Let's talk about what happened over the weekend in the "Neo-Darwinism" comment board

Thanks for the statements of support, but there is no question that my response to criticism was rude, unjust, and outside the Biologos guidelines. I have apologized to one of the offended parties, as well as to Biologos staff for this lapse. I intend to spend some time in prayerful reflection, and I sincerely hope that the Spirit will show me the way to move forward, and to continue to bless the efforts of all who seek God’s truth. Peace of Christ.

While I understand what Brad has done and why, I do not think that it is as simple as that.

The topic that we were discussing was the future of evolutionary science. It seems to me that BioLogos does not fully understand the emotions and issues aroused by this issue, especially when talking about random variation.

This does not excuse what happened, but it does mean that we need to address the issue. I hope that Sy will post his excellent article and the reference to long article so we can discuss them again. They are very important to anyone who cares about science.

Mod Squad -

Thanks for all you do! And I know that your job is neither easy nor highly remunerated.

While the conversation had excessive heat, it also contained a good bit of light. I learned a fair amount about “RNA world” from the comments, and I was actually planning to go back and follow some of the links which are, unfortunately, no longer available.

Another organization I have belonged to handled this situation by allowing a commenter to edit a comment after it had been embargoed by the moderator. If the commenter abused the opportunity by leaving inflammatory language in the re-post, the moderators could bar the commenter from further participation in the thread, or even from the entire discussion board for a few days. To use a hockey analogy, it was like sitting in the penalty box.

This approach has many advantages:

  • Moderators aren’t responsible for separating the wheat from the chaff in the comments; the commenters are.
  • Useful commentary is not discarded along with the acrimony.

The ability to do this involves software/administrative capabilities that your system may or may not have, and you would have to adjust your moderation workflow. I hope you will consider this suggestion anyway! :smile:

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

There was certainly some unnecessarily caustic phraseology. On the other hand, those who disagreed with Sy seemed to have some expertise in the field, and introduced some important evidence and arguments. The distinction between randomness with respect to fitness and randomness with respect to mutation rate seemed particularly important. I have no idea whether or not it’s a winning argument, but the distinction seems worth considering. So I would not want to characterize them with a pejorative label.

I do appreciate the contributions you have made on this discussion forum, @GJDS, and I hope that you will continue making them. I, for one, find them to be very helpful.

Grace and peace,
Chris Falter

FYI, I just restored a couple of comments from that “batch delete” that were actually on-topic, so this will be slightly less of a carpet-bombing. :airplane::bomb::boom:

Thanks, Brad! Is it possible to move some of the off-topic posts to their own thread?

Technically, yes, but the issue is more than just that the posts were off-topic.

Brad, I suggested that Christian de Duve’s book, “Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humaity” should be germane to this topic. Do you agree?
Al Leo

It depends what you mean by “this topic”. The thread I closed was full of discussions on all sorts of topics. If you want to start a new discussion about the ideas in the book, go ahead.

I tried. Was it accepted? I can’t find it.
Al Leo

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Hi Brad

I must conclude that I am a poor judge of what the BioLogos community wants to discuss. I thought that the primary objection by evangelical Christians to (neo)-Darwinian evolution was that it depended so much on chance and (seemingly) refuted any teleological arguments. However, if any Lamarkian type of evolution is actually operative, these two objections may be (at least partly) overcome. Since a Nobel Prize winner has put the subject up for discussion, I thought the BioLogos community would want to participate. Was I just wrong, or did I just title it badly?

Thanks for letting me post it, regardless.
Al Leo

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10 posts were merged into an existing topic: God’s interventions?

A post was merged into an existing topic: Randomness vs. God’s interventions?

Hi Al, I liked your post and I am adding the book to my Amazon queue. Perhaps I will have some further comments after I have read it. Thanks for posting!

@aleo, I thought your topic was well worth raising. However, I would recommend not being too surprised that it hasn’t gained a lot of reader traction yet. The Biologos forum is still building a constituency, little by little, but at the moment, the traffic is not so large that every topic has a large following. I know that in my case I just drop in here now and then and look around before returning to my work (even in what is allegedly a more casual retirement lifestyle.) I don’t systematically review the topics and I miss a lot. So I think it is partly a numbers issue and partly a matter of a not yet fully diverse readership like one finds at some of the older website forums.

If I were going to categorize the PRIMARY objections of Evangelicals… my informal and intuitive listing (which may have no connection with reality) would be these three in order of importance:

  1. Evangelicals want to blame an imperfect universe on Adam;

  2. Evangelicals don’t see a difference between the story of Eden and the story of Noah’s Ark.

  3. If the New Testament mentions Adam and Noah, then it HAS to be true.

Anyone else want to list the top 3 Evangelical objections?

Evangelicals want the Bible to be taken literally, except where they don’t take the Bible literally.

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Nobody takes all of the Bible literally. Christians disagree on where that line is…

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