What has creationism ever done for us?

[MagusYanam]

My question is simply this: in light of the fact that Darwin's model of biological evolution has contributed vastly to our understanding of genetics and has advanced beyond question the fields of agriculture, medicine, environmental ecology, palaeontology and thus geology, what has the creation model done to further man's more noble pursuits? Exactly what purpose is it serving? In other words, where is the utility in creationism and how is it supposed to better our lot in the universe?

[Bart007]

"None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false."

I was answering a question on imposed censorship on Creationary science articles by evolutionists. Nevertheless, since it has nothing to do with the scientific evidence relating to darwinism

It wasn't meant to demonstrate Darwinism is false, and since it does not deal with that, I am not going to waste anymore time on it. Your minds are made up and it is only going to come down to "he said, she said" type of useless discussion. In my view, many evolutionists are more bigoted than they imagine themselves to be, level of education notwithstanding.

Stephen Meyers paper was peered review by three independant scientists who approved it for publication. When it was discovered by dogmatic evolutionists that a paper on ID by a Creationist got published, they viciously and unethically attacked those responsible, casting aside any and all decor of being educated fairminded people. Their true colors showed. The US Office of Special counsel that no wrong was done in publishing the article on ID, but great harm was done to Sternberg by his attackers angry at the publication of the IDArticle in a peer reviewed science journal.

August 16, 2005, 8:26 a.m.
Unintelligent Design
Hostility toward religious believers at the nation’s museum.

By David Klinghoffer

The Smithsonian Institution is a national treasure of which every American can legitimately feel a sense of personal ownership. Considering this, I'd imagine widespread displeasure as more Americans become aware that senior scientists at the publicly funded Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History have reportedly been creating a "hostile work environment" for one of their colleagues merely because he published a controversial idea in a biology journal.

The controversial idea is Intelligent Design, the scientific critique of neo-Darwinism. The persecuted Smithsonian scientist is Richard von Sternberg, the holder of two PhDs in biology (one in theoretical biology, the other in molecular evolution). While the Smithsonian disputes the case, Sternberg's version has so far been substantiated in an investigation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an independent federal agency.

A lengthy and detailed letter from OSC attorney James McVay, dated August 5, 2005, and addressed to Sternberg, summarizes the government's findings, based largely on e-mail traffic among top Smithsonian scientists. A particularly damning passage in the OSC letter reads:

Our preliminary investigation indicates that retaliation [against Sternberg by his colleagues] came in many forms. It came in the form of attempts to change your working conditions...During the process you were personally investigated and your professional competence was attacked. Misinformation was disseminated throughout the SI [Smithsonian Institution] and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false. It is also clear that a hostile work environment was created with the ultimate goal of forcing you out of the SI.
Meanwhile, on the basis of the "misinformation" directed against him, Sternberg's career prospects were being ruined.

Offensive Proceedings

What exactly was his offense? Some background is in order. In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, I reported the story of how Sternberg, a Smithsonian research associate, suffered as a result of his editing a technical peer-reviewed biology journal, The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

The journal is housed at the Smithsonian, though it's nominally independent. For his part, formally, Sternberg is employed by the National Institute of Health, though his agreement with his employer stipulates that he may spend 50 percent of his time working at the Smithsonian. So when the August 2004 issue of the Proceedings appeared, under Sternberg's editorship, Sternberg's managers at the Smithsonian took a keen interest in a particular article — the first paper laying out the evidence for ID to be published in a peer-reviewed technical journal.

The article was "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," by Stephen Meyer, a Cambridge University PhD in the philosophy of biology. He's currently a senior fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute. In the essay, Meyer reviewed the work of scientists around the world — at places like Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, and the University of Chicago — who have cast doubt on whether Darwinian evolution can explain the sudden infusion of genetic "information" and the resulting explosion of between 19 and 34 new animal phyla (body plans) about 530 million years ago — the Cambrian Explosion. Meyer argued that perhaps an unidentified designing intelligence played a role in the event.

No Way to Treat a "Respected Scientist"

However strong you think the argument is for Intelligent Design — and I'm no scientist — most reasonable people would agree that an ID theoretician should, without fear of retaliation, be allowed to state his case for the consideration of fellow scientists. This was the view held by Sternberg, who isn't himself an advocate of ID. However, according to the OSC's investigation, when the Meyer article was published, Sternberg's managers were outraged and a number of them sought a strategy that would make him pay.

