What is the probability?

[RonO]

Recently we had a brief addition to TO. It was likely a nym shift of
some existing poster, but what if it wasn't? It has to be difficult to
find TO among today's media offerings, and how many creationist rubes
could still exist that would be ignorant, incompetent, and or dishonest
enough to try to defend the ID scam at this time when the ID scam has
been degenerating so badly in the last 20 years?

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/kMyA12L5dLc/m/HmttOZxfCgAJ

IDiot creationist posters should put on their creato probability caps
and try to come up with how unlikely such a poster's existence should be.

Education seems to have been a big factor in whether you were taken in
by the IC scam or not. The more education the less likely. What
education level is most likely to find TO today? The IDEA university
student clubs were among the first creationist casualties of the bait
and switch scam. Most of them were scientific creationist student clubs
that converted over to IDiocy, and the IDEA clubs likely peaked around
the time that the bait and switch scam went down on Ohio in March 2002.
These were student clubs that claimed to be interested in discussing
the IDiot science. Casey Luskin was involved in getting an organization
up and running that would support such student clubs. It still has a
web site, but most of the student clubs died once the bait and switch
started to go down, and none seemed to have survived the Dover fiasco.
The university students wanted to discuss the IDiot science and not the
obfuscation and denial that the ID perps was telling them had nothing to
do with IDiocy.

The ISCID (IDiot science organization) basically died after the bait and
switch started to go down, and after 2003 no additional articles were
posted to their web journal until Dover hit the fan and the ID perps
updated the site and cleaned it up to try to make it look legitimate.

So after the bait and switch started to go down and no IDiots were
getting any ID science to teach in the public schools most of the
educated creationists that were half way honest and informed quit the ID
scam.

After the Dover fiasco and the loss in federal court most of the
"academics" that were left quit the ID scam along with notable IDiots
like Phillip Johnson and ex Senator Santorum. The ISCID was closed
down, and the ID Network of IDiotic academics quit more than 13 years ago.

So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?

Ron Okimoto

[Pro Plyd]

RonO wrote:
> Recently we had a brief addition to TO.  It was likely a nym shift of some
> existing poster, but what if it wasn't?  It has to be difficult to find TO
> among today's media offerings, and how many creationist rubes could still
> exist that would be ignorant, incompetent, and or dishonest enough to try
> to defend the ID scam at this time when the ID scam has been degenerating
> so badly in the last 20 years?
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/kMyA12L5dLc/m/HmttOZxfCgAJ
>
> IDiot creationist posters should put on their creato probability caps and
> try to come up with how unlikely such a poster's existence should be.
>
> Education seems to have been a big factor in whether you were taken in by
> the IC scam or not.  The more education the less likely.  What education

> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to support
> the ID scam at this time?  What is the probability?

Evidently not as educated and informed as one might hope.

[Ron Dean]

You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?

> Ron Okimoto

[Lawyer Daggett]

The fact that many people accept an idea isn't that compelling a thing
in support of said idea. Many people believe in the existence of a god,
many people do not. The truth cannot be established by a vote.
Many people asserted that Ivermectin was effective against covid-19,
many asserted it wasn't. Their assertions and beliefs aren't important.
Actual experiments, using double-blinding, were performed. No benefit
was found for ivermectin. Imperical evidence is nice specifically because
it persists independently of whether or not people do or do not want to believe.
see for example https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/11/6/796

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, November 30, 2022 at 8:30:07 PM UTC-5, Ron Dean wrote:

...something far down near the end of this post. Ron Dean did not
tackle the rant that Ron Okimoto indulged in, but I have had
plenty to say about it below. People who know what a prize jerk RonO is,
will probably just want to jump to the end of this post.

I don't know if that includes every talk.origins participant besides
Ron O, but there are plenty of t.o. regulars who make sure that
Ron O is not left to cry from loneliness, and therefore
have a "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" attitude towards him
while lending him support from time to time.

UPDATE: I just now saw that one of the aforementioned regulars,
posting under the pseudonym "Lawyer Daggett" because he is more
of a coward than Ron O but is full of empty bravado at times, has added
a post to this thread.

So now I will scroll back down to my unfinished response to
Ron Dean's words and wrap this post up.

> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>
> > Recently we had a brief addition to TO. It was likely a nym shift of
> > some existing poster, but what if it wasn't? It has to be difficult to
> > find TO among today's media offerings, and how many creationist rubes
> > could still exist that would be ignorant, incompetent, and or dishonest
> > enough to try to defend the ID scam at this time when the ID scam has
> > been degenerating so badly in the last 20 years?

Ron O is here treating us to a work of fiction that he has never tried
to document.

> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/kMyA12L5dLc/m/HmttOZxfCgAJ

This url is not documentation of anything except Ron O ranting and raving
with more passion than he is here. You will find a bunch of links in it
but they only take you to more of the same work of fiction that
he is summarizing here.

> > IDiot creationist posters should put on their creato probability caps
> > and try to come up with how unlikely such a poster's existence should be.

Since it is all based on the undocumented existence of "such a poster,"
it would be an exercise in producing fiction of one's own. However,
the exercise would be so boring, it would soon be abandoned except
by those who post satire spoofing Ron O.

> > Education seems to have been a big factor in whether you were taken in
> > by the IC scam or not. The more education the less likely. What
> > education level is most likely to find TO today? The IDEA university
> > student clubs were among the first creationist casualties of the bait
> > and switch scam. Most of them were scientific creationist student clubs
> > that converted over to IDiocy, and the IDEA clubs likely peaked around
> > the time that the bait and switch scam went down on Ohio in March 2002.
> > These were student clubs that claimed to be interested in discussing
> > the IDiot science. Casey Luskin was involved in getting an organization
> > up and running that would support such student clubs. It still has a
> > web site, but most of the student clubs died once the bait and switch
> > started to go down, and none seemed to have survived the Dover fiasco.

That's funny, because both Michael Behe and Scott Minnich presented a great deal of
ID theory and ID science (respectively, mostly) in Dover.
Anti-ID fanatics do their best to hide this, and they are
so insecure about their ability to refute Behe that they resort to
wholesale misrepresentation and almost never say an honest thing about Behe.

> > The university students wanted to discuss the IDiot science and not the
> > obfuscation and denial that the ID perps was telling them had nothing to
> > do with IDiocy.
> >
> > The ISCID (IDiot science organization) basically died after the bait and
> > switch started to go down, and after 2003 no additional articles were
> > posted to their web journal until Dover hit the fan and the ID perps
> > updated the site and cleaned it up to try to make it look legitimate.

Here Ron O, fanatic that he is, pretends that the elephant in the room
does not exist. This elephant is the online journal Evolution News,
and almost the only way you read about it is when Glenn posts links
to articles. This makes Ron O throw fits, and causes him to
post a lot of crap about Glenn which he never tries to document.

> >
> > So after the bait and switch started to go down

Ron O is just parroting a formula [1] here that he invented
and has long since ceased to think rationally about it.

[1] or inserting a bot, as automatic as me touch typing a key
on my keyboard; in fact, it hampers me to actually think
consciously about which key I am hitting. This is true even
of people who touch type much more slowly than I do.
[I should also add that I've seen people who touch type much faster than I do.

The use of the idiom "go down" is symptomatic of the inflexible
language Ron O is stuck with.

> > and no IDiots were
> > getting any ID science to teach in the public schools most of the
> > educated creationists that were half way honest and informed quit the ID
> > scam.

Ron O is here imposing his artificial "reality" on reality itself.

> >
> > After the Dover fiasco and the loss in federal court most of the
> > "academics" that were left quit the ID scam

Since there never was an ID scam, as opposed to the Wedge fiasco,
Ron O is here talking about the empty set.


> > along with notable IDiots
> > like Phillip Johnson and ex Senator Santorum.The ISCID was closed

> > down, and the ID Network of IDiotic academics quit more than 13 years ago.
> >
> > So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
> > support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?

Finally, we get a break in the storm clouds as we get to Ron Dean's brief comment.

> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?

You mean against unguided evolution. The best (on the whole) ID theorist, Michael Behe,
believes in common descent of earth organisms but also believes that there
is a lot of intelligent guidance behind it.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[RonO]

Do you remember your bouts with the Top Six over the last 5 years, and
how no IDiotic creationists or recently exIDiots would help you out in
understanding why no IDiots could deal with them in an honest and
straightforward manner?

You likely do not, or you wouldn't be asking the question that you are
asking.

The ID scam is a scam because that is what it has been for the last 20
years. The ID perps started running the bait and switch on the IDiot
creationist rubes back in March 2002, and they never quit. ID is put up
as the bait, but not a single IDiot creationist rube has gotten the ID
science when they have needed it. They only get an obfuscation and
denial switch scam that the ID perps tell the rubes has nothing to do
with ID. This has happened 100% of the time that any creationist rube
has wanted to teach the ID science in the public schools.

You can go to the ID perp web site and look up their education section
and see that they are still claiming to be able to teach ID in the
public schools as some type of scientific theory, but the bait and
switch scam will go down on the next group of creationists rubes (if
there are any stupid and dishonest enough to try). It has been 5 years
since there have been any creationist rubes stupid and dishonest enough
to try to teach the junk. That is the longest interval between bait and
switch events in the 20 year history of the ID scam.

Really, go to the ID perp web site and look up their education junk and
see for yourself that the ID perps never stopped claiming to be able to
teach the junk in the public schools. Do you expect any creationist
rubes to ever get any ID science to teach in the public schools?

https://www.discovery.org/f/1453/
You can get this link by pulling down the Education tab on the ID perps
Science and culture web site. The ID perps do not run the bait and
switch scam on the science side, they run the bait and switch on their
own creationist support base. You can't have something be more than a
scam than ID is. ID has only been the bait for the last 20 years. No
creationist rube has ever gotten the bait from the ID perps, they only
get the obfuscation and denial switch scam.

https://www.discovery.org/id/

To answer your question about the anti-evolution stupidity that you get
from IDiots, that is just part of the switch scam. It isn't supposed to
have anything to do with the ID science. The anti-evolution bullshit is
just junk to keep the creationist rubes sending in money to support the
bait and switch scam.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/BFev0TB1zNM/m/tveh7uvTAAAJ
This thread has been revived by someone, and it shows that even some of
the ID perps know that biological evolution is a fact of nature. Did
you learn anything from the Townes thread that Glenn recently put up.
He is another ID advocate that understands that life has evolved on this
planet for billions of years. Glenn puts up a lot of junk that he
doesn't understand nor want to understand.

The anti-evolution junk is a joke even to other ID perps. Both Denton
and Behe agree that biological evolution is a fact of nature and both
were ID perps when the ID creationist scam started in 1995.

Behe has participated in every bait and switch that the ID perps have
run for the last 20 years (he claims that he never supported teaching
the junk, but he never resigned once the bait and switch kept going
down). Denton quit the ID scam before the bait and switch started, but
Denton came back to the ID scam after Dover to participate in the bait
and switch scam that ID had become.

Ron Okimoto


>
>> Ron Okimoto
>

[jillery]

On Thu, 01 Dec 2022 01:29:32 GMT, Ron Dean <rdhall...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Since you asked:

WRT Q1, reality is not a popularity contest.
WRT Q2, read any authoritative book about evolution.

You're welcome.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[jillery]

PeeWee Peter accurately describes as "works of fiction" the
EvolutionNews articles RonO cites. Unintended satire? Or compulsive
haste to post yet more hate-ravaged attacks against RonO?

>> > IDiot creationist posters should put on their creato probability caps
>> > and try to come up with how unlikely such a poster's existence should be.
>
>Since it is all based on the undocumented existence of "such a poster,"
>it would be an exercise in producing fiction of one's own. However,
>the exercise would be so boring, it would soon be abandoned except
>by those who post satire spoofing Ron O.

In yet another example of accusing others of doing what he does even
as he does it, Pee Peter alludes to undocumented posters who spoof
RonO.

>> > Education seems to have been a big factor in whether you were taken in
>> > by the IC scam or not. The more education the less likely. What
>> > education level is most likely to find TO today? The IDEA university
>> > student clubs were among the first creationist casualties of the bait
>> > and switch scam. Most of them were scientific creationist student clubs
>> > that converted over to IDiocy, and the IDEA clubs likely peaked around
>> > the time that the bait and switch scam went down on Ohio in March 2002.
>> > These were student clubs that claimed to be interested in discussing
>> > the IDiot science. Casey Luskin was involved in getting an organization
>> > up and running that would support such student clubs. It still has a
>> > web site, but most of the student clubs died once the bait and switch
>> > started to go down, and none seemed to have survived the Dover fiasco.
>
>That's funny, because both Michael Behe and Scott Minnich presented a great deal of
>ID theory and ID science (respectively, mostly) in Dover.
>Anti-ID fanatics do their best to hide this, and they are
>so insecure about their ability to refute Behe that they resort to
>wholesale misrepresentation and almost never say an honest thing about Behe.

In yet another example of accusing others of doing what he does even
as he does it, PeeWee Peter alludes to "wholesale misrepresentation
and almost never say[s] an honest thing".

>> > The university students wanted to discuss the IDiot science and not the
>> > obfuscation and denial that the ID perps was telling them had nothing to
>> > do with IDiocy.
>> >
>> > The ISCID (IDiot science organization) basically died after the bait and
>> > switch started to go down, and after 2003 no additional articles were
>> > posted to their web journal until Dover hit the fan and the ID perps
>> > updated the site and cleaned it up to try to make it look legitimate.
>
>Here Ron O, fanatic that he is, pretends that the elephant in the room
>does not exist. This elephant is the online journal Evolution News,
>and almost the only way you read about it is when Glenn posts links
>to articles. This makes Ron O throw fits, and causes him to
>post a lot of crap about Glenn which he never tries to document.

PeeWee Peter conveniently forgets about the EvolutionNews articles
RonO cites in the very link PeeWee Peter provides above.

[Mark Isaak]

On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>

>> [...]

>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
>>
> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?

Regarding your last point, it is worth repeating that those arguments
against evolution have nothing to do with ID. It's like trying to
convict Joe Schmoe of planning a robbery by saying, "The prosecution has
spent the last month proving that Debbie Doe did not plan the robbery.
Therefore Joe did."

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:

> On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
>> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>>
>>> [...]
>>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
>>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
>>>
>> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
>> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
>> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?

And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?

>
> Regarding your last point, it is worth repeating that those arguments
> against evolution have nothing to do with ID. It's like trying to
> convict Joe Schmoe of planning a robbery by saying, "The prosecution
> has spent the last month proving that Debbie Doe did not plan the
> robbery. Therefore Joe did."


