Nature magazine definitely announced, daring to be doubted, “Science and politics are inseparable”. They followed this up with, “We cannot stand by and let science be undermined”, and so endorsed Payoff Joe for president.
To say science and politics are inseparable, one must know what both are. Politics needs no explanation. What is science?
Some say science is a process. This is wrong. The way you complete the morning paperwork is a process. Renewing your driver’s license is a process. Everything is a process. Being a process is not what makes science scientific.
Here is what science is: a collection of theories about how and why the world works. It’s theories that makes a thing a science. Scientific theories are an amalgam of physics (which is empirical), mathematics (which is not empirical), and metaphysics (not empirical).
That which is not empirical cannot be tested against observation, and thus must rely (in brief) on belief. That’s where the politics comes in. To see that, contrast technology with science.
Technology is science’s close cousin. It often takes the more-or-less true theories of science that are amenable to manipulation, theories of the kind that say “Push here and then this happens because of that”, and puts them to work.
It should be clear that observation, upon which technology relies, is not the same as theory. A person ignorant of theory can “push here” and see that “this happens” or not. He needs no “because that”. Technology doesn’t need theory. If you get something to work, it works, and you need not know, or can be wrong about, why.
Because of this, technology is judged more rigorously than science. It has to work—and here is the key!—but science does not.
The reason for the difference is obvious enough: You can sell a non-functioning technology for only so long before you’re caught (see, inter alia, Theranos). But you can sell theories forever.
Not all of science’s theories have to be true, but they all have to be pleasing. Consider a multiverse theory, which pleases some. It claims an entirely new universe peels off from our own every time a wave-function “collapses”. This peeling off can never be observed, so the theory can’t be proven or falsified by observation, but it sure can generate enthusiastic papers, theory building upon theory, all of the how-many-universes-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin variety.
Theories do not need to make predictions that can be checked to be liked. Even if liked theories do make verifiable predictions that fail, it is a breeze to explain aberrant observations as outliers or special exceptions. Theories are infinitely malleable: falsifiability has always been a dead end.
Politics intrudes at this point, because what makes theories pleasing is often their non-empirical parts. It is those parts which are embraced with the most enthusiasm.
Technology can remain mute about deeper questions, but science cannot, because all theories have meaning and all touch on metaphysical beliefs to some extent. The parts of theories that are metaphysics and math is why it isn’t always inappropriate to speak of believing a scientific theory. You can, for instance, only “believe” math, because numbers can never be observed (try observing the largest prime). Same thing for many metaphysical propositions. We believe the non-empirical based on argument that makes use of observations but extrapolates from them to the non-observable.
There is much to all this (ahem), so let’s only examine or two cases.
A particular metaphysical belief that has crept into science is that man is god. It’s never said in so dramatic a fashion, of course, but the lineaments are there. There is a case to be made this started in quantum mechanics a century ago, in which some theories require man’s acts to “collapse” those wave functions mentioned above. This implies that, without us, nothing, or nothing important, happens.
Even if that is false or fanciful, metaphysics is inescapable in scientific theories.
For instance, an older metaphysical belief says only God can change the essence of a thing into something new: after a prayer, the bread becomes Christ’s body, a miracle. But man now believes he too can manipulate natures (the plural is not a mistake). A male can become a female by speaking the “transition” into existence, a miracle.
In neither case can any observation falsify these metaphysical propositions. What good does it do to tell a tranny he is, based on all observation, a man? All he will admit is that outward appearances deceive, that he really is a woman in essence, in nature because he says so.
Metaphysics always trumps physics. Metaphysical beliefs are a lot closer to ultimate Reality, and thus dearer to people’s hearts than any empirical theory. Take differentially heated fluids flowing on rotating spheres. There are two main theories regarding this, relying on two different metaphysical beliefs. One is that man is not part of the world, and that he corrupts creation (gods can be good or evil). The other is that man is made from dust, and so is a natural part of the world.
Nature magazine, calling on the first metaphysical belief, speaks of “irrefutable evidence” of global-warming-of-doom theory. If they mean those parts of the theory that man is an aberration, requiring government of enlightened gods (themselves) to restrain evil demigods (us), then they’re right. Bad forecasts will never challenge their belief—if they hold is strongly enough.
