Intelligent Design is not creationism

With the last few paste-and-copy posts, Teleo has finally confessed that ID is creationism.

All the claims that he was not opposed to evolution, that ID and evolution did not contradict each other were just a facade.

Now that he has turned around and showed his true colors, this thread has reached its final conclusion.

ID does not agree with evolution. ID is creationism.

 

ID is not anti-evolution. ID disputes that evolution is an entirely non-teleological process. ID is not creationism as most Americans would define it. The only way you can claim that ID is creationism is by defining creationism so broadly that 90% of Americans would be creationists.

 

I find it interesting that no one is challenging his statement about complex sentences.

Just few years ago one of the most frequently used anti design arguments was - Infinite monkeys typing away would create the Illiad. So randomness could have created life as we know it. Of course we know it is absurdly unlikely infinite monkeys would ever type the Illiad. But more importantly science has begun to recognize the constraints on chance dictated by our universe.

Chance is becoming unlikely and soon it may be ruled out by a majority of scientists.

 

Nobody is interested in teaching someone who refuses to learn. The problem of complex systems has been studied for decades. There are many books on the topic. Just because you've never read them doesn't mean these problems are not understood.

It's funny that in your knowledge-deprived circle a few questions raised by people who are ignorant of large parts of science are seen as profound. These are all trivial questions if you ever invested in some learning.

 

Do Scientists ever use the Design Inference in Biology? (Hmmm...let me think…)
By Michael Egnor

Orac, a prominent Darwinist blogger who is also a surgical oncologist, recently challenged me:

It took me a while to answer, because there are so many examples of it that I couldn’t decide what to pick first!

The natural place to start showing examples of the inference to design in medical research is the seminal biological discovery of the 20th Century—Watson’s and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA.

To untangle the structure of DNA they didn't use a pair of dice. They inferred design, not chance. They reversed-engineered DNA. They collected physical data about the structure of DNA (X-ray diffraction studies, Chargaff’s rules, the physical chemistry of nucleotides, etc), and then they designed a model of the molecule to understand its structure and function.

What exactly is reverse engineering? From Wikipedia:

Watson’s and Crick’s work of course had nothing to do with Darwinism (except perhaps their laboratory politics, which is another matter).

This is not to say that Watson and Crick believed that DNA was designed by God. They were both atheists. Even molecular biologists who are avowed atheists use the design inference in their work.

Much of modern biological research, and most research in molecular biology, is reverse engineering. Some scientists infer design explicitly. Some use the design inference implicitly, even if they disagree with its philosophical implications. We can’t do modern biology, at least at the molecular level, without using reverse engineering, which is the inference to design.

So, in reply to Orac’s challenge, I ask: Which inference played a greater role in the discovery of the structure and function of DNA: the inference to Darwin’s theory of random variation and natural selection, or the inference to design, applying the principles of reverse engineering?

 

It fits in with the love of appeal to authority evinced by the believers. After all, their belief systems are based on an appeal to the ultimate authority. These are people who are quite comfortable being told what to think.

 

Is Darwinism indispensable to modern medicine?
By Michael Egnor


Darwinists claim that their theory, which is the assertion that all biological complexity arose by random heritable variation and natural selection ("chance and necessity"), is indispensable to modern medicine. What was Darwin’s role in genetics?

He played an important role in classical genetics, in a negative way. In 1865, an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel presented a scientific paper called 'Experiments in Plant Hybridization' at meeting of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia. Fr. Mendel found a remarkable pattern of inheritance in experiments on plants in his garden in his monastery. The experiments suggested that heritable factors were, in some cases, particulate, could remain hidden for generations, and sorted according to simple mathematical rules. According to contemporary records, his paper was ignored, and discussion at the meeting swirled around Charles Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. Mendel’s seminal work, the basis for classical genetics, was buried for the rest of the 19th century under a Darwinian frenzy.

Modern molecular genetics grew out of the work of James Watson and Francis Crick in Cambridge in the early 1950s. Using x-ray diffraction and information about molecular structure derived from quantum mechanics, Watson and Crick designed scale models of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The models made it evident that DNA was a double helix, and that the individual components (base pairs) were symbols in a code. Subsequent work translated the genetic code, and revealed that at the core of life there is a symbolic language, with letters (base pairs), words (codons), sentences (genes), directional reading frames, and even punctuation (stop codons).

Darwin’s role in the emergence of molecular genetics was negative, as well. Molecular geneticists worked implicitly from an inference to design, using the principles of reverse engineering applied to biology. The genetic code was translated, and read, like a language. Darwin’s assertion that the raw material for biological complexity is "randomness" was anti-heuristic. It was the inference to design, not the inference to randomness, that led to the understanding and translation of the genetic code. Darwin never predicted, in his theory of chance and necessity, a language at the core of life. The understanding of the genetic code was the direct result of the inference to design in biology.

Former Vice President Al Gore famously claimed to have invented the Internet because years ago he was in the Senate and sponsored a bill. The assertion that Charles Darwin’s theory was indispensable to classical and molecular genetics is a claim of an even lower order. Darwin’s theory impeded the recognition of Mendel’s discovery for a third of a century, and Darwin’s assertion that random variation was the raw material for biological complexity was of no help in decoding the genetic language of DNA. The single incontrovertible Darwinian contribution to the field of medical genetics was eugenics, which is the Darwinian theory that humans can be bred for social and character traits, like animals. The field of medical genetics is still recovering from eugneics, which was Darwin’s only gift to medicine.

