Creation or Evolution

[hecd2]

Reggie cares so much about the truth that he is willing to utterly misrepresent the work of some evolutionary biologists who think that we have learned some things since the 1930s and that the modern synthesis needs an update. Read on.

I find it impossible to believe in Darwinian fantasies. I’m not the only one – there are scientists who reject those notions also and they know more about it than I do.

I can simply note the work of the so-called Altenberg 16 and their rejection of Darwinism. They point out that there are so many holes in Darwinian theory that they have to invent an entirely new one.

scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0807/S00053.htm

You can note it, but you’d be wrong that these people reject the insights of both Darwin and the modern synthesis.

Let’s take the leading light and organiser of the Altenburg 16 , Massimo Pigliucci. According to you, he rejects the modern synthesis. What are the facts? He is a professor of evolution at Stony Brook and one of the most outspoken critics of the idiocies of creationism.He has three PhDs - one in genetics, one in botany and one in philosophy. He utterly abhors creationism and has debated Kent Hovind and Jonathan Wells. He writes for Skeptical Inquirer. This is one of the cutting edge scientists that you think saves your intellectually bankrupt position. He doesn’t. None of them do.

What you have written is based entirely on the sensationalist journalism of Suzan Mazur. You should know better. “Mazur’s attention”, Pigliucci admits, “frankly caused me embarrassment”.

Supposedly, Darwinism is on such solid ground that no one could possibly doubt it. I’m thus encouraged to read Darwinian hype. However, I discover these cutting-edge scientists who reject the theory entirely and propose, instead, “self-organization”.

I’d like you to find one of these 16 scientists who rejects the theory of evolution at all, or completely rejects the modern synthesis. Go to their websites, read their published papers. Not one of them is saying that but you are relying on a sensationalist journalist and you don’t have the basic biological knowledge to understand what they are talking about. And they certainly do not have any proposition that would replace genetic inheritance with “self-organisation”. There are many other nuances that they rightly want to take into account (for example epigenetics, developmental constraints, networks, regulation, physical DNA structure around histones, physical processes, evolvability, plasticity). These are factors that need to be considered but everyone knows about them and they do not in any way undermine the Theory of Evolution. Nor would any one of the Altenburg 16 claim that they did. But you,. Reggie, claim that they do. Why is that?

Sour apples? Well, I hope I haven’t disguised my opposition to the the frauds that are passed off as “evolutionary science”.

What frauds would they be exactly? And which of the Altenburg 16 would agree that what you think are “frauds” are indeed frauds. The answer is none. The all accept the basics of evolutionary biology, common descent and natural selection.

You have been taken in by a journalist, Reggie, because you are desperate to think that evolution and common descent is not true, and your rather pathetic grasping at an imaginary straw is plain for all to see. I would talk less about the Altenburg 16 in future, because you have chosen unwise grounds for debate.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[buffalo]

Reggie cares so much about the truth that he is willing to utterly misrepresent the work of some evolutionary biologists who think that we have learned some things since the 1930s and that the modern synthesis needs an update. Read on.

You can note it, but you’d be wrong that these people reject the insights of both Darwin and the modern synthesis.

Let’s take the leading light and organiser of the Altenburg 16 , Massimo Pigliucci. According to you, he rejects the modern synthesis. What are the facts? He is a professor of evolution at Stony Brook and one of the most outspoken critics of the idiocies of creationism.He has three PhDs - one in genetics, one in botany and one in philosophy. He utterly abhors creationism and has debated Kent Hovind and Jonathan Wells. He writes for Skeptical Inquirer. This is one of the cutting edge scientists that you think saves your intellectually bankrupt position. He doesn’t. None of them do.

What you have written is based entirely on the sensationalist journalism of Suzan Mazur. You should know better. “Mazur’s attention”, Pigliucci admits, “frankly caused me embarrassment”.

