One scientist I know something about expressed this thought beautifully. He wrote:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but it doesn’t know what it is. That it seems to me, is that attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws…”

The problems begin when some of the other children in the library after reading and studying a few of the books start announcing that they have figured it all out. You and I of course can see that even those these kids, are fairly bright, from the perspective of “the grand scheme of things” these kids don’t know squat.

So are these other kids stupid are just a little bit (maybe alot) more presumptuous about what they have learned? I would argue it is the latter.

The problem is when the presumption turns into arrogance. It’s compounded when such presumption and arrogance finds itself in a position of dominance and power. That's how you end up with self appointed gate keepers.

BTW the scientist that I quoted above was named Albert Einstein.

I can certainly understand your pessismism, JAD.

But scientists don’t fill those gaps in our knowledge with concrete. The material they use is spongy, porous, brittle, full of holes itself, it doesn’t fit the original gap very well, and tends to fall out when you turn your back to guard the gate. LOL When you attempt to fill (if you ever do) one of those gaps with a theory and positive experimental results you will quickly discover what every scientists knows–those gaps are in the theories and experiments! So don’t think you are going to fill all those gaps with anything that isn’t itself full of holes!

Does that sound even more discouraging? You bring the gloom and I’ll bring the doom. It gets even more discouraging!

A report published a few years ago about stupidity drew a bit of attention at the time. The researchers discovered that some people are so stupid they don’t even know they are stupid. Quite the opposite! They think they’re smart! (You know em, “gatekeepers.”) This is one of those scientific reports that informs you of what everyone already knew. LOL But it has to be done. Every scientist feels that way sometimes. How could I have been so stupid when I thought I was being so smart?!

But take courage. There are some stupid people who fully realize that they are stupid. I.e., all the rest of us. LOL So don’t allow yourself to be discouraged. Something I’ve tried to drive home in these discussions is that we are all in the same boat.

But to even begin to do science one has to precisely identify a problem and provide a possible solution and a way to test it. As I suggested above, I don’t think you guys are correctly identifying the problem. Or any problem! I don’t think you’re problem is gatekeepers. Not reductionism. Not materialism. Not the military-industrial complex. Not the Illuminati. Not even Darwinism! You are the problem. And you are the solution.

“…I believe some hesitate because they do not like their thoughts disturbed.”—Michael Faraday

But you aren’t one of those people are you?

You guys are risk-takers. I believe in you.

So stop moping, get up off your lazy ass, and get to work!

Sheesh! C'mon, guys!

“Reductionism is not the enemy of the design, IDers. If your theory (if you ever come up with one) approx the truth then it should be robust wrt reduction, analysis, i.e., taking things apart to see how they work. How they are designed. Unlike Neo-Darwinism.”

“Reductionism is not atheism, evolutionism, scientism, Darwinism, or what have you. It’s just taking things apart in the attempt to figure out how they work.”

A clock is made up of gears and springs and things. But a clock is more than gears and springs and things. A clock has a function– to measure time. A clock is more than the sum of it’s parts; it is a purposeful arrangement of its parts. Even the simplest living organism is staggeringly more complex than a clock. And, like a clock living organism have functions that are more than the sum of it’s parts.

Reductionism in its most extreme form sees living things as nothing more than a collection of parts.

Nobody represents this view better (or with more crassness) than the late Carl Sagan. In his book, Cosmos, he writes:

“ I am a collection of water, calcium, and the organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. Is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permit’s the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together.” (p105)

Well, at least in the final sentence, which seems more like an afterthought, I can find some common ground with Rabbi Carl. But this is exactly where ID parts company with “mainstream” science. ID focuses not on the collection of parts, but “the way in which they are put together.” This is more holistic approach than has been practiced by science for the last century.

So, the issue is not parts, or figuring out how the parts are put together but a matter of focus. Do we focus on the parts or the thing that exceeds the sum of its parts?

Is that what you were trying to say when you wrote?

Reductionism’s necessary complement in all science, natural and design, is synthesis: Putting the parts back together so that they work. (Damn! The very practice of science is so teleological! For want of a better word. LOL) Proving that you actually know how all the parts fit together and work. Even if it was purely by chance that you actually put all the parts together, etc.! That’s science! Design!

I would partially agree, again emphasizing that the focus of reductionism is on the parts. There are other approaches to science, including ID, which places its focus on the whole. After all, that is what we are really trying to understand, isn’t it?

“I have suggested to the IDers that they pursue that same tact: All I’ve ever required of you (IDers) is to reinterpret the very same set of facts from your own design-theoretic perspective. But you have no theory! All you’ve got are gaps in existing theory. That does not suffice for scientific purposes as you’ve been reminded innumerable times.

“What you need is a theory of design. Nothing less will suffice for science.

As I have written numerous time before, I am not member the ID is science crowd. (Furthermore, I’m not sure it can be, or ever will be science.) Nevertheless, in its present form I see ID playing a more useful role as a conceptual framework. In such a role it may help us not only in the questions we ask, but also in the way we actually do science.

For example, just above you wrote: “All you’ve got are gaps in existing theory.” But why are there gaps? And why do the gaps always seem to occur at the crucial junctions? Are there natural explanations that can close those gaps or are we missing something? I don’t necessarily mean that the something is some kind of intervening intelligence. The something else could be some unknown natural process. An ID conceptual framework at least allows one to ask those kinds of questions. Questions that the “gate keepers” for some reason don’t like.

Self-appointed gatekeepers of science inevitable get trampled in the rush of new discoveries. Their turf, that they so desperately and vainly attempt to protect, is fertile ground for science and is inevitably reclaimed by inquiring minds.

