Kamarling,
You said on the other thread:
Thanks for all the extra details. I find that phrase " Sternberg was a closet creationist all along" extremely telling. It illustrates something that I feel is true of a lot of modern science - internally certain subjects are more like politics, with only lip-service being paid to the idea that it is the truth that matters. That wouldn't grate so much, if they didn't try to pretend to be above such things - pure seekers after truth.
I was also struck by the way it was the orthodox scientists that introduced the term "exaptation" - a quite unnecessary piece of jargon - to describe the concept of re-using components for another purpose. Although I guessed its meaning from context, I had to look it up to be sure. I am sure they thought it would add an air of sophistication to their discussion - rather like Catholic Latin mass - the congregation may understand a little less, but be awed a lot more!
The video was amazing in the way the panel of orthodox scientists (plus a couple of others) started off really cool discussing the science, and it wasn't until the ID folk had pulled their presentation apart (with information that they must surely have known already, but didn't want displayed to the audience) that they rather lost their cool!
I really hope that Malf, who, IMHO, tends to believe in orthodox science rather too easily, listens to this entire discussion - it is very revealing.
Obviously I agree with your comments about the funding of the Discovery Institute and its links with religious fundamentalism, but they really do try to keep their science removed from religious issues. Life is richer for the works of Mozart and Bach, even though their funding came from the unreasonably wealthy, and from religious sources!
David
And this definitely belongs in this thread, but then as an example of what is not science.
I watched some of the video, but it got boring even sooner than i expected. This seemed a bit of a set-up by the ID/creationist camp, none of the names of the scientific side were immediately familiar to me, and most of them were not even scientist from disciplines that are directly related to the discussion.
That might be because a lot of well known scientists in relevant fields, make it clear they do not like to debate ID/creationism, they feel it might give it the legitimacy it does not deserve.
Maybe that is why the evolution camp seemed not totally familiar with the old and stale arguments of the Discovery institute, they gave the other side way to much rope in debating irreducible complexity, indeed they used exaptation in that context, but what is wrong with that? They didn't coin it. As appropriate terms do, it says what otherwise needs a few sentences. And as the word is often used in context of the bullshit concept of irreducible complexity, something that is far more contrived than exaptation, i am sure Meyers and co probably know it well.
And about the funding of the Disco Tute, it has no links with religious fundamentalism, it IS religious fundamentalism, and also a political organization.
According to it's founding document the
Wedge Strategy, it's goals are:
To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God
It has set up a closed system of it's own
"scientific" institute, that publishes it's own
"scientific" publication where the institutes "scientists" conveniently can have their "papers" peer reviewed.
This is going through the motions with the only purpose being the ability to claim "peer review" for their "work"
This is not science, this is not even pseudoscience, this is pretend science.
The Discovery Institute definitely belongs in this thread as an example of the worst way to pretend to do science.