An error occurred: This topic is in slow mode. To encourage thoughtful, considered discussion, editing old posts in this topic is not currently allowed during slow mode.
Therefore I have no choice but to delete my old post and post a corrected version (@Dan_Eastwood – this is is a pain in the neck!):
Another unsubstantiated assertion – as a “reason” for evolution “to give us a clear perception of reality” (or a reasonable approximation of one) has already been given: that it is a survival trait – your substance-free hypothetical that “belief in aliens produces hope that keeps people from destructive behavior” and Plantinga’s equally-ludicrous ‘running away from tigers to make friends with them’ hypothetical notwithstanding.
Given that Lee has returned to his “evolution has no reason to give us a clear perception of reality” claim, I think it is worth looking at the hypothetical in more detail.
I think an equal argument could be made that:
If belief in aliens produces hope that keeps people from destructive behavior, then God, being Omnibenevolent would want us believing in aliens.
Even if it is true that “belief in aliens produces hope that keeps people from destructive behavior”, it is not clear that belief in aliens results in a net gain in fitness. It is entirely possible that this belief would also result in increased difficulty in finding and retaining a mate, and thus producing offspring. I’m sure that some potential/actual mates find such beliefs offputting.
As I have stated before, Evolution and Natural Selection is not purported to give us a perfect perception of reality, merely a ‘good enough’ one. And if a hypertrophied tendency to believe in unseen causes (be they large predators or aliens) for unexpected phenomena was a survival trait in our past, likely we would retain it.
Funny thing is, when @lee_merrill posted that earlier, I took him to be making a sly joke. It was simply too much like a kind of evo-psych speculation about the origins of religion to miss. Alas, I now suspect he was not joking.
This has been pointed out to you several times so far, but here we are again:
Such clear perceptions as we have are of adaptive value, and that’s reason enough.
Our perceptions are in fact only approximate, full of heuristics, so not clear in the way you suppose. That’s, by your argument, evidence that they evolved naturally.
You have presented no reason why creation would give us a clear perception of reality.
You have made no argument for why we should trust our reason given creation, just as you have made no argument for why we should not trust our reason given evolution.
At the risk of stating the obvious: @lee_merrill simply is not at all good at logic, thinking and all that rationality sort of stuff. By all means, engage with his arguments, but don’t expect him to provide responses that at all pertain to the points you have raised. I find it helpful for my blood pressure to keep this in mind when interacting with him.
Yes, reading that comment elsewhere serves as a warning not to be cocksure about any of our convictions. They can and often will change in the course of our life.
It is rather funny that they say ‘in the past I thought’ and ‘now I know’. Could it not equally be ‘in the past I knew’ and ‘now I think’?
My own experience is that the older I get, the more I realise how little I know. I find that rather stimulating, actually.
Since (it appears, based on the low level of scientific discussion on the Talk pages) almost none of the articles on Wikipedia regarding origins issues are written by people with even a BA in any natural science, and since none or virtually none of them are written by people with a PhD in any natural science, and since virtually none of the are written by people trained in science journalism or even journalism generally, Wikipedia is not a good source for determining what “the scientific community” thinks about anything.
Further, the evidence Wikipedia presented for what “the scientific community” thinks about Behe and/or ID is based on the directly expressed opinion of probably about 1% of 1% of 1% of scientists worldwide, hardly a representative sample. Wikipedia presents not a single properly conducted poll of scientific opinion on the works of Behe or on ID generally.
Third, (and here Tim is deliberately misrepresenting by leaving out explicit statements) the student who was referred to as “an arrogant twit” was given that label *explicitly because of her manners", not because of any claim that anything was wrong with her “efforts” on the scientific side. And it is appropriate to call an arrogant young woman arrogant, even if her science were of Nobel Prize-winning in quality. If the scientific community does not police arrogance among its young members before giving them tenure, that’s an indictment of the scientific community, not a fault of anyone outside the scientific community who calls a spade a spade. It also makes the scientific community unpopular among non-scientists, further contributing to public distrust in science When scientists were thought of as humble, absent-minded seekers after truth, they were often beloved or at least admired by non-scientists; the new distrust of science and disinclination to follow the advice of scientists has gone hand-in-hand with the rise in the number of scientists who have stepped outside of the ivory tower and involved themselves in loud and aggressive ways in public discussions. Just as lay people find clergymen who behave in ungodly ways unworthy of respect, so they find the modern secular clergy, i.e., the scientists, unworthy of respect precisely insofar as they behave like the aforementioned arrogant young twit.
