Intelligent Design's research impact on science

Ophiolite · Jul 10, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
Based on the blowback from you guys I believe I've struck a nerve (pun intended).
You came late to the beatdown, so you don't know how it started.

How it started is irrelevant. Knowing repetition of fanciful,provocative nonsense is crude, unseemly and discourteous. End of!

JackRT · Jul 10, 2019

pitabread said:
Things are better now than they have been at any point in history. And medical science certainly has reduced instances disease. Just look at things like infant mortality rates as a prime example.

If you want extreme cases, just compare to some of the plagues in human history.

Claiming things aren't better... well, I have no idea why anyone would think that.

In the third world infant mortality rates have dropped dramatically but in recent years infant mortality has actually increased in the USA. I suspect that this is influenced strongly by the highly inflated cost of medical care and the lack of effective and efficient medical insurance in the USA.

OldWiseGuy · Jul 10, 2019

Ophiolite said:
How it started is irrelevant. Knowing repetition of fanciful,provocative nonsense is crude, unseemly and discourteous. End of!

Go back, check it out. Then do some research on my ideas. You might be surprised.

tas8831 · Jul 16, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
Go back, check it out. Then do some research on my ideas. You might be surprised.

Doubt it.

driewerf · Jul 20, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
I have perused it and the impossibility of understanding it became obvious pretty quick.
Do you think that everyone who says they believe it actually understands it? Note that there is no such requirement for belief in creation.

The relevance of 'comparative anatomy' is common or similar design. That is obvious. Organisms function they way they do because they were designed that way. So, my position is "Argument from Obviousness". And that's not intended as a pun.

How is obviousness a weak argument? If I see deliberate design why am I wrong?

"It's obvious" is not a strong argument it's a weak one. It more often than not reflects the user's prejudice in stead of good argument.
It's in the same category as "common sense", "a child can see it" or " it' just logical".
A good scientific argument refers to data or to a strict deduction (preferably a mathematical one).
Please reread Ophiolite's excellent post with this in mind.
Intelligent Design's research impact on science

Ophiolite · Jul 20, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
Go back, check it out. Then do some research on my ideas. You might be surprised.

No. If you think there is something of value then provide a concise description of the idea accompanied by relevant citations to research published in peer reviewed articles. In other words provide a technical argument, not the sort of argument that is the equivalent of a bar-room brawl and that typifies your usual standards.

driewerf · Jul 20, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
That's harsh man.

You should be happy that some agree that the earth is very old.

It is not a matter of being happy. It's a matter of advancing or holding up scientific education, scientific progress and the benefits of this scientific progress.
If you can show an existing theory or hypothesis wrong, but really show it, with empirical evidence, the scientific community will gladly reject the wrong theory or hypothesis. Nobody is advanced by clinging to a falsehood. But that requires knowledge, expert level knowledge.
The actual situation is that a creationists are trying by many means (educational boards, disrupting behaviour in class, censoring text books) to stop the teaching of Evilution (*). While doing research and educating the next generation of scientists is a huge task in itself, a lot of energy goes now into minimizing the damaging effect of creationists of all flavours.

(*) Evilution: all sciences that somehow offend the creationists, including, but not limited to: biology, embriology, geology, astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, thermodynamics, sedimentology, glaciology, dendrochronology, plate tectonics, paleontology, archeology, geophysics, comparative anatomy, genetics, biochemistry.

edit: if someone knows another name for this, please make suggestions for improvement.

driewerf · Jul 20, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
An atheist has to believe in evolution; club rules. Believers have no such requirement.

HitchSlap said:
Wrong again. As an atheist, I’m free to accept what’s reasonable. I have no personal investment in ToE. It’s simply the best explanation. I consider ToE like you might consider gravity - our current understanding works to explain both.

Old Wise Guy is dead wrong in his post, but I'm not exactly happy with HitchSlap's answer either.
Being an atheist is like being a non smoker, you are defined by not doing/believing something. But just like there is no club of non smokers, there isn't no club of atheist, hence no club rules.
i'll use the non smoker analogy a little bit longer: a lot of people don't smoke because it's damaging of the health. But nothing impose a non smoker of being moderate with alcohol, or sugar or fat. Being a non smoker does not impose this.
In the same way, being an atheist does not impose to be rational. Atheists are free to believe what ever they want, even if it is irrational (Fred Hoyle, Lyssenko), they are just defined by not believing in a deity.
Of course, the people posting here have a strong interest in science, and will advocate for scientific integrity, but it's not a requirement for atheists world wide.

driewerf · Jul 20, 2019

OldWiseGuy said:
The point is to look at the evidence with no preconceived notions of either evolution or creation, then decide.

That has been done 150 years ago. Evolution won.

JackRT · Jul 20, 2019

The lives of creationists are dominated by the need for absolute certainty. Religious beliefs provide just that sort of certainty. In the case of fundamentalist Christianity the only way to achieve such certainty is to view the bible as inerrant and to be read literally. The theory of evolution, in that it challenges a literal understanding of the creation story in Genesis, is thereby regarded as the thin edge of the wedge. Much of orthodox Christian theology is based upon the theory of original sin. This theory, of course, is another interpretation of the Genesis creation story. If Genesis falls so much else falls with it. That is the source of the creationists' fear and why they oppose evolution so vehemently, even to the point of sometimes using fraud and outright lies in their defensive tactics.

