3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia

bbc.co.uk

141–142 of 142 posts

Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia

#141

Post by the_af » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

whowhatwhy wrote: post #132

the_af wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did I miss? I argued that: - The author of TFA is not a subject matter expert. - He relies on the opinions of people known to hold fringe, debunked opinions on the subject matter, like Stephen Meyer. - Said people belong to the Discovery Institute, known to promote religion as science. - It is a pointless exercise for the scientific community to engage with crackpots and people dishonest about their actual goals…

- It is a pointless exercise for the scientific community to engage with crackpots and people dishonest about their actual goals (e.g. promoting religious views, fighting atheism, whatever it is they believe they are doing). You haven't touched on one single aspect of any of the actual ideas being discussed. All you've offered is ad hominem attacks on the purveyors of the ideas.

His ideas are fringe pseudoscientific ideas at odds with mainstream biology, and he misrepresents the current knowledge he claims to "demolish". He relies on pop culture books from discredited people who are not subject matter experts and who have a religious agenda.

What aspect is there to touch?

Re: 3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia

#142

Post by msla » Fri, Aug 30, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

TravisCooper wrote: post #84

Evolution is simply not sufficient. Dr. David Gelertner, a CS professor from Yale, penned an essay in May that lays out the high level argument against Darwin/Evolution, including references to background material. https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/

This refutes your position utterly by proving it isn't a scientific one but, instead, a political dogma:

https://ncse.com/creationism/legal/cdesign-proponentsists

> For years, "intelligent design" (ID) proponents denied that ID is just a new label for creationism. However, it is now well-known that the first intelligent design "textbook," Of Pandas and People, is just a revised version of a classic "two-model' creationism vs. evolution book named Creation Biology. As Barbara Forrest showed during her testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover, Pandas was remade into an intelligent design textbook in 1987, in a few months after the Supreme Court ruling against creation science in Edwards v. Aguillard came down.

> The most striking example of the transition was discovered by Dr. Forrest as she compared the drafts of Creation Biology and Of Pandas and People. Not only had "creationism" and "creationist" literally been replaced, apparently via a word processor, with "intelligent design" and "design proponent" in passages that were otherwise unchanged, but she even found a transitional form between the two labels!

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