I’d like you to find one of these 16 scientists who rejects the theory of evolution at all, or completely rejects the modern synthesis. Go to their websites, read their published papers. Not one of them is saying that but you are relying on a sensationalist journalist and you don’t have the basic biological knowledge to understand what they are talking about. And they certainly do not have any proposition that would replace genetic inheritance with “self-organisation”. There are many other nuances that they rightly want to take into account (for example epigenetics, developmental constraints, networks, regulation, physical DNA structure around histones, physical processes, evolvability, plasticity). These are factors that need to be considered but everyone knows about them and they do not in any way undermine the Theory of Evolution. Nor would any one of the Altenburg 16 claim that they did. But you,. Reggie, claim that they do. Why is that?

What frauds would they be exactly? And which of the Altenburg 16 would agree that what you think are “frauds” are indeed frauds. The answer is none. The all accept the basics of evolutionary biology, common descent and natural selection.

You have been taken in by a journalist, Reggie, because you are desperate to think that evolution and common descent is not true, and your rather pathetic grasping at an imaginary straw is plain for all to see. I would talk less about the Altenburg 16 in future, because you have chosen unwise grounds for debate.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Well you have to answer their quotes. They are responsible for them, not Mazur. Bye bye natural selection, hello self organization.

 

[hecd2]

I can simply note the work of the so-called Altenberg 16 and their rejection of Darwinism. They point out that there are so many holes in Darwinian theory that they have to invent an entirely new one.

scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0807/S00053.htm

And just to put a nail in the coffin of your absurd argument, let me quote from the organiser himself:

Creationists and their intellectual cousins, intelligent design proponents, keep saying that scientists disagree as to “the truth” of evolution, and that the field is therefore in crisis, despite official attempts by scientists to deny any problem and unite under the evil cause of fighting “the truth” about Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. … As a case in point, I am about to leave the United States for a trip to Vienna where I will be chairing a workshop on the status and future of evolutionary theory, the anticipation of which has been providing delight to creationists for the past several months.

The so-called “Woodstock of evolution” (not my term, and a pretty bad one for sure) will see a group of scientists, by now known as “the Altenberg 16” (because there are sixteen of us, and we’ll meet at the Konrad Lorenz Institure for theoretical biology in Altenberg, near Vienna) has been featured on blogs by a variety of nutcases, as well as the quintessential ID “think” tank, the Discovery Institute of Seattle. They have presented the workshop that I am organizing in collaboration with my colleague Gerd Müller, and the proceedings of which will be published next year by MIT Press, as an almost conspiratorial, quasi-secret cabala, brought to the light of day by the brave work of independent journalists and “scholars” bent on getting the truth out about evolution. Of course, nothing could be further from the (actual) truth.

The workshop is part of a regular series organized by the KLI (they do a couple of these a year), that has been going on for years now. Each workshop is limited to a small number of participants, both for logistical reasons (the Institute is small, and they have to budget the costs of paying for travel and lodging for all scientists involved) and because the idea is to get people to focus on discussing, rather than lecturing (hard to do with large groups). Articles and commentaries on the web have also made much of the fact that the meeting is “private,” meaning that the public and journalists are not invited. This is completely normal for small science workshops all over the world, and I was genuinely puzzled by the charge until I realized (it took me a while) that a sense of conspiracy increases the likelihood that people will read journalistic internet articles and ID sympathetic blogs. You’ve got to sell the product, even at the cost of, shall we say, bending, the reality.

So, what are the Altenberg 16 going to do in Altenberg next week? …The agenda is to discuss the current status of evolutionary theory, with a particular emphasis on developments – some of them under intense debate – that have occurred since the last version of it has been in put in place back in the 1930s and ‘40s…
In the 1930s and ‘40s it became clear that one had to integrate the original Darwinism with the new disciplines of Mendelian and statistical genetics. Such integration occurred through a series of meetings where scientists discussed the status of evolutionary theory, and through the publication of a number of books by people like Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, George Gaylor Simpson, George Ledyard Stebbins and others. The result was an updated theoretical framework known as the Modern Synthesis (MS). But of course evolutionary biology has further progressed during the last eight decades (unlike, one cannot help but notice, creationism). So for a few years now several evolutionary biologists have suggested that it may be time for another update, call it evolutionary theory 3.0 or, as many of us have begun to refer to it, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