Tom 1 · Jul 20, 2019

pitabread said:
One common claim from ID proponents is that evolution's days are numbered and that scientists are progressively turning towards Intelligent Design as an alternative. This is certainly the message that groups like the Discovery Institute like to convey especially via things like their infamous "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" list.

However, a more meaningful measure of the impact of Intelligent Design on science is available through a couple means. The first is to examine the volume of output of ID related research. The second is to examine the impact of that research on the broader scientific community.

To test this, I examined the ID journal Bio-Complexity. This peer-review journal was first touted by the Discovery Institute back in 2010 as a means whereby scientific papers on ID could be peer-reviewed and published. They claimed the journal would, "accelerate the pace and heighten the tone of the debate over intelligent design". The journal first started publishing articles back in 2010 and has continued since.

I decided to examine what has been published in Bio-complexity. Fortunately it was quite straight-forward since there isn't much content to sift through.

Between 2010 to 2018 (there are no 2019 publications yet) a total of 31 articles were published. These articles were divided into 4 categories: Research Articles (17), Critical Reviews (9), Critical Focus (4) and Tools/Techniques (1).

I used the 17 research articles published in Bio-complexity to examine relative impact. As a measure of impact I use the number of citations each article had. A citation indicates that the article has been cited in another work. In general, the more citations an article has, the greater its impact. I primarily used scientific publication search engines (e.g. ResearchGate, SpringerLink, etc) to source the number of citations of the articles.

One research article was not available through such search engines and therefore I could not determine the number of citations it had. I excluded it from the study. Of the remaining 16, I counted a combined total of 50 citations for all 16 articles. Six articles had zero citations. The remaining articles had between 1 and 12 citations.

I also excluded two self-referential citations in two of the articles. The articles published in 2016 included Genetic Modeling of Human History Part 1 and Genetic Modeling of Human History Part 2. Each of these articles cited the other (e.g. Part 1 cited Part 2, and Part 2 cited Part 1). I removed those specific citations to get a more accurate picture of external citations.

The overall average number of citations for the 16 articles are 3.13 citations per article. The median number of citations is 1.

------------------------------------------------

correction: I inadvertently labeled one of the papers (Model and Laboratory Demonstrations That Evolutionary Optimization Works Well Only If Preceded by Invention--Selection Itself Is Not Inventive)
as having 40 citations. I accidentally counted the number of references from the article itself; the article in question had 0 citations. I have corrected the OP to reflect this. This reduces the average citations per article to 3.13.

How do you find the time for this stuff?

Any impact ID and related ideas have on science education is pretty minimal in Europe (I think). I don't know if that is any different in the US or Canada.

Tom 1 · Jul 20, 2019

JackRT said:
The lives of creationists are dominated by the need for absolute certainty. Religious beliefs provide just that sort of certainty.

I don't think that kind of thinking is limited to the religious, I reckon it's more of a personality type thing or perhaps socially constructed.

pitabread · Jul 20, 2019

Tom Farebrother said:
How do you find the time for this stuff?

There weren't that many articles to go through.

Tom 1 · Jul 20, 2019

pitabread said:
Things are better now than they have been at any point in history. And medical science certainly has reduced instances disease. Just look at things like infant mortality rates as a prime example.

If you want extreme cases, just compare to some of the plagues in human history.

Claiming things aren't better... well, I have no idea why anyone would think that.

There are a quite a few academics who lean towards or just fully embrace the idea that leaving the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was mankind's greatest mistake.

Tom 1 · Jul 20, 2019

JackRT said:
In the third world infant mortality rates have dropped dramatically but in recent years infant mortality has actually increased in the USA. I suspect that this is influenced strongly by the highly inflated cost of medical care and the lack of effective and efficient medical insurance in the USA.

I think chronic stress is an underlying factor. Seems to be a fairly widespread feature of life in the US.

Ophiolite · Jul 21, 2019

JackRT said:
That is the source of the creationists' fear and why they oppose evolution so vehemently, even to the point of sometimes using fraud and outright lies in their defensive tactics.

On the global scale we quite happily lie to our enemies and potential enemies. We told many lies to Hitler in WWII. I do find it a little unsettling that, perhaps, some creationists view me as akin to Hitler.

pitabread · Sep 9, 2019

We're over two-thirds into 2019 and still no 2019 papers published in Bio-Complexity. This time last year, they had already published 3 (of 4 total) for 2018.

Meanwhile, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology had 9 research papers alone published this month.

It's just not fair... :/

SLP · Sep 10, 2019

pitabread said:
We're over two-thirds into 2019 and still no 2019 papers published in Bio-Complexity. This time last year, they had already published 3 (of 4 total) for 2018.

Meanwhile, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology had 9 research papers alone published this month.

It's just not fair... :/

Man, what a blast from the past. I knew that ID was finished when in order to make it look like they actually had research going on, they just pasted any publication by anyone associated with Bio-Complexity in any way on the site, whether it had to do with ID or not.
Actually, I knew ID was a farce well before that.

Intelligent Design's research impact on science

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