--

Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 36+ years; mainly
in England until 1987.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:
>
> > On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
> >> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> [...]
> >>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
> >>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
> >>>
> >> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
> >> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
> >> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?

> And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
> prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
> there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?

The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
on evolution that is standard in the high schools.

Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."

ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.
It is only opposed this having all taken place without intelligent guidance.

High school is too early for a sufficient understanding of how
primitive a stage evolutionary theory is at currently.
Termed "neo-Darwinism" and "the Modern Synthesis, it is a theory
of *microevolution* only. As such, it has no more to say about the grand
panorama of life on earth evolving from humble bacteria than
cell signaling in our bodies has to say about the complex interactions
of the participants of talk.origins.

At this stage, the best that can be done in the direction of "competition"
is to point out the weaknesses of the theory in its present form.
This includes an inability to explain a number of striking biological phenomena.

> > Regarding your last point, it is worth repeating that those arguments
> > against evolution have nothing to do with ID.

Athel here seems to fall into the trap, inherited from Ron Dean, of not clearly
distinguishing between evolution and evolutionary theory. See above.

> >It's like trying to
> > convict Joe Schmoe of planning a robbery by saying, "The prosecution
> > has spent the last month proving that Debbie Doe did not plan the
> > robbery. Therefore Joe did."

No such false dichotomy exists when the above distinction is clearly made.
Then the issue is simply: "either life on earth evolved in the
complete absence of intelligent influence, or evolution was subjected
to intelligent intervention somewhere, perhaps many places and times."

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Glenn]

On Monday, December 5, 2022 at 7:45:11 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> > On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:
> >
> > > On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
> > >> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> [...]
> > >>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
> > >>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
> > >>>
> > >> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
> > >> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
> > >> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?
>
> > And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
> > prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
> > there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?

I'd like evidence of that, and not what someone else claims he said.

[*Hemidactylus*]

A mathematician who dabbles in biology as a hobby lecturing Athel about
evolution is priceless.

🤦‍♂️ [facepalm emoji]

[jillery]

On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 20:15:30 -0800 (PST), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>On Monday, December 5, 2022 at 7:45:11 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> > On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:
>> >
>> > > On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
>> > >> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>> > >>
>> > >>> [...]
>> > >>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
>> > >>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
>> > >>>
>> > >> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
>> > >> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
>> > >> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?
>>
>> > And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
>> > prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
>> > there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
>
>I'd like evidence of that, and not what someone else claims he said.

What you would like would be difficult to accommodate, considering
that Johnson died in 2019. So all that's left is what other people
said he said, including PeeWee Peter's comments below.

>> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
>> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
>> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.

According to this:
<http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/johnson-on-inte.html>

Johnson wrote this:
********************************
I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design
at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the
Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully
worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s
comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific
people that we have affiliated with the movement.
********************************

>> Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
>> like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
>> instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."

Note Johnson specifically stated "Darwinian theory", and there are no
references to those qualifiers PeeWee Peter made up.

I acknowledge the above qualifies as "someone said he said". OTOH
Panda's Thumb cites the following link:

<https://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution>

Unfortunately, all of my browsers return "insecure link", and the
Berkeley Science Review website archive doesn't go earlier than 2011.
Perhaps Athel or Ron O have a working link to something authoritative.

[jillery]

>???? [facepalm emoji]


It would be reasonable to suppose that PeeWee Peter's posts are
intelligently designed to show cdesign proponentsists are willfully
stupid.

[RonO]

The original link went broken years ago, but I found a working link and
it has been used in Phillip Johnson's wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_E._Johnson

You have to scroll all the way down to the last wiki entry "Admission
that there is no theory of intelligent design".

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution

I had routinely used this link since the original link went broken
because Nyikos has wanted to lie about it for years, and I gave it to
the person that edited Johnson's wiki. Anyone interested should read
the article. Phillip Johnson had been one of the biggest advocates of
teaching IDiocy in the public schools as part of his Wedge Strategy.
The author of the article was genuinely surprised by his change of heart
after Johnson sat in the Federal court room everyday and watched IDiocy
fail as science. Johnson had entered the courtroom claiming that ID
should be taught in the public schools and news outlets had him in
interviews claiming as much. He even made the claim in the documentary
that NOVA made for PBS on the Dover episode. The science testimony and
the antics of the ID perps made him change his mind.

Ron Okimoto

[Zen Cycle]

my thoughts exactly....

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Monday, December 5, 2022 at 11:30:11 PM UTC-5, *Hemidactylus* wrote:

I don't dabble in biology, as you would know if you were a sci.bio.paleontology
regular instead of a very occasional dabbler there. It's been a passion of
mine since the age of 12.

A great amateur at ichthyology, J. L. B. Smith, who did a superb research
article on the living coelacanth and thereby secured the right to give it the
name *Latimeria chalumnae*, wrote the following.

"Another type of intellectual snobbery is the dictum that science has now passed beyond the understanding of the ordinary man. That, however, is very largely a matter of presentation. With the possible exception of higher mathematics, there is not a single branch of science whose broad outlines the ordinary man cannot appreciate if it is properly explained to him.
--J.L.B. Smith, _The Search Beneath the Sea_, Henry Holt and Company, 1956, p. 44


> 🤦‍♂️ [facepalm emoji]

Athel did the opposite of a proper explanation, conflating evolution with evolutionary theory,
and posting a ridiculous, amateurish analogy.

Care to dispute this, Hemi?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 2:35:12 AM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 20:15:30 -0800 (PST), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> wrote:
> >On Monday, December 5, 2022 at 7:45:11 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> >> > On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:
> >> >
> >> > > On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
> >> > >> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
> >> > >>
> >> > >>> [...]
> >> > >>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
> >> > >>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
> >> > >>>
> >> > >> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
> >> > >> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
> >> > >> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?
> >>
> >> > And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
> >> > prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
> >> > there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
> >
> >I'd like evidence of that, and not what someone else claims he said.

> What you would like would be difficult to accommodate, considering
> that Johnson died in 2019.

Strange non sequitur, given that Johnson made the comments in
a "jaw-dropping" interview whose account he never disputed.

> So all that's left is what other people
> said he said, including PeeWee Peter's comments below.

I had a senior moment, confusing some of what Johnson
had said with claims by RonO about the alleged "bait and switch scam"
for which he cited Johnson as support. The alleged "bait" had to
do with teaching ID in the public schools, mostly high schools
since natural selection and mutation aren't suitable at the
dumbed-down level of earlier grades ("forms" in British lingo).

> >> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
> >> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
> >> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
> According to this:
> <http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/johnson-on-inte.html>
>
> Johnson wrote this:

See correction of "wrote" below.

> ********************************
> I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design
> at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the
> Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully
> worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s
> comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific
> people that we have affiliated with the movement.
> ********************************

That is from an interview, which was done in person, orally, according
to the link Ron O provided:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution

> >> Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
> >> like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
> >> instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."

> Note Johnson specifically stated "Darwinian theory",

...by which he would have meant neo-Darwinism, the reigning evolutionary theory.
You did an unmarked snip of the part where I explain why it really is only a theory of microevolution.

For those who prefer to click rather than scroll, I provide the url for the post
to which jillery is following up:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/nmTq1MCK3hg/m/9P_wZ3r2AAAJ

> and there are no
> references to those qualifiers PeeWee Peter made up.

True where "high school" is concerned, but "made up" is inaccurate, see above and below.

> I acknowledge the above qualifies as "someone said he said". OTOH
> Panda's Thumb cites the following link:
>
> <https://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution>
>
> Unfortunately, all of my browsers return "insecure link", and the
> Berkeley Science Review website archive doesn't go earlier than 2011.

> Perhaps Athel or Ron O have a working link to something authoritative.

Ron O came through, but then inadvertently helped me by revealing
how Johnson's "jaw-dropping" admission was not narrowed down to
"the public schools" (elementary and secondary). That narrowing
down had come earlier.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>
>> And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
>> prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
>> there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
>
> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
>
> Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
> like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
> instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."
>
> ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
> to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.

Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
Its name is promoted, but it is never studied. Except, of course, by
engineers who have nothing to do with the ID movement.

[jillery]

Thank you for pointing this out. You're correct that Wikipedia cites
the archive link, as well as the original. I had the same problem
with the Wikipedia cite as I did with the Panda's Thumb cite, because
I clicked on the "archived from the original" link, thinking it would
link to the archive page. Silly me.

The larger points are, none of PeeWee Peter's made-up qualifiers
appear in that article, and Glenn can still claim the article wasn't
written by Johnson and so doesn't count.

[jillery]

On Tue, 6 Dec 2022 07:08:19 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 2:35:12 AM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
>> On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 20:15:30 -0800 (PST), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
>> wrote:
>> >On Monday, December 5, 2022 at 7:45:11 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>> >> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> >> > On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:
>> >> >
>> >> > > On 11/30/22 5:29 PM, Ron Dean wrote:
>> >> > >> On Apr 2, 2022 at 6:20:24 AM EDT, "RonO" <roki...@cox.net> wrote:
>> >> > >>
>> >> > >>> [...]
>> >> > >>> So how many educated and informed creationists would still try to
>> >> > >>> support the ID scam at this time? What is the probability?
>> >> > >>>
>> >> > >> You continue to call intelligent design a scam, how do you justify this as
>> >> > >> a scam when so many people and accept as reality. Furthermore, how do
>> >> > >> you counter the arguments against evolution by ID proponents?
>> >>
>> >> > And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
>> >> > prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
>> >> > there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
>> >
>> >I'd like evidence of that, and not what someone else claims he said.
>
>> What you would like would be difficult to accommodate, considering
>> that Johnson died in 2019.
>
>Strange non sequitur, given that Johnson made the comments in
>a "jaw-dropping" interview whose account he never disputed.

Once again, you accuse me of doing what you do even while you do it
yourself.

>> So all that's left is what other people
>> said he said, including PeeWee Peter's comments below.
>
>I had a senior moment, confusing some of what Johnson
>had said with claims by RonO about the alleged "bait and switch scam"
>for which he cited Johnson as support. The alleged "bait" had to
>do with teaching ID in the public schools, mostly high schools
>since natural selection and mutation aren't suitable at the
>dumbed-down level of earlier grades ("forms" in British lingo).

Your posts have documented your senior moments since at least 2011.

>> >> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
>> >> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
>> >> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
>> According to this:
>> <http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/johnson-on-inte.html>
>>
>> Johnson wrote this:
>
>See correction of "wrote" below.

Your comment above is yet another strange non sequitur from you.

>> ********************************
>> I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design
>> at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the
>> Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully
>> worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s
>> comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific
>> people that we have affiliated with the movement.
>> ********************************
>
>That is from an interview, which was done in person, orally, according
>to the link Ron O provided:
>
>https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution
>
>
>> >> Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
>> >> like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
>> >> instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."
>
>> Note Johnson specifically stated "Darwinian theory",
>
>...by which he would have meant neo-Darwinism, the reigning evolutionary theory.
>You did an unmarked snip of the part where I explain why it really is only a theory of microevolution.

My reply was to Glenn and not to you. I deleted your transparent
obfuscating noise because it had nothing whatever to do with Glenn's
comment to which I replied.

And since you mention it, your interpretation of what Johnson meant
isn't based on anything Johnson said, nor does your interpretation
help support your criticism of what Athel wrote.

>For those who prefer to click rather than scroll, I provide the url for the post
>to which jillery is following up:
> https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/nmTq1MCK3hg/m/9P_wZ3r2AAAJ

You just can't control yourself. That's not the post I followed up.
Once again, I replied to Glenn's post, which is trivially proved by
those who use real newsreaders. Your self-serving link is to your own
post.

>> and there are no
>> references to those qualifiers PeeWee Peter made up.
>
>True where "high school" is concerned, but "made up" is inaccurate, see above and below.

Yes, those who read for comprehension can see that all of your
expressed qualifiers have no factual basis aka made up.

>> I acknowledge the above qualifies as "someone said he said". OTOH
>> Panda's Thumb cites the following link:
>>
>> <https://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution>
>>
>> Unfortunately, all of my browsers return "insecure link", and the
>> Berkeley Science Review website archive doesn't go earlier than 2011.
>
>> Perhaps Athel or Ron O have a working link to something authoritative.
>
>Ron O came through, but then inadvertently helped me by revealing
>how Johnson's "jaw-dropping" admission was not narrowed down to
>"the public schools" (elementary and secondary). That narrowing
>down had come earlier.

RonO's working cite of the article does nothing to justify your
twisted knappies here. Johnson's references to "school" are about
cdesign proponentsists' attempts to force public schools to teach ID,
and so don't inform your expressed criticism of Athel's comment.

[jillery]

>> ???? [facepalm emoji]

>
>Athel did the opposite of a proper explanation, conflating evolution with evolutionary theory,
>and posting a ridiculous, amateurish analogy.
>
>Care to dispute this, Hemi?

Care to justify "this", PeeWee? Nowhere did Athel mention either
evolution or evolutionary theory.

[Zen Cycle]

Johnson also wrote this in Darwin on Trial: "We are taking an intuition most people have and making it a scientific and academic enterprise.....In challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative theory we are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator."

[broger...@gmail.com]

I think Johnson is very wrong to think that Darwinism is the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as Creator. As far as I can tell, the only people who give up belief in God because they become convinced the ToE is true are the children of YECs. Other people who lose faith or interest in "God as Creator" do so for lots of reasons unrelated to the ToE - for example, theodicy, the poor behavior of various religious leaders, the politicization of religion, even just waking up one morning with the felling that it's all nonsense. In the other direction, I've not met any converts to Christianity who converted because they thought it offered them a better explanation for the origin of the bacterial flagellum than mainstream biology.

[Bill]

broger...@gmail.com wrote:

...

>> >
>> Johnson also wrote this in Darwin on Trial: "We are taking an intuition
>> most people have and making it a scientific and academic
>> enterprise.....In challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative
>> theory we are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting
>> the role of God as creator."
>
> I think Johnson is very wrong to think that Darwinism is the most
> important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as Creator. As
> far as I can tell, the only people who give up belief in God because they
> become convinced the ToE is true are the children of YECs. Other people
> who lose faith or interest in "God as Creator" do so for lots of reasons
> unrelated to the ToE - for example, theodicy, the poor behavior of various
> religious leaders, the politicization of religion, even just waking up one
> morning with the felling that it's all nonsense. In the other direction,
> I've not met any converts to Christianity who converted because they
> thought it offered them a better explanation for the origin of the
> bacterial flagellum than mainstream biology.

