Posted on 09/22/2005 8:25:42 PM PDT by Crackingham
A court case that begins Monday in Pennsylvania will be the first to determine whether it is legal to teach a controversial idea called intelligent design in public schools. Intelligent design, often referred to as ID, has been touted in recent years by a small group of proponents as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution. ID proponents say evolution is flawed. ID asserts that a supernatural being intervened at some point in the creation of life on Earth.
Scientists counter that evolution is a well-supported theory and that ID is not a verifiable theory at all and therefore has no place in a science curriculum. The case is called Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Prominent scientists Thursday called a teleconference with reporters to say that intelligent design distorts science and would bring religion into science classrooms.
"The reason this trial is so important is the Dover disclaimer brings religion straight into science classrooms," said Alan Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of the journal Science. "It distorts scientific standards and teaching objectives established by not only state of Pennsylvania but also leading scientific organizations of the United States."
"This will be first legal challenge to intelligent design and we'll see if they've been able to mask the creationist underpinnings of intelligent design well enough so that the courts might allow this into public school," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which co-hosted the teleconference.
AAAS is the world's largest general science society and the NCSE is a nonprofit organization committed to helping ensure that evolution remains a part of public school curriculums.
The suit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of concerned parents after Dover school board officials voted 6-3 last October to require that 9th graders be read a short statement about intelligent design before biology lessons on evolution. Students were also referred to an intelligent design textbook to learn more information about the controversial idea. The Dover school district earlier this month attempted to prevent the lawsuit from going forward, but a federal judge ruled last week that the trial would proceed as scheduled. The lawsuit argues that intelligent design is an inherently religious argument and a violation of the First Amendment that forbids state-sponsored schools from funding religious activities.
"Although it may not require a literal reading of Genesis, [ID] is creationism because it requires that an intelligent designer started or created and intervened in a natural process," Leshner said. "ID is trying to drag science into the supernatural and redefine what science is and isn't."
Sorry, Coyoteman has left the building.
(But be good here, as there could be an encore.)
Ahhh - the battle against religion builds!
Gramsci, Lenin, Marx, and the DNC are smiling!
I almost wish for their "revolution" to start openly - get it all over and done with!
I love the term supernatural. If it is a phenomenon that occurs and is inexplicable, by current standards, it is still a phenomenon.
OTOH, if it is not observable, by current standards, it is not a phenomenon. It is not a very useful term.
But folks sure bandy it about pretty loosely.
DK
Not accurate.
There is no supernatural being necessary in ID....just an intelligence.
For all we know that intelligence is natural.
DI is realistic. This is not what they wanted. the school board is going to get creamed.
xzins - It really sound to me like you are playing word games in an attempt at justifying the teaching of intelligent design in school.
For all we know that intelligence is natural.
The intelligent design hypothesis is that "certain features of the universe and life are best explained by intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection".
The mathematicians and physicists already investigating self-organizing complexity have identified intelligence as a candidate natural, emergent phenomenon of self-organizing complexity. They've also suggested the possibility of fractal intelligence. And creatures are known to use intelligence (such as selecting a mate) which may explain certain adaptations, mutations or variations of species.
The ID hypothesis does not stipulate whether the "intelligent cause" is a phenomenon (emergent or fractal) or an agent (God, collective consciousness, aliens, Gaia, etc.) - much less a specific phenomenon or agent.
Thanks for the ping.
How does this translate into "Congress shall make no law....."
Even the very basic theory of Ockhams Razor would support the concept of design over billion to one random chance.
ping
For all we know that intelligence is natural.
So you want it taught in our classrooms that aliens came to the earth some time in the past and created us?
Actually, Ockhams Razor really says we should limit our theories to make the fewest assumptions possible.
In this case, Intelligent Design assumes the existence of an otherwise undetected intelligent being affected our genes at some time in the past. Whereas Evolution assumes that over billions of years, and who knows what number of stars and planets, eventually life got lucky.
IMHO, the broad theme, the chief objection to the theory of evolution is not so much complexity (such as irreducible complexity v Kolmogorov v self-organizing etc.) - as it is that “randomness” cannot be the prime factor in the formulation: random mutations – natural selection > species.
In many ways, the mainstream of mathematics involved in biological research is also moving away from randomness as it investigates self-organizing complexity, swarm intelligence, etc.
When one observes potentiality by simple combination, it is only obvious that life is, to say the least, unlikely given the age of the universe. For instance, Gerald Schroeder points out that a typical protein is a chain of 300 amino acids and that there are 20 common amino acids in life which means that that the number of possible combinations for the protein would be 20300 or 10390. He summed it this way “it would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.” Schroeder, Gerald “Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness” (2000)
That is, of course, absurd. That is why other types of probability measures, such as Bayesian, are asserted by scientists to narrow the field from all possibilities to that which was more likely, i.e. not all possibilities are equal.
Many scientists have a unpleasant habit of appealing to combinations as probability when it suits them to argue that this universe is just one of 1080 possible universes and then rejecting combinations as probability when the subject turns to the likelihood of life emerging by happenstance. As Christ said mocking such reasoning "wisdom is justified of all her children”.
IOW, it cuts both ways. If combinations are valid for the beginning of the cosmos, they are valid for the beginning of life. If not, then they should apply to neither the beginning of the cosmos nor of life.
In a math/philosophy sense, randomness as a concept is also questioned most notably by Wolfram – who challenged Gregory Chaitin by claiming that such things as Omega are only pseudo-random because they are the effect of a cause. Which is to say that Chaitin’s formula Omega is the cause of the random number string it creates. Even Brownian motion is the effect of a cause. In other words, in naturalism (whether methodological or metaphysical) everything must be the effect of a prior physical cause (physical causality) and thus never more than pseudo-random.
The bottom line is this: because we as yet do not have a full explanation for space/time and energy/matter – it is impossible to say that what we presume is randomness (for instance at the quantum level) is actually random in the system. Until the “system” is known, randomness is a misleading and false presumption.
> the chief objection to the theory of evolution is not so much complexity (such as irreducible complexity v Kolmogorov v self-organizing etc.) - as it is that “randomness” cannot be the prime factor in the formulation
If that's the chief objection... it's a pretty lame one. Hard to believe that anyone with a basic scientific education would buy into the Creationist bunkum. Oh, wait... ahrdly anyone with a basic scientific education *does* buy into it.
>Gerald Schroeder points out that a typical protein is a chain of 300 amino acids and that there are 20 common amino acids in life which means that that the number of possible combinations for the protein would be 20^300 or 10^390.
...
> That is, of course, absurd.
Yes, it is. His math is silly and ridiculous.
> because we as yet do not have a full explanation for space/time and energy/matter – it is impossible to say that what we presume is randomness (for instance at the quantum level) is actually random in the system.
Freshman-level stoned philosophy major hogwash.
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