In the latest Newsweek featuring Charles Darwin, A good bit about "ID" near the end

Here's something about "Intelligent Design" from the latest Newsweek (with Charles Darwin on the cover):

Although ID advocates have struggled to achieve scientific respectability, biologists overwhelmingly dismiss it as nonsense. [Biologist, director of the Human Genome Project, and an evangelical Christian, Francis] Collins comments, in a video that is part of the [Charles Darwin] museum show: "[ID] says, if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out [how the eye evolved] - and I believe it's very likely that science will... Then where is God?"

Where is God? It is the mournful chorus that has accompanied every new scientific paradigm over the last 500 years, ever since Copernicus declared him unnecessary to the task of getting the sun up into the sky each day. The church eventually reconciled itself to the reality of the solar system, which Darwin, perhaps intentionally, invoked in the stirring conclusion to the "Origin": "There is grandeur in this view of life ... that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according the the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." For all his nets and guns and glasses, Darwin never found God; by the same token, the Bible has nothing to impart about the genetic relationships among the finches he did find. But it is human nature to seek both kinds of knowledge. Perhaps after a few more cycles of the planet, we will find a way to pursue them both in peace.








Isn't that great?

They also pointed out that ID advocates like to call evolution "Darwinism" to make it seem more dogmatic. Of course, no scientists call it "Darwinism".

The subhead of the story is:
He had planned to enter the ministry, but his discoveries on a fateful voyage 170 years ago shook his faith and changed our conception of the origins of life.

There's another small bit earlier in the story that is good stuff:

And there was an even more troubling implication to his theory. To a species that believed it was made in the image of God, Darwin's great book addressed only this one cryptic sentence: "Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." That would come 12 years later, in "The Descent of Man," which explicitly linked human beings to the rest of the animal kingdom by way of the apes. "Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale," Darwin wrote, offering a small sop to human vanity before his devastating conclusion: "that man with all his noble qualities ... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."



Go pick this up at the grocery store. They have pieces about the ID/evolution battles, and a pretty thorough explanation of the real theory of evolution, and how it was discovered.

ll

"Darwinism" seems to mean "the selection of traits due to competition between members of a species." It's a viable concept, I think. It's only a small portion of the Theory of Evolution.

>>> Where is God? <<<

In the judgement of the Nations.

Yeah, they call it Neo-Darwinism

Showtopic= 22067-----------**for "Christian Darwinians are true Darwinians"--->
http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/histschol/lamarck.htm :

Orthogenesis is the more distinctive element of American neo-Lamarckism, and it is precisely this non-adaptive aspect that was unintelligible to Darwin. Bowler is not altogether consistent in deciding whether Cope, Hyatt, and Packard each lean toward Lamarckism or orthogenesis, but he does clearly affirm that, “The American school rejected Darwinism from the start precisely because it denied the orderliness of development.”[21]

21 Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, op. cit., 119-121.

**June 24, 2008 & Showtopic= 20315.

MisterBelfry, That is a pretty arcane analysis discussing primarily 19th century views. There was not one mention of Gregor Mendel and the clarity that his discovery brought to the acceptance of Darwin's theory.

From: http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/histschol/lamarck.htm (Emphasis mine.)

Stephen Jay Gould is one of the top interpreters and writers on modern evolutionary synthesis and I would call him the Ernst Haeckel of our day.

(Same source.)

Basically, virtually all of the scientists of the world believe Darwin was right and evolution is the fundamental unifying principle of the biological sciences. And by far the vast majority are atheists or agnostics. Think about that when you are ranting to your sky fairy like a mad man! (())

The great popularizer of astronomy and all sciences, Dr. Carl Sagan wrote one of the best books summarizing man, the earth, the universe and our place in nature titled, "The Pale Blue Dot." Please read that book. It is mind altering and pure poetry in science!

Typical jounalist; no rigour in examination of the subject and takes the weak-minded middle ground that they assume, falsely, to be the higher moral ground also. Written to not offend but, at the same time, not educate either.
The first sentence displays arrogance and hints at the writer's own beliefs. In the end, a waste of time and a page filler, if the article continues in the same vein.
An article that the would probably attract the plaudits of letter writers who believe in the giant tooth fairy in the sky.
Physafan

And he is quite dead. Same topic thread as posted in Showtopic= 3691------->

The salient statement of thirty plus years ago reads:
The idea of punctuated equilibria is just as much a preconceived picture as that of phyletic gradualism.



....
Read August, not September..

From: bellfree campanile ® 9/08/2004 3:28:43 PM

Subject: re: Red Blood Cells found in Dinosaur Bones post id: 1202770

I am a charlatan of bellfree. How can this be?

"Quote mining" brings me back... and I still don't really understand the critcisim. If anybody should be held on quote mining for popular gain, it would be Gould. But I don't recall ever getting upset for him taking a bit of Scripture out of context. {I thought he wrote pretty.} It maybe disconcerting at first with his Marxist--godless views to quote the holy book as often as he did. I never heard anybody bring up the charge of quote mining, he had a lengthy monthly column to write. Good grief! Your argument is sick and needs an infusion.
...[MisterBelfry]

>>> lengthy monthly column to write <<<
A slight correction may be in order... "Natural History" last I saw, is ten issues a year.