Writes the OSC's McVay: "Within two weeks of receiving the Meyer article in the Proceedings, four managers at the SI and NMNH [National Museum of Natural History] expressed their desire to have your access to the SI denied." A typical internal e-mail on the subject fumed, "I hope we are not even considering extending his access to space." (All quotations from e-mails given here are taken from the OSC's letter to Sternberg.) Another expresses frustration that a good pretext for dismissing him had so far not been identified: "As he hasn't (yet) been discovered to have done anything wrong,... the sole reason to terminate his appt seems to be that the host unit has suddenly changed its mind. If that's OK w/NMNH, let me know and I'll send him a letter stating so." One manager huffed, "Well, if you ask me, a face-to-face meeting or at least a 'you are welcome to leave or resign' call with this individual is in order." The same e-mail indicated that a manager had been compiling trivial offenses by Sternberg that could be cited in telling him to get out. Among other things, the Smithsonian staffer had gone over Sternberg's library records. He "has currently 50 books checked out from the SI library (I checked this with the library)."

One bright idea was to tear apart the traditional veil of secrecy concerning the identities of the scientists ("peers") who had reviewed and approved Meyer's article before publication. The "serious effort" to do this, as the OSC document relates, would represent an unprecedented and unethical act within your [Sternberg's] field. They also assumed that you [Sternberg] violated editorial regulations of the Proceedings because you were the primary editor of the article. These comments were made to and by SI and NMNH managers and were published to several outside organizations. It was later revealed that you complied with all editorial requirements of the Proceedings and that the Meyer article was properly peer reviewed by renowned scientists. As an aside, the information received by OSC does not indicate that any effort was made to recall or correct these comments once the truth was made known.

One disturbing element in the affair concerns Sternberg's allegations that his supervisor, Zoology Department chairman Jonathan Coddington, called around the museum to check out Sternberg's religious and political affiliations. After I wrote about this in Wall Street Journal, Coddington, who had repeatedly ignored my telephone calls asking for his side of the story, responded on a favorite website of Darwinists.

Coddington wrote: "As for prejudice on the basis of beliefs or opinions, I repeated and consistently emphasized to staff...that private beliefs and/or controversial editorial decisions were irrelevant in the workplace...that [Sternberg] was an established and respected scientist, and that he would at all times be treated as such."

The OSC investigation directly contradicts this: "...at the same time many other actions were taken during the uproar over the Meyer article, your [Sternberg's] supervisor was questioning your friends about your personal political and religious background."

The investigation also contradicts Coddington's assertion that no actions were ever taken against Sternberg: "At no time did anyone deny him [research] space, keys, or access." According to the OSC, "they denied your access by taking your master key." The museum "prevented you from having the same access to the research specimens," access "given to others [who] do not have the same hindrances."


No Culture of Truth

Whether, in the end, Sternberg's legal rights were violated remains unclear. Owing to what the OSC's McVay describes as a "complicated jurisdictional puzzle," it turns out that because Sternberg is employed by the National Institute of Health he is "effectively remove[d]..from the protections granted under the auspices of OSC." So the OSC investigation is being closed.

Whether or not Sternberg's Smithsonian managers broke the law, the OSC's preliminary investigation certainly opens a window on the culture of the Smithsonian, a venerated institution where the unfettered search for truth is supposed to be the rule, and where, one also hopes, the people who fund that search would be respected.

And yet, quite apart from Sternberg's treatment, the e-mail traffic at the Smithsonian gives ample evidence not of respect for ordinary Americans but of contempt, especially if those Americans are religious believers. One senior SI staffer commented ruefully about the Meyer article in an e-mail quoted in the OCS document: "We are evolutionary biologists, and I am sorry to see us made into the laughing stock of the world [by publishing Meyer's article criticizing Darwinian theory], even if this kind of rubbish [that is, Intelligent Design] sells well in backwoods USA." One e-mail generously granted, "Scientists have been perfectly willing to let these people alone in their churches." Another from a scientist at the museum told of how, after "spending 4.5 years in the Bible Belt," the writer had learned how to deal with religious Christians. For example, he described the "fun we had" when "my son refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because of the 'under dog' [meaning presumably the 'under God'] part."

The Smithsonian is indeed a treasure, beloved by millions of Americans who visit it from across the country. How sad that some of the scientists who work there feel this way about the people who pay their salaries. Whether that observation is more or less troubling than the way the same scientists apparently feel about the search for truth is a question every taxpayer will have to decide for himself.

[Bart007]

He said he was allowed to report his finding without mentioning the negative impact it had on evolution theory. He said his colleagues whoe read the report may pick up on it, but the public and lay people would pick it up if they read the published article.

Please give us the citation information for this paper. I very much want to read it.

DanZ

I can't. It will reveal who he is etc.

