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I haven't looked at Susan Mazur's account of the arguments, since I don't consider her a reliable source. From what I have read (e.g. here), the ideas promoted by those at Altenberg have next to nothing in common with ID. What similarities do you see?
as far as i can tell the only person that is making those criticisms is suzan mazur and she seems to be completely wrong.
Correct. He and Niles Eldridge proposed that evolution takes place by a process they dubbed, punctuated equilibrium. And he argued that evolution drove itself toward diversification, not complexity. So to be clear here, these are "criticisms" of the general understanding of some evolutionary processes, and not in any way a criticism of the fact of evolution. This, of course, is how science has always worked; regardless of the field of research old understandings and theories are continually challenged. And I have to ask; just what ground have these criticisms gained, other than a better understanding of how evolution works?Lee bowman said:
Not familiar with Stuart Kaufmann, but disagreeing with gradualism is not a disagreement with "the idea that mutations to the genome can cause minor variations in the organism's properties, which can be accumulated piecemeal, bit by bit, over the eons to create the complex order found in the organisms we observe" only that these processes have always taken place. The alternative to gradualism is punctuated equilibrium (having previously mentioned Gould, I assume this is the alternative you have in mind). In any case, all the mechanics of evolution remain the same, except for their rhythm, which, as Gould et al suggested, is not steady. And, as important as Gould and Eldridge are and deserve to be listened to, their word is not the final one, which is why some in the field disagree with PE.
And if the resurrection of Christ fails the test, and if god's omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence defy the rationality of deductive logic, what is left to consider? One's navel?
"True design theorists"? The only design people I've ever come across don't bother with concocting theories, but simply issue statements of "fact."
Sorry, but you must be speaking from another planet. However, in case you're serious here, I'd be interested in which "True design theorists" (two names will do---links to their works would be appreciated) merely hypothesize ancient interventions in "biological processes," which I take to be speciation of some sort.
Unless you can falsify intelligent design, don't ever expect to become a scientific theory or even hypothesis or to be taken seriously in scientific circles.
Well, it seems like your basic argument is that from ignorance. You claim that such and such needed intervention of some kind, yet it's only because you can't explain how it could have happened any other way. To make a proper claim, show the evidence for intervention, not your incredulity or ignorance.
Bunk. You do not get grants and funding (or fame) by repeating or confiming other peoples' research. You get these by coming up with something new. Anyone who came up with a better paradigm than common descent would be set for life.
Any examples of these Emeritus profs who are no longer afraid for their funding and job and admit to ID?
So, God (or little green men) came over to earth every so often over hundreds of millions of years to do some genetic engineering? Is that your hypothesis?
Some theories or hypotheses can be falsified, some cannot. And Karl Popper admitted as much. From the 'falsifiability' treatise on Wikipedia,
The popular example is the 'black swan' example. The statement that "All swans are white" is falsified by finding a black one. But theories like evolution are multifaceted, and cannot be easily falsified. Same for Intelligent Design. ID, however, could be falsified by establishing natural evolutionary pathways for the most complex systems and structures in biology, an ongoing quest by science. Some would conclude that you could falsify the evolution of IC structures and systems by showing how imposed genetic alterations could accomplish similar alterations (similar to what evolved), something that may well be accomplished in the near future.
If mine is based on 'incredulity', yours is based on an 'argument from authority', not much better. But rather than incredulity, I base my skepticism on the failure of experiments and computer modeling to do what it has set out to do; empirically replicate speciation events. The '29+ Evidences for Macroevolution' treatise is based on allopatric, parapatric, peripatric, sympatric speciation, and of hybridization examples. Which of these would classify whale from land mammal evolution? Nada.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Stephen Jay Gould questioned both gradualism and (some of) the role of natural selection, but they're two different issues. Punk Eek is a challenge to gradualism, that is, it challenges the idea (which was never really Darwin's to start with) that phenotypic evolution proceeds at a more or less uniform pace, suggesting instead that most phenotypic evolution occurs in bursts, probably in small populations peripheral to the main population, and often as part of the speciation process. This suggestion is entirely in keeping with conventional Darwinian mechanisms, and is in no sense a challenge to the roles of mutation and natural selection.
But he doesn't disagree with it in anything like the way IDers do. He doesn't think that something in addition to random mutation and NS are involved in actual changes to organisms. Rather, he's suggesting that the laws of chemistry and physics make some configurations (some organisms) much easier to achieve than one might naively think. Random mutation and selection still produce the changes between species, but they have less work to do than in some versions of the theory. This is not so much a challenge to Darwinian mechanisms as it is an attempt (quite possibly a failed attempt) to extend the theory, to explain the diversity of organisms that are possible and that can be reached by Darwinian mechanisms. Again, I do not see the similarities with ID thought (which is presumably why Kaufman rejects ID).
I can't comment on statements that I haven't seen, but nothing in this thread provides support for ID that I can see.
What test has natural selection failed? Selection of random mutations works very well at explaining what it's intended to: the mechanism by which populations take on new, adapted forms. It does nothing at all to explain what adaptations might work best, or are most likely to be achievable. For that a larger theory is indeed needed.
Then technically, any theory could be falsified by the observation of an inconsistency. In some ways, the falsification requirement proposed by Popper does not apply well to certain theories, particularly those of forensic and historical perusals. I can think of two ...
