Why is it always Darwinism?

pitabread said:

ID hasn't officially discredited anything. They've *attempted* to discredit biological evolution insofar as being a natural explanation for the diversity of species, but they've thus far failed at that.

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So the only difference is that ID says that there is a divine intelligence who has designed the way that the natural biological diversity of the species happened/happens?
Rather than randomness?

Warden_of_the_Storm said:

Intelligent Design (note the capitals) is the pseudo-scientific and the pseudo-religious belief that the Bible is a scientific text book and should be taken as such.

Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, so it is not science. The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a fundamentalist Christian and politically conservative think tank based in the United States.

The 'argument for divine design in nature', the teleological argument, is different:
The teleological or physico-theological argument, also known as the argument from design, or intelligent design argument is an argument for the existence of God or, more generally, for an intelligent creator based on perceived evidence of deliberate design in the natural world.

Two different things entirely.

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That is not a definition of Paley's divine design, neither is it a unbiased definition of what ID says today.

in·tel·li·gent de·sign
noun
noun: intelligent design
the theory that life, or the universe, cannot have arisen by chance and was designed and created by some intelligent entity.
"proponents of intelligent design say that theories other than evolution must be considered"

Paley's argument is built mainly around anatomy and natural history. "For my part", he says, "I take my stand in human anatomy"; elsewhere he insists upon "the necessity, in each particular case, of an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the forms which organized bodies bear".
William Paley - Wikipedia

Warden_of_the_Storm said:

So it's okay for you to use a source from Wikipedia, but it's not okay for me to use one? Wow, double standard.
The information is right there in black and white (and light blue): Darwin went to study teleology, not Intelligent Design. They aren't the same thing.

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No you can use it. I'm just saying that is an opinion not a definition.
My post was to show only that the belief in ID was around in the 1700s, not what Darwin studied.

pitabread said:

I just told you: that evolution as a natural process is responsible for the diversity of life on Earth.

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I agree that it is a natural process. Where we may disagree is that it's a natural process that was designed and not just random.

Warden_of_the_Storm said:

No, it wasn't. Teleology is not the same as ID. They're two completely different things.
Teleology is a school of thought dating back to antiquity, which is fundamentally based on finding evidence of God in the world and universe.
Intelligent Design is pseudo-scientific nonsense based on a literal reading of the Bible and tries to shoe-horn the Bible into every scientific discovery.

And Paley's comments on intelligent design are opinion as well, not a definition either.

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I quoted the definition from the dictionary.

I never commented on all of what Darwin studied. You're trying to refute something that I never said.

Warden_of_the_Storm said:

This is something I don't fully understand when I look on this forum.
Every time a Creationist of any stripe or someone who says they're 'critical of evolution' talks about the theory of evolution, they only ever refer to it as Darwinism.

Darwinian evolution is no longer the accepted model for the theory of evolution. It has been superseded by the modern synthesis, and there have been talks of replacing it with the extended evolutionary synthesis or even the post-modern synthesis.

So I have to ask: why is it always Darwinism that is railed against?

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Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live --- By CARL SAFINA

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," Robert Darwin told his son, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more. By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "theory." The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too. In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after "Origin." He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical. Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.

Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term "dinosaur." Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved "spontaneous generation," the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things. Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. "Darwinism" implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And "isms" (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. "Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin’s "theory." It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

Using phrases like "Darwinian selection" or "Darwinian evolution" implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, "Newtonian physics" distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So "Darwinian evolution" raises a question: What’s the other evolution? Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the "isms" imply equivalence. But the term "Darwinian" built a stage upon which "intelligent" could share the spotlight.

Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science. That’s why Darwin must go.

Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. "Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?" he wrote in "Zoonomia" in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how. Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter "natural selection." What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.

But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin. Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered "genetics" met Darwin’s natural selection in the "modern synthesis" of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.

Darwin’s intellect, humility ("It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance") and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right. But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

Hank77 said:

I agree that it is a natural process. Where we may disagree is that it's a natural process that was designed and not just random.

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It would seem then that it was designed to be random.

Warden_of_the_Storm said:

Post #32. You made the point of pointing out that Darwin studied teleology. So you brought it up.
Also, your very first comment on this thread was about intelligent design, which is not what this thread is about.

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Ok my point was not to say what Darwin studied, I was responding to a post asking for a citation that shows ID was around during the 1700s.

You are saying that ID/teleology are two different things. I don't agree.
Paley said,
Paley's argument is built mainly around anatomy and natural history. "For my part", he says, "I take my stand in human anatomy"; elsewhere he insists upon "the necessity, in each particular case, of an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the forms which organized bodies bear".
William Paley - Wikipedia

Hank77 said:

I agree that it is a natural process. Where we may disagree is that it's a natural process that was designed and not just random.

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The belief that the process of evolution was may have been designed is not by any means the same as the claims of ID, which posits "designer" intervention over and above the process of evolution

Speedwell said:

The belief that the process of evolution was may have been designed is not by any means the same as the claims of ID, which posits "designer" intervention over and above the process of evolution

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Paley...
the necessity, in each particular case, of an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the forms which organized bodies bear".

So you're saying that ID is saying something different than Paley did?

Hank77 said:

Paley...
the necessity, in each particular case, of an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the forms which organized bodies bear".

So you're saying that ID is saying something different than Paley did?

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He gives us no clue as to how the forms which organized bodies bear care are contrived and determined by an intelligent and designing mind. That is such a vague statement that it could even comprise evolution.

ID also gives us no clue how an intelligent designer proceeds, but it quite specifically rules out evolution without offering any alternatives.

Hank77 said:

So the only difference is that ID says that there is a divine intelligence who has designed the way that the natural biological diversity of the species happened/happens?
Rather than randomness?

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I wouldn't say "randomness", since many things in nature aren't strictly random. Instead I'd say "natural" (e.g. implying no intelligent intervention).

Insofar as the specifics of what Intelligent Design advocates believe, that is where things get murky. ID advocates rarely get specific when it comes to the what, where, when and how portions of design.

Speedwell said:

He gives us no clue as to how the forms which organized bodies bear care are contrived and determined by an intelligent and designing mind. That is such a vague statement that it could even comprise evolution.

ID also gives us no clue how an intelligent designer proceeds, but it quite specifically rules out evolution without offering any alternatives.

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Ok, this post was helpful, lots to think about, thanks.

Ophiolite said:

And it has the secondary advantage that it will likely annoy the Creationists.

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How nice of you, good to know why you are here.

So I have to ask: why is it always Darwinism that is railed against?

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Oh don't worry, we will rail against all its forms in whatever name you decide to use.

coffee4u said:

How nice of you, good to know why you are here.



Oh don't worry, we will rail against all its forms in whatever name you decide to use.

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Then use the appropriate terms for the concept you are currently disagreeing with.

Using inappropriate or false terms can be misleading, confusing or simply dishonest.