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  • I observe that Kinsey (of sex fame) was the only author of a biology textbook who acknowledged evolution during the twenty years following the trial. For all practical
    purposes the anti-evolutionists won and were not defeated until after WWII.

      • The trial and its aftermath highlighted the then relatively new Theory of Evolution, and showed the resistance of Fundamentalist Protestantism to new ideas, new evidence.

        It was the beginning of the end of Protestantism dominating public schools, to the exclusion of Catholics and Jews.

          • Dr. Leonard, your piece leaves me mostly puzzled. You have bits from the actual
            history of the trial, but then you have bits that seem to reflect more of the twisted and sometimes blatantly false retelling of the trial found in the play Inherit the Wind. You also seem to be relying on popular understandings of Darwin's theory of evolution rather than a more realistic assessments of the increasingly shaky scientific grounds on which it stands today. By the way, Bryan was right about the theological implications of Darwin's theory for Christian orthodoxy.

            Two more things. First, given that the word "fundamentalist" meant in 1925 something very different than it usually means today (critics having very successfully turned it into a poorly-defined pejorative insult rather than a meaningful description of what someone actually believes), how exactly would you define "contemporary fundamentalists"?

            Second, the parallels between the Scopes trial and the Davis affair are interesting to me, but perhaps not in the ways you are thinking. Perhaps the most interesting to me is still only potential. Darwinism was the cause celebre of the cultural elite in 1925 and with the fantastically biased reporting of the likes of H.L. Menken at the trial you are right that it was viewed as a major cultural victory in spite of the legal loss. Since then, though, Darwinism has been analyzed in a great deal more detail and found to be
            seriously lacking on a number of counts and has accomplished almost no public good nor has it uniquely advanced the fields of science in any way. And today, while the cultural elite still cling to it jealousy, it's still pretty much just them. Well, the total normalization of homosexuality (with others on the horizon) is the cause celebre of the cultural elite today. While such an idea does enjoy somewhat more widespread public support than Darwinism ever has, I wonder what 90 years of analysis will do to it. It will be interesting to see.
            Thanks for your thoughts.

              • the only people who don't believe in evolution are the ones who haven't and won't study it, because it interferes with their bible. If you don't believe in the mountains of proof of evolution but you believe snakes talk, bushes talk, people can turn to salt, men walk on water, etc. then your thinking isn't clear enough to even make an argument.

                  • Hi Well_Read. Interesting perspective. I assume by "evolution" you mean "Darwinian macroevolution." (If I'm mistaken in that please correct me.) I think you may want to give that one a little more time to process before throwing it out there quite so forcefully again. Your view here doesn't seem to leave much room for agnostic mathematician David Berlinski who rejects Darwinism not because of anything in the Bible, but because he doesn't think the evidence adds up (his book The Devil's Delusion is worth a read). It would seem to discount entirely the views of Anthony Flew who though never embracing biblical Christianity finally rejected Darwinism and atheism near the end of his life because the evidence just wasn't there for him. It also writes off groups like the Discovery Center whose many credentialed scientists in various fields and of various faiths (albeit mostly Christian) who reject Darwinism do so not because of something written in the Bible, but because they've spent a great deal of time with the evidence and have found it to point in a different direction. Just because someone doesn't agree with your position here doesn't mean their "thinking isn't clear enough to even make an argument." It could mean that they've examined the evidence just as you have and have come to a very different conclusion. Thanks for your thoughts, though.

                    • Shaky scientific grounds of Evolution? Really? Details please.

                      Before you respond, please consider that Evolution is both fact and Theory. The facts include all the evidence of physiology, morphology, details of reproduction, radio isotope dating methods, strata, plate techtonics, genetics, comparative anatomy, and that's just a start off the top of my head. The Theory is a mechanism explaining how all those facts relate, add up, and explain what we see. The Theory also makes testable predictions that, depending on results, either confirm or disrupt the Theory, which will slowly change over time, "evolve" if you will, into a better explanation with more accurate predictive ability. For instance, The Theory predicted we should find a transition between fish and land animals in certain layers of rock. We looked, and found several species like Tiktalik, confirming current understanding of the Theory. Or we found those 15+ skeletons of a new Hominid in South Africa, challenging current understanding and requiring the Theory to improve itself.