A number of authors, including Stephen Gould, Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Eva Jablonka, Stuart Kauffman, Stuart Newman, the above mentioned Gerd Müller, and myself, have published papers and books recently attempting to articulate what an EES might look like, and which elements of the MS will need to be retained, modified or discarded (just like the MS had retained, modified or discarded individual components of the original Darwinism). The goal of the Altenberg workshop is to get some of these people around the same table for three days and trade ideas about these sorts of questions (while also enjoying some excellent Austrian Riesling, of course).

What exactly is it that the MS does not incorporate and may require an Extended Synthesis? Ah, this brings us back to why creationists, IDers and others who have been writing about this over the past few months are either misunderstanding the issue or (surely in the case of the Discovery Institute) are deliberately distorting it to serve their inane agenda.

The basic idea is that there have been some interesting empirical discoveries, as well as the articulation of some new concepts, subsequently to the Modern Synthesis, that one needs to explicitly integrate with the standard ideas about natural selection, common descent, population genetics and statistical genetics (nowadays known as evolutionary quantitative genetics). Some of these empirical discoveries include (but are not limited to) the existence of molecular buffering systems (like the so-called “heat shock response”) that may act as “capacitors” (i.e., facilitators) of bursts of phenotypic evolution, and the increasing evidence of the role of epigenetic (i.e., non-genetic) inheritance systems (this has nothing to do with Lamarckism, by the way). Some of the new concepts that have arisen since the MS include (but again are not limited to) the idea of “evolvability” (that different lineages have different propensities to evolve novel structures or functions), complexity theory (which opens the possibility of natural sources of organic complexity other than natural selection), and “accommodation” (a developmental process that may facilitate the coordinated appearance of complex traits in short evolutionary periods).

Now, did you see anything in the above that suggests that evolution is “a theory in crisis”? Did I say anything about intelligent designers, or the rejection of Darwinism, or any of the other nonsense that has filled the various uninformed and sometimes downright ridiculous commentaries that have appeared on the web about the Altenberg meeting? Didn’t think so… what we will achieve is taking one more step in an ongoing discussion among scientists about how our theories account for biological phenomena, and how the discovery of new phenomena is to be matched by the elaboration of new theoretical constructs. This is how science works, folks, not a sign of “crisis.”

I’ll tell you what does constitute a crisis, though: the fact that creationists have been on the retreat ever since the Scopes trial, having to invent increasingly vacuous versions of their attacks on science education in order to keep pestering the Courts of this country with their demands that religious nonsense be taught side by side with solid science. You want serious disagreement? How about several orders of magnitude difference in the estimate of the age of the earth among creationists: some of them still cling to the primitive idea that our planet is only a few thousand years old, their only “evidence” a circular argument from authority – that’s two logical fallacies at once! (The Bible says so; how do you know the Bible is right? Because it’s the word of God; how do you know it’s the word of God? The Bible says so…) Other creationists, particularly many in the ID movement, concede that the science of geology and physics is a bit too well established to throw it out of the window, so they accept the figure of about four billion years for the age of the earth. Now, if any scientific theory were to make statements that varied by six (I repeat: six!) orders of magnitude about a basic aspect of reality, that would really mean that the theory in question is in deep trouble. C’mon, guys, fix your own house first, then start knocking at our door if you must.

And with the evidence of this expert witness, organiser and chairman of the Altenburg 16, I rest my case m’lud.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

Well you have to answer their quotes. They are responsible for them, not Mazur. Bye bye natural selection, hello self organization.

What quotes exactly?

Alec

 

[buffalo]

What quotes exactly?

Alec

Start here:

Other thread

 

[hecd2]

Start here:

Other thread

There is nothing of substance there. And if you think that the proposals of Altenburg are to replace RM and NS with “self-organisation” then you have been made a rather sad dupe.