Irrelevant to my point. The Wikipedia article made the broader claim whether you think that broader claim is relevant or not. Only a very poor reference work would make such a broad claim without verifying that it was true. Oh, wait, Wikipedia is a very poor reference work (on origins issues, anyway)… So your excuse for Wikipedia is in fact no excuse.
List the number of “experts in molecular evolution and evolutionary biochemistry” cited by Wikipedia, and tell us what percentage of the “experts in molecular evolution and evolutionary biochemistry” worldwide is represented by the experts cited by Wikipedia.
We are talking here only about the statement made by Wikipedia and the evidence cited on Wikipedia to defend the claim. I was responding only to that, not to any general claim (based on information possibly available outside of Wikipedia) for or against Behe’s arguments.
Do you concede that Wikipedia did not adequately document its claim, even the narrower form of the claim which you insist was the real meaning of the (poor, unclear) Wikipedia writers?
If it did not, then Tim was wrong to cite the claim as if it proved anything. That was my only point.
I’m under no obligation to prove a negative. Wikipedia made the positive claim. It is entirely its own obligation to document the claim. And since Tim mentioned logical fallacies, it is worth noting that his argument contains a major one: the thrust of is argument, put in general form, is “You can’t prove my claim is wrong, so therefore my claim is right.” Anyone with even elementary understanding of logic can see the error here.
That Tim will not concede that Wikipedia failed to document its claim is more proof of Tim’s partisan approach (as if any more proof were needed).
But not irrelevant to my point – the point I was making to Tim when you butted in.
You’ve provided a “rescue” to excuse bad, unclear writing. Wikipedia articles are written for the layman, not for professional scientists. The layman, reading the words as written, will most likely interpret them as I suggested, and therefore would be misled. (In fact, I have more scientific training than most laymen, and that’s how I read them.) If the same words had been written in a professional journal of evolutionary biology, your excuse would be more relevant.
All, even if true, irrelevant to my point to Tim. I have no intention of discussing the scientific achievements of Behe. I limited my point to indicating a false and/or undocumented statement in a Wikipedia article. But as usual, a simple point which should have been granted immediately is now generating multiple caviling replies which attempt to change the topic. General rule of Peaceful Science: “Whatever Eddie says must be opposed, even when he’s not defending ID or any ID argument, but simply pointing out a false statement which could easily be granted while still rejecting ID.”
I would predict that, should I be foolish enough to keep responding, the caviling over this very small point will mushroom into twenty or thirty posts, with a least four or five atheist posters jumping in, all refusing to yield even a millimeter to my point. And eventually Mercer will jump in and start talking about peptidyl transferase. The discussions here simply are not adult ones.
The lazy, unscholarly route, you mean – and the route which most suits Wikipedia’s ideological aims regarding all origins articles. If they didn’t have any way of determining accurately, by normal standards of statistical reporting, the reaction of “the scientific community”, they should have shut their mouth about “the scientific community.” They could have simply said, “the majority of published reviews of Behe’s work by people in the life sciences find Behe’s argument unconvincing.” That would have been an accurate statement, and one to which I would not have objected, as a report of the reactions to Behe coming from a certain group of scientists. But of course, Wikipedia has every motive to inflate, exaggerate, overclaim, etc., given its ideologically motivated stance on origins issues.
Then why did Wikipedia bring up the number of scientists who supposedly opposed Behe? And why did Tim cite it? You should direct this criticism to Wikipedia and Tim, not me. And by the way, given that you have never done a shred of scientific research in your life, how do you know how science operates?
I thought you told us before that you had not published anything. OK, you’ve published one article. I stand corrected. What was the subject? Where can we read it?
