Thanks for the personal attack – always the sign of a skilled and reasoned debater! I must have lost my membership card for Club Mainstream. The statement that I am “more concerned about defending today’s status quo science than about skepticism and objective criticism” is complete and utter nonsense.

ID is best beaten by showing that science is less stagnated and indoctrine based than religion, not more so! Evolution itself was ever disputed at all, because people had been breeding species of horses, dogs, etc., for a long time before Darwin, and everyone knew how species can be evolved.

Darwin’s innovations were publically speculating on a link between primates and humans without genetic evidence (they could have evolved independently), and brainwashing people into believing in vague “continuous” changes (changes actually occur from discrete modifications in DNA).

Mainstream or group-think consensus isn’t worth a cent where there is not the slightest evidence, such as the basis for the origin of life, which is key to evolution.

Evolution doesn’t prove or testably predict the dynamics of the chemistry for exactly how life may have begun. All it “predicted” was long known from the breeding of animals, and the bit Darwin should have noticed about plant genetics from Mendel, he binned. Origin of life is the key issue of evolution and that is still speculative, with chemistry in the volcanic deep sea vents, etc. Darwin didn’t even have a genetic mechanism (Mendel sent Darwin his genetics paper, but Darwin reportedly binned it unread in 1859).

If there was a good candidate for how life began, the threat from ID would be tiny. The problem is, the detailed chemistry of how life began is totally speculative.

Really, Darwin (a) had no evolution mechanism because he ignored Mendel’s genetics as being crackpot without bothering to check it carefully, and (b) had no mechanism for how life began other than the vague speculation it was a chemical stew in some “warm little pond”. Yes, evolution is a fact, but the detailed dynamics of the chemistry of how DNA started is still speculative, like the details of the Higgs mechanism in physics.

The reason why groups of scientists have to try to imitate the apes of the medieval inquisition, in fighting back against ID’ers, is because they are paranoid about losing credibility. Admit it, you’re a member of Club Mainstream, which is more concerned about defending today’s status quo science than about skepticism and objective criticism. I don’t think facts which are clearly stated need to be defended against idiots.

‘Whatever ceases to ascend, fails to preserve itself and enters upon its inevitable path of decay. It decays … by reason of the failure of the new forms to fertilise the perceptive achievements which constitute its past history.’ — Alfred North Whitehead, F.R.S., Sc.D., Religion in the Making, Cambridge University Press, 1927, p. 144.

Ancient Egypt had arithmetic, plus good astronomy and basic chemical technology, but it became corrupted away from science and turned into a stagnant religion:

‘The creative period passed away … The past became sacred, and all that it had produced, good and bad, was reverenced alike. This kind of idolatry invariably springs up in that interval of languor and reaction which succeeds an epoch of production. In the mind-history of every land there is a time when slavish imitation is inculcated as a duty, and novelty regarded as a crime… The result will easily be guessed. Egypt stood still… Conventionality was admired, then enforced. The development of the mind was arrested; it was forbidden to do any new thing.’ — W.W. Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, 1872, c1, War.

Why aren’t children taught about how the world works according to science? Surely, one can tell ten year olds about the Big Bang, particles, atoms, molecules, and how they form living organisms. Of course, you cannot go into the details.

When I was 9, I read books about evolution, stars, Big Bang etc. It didn’t take long for me to realize that religion was nonsense because it was inconsistent with what I had read. No one could have changed my mind by pointing out some problems with the theory of evolution.

Still, scientists as a group are very slow to wake up to the threat. When next year’s budgets are at stake, we listen intently; but when the entire way we think is at stake, it’s not such a big deal.