>What I was saying is that the cold fusion guys dropped their claim
>when it was discredited. All they were doing was science and when
>that science was proved wrong there was no reason to pursue it.
>Behe's claim--and that of most "scientific" creationists"--has been
>discredited and he has *not* dropped it. He's not doing science,
>he's doing something else. He's trying to prove that evolution
>doesn't exist. When the scientific community proved him wrong and
>then ceased to listen to him he immediately went into the
>time-honored song about how he was being suppressed or ignored by
>the "dominant paradigm." It sort of worked for the crackpot
>Velikovski and nearly half a century later neither Behe nor Dembski
>are above using that ploy. Neither Behe nor Dembski will *ever*
>accept that their pet hypotheses are not credible or any of the
>science that proves them wrong, because science is not their
>ultimate project. "Defeating" evolution is their project.
>
>Neither of the cold fusion guys would be caught dead writing a book
>called "Defeating Physics by Opening Minds."
In trying to verify my remarks about "the cold fusion guys"--Pons and
Fleischmann--I ran across this very interesting webpage:
http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~goodstein/fusion.html
and this, an interview with Fleischman:
http://www.mv.com/ipusers/zeropoint/IEHTML/FEATURE/FEATR/297fleischmann.html
what's really interesting about the interview is that he *is* a bit
bitter about how it all turned out and he's kept up with the Italian
and Japanese research into cold fusion (yep! they do it! if they can
somehow pull it off there's a lot of money in it.) but he really
doesn't have much animosity toward the people who discredited his
research. He seemed to think that all he really needed to do was
redesign his experiment and it would have somehow worked. A different
reaction than what I had been led to expect but still vastly
different from similarly discredited creationists.
Susan
-- ----------I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction.
---Charles Darwin
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