So what quotes exactly?

Alec

 

[buffalo]

There is nothing of substance there. And if you think that the proposals of Altenburg are to replace RM and NS with “self-organisation” then you have been made a rather sad dupe.

So what quotes exactly?

Alec

 

[reggieM]

Reggie cares so much about the truth that he is willing to utterly misrepresent the work of some evolutionary biologists. I’d like you to find one of these 16 scientists who rejects the theory of evolution at all, or completely rejects the modern synthesis. Go to their websites, read their published papers. Not one of them is saying that but you are relying on a sensationalist journalist and you don’t have the basic biological knowledge to understand what they are talking about. And they certainly do not have any proposition that would replace genetic inheritance with “self-organisation”.

None would replace the current Darwinian myth with self-organization?

Third, one of the stars of the symposium, New York Medical College cell biologist Stuart Newman, hypothesizes that all 35 animal phyla self-organized at the time of the Cambrian explosion (a half billion years ago) without a genetic recipe or selection (hardwiring supposedly followed).

Supposedly, there’s no criticism of Darwinism to be found here at all …

Stuart Newman thinks Darwinism is a dying theory; it begins with life and doesn’t address where form comes from. Newman thinks he has a coherent hypothesis for origin of form. His paper will likely be the centerpiece of the Altenberg symposium.

Of course, this one is “not a scientist” so we’re not supposed to pay any attention to that. In fact, we can’t be permitted to agree with what this philosopher argues …

“Oh sure natural selection’s been demonstrated . . . the interesting point, however, is that it has rarely if ever been demonstrated to have anything to do with evolution in the sense of long-term changes in populations. . . . Summing up we can see that the import of the Darwinian theory of evolution is just unexplainable caprice from top to bottom. What evolves is just what happened to happen.” – Stanley Salthe, a natural philosopher at Binghamton University

Once again, another philosopher who must be lying or ignorant. He states that biologists “increasingly” reject Darwinism. But we’re not supposed to say anything abou that because it “misrepresents” the evolution industry …

Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor in the London Review of Books called “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings”.
In the piece, Fodor – who told me he left MIT because he wanted to be closer to opera in New York – essentially argues that biologists increasingly see the central story of Darwin as wrong in a way that can’t be repaired

He thinks natural selection is irrelevant. He’s also a scientist. But we shouldn’t pay any attention to him anyway.

Stuart Pivar has been investigating **self-organization **in living forms but **thinks natural selection is irrelevant **– and has paid the price for this on the blogosphere.

People came up with “just so stories” which were “concocted out of thin air”? Not possible. Scientists cannot do that. Gould must be lying. But he’s a scientist, so he can’t tell a lie. Therefore I believe him – that some Darwinists “concoct” just-so-stories, just as many critics of Darwinism have complained about.

And he notes that “Gould took issue with those who used natural selection carelessly as a mantra, as in the evidence-free “just-so stories” concocted out of thin air by mentally lazy adaptationists”.

I’m sure I must be misrepresenting the following when I think it says that biology offers no plausible mechanism for how genomic blueprints are followed in constructing phenotypes of living organisms.

“Steve [Gould] was one of the first evolutionary biologists, with Richard Lewontin, to publish the view that biology offered no plausible mechanism – a missing “theory of form,” if you will – for how these genomic “blueprints” are followed in constructing phenotypes of living organisms.”

Professor Salthe says that the Darwinists “exaggerate” and have “typical reactions” when anyone challenges their hegemony. They’re also narrow-minded. But I’m not permitted to agree with that, of course.

Michael’s [Ruse] reaction to the Fodor paper is quite typical of that of neoDarwinians to any challenge to their exaggeration of one aspect of the original Darwinian project (as by Charlie himself!), and to any challenge to their narrow-minded powerful hegemony. – Stan Salthe

Changing beak sizes give no evidence of macroevolutionary changes – in spite of decades of Darwinian propaganda claiming the opposite.

