The Horrors of Evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 18, 2008, 17:55 (5908 days ago) @ George Jelliss

I tried to read your article, but it is in very small print, and changing the View menu to enlarge the text size has no effect. Any chance of you updating the HTML so that the type sizes are not fixed? - I appreciate you efforts to read the article. It is published to the web on the Raleigh Tavern site, a discussion club from Tomball College. I have papers published there, as a member of the group by invitation, but have no control over the site. It is in my documents and I can email it to you as an attachment. I'd love to get it on this site, but this message area only allows 10,000 words, I believe. Try my website: www.sciencevsreligion.net as it is also published there and might come through better. - > As far as I could ascertain, the version of "Intelligent Design" that you espouse is very different from that propounded for instance by the defendants in the Dover trial. Judge Jones in his judgment on that trial made it clear that they were young-earth creationists. - You are quite correct. I arrived at a conclusion that some force of Intelligent Design existed, from my studies of cosmology, long before I looked at Darwin. As a student of Medicine, I accepted the Theory without question, until I began to read up on the subject, in preparation for writing my second book, encouraged by the publisher who had accepted my first book. In due course I found Dembski and Behe's publications, and have actually had a personal discussion with Behe at a meeting in which some Discovery individuals were present. I followed Dover closely. It is true that the Dover trial involved school board members who were young earth proponents, but many of the participants were of my mind, accepting the science but wanting the controversies in the scientific community also presented. Note that I am Jewish and have no Christian ax to grind as in the Discovery Institute.
 
> The idea that alternatives to Darwin's 1859 theories are not open for discussion is also nonsense. You yourself have cited the Altenberg conference. There are many ideas now discussed by biologists that are not part of Darwin's original thesis. He knew nothing of the actual mechanisms of genetics. - You are quite correct about Darwin and what he knew. Neo-Darwinism tries to incorporate genetics and the new knowledge of DNA and now the very new discoveries of the regulatory role of RNA. But you are wrong about open discussion of controversies outside of the Darwin community. My paper discusses some of the battling within the community, but the movie "Expelled" with Ben Stein, which I have not seen, covers other egregious examples of supression. Ben Stein is a highly regarded economics guru in this country and very fair-minded. The material he was shown convinced him to do the movie. The Richard Steinberg episode,when he was editor of the Proceedings of the Smithsonian, comes to mind. My point is simply that the Altenberg Conference is within the community of 'accepted scientists' who are 'allowed' to criticize.