For any scientific theory that has taken the taint of politics, from coronadoom to evolution, unless you can successfully challenge the underlying metaphysics you will not change any minds.
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Typo alert – shouldn’t there be a “not” inserted four words before the end?
John,
Another typo placed by my enemies. They grow ever stronger.
Science and politics are inseparable
There goes separation of Church and State
Briggs: Enemies … They grow ever stronger.
It may well be you grow ever weaker (could be WuFlu – have you been tested?)
Most science has been bunk for quite a few decades. The Copenhagen Interpretation is wholesale bunkum, highly refined and polished. Quantum computers do not work because they are based entirely upon this bunkum. “Many Worlds” isn’t a theory – it’s a fantasy.
Interesting note – General Relativity has disproven Special Relativity, upon which general relativity is based. It seems that, in the presence of a sufficiently strong gravity well, light slows down to outside observers. Thus disproving the basis of special relativity. The theory is self refuting, and yet the math works. (Caution:
industrial grade hokum, with a few interesting facts thrown in at the video link.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JCRDaa3ehk
There should be a separation of school and state because schools are the seminaries of liberty teaching the youth the false principles of liberty.
While there may be a case to be made that not all that purports to be science is science but faith/belief there can be no doubt that bears became whales – that is the Doctrine of Darwin taught in Nature, right? – and, presumably small timid bears who loathed the sun climbed trees and eventually became owls.
“One is that man is not part of the world, and that he corrupts creation (gods can be good or evil).” I KNEW IT!!! We are aliens from another galaxy!!! Finally, it is admitted that there is no God and no evolution and David Icke was right all along. Reptilians rule!!!
I think the piece is saying “scientific theory” is political, not science. The theory is what is usurped and made political. Actually, there are many in history who loved the politization of science. 99% were evil, cruel, nasty, horrible creatures, but it’s not new and the pushers of it remain evil, cruel, nasty, horrible creatures. However, this requires a stupid population, so I guess we could keep science science if we wanted, but obviously, we do not.
Good news, though. If science is fluid, without reality and totally political, it’s okay to burn down their huts for defiling YOUR version of science and politics. Have a nice day.
Briggs–Are you sure you’re not just less vigilant about those enemies? 🙂
bears became whales – that is the Doctrine of Darwin taught in Nature, right?
Wrong. Darwin wrote of “descent with modification”. He almost never used the term “evolution,” which was tainted by its political association with the French Terror. His thesis could be summed up as
Translated into modern talk: Any new species that appear (if they do) existed in potency in the genome of an old species, and were actualized by natural processes via mutations.
In Aristotelian terms:
1. Material Cause: the tendency to variation due to constant small random mutations in the genetic code; i. e., a variety of differing individuals within a species capable of transmitting their differences
2. Formal Cause: the tendency of an interbreeding population to reproduce itself in a stable manner and increase in numbers; i. e., the maintenance of type
3. Efficient Cause (Agent): natural selection by the environment which eliminates those variants which are less effective in reproducing their kind; i. e., the agent determining in which direction species-change will take place.
4. Final Cause (End): the flexibility of living things by which they are able to occupy new niches in the changing environment; i. e., a feed-back mechanism which guides the selective process toward a new type which can exploit new environmental possibilities.
What makes a trait advantageous is what the critter is trying to do. The panda’s wrist bone did not protrude ‘in order to’ help it strip bamboo leaves from the stalk. Rather, a mutation caused the wrist bone to protrude and the panda figured out how to use it to its advantage. Otherwise, it’s just a protruding wrist bone.
Dear Ye Olde Statistician:
Charles Darwin wrote in the first edition of The Origin of Species that North American black bears had been seen
swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.
Maybe a duck made that claim and evolved into Darwin.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1073.htm
What happened to your Twitter account?
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IOW, Darwin read of or saw a behavior in bears that resembled that of baleen whales and speculated that over a great expanse of time such behavior might result in a whale-like bear (if whales did not already exist). But bears as such did not evolve into whales as such. Whatever the critter was some of whose descendants were later called ‘whales’, it was likely not a critter we see round about today; and whatever remote descendant of some bears might become, it would not be too much like what we call ‘whales’ today.
Remember, Darwin knew nothing of genes or genetics.
And?