Phenotypic plasticity is the primitive condition of all biological systems. Thus, even if adaptation can be demonstrated in some modern forms, e.g., the beak size and shape in finches, this is hardly paradigmatic of how macroevolutionary change took place." – Stewart Newman

I forgot this one right at the beginning.

Meanwhile, Swedish cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria, author of the book Evolution without Selection, sees any continuance of the natural selection concept as “compromise”. He says Darwinism and neo-Darwinism deal only with the biological or “terminal” phase of evolution and impede discovery of the real mechanism, which is “primaeval” – based on elementary particles, chemical elements and minerals (Chapter 6, “Knight of the North Star”).

He sees “any continuance of the natural selection concept” as a compromise. Therefore, it shouldn’t continue. But of course he accepts the core concept of Darwinian theory – or not, given the book is entitled “Evolution without Selection”.

But Darwinism is 100% solid, so we are told.

 

[reggieM]

And with the evidence of this expert witness, organiser and chairman of the Altenburg 16, I rest my case m’lud.

I found that to be a remarkably defensive statement by Pigliucci. Normally, Darwinists just display a few lines of arrogance and sarcasm, but in this case, he’s actually ranting by the end.

How is this for a bit of melodrama? Crisis, increasingly vacuous, attacks, pestering, religious nonsense – all in one sentence. I think he’s trying to say that “creationists are dangerous” but he’s too frightened to get the words out calmly and clearly.

I’ll tell you what does constitute a crisis, though: the fact that creationists have been on the retreat ever since the Scopes trial, having to invent increasingly vacuous versions of their attacks on science education in order to keep pestering the Courts of this country with their demands that religious nonsense be taught side by side with solid science.

Then he offers this …

You want serious disagreement? How about several orders of magnitude difference in the estimate of the age of the earth among creationists: some of them still cling to the primitive idea that our planet is only a few thousand years old, their only “evidence” a circular argument from authority – that’s two logical fallacies at once!

Apparently, he thinks this is a major attack against creationists (and ID). Nothing like going after the weakest possible point. It’s pretty clear that Pigliucci’s cage has been rattled.

 

[hecd2]

None would replace the current Darwinian myth with self-organization…

But Darwinism is 100% solid, so we are told.

Trouble for you is that you are quoting a journalist (Mz Suzan Mazur) who is determined to have her moment in the sun by sensationalising what the Altenburg 16 is about. You are not quoting what any of these people actually wrote.You are so desperate to show that evolutionary biology is wrong that you are grasping at a non-existent straw.

First of all, no-one is trying to replace all of the mechanisms of evolutionary biology with “self-organization” - there are a number of complicating mechanisms that interact with the modern synthesis, such as self organization, epigenetics, evolvability, regulation, plasticity, physical biology that these guys are working on. Second, none of this is a threat to evolutionary biology; on the contrary it is helping to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that drive evolution, and if one or more of these turn out to have a big influence, well then, that will be very interesting and exciting. Third you won’t find any of these people who think that an alternative to evolutionary biology is young earth creationism or ID. They are not seeking to replace a scientific hypothesis with magic or supernatural intervention. You can be sure that any mechanism they propose will be firmly rooted in natural phenomena (and that includes self-organization, by the way). They agree about the fact of evolution, common descent, and the phylogenetic relationships of organisms, including the relationship of humans to other animals.

Now the conference has been held, what happens next? I don’t see evolutionary biology collapsing in despair and a press release from KLI to admit that God Did It after all. This week’s Nature and Science have articles on the evolutionary origin of snake fangs under the influence of a genetic marker, the specific action of a gene regulatory network on limb-budding, the influence of a gene on the development of veins and arteries, the regulation of stem cells by signalling from two genes, and the phenotypical consequences of genetic changes in metazoan mtDNA. Hmm.

You have been duped by the sensational excesses of an ill-informed and strident journalist. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last, but that is the case.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

I found that to be a remarkably defensive statement by Pigliucci. Normally, Darwinists just display a few lines of arrogance and sarcasm, but in this case, he’s actually ranting by the end.

