DNAunion

DNAunion: What a joker. Let’s see, pz’s original statement of interest was made back on page 1 of this thread, on 11/21/2002 at 4:50 pm. Then, nearly six days later, pz brings up whales: on page 5 of this thread, on 11/27/2002, at 10:24 am.

And now you are claiming that is the context in which he made his original statement?!?!?!?!?

Now, for the honest and intelligent people, let’s what I said and what pz’s response was, originally.


DNAunion: Anybody see anything about whales in there? Nope.

Why is it that every one who opposes me keeps sticking things into the statements of interest that simply aren’t there, even though pz emphasized that his original precise statement should be take literally?

Note again that pz’s statement is a response to my usage of direct evolution. Am I talking about all of evolution or even evolution in general? Nope, just small bite-size chunks: the evolution of a single biochemical system, such as the cilium, not some enormous process like the evolutionary origin of whales. Therefore, even if pz is actually talking about these much, much broader swaths of evolution, then he is guilty of switching the meaning of the word from that which I introduced (on Behe’s behalf): pz would be guilty of playing semantic games (and probably setting up a strawman to boot).

Give up guys - it's hopeless. And the longer you fight it, the longer the topic stays alive. Give pz a break - just let it die.

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: DNAunion ]</p>

hezekiah jones

Richard Lewontin must bear the burden for the evolution-deniers' misunderstanding of not only biological, but philosophical issues?? Is that some kind of joke?

hezekiah jones

You are correct. That is exactly the crux of Johnson's whole problem, and the key to why he is irrelevant to the scientific community, except as an irritating, thick-headed gadfly. Instead of evaluating the scientific data, he writes agenda-driven book reviews of The Blind Watchmaker and rummages about for malleable quotations from Dawkins, Gould, and Lewontin.

Johnson is little more than a rabble rousing populist churning out dreck for the apologetics press.

Albion

pz, thanks for the offer, but I've managed to find a copy on the web. I thought I'd read it a few months ago - must have stumbled across that copy then too. He makes some good points, but he has a very sour tone. He seems to really have it in for Gould and Sagan and others who popularise science. I mean, I don't see how you can present a technical subject to nonspecialists without running the risk of talking down to them. I don't understand these people who insist that science popularisers are causing problems and should stop. They seem to forget where their money is coming from and that the taxpayers deserve to have some idea of the relevance of the research they're funding. My husband's research group has a few people like that in it too - they have this lovely attitude that because they're so intellectually superior, they should be given all the money they think they need, with no questions asked. Course, I agree with him that research funds shouldn't just be given to groups who have telegenic spokespersons, but I'm not really clear just what he thinks the criteria should be in that case.

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: Albion ]</p>

Doubting Didymus

DNAunion: you seem not unable, but unwilling to understand the explanations given you. The sense that pz illustrates with his ambulocetus&gt;whale example is quite obviously the sense that he originally meant. To attempt an insinuation that his intentions are not in fact as he states them, but were aimed in some other fantastic direction of your imagining is the product of wishful thinking. You wish pz had made a terribly mistaken assumtion. He did not. Accept it and move on, for the sake of all our health.

Principia

DNA makes plenty of mistakes. In fact, he made several tonight, in this <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=57&t=000731" target="_blank">thread</a> alone, including some that no one has bothered to point out yet. That he is here obsessing over a point just so that he can end his posts with 'I win,' says plenty. The readers can judge for themselves.

hezekiah jones

Crow.

Nic Tamzek

To flagellate the dead horse a bit further, DNAunion returns to the original quote:

And DNAunion says of this that for him "evolution" clearly means the evolution of a single particular system, like a flagellum or something, and so it should for PZ too, therefore PZ was contradicting me, therefore the ID skeptics are dumb for not realizing it and agreeing with DNAunion on interpretation. Or something.

But it's pretty damn clear that PZ was challenging Behe's statement, and criticizing it for assuming that:

1) Evolution was always "direct", therefore
2) A challenge to "direct" evolution was a serious challenge.

PZ, making the point we've made a hundred times, no, evolutionary biologists have never assumed that evolution was always "direct", therefore a challenge to "direct" evolution is not any kind of actual challenge, even though Behe and fans repeatedly imply that it is.

(<a href="http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=3deafde206adffff;act=ST;f=9;t=8" target="_blank">BTW, documentation for the prevalence of change-of-function in the evolutionary lit. ever since Darwin is here on this antievolution.org thread. Darwin was rather adamant on the issue, funny that Behe did read the paragraphs after the "successive, slight" changes bit of Darwin.</a>)


However, if you want a victory DNAunion, I will concede that on Thornhill and Ussery's classification of Darwinian pathways, the VFT evolution pathway is not one of their 2 "direct" pathways, but is rather their #3 pathway, essentially "scaffolding". IMO this third pathway could work both with the system maintaining the same function (e.g., VFT) or changing function (e.g., loss of flagellar motors to form virulence systems from the remainder).

I think that their classification confuses continuity of function (one defintion of "direct", VFT evolution would qualify here) and continuity of structure (would not qualify here, a "part" having been lost), but that's another matter. In the end all of these classifications are just drawing lines around phenomenon that intergrade into each other.

nic

pz

Whoa...I disagree with several of your interpretations here. What you see as a sour tone, I read as more like regret -- that it is so damn hard to get the idea of science across to people, and that too often they see it as replacing one dogma with another. I think he is all for popularizing science, but his criticism of Sagan's book was that too much of it wasn't science.

I also think that he wasn't hard on Gould at all -- Gould was his fellow-in-arms, and he is approving of his approach to popularizing science. His review is very critical of Sagan, but it isn't because he has it "in" for him, but because they disagree on what we should learn from science.

He is also not arguing that we should stop popularizing science. I think his point is that it can't be done top-down -- we can't just tell people what they have to believe. If anything, the way to do it is to address class differences, and give people the opportunity to learn for themselves. His point is completely contrary to that of your "intellectually superior" example -- Lewontin would argue that it is more effective to give a scholarship to a prospective grade school teacher than to hire an elitist pundit to lecture or write a book.

Albion

Well, I was sort of getting the impression that in an ideal world, he'd like to see people provided with the tools to go away and understand the primary research themselves, and that really isn't feasible. People without a lot of science background are dependent on some sort of bridge provided by specialists who can communicate with nonspecialists; it's a shame if those specialists take the opportunity to append their political or religious opinions and make it appear as if they were somehow a consequence of the science, but I suppose there isn't much you can do except hope that for every Richard Dawkins there's also a Ken Miller.

I'll have to find that article and read it again, but I must say I was detecting anger rather than regret. I know that the high-profile science popularisers aren't held in high esteem by some colleagues, and it does annoy me when they use their media profile to try and influence funding decisions (I think if Sagan had had his way, planetary astronomy would have sucked the lifeblood out of some of the rival disciplines), but Lewontin sounded as if he was on a tear. On the other hand, I thought Sagan was making some good points in his book, so I suppose I'm not particularly well disposed to such a negative review.

On the other hand, the whole thhrust of the article was in a different direction from what you might believe by reading that one quoted passage alone (and interestingly enough, the preceding sentence, which starts the paragraph, was dropped by the quote collectors, probably because it gave a bit if a clue that the quote wasnt' quite what it seemed). The more I come across creationist quote mining, the more I wonder how these people can live with themselves and call themselves Christians; I thought this sort of deception was against the rules.