To be more accurate:
Species etiam novae, si quae apparent, praeextiterunt in quibusdam activis virtutibus, sicut et animalia ex putrefactione generata producuntur ex virtutibus stellarum et elementorum quas a principio acceperunt, etiam si novae species talium animalium producantur.
“The panda’s wrist bone did not protrude ‘in order to’ help it strip bamboo leaves from the stalk. Rather, a mutation caused the wrist bone to protrude and the panda figured out how to use it to its advantage. Otherwise, it’s just a protruding wrist bone.”
Exactly!
People who choose not to understand Darwin travel to great lengths to distort his writings about natural selection.
Evolution, boiled down to what seems to be its essence, is a tautology: “Mutable things mutate”, and it is *not* survival of the fittest, but survival of the fit enough. Thus, variations remain and reversion happens, when conditions necessitate it. Biological bodies run on chemistry, too; so there are multiple paths for pretty much all complex reactions. Most mutations are neutral. Some are relatively and conditionally optimal and some are not; and the future being unknown with respect to said mutable creatures, thus they’re ‘conservative’ and try to minimize mutations, using chemistry.
Speaking of politics in science, the Eisenhower quote regarding the military-industrial complex is widely remembered. Less well remembered is the government-academia complex run by a ‘technocratic’ ‘elite’. That’s where we are.
‘Survival of the fittest’ was iirc Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, who never said such things.
It is close to, but not quite a tautology. Like: heavy things fall because of gravity. We can measure gravity from the fall of heavy things. It is not that mutable being mutates, its that the mutations that are useful (or which the critter makes to be useful) tend to get passed along provided they are hereditable. When enough such changes accumulate in a population, humans give it a new name.
I’ve studied both chemistry and physics (PhD from Columbia as a George B. Pegram Distinguished Fellow) and although I chose to work in industry (Polaroid, RCA, Allied Chemical), I have done a lot of cooperative research with universities like Princeton (see here for example), Stanford, MIT, Penn State, and Univ. of Delaware. I have my share of awards, papers, and patents, and you may have used some of the products I helped bring from the laboratory into the marketplace.
I define science operationally as a process:
Science is an iterative, self-correcting process that relies on experimental observations and direct measurements to test its theories and hypotheses. The purpose is to extend knowledge by extrapolating into new and unknown areas. What a scientist thinks or believes about a theory or hypothesis is irrelevant, because the experimental measurements are what count. Only after repeatedly verifying those measurements does a result finally become a scientific fact.
By definition, nothing in science can ever be “settled.” The self-correcting part of the scientific process necessarily exposes every well-established scientific fact to continual scrutiny. That’s why one of the most comprehensive collections of scientific facts, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, is updated every year to provide the latest results of the best measurements that determine those facts.
I have given three power point lectures about science, global warming, and politics of global warming at a local college over the last 15 years (updated every year). Due to the ChinkyPox, I hastily put together (over a weekend last April) three you tube videos for the lectures (40 to 50 minutes).
If you would like to view them (in a private mode) here are the links. I may polish them and make them public eventually, so forgive the imperfections. 1) the scientific process, numbers in science, and pathological science (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sM34syM_y0&feature=youtu.be ), 2) CO2 induced global warming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IsAAMLhTSA&feature=youtu.be ), 3) The politics of global warming (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLToGF12eM&feature=youtu.be ).
As nobody (besides scientists) needs science to live, as you can consider the world flat o round without any serious consequence to your life, science is not a good that you can sell or buy in the market and scientists have it hard selling their stuff. Kings and governments are the only corporations stupid enough where scientists can look for funds, buying the probability of a big discovery or a vaccine for a malady. To do that scientists must get into politics and follow the narratives needed by rulers and politicos, whose relation with reality is always thin.
It is not that mutable being mutates, its that the mutations that are useful (or which the critter makes to be useful) tend to get passed along provided they are hereditable
Darwinists are forever trying to sneak teleology into their random this, mutation that, natural selection the other thing. just so claims.
Yes an animal which suffers a mutation decides whether or not that mutation he suffers from is “good” and so he will choose to pass it on if he can, who can doubt that?
Remember, Darwin knew nothing of genes or genetics.
The last four words ought be dropped as a nonhereditary vestigial defense of the monstrous mendacious fraud.
@MrChuck
Light in a strong gravity field gets redshifted, it does not go slower. If the field is strong enough, in a Black Hole, all light paths curve back into the hole, they wont reach you so cannot see them.
