Posted on 03/11/2005 3:47:39 AM PST by PatrickHenry
WHAT SHOULD public schools teach about life's origins? Should science educators teach only contemporary Darwinian theory or not mention it? Should school boards mandate that students learn about alternative theories? If so, which ones? Or should schools forbid discussion of all theories except neo-Darwinism?
These questions arise frequently as school districts around the country consider how to respond to the growing controversy over biological origins.
Of course, many educators wish such controversies would simply go away. If science teachers teach only Darwinian evolution, many parents and religious activists will protest. But if teachers present religiously based creationism, they run afoul of Supreme Court rulings.
There is a way to teach evolution that would benefit students and satisfy all but the most extreme ideologues. Rather than ignoring the controversy or teaching religiously based ideas, teachers should teach about the scientific controversy that now exists over Darwinian evolution. This is simply good education.
When credible experts disagree about a controversial subject, students should learn about competing perspectives.
In such cases, teachers should not teach as true only one view. Instead, teachers should describe competing views to students and explain the arguments for and against these views as made by their chief proponents. We call this "teaching the controversy."
[Snip]
Stephen C. Meyer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, and John Angus Campbell, a professor of communications at the University of Memphis, are the editors of Darwinism, Design and Public Education.
The rest of the article is here.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
First of all, I think you exaggerate the amount of mutation required to alter body plans, particularly when starting from a relatively undifferentiated plan.
Second, evolution is a road with no easy way back. When looking to the future, the only requirement for a mutation is that it not kill the individual before reproduction. there is no preferred direction and no specification or goal. Going backwards is unlikely for the very reason that ID claims evolution is impossible. If you try to evolve backwards (say as a deliberate laboratory experiment in which humans control selection) you run into all the improbabilities that are bandied about in the phrase, specified complexity. You would need specific mutations to occur in a specified sequence.
If you want to understand what evolution is, you must abandon the practice of starting with what has happened in history and trying to calculate the odds of reaching this destination. This was never the destination. There never was a destination. What happened, happened. The only necessity for evolution to occur is that enough individuals reproduce to avoid extinction. There is no necessity to evolve in any particular direction.
So what is my point? It is simply that when you start from something relatively simple, there are many directions towards greater complexity. Start with a sphere and everything is a non-sphere. Start with a cylinder and every lump is an appendage. But onde you have appendages, you no longer have the option of starting from a sphere or cylinder. Once a branch has begun it is not going to unbranch. Large scale body plans become more differentiated and more specialized, but they cannot return to the simple form that would allow a radically new body plan.
good, because otherwise I will cry
For there to be a scientific controversy, you have to have more than a handful of scientists lined up on the scrimmage line. 1, or 10 million math teachers, lawyers, or even physicists, filled with doubts do not a scientific controversy make. Only biological scientists constitute the body in which such controversy regarding evolutionary theory can be found--if it can be.
This is particularly true if one reads the account of Nigel Hughes (Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Riverside) of a small symposium held in June 1999 in China, where many well-preserved early metazoan fossils have recently been discovered. Hughes says that the meeting, the "International Symposium on the Origin of Animal Body Plans and Their Fossil Records," was organized by Professor Jun-Yuan Chen -- although, as we will see below, it appears that the Discovery Institute played a significant role as well. Hughes was one of about 50 symposium participants.
The co-host of the symposium along with Dr. Jun-Yuan Chen, Dr. Chien (second link at 101) offers insight which substantiates that notion by talkorigins when he says:
Basically this is a hush-hush topic in scientific circles, particularly among the Darwinists. The only place you can find it is in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book, Wonderful Life, where he points out that things like the Cambrian Explosion are the "trade secrets" of paleontology and the enigma of all enigmas. There has been a conspiracy among the scientists not to tell and talk about it. In the past hundred years or so, the Darwinian theory has become the paradigm in biology and adopted as the predominant worldview in the West. Anybody speaking up against it will suffer professionally and personally. I have experienced it myself. Another example is Louis Agrassiz, a Swiss-born Harvard professor who was described by Gould as "without a doubt the greatest and most influential naturalist of the 19th-century America." Due to his open criticism of Darwin's theory, [his] "summer of fame and fortune turned into a winter of doubt and befuddlement.* Richard Goldschmidt, a Berkeley professor and a very famous geneticist of the last generation, issued a famous challenge to the neo-Darwinists, listing a series of complex structures from mammalian hair to hemoglobin that he thought could not have been produced by the accumulation and selection of small mutations. The Darwinists met him with savage ridicule. As Goldschmidt put it himself, "This time I was not only crazy but almost a criminal."
