Maybe this will help you to understand in terms of your observation as it has been noted by cosmologists, and as it applies to cosmological ID:

Brandon Carter formalized the anthropic principle as, “a reaction against conscious and subconscious – anticentrist dogma”, that he called, “exagerated subserviance to the Copernican Principle”, which leads to absurdities by ideologically predispositioned scientists.

He was talking about counter-reactionism among scientists against old historical beliefs about geocentrism that causes them to automatically dismiss any relevance to features of the universe that also permit our existence, and this leads to equally absurd Copernican-(like) cosmological extensions, which do not agree with observation.

Carter’s example was as follows:

Unfortunately, there has been a strong and not always subconscious tendency to extend this to a most questionable dogma to the effect that our situation cannot be privileged in any sense. This dogma (which in its most extreme form led to the “perfect cosmological principle” on which the steady state theory was based) is clearly untenable, as was pointed out by Dicke (Nature 192, 440, 1961).
-Brandon Carter

It’s the same absurdly warped ideological slant, but by a different group of dogmatica “scientists”, in this case.

I don’t understand why so many “evolution scientists” absolutely lose their minds when something contradicts their beliefs (and until something is established as fact it is a belief). Maybe they’ve got a huge stake in God not existing? Don’t believe in Heaven, but still a little afraid of Hell? I don’t know. But it’s not very open-minded of them.

Thanks – I was not aware of this.

You should never “hate to do this” because this is the way science works: Somebody raises a hypothesis up the flagpole and somebody else comes up with more information and shoots it down. That’s life.

The presence of this morphology in both Australopithecus robustus and Australopithecus afarensis and its absence in modern humans has “cast doubt on the role of [Lucy] as a common ancestor.” Like a baton passed from runner to runner, the distinctive bone does the job of “eliminating the possibility that Lucy and her kind are Man’s direct ancestors.”
So what can be said about Lucy? “The specimen was only 1.1 meters tall, estimated to weigh 29 kilograms and look somewhat like a common chimpanzee.” Also, “the structure of Lucy’s mandibular ramus closely matches that of gorillas”, which was an unexpected find, because this does not fit the previous cladistic analyses of chimps, gorillas and humans.

Care to give an example of me “making things up again”? Or are you just “making that up”?

I hate to do this to you but here it is:

Gorilla-like anatomy on Australopithecus afarensis mandibles suggests Au. afarensis link to robust australopiths
Yoel Rak, Avishag Ginzburg, and Eli Geffen
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, April 17 2007, 104: 6568-6572, doi 10.1073/pnas.0606454104

Abstract: Mandibular ramus morphology on a recently discovered specimen of Australopithecus afarensis closely matches that of gorillas. This finding was unexpected given that chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans. Because modern humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and many other primates share a ramal morphology that differs from that of gorillas, the gorilla anatomy must represent a unique condition, and its appearance in fossil hominins must represent an independently derived morphology. This particular morphology appears also in Australopithecus robustus. The presence of the morphology in both the latter and Au. afarensis and its absence in modern humans cast doubt on the role of Au. afarensis as a modern human ancestor. The ramal anatomy of the earlier Ardipithecus ramidus is virtually that of a chimpanzee, corroborating the proposed phylogenetic scenario.

Like this pathetic excuse for science:

http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0701023

With the discovery of the four different types of jellyfish in the Cambrian, however, the researchers said that there is enough detail to assert that the types can be related to the modern orders and families of jellyfish. The specimens show the same complexity. That means that either the complexity of modern jellyfish developed rapidly roughly 500 million years ago, or that the group is even older and existed long before then.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071030211210.htm

However life emerged and developed on this planet, something is missing from the Darwinian explanation. What’s the big deal? Why can’t the institution of science just admit there’s a problem with the “random mutation” model, and then try to offer up a few possible theories to explain it? What’s up with all of this scientific orthodoxy?

She fell off the “ancestral” tree. Poor Lucy. One day she’s the “mother of all humanity”, and the next day, she’s a dead gorilla.

Oh, and those 500-million-year-old jellyfish they found in Canada? Exactly the same as modern-day jellyfish. Down to the internal organs.

Not at all – it can even be rather interesting. Thanks for your concern, but it’s not a problem for me.

Or were you perhaps thinking of intelligent design creationists such as Wells, Dembski, Behe et al? They’ve gone through the doctoral mill, mouthing things they don’t believe to gain credibility in one world, but then viewed as apostates by the world of actual science and viewed with suspicion by their fellow believers because of their contamination. (Sorta like Japanese who live in the Occident too long, and then are not accepted when they come back home.)

And here’s some good news: The Union of Concerned Scientists (started in 1969 at MIT) has just published “A Statement on Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design” – http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/statement-on-id.html (the Introduction is at
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/intelligent-design.html ) – you might find it interesting reading.

This resoves the problem,”makes the landscape, (and god), go away”… from first principles, the way that sceince is supposed to work.

But nobody believes the evidence enough to look at the most apparent implication of the direct observation.

http://www.answers.com/topic/copernican-principle

*note* “appearance of design”
-Susskind, Davies, Weinburg, Dawkins, etc…

Most, who aren’t simply ‘theoretically arrogant’ are simply afraid to look… so the missing dynamcial structure principle will remain missing until hell freezes over, since it is as obvious as one plus one.

I guess that everybody will stay happily in a culture war all the while that “hell” is cooling-off, so goes the long-term status quo, abeit more technical as the years wander by.