When I had a Quantum Physics class in university, there was no Interpretation. In short: These are the rules to turn Classical Physics concepts into their Quantum equivalents. For some rules nobody understands why they work.
And then you get Quantum Field Theory.
http://www.domcentral.org/farrell/companion/compfram.htm
Father Walter Farrell had a certain genius when it came to explaining complex philosophical ideas – and The Summa is certainly that.
One can look at the column on the left and see to what Part and Response to The Summa it refers to. It is useful as an intellectual emetic to purge from the intellect the progressive poison far too many modern men have been convinced to swallow so as to be “enlightened.”
This excellent companion to The Summa is meant for the consumption of the everyday Joe and Jolene Christian and it is useful to read what is essentially the orthodox exegesis of The Summa by a faithful and highly intelligent Christian.
ABS is tempted to invoke the teaching of an Ecumenical Council to blow this macroevolution-is-Darwin’s-Doctrine-and-it-is-scientific turd out of the philosophical punch bowl but the explication and explanation of evolution is handled so well by Father Farrell that the temptation is easily resisted.
“There is only one science. It is called ‘physics.’ Everything else is stamp collecting.” (Rutherford, via Heinlein)
P. Jones: Ah but does the physicist know his history almost to a man they do not,
the stamp collector on the other hand at least has some inkling.
For the most part. they do not know what teleology is. Once you take an Aristotelian tack, the whole thing makes much more sense.
Given the material and formal causes [being] mentioned above and the efficient and final causes [becoming] also mentioned, it is hard to conceive that phenotypical change does not take place. Darwin did not suppose that such change might be sudden, massive, and pointed, but as I said he did not know of friar Mendel and his genetics, let alone modern discoveries like editing, self-repair, or epigenetics.
Which is is, a tautology or a fraud? It can’t be both.
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An almost perfect restatement of the obvious:
Trump 2020 A Man vs. A Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_4n_MmNdxA&feature=emb_logo
It is not that mutable being mutates, its that the mutations that are useful (or which the critter makes to be useful) tend to get passed along provided they are hereditable.
This is the game always played by macro-evolutionists and they are as blind to it as a Mexican tetra is blind to its surroundings.
There you go pretending some mindless creature has intellect and judgement and can judge whether or not the mutation he sufferers from is useful and then he decides to pass it on if all goes well. And if the creature thinks this mutation is not useful then it changes it so it then is useful.
Darwinists always do this and they are always blind to it.
I wonder what monkey intellectual genetic material you inherited accounts for that?
In any event..adios.
and it is *not* survival of the fittest, but survival of the fit enough
It goes farther than that. It’s just another tautology. It’s not survival of the fit enough. It’s just “survival of what survives.” There’s no other standard for judging fitness than what survives. If it didn’t survive it clearly wasn’t fit enough, even if what killed it (or the entire species) looks to an outside observer like a freak accident.
A few thoughts of a Wednesday:
Some say science is a process. This is wrong. The way you complete the morning paperwork is a process. Renewing your driver’s license is a process. Everything is a process. Being a process is not what makes science scientific.
Word play doesn’t alter reality it just potentially affects understanding for a short while. Which is the business of political wrangling.
Science (in the personified, metaphorical sense) uses method and process.
Just as any formalised endeavour or area of human interest.
That does not mean that scientific processes and methods are not relevant to the defining of what science is. (In so far as it could be said to be “wrong’ to call science a process”. Reasonable people understand the point is to remove subjectivity from the definition.
Why not just use the translation of the word as many do?
Politics creeps into everything where large numbers of proud people or money /power are involved. Even social groups become infected with political bias.
The abstract noun means it is open to redefinition and argument.
Only the most dishonest argue about self evident truth, though.
The idea in science is to produce a proof or establish a theory that does not create controversy but ends it or reduces it without use of force or coercion, bribery, intimidation, or other underhand tricks.
That there is disagreement means that politics is inevitable.
Eventually the truth finds its way through.
Though politics / religious zealots and luddites ry to slow its pace.
There is nothing new but the size of the problem, in the current state of science, that has not happened before.
Joy
Well spoken
I would only comment on your final paragraph
There should also be a concern about the opposite of religious zealots and luddites; those are the scientivists who believe everything that comes out of science is true until science (or reality) shows it isn’t. These people are the opposite of luddites who embrace bad theory and equally slow the pace of science.
