I’m not Darwin-only; I’m science-only.

Do modern “Darwinists” deny this? Seems like a big, so what. Scientists have learned stuff since Darwin.

Now the white flag tails can be explained by a type of intelligent design, by an overall balance design to nature.

The lady is right guys, you just use big words. Your tongues are as doubled edged swords. They spoke of you in the bible.

Haaaaa Haaaaaa Haaaaaa

Actually, if she were not a Creationist, she might have continued to do real science instead of teaching homeschooled kids. We might’ve see some more papers from her.

As it is, at the Biologic Institute, even if she does good experiments, she will interpret them through Bible-colored glasses. That is very sad.

The willingness to examine one’s precommitments has to come from within. Without that, they are up against Morton’s Demon.

Thus was born the realization that there is a dangerous demon on the loose. When I was a YEC, I had a demon that did similar things for me that Maxwell’s demon did for thermodynamics. Morton’s demon was a demon who sat at the gate of my sensory input apparatus and if and when he saw supportive evidence coming in, he opened the gate. But if he saw contradictory data coming in, he closed the gate. In this way, the demon allowed me to believe that I was right and to avoid any nasty contradictory data. Fortunately, I eventually realized that the demon was there and began to open the gate when he wasn’t looking.

However, my conversations have made me aware that each YEC is a victim of my demon. Morton’s demon makes it possible for a person to have his own set of private facts which others are not privy to, allowing the YEC to construct a theory which is perfectly supported by the facts which the demon lets through the gate. And since these are the only facts known to the victim, he feels in his heart that he has explained everything. Indeed, the demon makes people feel morally superior and more knowledgeable than others.

The demon makes its victim feel very comfortable as there is no contradictory data in view. The demon is better than a set of rose colored glasses. The demon’s victim does not understand why everyone else doesn’t fall down and accept the victim’s views. After all, the world is thought to be as the victim sees it and the demon doesn’t let through the gate the knowledge that others don’t see the same thing. Because of this, the victim assumes that everyone else is biased, or holding those views so that they can keep their job, or, in an even more devious attack by my demon, they think that their opponents are actually demon possessed themselves or sons of Satan. This is a devious demon!

To me this is the saddest part of the article. It’s bad enough that secular universities are awarding PhD’s in science to creationists, but that Ivy League schools are participating in this lowering of standards is shameful. First Kurt Wise, now this woman. I mean, let’s just give Ray Comfort a doctorate in Theology while we’re at it.

A while back, I was wondering about neutral drift, and wrote a program that simulated a population with two absolutely equal alleles of a gene. That is, neither allele conferred any advantage or disadvantage upon the organism, and both were equally likely to be passed on to the next generation. I was surprised to find that in smaller populations, one of the alleles will often take over. See here for more details and colorful graphs.

You can also do this exercise in Avida-ED with colorful results.

This is a simple result of a shared illogic in the religious community. It was expressed explicitly in several lawsuits: McLean v. Arkansas (1982), Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), and Kitzmiller v. DASD (2005). The basic argument runs like this:

Evolutionists commonly criticize creationists for picking faults with evolution instead of letting the creation model stand on its own merit. What they do not understand is that there are only two models of origins. If life did not evolve, then it was created. Therefore evidence against evolution is evidence for creation, and evidence against creation is evidence for evolution.

The extent to which this erroneous mode of thinking goes contributed to Judge Jones’ comment about “breathtaking inanity” in the antievolution case that was presented to him.

“Intelligent design” creationism still relies upon this “two model” approach, though they now often simply present a public front of wanting to pick at what they consider “weaknesses” in the evidence for evolutionary science, believing that the cultural spread of the “two model” meme will lead students to choose creation/design if evolutionary science is perceived as being less tenable. The “weaknesses”, though, are either opportunistic critiques of current research or are readily seen to be from the same ensemble of criticisms made by explicitly religious antievolutionists in the past.

Gauger’s “cdesign propenentsists” argumentation is easily seen to fit the “two model” approach inherited from the “creation scientists”.

Sir Ronald Fisher produced a calculation giving a figure for the likelihood that a new beneficial allele would be lost from a population. That gave about an 85% chance of loss in the first 15 generations, and was relatively independent of the strength of selection, IIRC.

Small populations really do make it harder for selection to have an effect, and drift will be the more frequent mode of change, increasingly so as the effective population size decreases.