                        • Hi Mike, as I've asked some of the other commenters on this feed, what would you accept as evidence? As I suggested to RoverSerton, consider reading Dr. Stephen Meyer's books The Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. Both will unpack in very readable detail a great deal of Neo-Darwinism's shakiest ground. Check out some of the work from the Discovery Center and specifically the BioLogos Foundation.
                          I agree that evolution is both fact and theory. Microevolution is a fact of nature. It can easily be observed just about anywhere we look. Macroevolution (which is at the heart of Darwin's theory) is a theory which has remarkably little positive evidence in favor of it in light of the amount of time available for such evidence to be gathered. In fact, the more scientists learn about the utter complexity of life, the less and less likely it seems that one species could overtime evolve into another.
                          Could you point to any other testable predictions of Darwin's theory of macroevolution that have proven true offering further confirmation for it (I'll deal with the transitional fossils in a moment)? And yes, the theory has indeed "evolved" into its modern form: Neo-Darwinism. But that still is finding less and less sturdy scientific ground on which to stand.
                          As for the transitional fossils, the hard truth is that there actually aren't any. There have been several apparent discoveries which have garnered bold and triumphant headlines (like the TikTalik discovery in South Africa), but once the ardor has cooled and the real investigations have been done these have uniformly been revealed to not fit the desired bill. Those post-discoveries never seem to get the same media play as the original booms...go figure. Lucy was one of the most egregious of these that comes to mind for me.
                          Thanks again for your thoughts and I'd be glad to hear more.

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                            • Do you have anything not from the Discovery Institute? You do realize they aren't actually doing research?

                              I'd need a peer reviewed paper in a legitimate science journal, or even self-published and reviewed by other scientists, that actually has hard evidence contradicting Evolution, stuff that isn't just repackaged Creationist apologetics or Creationist logical fallacies?

                              Reposting completely discredited and dismissible sources isn't an argument.

                                • I make frequent reference to the Discovery Institute because they are the premier ID advocacy group in the country. If there is ID work going on in the U.S. it is in some way affiliated with them. That said, no, the Discovery Institute is not a research group. They are an advocacy group. However, they are closely aligned with at least two research labs (the Biologic Institute and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab) who are doing ID-related research.

                                  Again, your conflation of ID with creationism suggests that you really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to ID. You seem to be consistently relying on equally uninformed attacks made by other critics rather than seriously looking into it for yourself. That said, how about this: Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004) (HTML).

                                  Or this: William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010).

                                  Or this: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig and Heinz Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangement and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 36:389–410 (2002).

                                  Or this: Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).
                                  There are several more than these, but that's a good sample. And I agree with your last point. Let's agree not to do that.

                                    • At this point I've had a dozen comments not get through moderation. No idea why.

                                      The articles listed are copied from the Discovery Institute list. Only one of them is a scientific article of sufficient stature and deals with evolution, the Axe article. But it does not support ID. ID advocates and public opinion spokespeople have referred to it, but it does not say what they claim it says. That article even came up in the Dover trial, where it was dissected and shown to be a false claim.

                                        • Yes, the articles are indeed culled from their website. You asked for peer-reviewed articles supportive of ID and I listed several. You seem to be reaching for whatever excuse you can to justify your argument that ID is not really science. Let me ask you a question for clarity's sake. How do you determine whether or not an article is of a sufficiently scientific stature to meet with your standards? What's your rubric there? It does seem awfully convenient for your point to simply dismiss my point so succinctly by dismissing things as not of a "sufficient stature." As for the Axe piece, I guess you'll have to take up whether or not the article accomplishes it's purpose and is supportive of ID with Dr. Axe himself given that he did the research. Thanks!