What I find interesting is that the majority opinion seems to be there are
only two, mutually exclusive alternatives: Either God created-designed our
reality or nature created and designed itself. Neither is satisfactory
because we have no way to know which forces us invent answers that can't be
confirmed.

This leads us to respond with hostility and ridicule to the option we don't
like and elevate the other to certain truth. It doesn't matter who has the
better explanation because we reason from a preferred outcome; we always
win.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 4:30:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> ...
> >> >
> >> Johnson also wrote this in Darwin on Trial: "We are taking an intuition
> >> most people have and making it a scientific and academic
> >> enterprise.....In challenging Darwinism with a God-friendly alternative
> >> theory we are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting
> >> the role of God as creator."
> >
> > I think Johnson is very wrong to think that Darwinism is the most
> > important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as Creator. As
> > far as I can tell, the only people who give up belief in God because they
> > become convinced the ToE is true are the children of YECs. Other people
> > who lose faith or interest in "God as Creator" do so for lots of reasons
> > unrelated to the ToE - for example, theodicy, the poor behavior of various
> > religious leaders, the politicization of religion, even just waking up one
> > morning with the felling that it's all nonsense. In the other direction,
> > I've not met any converts to Christianity who converted because they
> > thought it offered them a better explanation for the origin of the
> > bacterial flagellum than mainstream biology.
> What I find interesting is that the majority opinion seems to be there are
> only two, mutually exclusive alternatives: Either God created-designed our
> reality or nature created and designed itself. Neither is satisfactory
> because we have no way to know which forces us invent answers that can't be
> confirmed.

......."Neither is satisfactory because I have no way to know, which forces me to invent answers that can't be confirmed. "

>
> This leads us to respond with hostility and ridicule to the option we don't
> like and elevate the other to certain truth. It doesn't matter who has the
> better explanation because we reason from a preferred outcome; we always
> win.

"This leads me to respond with hostility and ridicule to the option I don't like and elevate the other to certain truth. It doesn't matter who has the better explanation, because I reason from a preferred outcome; I always win."

You are the authority on you. Your confident pronouncements about "we" and "the majority" do not at all line up with my experience. I suggest you stick to characterizing your own views; you do a poor job characterizing the views of others. And since you somehow seem to think it would be offensive to quote the views which others have openly expressed here, you never present any evidence to support your characterizations of what others think.

You might want to rethink your position that it's bad to cite other posters. If Tom is perfectly happy to write a post saying "The Rolling Stones were much better than the Beetles" and post it here, it hardly seems likely that he'd be offended if you cited his post, which anyone could already read anyway. So I think that when you say "Most people here think X," you can really go ahead and quote a couple of posts in which people here say "X."
>
> Bill

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 4:30:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:

Your impression that the majority fall into dichotomous extremes is rather
different than mine, both for those that are generally believers and those
that are generally non-believers. Most of the believers I know don't really
feel certain at all, they frequently feel doubt. But they still take some comfort
in belief itself and are shall we say attracted to it. And that's good enough
for them. Perhaps that's missing a key point that's best revealed by that
line about prayer, "I don't pray to change god, I pray to change me."
Some people feel that their belief helps them be better people.
Some of the annoying ones also think that applies to everyone and so
try to get others to believe too under the impression that belief would
make others better people too. Such folks tend to have lived somewhat
sheltered lives without much interaction with people who they know are
non-believers.

And within non-believers, sure there are some that are dogmatic. Some
subset of people gravitate to surety and so make the transition from
not believing to actively professing a surety of the non-existence of
any form of supernatural deities or forces. But I know more who say
things like "I guess it's possible but it just doesn't seem likely to me,"
some similar ending with "seems unlikely". There's a difference between
those two that escapes some people.

So again, the dogmatic extremes are more the exception in my experience.

[erik simpson]

I can't believe you've missed at least one other alternative; Peter's "ancient aliens"
(directed panspermia) hypothesis that he's worked out in great detail. Contains all-
natural aliens, no God(s) required, and can explain anything and everything about
life on earth. Evidence not included.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:00:12 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> >
> >> And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
> >> prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
> >> there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
> >
> > The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
> > robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
> > on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
> >
> > Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
> > like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
> > instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."
> >
> > ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
> > to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.

> Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
> Its name is promoted, but it is never studied.

You sure are getting hung up on a cryptic definition of "practiced".
Also, you seem to be using a disambiguation of "ID" different
from "Intelligent Design," which is the way I use it.

> Except, of course, by
> engineers who have nothing to do with the ID movement.

Let me try again: Behe is a leader in the theoretical side of ID science;
Scott Minnich is a leader in its experimental side. The scientific
side of ID has had less than 50 years to develop. Evolutionary
theory has had over 200 years to develop, and its experimental
side likewise, gathering data in the form of fossils and sundry
experiments in genetics, beginning with Mendel over a century ago.


Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
community. The issue that separates Behe and Minnich from
the scientific community is gross misrepresentation of what ID
is all about, and your behavior on the thread, Re: ID perp Top Six,
makes you an accomplice in it, as does the behavior of jillery.

Documentation on request.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Burkhard]

peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:00:12 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>>>
>>>> And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
>>>> prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
>>>> there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
>>>
>>> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
>>> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
>>> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
>>>
>>> Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
>>> like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
>>> instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."
>>>
>>> ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
>>> to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.
>
>> Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
>> Its name is promoted, but it is never studied.
>
> You sure are getting hung up on a cryptic definition of "practiced".

More on the definition of "theory", "of" and "ID"

In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
results have there been about e.g.

- how many designers there are
- how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
- with what tools
- how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
a given trait T in nature

etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 5:15:13 PM UTC-5, erik simpson wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:30:13 PM UTC-8, Bill wrote:


> > What I find interesting is that the majority opinion seems to be there are
> > only two, mutually exclusive alternatives: Either God created-designed our
> > reality or nature created and designed itself. Neither is satisfactory
> > because we have no way to know which forces us invent answers that can't be
> > confirmed.
> >
> > This leads us to respond with hostility and ridicule to the option we don't
> > like and elevate the other to certain truth. It doesn't matter who has the
> > better explanation because we reason from a preferred outcome; we always
> > win.
> >
> > Bill

Erik, you mentioned DP here to Freon Bill, who probably
knows little about it, through no fault of his own, IMO.

But then you turned what could have been a favor into
a serious misrepresentation, benignly at the beginning and
malignantly at the end.

> I can't believe you've missed at least one other alternative;

I hope he DID miss your misrepresentation of it here up to now.
And you've made me wonder whether this misrepresentation has
circulated for years behind my back.

Your "can't believe" impels me to demand: did you ever see it before, and if so, where?

Directed Panspermia (DP) is only an alternative to abiogenesis having happened on earth
and has NOTHING to do with subsequent evolution.

>Peter's "ancient aliens" (directed panspermia) hypothesis
>that he's worked out in great detail.

If the Directed Panspermia (DP) hypothesis is correct [1] then what you
misleadingly call "ancient aliens" [2] did us a great favor ca. 3.5 billion years
ago by making our existence possible. They seeded thousands of planets
in planetary systems far from their own with microorganisms, and one of those seedings
resulted in life taking hold on our earth and evolving to produce us, *inter* *alia*.

But I can't claim credit for the hypothesis, which is due to
Nobel Laureate biochemist Francis Crick and world-class biochemist
Leslie Orgel. I am only responsible for having worked it out in
greater detail than they did.


[I] My estimate of its probability -- a very different one from that in the thread title --
keeps fluctuating as new data rolls in. At one point I estimated it above 50%;
now I estimate it below, maybe just above 10%.

[2] "ancient aliens" conjures up images of the wacky, discredited
"Chariots of the Gods" aliens, who lived no more than 10,000 years ago.
[Trivia: the first name of the kook author was spelled Erich, not Erik.]


>Contains all-natural aliens, no God(s) required,

But you still mislead about the "ancient" bit by a factor of over 300,000.


And now you descend into a malignant, shameless lie.

> and can explain anything and everything about
> life on earth.

And to compound this despicable misrepresentation,
it was done to mislead Freon Bill by giving him a totally false image
of what DP is all about.


And so, you continue to exemplify your superlative: most disingenuously
dishonest regular in talk.origins.


> Evidence not included.

Compounding your malfeasance. Not only is there some evidence for DP
[Crick and Orgel named a pair] but DP is eminently falsifiable.
This could come within our lifetimes if life without a genetic code,
or with a completely different genetic code, is discovered on Mars.

Additional possibilities for testing DP given on request.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Bill]

Burkhard wrote:

...

> In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
> results have there been about e.g.
>
> - how many designers there are
> - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
> - with what tools
> - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
> a given trait T in nature
>
> etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
> theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer

How could anyone benefit from answers to your examples? How would either
science or religion be affected by whatever changes are actually
established? All there is now are conjectures of what actually could be true
if any were actually true and that remains unknown.

Bill

[Öö Tiib]

Imagine that some constructors redesign your appartment now and then out
of blue and without any communicating with you. You perhaps want to know
about all such things and more. So why? Tell what is the benefit yourself.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 8:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> Burkhard wrote:
>
> ...
> > In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
> > results have there been about e.g.
> >
> > - how many designers there are
> > - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
> > - with what tools
> > - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
> > a given trait T in nature
> >
> > etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
> > theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer

Burkhard has a misconception about what science and the humanities
have in common, and I spent a lot of time and several posts trying
to explain the difference to him. It appears from his questions
that it all "went in one ear and out the other," to use a formula
my elementary school teachers were fond of using on duller students.

> How could anyone benefit from answers to your examples? How would either
> science or religion be affected by whatever changes are actually
> established?

If we did have the answers, a lot of people would have their lives enriched.
But I doubt that Burkhard's life would be enriched, because he has
never shown any interest in science, and the above incident is a symptom of that.
From what you say, your life wouldn't be enriched either, but do
try to understand why others of us are interested.

Look at sports fans. They obviously are greatly interested in one sport
but perhaps only in a few sports. The better ones don't assume that just
because they aren't interested, the sports aren't interesting.

It's the same way with films, music, etc. And it is actually better this way,
because the world would be boring if all of us had the same interests:
there would be too few of them. Don't you agree?

> All there is now are conjectures of what actually could be true
> if any were actually true and that remains unknown.

There is one restricted topic which we might learn some answers:
the Directed Panspermia hypothesis which I talked about in the
post that directly precedes yours in Google Groups.

At the end of my post I give a possibility for testing it.
There are lots of others. Interested?


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

Your quote above well illustrates the intent and design of the ID
movement. Scientific facts and historical realities don't matter.
That's why they continue to perpetually post PRATTs.
Instead, what matters is to maintain the poetic fiction that God made
humans special, and evolution is just another clever deception to test
us mortal and limited humans.

[jillery]

Your posts show that you have no idea what qualifies as
"documentation", especially in this topic, where you repeatedly and
willfully misrepresented what Behe and Johnson actually wrote.

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 10:30:13 PM UTC-5, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 8:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> > Burkhard wrote:
> >
> > ...
> > > In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
> > > results have there been about e.g.
> > >
> > > - how many designers there are
> > > - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
> > > - with what tools
> > > - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
> > > a given trait T in nature
> > >
> > > etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
> > > theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer

> Burkhard has a misconception about what science and the humanities
> have in common, and I spent a lot of time and several posts trying
> to explain the difference to him. It appears from his questions
> that it all "went in one ear and out the other," to use a formula
> my elementary school teachers were fond of using on duller students.

Just for you, I'll put this comment right below those two sentences.
It seems to me that you conflate having a different conception than
you with having no conception. Then again, I'm not sure his conception
is all that different because I think your accusation is more about an
raw attempt to discredit an opponent than the details of disagreement.
Regardless, all you've done there is to poison the well by disparaging
him in a way that asserts you are better. It's a repeating formula with you.

> > How could anyone benefit from answers to your examples? How would either
> > science or religion be affected by whatever changes are actually
> > established?

> If we did have the answers, a lot of people would have their lives enriched.
> But I doubt that Burkhard's life would be enriched, because he has
> never shown any interest in science, and the above incident is a symptom of that.
> From what you say, your life wouldn't be enriched either, but do
> try to understand why others of us are interested.

The same formula is being used, some accusation of incompetence rather
than an actual argument with reasons. But I would focus on the accusation,
coupled to your penchant for calling others liars while proclaiming your own
virtues.

How much "interest in science" would Burkhard have to show to rise up and
out of your category of "never shown any interest in science"? And yes, your
attention should be drawn to the words __never__ and __any__ when
evaluating your own honestly.

> Look at sports fans. They obviously are greatly interested in one sport
> but perhaps only in a few sports. The better ones don't assume that just
> because they aren't interested, the sports aren't interesting.
>
> It's the same way with films, music, etc. And it is actually better this way,
> because the world would be boring if all of us had the same interests:
> there would be too few of them. Don't you agree?

Is it the same with science? For example, if a person had specific interests
in different sciences than you, would you say that they don't have any
interest in science or that your interests in science doesn't show a
large overlap? For some reason, that seems an appropriate question, perhaps
one you should have even paused to consider.

[Zen Cycle]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 12:20:13 AM UTC-5, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 10:30:13 PM UTC-5, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 8:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> > > Burkhard wrote:
> > >
> > > ...
> > > > In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
> > > > results have there been about e.g.
> > > >
> > > > - how many designers there are
> > > > - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
> > > > - with what tools
> > > > - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
> > > > a given trait T in nature
> > > >
> > > > etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
> > > > theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer
>
> > Burkhard has a misconception about what science and the humanities
> > have in common, and I spent a lot of time and several posts trying
> > to explain the difference to him. It appears from his questions
> > that it all "went in one ear and out the other," to use a formula
> > my elementary school teachers were fond of using on duller students.
> Just for you, I'll put this comment right below those two sentences.
> It seems to me that you conflate having a different conception than
> you with having no conception. Then again, I'm not sure his conception
> is all that different because I think your accusation is more about an
> raw attempt to discredit an opponent than the details of disagreement.

I'd say you were being incredibly insightful if peters' motives weren't so blatantly obvious.

[*Hemidactylus*]

peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 8:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
>> Burkhard wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>> In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
>>> results have there been about e.g.
>>>
>>> - how many designers there are
>>> - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
>>> - with what tools
>>> - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
>>> a given trait T in nature
>>>
>>> etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
>>> theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer
>
> Burkhard has a misconception about what science and the humanities
> have in common, and I spent a lot of time and several posts trying
> to explain the difference to him. It appears from his questions
> that it all "went in one ear and out the other," to use a formula
> my elementary school teachers were fond of using on duller students.
>

Does putting others down help alleviate a profound debilitating sense of
status anxiety.

