Swatchmaker wrote:There is no error in my statement. The error is your naive understanding of Creationism. Developed resistence is evolutionary only in your perception of it. Creationists don't reject Natural Selection, Speciation, Developed resistance, etc. You only think they do because you have never actually taken the time to read Creationist articles. Word of advice: know your enemy.
What is so weird about this is that they accept these things, which
are evolution, and
claim that they are not evolution. Huh? They invent their own private definition of evolution so that they can pretend that evolution doesn't exist.
The Happy Humanist wrote:Doesn't it bolster the Creationists' case for suppression when non-biological scientists who happen to hold to Creationist views, but do legitimate work in other fields, suffer from what seems to be some kind of glass ceiling? Perhaps I don't know the whole story on these two cases. But I would like to think that the Creationists are wrong in crying foul, and that there is no effort to suppress their legitimate work in other fields; otherwise, one might suspect that their legitimate work in Creationist biology (if such existed) might suffer the same suppression.
If you actually look at the papers that are published, you find that the papers that Creation Scientists publish in true science journals have nothing to do with creation or evolution. There is no suppression of their work in other fields. Even in biology, where I know a couple of people who accept microevolution but not macroevolution (strange, but true), carefully avoid topics where evolution might come up. Of the great many biologists who are Christians, there seems to be an acceptance of evolution as clearly correct, and the text of the bible as allegorical.
The reason that Creationism papers tend to be rejected from science journals is that they fail to rule out alternative explanations. It's lousy science to say "here are some data--they support my hypothesis." It is necessary to go to the next step, and demonstrate that alternate hypotheses that also explain the data can be ruled out. Sure, one can explain almost anything with a Creationist hypothesis, but doing so fails to rule out other possibilities, like evolution.
Can one level the same charge against papers that provide data that support evolution? Do they fail to consider the alternative hypothesis of creation? Probably they do...but there are two reasons that this isn't necessary to bring up. First, we can
never rule out the possibility that god created everything to look just as it does, or for that matter, that he did so yesterday, or 10 seconds ago. It is generally assumed that this is so obvious that everyone knows it. Second, the biblical version of creation, which includes the story of the Flood as an integral part,
has already been ruled out by virtue of demonstrating that the features of god's creation itself
fail to meet the predictions of the Flood Hypothesis. Once an explanation has been ruled out, there is generally no need to keep ruling it out year after year after year. That's why there are libraries--so we can look up the old data if we need to refresh our memories. So, because this explanation has already been ruled out, there is no need to bring it up again.
What makes this asymmetric situation exist is a few simple facts. First, scientists evaluate the work of their predecessors, and if it appears to remain valid, they don't go back and repeat the same work over and over. Similarly, if their predecessors Great Ideas have been discredited, and their review of the data indicates that said ideas are still invalid, then scientists go on to new things. That is, history counts. Creationists, on the other hand, don't go for the idea that "if it's been discredited already, it's still discredited." They also don't go for the idea that, if their competitors discredit one of their own ideas, then that idea really is discredited. Instead, their competitors' work is not valid, by definition. Therefore, it is fair to raise the same objections-to-evolution year after year after year, and pretend that these are somehow "surprises" that evolutionists don't know about, or don't want to tell anyone about.
The Happy Humanist wrote:First, the Nobel Prize, and others, are no part of science. As a scientist, I neither know nor care who is winning these awards. It's just a popularity contest.
And I'm sure all the Nobel Laureates agree with you.
Regardless, we do point to all the Nobel Laureates who sign declarations against Creationism and the like. I'm not comfortable with the fact that we may be pointing to a list of people who were hand-chosen for their rejection of Creationism to begin with.
Allow me to say this about that. I don't know the stories of all Nobel laureates, but I can speak to two of them: Barbara McClintock and Tom Cech. Barbara was decades ahead of her field, and drove most people bonkers with her "absurd" claims of "jumping genes." They never bothered to read her papers--which, I found, must actually be read in order, in a marathon of paper-reading, in order to make sense of them. Only when molecular biology caught up with her was it clear that she'd been right for decades. The vote was more one of embarrassment at not recognizing her sooner than "popularity."
Tom was just a damn good chemist. He chose a particular organism to study, because the phenomenon he was investigating (formation of hairpin structures in DNA) was most accessible in that organism. That led to asking another type of question using the same organism, again because it was a good "model system" in which to study the process (RNA splicing). It turned out to be hard to isolate the starting material (unspliced RNA), so he cloned it into E. coli...and it still spliced, even though coli has none of the enzymes. This led to the insight that RNA might be enzymatically active, and that this RNA might be a self-splicing RNA enzyme. Tom's lab did the chemistry carefully enough to prove this. It didn't take long for other labs to discover that the same thing happened in their systems, or for a huge amount of previously-unknown RNA chemistry be discovered. Tom's a great guy, but I wouldn't have said that, at that time, he was tremendously popular--but he did do some science that dramatically altered the field of biology.
It also led to the concept of the "RNA world," a candidate for one of the early stages of pre-life. Creationists like to imagine that protein synthesis is so complicated that it could never have popped into existence in some "abiogenetic" way. Fine. There's no reason to think that it did. There was a prior stage of life, in which proteins were irrelevant, and all of the work was self-replicating RNAs with RNA enzymes that manipulated other RNAs that did more of the chemistry of the primitive cells. One catalytic RNA happened to be able to glue amino acids together...and became the ribosome.
But I digress.
The point is: these people weren't chosen by the Nobel committee because they were anti-creationists. They were chosen because they'd made discoveries that knocked peoples' socks off. Their views on evolution were irrelevant to that decision. That they accept evolution simply attests to the fact that, if one looks at all of the data, it's pretty clear.
But none of the above addresses the main question of the thread. It's been my understanding that a "Creation Scientist" is someone who performs experiments to test the Creation hypothesis--or, as it's usually phrased, someone who attempts to use scientific methods to prove the truth of Genesis. That they have published nothing that does so suggests that there may be a reason that Genesis is hard to prove.