                                            • My bar for peer reviewed science lit is indeed high:
                                              -It must be relevant to the subject. Search algorithms are not relevant.
                                              -It must consist of actual science. Hypothesis, data, math, conclusions. Most of the articles on the DI list fail here. DI counts on people not being able to tell. There are advocacy pieces on the list with no data, no math. They might be good editorials or opinion or advocacy pieces, but they are not science.
                                              -it must be peer reviewed by actual scientists in the field. Axe satisfies this and the first.
                                              -A decent journal helps a great deal, but isn't vital. This usually indicates the level of scrutiny the article received before printing. There is a more obscure journal that might or might not get there, but it from what I read it's a no. If the article is good, usually someone else will pick it up, or it will spur further research that will hit the big time.

                                          • The second article isn't about ID. Dembski is certainly an ID advocate, but this article is about search algorithms. Interesting commentary here. Math warning:
                                            http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/T...

                                              • It is supportive of ID concepts, not necessarily explicitly about ID. Im glad for the commentary, but I'm afraid the math in it goes over my head (so does most of the article after several reads). Given the website and a quick perusal of it, though, it's authors seems to share the same basic misunderstanding of the nature of ID that you have indicated you have. Still, you asked for peer-reviewed articles in legitimate scientific journals that are supportive of ID and I gave you several. I hope you'll take some time to look more into it for yourself soon and not keep relying on what it's critics allege. Thanks again for your thoughts.

                                                  • No, it's not. Any analogy is thin and brittle. Analogy is not science.

                                                    Complexity and specified complexity are not science. They are tautological fallacies. Circular thinking.

                                                    Search algorithms are not biological entities. It is possible to model biological processes, but that is different software.

                                                      • Search algorithms in a binary electronic environment are not illustrative of anything biological, except in a very broad sense that math and science is inherently interrelated. While this article wasn't very good at its subject and research, it also wasn't bad. It contributed nothing really new to computer search engines, but it did spur some discussion, which is usually good and can sometimes generate new ideas apart from mediocre research. It had nothing to do with evolution or biology, unless you conflate things by analogy. Since biological organisms are not binary and are not simple search engines, any analogy is shallow and falls apart quickly. Analogy is not science.

                                                        If you are interested in computers illuminating evolution, try looking in to various artificial life simulations dating back to the 1960s. They've had varying success working at all, much less producing useful ideas. This one seems very successful in showing mutation, adaptation, and speciation from basic core rules. It's name is Avida. There might be better ones out there, but this is interesting, and an example of computer research that actually applies to evolution and biology.

                                                        http://avida-ed.msu.edu/

                                                        They also use software trying to predict evolution of pathogens, including flu, cold, HIV, all the resistant superbugs, more. Then they get to practical treatment success. By comparing what really happened to what the computer predicted, we improve the software slowly over time. Flu shots today are better than they were 20 years ago.

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                                                          • The thing about computers illuminating evolution is that they are all incredibly carefully designed. The Avida-ED program sounds fantastic. I wish something like that had been around when I was in college. But it was designed to make a number of assumptions that allow it to work but which themselves have to be justified. Furthermore, the paper by Pennock extolling the virtues of the program (and it sounds like a wonder of computer programming) talks about how it can beautifully illustrate micro-evolutionary changes (that even...creationists...are starting to accept) which are totally non-controversial. These micro-evolutionary changes, however, do not result in one species becoming another species and there's just not any evidence to show that it does. This was the fatal flaw in Darwin's mechanism. It rests on a series of assumptions about the origins of life that together represent a hurdle too big for Darwin's totally naturalistic mechanism to over come. The same thing goes for the software research enabling scientists to better design things like flu vaccines. They carefully track how these viruses change over time, but the viruses never become anything other than viruses. They won't ever become, say, a fish. For Darwin's mechanism to be an adequate explanation for the countless variety of species of animals on the planet we would have had to win the cosmic lottery not just once in the origin of life, but over and over and over again. It just doesn't make sense.

