Absolutely there is objective value when reports are filed for moderation staff to determine is someone is lying and if action needs to be taken. And it's not a one line gaffe, it's about a basic understanding of vertebrate biology. Posts that predate the report are absolutely fair game to look into the issue of fairness of the charges and cleanliness of the hands.
You may, at the risk of being labeled. For they are worthy arguments. And these are the main science forums where special rules apply.
I use the idiom of my audience to convey my message of the time: Calm the fuck down.
There is nothing natural about that interpretation. You have ignored the historical context, some of which is preserved on that page. As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice (Act I, Scene 3), “The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” thus my citation of an appropriate quote doesn't mean I make any specific endorsement other than the text of that quote.
As per
site policy, advocacy of anything called "ID" is highly disfavored until such time as it is formulated as a competitive scientific theory. A
scientific theory is a
communicable framework for describing precisely the
observable behavior of a
large class of related phenomena. Thus a scientific theory is a useful summary of the way reality actually behaves.
In the framework of the molecular basis for biology, common descent of populations with modification is practically a mathematical theorem. But the application of the theory of evolution is well documented.
Bull, J. J. and H. A. Wichman. 2001. “Applied evolution.”
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 32: 183-217.
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.32.081501.114020
Eisen, J. A. and M. Wu. 2002. “Phylogenetic analysis and gene functional predictions: Phylogenomics in action.”
Theoretical Population Biology 61: 481-487.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580902915947
Searls, D. 2003. “Pharmacophylogenomics: Genes, evolution and drug targets.”
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2: 613-623.
http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v2/n8/full/nrd1152.html
To be
communicable, someone needs to be able to convey the useful particulars of the idea to others. Evolution is taught in schools and has many thousands of professionals engaged in writing about it without serious contradictions arising and is therefore communicable.
To be a
framework for describing we need definitions of terms and how they related to each other and reality. Evolution originally concerned itself with heritable traits before the discovery of 1) the principle mechanism for heredity and 2) the nature of gene switching leading to biological development.
To give
precise descriptions, we have to have tests for where predictions are on the mark and where they are not. Indeed, a whole host of biological innovations are incompatible with the theory of evolution, which is why we have no crocoducks but we do have platypuses.
To restrict ourselves to
observable behavior, means we don't posit mechanisms for what we don't observe, just relations of behavior. Evolution didn't need DNA in 1859, just a reality that acted as if some traits were heritable.
To cover a
large (related) class, means we aren't looking for a patchwork of unique cases, but something overarching and fundamentally common to these behaviors. Nothing we have in our experience is so large (in information) as the history of life on Earth.
And to restrict ourselves to the
phenomena of reality means we aren't required to handle spurious imaginary cases. Evolution isn't required to explain where life on Earth came from or the nonscientific viewpoints of some of its advocates.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
ID's best advocates haven't advanced a competitive theory and many of its bad advocates can't even read the score card.
