From: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Subject: Re: Ideology and Indoctrination
Reply-To: danwell@IASTATE.EDU (Daniel A Ashlock)
Organization: Iowa State University
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 21:20:51 GMT

In article <1k0tpu$5mp@agate.berkeley.edu>, philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu
(Phillip Johnson) writes:
> Chris Colby complains that Darwin on Trial reports that
> biologists have been hiding things from the public.   Why not,
> when leading figures have admitted as much on behalf of their
> profession?  It is not I but Stephen Jay Gould who described the
> prevalence of stasis and sudden appearance in the fossil record
> as the "trade secret" of paleontology.  Stephen Stanley has
> written that the doubts of paleontologists about the conformity
> of the fossil record with Darwinist gradualism were for long
> "suppressed."  Most revealing of all, Niles Eldredge confessed in
> print that "We paleontologists have said that the history of life
> supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while 
> really knowing that it does not."  That is a smoking gun indeed.

   No smoking gun at all.  If the Washington Post had broken the story
it would be a smoking gun but it wasn't.  It was the researchers 
themselves.  As I understand it the current theory acknowledges these 
sudden changes and is trying to figure out how important they are.
Also keep in mind what "sudden" means in the context; merely tens of
millenia instead of megayears.
 
> We owe these candid statements to the frustration of
> paleontologists with the Darwinian ideology that required reports
> of stasis to go unpublished.  [For Gould's frank acknowledgement
> of this and other references see Darwin on Trial, pp. 59-61 and
> the research notes to chapter 4.]

   They are being published now and being incorporated into the neodarwinian
theory.  For that matter I can personally confirm them because these sudden
changes occur in my computer simulations of evolution.  Far from showing
Darwinism is in crisis this shows the theory is changing to fit new ideas as
they gain acceptence.  You're confusing a conspiracy of supression with the
natural conservatism needed to fend off nuts.  Examples would be superflous in
this forum.

> We also owe them to the
> assumption of the writers that the rulers of "science" are not
> accountable to the public for what they do.   Dr. Gallo and Dr.
> Baltimore made similar assumptions in believing that they were
> beyond accountability.

   That's just plain not true.  Baltimore has a subordinate who lied
and falsified data; he didn't believe she did it: at no time did he act
as if he was not accountable and he was in fact held accountable.  You've
aluded to Science magazine before.  The whole controversy was chronicled in
there.  Where on earth do you see evidence that Baltimore did not think he was
accountable?

   Also you've got an analogic fallacy here.  Gallo, near as I can tell, is a
crook.  This has no effect on the reality of the HIV virus, the discovery he
misappropriated.

> As more of these instances of scientific
> arrogance come to light, the public becomes become more aware 
> that scientists are as corruptible as members of other
> professions.

   Yes but this is an incorrect impression.  Since people check more in Science
there is less room for corruption.  You have anecdotal (though correct)
evidence
of the corruptability of scientists.  You do not have quantatative data.  The
people aren't any better but the system is.  Look, for example, at the number of
lawyers cited for misconduct as compared to scientists last year (I have no idea
how it will come out) and tell us what happens. 
  
>  This is particularly the case when science
> becomes mixed with ideology, money and power.

   Agreed.  The government has abdicated it's responsability to finance basic
research and a lot of corrupting money is coming into science in the form of
corporate sposorship or research done by stockholding scientists.  It give more
motives to be dishonest.
 
> I wrote in another thread that dogmatic Darwinists should
> practice seeing themselves as others see them.  What I meant is
> that many outsiders see them not as the pure truth-seekers they
> claim to be, but as ideologues similar to their close cousins in
> the family of scientific materialist ideology,  the Marxists and
> the Freudians.

   I see your point _but_ evolutionary biologists (what the heck is a
Darwinist?) are quantatative while fruedians and Marxists are not.  Marxisim
makes few verifiable claims evolutionary theory makes many.  If the public
cannot see this difference as important then there is certianly a lot of
educating that needs to be done.

> The problem is not so much that Darwinists tell
> deliberate untruths as that they believe their own propaganda,
> and interpret everything they see as confirming the ideology that
> controls their own thinking.

