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.
More specifically: If you can't mate with Drosophila melanogaster, are you Drosophila melanogaster? If you can't mate with Drosophila pseudoobscura, are you Drosophila pseudoobscura? They're both often referred to by the name "fruit fly," even though they're technically different species.
And the follow-up answer is that no, once they can't mate with each other they're no longer considered the same species, because this prevents beneficial mutations from spreading from one population to the other. Unless plasmids or something get involved, but that's a completely different matter.
Your "failure to connect the dots" analogy breaks down where the amount of detailed data is concerned. For example, the fact that the crimes were committed during the lifetime of the parties involved makes a world of difference in the quality of data. Evolution theories don't have the luxury of a mere handful of evidential details upon which to construct a tiny subset of history. To assume that the story of the world's history is abundantly clear from the so-called geologic column is ludicrous.
It's still my major.
No. However, we could reasonably surmise that the code had indeed gone through several iterations/version, and wasn't simply poofed into existence. From analysis of the existing code and code from previous eras, we could also reasonably surmise that Windows XP, Linux, and FreeBSD all have a common ancestor in Berkeley BSD.
Ahh. Youre a "super" senior. ;-)
In what sense is it unaccounted for?
"My kid has a genetic disorder "
I am sorry to hear that. This will make a good teaching tool, however.
How do you think your kid got this genetic disorder? He inherited it from you and his mom, right? It is probably that the gene that gives him this disorder is two recessive alleles for the disorder. A person without the disease would probably have neither of the alleles for the disorder.
You and your wife probably have one allele each and another allele that does not carry the disorder, but may be different in some way. Thus in your family there are three alleles max.
In most families there is probably just one allele or perhaps two. The recessive alleles that gave your kid the disease are harmful and will reduce the liklihood of procreation (because the death rate prior to maturity is probably slightly higher). Over thousands of years, the number of disease alleles will be reduced in the population. This change in frequency of alleles in the population is evolution by natural selection.
The disease allele was probably formed by some sort of mutation in one individual many years ago and spread as a recessive throughout the population. As it becomes more frequent (evolution) the chances of mating with someone with another recessive increases. This causes the expression of the disease to increase, but only 25% of a heterozygous cross will produce children with the disease. 50% will be carriers of the recessive and 25% will have no disease allele.
This is why it is dangerous to marry someone too closely related to you. There are more chances of the recessive genes being expressed and genetic diseases in the offspring.
In any event, the genetic disease will eventually be driven out of the gene pool, unless, like sickle cell, it has some survival advantage in an isolated population. Then this population will diverge and possibly form a new species in a few hundred thousand years.
But as pointed out earlier, the scientists who pioneered geological science did NOT begin with a scheme. Based on the quote from Sedgwick, they examined the data, and if anything tried their darndest to reconcile it with a YEC global flood, and were forced to come up with a different model entirely.
Thats how science works. Even the most dogmatic theories must be revised in the face of contradictory evidence. If there were any serious problems with TOE model, there would be NO way to hide it indefinitely. Unless you are willing to believe in the wildest of conspiracy theories (which would put the flat earthers and the UFOlogists to shame).
Yep, a Theory is really as close as science comes to fact when describing how a whole set of data comes together, in this case to describe how life changed over time on Earh.
Yep. And I was a farm manager and worked for USDA for awhile.
Heck, he hasnt even defined "complexity" yet.
"What I said is that any view of evolution has to account for increasing complexity. "
One lie.
You gave Chuggy and opening here, because he is taking it that the TOE is not predictive of scientific discoveries in the future. The TOE has been predictive of fossils we will find and genetics etc. It will be again.
So, to a certain extent and in a creationists simple mind the TOE DOES predict the future.
Ask him to tell you what an allele is. I can't get any of them to tell me. I guess they are skeeered. lol
Pardon me, but you are sounding dense here. Your complaints are starting to sound like God of the Gaps arguments...where since we lack the ability to model these things because of our present technological capabilities, evolution must be bunkrupt. What happens to your argument when the 15,000Ghz Pentium X comes out and we can? What gap are you going to hide in then?
As an analogy, I guess you must not put much stock in the current meteorological sciences, because they don't offer anything realistic in terms of predictive power either. Heck, they can't even determine whether or not it's going to rain for sure tomorrow! And those Space Weather scientists, they can't determine whether or not we'll be hit by a huge solar flare tomorrow that would wipe us out completely. Damn them! Reduce all of their funding to zero! Don't teach any science in school! Is that it? Give me a break. If your criteria had merit, creationism and ID would be more bankrupt, as they have no groundwork to make any predictions other than the hopeful "God did it, and God will continue to do it.".
On small scales, Evolution does well at predicting what it should see (when we can limit the outside variables to something we can accurately model). Make sense?
Based on these threads, I dont think most creationists even know what a gene is, let alone alleles.
Or even the basic rules of chemistry like bond sharing, electrostatic interactions, hydrophobicity etc.
Its all just so much magic.
So? He doesn't understand how science is done, if that is the case. He's made a specious argument, and I'm walking him through why his argument sucks. We're pretty much there now.
Is it a fish that looks like a snake and eating thereof killed Lord Randall?
My contention is that there ain't nobody seen nothing yet when it comes to the complete geologic record. Think about it. What's the deepest hole ever dug by human design? Ten miles?
If you could drop a pfennig down the KTB hole, it would take several minutes to hit bottom, for this research drill hole has now penetrated to 7.5 kilometers. It is the second deepest man-made hole, after the Soviet 12-km hole in the Kola Peninsula. Drilled solely for scientific purposes, the rocks and strata encountered by the KTB drill bits have forced the redrawing of German geological maps. The "real" subterranean world turned out to be quite different from that inferred from both surface indications and the seismic and electrical probing of the depths. Three specific surprises are worth mentioning:1.) Temperatures in the drill hole rose far faster than predicted.
2.) The expected boundary ("suture") between two old tectonic plates thought to exist at 3 km according to surface geology had not yet appeared at 7.5 km.
3.) Most interestingly, crevicular structure (crevices and pores) existed at almost all depths, even though theory said they could not because of intense pressures. And these voids were filled with fluids. P. Keher, a KTB scientist, was amazed at what the drill found:"When I started 25 years ago, the idea was that the deeper you go into the crust, the drier it gets."
This is just one of a tiny few examples where the record has been explored in some detail. How does it compare to the rest of the earth? Do you think the theory of evolution will be revised any if, as it appears from the article above, there there is a hell of a lot more water down there than anyone ever suspected?
1,600: another prime!
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