Doubting Darwin - Merged

[_MrStakhanovite]

I won’t ever read the book to be honest, I don’t have the interest nor the endurance. Really, if someone has got some really important insight that is going to overturn a paragon of what a theory is, I’m one of the last people you are going to want to convince of that.

I simply do not know enough biology to be able to ascertain from legit insights to pseudoscience in biology jargon. The best I can manage it to take my lead from the academic establishment.

[_Runtu]

I've been fascinated by this ongoing review of "Darwin's Doubt":

http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretr ... -a-review/

This guy has way more patience than I do, but I'm learning a lot from his review. Let's just say that Stephen Meyer does not come out of this looking very good (or honest or intelligent, for that matter).

[_Bazooka]

I've been fascinated by this ongoing review of "Darwin's Doubt":

http://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretr ... -a-review/

This guy has way more patience than I do, but I'm learning a lot from his review. Let's just say that Stephen Meyer does not come out of this looking very good (or honest or intelligent, for that matter).

The Sternberg peer review controversy concerns the conflict arising from the publication of an article supporting the controversial concept of intelligent design in a scientific journal, and the subsequent questions of whether proper editorial procedures had been followed and whether it was properly peer reviewed.
One of the primary criticisms of the intelligent design movement is that there are no research papers supporting their positions in peer reviewed scientific journals.[1] On 4 August 2004, an article by Stephen C. Meyer (Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture) titled "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories", appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Meyer's article was a literature review article, and contained no new primary scholarship itself on the topic of intelligent design.[2] The following month, the publisher of the journal, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, released a statement repudiating the article and stating that Richard M. Sternberg (whom they described as a "former editor") had, in an unusual manner, handled the entire review process without consultation or review from an associate editor.[3] Sternberg disputes the Council's statement and asserts that the paper was appropriately peer reviewed by three biologists who "concluded that [the paper] warranted publication".[4]
The same statement from the Council vowed that proper review procedures would be followed in the future and endorsed a resolution published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which states that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting intelligent design.[5] On September 18, the Discovery Institute issued a statement exulting over the publication of Meyer's paper in a peer-reviewed journal and chastising the National Center for Science Education for stating that the paper should not have been published.[6] The Biological Society of Washington's president, Roy McDiarmid called Sternberg's decision to publish Meyer's article "a really bad judgment call on the editor's part" and it was doubtful whether the three scientists who peer reviewed the article and recommended it for publication were evolutionary biologists.[7]


Criticism[edit source]

In a review of Meyer's article The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories, Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry claimed it contained poor scholarship, that it failed to cite and specifically rebut the actual data supporting evolution, and "constructed a rhetorical edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down straw men, and tendentious interpretations."[20] Further examination of the article revealed that it was substantially similar to previously published articles co-authored by Meyer.[24]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sternberg_peer_review_controversy

[_EAllusion]

Darth -

"Theory" in science means something like an explanation for a set of observations. Theories can be extremely well supported like evolutionary theory, atomic theory, or germ theory of disease, or they can be highly speculative. Creationists tend to trade on the false lay understanding of "theory" as being on the low end of a continuum of certainty to imply evolution is on less sure scientific grounds than it is, but a theory doesn't have well-supported to be a theory.

[_EAllusion]

I've read the book. Stephen Meyer, for those less familiar, is notorious for recycling his material over and over. This is nice if you are interested in debunking his misleading tripe since it is less work, but it also means that if you are already familiar with his arguments, you don't gain too much by reading the book. If you're interested in the latest in creationist Cambrian explosion arguments, you should pick it up.

[_EAllusion]

Darth -

"Theory" in science means something like an explanation for a set of observations. Theories can be extremely well supported like evolutionary theory, atomic theory, or germ theory of disease, or they can be highly speculative. Creationists tend to trade on the false lay understanding of "theory" as being on the low end of a continuum of certainty to imply evolution is on less sure scientific grounds than it is, but a theory doesn't have well-supported to be a theory.

I think I'm going to expand on this:

There is a widely held, but incorrect understanding of scientific jargon and certainty in the public in the US. The idea is that you can lay out the terms

Hypothesis
Theory
Law

like a ladder of certainty. A hypothesis is essentially an educated guess and as you move down the list your scientific idea becomes more established until you get to law where you can say something has been proven. Only then can it be called a fact. This understanding, unfortunately, is totally wrong. Creationists use this misunderstanding to imply that because evolutionary theory is called a theory, it must be speculative or relatively uncertain. But, as mentioned before, a theory is more like an explanation for a set of observations. It is the meat and potatoes of science. It's the idea or set of ideas that account for and give insight into the web of information we take in. A hypothesis is more like a specific prediction or set of predictions that should happen if a given theory is the case. A law is a formal description of a general pattern of behavior in nature, usually expressed mathematically. Laws don't have to be certain or even true to be called laws. Newton's laws are still laws even though we know there are exceptions.

