Posted on 10/14/2002 4:59:49 PM PDT by RCW2001
| The Associated Press
|
| COLUMBUS, Ohio Oct. 14 — A state school board panel Monday recommended that Ohio science classes emphasize both evolution and the debate over its validity.
The committee left it up to individual school districts to decide whether to include in the debate the concept of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is guided by a higher intelligence. The guidelines for the science curriculum simply put into writing what many school districts already do. The current guidelines do not even mention evolution. "What we're essentially saying here is evolution is a very strong theory, and students can learn from it by analyzing evidence as it is accumulated over time," said Tom McClain, a board member and co-chairman of the Ohio Board of Education's academic standards committee. Conservative groups, some of which had tried and failed to get biblical creation taught in the public schools, had argued that students should learn about intelligent design. But critics of intelligent design said it is creationism in disguise. On Monday, the committee unanimously forwarded a final draft without the concept in it to the full 19-member board. Board member Michael Cochran, who had pushed for intelligent design in the standards, said, "The amendment allows teachers and students in Ohio to understand that evolution really is a theory and that there are competing views and different interpretations. This allows them to be discussed." The Ohio school board will decide Tuesday whether to adopt the new standards or order that they be revised.
On the Net: Ohio Department of Education: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/ |
Yes, but the intelligence of the actors just tells us why the evolution of the marketplace happens in years instead of millions of years. Ironically, intelligence itself is something of a Darwinian process! We are constantly coming up with scenarios at random, and testing them out in our own simulation of the real world before deciding on which course to choose. This activity comes so naturally to us we hardly even notice when we're doing it. And of course this makes for a vastly faster evolutionary process than if we had to act out each one of our tentative ideas in strictly Darwinian fashion out in the real world.Even with all the intelligence of people individually, the economy as a whole goes along & evolves beyond our ability to design it or predict where it's going!
Problem is that unpredictability does not mean randomness. The economy is unpredictable because there are 6 billion people trying to find a better way to make money, a better way to save money, a better way to make a living and so forth. It is unpredictable because there are so many people looking for ways to better their economic lives that it is impossible to make a model of it. The unpredictability is therefore the result of intelligence, not randomness.
But this means that if Dembski's Explanatory Filter does turn out to be valid, it would merely be a valid Darwin Detector!
Just for reference, I've typed in a passage from Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel, which helps illuminate the trap that IDists have set for themselves:
Randomness & Creativity
Contrary to what one might expect, the introduction of randomness into a system is one of the most important engines of creativity. Faced with a blank canvas, painters often spur their creative thoughts by splashing a bit of paint at random on the canvas. Jean Arp dropped shapes randomly as the basis for some of his sculptural pieces. The lyrical tunes of George Gershwin's musical play Porgy and Bess were written using random elements. [So did Mozart - jp] People who have investigated the nature of creativity have discovered that this is surprisingly important in creative thinking and is by no means restricted to art.Edward de Bono was one pioneer in the practical study of creativity. Paul MacCready, who designed the Gossamer Condor, the first significant human-powered airplane, credited de Bono's methods for helping his team come up with creative solutions to design problems. MacCready had taken on the challenge of human-powered flight, a challenge that had inspired but eluded our species since the mythical Icarus strapped feather-coated wax wings to his arms and flapped madly towards the sun, only to plunge immediately back to earth. Among other problems, MacCready's engineering team had to figure out a wing design that could maintain lift for a craft that would only move at the very slow speed that a cyclist turning a propeller with pedal power would be able to sustain. The team succeeded where all before them had failed, and the Gossamer Condor now proudly hangs suspended in perpetual flight within the airspace of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, together with the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer, Lindbergh's Lockheed 8 Sirius, and the Apollo 11 Command Module. I had the pleasure of hearing MacCready speak a couple of years after the first successful flight of the Gossamer Condor, about how his team overcame the difficult design problems they faced, and his recommendation led me to seek out de Bono's work on creativity.
Edward de Bono was primarily interested in creative reasoning — what he termed "lateral thinking"59 — and in developing practical techniques to improve creative thinking. Reading through his suggestions for stimulating new ideas or creative problem solutions one soon notices that chance appears again and again in a variety of ways. According to de Bono, introducing randomness is a prominent factor in creative processes. Lateral thinking, he writes, is concerned with changing patterns (arrangements of information), and it deliberately seeks out apparently irrelevant information and chance intrusions as a way to generate new patterns. Again and again he mentions the utility of exposure to random stimulation or attending to random inputs. This is the same notion of randomness that appears in evolutionary theory — it is not that mutation has no cause (deterministic or indeterministic) but that the cause is not aimed at producing a particular desirable or advantageous result. De Bono says that the main point is that one is not looking for anything, but is just wandering aimlessly with a blank mind until something just pops out. He often suggests some formal method to generate a random input, such as a routine to select a chance object from the surroundings (e.g., nearest red object) or using the dictionary to provide a random word.
The idea that the introduction of randomness is an important creative force is not idiosyncratic to de Bono; one finds this point reiterated by others who have studied creativity. James Adams, director of the Design division at Stanford's School of Engineering and member of the design team for Mariner IV, the first Venus spacecraft, writes about creativity in terms of what he calls "conceptual blockbusting" noting that one mental blockage to creative design is having "no appetite for chaos."60 Koberg and Bagnall describe a procedure they call "morphological forced connections" (whereby one assembles the result of random runs through alternative variations) as being a "foolproof invention-finding scheme."61 More interesting still is the earlier work of Alex Osborn, originator of the concept of the process of (and coiner of the term) "brainstorming," who was interested in creative imagination.62 Like the others, he drew no connections to biology but his observations about creative processes have surprising natural counterparts in the biological world. This is particularly striking in his lists of procedures for coming up with new ideas. I'll mention just a sample:
- New ways to use it?