Nor intellect, but what Aquinas and Aristotle called “animal prudence.” Animals will generally try that and try this and when they come across something that satisfies an appetite will naturally repeat it. They do not ‘decide’ in a rational way, but rather in a prudential way using the estimative power of instinct. The combination of perception and emotion that all animals possess can mimic the actions of conception and volition and be easily mistaken for them. A useful text that covers much of this is Brennan’s Thomistic Psychology.
Since it is impossible to desire what is not known, the first requirement is a cognitive determination by the imagination. This is an estimation of the utility or harmfulness of the perceived (or remembered) object, as an object, so it is sometimes called the estimative power of the imagination.
The second requirement is an impulsive determination by the appetites. This is a feeling of emotion resulting from the estimation.
Then thirdly, there is the locomotive power, by which some actual physical behavior gives “natural selection” something to select on.
These three things in combination comprise “instinct,” which we can see is more complex for the Aristotelians than the usual meat puppet notion of the Early Moderns. Not until the invention of software was there a model on which instinct could be more firmly based. Before that, they had only clockwork and machinery.
https://aquinasonline.com/estimative-sense/
Very briefly, there are several commentators in the above who know what they’re talking about, and the rest don’t know how science works or anything about the history of philosophy of science. I won’t bother to give my own credentials, but for those interested do a web search for “Kurland-McGarvey equation,” one that doesn’t need citations.
PS-with respect to arguments about Common Descent (which does not necessarily entail the Darwinian model of “survival of the fittest”), I’ve found that rational argument, facts are to no avail. So I don’t bother to reply to Young Earthers, Geocentrists and Flatearthers.
“Survival of the fittest”, has lately evolved into survival of the fattest.
Dean, that was good 🙂
Just a note: read in Father Farrell’s book .. from the book … “The woman who gives birth to a child is not only a cause of a wondrous effect, she herself has become what she was not before, a mother.”
Actually a woman, once she is pregnant, has become what she was not before, which is that she has become a mother, as birthing the child does not make her a mother.
Every woman who has ever become pregnant, whether the pregnancy ended in giving birth, in abortion, or in miscarriage, she will always be a mother.
God bless, C-Marie
Science and politics have always been deeply intertwined: alchemists and kings, witch doctors and chieftains, expert hunters and the rest of the tribe, root diggers and root eaters. Scientists solve puzzles. It’s only in modern times that many of the puzzles have become useless to the rest of us. There’s no political application to the study of twin primes, for instance, except for funding the chalk board performers after skimming a percentage for “administration”.
Most scientists desperately seek political relevance. What’s the point of ascending the tower if you don’t get paid for it, and that requires pleasing the politically powerful. I remember when the study of lichens was so esoteric only the socially deficient undertook it. Now lichens are harbingers of doom, according to lichen researchers seeking funding. Even total nerds need to eat.
Changing minds is politics. It doesn’t require metaphysics; it requires propaganda. Four out of five dentists recommend Blotto Toothpaste — that’s typical science used for mind manipulation.
Science is not some pure pursuit of deep thinkers separate from human foibles, desires, and inflated egos. Like the priest, the scientist is a member of the social stew, not a special being who stands apart. Don’t expect too much from people who wear lab coats with test tubes in the pockets. It’s just another fancy costume. They want your money and will do or say just about anything to get it. Nature has been a charlatan rag for decades. They fell off the pedestal long ago. Indeed, the pedestal was fake from the beginning.
until the invention of software … they had only clockwork and machinery.
Software IS machinery. It means: soft wiring as opposed to hard wiring. It converts the general device into a specific one. IOW: it completes the construction.
There you go pretending some mindless creature has intellect and judgement and can judge whether or not the mutation he sufferers from is useful and then he decides to pass it on if all goes well.
…
Nor intellect, but what Aquinas and Aristotle called “animal prudence.” Animals will generally try that and try this and when they come across something that satisfies an appetite will naturally repeat it. They do not ‘decide’ in a rational way,
Gotta wonder how any creature that can’t communicate can decide to pass on anything to its offspring. How would it do so?
A better word is “discover”. It doesn’t have to involve trial and error — at least not on the creature’s part.
