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Topic: John A. Davison: An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New Hypothesis For Organic Change
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nosivad
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posted 20. September 2008 05:20
http://www.overwhelmingevidence.com/oe/node/594#comment-2163
Note that Alan Fox, long banned from this forum, is now holding forth at Overwhelming Evidence, making, as usual, a complete fool of himself.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
I love it so!
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
[ 20. September 2008, 05:20: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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nosivad
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posted 24. September 2008 04:40
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/there_is_such_a_thing_as_bad_s.php#comments
Myers continues with his insistence that if you are not a Darwinist you must be a Christian Fundamentalist. His mind is unable to conceive of a middle ground, a creationism independent of religious dogma.
The facts are very clear on these matters. As I pointed out in my essay "What is an atheist?," there is no more reason to accept monotheism than there is to accept monophyleticism. No one has the foggiest notion about how many Gods there were or how many times they plied their trade. Monophyletic Darwinism is without foundation, a mere figment of the imagination. So is a male God. The sole role of the male in evolution has always been to bring the process to a screeching halt. The same can be said for natural selection, sexual reproduction, Mendelian and population genetics. Sexual reproduction has independently appeared several times in the distant past, using vastly different cytogenetic mechanisms to determine the sexes. Its purpose was always the same: to stabilize the species and stop all further evolutionary progress.
The entire fabric of the Darwinian model is useless as an explanatory device. It is not worth even discussing any more.
I am sick and tired of trying to communicate with factions that are hopelessly mired in mindless bigotries that have no support in the real world. I hope this brief statement serves to establish my position as one unalterably opposed to both sides of this idiotic debate about our origins. There has never been a role for debate or even discussion in science. There never will be.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
I hope this harangue will at least stimulate some sort of response.
[ 25. September 2008, 18:33: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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nosivad
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posted 27. September 2008 18:00
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-is-not-science-because/#comments
Check out message #12 by DaveScot / David "I love being right" Springer in which he denies that there is any evidence for a designer or for supernatural intervention. Apparently Dave believes that life originated and then evolved automatically. Isn't that a Darwinian position? Maybe Dave would like to defend his remarkable assertion here or anywhere else where I can respond. I can't belabor him at Uncommon Descent much as I would love to. He has seen to that. I doubt if anyone at Uncommon Descent will challenge him.
It is hard to believe isn't it?
It doesn't get any better than this.
I love it so!
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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nosivad
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posted 28. September 2008 05:16
Well come on Dave. Surely the big brave Marine isn't going to let a challenge go unanswered: or is he?
It is hard to believe isn't it?
It doesn't get any better than this.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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nosivad
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posted 28. September 2008 18:10
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-is-not-science-because/#comments
In comment # 12 Springer states -
"I don't believe in anything without evidence and I have yet to see any evidence showing that the design of life on the planet earth requires supernatural power."
Then he offers the following -
"I challenge you to produce some evidence of life needing a designer with supernatural abilities."
I am prepared to present a huge body of evidence in support of supernatural intervention. I thought I already had in my published papers as did my sources on whom my own work so securely rests.
Since I cannot rise to his challenge at Uncommon Descent from which Springer has twice banished me, I have chosen to challenge Springer to come here to defend his assertion which I regard as irresponsible, undefensible and intellectually completely without merit.
So far he has refused to acknowledge my challenge, so I will respond to his position here even though he refuses to appear.
Before I begin, I wonder how O'Leary and Dembski feel about Springer's position, since I don't see how it could possibly be reconciled with their position with respect to our origins, a position that is clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic of an omnipotent God.
Springer has overlooked an important Principle. It is called the elimination of all other alternatives. In the Law there is an analogous Principle called the exhaustion of all remedies. Once all alternatives have been eliminated, there remains only one surviving reality, namely that organic evolution was planned and executed in a manner in which there was little or no role for chance.
I admit that there is no tangible evidence for the supernatural at present but that is not a requirement. Springer's stated position is basically Darwinian in nature. The Darwinian myth has no role for the supernatural either.