>
>> How could anyone benefit from answers to your examples? How would either
>> science or religion be affected by whatever changes are actually
>> established?
>
> If we did have the answers, a lot of people would have their lives enriched.
> But I doubt that Burkhard's life would be enriched, because he has
> never shown any interest in science, and the above incident is a symptom of that.
> From what you say, your life wouldn't be enriched either, but do
> try to understand why others of us are interested.
>
> Look at sports fans. They obviously are greatly interested in one sport
> but perhaps only in a few sports. The better ones don't assume that just
> because they aren't interested, the sports aren't interesting.
>
> It's the same way with films, music, etc. And it is actually better this way,
> because the world would be boring if all of us had the same interests:
> there would be too few of them. Don't you agree?
>
>> All there is now are conjectures of what actually could be true
>> if any were actually true and that remains unknown.
>
> There is one restricted topic which we might learn some answers:
> the Directed Panspermia hypothesis which I talked about in the
> post that directly precedes yours in Google Groups.
>
> At the end of my post I give a possibility for testing it.
> There are lots of others. Interested?
>

DP bridges science and humanities in that it is science fiction, more War
of the Worlds than Origin of Species. Actually more Origin of the Specious.


Ted Steele’s notion of a non-Earth origin for COVID at least benefits from
its being easily dismissed. DP is too ethereal for that.

[Burkhard]

peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 8:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
>> Burkhard wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>> In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
>>> results have there been about e.g.
>>>
>>> - how many designers there are
>>> - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
>>> - with what tools
>>> - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
>>> a given trait T in nature
>>>
>>> etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
>>> theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer
>
> Burkhard has a misconception about what science and the humanities
> have in common, and I spent a lot of time and several posts trying
> to explain the difference to him. It appears from his questions
> that it all "went in one ear and out the other," to use a formula
> my elementary school teachers were fond of using on duller students.

If you mean with that that I reminded utterly unimpressed by your bare
assertions that contained as per usual lots of insults and bluster, but
next to nothing in terms of actual, you know, reasons, then yes, you'd
be right.

The counter-arguments that I used to reject your attempt to carve out an
entirely ad-hoc exemption from common scientific practice for ID included

- that prominent ID proponents consistently claim that the appropriate
model to evaluate ID are the historical sciences, including but not
limited to history, archeology, anthropology and the forensic sciences.
Here Casey Lusking from Evolutiuon News, a source you cited before:
https://evolutionnews.org/2012/10/intelligent_des_4/

Then of course Dembski, who promoted his book "The Design Inference" to
forensics scientists, archeologists and historians, and to make the
point that ID is just the same as these, he sues examples from "design
inferences" in intellectual property law, insurance fraud investigations
and forensic science - indeed he is explicit in saying that the
evolution debate is but one "case study"

Or the Discovery Institutes Anne Gauger: The theory of intelligent
design also qualifies as historical science Historical sciences such as
archeology, geology, forensics, and evolutionary biology all infer
causal events in the past to explain the occurrence of other events or
to explain the evidence we have left behind in the present.

And finally this report from an ID workshop, "Can There be a Scientific
Theory of Intelligent Design?" attended also by Behe,
http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or152/152main.htm

It makes exactly the type of inferences to motives, agency and means
that you deem illegitimate.

I also cited John Ray as a historical precursor. A much more profound,
and also by the standards of the time scientific thinker than Paley, his
design inferences tried to establish properties of the designer.

So for that reason alone, your unsupported claims that there was a
conflation of science and humanities does not work, ID folks themselves
embrace it.

And even if they didn't, the questions I raised would be legitimate - I
cited in this context in particular Lakatos' theory of science, and how
by these criteria ID is both theoretically and empirically degenerate,
in that it fails to generate new and interesting hypothesis about its
subject matter, which direct us to new observations and explanations. ID
isn't even trying.

IIRC your next attempt was an ill-fated analogy to the research about
the Voynich manuscript. As per usual, you made bold claims backed up by
nothing but bluster, which showed that you were utterly unfamiliar with
the research that has been going on in that field, and which tries to
answer exactly the questions you claim are inappropriate, So that was
quite funny too, though you had a bit of bad luck there. I've worked for
some time in the same lab as one of the cryptologists who did quite a
bit of the studies on this, and was really into the whole debate.

So it was really rather straightforward to not only point you to the
relevant literature that flat out contradicted your claims, I also
talked you through slowly through all the inferences they were making,
and which matched exactly what I requested from ID

You then abandoned that threat double quick if I recall.

Nothing what you asserted gave me any reasons to reconsider my approach
to ID. Maybe next time when you come up with some actual arguments and
reasons. My guess is that will be around the same time "ID theorists"
come up with an actual theory of ID, so not before the heath death of
the universe

[Zen Cycle]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 8:35:13 AM UTC-5, Burkhard wrote:
>
>
> Then of course Dembski, who promoted his book "The Design Inference" to
> forensics scientists, archeologists and historians, and to make the
> point that ID is just the same as these, he sues examples from "design
> inferences" in intellectual property law, insurance fraud investigations
> and forensic science - indeed he is explicit in saying that the
> evolution debate is but one "case study"
>

These are a bit dated, but I haven't seen anything from Dembski that revises his bias:

"Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him."
- William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, p. 210

"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."
- William A. Dembski, Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue4: July/August, 1999

[Mark Isaak]

I was going to make the same point, but you did a much better job at it
than I would have.

"Faith" means different things to different people. Many people don't
understand that a loss of faith can mean the beginning of a deeper faith.

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/6/22 2:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:00:12 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>>>
>>>> And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
>>>> prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
>>>> there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
>>>
>>> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
>>> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
>>> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
>>>
>>> Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
>>> like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and "high school"
>>> instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."
>>>
>>> ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
>>> to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.
>
>> Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
>> Its name is promoted, but it is never studied.
>
> You sure are getting hung up on a cryptic definition of "practiced".
> Also, you seem to be using a disambiguation of "ID" different
> from "Intelligent Design," which is the way I use it.

Yes. Intelligent design is practiced in engineering and art departments
around the world. ID is a socio-religious movement that seeks to
promote a form of creationism and/or discredit evolution.

> > Except, of course, by
>> engineers who have nothing to do with the ID movement.
>
> Let me try again: Behe is a leader in the theoretical side of ID science;

Again I must point out: THERE IS NO ID SCIENCE. There is anti-evolution
science done by ID proponents.

> Scott Minnich is a leader in its experimental side. The scientific
> side of ID has had less than 50 years to develop. Evolutionary
> theory has had over 200 years to develop, and its experimental
> side likewise, gathering data in the form of fossils and sundry
> experiments in genetics, beginning with Mendel over a century ago.

So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design. And especially not
designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is meaningless.

> Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
> which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
> community. The issue that separates Behe and Minnich from
> the scientific community is gross misrepresentation of what ID
> is all about, and your behavior on the thread, Re: ID perp Top Six,
> makes you an accomplice in it, as does the behavior of jillery.
>
> Documentation on request.

References to documentation accepted.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 8:10:13 AM UTC-5, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 8:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> >> Burkhard wrote:
> >>
> >> ...
> >>> In the years since Darwin's bacl box, what new insights, theories,
> >>> results have there been about e.g.
> >>>
> >>> - how many designers there are
> >>> - how often and when s/he/them/it intervene and why
> >>> - with what tools
> >>> - how the answers to the above lead to testable theories of hwy we find
> >>> a given trait T in nature
> >>>
> >>> etc etc etc - you know, all the questions any other scientific design
> >>> theory, in any other field of science, tries to answer
> >
> > Burkhard has a misconception about what science and the humanities
> > have in common, and I spent a lot of time and several posts trying
> > to explain the difference to him. It appears from his questions
> > that it all "went in one ear and out the other," to use a formula
> > my elementary school teachers were fond of using on duller students.

As usual, you ignored the actual content of what I wrote:

> Does putting others down help alleviate a profound debilitating sense of
> status anxiety.

My "status" in talk.origins is similar that of myself in the big outside world,
where scientists and mathematicians are outside the status hierarchy
[at least according to the textbook that was used for my one-year Sociology course]
of "lower class...upper class".

On the other hand, since you bring up "status" the way you do, let me ask:
would you rate your status in talk.origins higher or lower than jillery's, given that you
put others down far less frequently than jillery?

Of course, your two-liner is on your side of the ledger, but that's just a drop in the bucket.

> >> How could anyone benefit from answers to your examples? How would either
> >> science or religion be affected by whatever changes are actually
> >> established?
> >
> > If we did have the answers, a lot of people would have their lives enriched.
> > But I doubt that Burkhard's life would be enriched, because he has
> > never shown any interest in science, and the above incident is a symptom of that.
> > From what you say, your life wouldn't be enriched either, but do
> > try to understand why others of us are interested.
> >
> > Look at sports fans. They obviously are greatly interested in one sport
> > but perhaps only in a few sports. The better ones don't assume that just
> > because they aren't interested, the sports aren't interesting.
> >
> > It's the same way with films, music, etc. And it is actually better this way,
> > because the world would be boring if all of us had the same interests:
> > there would be too few of them. Don't you agree?
> >
> >> All there is now are conjectures of what actually could be true
> >> if any were actually true and that remains unknown.
> >
> > There is one restricted topic which we might learn some answers:
> > the Directed Panspermia hypothesis which I talked about in the
> > post that directly precedes yours in Google Groups.
> >
> > At the end of my post I give a possibility for testing it.
> > There are lots of others. Interested?

Taking advantage of how I didn't mention Erik Simpson's shameless
misrepresentation, nor where I talked about Crick and Orgel,
you cravenly posted a shameless falsehood about it:

> DP bridges science and humanities in that it is science fiction, more War
> of the Worlds than Origin of Species. Actually more Origin of the Specious.

It's about the origin of life ON EARTH. It is of the same genre as a lot of recent speculation,
taken very seriously by scientists and the media, that life may have begun on Mars
and was carried to earth by 3.5 billion year precursors of the Murchison meteorite.

>
> Ted Steele’s notion of a non-Earth origin for COVID at least benefits from
> its being easily dismissed. DP is too ethereal for that.

No more ethereal than the "Mars first" hypotheses going around.
As I wrote in my one feel-good paragraph in reply to your fellow
anti-DP fanatic Erik:

"But I can't claim credit for the hypothesis, which is due to
Nobel Laureate biochemist Francis Crick and world-class biochemist
Leslie Orgel. I am only responsible for having worked it out in
greater detail than they did."

You welcomed Wolffan with open arms when he first showed up
in t.o. so that he would help you to trash sober scientific information
about Directed Panspermia. Which he enthusiastically did, emulating you
in completely ignoring the scientific content of what he was trashing.

And in this post, you've demonstrated your undying gratitude to Wolffan for that.
Also your perennial solidarity with Burkhard.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS In what order of status in talk.origins would you rank Wolffan, Burkhard, and yourself?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 11:20:13 AM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 12/6/22 2:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:00:12 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >> On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> >>> ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
> >>> to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.
> >
> >> Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
> >> Its name is promoted, but it is never studied.
> >
> > You sure are getting hung up on a cryptic definition of "practiced".
> > Also, you seem to be using a disambiguation of "ID" different
> > from "Intelligent Design," which is the way I use it.

Despite your "Yes" below, it's clear that you are not using a
different disambiguation of "ID" than the usual one.

> Yes. Intelligent design is practiced in engineering and art departments
> around the world.

It's also practiced in biology, not just by genetic engineering but
by very different methods like the following, which might have been used eons ago
in intelligently designing the course of evolution.


About a decade ago, I saw a National Geographic special on TV
in which it talked about the crazy ants on Christmas Island
and how they seemed to be driving a special species of indigenous
crabs towards extinction.

Now I see that humans have intelligently intervened in evolution and have
staved their extinction off indefinitely.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-29/christmas-island-red-crabs-begin-migration/101581790

It's been so successful that you have to scroll down a good ways to learn
about the crazy ant menace, starting at the header, "Pest control behind surge".
Excerpt:
Mr Ball said the crab population had rebounded in recent years due to pest control.
"Those numbers are approximately doubled from what they were five or six years ago," he said.
"That's probably largely due to the fact that we've been able to suppress invasive species like crazy ants, which do kill the crabs unfortunately."
Yellow crazy ants have killed millions of red crabs since accidentally being introduced to the island in the 1990s.
[end of excerpt]

Now if only the accidentally introduced brown snakes which have decimated the songbird population on Guam could be dealt with in the same way!

> ID is a socio-religious movement that seeks to
> promote a form of creationism and/or discredit evolution.

I've refuted this lie many times, but you are like Martin Harran: you don't think
lying is anything to be ashamed of. Therefore, it is quite useless to ask you to stop
promoting this lie in service of the worldwide anti-ID ideological movement.

> > > Except, of course, by
> >> engineers who have nothing to do with the ID movement.
> >
> > Let me try again: Behe is a leader in the theoretical side of ID science;

> Again I must [blatantly assert]: THERE IS NO ID SCIENCE.

Fixed it for everyone who is tired of seeing "point out" being
used as a form of the Fallacy of Begging the Question.
With your superficial understanding of biology, you are in no
position to assert what you did just now.

> There is anti-evolution science done by ID proponents.

There is nothing anti-evolution in the experiments by Scott Minnich
and his students about which he testified at Dover, nor in the
data on malaria which Behe related, and used to compare the frequency and
efficacy of mutations by the plasmodium on the one hand
and human beings on the other.

He did this for many pages in _The Edge of Evolution_, but you've
seen no awareness of this in anything written by Bill Rogers, the talk.origins
specialist on malaria, have you? In contrast, Rogers did spend an enormous
amount of time arguing with Dr.Dr. Kleinman, who really did indulge
in anti-evolution pseudoscience but was no friend of Intelligent Design.

> > Scott Minnich is a leader in its experimental side. The scientific
> > side of ID has had less than 50 years to develop. Evolutionary
> > theory has had over 200 years to develop, and its experimental
> > side likewise, gathering data in the form of fossils and sundry
> > experiments in genetics, beginning with Mendel over a century ago.

> So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
> otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design.

Now you might see why I was so angry with Erik Simpson and Hemidactylus
for lying their heads off about what the science behind Directed
Panspermia (DP) is all about.