[Bart007]

Just post a page/post and make thirty posts, this is the best stuff come down the pike since I been here.

The best stuff you've seen posted here is a long list of irrelevant material If any of those papers were to actually reference creationist issues then we might be able to count them as support for creationism but with titles such as "Anti-hydrogen production with cold trapped plasmas" and "Electrical Resistivity and Thermopower of the Liquid Alloy MgZn" it makes the assumption that they are all relevant seem exceedingly unsafe. Still, if you want to stand by this as the cream of the crop then that's entirely up to you.

QED, Perhaps I misunderstood Chimp's point, I was thinking along the lines of what scientific contributions have creationary scientists made recently to the secular science journals. Most of the creationary science articles appear in the TECH JOURNAL & THE CRS QUARTERLY. These I read and find to be very informative. I read the Secular Journals as well, and not just with respect to evolution.

[Grumpy]

Bart007

The article was "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," by Stephen Meyer, a Cambridge University PhD in the philosophy of biology. He's currently a senior fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute. In the essay, Meyer reviewed the work of scientists around the world — at places like Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, and the University of Chicago — who have cast doubt on whether Darwinian evolution can explain the sudden infusion of genetic "information" and the resulting explosion of between 19 and 34 new animal phyla (body plans) about 530 million years ago — the Cambrian Explosion. Meyer argued that perhaps an unidentified designing intelligence played a role in the event.

The reason a stink was raised in the scientific community was that Meyer's paper was a hack job filled with ommisions, distortions and outright falsehoods. He ignored research which directly falsified his conclusions and statements.

I would post his paper here but it is no longer available at the DI site(from embarisment, one would presume) nor at Meyers site(ditto).

Here is a critique(the beginning of the peer review process)

Meyer’s paper predictably follows the same pattern that has characterized “intelligent design” since its inception: deny the sufficiency of evolutionary processes to account for life’s history and diversity, then assert that an “intelligent designer” provides a better explanation. Although ID is discussed in the concluding section of the paper, there is no positive account of “intelligent design” presented, just as in all previous work on “intelligent design”. Just as a detective doesn’t have a case against someone without motive, means, and opportunity, ID doesn’t stand a scientific chance without some kind of model of what happened, how, and why. Only a reasonably detailed model could provide explanatory hypotheses that can be empirically tested. “An unknown intelligent designer did something, somewhere, somehow, for no apparent reason” is not a model.

Meyer’s paper, therefore, is almost entirely based on negative argument. He focuses upon the Cambrian explosion as an event he thinks that evolutionary biology is unable to account for. Meyer asserts that the Cambrian explosion represented an actual sudden origin of higher taxa; that these taxa (such as phyla) are “real” and not an artifact of human retrospective classification; and that morphological disparity coincides with phyletic categories. Meyer then argues that the origin of these phyla would require dramatic increases in biological “information,” namely new proteins and new genes (and some vaguer forms of “information” at higher levels of biological organization). He argues that genes/proteins are highly “complex” and “specified,” and that therefore the evolutionary origin of new genes is so improbable as to be effectively impossible. Meyer briefly considers and rejects several theories proposed within evolutionary biology that deal with macroevolutionary phenomena. Having rejected these, Meyer argues that ID is a better alternative explanation for the emergence of new taxa in the Cambrian explosion, based solely upon an analogy between “designs” in biology and the designs of human designers observed in everyday experience.

The mistakes and omissions in Meyer’s work are many and varied, and often layered on top of each other. Not every aspect of Meyer’s work can be addressed in this initial review, so we have chosen several of Meyer’s major claims to assess. Among these, we will take up the Cambrian explosion and its relation to paleontology and systematics. We will examine Meyer’s negative arguments concerning evolutionary theories and the origin of biological “information” in the form of genes.

Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry 2004/08/24: Meyer's Hopeless Monster

Much more here:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/200 ... ess_1.html

This hopelessly flawed paper had no business in a HS biology class term paper, much less in a legitement scientific journal.

The subject is not the problem, the exicution(quality) was.

Grumpy 8)

[jcrawford]

The Smithsonian is indeed a treasure, beloved by millions of Americans who visit it from across the country. How sad that some of the scientists who work there feel this way about the people who pay their salaries. Whether that observation is more or less troubling than the way the same scientists apparently feel about the search for truth is a question every taxpayer will have to decide for himself.[/b]

The Smithsonian Institute is a national disgrace. Their website depicts the first African people as originating from sub-human australopithicine apes.
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigi ... _tree.html

They debase, degrade and dehumanize the first African people on earth and then have the unmitigated gall to humanize African apes.