Springer sees no evidence showing that the "design of life on the planet earth requires supernatural power." In other words Springer endorses the position that it is intrinsic in the nature of matter to assemble itself at least once into a metabolizing, reproducing and evolving entity which, as the fossil record proves beyond any doubt, resulted in an ascending sequence, a sequence that, I am convinced, has ended, never to resume.
His position is atheist Darwinism pure and simple.
Perhaps now that I have exposed his position (in his own words), he will condescend to appear here and defend his absurd assertion in open dialogue so others may draw their conclusions, as I have drawn mine, about the validity of Springer's view of the great mystery of organic evolution.
I bet he won't show.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
[ 28. September 2008, 18:17: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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nosivad
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posted 29. September 2008 15:45
What did I tell you?
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nosivad
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posted 30. September 2008 05:04
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/tree-of-life-gets-stung-by-jellyfish/#comments
There is no compelling reason to insist that the jellyfish "picked up its sting" from a bacterium. An alternative explanation is that the bacterium and the jellyfish were sharing the same common informational "prescribed" pool. The same explanation applies to Lynn Margulis' insistence on the origin of cellular organelles through endosymbiosis, an idea for which no experimental evidence exists. There is no evidence that any cellular organelle ever had a precursor fundamentally different from its present configuration. In other words they did not evolve but appeared first exactly as we now still find them.
It is very possible that there has been very little information added during the course of organic evolution. Evolution has more likely been the loss of potentiality than its gain. Each stage of the loss of information has been accompanied by a further restriction in evolutionary creativity, until today evolution is no longer possible. The contemporary biota is apparently immutable just as Linnaeus, Cuvier and others long ago insisted. Unfortunately it is not immune to extinction.
Organic evolution can be compared to a block of marble from which the sculptor laboriously removes material, leaving finally the finished product which he had in mind all along and which cannot be further altered without being destroyed, the last resulting in extinction.
Once again Leo Berg anticipated the truth -
"Evolution is in a great measure an unfolding of pre-existing rudiments."
Nomogenesis page 406,(1922).
I only wish he had used WAS instead of IS because there not a shred of evidence at present favoring progressive evolutionary change.
William Bateson had earlier suggested the same thing by comparing evolution to -
"An unpacking of an original complex which contained within itself the whole range of diversity which living things present."
Nature, 93, 635-642,(1914).
There is nothing new under the sun.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
[ 30. September 2008, 17:00: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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nosivad
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posted 30. September 2008 16:22
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-is-not-science-because/#comments
By not responding to my reaction to his comments above, comments which are clearly Darwinian in character, Springer displays the same tactics that the Darwinians themselves have always used. He does not allow his critics to exist. If he can't eliminate them directly by summary banishment, his favorite method, then he pretends that he has no critics just as the Darwinians have always done.
Let the record show that he refuses to respond to my charge that his declared posture, that there is no evidence for supernatural intervention in evolution, identifies him as an atheist and, to that extent, an ally of Paul Zachary Myers and Richard Dawkins.
My conviction, by contrast, is that an organic evolution without supernatural intervention is not only absurd but stands in blind defiance of an enormous body of historical and experimental reality.
One of my favorite philosphers is Michel Montaigne, but there is one of his aphorisms with which I take exception -
"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
I respond -
"Man must make gods because he cannot make worms."
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison
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DaveScot
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posted 01. October 2008 03:19
John, I find it a bit remarkable that the Darwin camp hasn't embraced me for my stand that life on earth could have been created by a sufficiently advanced evolved entity. I even offered a mechanism for how it was done - via viruses and phages which are a wonderfully efficient tool for injecting new DNA into an organism. Just a few well designed phages or viruses introduced into the environment can spread like wildfire.
It doesn't require magic to do this. I make no claim that the designer or orchestrator of organic evolution on the earth must be an evolved intelligence. Maybe it's a magic sky fairy and maybe it ain't. The data only speaks from what we can actually observe and what we can actually observe doesn't require magic.
The Darwinian claim is that life evolved from scratch on this planet via stochastic processes without outside help of any kind. I deny that and I further deny that the outside helper must be an evolved helper.
Now feel free to fulfill your promise that you'll show me where magic is required to generate the life on this planet. I'm all ears. Just be advised I only check this forum once a week or less so take your time and give me a response with some meat in it instead of your usual empty hand waving.
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