Posted on March 3 at 6:35 p.m.Suggest removal

Billy Boy Wonder is a spent force and can't even summon a harrumph after all he got the stuffing knocked out of whom in 2002 in Ohio. After that he made a feeble attempt to grandstand at Kitzmiller v. Dover. But when he found that Jeff Shallit would be the rebuttal witness and would grill him during deposition, BillyD scampered aways like a scared kitten. These days the pompous know-nothing spends his time at diploma mills and keeps clear of anything requiring an IQ>75. Michael Ruse is an indulgent old man so BillyD gets away with trotting out the same old nonsense. Pathetic!

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Posted on February 13 at 12:04 p.m.Suggest removal

Royse87,

To say you are wrong would be understatement.

Science cannot prove anything, most of the time it can only disprove. Proof belongs to mathematics. The techniques used by Holocaust deniers and pseudo-scientific quacks who parrot young/old earth dogma, is the same. Obfuscate - mine quotes selectively, leave out entire paragraphs, cast doubt, shift goalposts, throw the burden of proof on the other side rather than conduct your own experiments to disprove. Evade the forums where research is discussed - discotute quacks aren't biologists mostly, and the ones who are are mere graduates not practitioners (like Wells with publication record) and if they do they have no evidence at all. Others like Behe don't take on graduate students - because no one wants to work with them, don't do research. Or some like Dembski work at diploma mills. the new creationists aka the old earth guys aka the ID types are notorious for their intolerance. Their blogs as a rule have disabled commenting, and even where they do, they make it a point to delete the views of scientists. Further ID/creationists are given to cheap cybertrickery, like hijacking domain names. Richarddawkins.net is the Richard Dawkins Foundation website. Richarddawkins.org redirects to the website of Access Research Network a pseudoscientific creationist quack's haven. These are some of the many methods that creationists use that marks them out as deniers.

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Posted on February 12 at 9:06 p.m.Suggest removal

NeilBJ says, [[Is it possible that, as Dembski says, there is no rational justification for concluding from what we know today that undirected processes can account for the physical transitions that took place in the distant past?]] No! That's why do science and not spiritual invocation. Firstly the term undirected process, doesn't mean anything. The physical laws that prevail on one side of your skin are the same as those on the other. Secondly why does one have to think that physical transitions took place in the past only? They are happening all the time. What we have seen in as little as 30 years, speciation of unicellular into multicellular organisms is enormous. In fact recently when they re-analyzed the original Miller-Urey sample (the output of just one of many early molecule experiments) with some cool equipment they have found an amazingly lot more molecules than there were originally reported by Miller-Urey! We won't of course hear a bleep from the creationists. Suggestion, it is hard to overcome commonsense. Suggestion, just get over it.

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Posted on February 12 at 10:24 a.m.Suggest removal

NeilBJ first of all a deck of cards is not like a DNA sequence. So cut that out. A Hathaway Man hand or a perfect bridge hand have the same probability as any other hand. It is hte rule we make that makes a perfect bridge hand worth more than less than perfeect one. You change the rules and a bridge hand is worth less, much less. DNA sequences emerge as a result of many other processes some random, some predictable, and in many different combinations.

Sal,

Blyth was a creationist like you, and obviously Darwin like many other scientists of his time found that there was no evidence for Blyth's belief in what Blyth called "natural selection" a "vital-force" driven process. In case you didn't know natural selection isn't a process that happens inside an organism or in its environs. It does differ from genetic drift in that respect. You should read the book before you quote from it, because you see we too read books. And surely you can do better than quoting from a collection of essays (Eisley's) written over many years, over 30 years ago?

Now Sal you are going take your textbook and read out that magical sentence that tells us that evolution doesn't happen. We can wait. OK?

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Posted on February 9 at 10:35 p.m.Suggest removal

Salzo is at it again. So you own several textbooks on evolutionary biology. How about reading one? Don't repeat comments that got you laughed out of pandasthumb.org!

NeilBJ there is science. Historical science is a creationist pseudoscientific term. Explanations aren't just that to be left hanging in the air. They too must be demonstrated within the bounds of the phenomenon. So the creationist saw of "it is designed because it looks designed because it points to design" is a bogus explanation. It cannot be demonstrated. All that you creationists have to do is to change all your passive voice statements into active voice. In other words put your money where your mouth is!

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Posted on February 9 at 8:49 a.m.Suggest removal

NeilBJ,

I wish you wouldn't repeat discredited talking points.

[Broadly construed intelligent design is science. Intelligent design is used in forensics, archaeology, and SETI.] Forensic investigators the CSI types search for perps along the lines motive, method, and if possible, opportunity. Archeologists try to uncover the past, and are primarily interested in how people like us lived. SETI also makes the assumption that PLUS on other planets are likely to transmit signals like we do. But than IDists aren't doing any of these, and extrapolate forensics beyond all reason to claim not just an object here or htere is designed (because it is designed, because it is designed, wink, nudge) but everything we see! And then there is that old saw from Paley. Ever wonder why Paley thinks the watch is designed but not the grass or the stone?

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Posted on February 9 at 7:50 a.m.Suggest removal

To the rube who said this,
[[I agree. It is easy to generate complexity. Mix a deck of cards and deal out all 52 cards and you end up with a complex pattern. Now how many times must you deal a deck of cards before you deal a perfect bridge hand? Now the complexity is specified (a qualifier I should have added in my previous post) and it’s just a tiny bit more difficult to come by.]]

There is complexity, that's it. The specified tag is bunkum and bogus. A bridge hand or even the "Hathaway Man" hand is no different from any other. It's easier for the typical human being to make sense of a bridge hand, than any other "random" hand. We can make sense if we want to of any hand, given the time.

Try something else!

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