Before the international symposium on the "Origins of Animal Body Plans" last June, some scientists found a lot of areas not working right with neo-Darwinian theory. A Chinese professor suggested that we should have experts from other disciplines such as molecular genetics, developmental biology, even historians and philosophers, to join the discussions on the broader issues of this animal big bang. But during the meeting he was pressured by the American Darwinists not to allow open discussion, and the papers written from a non-Darwinian standpoint would not be published.
In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Phillip Johnson quotes a Chinese professor saying: "You Americans say that in China we cannot criticize the government, but you see we can criticize Darwin. In America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin."
Am I wrong to assume we are talking about sea life? Is it stretching credulity to assume that millions of years, although an eyeblink in geology, is sufficient for living things to swim or even crawl to the ends of the earth underwater? I mean, sea turtles swim a significant fraction of that distance in one lifetime.
Thanks for pointing out the global simultaneity of this "animal big bang," As Dr. Chien calls the Cambrian explosion.
The proposal of a universal vacuum field as communication host or "broadcast channel" looks more and more plausible to me.
Thans so much for writing, A-G!
Placemarker.
I didn't do that. Read more carefully. I was referring only to these alphabet soup associations as the sole arbiters of truth.
Looks that way to me!!! Thanks, Alamo-Girl!
Have you ever heard of a joke? I sure hope you Darwinists evolve a sense of humor soon. C'mon. It's Friday afternoon.
Gotta go stoke the fire. It's witch burning tonight.
Your links still don't show the veracity or provenance of the quote. It's all circular. I'm guessing someone in the circle made up the quote.
Do you mean to explain the Cambrian explosion as reducible to mutating body plans? It looks to me that there were no "body plans" prior to the Cambrian explosion -- at least not of any of the higher phyla. Then, suddenly -- bang! -- there were body plans. How long would it take a process of mutation to get from a "relatively undifferentiated body plan" to the body plans of all the great phyla -- which all erupted in a single relatively short time-frame, and all over the world? And after which, no new phyla have emerged? Did the process of mutation stop after the CE?
These are real questions, js1138, not figments of someone's imagination.
I've read "wonderful Life". I would not recommend it to a creationist looking for deep flaws in evolution. At least not to an honest person.
Quote mining is a perversion. It is disturbing to watch Christians do this.
I cannot think of a "trade secret" that has been so poorly kept. How on earth could an intelligent person think there is a conspiracy to cover up something that is featured in every geology and biology textbook.
My only guess about substance to this paranoid fantasy is that biologists caution each other not to fuel the quote miners with overenthusiastic speculation.
If you think paleontology is easy and should have all the answers, I invite you to write a history of your city entirely from internet available satellite images. Be sure to include a detailed description of your city's origins, and the names of the founders. Why not? You demand this kind of detective work from biologists.
As for the reason so many body plans developed so quickly, take a look at my previous post.
Try reading my post, and if you have questions, please address each point I made individually.
In all the posts I have seen - these two remarks hit the nail on the head.
Evolutionism to you guys is like a friggin' cult, you just can't let go, can you?
and this one from TonyRo76:
They can't let it go because that would be an admission that God's Word is actually true, and thus morals are not negotiable.
Thank you both!
Yes, that's what I said.
Bombay, India - Around the streets in India you will see white cows, these are considered to be Sacred Cows. The caretaker of the Sacred Cow sits by the cow and sells grass that people buy to feed the Sacred Cow. This is considered a very holy thing to do
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