Ham wants to hear .

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@T_aquaticus

Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

But Jeanson clearly isn’t stupid. Moreover, smart people can be very good at fooling themselves. That’s why some smart people embrace the scientific method, er, worldview.

[John_Harshman]

Ah, so this is the article in question?:

Does Natural Selection Exist?

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

@Mercer

But Jeanson clearly isn’t stupid. Moreover, smart people can be very good at fooling themselves. That’s why some smart people embrace the scientific method, er, worldview.

As I have said before on this topic, I have found that dishonesty and stupidity, which are often thought of as alternatives, are more often ingredients in the same recipe. Proportions vary, though, and “fooling themselves” is a case where the two are so well blended that picking the ingredients apart is well nigh impossible. Still, even when one has fooled oneself completely, it is still often necessary to resort to clear dishonesty in order to fool others. So, for example, Stephen Meyer may think his conclusions are right, but if so, he also clearly thinks that lying about what scientific papers say is a good idea when trying to convince others.

[Faizal_Ali]

Organisms within a population differ in many of their physical attributes.

Many of those attributes are determined, in whole or in part, by inheritance.

Many of those attributes influenced by inheritance will make it more likely or less likely that the organism will survive to pass them on to its offspring.

The likelihood with which these attributes will become more or less common in the population is correlated with the degree to which they make it more or less likely that the organism will survive to pass its heritable attributes on to its offspring.

I can see no rational argument for denying any of this.

It’s nice to see that even Jeanson has a limit to his irrationality.

[Tedinoz]

No. This is the article.

natural-selection-randy-guliuzza.pdf

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

That’s the same article, just the PDF of the journal rather than a webpage.

So @Joel_Duff I’m in the middle of watching your video, and I’m a little flabbergasted about the claim that AIG has natural selection at the center of their model. It’s actually a little funny (a lot funny?) because one of @dsterncardinale critiques in his video on Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin Made Simple is that Jeanson claims natural selection isn’t acting at all.

I tried re-reading the section in Replacing Darwin to see what I could make of it, noticed the language that Dan showed up on the screen looked similar and that’s all the farther I’d gotten earlier this week. Anyway, in the past I’ve read Ken Ham and Jeanson affirming natural selection, but that’s all I know. So…does that mean there’s a lot of diversity within AIG staff’s views? Is that slide not representative? Was @dsterncardinale not reading Jeanson carefully?

I have a lot of questions about this now and I’d like to do a deep dive and read on it, but it’s getting late, and I don’t have a functioning dishwasher at the moment. Sigh, duty calls. But I thought I’d write this out in case anyone wants to chime in and shed some light on this before I get to it.

[John_Harshman]

That seems to be the same article in pdf rather than web format.

[dsterncardinale]

Strictly speaking, Jeanson doesn’t go as far as ICR in poopooing natural selection. ICR explicitly rejects it, but Jeanson just says it isn’t required for speciation, and in describing how speciation occurs according to his model, natural selection doesn’t play a role. That’s not to say Jeanson says it doesn’t exist. Just that on the narrow question of the mechanism of speciation, it doesn’t play a role.

[Faizal_Ali]

You might want to look at what I wrote just above:

@Faizal_Ali

Organisms within a population differ in many of their physical attributes.

Many of those attributes are determined, in whole or in part, by inheritance.

Many of those attributes influenced by inheritance will make it more likely or less likely that the organism will survive to pass them on to its offspring.

The likelihood with which these attributes will become more or less common in the population is correlated with the degree to which they make it more or less likely that the organism will survive to pass its heritable attributes on to its offspring.

Do you think any creationists would disagree with any of the premises above?

If they don’t but still deny NS, then they simply do not understand NS.

[Joel_Duff (R. Joel Duff)]

@dsterncardinale

Strictly speaking, Jeanson doesn’t go as far as ICR in poopooing natural selection. ICR explicitly rejects it, but Jeanson just says it isn’t required for speciation, and in describing how speciation occurs according to his model, natural selection doesn’t play a role. That’s not to say Jeanson says it doesn’t exist. Just that on the narrow question of the mechanism of speciation, it doesn’t play a role.

Yes, this is more nuanced then my video suggests. Dan is right, he does deny natural selection at the same time he excepts it. Jeanson doesn’t want to give it a role or at least an important role in speciation but will accept that it does play a role in adapting populations to their local environments. In my defense or my strong contrast between ICR and AiG, Jeason does forcefully arge that natural selection is real in his paper responding to Guliuzza and if you just watch general talks at AiG they regularly talk about natural selection as a (or THE) mechanism by which kinds have diversified into species. But consistency of message is a bit of a challenge for AiG at times and makes it very difficult to characterize their views.

[Chris_Falter]

@thoughtful

So @Joel_Duff I’m in the middle of watching your video, and I’m a little flabbergasted about the claim that AIG has natural selection at the center of their model. It’s actually a little funny (a lot funny?) because one of @dsterncardinale critiques in his video on Jeanson’s Replacing Darwin Made Simple is that Jeanson claims natural selection isn’t acting at all.

FWIW, YEC advocates often say contradictory things when they dive into details. So the contradiction might be in the original sources rather than in the analyses by @Joel_Duff and @dsterncardinale

I say “might” because I have not investigated these particular sources and analyses.

@dsterncardinale 's clarification above is also worth noting.

Sorry about your dishwasher.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

[dsterncardinale]

Exactly this. Also the bit about changing employers is worth mentioning here. And then also the slippery slope. If orgs like AiG are going to propose warp speed post-Ark speciation, and also permit natural selection as a/the driving mechanism, I bet that’s flying a little too close to the evolutionary theory sun for some people. The beef becomes “yes but actually it’s usually slower and also your boundaries are fake” instead of a more complete disagreement. That’s a tenuous place for a large YEC ministry to find itself.