Posted on 10/03/2005 6:22:51 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
After a weekend break from a court case involving intelligent design, the Dover school board officials will face business as usual. The board today will hold its first school board meeting since the trial began.
On Sunday, Dover school board member David Napierski said he sympathized with the time fellow members Shelia Harkins and Alan Bonsell have spent on the court case.
I really havent seen it erode them from their duties, he said. It definitely has taken a lot of their time . . . I think it is sapping some of the people, too.
The trial began Sept. 26 in U.S. Middle District Court in Harrisburg. It resumes Wednesday.
Napierski hopes to attend at least one day per week of the trial.
Were seeing one side of the whole picture right now, he said. I think its going to go all the way up to the Supreme Court.
He said dealing with the court case while running the school district is a double-edged sword.
I just hope and pray that our focus will stay on business, he said.
School district residents might have a difficult time resuming day-to-day life as it was before the trial began.
Lonnie Langioni left his position as a school board member in Dover in 2003. He said the issue has divided the community and he wants folks to again be friends.
Were just going to have to let it run its course, he said about the trial. Im just waiting for the day that this is all over and that the people of Dover can go back to talking to each other again.
He said he follows the case and reads newspapers and articles online.
Its crossed all kinds of lines, he said of the trial. Dover is a great community. We all need to respect each others viewpoints.
Former Dover school board member Barrie Callahan, a plaintiff in the court case, is ready to spend more time in court this week.
The case needs to proceed, she said Saturday. I know the issue. To see it through the process is truly fascinating.
Youre seeing the best of the best, she said about attorneys. It is an honor to be in their presence.
She said shes been following news of the trial posted online.
Its not about little tiny Dover, she said. This case really, really is important.
UPDATE
Trial schedule: The trial resumes Wednesday and Thursday in U.S. Middle District Court in Harrisburg and is scheduled to continue Oct. 12, 14, 17 through 21, 24, 27 and Nov. 2 through 4.
At stake: Its the most significant court challenge to evolution since 1987, and its the first time a court has been asked to rule whether intelligent design can be taught in public schools. Experts say the cases outcome could influence how science is defined and taught in schools across the country. The lead defense lawyer said he wanted to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Coming this week: Among the scheduled witnesses: Dover school district science teacher Bertha Spahr and Jennifer Miller and plaintiffs Cynthia Sneath, Joel Leib and Deb Fenimore.
Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, also is scheduled. Forrest co-authored Creationisms Trojan Horse, subtitled The Wedge of Intelligent Design.
He's been added to my little black box. The newbies never know when to keep their heads down.
Wonderful. Perhaps FreeDominion's moderators should be notified that Nathan loves the US really and is just trolling in FreeDominion.
"Dr Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum" placemarker.
If you're around long enough, you can recite the quote mined nuggets verbatim. They're constantly recycled.
Colin Patterson alert! We need your most excellent expose of that ancient pile of poop.
Do you know what anthropologists do?
Do you mean this Colin Patterson?
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html
Here we go with the magic again. That is belief a leap of faith, religion and has no basis in science. Just say, God did it. It's more believable. " Spores, or organic molecules drifting in space are not intelligent designers.
(Your evolutionist pals theory, not mine) He said these spores contained DNA which he claimed came from intelligent life which came from "elsewhere"
Wolf
Hard to say; so many anti-Evo sneak-back disruptor Trolls -- so little time.
Excuse me? show me an American bashing post from FD. I work in MB and live in ND.
LOL I sent that to myself
I forgot,
Will you put me on your ping list?
Wolf
[snip quote mines]
So, Darwin earnestly considering the questions his theory brings up, questions he answers later on, is a statement of Darwin's putative belief that he should abandon the ToE? You really ought to read the book rather than regurgipost drivel from creationist sites that you believe will back up your claim. Darwin contemplated these questions not because he questioned his theory but because they were valid questions that needed answering, which he did in a later chapter.
"The late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University:
Again you mistake contemplation of valid questions about the ToE for the author's consideration of abandonment of the theory. You are assuming that questions about the theory equate to abandonment. That is bad logic and nonsensical. In this case, Gould was questioning the consistency of the rate of evolutionary change and postulated that the rate of change could be inconsistent. His hypothesis has since been incorporated into the ToE because it fits observations and does not falsify adaptation.
"Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal:"
Now you have turned to another discussion of the necessity of gradualness in evolution. The question of transitionals raised by both Gould and Patterson, and explained quite convincingly by Gould, is in regards to the sparseness of intermediate species level fossils. Species as defined by science, not creationists. In other words, fossils that would be separated by a few tens of thousands of years. The transitional fossil sequences we have are millions of years apart and show a consistent and morphologically gradual change between taxonomic levels much farther apart than species - which is the lowest taxon of importance in these discussions.
The rest of your quotes I do not know enough about to rebut, but a number look to be based on the absence of continual intra-species fossils, something, that because of the difficulty in recovering fossils that are from short-lived organisms, are unlikely to be found.
Creationists are fond of basing their doubt of abiogenesis on probability, perhaps you could perform the probability calculations on the likelyhood of finding 3 or 4 directly connected sequential fossils at the species level. Don't forget to include the number of species possible in 500 million years, the geologic upheaval from tectonics, difficulty in the preservation of bones, weathering of exposed fossils, dispersion of both bones and fossils by erosion, the percentage of earth searched for fossils - don't forget the depth of the strata, and any other condition likely to bear on our recovery of a specific fossil.
When you have finished the calculations, please post them. I would be very interested in the calculations themselves as well as the result.
ahhh...the days of flipping a top water frog over some dense lillypads in the lakes of northern MN...those were the days.
"Moore is right about one thing; Americans are the dumbest people on the planet. "
posted (by an incredible coincidence) by that other guy called Nathan Zachary, on the Free Dominion website, on 7/15/04.
I'm sure glad our Nathan Zachary isn't a hostile anti-American jerk like the one who posts on Free Dominion.
Nice feet, where's the lungs? I catch plenty of catfish. they can live a long time out of water. just because a fish flips itself across short bits of land and go into other ponds doesn't mean it's evolving. In fact there is not even a hint of anyhing 'evolving' on that fih, whaich has been observed for hundreds of years.
yep, I knew what you meant. check your Freepmail.
DONE.
Well, on a tangent, I once heard a very good homily and, inter alia, the priest noted that we are said to be "the salt of the earth" and that one major reason we use salt is to add flavor and zest to food. Now one respectable conclusion one can draw from that analogy is that people exist to add flavor and zest to the universe. Kind of a cosmic soap opera.
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