The First Humans: The Early Australopiths

By at least 4.4 million years ago in Africa, an apelike species had evolved that had two important traits, which distinguished it from other apes: (1) small canine (eye) teeth (next to the incisors, or front teeth) and (2) bipedalism--that is the ability to walk on two legs. Scientists commonly refer to these earliest human species as australopithecines, or australopiths for short.
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigi ... ncarta.htm

Every American who sympathizes with, and supports, what Martin Luther King tried to do for his country should defund Racial Darwinism in the Smithsonian Institute.

[Lotan]

I was answering a question on imposed censorship on Creationary science articles by evolutionists.

Yes, that was quite clear. But then you went on a rant...

I'm amazed how many papers are published that reference evolution and darwin when the their scietific paper had noting at all to do with either.

...supported by the Philip S. Skell article, which I also quoted (for fun). This is what prompted me to state...

I have no idea what you are trying to get at with the rest of your post.

Thank you for posting the David Klinghoffer article.
( I had to ask!)

Let's see who this fellow is...
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute...
Sounds like an impartial observer to me...
David Klinghoffer, a frequent contributor to National Review, often uses selective readings from rabbinical tradition to push neocon doctrine.
...fair-minded...
Mr. Klinghoffer...has argued that the Holocaust is God’s direct punishment for "our disobedience."
...and level-headed, too.

Thanks anyway, but I'll take Grumpy's word on this one.

One more thing though. You mentioned...

If you want to read articles by scientists on creation, you will have to go to their Science Journals. That is, if you wish to be informed on their science findings.

I'll ask again - Where does one obtain these "Science Journals"?

[Bart007]

The reason a stink was raised in the scientific community was that Meyer's paper was a hack job filled with ommisions, distortions and outright falsehoods. He ignored research which directly falsified his conclusions and statements.

I would post his paper here but it is no longer available at the DI site(from embarisment, one would presume) nor at Meyers site(ditto).

Here is a critique(the beginning of the peer review process)

Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry 2004/08/24: Meyer's Hopeless Monster

Much more here:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/200 ... ess_1.html

This hopelessly flawed paper had no business in a HS biology class term paper, much less in a legitement scientific journal.

The subject is not the problem, the exicution(quality) was.

Grumpy 8)

I have Meyers article but I have not read it.

I read the pandas thumb article awhile ago and it seemed to be simply a propaganda piece. I was not as pleased with it as you are. Criticism ought to done more scholarly and civil than that was.

I have great respect for the articles in the national review. It is a quality journal. The article contained the OSC findings. I checked on those findings and the possible discrepancy I came across is that Sternberg may have agreed to the new workstation he received, but that is very unclear. In any case, the article was peer reviewed by 3 scientists, it was shown and approved by at least one editor, Sternberg followed same procedures as he had for all other articles that was published in the pprior 3 years under his oversight, any complaints of the publishing of Meyer's article by the members of the evo community should have been directed solely at the content of that article and not at Sternberg, the scientists who performed the peer review, or any other personel of the Smithsonian.

Censorship is a dangerous game to play and/or approve.

[Bart007]

The First Humans: The Early Australopiths

By at least 4.4 million years ago in Africa, an apelike species had evolved that had two important traits, which distinguished it from other apes: (1) small canine (eye) teeth (next to the incisors, or front teeth) and (2) bipedalism--that is the ability to walk on two legs. Scientists commonly refer to these earliest human species as australopithecines, or australopiths for short.
http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigi ... ncarta.htm

Every American who sympathizes with, and supports, what Martin Luther King tried to do for his country should defund Racial Darwinism in the Smithsonian Institute.

Sorry Mr. Crawford. I do not share your discernment of the websites you have offered for your unique conclusions.

[Bart007]

I was answering a question on imposed censorship on Creationary science articles by evolutionists.

Yes, that was quite clear. But then you went on a rant....

Oh, did I. perhaps you can more clearly explain this rant I went on so I know exactly what you mean by rant? One definition of rant is "A rousing good time."

I'm amazed how many papers are published that reference evolution and darwin when the their scietific paper had noting at all to do with either.

...supported by the Philip S. Skell article, which I also quoted (for fun). This is what prompted me to state...

I have no idea what you are trying to get at with the rest of your post.

Thank you for posting the David Klinghoffer article.
( I had to ask!)

Yes, I have read some science papers that mentions 'evolution' or 'Darwinism' and the whole report has nothing to do with either, it is added gratuitously. So whe I read Klinghoffer's article, it just simply struck a chord.

It's late tonight, I'll look up how you may obtain the journals. I believe they are available only from the publisher's, that is how I obtain them.