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This is taken, directly, from the new Kansas State Standards:

f. The view that living things in all the major kingdoms are modified descendants of a common ancestor (described in the pattern of a branching tree) has been challenged in recent years by:

i. Discrepancies in the molecular evidence (e.g., differences in relatedness inferred from sequence studies of different proteins) previously thought to support that view.
ii. A fossil record that shows sudden bursts of increased complexity (the Cambrian Explosion), long periods of stasis and the absence of abundant transitional forms rather than steady gradual increases in complexity, and
iii. Studies that show animals follow different rather than identical early stages of embryological development.

Breathtaking. And this will pass for science in Kansas.

Why is it that you who discount bussing people out of harms way as a viable option, which is part of the mandatory evacuation plan for New Oleans by the way, seem to think that unless total success is to be had, it's a bad idea?

Total success is inconceivable. I disagree with the idealistically hopeful numbers that people imagine could have been off better under the circumstances. There are simply too many management steps and countless difficulties.

400 buses, 60 people per load, going to Baton Rouge, can move 480,000 people in 48 hours.

And traffic was moving how fast out of the city? It was at a crawl and only because not everybody was on the road.

Just for the record, the massive flooding in New Orleans was not caused by the storm surge. It was caused by water flow through levee breaches from Lake Pontchartrain.

And it's truly naive to expect local buses to move 1/3 of the city in less than 48 hours. Even assuming that everyone was standing and waiting at bus stations with important medicines and papers in hand.

And here, in looking for that which distinguishes life from non-life/death – when both consist of the same “stuff” – the biologist/chemist approach is characterization, the mathematician’s approach is mathematical structure.

I appreciate your oft-repeated sentiment along those lines. But, your shannon-communication definition of life, even if simple and elegant by itself, does not provide a clear or sharp demarcation between life and non-life. And that has nothing to do with a limitation of math nor a limitation of the physical world or a physical discription, nor, as you imply, a limited ability to communicate about it. It's quite simply that the model doesn't fit the data completely. Examples are simple organic molecules and artifical life systems. At any rate, this model brings one much closer to the fringes of life and greatly shortens the distance from life to non-life than most biological definitions. It's far easier to conceptualize, using your definition, how spontaneous generation of communication can occur in an molecular soup.

...Hence, the difficulty in our making a “connection.” Perhaps we ought to quit trying?

That's generous of you. Please feel welcome to jump in, again, any time. In any case, thank you for your posts.

Two points, quickly: 1) Information theory is used in molecular biology to discern meaning between molecules and their environment. Shannon did not concern himself with this, but this is one of the applications of his theory and useful in drug design, sequence comparisons, etc.

2) The simplistic "Where successful communications occur in nature, there is life." is not helpful at all for the fringes where the difficulty arises. By this definition, prions are alive (they are pieces of protein) and self-organizing automata are alive.

Actually, Nebullis, I can propose a basis for the "sharp dividing line," but it's not physical; it's informational, Shannon information.

This doesn't help you for those questionable entities. There is no sharp dividing line. Information theory can be very useful for detemining molecular (particularly DNA) meaning within specific contexts, but for a definition of life, it becomes inclusive of things like prions or even artificial life systems.

Presence or absence. That is all. The DNA is the same regardless of whether the entity is alive or dead. But something is definitely "absent" in the latter case. We know this intuitively, we know this from direct observation. But that "something" may prove extraordinarily difficult to "isolate" experimentally.

It's something worth thinking about because that "something" seems obvious for straightforward examples like rocks and humans. But it is much less obvious for entities like viruses or viroids or even prions. Along those very murky lines, it is not obvious to anyone what constitutes life and what doesn't. Scientists draw up very precise definitions to include or exclude certain entities from life. And not all of them agree. There is no sharp dividing line and where a dividing line is drawn, it is done with definite measurable criteria. It's clear from your answers that even though you claim a sharp dividing line, you don't really know what that line is. You're in good company!

In thinking about abiogenesis, the same murky life-non life distinction exists. Afterall, nobody is suggesting that humans sprang from rocks (accepting some creationists). The gulf between life and non life is certainly not as clear-cut as you proclaim and it is possibly not a very big one.

There is a very sharp dividing line, or difference, between the presence or absense of life. There is no in-between state. A thing is either alive, or it is not.

Right, betty boop, that's what you said earlier. My question is what is that sharp dividing line? What is it that demarcates something living from something non living?

Er, if I might ask, how can you not see that there is a sharp dividing line between life and non-life?

What is that sharp dividing line? (It's not obvious to everybody.)

Devolution. (I think there is something to that.)
As for attack on science, the "learned" social science types are just as anti-evolution as the creationists are (as you've pointed out before--all of it a post-modern deconstructionism) and they use exactly the same arguments that the IDers use. As you know, their motivation is derived from behaviorism. They abhor the idea of genetic contributions to human behavior or society. Remarkably, there are quite a number of biologists among this group.

Hi! I lurk once in a while, but barely find the time to to comment.

Am I wrong in thinking that the public knows less and less about evolution and science every year?

"--one in five Americans--believe man was created in his present form 10,000 years ago, but not because they read the Bible literally. Just 9 percent of the country read the Bible literally but are open to the theory of evolution.

This group must read creationist propaganda literally.

Among prominent evolutionary biologists (National Academy of Sciences members), 5.5% believe in a personal God and another 6.5% believe in a deist God. Evolution and religion are clearly not so much at odds as the fundamentalists like to claim. More here (pdf).

Columbia Presbyterian is fine. The surgeons will be flown in.

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ANWR and nuclear energy. The liberals have a pathological resistance to considering alternatives to imported oil.

Will the United States be bombed into submission like Spain? I doubt it. More attacks will lead us to greater resolve against the terrorists and the nations that support them.

The Muslims are after Israel and it's becoming clear that the Europeans can be easily cowed into detaching from the United States. Next, Europe will be begging the Muslims "Take Israel! Just leave us in peace!"

By June 30th? When we hand over the goverment to Iraq?

Aznar would have done the same.

This suggests two kinds of scope: (a) a sufficiently large scope of objects that merit legitimate scientific analysis; (b) the sufficiently large scope of information discovered about those objects.

Both of these require limitation by statements in the curriculum proposal (e.g. the confine of scientific knowledge).

First, the scope of the field is not limited by the curriculum guidelines for elementary and secondary schools.

Second, the scope of science changes as discoveries are made.

I don't know all that the ID proponents want--some of them appear to be kamikaze--but I'm all in favor of teaching the history of science, in science classes, both at the primary and at the secondary level.

I'm in favor of a historical presentation at, maybe a high school level. Currently, as you move up toward graduate education, the curriculum changes to only a historical and contextual presentation of experiments and thought processes. This, by the way, has nothing to do with ID.