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> I think I am starting to understand you Campbell. Creationists, all > bad. > ID people, many bad and many misrepresented by a biased media looking > to > keep the unattractive propaganda going. Young earth creationist science is almost all bad. There are a few young earth advocates who do some valid research, but then get into trouble when they try to fit the results into their young earth paradigm. Intelligent Design science is also generally wrong, but it is even less of a coherent entity than creation science and so more prone to exceptions. Some, especially the popular versions such as the proposed school science standards, invoke a lot of bogus science. Others do a rather better job of accepting scientific evidence. These generally make the valid point that we don't have full evolutionary explanations for everything, but fail to recognize the fact that evolutionary explanations are progressing. At best, such arguments for gaps in evolution are like arguing if a glass is half full or half empty-there's no way to prove that there will or will not be natural explanations for things not yet explained, but the continuing success of natural explanations in evolutionary biology makes me highly doubtful about the long-term viability of ID claims, in addition to my philosophical doubts about their inspiration. Both are typically motivated by religious/philosophical concerns, but the preoccupation with promoting their claims about science tends to overwhelm their commitment to a particular religion, so that they often make claims incompatible with the religion they are trying to promote. The average person has no clue about the science and may be quite nice, despite having bad science. The average journalist, whether favoring such things or not, also has no clue about the science. Both may also know very little of the religious and philosophical issues involved. For paleontologists, being knowledgeable about the science, the main risk is making pronouncements about the religious and philosophical issues without knowing much about them. The history of these issues is quite informative, but many readily available sources are misinformative (e.g., see Gould's review rightly panning the theological "history" in Winchester's The Map that Changed the World). -- Dr. David Campbell 425 Scientific Collections Building Department of Biological Sciences Biodiversity and Systematics University of Alabama, Box 870345 Tuscaloosa AL 35487-0345 USA
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