                                                              • Origins of life are Abiogenesis. That is not Evolution. Evolution only applies to existing life.

                                                                Abiogenesis is a field with no clear Theory. It has several unproven hypothesis that look promising but are not demonstrated.

                                                                Again with lotteries and probabilities. Your chance of winning 200 million powerball jackpot are lower than getting hit by lightning. But it happens all the time. We install lightning rods. Attorneys specialize in lottery winners. It only needs to happen once.

                                                                Panspermia is one Abiogenesis hypothesis. This is a helpful and troublesome one, and is plausible but not demonstrated. Deep sea vents are plausible but not demonstrated. Lightning hitting a shallow carbon rich sea is plausible but not demonstrated.

                                                                The data shows life appeared on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago. We do not yet have a Theory demonstrating how. But once it started, Evolution explains life since then.

                                                                  • I think perhaps you are overstating the promise of the various abiogenetic theories. You are mistaken that "it only needs to happen once." For life to be created a variety of things with probabilities so much lower than winning the lottery or getting hit by lightning that a comparison is laughable needed to happen many, many times.
                                                                    I'm afraid it's becoming abundantly clear that we see this issue (and the host of issues related to it) in two very different ways and aren't likely to convince one another. While I've been glad for the clarity you've offered on several points, you haven't made any arguments that are even remotely convincing to me and I've clearly failed on the same count. I think we will have to simply agree to disagree on this point. Thanks so much for the conversation, Mike.

                                                        • Relying on complexity and probability is a poor argument, most likely to convince me you are not serious. These essentially boil down to an argument that the question is too complicated to be answered with evidence, use that to insert magic (a deity waving its hand, and poof, there it was), and claim victory. As an answer reaching for scientific credibility, this fails. It answers nothing, has no ability to make useful predictions, and uses one claim of improbability (use of magic) to answer a complex problem (life speciation, fossils, radio isotope dating, genetics..). At the end it actually answers nothing, only adding another layer of mystery. It also is a basic logical fallacy, an argument from ignorance. This doesn't impress me.

                                                          Probability is a slippery devil. We have only Earth as an example of life to study, meaning that with our data set, life as we know it has a probability of exactly 1, or 100%. 1 hit in a dataset if 1. Other places, like Europa or Mars or the thousands of extra solar planets found, we simply have too little data on to enter them into the data set yet.

                                                          A scientific approach, if you truly wish to challenge a Theory on scientific grounds, would seek data, make predictions, and be falsifiable. Any act of creation by a supernatural entity (panspermia doesn't count - that sci if speculation still implies natural forces), is by definition not falsifiable. How do you disprove something beyond natural means of explanation? Or positively prove it? Neither is a scientific question.

                                                            • That's quite a confident statement, Mike. I didn't say anything about probability in my comment, just complexity. Your comments here suggest to me that you haven't actually taken any kind of a serious look at the intelligent design movement for yourself, but have relied on the almost uniformly false descriptions put out by its Neo-Darwinian critics, and thus don't really understand it or its claims.
                                                              ID is actually rooted in part in a historical method of scientific reasoning called inference to the best explanation that was used by Darwin himself in formulating his theory. The major claim of ID is that the evidence points in a direction other than Darwinism suggests in terms of the origin of both life and of particular species. It has made testable predictions. Perhaps most notably that the so-called "Junk DNA" largely written off in the 1970s as worthless would eventually be found to be riddled with significant purpose...just exactly as has been found in the last few years with the promise of more on the way.
                                                              As it turns out, ID does in fact seek data, it makes predictions, and is falsifiable on the grounds of its scientific claims. One thing you would understand with a bit more study on the subject is that ID does not posit anything about the identity of the designer, supernatural or otherwise (by the way, panspermia is just a silly attempt by folks desperate for a plausible-sounding explanation other than God to explain the origin of life; I give it absolutely zero credibility). That it does is an assumption falsely made by its critics. The identity of the designer is left up to the philosophers and theologians. ID stops at what science is able to claim. I really would encourage you to check out Dr. Meyer's books to understand ID better before you continue picking it to pieces.
                                                              Thanks again for your thoughts!