I already was clear. I’m not claiming anything at all about anything. I merely pointed out that the vast claim made by Wikipedia was false or undocumented. And I already told the others what it would take to fix the sentence I was complaining about, to make it totally acceptable in my view:
But the ideologues on Wikipedia are unable to restrain themselves to reporting facts which they can document with evidence. So they tell us that “the scientific community” (without qualification) rejects Behe’s arguments. Well, maybe it does, but how does Wikipedia know that? Not from anything they presented – the total of which falls short of what would be necessary to demonstrate the claim. Any history, philosophy, religion, Classics, etc. teacher worth his salt would mark up a student’s paper in red for an inadequately documented claim like that.
There are only two reasonable explanations for Wikipedia’s behavior: (a) the writers are below even undergraduate freshman level in understanding of what means to document a claim adequately, in which case they have no business writing encyclopedia articles; (b) the writers are deliberately overclaiming, in which case they are intellectually dishonest. Now, we already know on other grounds that (b) is true generally for Wikipedia articles on origins, and (a) is not out of the question in some cases as well; a writer might be both dishonest and incompetent.
The complaint against Wikipedia is not that it is imperfect in execution; the complaint is that it deliberately misleads its readers because of its ideological stance on origins questions. If Wikipedia merely made the odd mistake or produced the odd ambiguous sentence, that could be forgiven, but the pattern in the way the origins articles are produced and edited clearly indicate ideological intent (which no encyclopedia should ever have) and polemical motivation. The co-founder of Wikipedia, who wrote up their rules for Neutral Point of View, agrees with me. I already gave the passages and the relevant links in earlier discussions, and since everyone here claims to be such a hotshot at doing searches in mere seconds, I’ll leave people to find the spots themselves.
I seem to have lost the discussion of the citations that accompanied the statement in Wikipedia to the effect that the scientific community has rejected Behe’s assertions. The article I read on Wikipedia had a few citations. This means the claim that the opinion voiced on Wikipedia is undocumented is false.
No documentation is needed for such a blatantly obvious fact.
That’s another reason why they shouldn’t be filled with citations.
There’s nothing misleading, and I dispute your claim of having more scientific training than anyone. You have repeatedly demonstrated a less-than-Wikipedia understanding of basic scientific facts and theories.
Regarding the lack of scientific agreement with Behe. Do you have any idea how often you contradict yourself?
It is very relevant to your claim of more scientific training than most laypeople…
That ignores the fact that most scientists with relevant expertise (biologists) find Behe to be so silly as to not be worth responding to.
If you followed the context here, you will know that my point was that the documentation is sketchy and inadequate. A handful of book reviews by the most heated partisans hardly represent the opinion of “the scientific community”. Even statements by just one or two American organizations that represent only some (the smallest part) of US scientists, and statements which were produced by the executive of those organizations without even polling their members, don’t represent “the scientific community”. (That would be like saying that the opinion expressed in a New York Times editorial, expressing the views of the majority of the Times editorial staff, represented the opinion of the entire population of New York.) Part of the problem also is that the mods have moved some (but not all) of this discussion over from the other thread, and so you are not seeing everything that has been said.
Do you have any idea that your objection here is based on a logical error?
That handful of reviews pointing out the utter lack of science in Behe’s books, coupled with the absence of enthusiastic reviews, and much more importantly the absence of citations of this alleged contribution to biology in the primary biology literature, tells us all we need to know.
It’s a lot like not having to explain that a RIBOzyme is made of RIBOnucleic acid.
Perhaps. But the fact of the matter is that the documentation presented in Wikipedia is reflective of the larger scientific community - a quick Pubmed search for “Behe” AND “Irreducible complexity” reveals that Behe’s idea is long-forgotten (if it ever was noticed). The ONLY community that would disagree with Wikipedia are themselves “heated partisans” who collectively are wont to fantabulously misrepresent everything about this field of study. The sources cited by Wiki are accurate, spot-on when it comes to the acceptance of Behe’s ideas by the scientific community. This means that the sources cited by Wikipedia are not necessarily “sketchy and inadequate”.
In case it isn’t clear, the afore-mentioned Pubmed exercise is the sort of survey that would confirm or refute the claims made by the Wiki authors. If Wiki is going to be criticized, it is for suggesting that Behe’s ideas were ever anything more than a scientific backwater.