I see - so the organiser and chairman of the Altenburg conference, one of the famous 16 that Mz Mazur has persuaded you is about to overthrow Darwinism, is a Darwinist? Perhaps he’s a double agent. I think you’re on a loser here, Reggie old son.

Then he offers this …

You want serious disagreement? How about several orders of magnitude difference in the estimate of the age of the earth among creationists: some of them still cling to the primitive idea that our planet is only a few thousand years old, their only “evidence” a circular argument from authority – that’s two logical fallacies at once!

Apparently, he thinks this is a major attack against creationists (and ID). Nothing like going after the weakest possible point. It’s pretty clear that Pigliucci’s cage has been rattled.

It IS a terribly weak aspect of creationism/ID isn’t it? Pigliucci explains in some detail why all the nonsense on ID and creationist websites about the conference at KLI that you have been quoting is garbage. That’s from the horse’s mouth - the organiser and chairman of the conference. If anyone is rattled, it’s you. If you want to continue digging the hole that you put yourself in, be my guest.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[The_Barbarian]

The Altenberg conference seems likely to strengthen, not damage evolutionary theory. Although the idea of self-organization and form arising from physical forces is not new (D’Arcy Thompson wrote about it in the early years of the last century) there certainly remain questions about the way genes and the rest of nature interact in producing organisms.

In general, advances in biology don’t come out of conferences. You see new religions, new political movments, but almost never, new science.

That is made in labs, in field investigations, and is announced in journal articles, not press releases.

New directions for research, new paradigms for understanding organization, even new enthusiasm for investigating growth and form, that may happen from this conference. No new science, I think.

 

[The_Barbarian]

Barbarian chuckles:
Ah, you’re an IDer, um?

That’s not a sentence that I can understand

I guess it was the long subordinate clauses.

Barbarian observes:
Behe, at least. But as you know, most scientists think he’s gone off the deep end.

Most scientists thought the world was flat

Name me one.

and that leaches could help cure disease.

Turns out they still do:

Leeches Cleared for Medical Use by the FDA
After Thousands of Years of Use, FDA Approves Leeches as Medical Devices
webmd.com/news/20040628/leeches-cleared-for-medical-use-by-fda

Barbarian on the methods of science:
It might seem like a bad process to you, but you might consider that nothing humans have done works better for understanding the physical universe.

Interesting opinion.

Name something that has worked as well, much less better.

I could say that nothing humans have done has created more damage in the physical universe also.

Can’t think of anything science has done to rival slavery, religious wars, Marxism, Fascism, etc.

Barbarian suggests:
You can be, of course [a person who gets to vote on what is science]. Learn about it, discover something new, and submit an article to a journal. Of course, that might be too much work for you…

Engaging in that kind of moral compromise and public deception in order to get published in mainstream Darwinist journals is, indeed, more work than the investment is worth.

Everyone has his own excuse. Yours is not original.
tinyurl.com/46u8s

 

[edwest2]

“can’t think of anything science has done…”??

Science has no intellect or will, human beings do. Human beings do science. And human beings are behind all the good and bad in the world, including the uses of science.

Atomic bombs for destroying cities to nuclear arsenals that can destroy the world many times over.

Feeding plutonium to unsuspecting subjects during the Cold War.

Releasing Germ Warfare type bacteria to monitor its spread in actual environments.

Fluoride in water, now documented as being a bad thing.

Medical experiments without the full knowledge and consent of the participants.

Look up the Invention Secrecy Act.

Yes, science has been used for good but it has been intentionally misused by human beings as well.

Peace,
Ed

 

[The_Barbarian]

Science has no intellect or will, human beings do. Human beings do science. And human beings are behind all the good and bad in the world, including the uses of science.

Well, let’s see your list of things scientists did that was worse than religious persecution, Hitler or Stalin…

Atomic bombs for destroying cities to nuclear arsenals that can destroy the world many times over.