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                                                            • Evolution encompasses evidence and useful conclusions about many converging lines of evidence. Find another mechanism that accounts for this same convergence and makes useful, testable predictions that can make your Theory falsifiable if the tests fail. Evolution has already passed 150 years of such tests and has only gotten richer, stronger.

                                                              Evolution filled a gap in knowledge when 350 years of exploration and colonialism and worldwide inquiry made any sort of Creationism based on Genesis completely untenable. The same was true for geology. Darwin was the best fit for the evidence, and he has mostly been proven right, as opposed to early ideas like Lamarckian Evolution, which failed evidence tests.

                                                              Geology's Flood Model died before 1800, but didn't find a new answer until the mid 20th Century when we figured out Plate Tectonics. Plate tectonics also answered some lingering questions from Darwin's time.

                                                                • Thanks for more thoughts, Mike. For clarity's sake, what exactly do you mean when you talk about "evolution"? I'll assume you mean Darwinian macroevolution given that microevolution is utterly noncontroversial, but please correct me if I'm mistaken in that. I asked if you could point to any specific testable predictions of Darwinism, but I don't see any in your response. I'd still be glad to hear some.
                                                                  As for the evidence during Darwin's day, yes, his theory seemed to be the best fit for the evidence in the 1860s. But Darwin himself recognized that there were significant holes in the fossil record that his theory depended upon being filled in certain ways and if they were not it would fall apart. Well, to date, they still haven't been filled but have in fact been rendered even larger than they were in his day. To the contrary, then, Darwin has not been "mostly been proven right." The more we have learned about how life works, the more it becomes clear that his was a good theory for the 1860s...not the 21st century.
                                                                  And, while there have been many attempts to update his original mechanism based on the flood of new information that has come over the last 50 years alone, there is still no naturalistic mechanism that comes anywhere close to satisfactorily explain the origin of life, let alone the origin of species. For me, as a scientific theory, intelligent design--not creationism--does a much, much better job. Thanks again for continue the conversation.

                                                                    • I answered these in a post that never made the thread. Unknown reason.

                                                                      FTR, Evolution as a Theory was and remains Darwinian, in that it is species evolve and are interrelated through common ancestry. A good, short description is "Descent With Modification". Though short descriptions can mislead. Internal innate characteristics of individuals are selected for or against by outside factors, and individuals that have offspring will define future generations, future species. My selection factors might not be complete, but they include environmental and sexual selection, as well as genetic drift. Variation and selection.

                                                                      Micro and macro evolution are the same thing, different only in scale of time and number of iterations. As an illustration, talking about a single battle or election or scandal is often important, but to see the nation as a whole you need the whole war, all other wars, every election and every scandal, in some ways the aggregate lives and efforts and struggles of each citizen over centuries. Macro evolution isn't really a scientific term, but in the context you use it in, it is the summation of micro evolutionary events over long time periods. Move a shovel of dirt every day, and you can move continents if you have enough time. This is also where your poor understanding of probability shows through, because very improbable events will happen given enough time and enough iterations. You can count on improbable events occurring over deep time.

                                                                      Darwin did predict some things, his successors did too. Tiktalik was a successful prediction not from Darwin but from scientists the last few decades. Darwin said the one thing that could destroy his Theory was not finding a means by which creature traits could be selected and passed along - he had no answer and said that it must be there if his Theory were true, and failure to find it would be fatal to the idea. We had the glimmers of heredity within decades, and DNA was discovered in less than a century. Genetics answered this so well that biologists consider genetics alone to be sufficient evidence for Descent With Modification. No other evidence is necessary. Geographic island speciation is proven. Go down his list, it might be he was wrong on a detail or two, but his ideas and most of his points remain true.

