Posted on 11/29/2004 6:52:41 AM PST by PatrickHenry
In a poll released last week, two-thirds of Americans said they wanted to see creationism taught to public-school science pupils alongside evolution. Thirty-seven percent said they wanted to see creationism taught instead of evolution.
So why shouldn't majority rule? That's democracy, right?
Wrong. Science isn't a matter of votes -- or beliefs. It's a system of verifiable facts, an approach that must be preserved and fought for if American pupils are going to get the kind of education they need to complete in an increasingly global techno-economy.
Unfortunately, the debate over evolution and creationism is back, with a spiffy new look and a mass of plausible-sounding talking points, traveling under the seemingly secular name of "intelligent design."
This "theory" doesn't spend much time pondering which intelligence did the designing. Instead, it backwards-engineers its way into a complicated rationale, capitalizing on a few biological oddities to "prove" life could not have evolved by natural selection.
On the strength of this redesigned premise -- what Wired Magazine dubbed "creationism in a lab coat" -- school districts across the country are being bombarded by activists seeking to have their version given equal footing with established evolutionary theory in biology textbooks. School boards in Ohio, Georgia and most recently Dover, Pa., have all succumbed.
There's no problem with letting pupils know that debate exists over the origin of man, along with other animal and plant life. But peddling junk science in the name of "furthering the discussion" won't help their search for knowledge. Instead, pupils should be given a framework for understanding the gaps in evidence and credibility between the two camps.
A lot of the confusion springs from use of the word "theory" itself. Used in science, it signifies a maxim that is believed to be true, but has not been directly observed. Since evolution takes place over millions of years, it would be inaccurate to say that man has directly observed it -- but it is reasonable to say that evolution is thoroughly supported by a vast weight of scientific evidence and research.
That's not to say it's irrefutable. Some day, scientists may find enough evidence to mount a credible challenge to evolutionary theory -- in fact, some of Charles Darwin's original suppositions have been successfully challenged.
But that day has not come. As a theory, intelligent design is not ready to steal, or even share, the spotlight, and it's unfair to burden children with pseudoscience to further an agenda that is more political than academic.
Other than annual floods of the Nile, Egyptian history seems to have completely missed Noah's Flood. I guess they were just lucky, being located at such a high elevation ...
Sorry for the cheap shot but it isn't as if I didn't take quite a few from you before responding in kind.
However, my question to you was very simple. Has mating of fruit flies ever produced anything other than fruit flies?
Answer: NO.
See my response to shubi below for my opinion on speciation.
It was the First Amphibious Period, after the end of the Old Dry Kingdom and preceding the Sopping Wet Period. There are few well-preserved papyruses from the time because ink doesn't dry underwater.
They got theirs when Pharaoh's army marched into the Red Sea. ;)
Make that my answer to shubi ABOVE, in post 1,300.
Wasn't the Sea Scorpion King the founder of that Dynasty?
Romania missed the Flood too, but that's another story ...
The Princess Anemone figures in the story somewhere, too.
submerged placemarker
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Yep. The step-by-step flooding of ecosystems (resulting in groups of similar fossils), varying degrees of mobility (fast moving animals escape the rising flood waters), and water sorting (segregation of fossils via gravity) all have a part in the geologic record. Too bad neither you nor I were there to witness it, but at least a human was around to take notes (more than I can say for the "millions of years" folks).
Wait. No. We're lucky we get to see any evidence at all. Thanks to righteous Noah we get to take a look around this fantastic creation of God for a little while and enjoy His gifts.
Did you get even a hint about how much water we are talking about here from your chat with Junior?
How much water is currently on the planet, give or take a few billion gallons? Why should I have any reason to believe there is less water on the planet today than there always has been? I reckon God could have fabricated more water for the occasion, but I don't think proper study would reveal it. Do you know how much water there is and where it all resides? Does science?
Bull, you are blinded by your worldview and your loyalty to a colleague. I have said nothing bad about Lauterbur, but you do not hesitate to belittle an acknowledged pioneer in the field. First, Damadian has patents filed. Second, these patents were useful enough to GE and others that diagnostic equipment was built using them. The proof is in the suit he won and the concessions he got from others.
Against All Odds: History of the MRI
Once the potential to detect tumors was accepted, however, Dr. Damadian had to fight off giant companies such as Hitachi and General Electric to protect his patented technology. Hitachi settled out of court, but the case against GE went to trial in 1995. In a "David v. Goliath" lawsuit, FONAR won one of the largest patent settlements on record: $128.7 million.
That is proof enough to most people that Damadian is no fraud.