Using the eye as an example, something caused the light sensitive cells to become useful. Perhaps a novel neural pathway. Before that, light sensitive cells would have been the functional equivalent of eye color in humans — a neutral trait.
Gotta wonder how any creature that can’t communicate can decide to pass on anything to its offspring. How would it do so?
That’s why ‘decide’ was put in quote marks. Aquinas distinguishes rational decisions (an act of the intellective appetite, or will) and an estimative decision (an act of the sensitive appetite). The former is spurred by the intellect, the latter by the imagination. Thus, the sheep esteems the wolf an enemy and instinctively flees even if it has never previously encountered a wolf. Not being of the will, it is not free.
But what makes you think animals can’t communicate? They may not be able to discuss nominalsim or debate the merits of free silver, but they can raise the cry that means “cheetah!” and the other baboons will run. That isn’t language, of course; but something has been communicated. Heck, even diseases can be communicated.
Ambrose Bierce defined “Politics” as “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” That makes the always-politically-correct Nature magazine, and its grant-grubbing scientists, political ho’s, extraordinaire. Thus, in the spirit of Snopes, we’ll deem the Nature article “mostly true.”
Real science begins with observation, and modern scientists now observe far more than Darwin could ever have done. Even so, many people base the “metaphysics” of their “science” on outdated scientific observations of the 19th century.
The heart of the materialists’ reply to Paley’s “Watchmaker Argument” is that apparent design and purpose seen in Earth’s life forms is not real, but the product of strict natural processes.
As Hugh Ross noted in his wonderful book “The Creator and the Cosmos”, we now know that while no mechanical engine is an organism, all organisms are engines, meaning capable of processing energy and performing work. “Thus, since no one would rationally argue that a working engine designed by another human could be chance-assembled by natural processes, it is far more ludicrous to suggest that strictly natural processes could assemble living organisms.”
Thanks to modern X-ray scanning electron microscopes, scientists can observe and map complex biological molecules down to the level of individual atoms. Design that was hidden from view in Darwin’s day, has now been exposed.
As Ross notes in his book, one of the earliest designs so mapped, the crystal structure of the F1-ATPase enzyme, revealed nature’s own rotary engine, no bigger than ten billionths by ten billionths by eight billionths of a meter:
“This tiny motor includes the equivalent of an engine block, a drive shaft, and three pistons. It is a variable speed motor that runs at speeds between 0.5 and 4.0 revolutions per second.
“Near the other end of the size spectrum…is the yeast 26S proteasome molecule. This molecule contains over two million protons and neutrons. Its map reveals it serves as an intracellular waste-disposal and recycling system.
“Smaller molecules within a cell attach protein markers (called ‘ubiquitin’) to other protein molecules deemed [by the cell’s command center] waste material. Since these ready-for-disposal proteins resemble tangled balls of yarn, the first job of the 26S proteasome, after identifying the tagged protein, is to unfold, untwist, and unravel it. This function is performed by an apparatus at one end of the proteasome.
“Once the targeted protein is straightened out, the proteasome slowly drags it into its core and cuts the protein into segments. These segments are precisely measured by a ‘ruler’ inside the proteasome. The cut-up pieces are then ejected from the proteasome, and a ‘sanitation’ fleet (other proteins) drives by to pick them up and sort them, separated the stuff that can be reused from the stuff that cannot.
“To date, several dozen different biological molecules have been so mapped. Not only do biochemists now see strict analogies in these molecules to humanly designed machines, they are observing designs that are superior to our best human efforts. Nanomotors (motors that are just several billionths of a meter in diameter) designed and built by human engineers, for example, are more than ten times less efficient than equivalently sized motors biochemists find in biological molecules.
“The molecular biological machines….do not work in isolation. That are strictly analogies to factories…[and they] cooperatively support one another in their tasks. Thus, Paley’s design argument is now acknowledged as being far too conservative.”
Ross notes that radical Darwinists fail to address the origin of life. Mechanisms of natural selection and mutations are useless until the first form of life is assembled. Despite years of intense research, nobody has demonstrated the feasibility of assembling a living organism form inorganic materials by strictly natural processes, nor do geologic eras provide remotely sufficient time.