I deduced evolution and natural selection when I was 11 or 12 years old, having visited zoos in Frankfurt (Germany), St. Louis and Brookfield (a Chicago suburb) and seen okapis (did you know okapis’ tongues are so long they can lick their ears?) and kudus reaching up to forage in trees, and then seeing giraffes, with their longer necks doing the same thing more successfully. It made sense to me then that animals might evolve longer necks (or other characteristics) and become a different animal. Luckily I also had no problems with accepting the concept of the millions or billions of years it might take for this process, as I had also “discovered” astronomy and the distances and times involved.

Now the Young Earth Creationists (YECs) want to take all this away, and compress everything into not just the 6,012 years since Creation in 4004 BC, but really only the 4,356 years since Noah’s Flood in 2348 BC and the sudden repopulation of a radically different earth after Noah’s flood. There just isn’t time for the speciation involved, or the transportation difficulties involved, for it to be anything other than a miracle. The YECs don’t want kids’ education to bother with biology or astronomy or any other science, because everything is miracles, not susceptible to human understanding.

A few years ago, there was an estimate of 480,000 scientists in the United States, and it’s no stretch to say there have probably been a million scientists around the planet since the terms “science” and “scientist” took on their current meaning. The collaborative efforts of these million scientists, with the self-correcting system of peer-review of findings in the various journals, have pretty much agreed on what our species today knows about evolution and biology and astronomy and geology and paleontology and physics and mathematics and every other science. That system makes sense to me as providing a pretty good understanding of the way things work.

When I compare the findings of all the sciences to the Bronze Age creation myths enshrined in Genesis, it’s easy to see which is a grand fairy tale and which is based on reality as agreed upon by experts. That’s what is so “unpalatable” to me – so many people supporting an unsupportable myth, which was good enough for wandering Bronze Age nomads who had no possible way of understanding biology or astronomy or geology or paleontology or physics or mathematics or any other science. We’ve grown up – why do we still need to fight over the children’s fairy tale of creation that was good enough then when we know better now?

Absolutely. Excising all mention of the Creator from His Creation, as I have mentioned previously in my responses to other MND articles, is both blasphemy and heresy. Like Peter denying Jesus, intelligent design creationists deny God (publicly, at least). (This is even worse in many parts of the Moslem world, where intelligent design creationism will never catch on, because the punishments for denying Allah’s role in Creation are sure and swift…and final.)

Micro or Macro? Microbiologist Ralph Seelke on Evolution
January 03, 2008 12:49PM

On this episode of ID the Future, Rob Crowther interviews Dr. Ralph Seelke, who explains the differences between Micro- and Macro-evolution and shares about his current evolution research.

Ralph Seelke received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in 1981, was a postdoctoral researcher at the Mayo Clinic until 1983, and has been an Associate Professor or Professor in the Department of Biology and Earth Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Superior since 1989. An authority on evolution’s capabilities and limitations in producing new functions in bacteria, Prof. Seelke recently co-authored the science textbook Explore Evolution.

This fellow is actually trying to put speciation to the test using e coli bacteria. So far, no luck. Very interesting stuff indeed.

And the Galapagos Islands are an even better example. Yes, each of the different islands have slightly different versions of a lot of species, but they are still the same species. The flat-nose turtles can breed with their longer-nosed “cousins” on the other islands. It’s no different than one island being populated with tall people, and another being populated with pygmies. They’re still people, no matter how many millenia they’ve been separated.

And just for your info, I believe the Earth is very, very old. Don’t try to saddle me with some fifteenth century Catholic priests’ theory that the Earth is six thousand years old. The hard science (i.e. real science) of geology is very very good (because they rely on actual observation, and don’t make up stuff that require blind faith). Leave the faith stuff to spiritual matters.

Nonethless, I’m sure God is more subtle in his doings than simply making the fossil record in a day. No one here has said this, but I get the impression from many ID proponents that this is the explanation and that evolution plays only the tiniest of roles. Maybe I’m not hearing them correctly.

But, okay, Paul. If it’s not the Scientific Method that makes ID so unpalatable to you, then what is it exactly?

You mentioned that you are an ordained minister. Do you object to ID on religious grounds? Also, could you tell me the name of the church in which you have been ordained?

And BTW — since you keep bringing up “Bronze-Age creation mythology”, I personally think an argument can be made that — like Christianity — Greek myths also provide a good explanation for the creation of the universe.

I’m not an expert on Greek mythology, but I get the basic idea: Chaos represented the initial condition of the universe. Eros — the spark of life — was the offspring of Chaos. (In Christian terms, Eros can be identified with the Holy Spirit IMO. In modern cosmological terms, Eros is the Big Bang. In any case, Eros is conceptually identified with the First Cause (Protogonus).) Once Causes were introduced into the cosmos, a whole series of elemental gods could be born: land (Gaia), the underworld (Tartarus), darkness (Erebos) and night (Nyx). These god/elements then recombined to form another generation of god/elements — day, brightness, oceans, mountains, and so on.

Obviously these are not LITERAL events. These are analogs — human narratives that offer representative explanations for the actual state of things. In my opinion, virtually all religions offer humanly valid interpretations of the cosmos — including stacks of turtles or the flying spaghetti monster. But like the institution of science, they offer symbols of reality, not reality itself.

As a matter of personal policy, I would never say anything like that. Can you show me the quote where I said that? Or are you just “Lying For Jesus”™ again?

My basic contention is that science has a much better chance of being able to provide an explanation for Creation than any Bronze-Age creation mythology – whether or not it is dressed up in a lab coat or a shabby tuxedo. Has intelligent design creationism come up with anything better than “Lo – a miracle!”?