On related ID nonsense, I saw this at Hit and Run, which made me think of a recent discussion over at The Design Paradigm, where I made the case that a young earth creationist is incompetent to be a biologist, medical practitioner, ecologist, or geol…

Of all things! We happen to be students, and don’t have all the time in the world to go back to old threads and see who commented on things. It is a huge stretch of the imagination that we don’t answer something because we feel it’s been “thoroughly refuted”.

We appreciate all you people coming by our site, but that doesn’t mean we always have time to respond to you. Especially during the next few weeks, when we take our finals. It is unfortunate, sure, but that is how it is; science students at Cornell simply don’t have much time. And the blog is somewhere way down in the list of priorities.

Sometimes, it is true, we reach the conclusion that the particular people commenting on one thread or other are immune to logic, and feel less inclined than otherwise to answer them, but that isn’t the case in many situations– some of you do present your side logically; and those times our responses are strictly limited by Cornell’s most limited resource– time.

As a side-note, just because it looked so funny to have you say it, our listserve is not “circle-jerking comfort”, but generally hosts arguments considerably more intense than those here. Some of our best posters are evolutionists, and no-one hesitates to say what they think..

But back to the blog– I’m afraid you’ll have to think of it as that we provide the forum, but not always the arguments. We do plenty of arguing every day on our own campus, and when we get in from classes and labs our first action might not necessarily be to go to the website and see which random people felt like arguing more. We will come by when we can, but other things– like homework– come first.

Thanks for the new information; it does clarify thiings.

The shock! The awe! The amazement!

Not!

I can’t help but notice that each thread here, after being thoroughly refuted by people who know what they’re talking about, are no longer commented on by the Cornell IDEA club folk.

Presumably they dive to the circle-jerking comfort of their listserv.

The assumption of design is already pervasive in biology and this will be more so as systems biology becomes the dominant paradigm Sort of. But biologists don’t call it “design,” we refer to it as the natural selection of structure as a result of function. Most, if not all, of modern biology is built upon this concept.

The fact that systems biology uses teleological language

It’s you, and the rest of the ID movement, that’s leaving this convenient fact out. By confusing descriptions of structure & function, natural selection, etc., you’re doing an excellent job of re-framing the discussion - hence the ID “propaganda.”

…degree denial might be what the status quo feels they need to resort to in order to maintain power.

Make excuses about fairness all you want, but until you start showing equal preference to astronomers convinced that the Earth is the center of the Universe, or YEC’s into geology, or tribal shamans into med school, you’re arguments of “fairness” will remain a joke.

Dan wrote:

where’re those empirical observations of Design, or testable hypotheses based on Design?

The assumption of design is already pervasive in biology and this will be more so as systems biology becomes the dominant paradigm. The assuption a system has a design is the starting point in systems biology. Not only is there an assumption the system has a design, but that design is assumed to be eventually describable in metaphors familiar to engineers.

Whether the design has an intelligent origin is what is debated, but the assumption of a design is the starting point. The fact that systems biology uses teleological language is so distressing to the anti-design crowd some have raised a call to arms to stop the spread of teleological language:

Send Us Your Trash
His most recent, “Stand up for evolution” (Evolution and Development 7 [July 2005]:273-275), advises biologists to police their own language when describing biological systems. As Raff writes:

…let us not play into the hands of ID propagandists. For instance, be careful about using teleological words to describe biological entities in our teaching and writing. Calling cells “machines that do X,” or describing biological structures as “well designed to do Y” will be duly cited in ID propaganda as one more biologist-supporting design.

Regarding the PhD’s in biology graduating, I’m very concerned because 1/4 to 1/3 of freshman biology students are now pro-ID, and if there is even a marginal correlation between the freshman class to biology PhD candidates in the next several years, degree denial might be what the status quo feels they need to resort to in order to maintain power.

Master’s and Doctorate degrees, however, are far less associated with your ability to pass a test (by then a student should be quite capable of passing such tests), and more about your ability to apply or teach the information. If what a student’s competency to apply or teach biology is hampered by his or her beliefs, then yes, the student’s qualifications for the biology degree is called into question.

Twenty years or so ago someone suggested that YEC students should be failed in their college biology classes if a professor happened to find out about their beliefs and they didn’t recant. Do you agree with him on this?

Your comment on other biology degrees wasn’t very straightforward. I understand your reasons, but are you saying that YEC students shouldn’t be given bachelor degrees in biology, or just not masters; or just not Ph.Ds?

Twenty years or so ago someone suggested that YEC students should be failed in their college biology classes if a professor happened to find out about their beliefs and they didn’t recant. Do you agree with him on this?

But you have an interesting perspective. How far would you take it? Would you grant masters degrees in biology to people who “knew all the right stuff” and could pass any exam in the subject, but happened to be YECs? What about bachelors degrees? Unless the job in question entails just taking tests or regurgitating information for the career, “just passing the test” dismisses the importance of understanding and applying the knowledge one learns. If you don’t understand evolution and refuse to work with the best explanation the observed change over time that is studies in biology, then how can you be competent at it?

And degrees in other scientific fields?– if you have a Ph.D. in physics you’re more of a threat to evolutionary biology then if you never had been allowed to get a highschool diploma, so should universities stop giving science degrees to YEC students altogether, and tell them to go major in theology?