- Other uses if modified?
- New twist?
- Change meaning, color, motion, sound, odor, form, shape?
It is fascinating to read through Osborn's lists and realize just how many of the processes he recommends for generating useful, novel ideas are used regularly by evolution to produce useful new biological structures and functions. For example, he writes of random recombinations, permutations, reversals, multiplications, transpositions, substitutions, and so on. It would be interesting to go through the lists in detail to show how evolutionary processes follow the same patterns, but many of the parallels should be obvious from our earlier brief introduction to molecular mechanisms of DNA replication.
Can chance create useful novelties? You bet. Random mutations and recombinations are the very springs of creative variation, and as genetic replicators, biological organisms are equipped with both.
Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel, pp 92-94
You're so humorous. This is just evidence that cracks are forming in the Darwininian facade and that the skeptics now are admitting that ID can do something that they said was clearly impossible. There is design, but now they are admitting that the designer is "Darwins processes".
Dembski's work has been criticized (Fitelson et al. 1999), but these objections do not seem fatal. In any case, Dembski's criteria are not signs of design as he understands it, even if we were to ignore all such criticism.
You want proof? Fine. For all the world to see:
283 posted on 4/5/02 12:06 PM Eastern by Junior:
472 posted on 4/6/02 1:26 AM Eastern by gore3000:
[This was followed by a list of corrections, orbit data, expanations of the relationship of circles to ellipses, and so on, by a slew of different posters, the specifics of which are available by clicking on the "472" link above and following the thread. It eventually culminated with this "retraction."]
531 posted on 4/6/02 11:39 AM Eastern by gore3000:
671 posted on 7/10/02 8:30 AM Eastern by gore3000:
At your request, these are the facts. For all the world to see. Based on these facts one is led to the seemingly obvious conlusion that you are engaging in mischaracterization, misquoting, and dishonesty bordering on pathological. This is your opportunity to discuss the facts, and offer an alternate theory, additional information, or some other rational explanation for your behavior. You have the floor.
This is just evidence that cracks are forming in the Darwininian facade and that the skeptics now are admitting that ID can do something that they said was clearly impossible.Sadly (and surprisingly), your characterization misses his point:
Enter William Dembski. Already known as one of the better ID proponents, he has recently gathered his arguments in a book that claims to put ID on a solid footing (Dembski 1999). Surprisingly, he is often correct. Though dead wrong in his overall conclusions, he makes interesting mistakes, and his errors highlight how powerful an idea Darwinian evolution is, in biology and beyond.
No, I understand his attempted point. I claim that he has failed to make his point. We all seem to agree the facts do back that Dembski has demonstrated his intended point, only the name of something is different. The "he is wrong" statement is nothing but hot air. Just-so-stories are the "evidence" that keeps being proffered by the Darwininians, along with poorly written programs.
This is warmed over Darwininian argument from Dawkins "The Blind Watchmaker". But it is an admission that the railing against Dembski has been a red herring.
[Note to moderator: The above epithets are merely those used by the fair-haired boy of the creo set to characterize anyone who disagrees with him. Any resemblance to anyone, living or dead, is purely imaginary]
(My sincere apologies to Jerry Springer, pencils, and the many fine employees of both Pabst Breweries and the DMV who might have been offended by the preceding outburst.)
}:^P
Yeah! Nobody down at the DMV really does any work!
It all sounds so pretty. However, the above is not science and there is no scientific proof of any of it ever happening. What happens when cells mutate is that you get cancer. What happens when cells mutate is that you lose some functioning. What does not happen is that you get new and better functioning. We have been studying the simplest organisms - viruses, bacteria, flies for decades in thousands of laboratories and a more complex more functional organism has never come about as a result. In addition, what you call 'randomness' is not randomness at all. The human organism is very tightly controlled, has several ways of dealing with mutations and correcting them. Random functioning would quickly kill any individual. In other words, the above paragraph is total nonsense.
Post #424 is still waiting for attention.
This article summarizes exactly why I don't feel it necessary to teach someone basic science.
You call the above proof of evolution?????
Let's see an FAQ written by who knows who, in some page in TalkOrigins, the fountain of evolutionist disinformation which you are too ashamed to link to! Oh yes we all must bow our heads to this post!
Now regardless of that first sentence, evolution (if true) has to be about greater complexity. Otherwise, the basic premise of evolution that life evolved from single celled organisms to humans could not have occurred as evolution proposes that it did. Since the basic premise itself comtradicts the theory of evolution, I need not waste further time discussing your 'proof' of nothing.
To reference and to refute are different things. Check the thread later and you will see how wrong that article is. Let me just this here, the article is from a nonsense site called Stardestroyer and the welcome message says "The ranks of the resurgent Empire continue to swell. What say you, citizen? Are you ready to join the Empire? Are you ready to fight for the glory of Coruscant? If you are, then join now. Fight for your people. Fight for your Emperor!". Does not seem to be a very serious place for scientific information eh?
Can't refute the message so you attack the messenger? How "evolutionist" of you.
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