Erik sought to make Freon Bill a victim of a totally false illusion
of what DP is all about, as I demonstrated on this very thread:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/nmTq1MCK3hg/m/vyFsJfc9AQAJ
Dec 6, 2022, 5:45:13 PM

And Hemidactylus implicitly supported an electronic analogue of book-burning,
by giving phony reasons for his opposition to ID.

I reminded him here of that analogue in my reply to him here less than two hours ago:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/nmTq1MCK3hg/m/VaKQjRFkAQAJ

The analogue was the thorough trashing by himself and his accomplices,
in 2016, of the part of the FAQ on DP which dealt with (largely science-based)
objections to DP and science-based rebuttals and explanations by myself.

> And especially not
> designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is meaningless.

Here's a start on that, in a statement that speaks of intelligent design ("developed"),
in direct connection with DP:

The senders could well have developed wholly new strains of
microorganisms, specially designed to cope with prebiotic
conditions, though whether it would have been better to try to
combine all the desirable properties within one single type
of organism or to send many different organisms is not
completely clear.
--Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, _Life Itself_
Simon and Schuster, 1981, p. 137

"The senders" refers to the hypothesized panspermists, whose nature
I explained in my reply to Erik, linked above.


CONCLUDED in next reply to this post of yours, to be done later this week.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Bill]

Mark Isaak wrote:


>
> So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
> otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design. And especially not
> designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is meaningless.
>
>> Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
>> which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
>> community. The issue that separates Behe and Minnich from
>> the scientific community is gross misrepresentation of what ID
>> is all about, and your behavior on the thread, Re: ID perp Top Six,
>> makes you an accomplice in it, as does the behavior of jillery.
>>
>> Documentation on request.
>
> References to documentation accepted.
>

If ID is entirely anti-evolution with no positive evidence supporting it,
it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
theory. The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that there
are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled. Does
anyone really believe that?

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 6:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> Mark Isaak wrote:
>
>
> >
> > So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
> > otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design. And especially not
> > designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is meaningless.

> >> Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
> >> which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
> >> community.

<snip for focus>

> If ID is entirely anti-evolution

It is not, as you would know if you didn't get bombarded by propaganda like what
Mark is posting above and what Erik Simpson spewed in direct reply to you
the other day.

At the end of my long reply to Mark about an hour ago,
I gave him a counterexample that has been around since 1981.
It involves Directed Panspermia (DP), which Erik outrageously misrepresented
in his reply to you. The scientific status of DP is secure because of its testability.

> with no positive evidence supporting it,
> it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
> should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
> theory.

This would be a great boon to meaningful communication in talk.origins,
but it is the opposite of the behavior of you next describe.

>The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that there
> are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled. Does
> anyone really believe that?

The lengths to which propagandists in talk.origins will go strongly suggests
that they are insecure about their beliefs. Unable to refute the arguments
of ID leaders like Behe, they go to extraordinary lengths to misrepresent them.
The following shows how I dealt with a post by Mark full of dirty debating
tactics by him:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/wLSRK67XcYs/m/oQeIEbw_AQAJ
Re: ID perp Top Six
Dec 1, 2022, 10:00:08 PM

These newer threads involving Ron Dean diverted my attention from that thread,
and so my promise at the end of the linked post to finish replying the next day got postponed.
New threads need to be dealt with early on before the hostile people to whom
you have implicitly referred get too much of a head start with their misrepresentations.

But now that I have put in some good time on this thread and the one
titled "Physic Class and Fine Tuning", and Ron Dean hasn't returned to
either thread except to regret having started the other one, I am
pretty sure I can return to the "ID perp Top Six" before the weekend.


Peter Nyikos

[erik simpson]

Darwin had Huxley, Behe has you. Darwin obviously got the better deal.

[jillery]

Your example above is not of ID, or even intelligent design, but of
unintentional intervention. How would that process have caused
anything Behe and other cdesign proponentsists have claimed are
evidence of ID?

[*Hemidactylus*]

Yes most definitely so.

[jillery]

Your point above would be valid if ID actually challenged theories of
evolution. But it doesn't. Instead it merely repeats PRATTs designed
to appeal the choir.

[jillery]

FTR the above shows how you misrepresented what Behe and other cdesign
proponentsists have written and said many times in many way in many
places.

>These newer threads involving Ron Dean diverted my attention from that thread,
>and so my promise at the end of the linked post to finish replying the next day got postponed.
>New threads need to be dealt with early on before the hostile people to whom
>you have implicitly referred get too much of a head start with their misrepresentations.
>
>But now that I have put in some good time on this thread and the one
>titled "Physic Class and Fine Tuning", and Ron Dean hasn't returned to
>either thread except to regret having started the other one, I am
>pretty sure I can return to the "ID perp Top Six" before the weekend.
>
>
>Peter Nyikos

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/7/22 3:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 11:20:13 AM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>> On 12/6/22 2:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:00:12 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>> On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>>>>> ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
>>>>> to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.
>>>
>>>> Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
>>>> Its name is promoted, but it is never studied.
>>>
>>> You sure are getting hung up on a cryptic definition of "practiced".
>>> Also, you seem to be using a disambiguation of "ID" different
>>> from "Intelligent Design," which is the way I use it.
>
> Despite your "Yes" below, it's clear that you are not using a
> different disambiguation of "ID" than the usual one.
>
>> Yes. Intelligent design is practiced in engineering and art departments
>> around the world.
>
> It's also practiced in biology, not just by genetic engineering but
> by very different methods like the following, which might have been used eons ago
> in intelligently designing the course of evolution.

That is, of course, possible, but it falls in the genre of fantasy, not
science.

Your example about crabs and ants shows natural selection, which has
much in common with design (which is why people so often see what they
take for design in evolved things), but it is neither intelligent nor
deliberate.

>> ID is a socio-religious movement that seeks to
>> promote a form of creationism and/or discredit evolution.
>
> I've refuted this lie many times,

And yet, for all your refutations, ID remains a socio-religious
movement, as expressed by the people who identify as its proponents.
Don't you think "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" implies
something about culture? And its stated aims were overtly religious;
its leaders still are. The Wedge document clearly stated that science
was secondary to the religion and culture.

> but you are like Martin Harran: you don't think
> lying is anything to be ashamed of. Therefore, it is quite useless to ask you to stop
> promoting this lie in service of the worldwide anti-ID ideological movement.

Aren't you ashamed to tell lies like that?

>>>> Except, of course, by
>>>> engineers who have nothing to do with the ID movement.
>>>
>>> Let me try again: Behe is a leader in the theoretical side of ID science;
>
>> Again I must [blatantly assert]: THERE IS NO ID SCIENCE.
>
> Fixed it for everyone who is tired of seeing "point out" being
> used as a form of the Fallacy of Begging the Question.
> With your superficial understanding of biology, you are in no
> position to assert what you did just now.

Only the fact that neither you nor anyone else have brought forth any
design science done by ID proponents. No, the work done by Minnich and
Behe has no bearing on design.

Do you even know what "design" means?

>>> Scott Minnich is a leader in its experimental side. The scientific
>>> side of ID has had less than 50 years to develop. Evolutionary
>>> theory has had over 200 years to develop, and its experimental
>>> side likewise, gathering data in the form of fossils and sundry
>>> experiments in genetics, beginning with Mendel over a century ago.
>
>> So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
>> otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design.
>
> Now you might see why I was so angry with Erik Simpson and Hemidactylus
> for lying their heads off about what the science behind Directed
> Panspermia (DP) is all about.

Directed panspermia is your own toy; it is not part of the ID agenda.

Even if it were, there has been no scientific research on it, to my
knowledge. Only scientific speculation.

[erik simpson]

It's probably been good for Peter's subsequent career that he didn't appear
in the Infamous Trial to present his contributions to the concept of ID.

[Mark Isaak]

ID has no *scientific* support. It does, however, have ideological
support. The stated objective of ID (from the Wedge Document) is
"nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural
legacies." It appeals to the victims of the culture wars who have been
taught that an inimical loving Christian god has to be involved in every
aspect of absolutely everything in order for you to have a fulfilled
life and for the evil people who are the reason you are unhappy to go to
hell (or something like that).

Science welcomes scientific challenges. Funding cuts and hate speech
are not the sort of challenges which make it stronger.

[Bill]

Mark Isaak wrote:

> On 12/7/22 3:17 PM, Bill wrote:
>> Mark Isaak wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
>>> otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design. And especially not
>>> designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is
>>> meaningless.
>>>
>>>> Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
>>>> which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
>>>> community. The issue that separates Behe and Minnich from
>>>> the scientific community is gross misrepresentation of what ID
>>>> is all about, and your behavior on the thread, Re: ID perp Top Six,
>>>> makes you an accomplice in it, as does the behavior of jillery.
>>>>
>>>> Documentation on request.
>>>
>>> References to documentation accepted.
>>>
>>
>> If ID is entirely anti-evolution with no positive evidence supporting it,
>> it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
>> should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
>> theory. The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that
>> there are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled.
>> Does anyone really believe that?
>
> ID has no *scientific* support.

Why is that important? Does this mean that the origins of life must agree
with 21st century science? If the answers are not scientific, does that mean
that life didn't originate? Should I believe that 21st century science is
the end of any investigation into the nature of nature?

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 7:40:14 PM UTC-5, erik simpson wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 4:15:13 PM UTC-8, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 6:20:13 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> > > Mark Isaak wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > >
> > > > So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
> > > > otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design. And especially not
> > > > designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is meaningless.

> > > >> Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
> > > >> which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
> > > >> community.
> > <snip for focus>
> > > If ID is entirely anti-evolution

Erik again illustrates the self-serving advantages of bottom-posting.
He gets to ignore embarrassing facts like the one I mention next,
identified after a documented two-line mention of Mark Isaak:

> > It is not, as you would know if you didn't get bombarded by propaganda like what
> > Mark is posting above and what Erik Simpson spewed in direct reply to you
> > the other day.
> >
> > At the end of my long reply to Mark about an hour ago,
> > I gave him a counterexample that has been around since 1981.

Here:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/nmTq1MCK3hg/m/vyFsJfc9AQAJ
Re: What is the probability?
Dec 6, 2022, 7:35:13 PM

> > It involves Directed Panspermia (DP), which Erik outrageously misrepresented
> > in his reply to you. The scientific status of DP is secure because of its testability.

I've alluded to this example several times, explicitly telling Hemidactylus there were more,
and asking him whether he is interested, but everyone has ignored the offer,
including Hemi himself.

> > > with no positive evidence supporting it,
> > > it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
> > > should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
> > > theory.

> > This would be a great boon to meaningful communication in talk.origins,
> > but it is the opposite of the behavior of you next describe.

It is also the opposite of the behavior I described in the wake of my offer to Hemi.

> > >The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that there
> > > are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled. Does
> > > anyone really believe that?

> > The lengths to which propagandists in talk.origins will go strongly suggests
> > that they are insecure about their beliefs. Unable to refute the arguments
> > of ID leaders like Behe, they go to extraordinary lengths to misrepresent them.

> > The following shows how I dealt with a post by Mark full of dirty debating
> > tactics by him:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/wLSRK67XcYs/m/oQeIEbw_AQAJ
> > Re: ID perp Top Six
> > Dec 1, 2022, 10:00:08 PM

The really extraordinary lengths came in response to the post linked and identified here.

> > These newer threads involving Ron Dean diverted my attention from that thread,
> > and so my promise at the end of the linked post to finish replying the next day got postponed.

> > New threads need to be dealt with early on before the hostile people to whom
> > you have implicitly referred get too much of a head start with their misrepresentations.
> >
> > But now that I have put in some good time on this thread and the one
> > titled "Physic Class and Fine Tuning", and Ron Dean hasn't returned to
> > either thread except to regret having started the other one, I am
> > pretty sure I can return to the "ID perp Top Six" before the weekend.

Now comes the payoff, as Erik seems oblivious to everything that
appeared above, and readily available for perusal:

> Darwin had Huxley, Behe has you. Darwin obviously got the better deal.

Who was it that very recently pronounced talk.origins "effectively extinct"?
Hemidactylus? Erik himself?

The contrast between the obscurity into which this forum has fallen,
and even one incident in the role of Thomas Huxley as "Darwin's Bulldog", is striking.

I refer to the famous debate between him and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley#Debate_with_Wilberforce

The following excerpt from the wiki page brings out the contrast I mentioned above.

"One effect of the debate was to hugely increase Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate: a lesson he never forgot."

Surprisingly, the wiki page mentions none of the iconic quotations from that debate,
such as the case of the agnostic Huxley thinking,
"The Lord God has delivered him into my hands."

For the last decade at least, I've had suspicions about that quote.
It sounds incredibly naive when one thinks of the cunning behavior of
polemicists like Erik and Mark. They manage to negate the effect
of far better ripostes than the one that is Huxley is said to have delivered in
his next response to Wilberforce:

"His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate—the exact wording is not certain—was widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play.[citation needed]"

Note the words in brackets at the end.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

University of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 12:35:13 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak showed how addicted
he is to lying where ID is concerned. In this way, he adds weight to what I wrote
to "Freon Bill" about a deep underlying insecurity about the chances of his kind
being able to defeat it [or its top expositor Behe] fair and square.

> On 12/7/22 3:11 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 7, 2022 at 11:20:13 AM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >> On 12/6/22 2:42 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:00:12 PM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>>> On 12/5/22 6:43 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> >>>>> ID, as practiced by Behe and some other ID leaders, is not hostile
> >>>>> to evolution, not even to common descent of all living things.
> >>>
> >>>> Point of order: ID is not practiced by Behe or any other ID leaders.
> >>>> Its name is promoted, but it is never studied.
> >>>
> >>> You sure are getting hung up on a cryptic definition of "practiced".
> >>> Also, you seem to be using a disambiguation of "ID" different
> >>> from "Intelligent Design," which is the way I use it.
> >
> > Despite your "Yes" below, it's clear that you are not using a
> > different disambiguation of "ID" than the usual one.
> >
> >> Yes. Intelligent design is practiced in engineering and art departments
> >> around the world.
> >
> > It's also practiced in biology, not just by genetic engineering but
> > by very different methods like the following, which might have been used eons ago
> > in intelligently designing the course of evolution.

Mark did an unmarked snip here, so he could misrepresent the "following [example]"
as thoroughly as Erik did Directed Panspermia earlier in this thread.
I would have said "outrageously" instead of "thoroughly," except that
Mark isn't misrepresenting in reply to a third party, like Erik did in reply to "Freon Bill".

> That is, of course, possible, but it falls in the genre of fantasy, not
> science.