   This is patently untrue and you are aware it is untrue OR you are railing
against a non-existant group.  Was it not the famous evolutionary biologist
Steven J. Gould who attacked and overturned the "ideology" in question a
few paragraphs back?  Again: what is a Darwinist?
 
> An excellent example is the standard Darwinist delusion that the
> peppered moth example illustrates "evolution" in any non-trivial
> sense.  That this unremarkable instance of population shifts has
> anything to do with the great creative process that produced
> moths and trees and scientific observers in the first place is so
> absurd to any unprejudiced mind that my lecture audiences
> consistently laugh when I explain it to them.  Many Darwinists
> throw the peppered moth overboard, like Thomas Jukes writing in
> response to me in First Things:  "Johnson's opening discussion
> incorrectly states that 'the most famous piece of evidence for
> Darwinism is a study of an English peppered-moth population....'
> He uses the peppered-moth example three times.  The phenomenon
> shows fluctuations of populations rather than evolution, and even
> creationists have pointed this out." Indeed.

   Evolution _is_ fluctuations of allele frequency in populations.  You are
turning a difference in degree into a diference in kind.
 
> Even the California science framework, itself a piece of
> naturalistic propaganda, no long presents the moth example as an
> illustration of directional or creative change:
> 
> "Students should understand that this is not an example of
> evolutionary change from light to dark to light moths, because 
> both kinds were already in the population.  It is an example of 
> natural selection, but in two senses.  First, temporary
> conditions in the environment encouraged selection against dark
> moths and then against light moths.  But, second, and just as
> important, is the selection to maintain a balance of both black
> and white forms, which are adaptable to a variety of
> environmental circumstances.  This balanced selection increases
> the chances for survival of the species.  This is in many ways
> the most interesting feature of the evolution of the peppered
> moth, but it is often misrepresented in textbooks."  [P. 103]

   You badly need to state a definition of "evolution".  You current one
appears to be "that which does not happen".  
 
> That frequent misrepresentation occurred, of course, because 
> cyclical variation

   The industrial revolution was a cyclical variation?  Are you a 
Toynbean?

> within a fundamentally stable and unchanging
> situation is not what Darwinists need to show.  They are trying
> to tell a creation story for a culture, and for that purpose the
> moth example has to illustrate the kind of change that eventually
> makes a butterfly from a bacterium.
> 
> Darwinist indoctrination makes its victims incapable of
> understanding that the fundamental problem of biological
> evolution, or creation, is not diversity within the type but the
> origin of complexity.

   Bzzzzzttttt.  Flaw alert.  This is another version of the "too improbable
to have happened argument".

> It is pathetic to see advanced biology
> students (or faculty members) say that natural selection does not
> have to be "the least bit creative" to be "the primary mechanism
> responsible for bringing about, from a single common ancestor,
> all of the species on earth  and their phenotypic features." 
> That isn't even reasonable by the standards of Darwinist
> literature, where the creative power of natural selection is
> often extolled hyperbolically.  As Richard Dawkins puts it,
> a single cell has more genetic information than all the volumes
> of an encyclopedia.  If you don't understand that explaining the
> origin of all that information presents a serious problem,
> it is probably because indoctrination in the notion
> that population fluctuation in the peppered moth is the paradigm
> example of evolution in action has a tendency to cloud the mind.

   The origin of the information is in the interaction between the survival
filter and the essentialy random proess of mutation.  This more than suffices
as an origin for the complexity.  John Miller's model given in "The Coevolution
of Finite Automata in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma" gives an example of
remarkable complexity arising from randomness by purely Darwinian means.
 
> I recognize that this frank talk will cause offense.  My purpose
> is not to insult anyone, however, but to free minds.  Many of you
> have been indoctrinated not to question assumptions that are
> based on ideology rather than evidence.  You can be free of that
> indoctrination if you wish to be.

   I'm offended because I wasn't indoctrinated.  I'm a mathemetician and I have
personally, independently verified the broad outlines of the neodarwinian
hypothisis in sillicon and magnetism.  There is no problem with the production
of complexity - complexity is not a conserved quantity and any complex system
that can store and replicate information can generate complexity at a
remarkable
rate.  Complexity is cheap and easy.  If it matters this is a consequence of
information theory NOT biology.

Dan
Danwell@IASTATE.EDU