Um, scientists didn’t decide to do this. Indeed, many who were ordered to work on it, decided not to. And even some who did it in the idea that it could stop Hitler, later regretted it.

Feeding plutonium to unsuspecting subjects during the Cold War.

Releasing Germ Warfare type bacteria to monitor its spread in actual environments.

Political decisions, but the scientists shouldn’t have gone along.

Fluoride in water, now documented as being a bad thing.

I can remember fruitcakes arguing that communists were “polluting out natural body fluids” with fluoridation. Haven’t heard anyone do that in a long time.

Medical experiments without the full knowledge and consent of the participants.

Look up the Invention Secrecy Act.

Yes, science has been used for good but it has been intentionally misused by human beings as well.

So which of these do you think are worse than the worst religious persecutions?

Which is worse than Hitler or Stalin?

Does this mean you now agree I’m right?

 

[edwest2]

You ask questions, what do you want me to agree with? Read the book, The Fluoride Deception.

amazon.com/Fluoride-Deception-Christopher-Bryson/dp/1583227008/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217648889&sr=8-1

Science is done by human beings. It has no intellect or will.

Peace,
Ed

 

[The_Barbarian]

When I was a kid, there were these guys going around with lurid phamplets, arguing that the communists were behind fluoridation.

But in the scientific and medical literature, there isn’t any evidence that the levels of fluoride found in toothpast or public water has any harmful effects at all.

Yes, I know your guys want us to believe there is. But evidence counts.

 

[Shredderbeam]

To the creationists - what fatal gaps or flaws are there in Darwinian evolution?

 

[The_Barbarian]

Mazur’s take on Newman:
**Stuart Newman thinks Darwinism is a dying theory; it begins with life and doesn’t address where form comes from. Newman thinks he has a coherent hypothesis for origin of form. His paper will likely be the centerpiece of the Altenberg symposium. **

For a moment, let’s not focus on her conflation of Darwin’s theory with abiogenesis, but rather look at what Newman thinks:

**The pre-Mendelian, pre-Darwinian world: shifting relations between genetic and epigenetic mechanisms in early multicellular evolution.Newman SA.
Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Basic Science Building, New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY 10595, USA. newman@nymc.edu

The reliable dependence of many features of contemporary organisms on changes in gene content and activity is tied to the processes of Mendelian inheritance and Darwinian evolution. With regard to morphological characters, however, Mendelian inheritance is the exception rather than the rule, and neo-Darwinian mechanisms in any case do not account for the origination (as opposed to the inherited variation) of such characters. It is proposed, therefore, that multicellular organisms passed through a pre-Mendelian, pre-Darwinian phase, whereby cells, genes and gene products constituted complex systems with context-dependent, self-organizing morphogenetic capabilities. An example is provided of a plausible ‘core’ mechanism for the development of the vertebrate limb that is both inherently pattern forming and morphogenetically plastic. It is suggested that most complex multicellular structures originated from such systems. The notion that genes are privileged determinants of biological characters can only be sustained by neglecting questions of evolutionary origination and the evolution of developmental mechanisms.**
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15824443

So Newman thinks Darwinism works fine for evolution, but not for the origin of life. He further thinks he has identified a pre-Darwinian phase of life that relied on non-genetic processes. Maybe so.

Susan just didn’t get it, that’s all.

 

[edwest2]

When I was a kid, there were these guys going around with lurid phamplets, arguing that the communists were behind fluoridation.

But in the scientific and medical literature, there isn’t any evidence that the levels of fluoride found in toothpast or public water has any harmful effects at all.

Yes, I know your guys want us to believe there is. But evidence counts.

Who are “your guys”? Why did you make that assumption? Your statement about the effects of fluoridation are unsupportable.

fluoridealert.org/fluoridation.htm

Fluoride was added to the water supply since there was so much of it. It’s an industrial byproduct of aluminum manufacture and the manufacture of atomic materials.

Peace,
Ed