Well the reason we do not readily accept ID because the evidence for it is flimsy to non existent, and proponents of ID have yet to publish or peer review a single scientific document on the subject. You claim there are experts in the field that support ID, and I am sure there are some, since the discovery institute loves to strut those scientists around as a posterchild.
As other postings from you have shown, you are more prone to take arguments at face value. By applying the skepticism as used in the scientific method you will see that arguments from a single source do not carry much weight with us. It is one of the cool failsafes of science, it protects it from scientists.
PZ Meyers Wrote:Scientists are human beings, too, and we all have our personal quirks and failures to think rationally. You will always be able find some small fraction of the population of scientists who believe in some wacky thing, whether it is UFOs, bigfoot, or that ST:TNG is better than ST:TOS. It is nothing but background noise. Finding that I have an irrational infatuation with cephalopods does not mean that squid-loving is scientific.
Here's another example: Kary Mullis. He won the Nobel Prize! He invented PCR, which even laypeople know is some extremely cool DNA technology that they use all the time on CSI!
At the same time, he's an HIV denier (and coauthored papers with the Discovery Institute's Philip Johnson, no less). I know, I know, many of the same crackpots who love Intelligent Design creationism will think that's a point in his favor, but how about this: he's also an astrologer. He believes the stars influence everyone's destiny. And astrologers do exactly what the Discovery Institute does, and claim validation by listing the 'scientists' who support their ideas. (You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that there are just as many scientists out there who think there is something to astrology, as there are those who think Intelligent Design creationism is Da Bomb. I've seen polls that show over half the population believe astrology works. Shall we start teaching it in the schools?)
Mullis wrote an autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, that is depressing in how it reveals the poor understanding of science held by an actual Nobel Prize winner. He has a chapter on his personal discovery of the validity of astrology. He ran through a whole heap of astrological descriptors from his birthdate. Some fit, some didn't (no surprise there). He then filtered those assessments, picking the ones that fit best, and announced that the astrological factors behind the good predictions were correct, while the others were invalid.
Methodologically, it was a disgraceful example of blatant selection bias, and cherry-picking the data to his hypothesis. It was very, very bad science. I literally cringed on reading it, it was so embarrassingly stupid. He even ended the chapter by saying that he really hadn't needed to write an abutobiography—all he needed to do was publish his birth data, and everything else was derivable.
It just goes to show that finding a few scientists, even prominent scientists, who believe in something doesn't make it so. That Argument from Miniscule Fraction of Authority of which the Discovery Institute is so fond is utterly bogus. Science rests on replicable experiment and observable evidence, not the credentials of one or four hundred or even ten million scientists.
As other postings from you have shown, you are more prone to take arguments at face value. By applying the skepticism as used in the scientific method you will see that arguments from a single source do not carry much weight with us. It is one of the cool failsafes of science, it protects it from scientists.
Best regards,
Leo van Miert
Horsepower is how hard you hit the wall --Torque is how far you take the wall with you
Leo van Miert
Horsepower is how hard you hit the wall --Torque is how far you take the wall with you