Not fantasy, which is a genre allied with science fiction, but theoretical comments
as to how intelligent design, in principle, might have happened at some point
in the long course of evolution.

> Your example about crabs and ants shows natural selection,

Like hell it does. It shows intelligent intervention into what would otherwise be
the course of natural selection.

> which has much in common with design (which is why people so often see what they
> take for design in evolved things), but it is neither intelligent nor deliberate.

These lies were made possible by Mark's unmarked snip of the following:

_______________________________excerpt 1__________________________

About a decade ago, I saw a National Geographic special on TV
in which it talked about the crazy ants on Christmas Island
and how they seemed to be driving a special species of indigenous
crabs towards extinction.

Now I see that humans have intelligently intervened in evolution and have
staved their extinction off indefinitely.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-29/christmas-island-red-crabs-begin-migration/101581790

It's been so successful that you have to scroll down a good ways to learn
about the crazy ant menace, starting at the header, "Pest control behind surge".

============================end of excerpt 1 =================

> >> ID is a socio-religious movement that seeks to
> >> promote a form of creationism and/or discredit evolution.
> >
> > I've refuted this lie many times,

As I now refute Mark's newest lies, with the second excerpt
from Mark's unmarked snip:

______________________________ excerpt 2, from webpage I linked above _________________________

Mr Ball said the crab population had rebounded in recent years due to pest control.
"Those numbers are approximately doubled from what they were five or six years ago," he said.
"That's probably largely due to the fact that we've been able to suppress invasive species like crazy ants, which do kill the crabs unfortunately."
Yellow crazy ants have killed millions of red crabs since accidentally being introduced to the island in the 1990s.

================== end of excerpt ======================

The excerpt was followed by the following remark, also part of what
Mark snipped without marking it:

"Now if only the accidentally introduced brown snakes which have decimated the songbird population on Guam could be dealt with in the same way!"

Mark couldn't care less about crabs or songbirds. What he really
cares about is his gross misrepresentations of ID, its proponents, and myself.
[I can't recall any of Glenn offhand, but any would certainly be in character.]

> And yet, for all your refutations, ID remains a socio-religious
> movement, as expressed by the people who identify as its proponents.

Not all the proponents, certainly not the Elephant in the Room whom
Mark is deliberately ignoring, Michael Behe.

> Don't you think "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" implies
> something about culture? And its stated aims were overtly religious;
> its leaders still are.

Not all the ones writing articles in Evolution News, not
by a long shot.

The Wedge document clearly stated that science
> was secondary to the religion and culture.

The Wedge document is long dead, as Phillip Johnson admitted in
his "jaw-dropping" interview. Mark is doing a Rip van Winkle
imitation here.

> > but you are like Martin Harran: you don't think
> > lying is anything to be ashamed of. Therefore, it is quite useless to ask you to stop
> > promoting this lie in service of the worldwide anti-ID ideological movement.

> Aren't you ashamed to tell lies like that?

I'm not ashamed of truthful statements, like the ones that demonstrate
the new lies by Mark above, to which he has now added a third.


<snip of things to be dealt with in my next response to this deceitful post of Mark's>

> > Do you even know what "design" means?

Certainly, and one example is that the pest control described in excerpt 2 was at least partly
designed to save the red crabs of Christmas Island from possible extinction.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS This isn't the first time Mark has played "snip-n-deceive" this year. Here is another example:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/vfM-Eor38jA/m/TFK604jYAAAJ
Re: Is Common Descent evolution?
Oct 31, 2022, 7:25:10 PM

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 1:50:14 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> Mark Isaak wrote:
>
> > On 12/7/22 3:17 PM, Bill wrote:
> >> Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> So when is ID going to start? So far, all the science, theoretical or
> >>> otherwise, has focused on evolution, not design. And especially not
> >>> designers, without which design (in the sense ID intends) is
> >>> meaningless.
> >>>
> >>>> Neither Behe nor Minnich has any problems with common descent,
> >>>> which is the biggest issue separating creationists from the scientific
> >>>> community. The issue that separates Behe and Minnich from
> >>>> the scientific community is gross misrepresentation of what ID
> >>>> is all about, and your behavior on the thread, Re: ID perp Top Six,
> >>>> makes you an accomplice in it, as does the behavior of jillery.
> >>>>
> >>>> Documentation on request.
> >>>
> >>> References to documentation accepted.
> >>>
> >>
> >> If ID is entirely anti-evolution with no positive evidence supporting it,
> >> it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
> >> should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
> >> theory. The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that
> >> there are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled.
> >> Does anyone really believe that?

.........................................

> > ID has no *scientific* support.
> Why is that important?

It's only important because many of its proponents wanted it to be taught as science in school.

>Does this mean that the origins of life must agree
> with 21st century science?

Since it's the 21st century and we have not figured out how life got started there's no way that it could "agree with 21st century science."

>If the answers are not scientific, does that mean
> that life didn't originate?

Obviously life originated, regardless of what anyone thinks about how it happened.

>Should I believe that 21st century science is
> the end of any investigation into the nature of nature?

Obviously not. Why would we stop learning things at the turn of the 22nd century?

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 5:50:15 PM UTC-5, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 1:50:14 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> > Mark Isaak wrote:
> >
> > > On 12/7/22 3:17 PM, Bill wrote:

> > >> If ID is entirely anti-evolution with no positive evidence supporting it,
> > >> it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
> > >> should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
> > >> theory. The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that
> > >> there are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled.
> > >> Does anyone really believe that?
> .........................................
> > > ID has no *scientific* support.

It is a legitimate scientific theory for all that. Oparin's theory of life's origins
had no scientific support for decades, until the Urey-Miller experiment provided
the first inkling of how it might have begun. And even now, it is still in its infancy,
at a stage not far removed from that of ID theory and ID science.

> > Why is that important?

> It's only important because many of its proponents wanted it to be taught as science in school.

Bill Rogers is honest enough to say "wanted". I doubt that any leading advocate of ID thinks
it is ready to be *taught* *as* *science* in our educational system. Phillip Johnson,
perhaps the top advocate, gave up on that in a "jaw-dropping" interview that has been
documented on this thread, thanks to the following webpage:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution

I say this despite a serious misrepresentation near the end, about Johnson. It follows
immediately after Padian's wholly false, ideologically driven claim:

"For Phil Johnson and the Discovery Institute, the fat lady has sung…No one who can fog a mirror intellectually can have any more illusions that this drivel should be taken seriously as science, or even as social studies.”

Note, "science", as opposed to whether it is ready to be *taught* as science in our educational
system. But the article totally disregards the distinction in the teeth of what it next quotes from Johnson.

The "narrator" [1] tells us, immediately after Padian's screed,

For his part, Johnson agrees: “I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools…the courts are just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change things in the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything…"

The emphasis on public school teaching continues to the end. Bill Rogers's friends (especially Burkhard
and Mark Isaak) have brought up trumped-up charges against me being deficient in
reading comprehension, but I expect deafening silence from them about this REAL example.
Their ideologically motivated anti-ID fanaticism probably extends this far and beyond.

[1] Michelangelo D’Agostino, a graduate student in physics at the time.

> >Does this mean that the origins of life must agree
> > with 21st century science?

> Since it's the 21st century and we have not figured out how life got started there's no way that it could "agree with 21st century science."

Bill Rogers is honest here too, but he has never come close to acknowledging
HOW far we are from figuring it out. I don't expect anything like an adequate
explanation in the 21st century or even the 22nd. We've had about a century
since Oparin's theorizing and close to 70 years since the Miller-Urey experiments,
and haven't gotten much further from them since.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2022 19:04:00 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> spammed:

<snip transparent obfuscating noise>

>Bill Rogers is honest here too, but he has never come close to acknowledging
>HOW far we are from figuring it out. I don't expect anything like an adequate
>explanation in the 21st century or even the 22nd. We've had about a century
>since Oparin's theorizing and close to 70 years since the Miller-Urey experiments,
>and haven't gotten much further from them since.

Your criticism above is a transparent non sequitur. It's impossible
to know how far we are from figuring anything out until we actually
do.

[Mark Isaak]

On 12/8/22 7:04 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 5:50:15 PM UTC-5, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 1:50:14 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
>>> Mark Isaak wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 12/7/22 3:17 PM, Bill wrote:
>
>>>>> If ID is entirely anti-evolution with no positive evidence supporting it,
>>>>> it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
>>>>> should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
>>>>> theory. The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that
>>>>> there are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled.
>>>>> Does anyone really believe that?
>> .........................................
>>>> ID has no *scientific* support.
>
> It is a legitimate scientific theory for all that. Oparin's theory of life's origins
> had no scientific support for decades, until the Urey-Miller experiment provided
> the first inkling of how it might have begun. And even now, it is still in its infancy,
> at a stage not far removed from that of ID theory and ID science.

No, directed panspermia is a legitimate scientific *hypothesis*. It
does not come close to being a theory.

>>> Why is that important?
>
>> It's only important because many of its proponents wanted it to be taught as science in school.

Science is also important to many because in a developed economy,
science (and the technological innovation which follows from it) is the
only source of economic growth.

Also, reality is important to some people.

> Bill Rogers is honest enough to say "wanted". I doubt that any leading advocate of ID thinks
> it is ready to be *taught* *as* *science* in our educational system. Phillip Johnson,
> perhaps the top advocate, gave up on that in a "jaw-dropping" interview that has been
> documented on this thread, thanks to the following webpage:
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution
>
> I say this despite a serious misrepresentation near the end, about Johnson. It follows
> immediately after Padian's wholly false, ideologically driven claim:
>
> "For Phil Johnson and the Discovery Institute, the fat lady has sung…No one who can fog a mirror intellectually can have any more illusions that this drivel should be taken seriously as science, or even as social studies.”
>
> Note, "science", as opposed to whether it is ready to be *taught* as science in our educational
> system. But the article totally disregards the distinction in the teeth of what it next quotes from Johnson.
>
> The "narrator" [1] tells us, immediately after Padian's screed,
>
> For his part, Johnson agrees: “I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools…the courts are just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change things in the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything…"
>
> The emphasis on public school teaching continues to the end. Bill Rogers's friends (especially Burkhard
> and Mark Isaak) have brought up trumped-up charges against me being deficient in
> reading comprehension, but I expect deafening silence from them about this REAL example.

Since I don't know what example of what you are talking about, I shall
be deafeningly silent.

>>> Does this mean that the origins of life must agree
>>> with 21st century science?
>
>> Since it's the 21st century and we have not figured out how life got started there's no way that it could "agree with 21st century science."
>
> Bill Rogers is honest here too, but he has never come close to acknowledging
> HOW far we are from figuring it out. I don't expect anything like an adequate
> explanation in the 21st century or even the 22nd. We've had about a century
> since Oparin's theorizing and close to 70 years since the Miller-Urey experiments,
> and haven't gotten much further from them since.

Actually we have gotten farther, but (a) not to the point that there has
been anything worthy of popular headlines, and (b) in areas not easily
expressible in layman's terms (certainly not always in terms I
understand). I frankly have no idea how much further there is to go.

[Mark Isaak]

*That* was your point?!? That humans can act as designers? Why the
hell would you think that is newsworthy enough to waste electrons on?

Yes, I missed your point, and snipped it. I didn't expect your point to
be so mind-bogglingly stupid.

> [...]

>> And yet, for all your refutations, ID remains a socio-religious
>> movement, as expressed by the people who identify as its proponents.
>
> Not all the proponents, certainly not the Elephant in the Room whom
> Mark is deliberately ignoring, Michael Behe.

No, I am not ignoring Behe, who has done zero research on design.

>> Don't you think "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" implies
>> something about culture? And its stated aims were overtly religious;
>> its leaders still are.
>
> Not all the ones writing articles in Evolution News, not
> by a long shot.
>
> The Wedge document clearly stated that science
>> was secondary to the religion and culture.
>
> The Wedge document is long dead, as Phillip Johnson admitted in
> his "jaw-dropping" interview. Mark is doing a Rip van Winkle
> imitation here.

And yet you keep bringing up Michael Behe, who was as much a part of
those beginnings as anyone.

>>> but you are like Martin Harran: you don't think
>>> lying is anything to be ashamed of. Therefore, it is quite useless to ask you to stop
>>> promoting this lie in service of the worldwide anti-ID ideological movement.
>
>> Aren't you ashamed to tell lies like that?
>
> I'm not ashamed of truthful statements, like the ones that demonstrate
> the new lies by Mark above, to which he has now added a third.
>
>
> <snip of things to be dealt with in my next response to this deceitful post of Mark's>
>
>
>>> Do you even know what "design" means?
>
> Certainly, and one example is that the pest control described in excerpt 2 was at least partly
> designed to save the red crabs of Christmas Island from possible extinction.

Okay, so we have agreed that humans are designers. Do you have any
examples of intelligent design research *not* with humans (or other
known animals) as the designers?

[Bill]

Hate speech most often means speech we disagree with. Our approval
determines the truth.

Bill

[Zen Cycle]

On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 11:55:15 AM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
>
>
> >
> Hate speech most often means speech we disagree with. Our approval
> determines the truth.

Wow...And peter accuses _me_ of the humpty dumpty paradigm....

[Bill]

Humanity is adept at skewing any utterance to mean what it doesn't say. We
cannot trust much of anything we're told yet, we do. Someone in authority
can argue any point about anything and find people to agree.

I find that the existence of nuclear weapons is an inexcusable evil. There
is no provocation that can justify their use. Even so, there was (probably
still is) a doctrine of mutually assured destruction that everyone believed
a legitimate government policy. By this bit of collective insanity, everyone
on this planet is hostage to a few megalomaniacs. No one seems to care.

Anyone who believes in MAD is engaging in hate speech, believing the
destruction of humankind is a reasonable response to the prejudges of the
few "leaders".

Hate speech is is just a cynical slogan.

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 10:50:15 AM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 12/8/22 7:04 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 5:50:15 PM UTC-5, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 1:50:14 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> >>> Mark Isaak wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 12/7/22 3:17 PM, Bill wrote:
> >
> >>>>> If ID is entirely anti-evolution with no positive evidence supporting it,
> >>>>> it's value is it's challenges to theories of evolution. The challenges
> >>>>> should be welcome since they point to possible weaknesses in parts of the
> >>>>> theory. The way the challenges provoke hostility seems to imply that
> >>>>> there are no weaknesses, all is known well enough to be firmly settled.
> >>>>> Does anyone really believe that?
> >> .........................................
> >>>> ID has no *scientific* support.
> >
> > It is a legitimate scientific theory for all that. Oparin's theory of life's origins
> > had no scientific support for decades, until the Urey-Miller experiment provided
> > the first inkling of how it might have begun. And even now, it is still in its infancy,
> > at a stage not far removed from that of ID theory and ID science.