As for the “Panda’s thumb” as an example of a “bad design”, others such as Peter Gordon, argues the rather than the thumb being clumsy and jury-rigged, it is a functional, original design. This conclusion was established in a recent study by Japanese biologists who used 3-dimensional and magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate that certain bones of the giant panda’s hand form a double pincer-like apparatus that allows the panda to “manipulate objects with great dexterity.” Hideki Endo, et al., “Role of the Giant Panda’s ‘Pseudo-Thumb’” Nature, 397 (1999).
But what makes you think animals can’t communicate?
With “communicate” I was trying to avoid training and confine the transmission to cellular replication.
I’ve always wondered how that negates design. It’s like saying the Mona Lisa is the product of paint brushes and pigments. Where did “natural” processes come from?
Besides, natural processes can account only for transformation, not substantiation. They can move matter around, but they can’t account for its existence. Paley was a modernist and bout into the ‘dead matter’ metaphysic of the moderns.
http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/calhoun/socratic/Tkacz_AquinasvsID.html
Get a load of this excuse –
Evolving science reason for inconsistent messaging on COVID-19: Tam
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/evolving-science-reason-for-inconsistent-messaging-on-covid-19-tam/ar-BB1aiNYB
LOCK YOURSELVES UP AND GIVE UP YOUR RIGHTS AND DIE IN ISOLATION BECAUSE OF OUR… UMMmmm… ever-changing evolving contradictory opinions on different times and places… and… hey look, you CAN’T expect us to always debate things or do peer reviews before we FORCE and THREATEN you to OBEY US now, can you???
cdquarles: “survival of the fit enough”!! Yes, you’re one of the few people I’ve seen bring this up.
Ye Olde Statistician, thanks for your thoughtful comments. I quickly read your linked article, “Thomas Aquinas v. The Intelligent Designers, What is God’s finger doing in my prebiotic soup?” I printed and will read these five pages, single spaced, more carefully. My first impression is that, like St. Thomas, the Gonzaga U. Assoc. Prof of Philosophy has a tendency to over-think things. But that’s his job, right?
What if we Catholics just set aside the quibbling about whether Intelligent Design is Catholic orthodoxy. If the Lord our God is not an Intelligent Designer, I don’t know who is. And to say that He Designs, does not take away from His other qualities, or say very much about “from what” or “from whence” He designs. We assume, science tells us, there was a Big Bang. Maybe it was like the burst of light that happens when human sperm meets egg, and the soul is born. Except way bigger.
I see the “Intelligent Design” argument much as Paul described in his letter to the Romans, how even pagans can be receptive to these arguments, that the existence of God is evident in nature, by natural reason. In that whole pointy-headed article, “prepared for the Gonzaga Socratic Club”, the writer forgot to quote anything from Holy Scripture.
How about Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, where the Holy Spirit tells us, beginning in 1:12, “Giving thanks to God, the Father, who hath made us worthy to be partakers of the lot of the saints in light : Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the Kingdom of the Son of his love, In whom we have redemption though his blood, the remission of sins : Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature : For in him were all things created in heaven, and on earth, visible, and invisible, whether thrones, or dominations, or principalities, or powers : all things were created by him, and in him : And he is before all, and by him all things consist.” In one perfect nutshell! The rest, as St. Thomas might agree, “is straw”. But fun straw to play in sometimes, like the little children we are. God bless.
@Sander van der Wal –
That’s what I thought, too. But I’ve seen two reports about relatively recent studies showing that radar signals to Mercury and Venus that pass and return in close proximity to the sun take extra time in their round trip journey than is explained by the measured distance. Thus, the speed of light has been measured to not be constant to all observers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Light_travel_time_delay_testing
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/954/10-things-einstein-got-right/
People on both main sides consistently conflate evolution with creation. Evolution tries to explain how some things transform into other things, just like morphogenesis, distillation, or erosion. Whereas creation is the conjoining of an essence with an act of being; that is, with the existence of things in the first place. People who insist on Nature as the driving force forget that Nature has an Author and the paintbrush, no matter how long the handle or how fine the hairs, must ultimately be held by an Artist. As for the the others, William of Conches wrote
@YOS,
Exactly. Some ask me for proof of God. I say “You’re looking at it”, but they don’t, yet, understand.
John B
Late reply, sorry,
You are right of course but I assumed it was a given
Can’t say too much more. People are just too attached to their preconceived ideas about other’s ideas.