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                                                                        • Sorry your first post never made it. Some quick thoughts for you. Microevolution was the mechanism by which Darwin explained how his theory of macroevolution (speciation) operated. Given the understanding of genetics and biology generally in Darwin's day, while he knew he didn't have clear evidence of speciation in the fossil record, the theory made sense and he was confident the holes would be filled by later geologists. Unfortunately, the holes not only haven't been filled, they've been rendered wider than they were in his day.
                                                                          Furthermore, modern genetics has revealed the idea of one species gradually becoming another over time almost entirely implausible. The reason for this is that there hasn't been anywhere in the same universe of enough time since the first appearances of single-cellular life to achieve the necessary variety in plant and animal life we see today in order for Darwin's theory to be true. That's not to mention that Neo-Darwinian biologists still have no plausible explanation for how life began which is why there are folks promoting silly things (albeit with very technical-sounding descriptions) like pansperia or the idea of a multiverse.
                                                                          You say that "geographic island speciation is proven." Are you referring to "Darwin's finches" for that or is there another example? Subsequent research suggests that they aren't nearly the evidence they once were thought to be. Thanks once more for your thoughts.

                                                                  • When beliefs are not come by rationally, they can not be argued rationally.

                                                                    • Evolution is probably the most firmly established and influential of all scientific theories and is the basis of modern biology.

                                                                        • Hi Jack. As I asked RoverSerton, what exactly do you mean by "evolution"? Beyond that, I would challenge you on each your assertions here. Assuming you are referring to Darwinian evolution, it is simply not as firmly established as things like gravity (once a theory but now widely accepted as a natural law) or even Newton's laws of motion and thermodynamics for everyday physics (as Einstein noted, things change a bit when you get very fast, very large, or very distant). In the same vein, while Darwinism has certainly been very influential on a cultural level, when it comes to science and more specifically biology, Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule (which did not depend on Darwin's theory in the slightest and actually opened the door to discovering a number of it's great weaknesses) is more influential. And for that matter, a strong argument could be made that the discovery of the DNA molecule combined with Mendel's rules for genetic inheritance together form the basis for modern biology. I'm curious what arguments you would make to defend your assertions here? Thanks for your thoughts.

                                                                          • Evolutionary theory is on a solid of ground as ever. It is as sure as gravity. Do you have a scientifically recognized argument for the shaky ground claim? Please be specific.

                                                                            BTW, does cultural elite mean educated? Please define who these terrible cultural elitists are.

                                                                              • RoverSerton, thanks for your thoughts. Let me ask some clarifying questions of my own, though. When you say "evolutionary theory" what do you have in mind exactly? Are you referring to microevolution or macroevolution? Darwin's theory, of course, is concerned with the latter. The former is entirely uncontroversial.
                                                                                Second, you ask for a "scientifically recognized argument for the shaky ground claim." By what criteria would you accept something as scientifically recognized? Your answer will determine mine to some degree, but here are two all the same: the incredible complexity of the cell (human or otherwise, but we'll go with human for now) has rendered arguments that its existence can preclude a designer empty; the incredibly rapid appearance of whole animal body plans combined with the total absence of transitional fossils in the early Cambrian period suggests rather powerfully that Darwin's macroevolution as an explanation for the origin of species is not correct. Both topics are addressed in detail in Dr. Stephen Meyer's great books The Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. Both are very much worth you time if you'd like to know more about the other side of the position you're taking.
                                                                                By "cultural elite" I do not necessarily mean the educated. I am referring to those people who because of their wealth, level of education, or political power consider their opinions on a range of culturally significant issues more important than those who, though not necessarily less intelligent by any means, do not share their advantages (and usually do not share their worldview either). Thanks again for your thoughts and I look forward to more.

                                                                              • So, Bill, when will you take this show on the road?