> No, directed panspermia is a legitimate scientific *hypothesis*. It
> does not come close to being a theory.

I hate getting hung up on semantics, especially with verbal spin-doctors like yourself,
so [as the "Henry Drummond" character says in the movie "Inherit the Wind" put it]
we'll play in your ballpark.

By your standards, abiogenesis was a hypothesis and not a theory until
the 1980's, when the concept of RNA World was worked out. That's
something like a 6 decade delay, and ID has only had less than half
that time to get on its feet since Behe made it a scientific hypothesis in 1996.

Give it time, it may surprise you.

> >>> Why is that important?
> >
> >> It's only important because many of its proponents wanted it to be taught as science in school.

> Science is also important to many because in a developed economy,
> science (and the technological innovation which follows from it) is the
> only source of economic growth.

Your computer geek bias is showing here. Technological innovation is only a
component of economic growth, and will become an increasingly small part of it
as mining asteroids gets underway in earnest.

If your buddy Hemidatylus and his accomplices hadn't trashed the DP FAQ
so thoroughly in 2016, you would now have a FAQ less than two years old
from which you could recall that I described the asteroid mining scenario in detail.
As it is, I can't expect you to recall the way I already did that in 2013.

>
> Also, reality is important to some people.

It is more to me than to you. You did your best to lie about reality on this thread when you
snipped the entire description (and link to) a recent example of guided evolution by humans
and lied that it was a case of natural selection.

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/nmTq1MCK3hg/m/TXqGvtSxAQAJ

Re: What is the probability?

Dec 8, 2022, 3:50:14 PM

Note, a bit less than a day ago. You could not have done better to show that "some people"
does not include you if you had tried.


Concluded in next reply to this post of yours, to be done this evening.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ, of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Get it right, turkey. It's the Humpty Dumpty *Prerogative*, employed by Humpty Dumpty
when talking to Alice in the "Through the Looking Glass book:

____________________________ excerpt _____________________________
... there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents —'

'Certainly,' said Alice.

'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'

'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

########################## end of excerpt ######################

The Humpty Dumpty Prerogative is harmless as long as the person explains what
[s]he means when using a word with a different meaning from any of the
accepted ones. But all too many in talk.origins use its Dark Side: they do the
same thing but they do not explain the meaning they attach to it.

But Bill is not on the Dark Side because he explained his meaning right in
the process of using it. [And maybe this is taking his word "means" too literally.]

On the other hand, Humpty Dumpty didn't explain his meaning
until asked by Alice. Moreover, he is contemptuous of Alice for
being clueless about the fact that he is availing himself
of the Prerogative.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:10:12 PM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Dec 2022 07:08:19 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 2:35:12 AM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
> >> On Mon, 5 Dec 2022 20:15:30 -0800 (PST), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> >> wrote:
> >> >On Monday, December 5, 2022 at 7:45:11 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> >> On Saturday, December 3, 2022 at 9:35:09 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
> >> >> > On 2022-12-02 23:18:10 +0000, Mark Isaak said:

> >> >> > And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
> >> >> > prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
> >> >> > there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?

As is getting to be increasingly common with Mark Isaak, his "fact" is not a fact at all.

Glenn may have sensed this, when he challenged Mark as follows:

> >> >I'd like evidence of that, and not what someone else claims he said.


> >> What you would like would be difficult to accommodate, considering
> >> that Johnson died in 2019.
> >
> >Strange non sequitur, given that Johnson made the comments in
> >a "jaw-dropping" interview whose account he never disputed.


<big snip for focus>


> >> >> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
> >> >> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
> >> >> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.

As it turns out, the above comment of mine turned out to be right on the money,
modulo one hairsplitting detail: "high schools" instead of "public schools".

> >> According to this:
> >> <http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/johnson-on-inte.html>
> >>
> >> Johnson wrote this:

> >> ********************************
> >> I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design
> >> at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the
> >> Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully
> >> worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s
> >> comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific
> >> people that we have affiliated with the movement.
> >> ********************************

That's not all Johnson wrote (more precisely, said in an interview).

The part between asterisks was cherry-picked by PvM (whoever that is) from the long article that
Ron O gave us the link for:

> >https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution

The words "comparable alternative" are actually ambiguous, once one reads something
Johnson said much further down:

“I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools…the courts are just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change things in the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything…I don’t think that means the end of the issue at all.” “In some respects,” he later goes on, “I’m almost relieved, and glad. I think the issue is properly settled. It’s clear to me now that the public schools are not going to change their line in my lifetime.

Note the frequent repetition of "public schools." Its omission gives the reader the
completely false impression that Mark Isaak gave at the beginning.

<small snip for focus>

> >> Note Johnson specifically stated "Darwinian theory",
> >
> >...by which he would have meant neo-Darwinism, the reigning evolutionary theory.

<small snip for focus>

> And since you mention it, your interpretation of what Johnson meant
> isn't based on anything Johnson said,

As it turns out, it is very much based on what Johnson said. Do you want
to hang on for dear life to the distinction between "public schools" and "high schools"?


Remainder deleted, to be replied to next week if that seems called for.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, December 9, 2022 at 10:50:15 AM UTC-5, Mark Isaak wrote:

> On 12/8/22 7:04 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 5:50:15 PM UTC-5, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 1:50:14 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> >>> Mark Isaak wrote:

Adding two little details for context before picking up where I left off in my first reply:

> >>>> ID has no *scientific* support.

> >>> Why is that important?
> >
> >> It's only important because many of its proponents wanted it to be taught as science in school.

> > Bill Rogers is honest enough to say "wanted". I doubt that any leading advocate of ID thinks
> > it is ready to be *taught* *as* *science* in our educational system. Phillip Johnson,
> > perhaps the top advocate, gave up on that in a "jaw-dropping" interview that has been
> > documented on this thread, thanks to the following webpage:
> >
> > https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution

I showed in my reply to jillery earlier this evening how the Panda's Thumb had cherry-picked
from that interview in a way that made the following screed by Padian plausible:
-

> > "For Phil Johnson and the Discovery Institute, the fat lady has sung…No one who can fog a mirror intellectually can have any more illusions that this drivel should be taken seriously as science, or even as social studies.”
> >
> > Note, "science", as opposed to whether it is ready to be *taught* as science in our educational
> > system. But the article totally disregards the distinction in the teeth of what it next quotes from Johnson.
> >
> > The "narrator" [1] tells us, immediately after Padian's screed,
> >
> > For his part, Johnson agrees: “I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools…the courts are just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change things in the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything…"
> >
> > The emphasis on public school teaching continues to the end. Bill Rogers's friends (especially Burkhard
> > and Mark Isaak) have brought up trumped-up charges against me being deficient in
> > reading comprehension, but I expect deafening silence from them about this REAL example.

> Since I don't know what example of what you are talking about, I shall
> be deafeningly silent.

Below-60-IQ simulation noted. The example was the grotesque falsehood
[repeated from above]

> > For his part, Johnson agrees: “I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools…

This is alleged to be in agreement with a fanatical screed by Padian which reads:
[repeated from above]

> > "For Phil Johnson and the Discovery Institute, the fat lady has sung…No one who can fog a mirror intellectually can have any more illusions that this drivel should be taken seriously as science, or even as social studies.”

The narrator had a severe comprehension problem of confusing Johnson's clear description
of an issue about public schools with an issue about ID as a whole.

Would you now like to treat us to a below-50-IQ simulation?

> >>> Does this mean that the origins of life must agree
> >>> with 21st century science?
> >
> >> Since it's the 21st century and we have not figured out how life got started there's no way that it could "agree with 21st century science."
> >
> > Bill Rogers is honest here too, but he has never come close to acknowledging
> > HOW far we are from figuring it out. I don't expect anything like an adequate
> > explanation in the 21st century or even the 22nd. We've had about a century
> > since Oparin's theorizing and close to 70 years since the Miller-Urey experiments,
> > and haven't gotten much further from them since.

> Actually we have gotten farther, but (a) not to the point that there has
> been anything worthy of popular headlines,

Misleading. Using the metaphor of a 100-floor skyscraper whose roof represents
the simplest free-living bacterium, the steps that have
been taken in the last 70 years HAVE been subjected to lots of popular headlines,
and yet they have only taken us from the Miller-Urey basement to the steps
leading up from the ground floor to the next level. We are now at the point
where all four RNA nucleotides have been produced separately under what
is claimed to have been prebiotic conditions, but not all four together.

> (b) in areas not easily expressible in layman's terms (certainly not always in terms I
> understand).

If you don't understand what is meant by "all four RNA nucleotides," then you'd better leave
this discussion to Bill Rogers and Athel, and Ernest Major if he cares to join this thread.
Back ca. 5 years ago, t.o. had a regular who was better at biochemistry
than any of the three IMO: "Roger Shrubber." And 12 years ago there was one who
was even better: "el cid," who died in January 2011.

"The leaves of life are dropping one by one" -- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

> I frankly have no idea how much further there is to go.

Right about the 50th floor, the RNA+DNA World prototype of a primitive
(ca. 4 amino acids) genetic code, managed by ribozymes, and building
simple structural proteins, kicks in.

But the biggest obstacle, the complete protein takeover, still looms above us.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

U. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[jillery]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 17:48:04 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> spammed:

>On Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 1:10:12 PM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 6 Dec 2022 07:08:19 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> >> >> > And you, how do you deal with the fact that Phillip Johnson, a
>>> >> >> > prominent cdesign proponentsist if there ever was one, came to say that
>>> >> >> > there was no intelligent design theory worthy of the name?
>>
>>As is getting to be increasingly common with Mark Isaak, his "fact" is not a fact at all.

The above wasn't written by Isaak. Pay attention.


><big snip for focus>


Works for me. And yes, please focus.

>> >> >> The above is not a fact. What Johnson admitted was that ID was not
>> >> >> robust enough evidence-wise to be a competitor with the teaching
>> >> >> on evolution that is standard in the high schools.
>
>As it turns out, the above comment of mine turned out to be right on the money,
>modulo one hairsplitting detail: "high schools" instead of "public schools".

I suppose you're right, if you conveniently ignore the fact that
nobody mentioned until now that particular hairsplitting detail, and
if you conveniently ignore the fact that the following were your
original hairsplitting details:
******************************
From: "peter2...@gmail.com" <peter2...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: What is the probability?
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2022 18:43:38 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <d687d1c4-12fe-4272...@googlegroups.com>
>
>Note the qualifiers, ye who do not have me in a *de* *facto* killfile,
>like Athel has: "evolution" instead of "evolutionary theory" and
>"high school" instead of "graduate school" and "competitor."
********************************

none of which neither Johnson nor Athel even mentioned.

>> >> According to this:
>> >> <http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/johnson-on-inte.html>
>> >>
>> >> Johnson wrote this:
>
>> >> ********************************
>> >> I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design
>> >> at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the
>> >> Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully
>> >> worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s
>> >> comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific
>> >> people that we have affiliated with the movement.
>> >> ********************************
>
>That's not all Johnson wrote (more precisely, said in an interview).

Or even more precisely, what D’Agostino said Johnson said.

>The part between asterisks was cherry-picked by PvM (whoever that is) from the long article that
>Ron O gave us the link for:
>
>> >https://web.archive.org/web/20070609131601/http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution
>
>The words "comparable alternative" are actually ambiguous, once one reads something
>Johnson said much further down:
>
>“I think the fat lady has sung for any efforts to change the approach in the public schools…the courts are just not going to allow it. They never have. The efforts to change things in the public schools generate more powerful opposition than accomplish anything…I don’t think that means the end of the issue at all.” “In some respects,” he later goes on, “I’m almost relieved, and glad. I think the issue is properly settled. It’s clear to me now that the public schools are not going to change their line in my lifetime.
>
>Note the frequent repetition of "public schools." Its omission gives the reader the
>completely false impression that Mark Isaak gave at the beginning.

Not Mark Isaak and not one he gave, but you did.


><small snip for focus>


You *still* haven't stayed in focus.

>> >> Note Johnson specifically stated "Darwinian theory",
>> >
>> >...by which he would have meant neo-Darwinism, the reigning evolutionary theory.
>
><small snip for focus>
>
>> And since you mention it, your interpretation of what Johnson meant
>> isn't based on anything Johnson said,
>
>As it turns out, it is very much based on what Johnson said. Do you want
>to hang on for dear life to the distinction between "public schools" and "high schools"?

That's *your* hairsplitting detail, not mine, which you conveniently
snipped out.

>Remainder deleted, to be replied to next week if that seems called for.

Given that focusing is a chronic problem for you, it's almost certain
you won't focus any better next week.

[Mark Isaak]

Abiogenesis is a generality. Specific proposals of how abiogenesis
happened are hypotheses, and to the best of my knowledge, remain
hypotheses to this day. Note: There are *multiple* abiogenesis
hypotheses. I don't know of any that have enough well-supported
framework for their whole operation to be regarded as a theory.

I have no idea what scientific hypothesis Behe has made regarding ID.
Could you please tell us what testable proposals he has made about what
the designer is and how it operates?

>>>>> Why is that important?
>>>
>>>> It's only important because many of its proponents wanted it to be taught as science in school.
>
>> Science is also important to many because in a developed economy,
>> science (and the technological innovation which follows from it) is the
>> only source of economic growth.
>
> Your computer geek bias is showing here. Technological innovation is only a
> component of economic growth, and will become an increasingly small part of it
> as mining asteroids gets underway in earnest.

Not my bias; the bias of economists basing their views on economic
evidence. At least, that's what economists write in economics books.
Growth can come from people working harder, or from more people working,
or from technological advance. People are already working as hard as
they are willing to work, and conditions which could change that (like a
war) would damage the economy more than help it. More people, in
developed countries, is a small contribution at best. (And in the US,
it comes from immigration, which lots of people calling themselves
capitalists don't like.) That leaves technological advance.
Undeveloped countries can get extremely fast growth from adopting
already developed technology (South Korea, Singapore, and China, among
others, did this), but technological leaders such as the US need to come
up with new innovations for growth.

> If your buddy Hemidatylus and his accomplices hadn't trashed the DP FAQ
> so thoroughly in 2016, you would now have a FAQ less than two years old
> from which you could recall that I described the asteroid mining scenario in detail.
> As it is, I can't expect you to recall the way I already did that in 2013.