 

Darwinists insult our intelligence when they claim that Darwinism is indispensable to any area of science or medicine

By Michael Egnor


Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a pioneer in antibiotic research, said it best: Darwinism is a "narrative gloss" on biology. Darwinists expropriate the work of other fields of science, then claim the credit for Darwin's theory. Nowhere in science is the truth of Skell’s observation more apparent than in the Darwinist claim that Darwin’s theory — the assertion that random variation and natural selection is the source of all biological complexity — is indispensable to modern medicine. It is a claim that, upon inspection, is almost delusional.

Darwinists claim that comparative medicine and biology, which is the study of the similarities between non-human organisms and humans, arose from Darwin’s theory. That’s nonsense. Comparative biology has been the basis for biological science for thousands of years, and many of the greatest medical advances, such as Galen’s and Vesalius’ studies of anatomy and Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, were the fruit of comparative biological research that antedated Darwin by centuries. The father of modern comparative biology was Carolus Linnaeus, who worked a century before Darwin was born.

Darwinists claim that modern medical genetics owes much to Darwin’s theory. That’s nonsense as well. Darwin contributed nothing original to our understanding of the basic mechanisms of heredity. His view of heredity was vaguely Lamarckian (the theory that traits acquired in adulthood could be passed to offspring) and he ascribed to the erroneous theory of ‘blending’ inheritance, which denied the existence of discrete units of heredity. The father of modern genetics was Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and a contemporary of Darwin, who worked out the basic rules of inheritance in plants in his garden in a monastery. The frenzy over Darwin’s theory distracted 19th century scientists, and Mendel’s seminal discoveries in genetics went unrecognized for half a century. Modern molecular genetics began with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Watson and Crick discerned the structure and function of DNA by designing models of the double helix, and subsequent work revealed the molecular language of heredity. The Darwinian inference of randomness as the origin of biological structure was obviously of no help in translating the genetic code, which is a symbolic language.

Finally, Darwinists claim that our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics is dependent on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But “natural selection” is a tautology, not a theory. The fit survive. Who are the fit? The survivors. Who are the survivors? The fit. The concept is true (how could it be false?), but it’s worthless to science and medicine. The observation that bacteria that aren’t killed by antibiotics aren’t killed by antibiotics is of no value in understanding or treating infectious diseases. We use microbiology, molecular biology, pharmacology, and statistical methods in population biology to understand and treat infections.

The astonishing Darwinian claim of indispensability in areas of science that antedate it by millennia (such as comparative biology) and in areas of science to which it is obviously tangential or merely tautological (molecular genetics or bacterial resistance to antibiotics) bespeak its irrelevance to biology and medicine. Some less-grounded Darwinists like Daniel Dennett have even gone further, claiming that the universe itself can be explained by Darwinian mechanisms. Darwinism is indispensable to cosmology!

There’s a reason for this almost delusional attribution of scientific progress to Darwin’s theory. Darwinism is based on the radical and unsubstantiated assertion that all natural biological complexity arose from random heritable variation and natural selection. It is the creation myth of contemporary philosophical materialism, which is the view that the material world (matter and energy) are the only things that exist. The materialist worldview depends critically on Darwin’s theory. We can do science just fine without Darwin’s theory, using molecular biology, biological statistics, and other well established fields of biology.

It’s time for fields of science on which Darwinism has hitched a ride to open the door and let it off. If Darwinists have real quantitative evidence that biological complexity arose entirely by chance and necessity, they should show us the evidence. Until then, Darwinists insult our intelligence when they claim that Darwinism is indispensable to any area of science or medicine. Darwin's theory is indispensible in only one way: Darwinists can’t do philosophy without Darwin’s theory.

 

raise your cut & paste with my copy & paste...

bhumburg posted Entry 2971 on March 9, 2007 08:44 PM.

• 
  " Dr. Egnor knows that he would be required to use glucocorticoids to prevent seizures in many situations in neurosurgery, but they were first tested in humans in 1948 - well after the FDA would have required the drugs to be proven non-toxic in animal models.
  Unless he isn’t giving medicines approved after the 1930s - and one doesn’t often find homeopathic surgeons - then he’s using evolution, even if he refuses to recognize it.
  
  But that’s what his post is primarily about. It’s not that evolution is useless to medicine; on the contrary, it is a non-controversial component of essential medical education and one needs to know it certainly to get into medical school these days, to say nothing of staying in and doing well afterwards, to say nothing of having any prayer of a chance of making sense of the science that others use to generate the “standards of care”.
  
  What’s going on here is that Egnor dislikes evolution and is hoping to de-emphasize its importance. Why? It is possible that he earnestly and sincerely believes that evolution has not contributed to his art. It is possible that he earnestly and sincerely believes that recognizing the validity of evolution would render his life meaningless or without value. It is possible he is a cynical liar and he wants no readers of the Discovery Institute Ministry of Media Complaints who credit his perspectives to enter or do well in medical school. (Hey, if true, he wouldn’t be the first surgeon who knew better about evolution but still advocated for ID only to make a buck, gain a little influence, or exhibit some sort of other ulterior motive.) Whatever his motivations may be, readers should not credit his testimony: he is at least dead wrong.
  
  Further, his perspectives are very difficult to distinguish from ignorance advocacy. Egnor first came to attention when a blogger at Time magazine criticized him for not being an expert in evolution. He has stated that he does not use evolution, but this is more an admission of a willful disregard for the evolution he does use and upon which his art is based. Taken together, along with his assurance that the only contribution evolution has made to medicine was eugenics*, his writings bespeak the dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance, traits altogether common with creationists, but that shine in Dr. Egnor to such an extent that a neologism should bear his namesake. Egnorance. (n) The egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance. "

Dr. Egnor probably gets paid for making an ass of himself, so tell us Tele, what's your excuse?

 

The article you posted doesn't provide a shred of evidence that Darwinism is useful to medical science and medical students are not required to take courses on evolution.