Here is one comment, and note the charge at the end. It is worse than your charge against another creationist for allowing his name to be added to a study which had a portion he would disagree with.
Damadian invented Medical MRI
As a physician with a biophysics degree, I have followed the Damadian story from its beginnings. Claiming he didn't invent MRI is like saying the Wright brothers did not invent powered flight because slighly later aircraft were rather different from their original "Flyer".
T1/T2 had been around for decades. He was the first to realize and show they could be used for imaging. This is what made medical MRI possble and will be used long after the contributons of this years winners are obsolete.
Further, in the patent suit, Lauderbur's notebook revealed that he had been directly inspired by Damadian, though he never acknowledged this in his published work. This is called "citation plagarism" and is a definite no-no.
Posted by: Peter H Proctor, PhD, M at October 14, 2003 08:35 AM
This would be a difficult thing to show, however. How can we account for all the water on this planet when we cannot pry downward but - what? - several miles at best. Think how far down we can probe but haven't yet gone. Lots of energy down there, too. I'd bet on it. The biblical account of the great flood indicates water coming from within the earth.
It is quite apparent, with all the varying tales of the great flood, that there were fabricators back then just as there are today. Folks who cannot bear to hear the unpolished truth. References to Sea Kings and pebbles thrown over shoulders are the fanciful tales that, today, have been replaced with theories of evolution. Some people simply can't get their story straight. Business as usual.
http://geocities.com/MotorCity/Factory/2583/egyptmyth.htm
Many people object that there are no deluge legends in Egypt but this is not the case. The earliest tells that the God Atmu caused the waters of the great deep and drowned everybody except those who were with him in his boat, which would indicate that when he or she was deposed from the post of chaos monster he became the Egyptian Noah or Uta Napishtim.
Maybe not.
The reference to age limits in humans was simply an analogy about limits per se.
The issue with speciation is whether it reaches a limit or does not. Is speciation an example of how maximizing certain pre-existing traits can lead to loss of others? Or is it a stage in the evolution of one thing into another?
That's the debate. The evolutionist would propose that random mutations over time account for the diversity of life on earth. That's an awful lot of diversity. Millions of species. Some fly. Some swim. Some are huge. Others are so small they can only be seen through a microscope. Some split to reproduce. Others have complicated courtship rituals, followed by mating, gestation, birth, nurturance, etc..
I don't object to faith at all. I have it myself. Perhaps I've inadvertently left the impression that I devalue faith by stating that belief in evolution requires faith (and a lot of it) but that was not my intent.
On another issue you raised, I understand that deliberate breeding produces results different from the more random variations we see in nature. It's doubtful nature would produce a chihuahua. But the lesson there is that deliberate efforts to stretch natural boundaries eventually reach a limit. We can't breed a dog the size of a flea or the size of an elephant. We can't produce anything from breeding fruit flies other than fruit flies. What would lead anyone to assume that random mutations would ever lead to anything radically different from what was there to begin with?
How long would we have to observe micro-organisms dividing until somehow we ended up, through random mutations (and it would surely take a ton of them), with a larger creature that reproduces sexually?
Might it simply be that such a thing never happened? That giraffes have always been giraffes? That the variation we see is in fact limited. Natural selection takes it to one level, and we can push it to another through selective breeding, and then CRASH! We hit a wall that neither we nor nature can breach. You simply CAN'T produce dogs the size of an elephant, and neither can natural selection and mutation.
Nor can natural selection and mutation lead to micro-organisms evolving over eons into the millions of life forms we see today.
If you believe in evolution, you must believe that the limits we have seen in everything from amoeba to fruit flies to dogs can be breached and have been breached countless millions of times by random chance. Maybe that's true, but it's speculation. I would suggest that those limits are unbreachable by any natural process. The number of mutations necessary to account for all the life we see would be unfathomable.
Anyone is free to suggest that such an incredible, and unobserved, series of mutations happened. Perhaps it did. So offer it as a theory. But don't shout down other ideas, or use the circular reasoning we so often see (e.g., those countless millions of mutations had to occur because without it there would be no evolution). That's like the atheist who once said, "spontaneous generation of life seems impossible, but it must have happened because here I am!"
shubi, I see that I failed to answer your query about the scientific definition of "kind". I'm not a scientist and don't have a science dictionary handy but I'd say it probably refers to species, or perhaps genus. Feel free to correct me! :-)
I didn't comment on your religious opinions, as that would seem to be out of the scope of the discussion here. However, if you want to engage me in a theological discussion feel free to Freepmail me!
Miracle Needed Placemarker
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