Darwin Was Right and Compact Magazine is Wrong

Ben and Stefan defend the thesis that, no actually, Intelligent Design is a crock of shit.
Read Ben's essay:
substack.com/h...
Read the Compact Article that Ben was responding to:
www.compactmag...
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[@RedShift323]

If this is swinging around again.
In my experience, the thing to remember is that creationist talking heads and thought leaders are almost always acting and talking in bad faith.

[@john-r-edge]

For this issue you really need people with a deeper familiarity with the science and the cultural/political shitshow. So Forrest Valkai, PZ Myers, Aron Ra, Professor Dave.
The history of this space important too - there are relatively recent decisions like Dover Vs Kitzmiller which fully blew away Intelligent Design.

[@bengreen171]

Professor Dave in particular has an impeccable deconstruction of the fake science claims, and the obvious religious apologism of the ID project.

[@mronyoutube4082]

I'm a fan of yours, but this show is terrible. I watched over a half an hour of this hoping to hear an argument, but instead all I got was banter, meandering interruptions, a lot of chest clearing and one or two intimations of systematic thought. I know you don't write this way and I'm posting this here sincerely. Please fix this bloated talk format and get to the point! When I compare it to William Lane Craig's podcasts, I'd actually much rather listen to those: I know that in a fairly short time I'll get a cogent, if crazy, presentation of his positions. I don't mean to be crass, but who wants to watch this kind of pass-the-bong dudes-at-home chit-chat?

[@humptydmt3439]

Great show

[@robertcarpenter8077]

Where biological evolution works by way of selection at the species level, cultural evolution works by way of selection at the group level. It is by way of cultural evolution that most human 'institutions' have formed, including language, law, money, markets, private property, and the price mechanism of supply and demand. The latter four incidentally are the crucial subsidiary components of 'capitalism' - the entrepreneur merely exploiting their presence, the 'capitalist' merely funding such entrepreneurial exploits.
Now interestingly - and 'isomorphically' - where 'intelligent design' tends to diminish the importance of selection at the species level with regard to biological evolution, so philosophy since Descartes diminishes the importance of selection at the group level with regard to cultural evolution. Philosophy can be said to have come up with its own version of 'intelligent design' as a substitute for the complex, distributed, collective, unintentional processes of cultural evolution.
This is the gravamen of 'I think therefore I am', the conceit that nothing in the realm of ideas can arise without intentional, deliberate, individual thought and action. This is seen in science by way of every 'discovery' attaching to an individual researcher. Western science rejects the notion of knowledge operating at a more dispersed, collective, unconscious, unintentional level - an operational level Foucault termed the 'episteme'. In consequence, scholarship in the West tends to be quite egocentric. Expression of ideas unfolds almost as a kind of battle among contending individuals rather than as a kind of collective, cooperative enterprise on a quest for understanding.

[@erikbjorke5851]

Wouldn’t just adhering to methodological naturalism rule out intelligent design, or am I missing something?

[@bandito_burrito]

Methodological naturalism assumes a naturalist ontology, i.e. laws of nature, and would get you the same results as Newton who assumed God existed and that nature conformed to his will

[@erikbjorke5851]

@@bandito_burrito methodological naturalism does not require metaphysical naturalism, it just requires only positing natural causes in forming hypotheses. It is agnostic regarding the supernatural.

[@Anthropomorphic]

I think some ID proponents have argued that the designer doesn't have to be supernatural. To use a niche example, the Raëlians are atheists who argue against the standard evolutionary model on the basis that they think we were intelligently designed by aliens.

[@fightthepowerman]

Yo this guy is definitely a vampire.

[@stefanbertram3097]

lol

[@josephjewell3260]

.

[@DavidCDrake]

Deep. 🤔

[@benzur3503]

The lack if explanation for mutation always bothered me in the theory. Its an open hole in the causal theory

[@garethmorley3430]

Darwin himself didn’t have an explanation but we certainly do now. To simplify a little, DNA copies very well but not perfectly. (This is a bit too simple because sexual reproduction itself also creates variation - and this is likely the reason it evolved.)

[@benzur3503]

@@garethmorley3430 i know about darwin’s and gregor mendel’s models, what bothers me is the lack of explanations for genetic mutation. Its a wheel of fortune inside a reasoned argument

[@garethmorley3430]

@@benzur3503 copying chromosomes is very tricky chemical engineering. So what really needs explanation is how it is done so well. There is no problem with explaining why it sometimes leads to errors. Errors are the default

[@benzur3503]

@@garethmorley3430 in describing it as engineering we are leaning towards it actually being a design by a thinking agent. The explanation is meant to be of a natural process agnostic to the purposes and capacities of a designer. Complex or simple.

[@garethmorley3430]

@@benzur3503 well, selection is a way of “designing” features if they have the effect of increasing the probability that the code for them will continue into the future. So over time the copying process, which itself is subject to selection, got better and better. But it never becomes *perfect* because engineering, whether intentional or the result of selection, never aims at perfection but just an acceptable level of error.