Have you corrected the FAQ yet to reflect those parts of the "evidence
for" section that have been discredited?

[Mark Isaak]

Why would ID be unacceptable in public schools? Do you think it is
because ID is religion, or because it has no science content, or both?
If it had science content, it would be acceptable to teach in public
schools even with its religious overtones (like the Big Bang is). So
Padian's comment about ID lack of science content is justified.

[Bill]

The prohibition of all reference to anything that might even imply religion
in a school's curriculum, makes constitutional protections regarding
religion, a joke. The lawyers are the only benefactors in this parody of
social justice.

The issue is not that religion poses a threat but rather that is offends
secularists. We have been forced to accept one view of the world as if there
were no others. If we respect the intelligence of others, we shouldn't fear
any point of view. We generally have no such respect so suppressing the
viewpoints only requires the it's popular.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

How does the government's failure to establish religion infringe on your right to practice your own religion?

>
> The issue is not that religion poses a threat but rather that is offends
> secularists. We have been forced to accept one view of the world as if there
> were no others. If we respect the intelligence of others, we shouldn't fear
> any point of view. We generally have no such respect so suppressing the
> viewpoints only requires the it's popular.

The failure of the government to promote your religion is not the same as the government's oppressing your religion. Chinese Muslims getting sent to reeducation camps and being tortured because of their religion constitutes religious persecution. American Christians failing to get the government to establish their religion does not constitute religious persecution.
>
> Bill

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 10 Dec 2022 17:49:03 -0600, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Bill <fre...@gmail.com>:

<snip>

>
>The prohibition of all reference to anything that might even imply religion
>in a school's curriculum, makes constitutional protections regarding
>religion, a joke.
>

It would, if it did. It doesn't. Comparative religion
classes are nearly ubiquitous, as are discussions of
religion in history and sociology classes. What *is*
prohibited is promoting any specific religion, which is
probably what gets your panties in a twist and prompts you
to spread lies like the one above.

BYW, I'm still waiting for those examples from the "Physics
and fine tuning" thread; to refresh your memory this was the
exchange:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Bill]
>>>It is probably significant that discussions of physics questions inevitably
>>>lead to theological speculations.
[Me]
>>Really? Perhaps a few examples would show the truth of that
>>assertion. Note that the "theological speculations" must
>>derive from the discussion, not be tacked on by someone
>>desiring to inject religion into a discussion of physics.
>>
>>Thanks in advance.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Bill]

American re-education camps are called public schools. The intent is the
same though: teach kids to trust their teachers.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

What nonsense. The intent of American public schools is the same as that of Chinese reeducation camps for Uighurs? Get a grip on reality. I understand that being persecuted was a part of the identity of the early Christians, but it trivializes real persecution to think that Christians are persecuted by the same American government for which no chief executive of which could forgo attendance at "prayer breakfasts" without suffering serious political repercussions, and successful election to which, except in a very few districts, requires public profession of Christian faith.
>
> Bill

[Bill]

The ultimate goal is the same for all. We need to persuade people that their
society is worth preserving so they will support it. There are always those
who will annoy those in power even if the methods for suppressing them may
differ. All governments are dangerous.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

Societies differ in the amount of persuasion required for people to want to preserve them. Governments differ in the methods employed and extent to which they suppress dissent. Governments differ in the extent to which they are dangerous. All of these differences are quite important; waving them away is lazy or disingenuous or both.

[Bill]

As I've tried to point out before, people are the same everywhere. The
differences we see are fairly insignificant, superficial really. Just the
history of 20th century proves that people will enthusiastically murder and
maim their enemies. The enemies are determined by whoever controls the
government. Their badness or goodness is determined by the government.

Either we are loyal patriots of we are traitors and, again, that is
determined by the government. It is through our passive acceptance of the
Official Word that makes it all possible.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

............................

> As I've tried to point out before, people are the same everywhere. The
> differences we see are fairly insignificant, superficial really. Just the
> history of 20th century proves that people will enthusiastically murder and
> maim their enemies. The enemies are determined by whoever controls the
> government. Their badness or goodness is determined by the government.

How can there be enemies? How can people even disagree? There are only insignificant, superficial differences between people, right? I thought you were just an epistemological nihilist, but it's starting to look like you are a moral nihilist as well. Weed has done a number on you.

>
> Either we are loyal patriots of we are traitors and, again, that is
> determined by the government. It is through our passive acceptance of the
> Official Word that makes it all possible.

Of course we passively accept the Official Word - the people who produce the Official Word are the same as us. How could we differ with them, except in the most insignificant and superficial way?
>
> Bill

[Bill]

We don't differ from each other. We speak different languages so we can be
excused for misunderstanding each other. Our taste in clothes, the styles we
prefer, the food and drink and every other distinction we can conjure up
persuade us that we are unique.

These distinctions apply in every society so that we see variations of a
theme but nothing really distinctive. Our culture is like a uniform,
superficially different from other uniforms yet, still a uniform.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

As I've said many times, you are the authority on you yourself. But your generalizations about "we" and "people" don't line up with my experience.

[Mark Isaak]

Bullshit. Fred Rogers and Steve Bannon are not interchangeable. Simone
Biles and Andre the Giant are not interchangeable. Emily Dickenson and
Andrew Jackson are not interchangeable. The differences between and
among people are hugely significant.

[jillery]

Governments are run by people. What's dangerous are people without
government.

[broger...@gmail.com]

.......................................

> > As I've tried to point out before, people are the same everywhere. The
> > differences we see are fairly insignificant, superficial really.
> Bullshit. Fred Rogers and Steve Bannon are not interchangeable. Simone
> Biles and Andre the Giant are not interchangeable. Emily Dickenson and
> Andrew Jackson are not interchangeable. The differences between and
> among people are hugely significant.

......Freon Bill and Socrates are not interchangeable.

[Bill]

Thanks to body piercing and tattoos and artful haircuts, we know that some
people desperately want to be different. People identify with others doing
the same things, they will copy and mimic and seek the approval of some
people and condemn those who don't.

Bill

[broger...@gmail.com]

Since there are only superficial and insignificant differences between people, your post suggests that you, too, desperately want to be different and that you identify with and seek the approval of some people. So what do you do in your desperate attempt to be different? I'm guessing it's not piercings and tattoos, but it must be something. And who are the people you copy and mimic and seek the approval of?

[Bob Casanova]

On Sun, 11 Dec 2022 09:36:13 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:

[Silence]

As usual from The Refrigerant when refuted or challenged.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, December 11, 2022 at 5:30:17 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:

> As I've tried to point out before, people are the same everywhere.

Oh, please, are you still harping on this slogan of yours?

Look. Except for needs and behaviors that we share with
all members of the order Primates, we are not the same at all.
Sure, most people seek out others who are like them
--a behavior common to primates-- and this accounts for the
fact that these *groups* are pretty much the same.

A similar dynamic is at work in online forums, like right here
in talk.origins, where all your critics except for Glenn and myself
(and the two of us are very different) are getting to be more and more alike.

However, in the big outside world, there is a staggering variety of human behaviors.
I don't want to add to the overkill of all the ways you've been told this,
but I do want to talk about another slogan of yours, "People are very predictable."


My thesis is that people only *become* very predictable after we see how they pass
through what I call "The Black Swan Filter":

"I don't particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant. Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the 'normal,' particularly with 'bell curve' methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud."
--Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (22 April 2007). "The Black Swan: Chapter 1: The Impact of the Highly Improbable". The New York Times. Quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

Many here in talk.origins have been tested many times under severe circumstances, and so their
behavior is very predictable under similar circumstances. You have not taken notice of more than
a handful of these circumstances, so their behavior is predictable to you "under the regular rosy glow of daily life."

And thus you maintain the illusion that they are like what you see, oblivious to what ridiculous
or despicable behavior some of them will resort to when things are not going their way.

I gave Glenn an example of this earlier today:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/WATJ1V2lWcI/m/9cvb_wxJBgAJ
Re: Darwin of the Gaps
9:55 AM EST

Predictably, everyone is ignoring it except jillery, and jillery's response is what
one would predict after seeing earlier behavior of jillery under similar severe
circumstances: unabashed sophistry.

> The differences we see are fairly insignificant, superficial really.

The way you go off on a tangent below suggests that you were
thinking along very specialized lines while writing this last slogan,
and not trying to make a statement about people in general.

> Just the history of 20th century proves that people will enthusiastically murder and
> maim their enemies. The enemies are determined by whoever controls the
> government. Their badness or goodness is determined by the government.
>
> Either we are loyal patriots of we are traitors and, again, that is
> determined by the government. It is through our passive acceptance of the
> Official Word that makes it all possible.

Is it possible that your slogan about predictability was also confined to
such a highly specialized context, perhaps even more specialized than an
application of the Black Swan Filter, and not meant to be about
people in general?

Inquiring minds want to know.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:42:16 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> continued to add to his 300+ lines of
obfuscating noise:


<snip for focus, a futile exercise with PeeWee Peter>

>Predictably, everyone is ignoring it except jillery, and jillery's response is what
>one would predict after seeing earlier behavior of jillery under similar severe
>circumstances: unabashed sophistry.

PeeWee Peter's baseless accusations don't remotely cover jillery's
alleged unabashed sophistry. PeeWee Peter needs to ante-up or fold.

[Bill]

Why mention anthropologists or sociologists or even psychologists since they
each claim to study human behavior as if it were predictable? Doesn't this
suggest that science, the Grand Arbiter of knowledge worth knowing, sees
humans as a collective; individuality merely interesting without being
significant? Again, consider history, the collection of facts that shows
that people repeat their behavior over generations with little variation.

Bill

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 6:05:20 AM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:42:16 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
> <peter2...@gmail.com> continued to add to his 300+ lines of

> obfuscating noise [by others, along with his corrections]:

Fixed to make it honest; and the jillery is showing below what real
obfuscating is all about, by indulging in it.

>
> <snip for focus, a futile exercise with PeeWee Peter>

The jillery is snipping not just for focus, but to obfuscate [see above]
by forcing people wanting to know what
"ignoring it" is all about, to scroll up and find the right post, etc.

Keep reading, folks, there is more obfuscation to come.

> >Predictably, everyone is ignoring it except jillery,

This is what is being ignored by everyone else, and jillery is obfuscating about:

_________________________ repost of text addressed to Freon Bill ___________________

And thus you maintain the illusion that they are like what you see, oblivious to what ridiculous
or despicable behavior some of them will resort to when things are not going their way.

I gave Glenn an example of this earlier today:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/WATJ1V2lWcI/m/9cvb_wxJBgAJ
Re: Darwin of the Gaps
9:55 AM EST

===================== end of repost =================

And now I reveal that the "example" is of ridiculous comments by Mark Isaak,
a staunch ally of the jillery.

>>and jillery's response is what
> >one would predict after seeing earlier behavior of jillery under similar severe
> >circumstances: unabashed sophistry.
> PeeWee Peter's baseless accusations don't remotely cover jillery's
> alleged unabashed sophistry. PeeWee Peter needs to ante-up or fold.

Note how the jillery makes no attempt to show that the accusations were baseless;
this could easily have been done with a link to the jillery's response so that readers
can see for themselves how baseless [or not] the accusations were.

Nevertheless, I will ante-up, on the thread where the incidents occurred, and
report the results back to this thread. But the jillery will have to wait for his/her/their turn.
On-topic discussion/debate takes precedence over personal attacks,
and one or two earlier attacks by the jillery on the same thread will be dealt with before
the ante-up takes place.

The jillery does not have the power to enforce deadlines or priorities by others,
much though the jillery would love to have that kind of power.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 11:25:20 AM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > On Sunday, December 11, 2022 at 5:30:17 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
> >
> >> As I've tried to point out before, people are the same everywhere.
> >
> > Oh, please, are you still harping on this slogan of yours?
> >
> > Look. Except for needs and behaviors that we share with
> > all members of the order Primates, we are not the same at all.

A minor adjustment: since I posted what I did below, I've learned
that some prosimian species are solitary, so I should have
confined myself to monkeys and their descendants, including ourselves.

[On the other hand, there are solitary humans, such as hermits, and that too
shows how people are not the same everywhere.]

> > Sure, most people seek out others who are like them
> > --a behavior common to primates-- and this accounts for the
> > fact that these *groups* are pretty much the same.

Above, I meant that people *within* each group are pretty much the same.
But even that is bending over backwards to accommodate you.

"as if it were predictable" has to do with very limited present-day ability to predict
behavior. The way you talk, one would think these kinds of social sciences
were 1000 years further advanced than they are.

> Doesn't this
> suggest that science, the Grand Arbiter of knowledge worth knowing,

"knowledge" seems to refer to objective data, as though literature were of no
use in understanding human behavior. I beg to differ: I'd take Shakespeare's plays over
any psychology or sociology textbook for that; the same goes for that branch
of anthropology which studies human behavior.

> sees humans as a collective; individuality merely interesting without being
> significant? Again, consider history, the collection of facts that shows
> that people repeat their behavior over generations with little variation.

Yes, but such people don't figure in the history books. Napoleon was one example
of someone who does, because his behavior did not repeat that of others.
Instead, he made a tremendous change in the course of history
and the way ordinary people lived their lives. Take another look at a part of what I quoted:

"Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the 'normal,' particularly with 'bell curve' methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud."

Peter Nyikos

PS Notice how different my responses to you are from those of everyone else?
It is because I have been accustomed to thinking "outside the box" from an early age.

[jillery]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2022 14:20:01 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 6:05:20 AM UTC-5, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 15:42:16 -0800 (PST), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> continued to add to his 300+ lines of

>> obfuscating noise:


The following post puts the PeeWee in PeeWee Peter, by showing how he
accuses jillery of what PeeWee does even while PeeWee Peter is doing
it.

PeeWee Peter complains about not having enough time to actually back
up his transparent obfuscating noise. Not sure how he *still* doesn't
understand that he would have plenty of time simply by not posting
300+ lines of obfuscating noise. Is it it's ok for tenured professors
to be willfully stupid in South Carolina?

Meanwhile, PeeWee Peter conveniently ignores the willfully stupid lie
he posted about jillery:
*****************************
Subject: Re: Darwin of the Gaps
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:04:28 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <b4daa34a-7229-4b37...@googlegroups.com>
*****************************

For someone who twists his knappies over alleged insults, attacks, and
libels against him, PeeWee Peter makes all kinds of excuses for not
acknowledging, nevermind apologizing, when he posts them.
Tenured professor or not, his behavior in T.O. remains out of control.