What we call facts are just ideas that are mutually understood to be so well established that any reasonable observer properly informed should be compelled to accept them. What we think of as the most basic raw observations are often called facts. But even simple observations, such as there being a tree over there, are ultimately theoretical accounts of even more basic sense data (such as the pattern of photons hitting your eye). Really, any sufficiently well-established theory has every right to be called a fact. In that sense, some theories are facts, some are not. The rudiments of evolutionary theory certainly is as much a fact as any number of scientific ideas that people at this point take completely for granted, such as the heliocentric model of the solar system.

[_EAllusion]

You yourself are going to have to decide which side you are going to take (or find a rare position in the middle), and those is going to require even more reading. You know Meyer’s claims are going to be contested, so if you want to be intellectually honest, you are going to have to track down sources and see if he is on the up and up. I don’t mean going over Talk Origins and seeing what they have to say, I mean non-polemical sources that are just trying to explain concepts without aim to taking on Intelligent Design. That is no easy task, highly rewarding, but comes at a cost.

My assessment is that the return value from that book is simply not going to be worth the effort. When you have some time, check out this blog by Stephen Matheson. Matheson is a Cell Biologist at Calvin College and a conservative Christian. In that blog who goes through Meyer’s last book ‘Signature of the Cell’ chapter by chapter. He also had a chance to engage Meyer in person at an event, watch how Meyer and the Discovery Institute covered the event and how they treated Matheson.

Matheson is known for opposing intelligent design theorist material. It's how he found himself on a panel discussion. He is as polemical (or not) a source as any of the routine contributors to talk origins. I'm pretty sure he's personally praised talk origins, in fact.

[_Themis]

I've read the book. Stephen Meyer, for those less familiar, is notorious for recycling his material over and over. This is nice if you are interested in debunking his misleading tripe since it is less work, but it also means that if you are already familiar with his arguments, you don't gain too much by reading the book. If you're interested in the latest in creationist Cambrian explosion arguments, you should pick it up.

ID is religion masquerading as science. Stephen Meyer is one of the prophets of ID. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who listen to this crap. As such he probably makes a lot of money for his appearances and books. This is one way to make a lot of money. You might get more women though if you actually start your own church.

[_Darth J]

Darth -

"Theory" in science means something like an explanation for a set of observations. Theories can be extremely well supported like evolutionary theory, atomic theory, or germ theory of disease, or they can be highly speculative. Creationists tend to trade on the false lay understanding of "theory" as being on the low end of a continuum of certainty to imply evolution is on less sure scientific grounds than it is, but a theory doesn't have well-supported to be a theory.

a theory is more like an explanation for a set of observations. It is the meat and potatoes of science. It's the idea or set of ideas that account for and given insight into the web of information we take in.

^ that is what I meant by "a given hypothesis has to have empirical support before it is considered to be a 'theory.'" I didn't say it had to be "well" supported.

ETA: I meant to say that a hypothesis is a prediction about empirical data, but a theory is an explanation of empirical data that has already been seen. But I probably did not articulate that very well, just like I am not articulating the explanation of my explanation very well.

[_DrW]

Darth -

"Theory" in science means something like an explanation for a set of observations. Theories can be extremely well supported like evolutionary theory, atomic theory, or germ theory of disease, or they can be highly speculative. Creationists tend to trade on the false lay understanding of "theory" as being on the low end of a continuum of certainty to imply evolution is on less sure scientific grounds than it is, but a theory doesn't have well-supported to be a theory.

a theory is more like an explanation for a set of observations. It is the meat and potatoes of science. It's the idea or set of ideas that account for and given insight into the web of information we take in.

^ that is what I meant by "a given hypothesis has to have empirical support before it is considered to be a 'theory.'" I didn't say it had to be "well" supported.

ETA: I meant to say that a hypothesis is a prediction about empirical data, but a theory is an explanation of empirical data that has already been seen. But I probably did not articulate that very well, just like I am not articulating the explanation of my explanation very well.

Darth,

for what it's worth, I think your comments on ID and your descriptions of scientific terms so far on this thread have shown good knowledge and insight on the subject and were perfectly suitable for the purposes of this board. As you may have seen, I even referred to them on another thread.