Science marches on, but not in a lockstep. Get in its way and you’ll be stepped on. The N-D’s thought attempted to put a stopper on science, by their theoretical dictums and it didn’t (never) worked. Their only success is by ex post facto admissions to their theory: Their theory, in name only, can admit just about any result by theoretical, interpretational, revision.

I have suggested to the IDers that they pursue that same tact: All I’ve ever required of you (IDers) is to reinterpret the very same set of facts from your own design-theoretic perspective. But you have no theory! All you’ve got are gaps in existing theory. That does not suffice for scientific purposes as you’ve been reminded innumerable times.

What you need is a theory of design. Nothing less will suffice for science.

Reductionism is not atheism, evolutionism, scientism, Darwinism, or what have you. It’s just taking things apart in the attempt to figure out how they work.
Reductionism’s necessary complement in all science, natural and design, is synthesis: Putting the parts back together so that they work. (Damn! The very practice of science is so teleological! For want of a better word. LOL) Proving that you actually know how all the parts fit together and work. Even if it was purely by chance that you actually put all the parts together, etc.! That’s science! Design!

According Eldredge it is the geneticists who occupy the “High Table of evolutionary discourse.” Historically he argues the geneticist have excluded the paleontologists, like himself, from participating in the discourse of the High Table.

In his book, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, he writes:

Naturalist’s take the existence of large-scale systems seriously. We are not loathe to write them off simply as epiphenomena of reproductive competition– especially entities like ecosystems, which lie squarely in the realm of economics (matter-energy transfer processes) and have nothing to do with reproductive biology in the first place.

That’s one major bone of contention, one way in which the ultra-Darwinians reveal a thoroughgoing reductionist stance. Ultra-Darwinians simply wave at large-scale systems, but only address the dynamics of gene-frequency changes as they see them, arising from competitive reproductive struggle…

Naturalists, in contrast, are attuned to the hierarchical structure of biological systems. They are convinced that there are processes relevant to understanding evolution that go on within each of these levels–from genes, right on up through populations species, and ecosystems.

I have already touched on a related aspect of ultra-Darwinian redutionism: the credo that extrapolation of generation-by-generation change under natural selection is all we need to consider when framing a theory of adaptive evolutionary change. But ultra-Darwinians are strangely silent about why adaptive change occurs when it does and why–for the most part during the history of a given species–adaptive change does not seem to occur. (p6)

In other words, in Eldredge’s opinion, those who occupy what he calls the “High Table” (those who control the research agenda’s) are addicted to a highly reductive way of thinking. This highly reductive way of thinking, according to Eldridge, has kept us from investigating some other important questions concerning evolution.

The point I have been trying to make, on numerous occasions, is that gradualistic reductionistic thinking can hinder science from exploring some very interesting and potentially important questions, because they don’t fit the “accepted dogma.”

I had to comment to this thread because of the wonderful irony of Joy posting about gatekeepers censoring opposing views, and then, just four hours later, there she is preventing dissent on her own thread.

Oh, I dunno. Googling those very terms yields 24,300 hits, not all of them from TT.

A lot of them are from uses of the Nintendo DS! Only two - both at TT - have the words together (as can be determined by using quotes).

The terms "Darwinian Orthodoxy" garner 595,000 hits.

Use quotes, and that drops to 5,900, and from a casual glance the majority of them by creationists and IDists.

Now Joy advocates not using quotes, while Raevmo advocates quotes, so the interesting question is what sites does Joy want to include, that Raevmo would not. We can find them using:
Darwinian Orthodoxy -"Darwinian Orthodoxy"

http://www.google.com/search?h...

Here is what Google abstracts from the first ten (my comments in square brackets):

To escape the noose of Darwin, orthodoxy must recognize evolution or plant itself in the impossible, the miraculous. The fundamentalist imagines that the

HOLLINGER / What is Darwinism? 81 Darwin's orthodox presuppositions enabled some orthodox Christians, in turn, to swallow his science whole.

The Rev'd Darwin Kirby, Jr, passed away yesterday in North Carolina. I received a call this morning from a lady in Houston — of all places — who was [absolutely nothing to do with Darwinism!]

On this, the New Atheists and orthodox believers are in agreement. ….. "Religion is so wasteful, so extravagant; and Darwinian selection habitually

Darwinism in the Classroom: Critiquing Orthodoxy and Surviving in the Current Environment at BiggerBooks.com - Robert D'agostino, 9781600420092, History

I might begin by stating that, if by evolution one is referring to the theories and teachings of Charles Darwin, the Orthodox Church surely does not

9 Oct 2007 … So it is no surprise that the orthodox Darwinian priesthood were careful in denouncing his heresy. Witness geographer Nick Matzke [Discovery Institute]

The role of the heretic is to threaten orthodoxy, whether or not the orthodoxy is false. Gould, after trying for a generation to scupper orthodox Darwinism

Among Darwinian psychologists, there is still disagreement in all these areas, and the currently dominant school of Darwinian psychology, … orthodoxy

In our century, Darwinism has triumphed as an orthodoxy, as a "rallying point of innumerable scientific, philosophical, and social movements [New age hippies]

One of these has nothing to do with Darwinism, several are talking about the relationship between Darwinism and Christian othodoxy. Are these really the sites Joy thinks should be included to support her claim?

Raevmo's the only person and/or pseud I've ever met who automatically includes the quotes in the search terms.

If you are searching for a phrase, it is wrong not to include quotes. What were you trying to prove, Joy? That NDS and orthodoxy are common words, or that NDS orthodoxy is a common phrase?

Conceptual inertia is part of human nature.