The Design Paradigm

February 19, 2007

Steve Fuller, Allen MacNeill and the Science Wars

Filed under: General by Wulfgar

Our friend Allen MacNeill over at EvolutionList has written a bunch about Steve Fuller in his last two posts, but he seems to have badly misunderstood what Fuller was saying. Allen seems to not realize (as a Macht pointed out to him in the comments) that Science Wars is a name for an intelluctual discussion between the humanities and the sciences during the nineties. It has nothing to do with evolution or ID or the culture wars. What is even sadder than this misunderstanding is that it spawned a whole conspiracy theory of an alliance between postmodernists and Christians who desperately want win some kind of social discourse.

You can read a bunch of articles on the Science Wars here by Fuller. The wikipedia article on the Science Wars also has some useful information.

It was common during the science wars for scientists to remonstrate that the sociologists, philosophers and historians who wrote about science knew nothing about science. It seems in this case we perhaps may have the reverse scenerio.

February 17, 2007

Does Darwinism predict anything?

Filed under: Evolution by Wulfgar

We’ve heard over and over again from the Darwinist side of this debate that ID offers no novel predictions. Intelligent design actually offers many intriguing and novel predictions (you can head over to ResearchID.org to see some of them), but what about Darwinism?

I would love it if some of our commentators or readers would offer what they think are predictions of Darwinism. The definiton of Darwinism that we’ll use is the following proposition:

 "The origin and diversity of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection."

 For a prediction to count, of course it will have to be one that only Darwinism makes.

Update: There seems to be some confusion about what kind of predictions count. No predictions count that could be made from a more modest postulate. ID has no bones about common descent, so any predictions from common descent don’t count.

The one sentence hypothesis above could of course be written as two:

1.  "The origin of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection."

2.  "The diversity of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection."

It’s fine to just give a prediction from just one of those hypothesis.