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First, let me thank you for a well written and respectful response. Jonathan King wrote: The ICR themselves give several answers to this. First, its far from a complete list but rather just a list of those directly involved with the ICR. (See below for notes on the deceased.) Furthermore, there are so many individuals like Mike in the scientific fields that immediately discount a person that professes belief in something other than evolution. For this reason, some individuals are likely to keep this belief to themselves or at least not advertise it. Look at me - I just wanted someone to acknowledge that Christianity exists and it has resulted in a list of personal insults from one evolutionist. Imagine the harassment if I made a career of it!OK, so I don't really have time to follow everything on a thead like this, but... On 1/5/06, Josh <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:Here is a list of general scientists who support creationism: http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action=""> And here is a list of just biologists: http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action="">OK, so I have to point out that the list of biologists is really, really, *really* uncompelling. If this is the best that the ICR can do, then the conclusion that 99.9% of all biological scientists support evolution is wrong; the figure would be more like 99.995% of all biological scientists support evolution. How do I conclude this? Well... 1) This is a really short list. When you have a short list of people supporting a cause, and you want this list to be as impressive as possible, you want to make sure there are some very distinguished people on the list. People who do things like: win Nobel Prizes, get elected to the National Academy of Sciences, occupy endowed chairs in top departments at top schools, that sort of thing. This list is very, very thin in that sort of person. Or, to put it another way, I could construct the list that matches this list person-for-person (all 42) and guarantee that I could find people who were all PhDs, and who had all won either the Nobel Prize or the Lasker Prize and professed belief in evolution. If you're making an appeal to authority (which is what this list is trying to do), it's not good if 100% of the best authorities are against you. As to the credentials, you're right that the credentials listed aren't necessarily stellar. The explanations for this could range from the ICR's limited funding to pay the salaries more prominent members of the community demand to the fact that the scientific community shuns those who profess faith in something other than evolution - something which makes a rise to prominence difficult. Another part of the problem could be that many scientific organizations themselves are institutionally pro-evolution and show that in their selection process. As far as the references to the nobel prize - its a joke. I wrote off their opinions the moment they gave a known terrorist (arafat) and a former-president who many consider a traitor (carter) the nod. Also, the stated purpose of the list is to respond to critics who say "name one legitimate scientist who supports creationism." The evolutionists have done a great job of spreading the FUD that no legitimate scientists do, so lists like this become necessary. It all comes down to who you trust to determine authority. Consider that the modern scientific community is dogmatic in its belief in evolution and becoming an authority with other beliefs is considerably more challenging.2) The credentials touted for these people are pretty weak. One of them, for example, is actually dead (Richard D. Lumsden). The problem with including dead people on a list like this should be self-evident, I think. In other cases, people are lauded for being members of organizations like the Society for Neuroscience (e.g., David DeWitt). The problem with that is two-fold. First, if you polled the members of SFN, you would find that 99.99+% of them believe in evolution. Second, almost anybody can become a member of a professional society, especially SFN. After you first enter the society (and you do need 2 members to sponsor you), all you need to do is continue to breathe and pay the annual dues. Now, it would be one thing if DeWitt were a prominent member of the society or something (say he had a leadership role), but he isn't. For every guy like him in SFN, there are (probably literally) thousands who hold the opposite point of view, and hundreds who have had more important scientific careers. Also, it's not nice to make fun of people's academic affiliations, but being (say) an adjunct professor at a small college in Tennessee that nobody has ever heard of is not a leading sign that the person is important in the field. Again, an appeal to authority is only interesting if the authorities are the kind of people who make you go, "hmm...that's not too shabby". There are individuals who work in those fields, but evolution is not just based on molecular genetics. Its supposedly based on a wide variety of sciences. Biology cannot exist in a vacuum.3) A lot of the people on this list would have professional expertise in areas that are only quite tangentially related to evolution. In other words: they could be wonderful people and good scientists, but it wouldn't mean much (to me) unless they had done substantive work to confront the theory they oppose. So I have a PhD, and maybe I'm not too crazy about the consensus opinion about the role of the amygdala in the generation of emotional states; the problem is, of course, that my opinions need not be that well-informed on this topic, since it has nothing much to do with things I actually do. So in this case, I would like to see lots of people who work in fields like molecular genetics or bioinformatics or something where evolution is absolutely crucial. The problem is, I don't see those people. Here are the closest matches: One could only make the "all but..." statement if they had accurate statistics on the beliefs of scientists throughout the world. The current climate makes gathering those statistics accurately difficult. Plus, I don't believe that those not holding advanced degrees (which includes me at the moment) should be discounted simply for that one reason. Looking at the general population, the statistics are much more in favor of creationism...which is interesting since our public schools indoctrinate kids with evolution nowadays.Daniel Criswell (MolBio from Montana) Todd C. Wood (PostDoc in Genomics) Ian G. Macreadie (MolBio from Monash) Andre Eggen (Molecular Genetics) Lane Lester (Genetics) Arthur Jones (Developmental Biology, Birmingham) Of these people Jones would appear to believe in evolution, since his field of interest is on speciation in fish. Dunno about the others. I think the most interesting of this bunch is Wood, who did a (brief) post-doc in bioinformatics in 2000. The number of bioinformatics people who don't believe in evolution must be vanishingly small, since evolution is *the* organizing idea of a lot of this work. Sure enough, he has a bunch of creationist publications, but none that really seem to have any empirical/data content about sequence data, which is what you'd like to see. So this is what I see. This is a list of people in biology-related fields who are creationists. Of the 41 living people on the list, 27 have PhDs. Of those, 6 have PhDs in fields where I would think it is quite surprising to find creationists. None of these people are prominent in the field. If this is the best that the ICR can do, I'm quite underwhelmed. This is (literally) a handful of people among (literally) hundreds of thousands of people world-wide with the same basic qualifications. If somebody made the statement "all molecular biologists believe in evolution", you could presumably refute it by pointing out these people. But if the alternative statement would then become "all of the 100,000 people having PhDs in molecular biology or related fields believe in evolution except for these 6 people", I think you can see that the point is pretty weak. The point is weak if you look at that list as complete - but it is far from it. As for the deceased individual, there are a lot of possible explanations. Perhaps the page isn't properly updated, perhaps its placed there as a nod to his work, etc.. hard to say, but the motives may not be sinister. jking _______________________________________________ discussion mailing list EMAIL:PROTECTED http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion |
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