For at least sixty years, fluoride in the drinking water has been another one of those sacred items. Only half wits doubt it. But recent studies show “strong inverse correlation” between it and children’s intellectual development.
Lots of caveats, of course. Perhaps the drinking water level is okay but sloshing the kids with the stuff straight as happened to me in elementary school, or also fluoride-heavy toothpastes might put one into the “toxic” level. But who wants to admit the hillbillies may have been right? You don’t have to know how to spell the stuff (quick, without looking, does the “u” come before or after the “o”) to be a scientific genius. Darn shame to lose that, too. Where’s the ACLU?

But it does not apply equally to all contenders. A new proposed explanation has to do just as well as the older ones at explaining what they explain, and has to do better at explaining things they didn’t explain. It is an extremely high bar that a new proposed explanation has to clear.

GB,

Ive read Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt and found it interesting. Part of my reading list of critics of standard Darwinian evolution. I’m not a creationist. However, I find it strange that the biologists really close ranks on any criticism (of which there are some legitimate ones) of orthodox DE. Not a great way to advance a scientific field.

But by no means historically atypical. Scientists are as human as anyone else, and they get emotional investments in their ideas, or hostility to other ideas. There was quite a dispute in the late 19C because geologists and paleontologists kept finding more and more evidence that the Earth and thus the Sun were first hundreds of millions, then billions of years old. A swath of the physics community, led by Lord Kelvin, insisted that was impossible because no energy source could keep the Sun burning that long, therefore the geologists and biologists must be wrong.

Then came the discovery of nuclear physics and the overturn of Dalton.

(That incident is one reason I always remind myself that all scientific conclusions are conditional, there’s always a spoken or silent ‘as far as we currently know’.)

And of course the geological community was limited for a long time by the imposing presence of Lyell, who’s accomplishments were real, but who’s utter insistence that all geology must be interpreted in light of current-visible processes limited many promising careers and slowed understanding of plate tectonics.

But Lyell had his own reasons, which he thought good, for his attitude.

Nice summation huxley. From my view there’s some major issues with orthodox DE. However, much like Newtonian physics, it works fairly well in many circumstances, but the need for a biological “relativity and maybe QM” seems to be there. Has it been found? No. But the resistance of biologists to even searching for such is wrong. Again in my conversations with biologists, any suggestion of looking beyond standard DE is met with anger and great resistance.

The Gelernter link is now: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/

Gelernter doesn’t reject Darwinism totally and neither does Meyer:
____________________________________

Meyer doesn’t reject Darwinian evolution. He only rejects it as a sufficient theory of life as we know it.

–David Gelernter, “Giving Up Darwin”
____________________________________

There are reasonable arguments — some mathematical — against strict Darwinism explaining evolution totally. One may jump to the conclusion of Intelligent Design, but that’s not necessary to critique Darwinism.

Darwinists may complain that these are God of the Gaps attacks to be shrugged off. But we’ve already seen the Darwinists overthrown by a gap they couldn’t honestly explain — the mitochondria.

It was Lynn Margulis who pointed out that the most likely explanation of mitochondria is that it emerged from the symbiosis of a primitive cell with aerobic bacteria. Naturally, she was attacked by the Darwinists but she eventually won the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis#Endosymbiosis_theory

IMO, with Gelernter and Meyer, Darwinism, as currently defined, can’t explain some important gaps, as Gelernter enumerates in his article. I would rather not resort to Intelligent Design, but some explanation(s) beyond Darwinism have yet to be found.

More Coyne: Quillette article/ review critical of Gelernter’s views on Darwin:
https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/david-gelernter-is-wrong-about-ditching-darwin/
David Gelernter is Wrong About Ditching Darwin
written by Jerry A. Coyne Published on September 9, 2019

Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge fame had Gelernter, Meyer, and Berlinksi on one of his interview shows: https://www.hoover.org/research/mathematical-challenges-darwins-theory-evolution-david-berlinski-stephen-meyer-and-david
Mathematical Challenges To Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution, With David Berlinski, Stephen Meyer, And David Gelernter Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Italy.

When I saw that, I was disappointed that Robinson did not have a follow up with someone from the pro Darwinian side, but from searching for that link I see Robinson has had these and other participants back for discussions several times. Therefore I should not expect to find a balanced pro-con discussion or presentation from him. At least on this topic he appears to have no interest in exploring the Common Knowledge.

However, Stephen Meyer is knowledgeable about the materialistic view of science, cosmology, and biology, even if he does not accept it and makes claims for “intelligence” that could have a different answer (or at least a different type of ‘watch maker” design than he wants to believe. Today I happened to find this video where he touches on some of that: Stephen Meyer Scientists Tried to Create Life and Failed: Here’s Why [14 mins]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjjJEP0RMeM
It is an interview of Stephen Meyer by Ben Shapiro, that seems to make a strong case for rejecting a natural materialistic view of science and biology. He cites a 11/7/2016 Royal Society meeting that was called to answer a growing set of supposed issues with the NeoDarwinian Theory of evolution; i.e., that is was “not working”. But supposedly these pro-NeoDarwinian attendees could not find a better answer to the objections being raised.
Bottom line for me is I don’t accept Meyer’s views but I need to dig deeper to understand the limits and flaws (or baseline assumptions) in his reasoning. It is always possible that my view is wrong (won’t be the first time), but typically these analyses fail to allow for the nearly infinite number of opportunities for possibly favorable natural biochemical reactions to occur [millions or billions per second?] and for RNA/DNA based evolution to try different chemical “trials” in a variety of different environmental conditions over a few 100 million years about 3500 million years ago.

RA, I will add “Pattison, author of The Fossil Men” to my potential “to buy” book list.

*See here: https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/
Giving Up Darwin
By: David Gelernter Posted: May 1, 2019
This article appeared in: Volume XIX, Number 2, Spring 2019

Then there’s David Gelerntner, Yale computer prof, who says Darwin doesn’t work because the math fails. See his “Giving Up Darwin”. If your calculator has sufficient places, like maybe a thousand, you might try to follow his theory.

Now here’s a rather allegorical(?) allegation:

“Comey’s Daughter Reportedly Sought To Cut Deal With Epstein To Smear Trump”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/comeys-daughter-reportedly-sought-cut-deal-epstein-smear-trump

I think their reluctance has more to do with what they perceive as attacks from creationists in the K12 curriculum. At least that’s my view after conversations with the biologists I knew. Being a relatively young science they thought any attacks from religion to be a mortal threat to their discipline, hence the stone walls. DE is their Newtonian foundation, or so they think. It’s not an old vs young scientist thing.