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 haven’t 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.
“We’re seeing one side of the whole picture right now,” he said. “I think it’s 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.
“We’re just going to have to let it run its course,” he said about the trial. “I’m 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.
“It’s 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.
“You’re seeing the best of the best,” she said about attorneys. “It is an honor to be in their presence.”
She said she’s been following news of the trial posted online.
“It’s 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: It’s the most significant court challenge to evolution since 1987, and it’s the first time a court has been asked to rule whether intelligent design can be taught in public schools. Experts say the case’s 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 “Creationism’s Trojan Horse,” subtitled “The Wedge of Intelligent Design.”
Bring back ModernMan and SeaLion!
Hell, bring back Aric2000!
Why? Be specific.
"Name the protein. That is all I ask. Then we can discuss what the experiment involving the named chemical "proves" or demonstrates. That is called discussion. But I find that you don't want to do that. All you seem to want to do is cite some thing and assert a definite answer to what the citation means.
Name what protein? The protein that started our lineage? Who believes we could conclusively provide that? We do not need to know the exact protein, we just need to show that abiogenesis is possible and can be done in less than 3.2 billion years.
ME:Abiogenesis, or life from non-life postulates that early life started with self-replicating chemicals, something we have observed,
If you look back through my posts you will see that I did not claim I knew the exact chemicals of our pre-biotic ancestor. I said we have observed self replicating chemicals. I also made that comment to differentiate abiogenesis from the ToE. Please stay with the focus of the sidebar.
BTW, I didn't call abiogenesis a theory, I called it an hypothesis. It is still in the process of being tested.
Who am I to argue with my personal deity?
No. It's difficult to figure out when they had no pulled posts and didn't break any of the posted rules.
Maybe someone in the hierarchy of FR knows why a particular mod pushed the button on ModernMan and/or SeaLion. And surely some others could find out. But they either don't care, aren't listening or are tiptoeing around the issue for some reason. In any case, they aren't talking.
monkey skulls and human skulls, different races of humans does not prove evolution and transitional fossil record.
From your comments it looks like nothing will convince you of any aspect of evolution. Not fact, not well-supported theory, and certainly not anything anyone on these threads has to say. We post good pictures of the fossil record leading to Homo sapiens and you reply "monkey skulls and human skulls, different races of humans does not prove evolution and transitional fossil record."
The experts, who have examined the actual fossils, can clearly distinguish not only the human skulls but the various transitional species back several million years. And you know, not a one of them is a monkey skull. New and Old World monkeys split off many million years earlier.
I think your mind is made up and no evidence will even be considered. I also think that is pretty sad, because Homo sapiens didn't get where we are today by this kind of behavior.
The one you claim you cited.
The first experiment, I believe, was a designed 32 unit protein, specifically chosen because it would act as a template for the designed reaction. It was then split into a 17 unit block and a 15 unit block. The blocks were properly activated and then allowed to react. Voila! A designed experiment produced a designed result. Half a cadillac joined preferentially to the matching other half of a cadillac when superglue was put into the proper position. Fact is, there are plenty of "self-replicating" chemicals. They just reside in living things. Simply put, to dot the i in a penned copy of "Hamlet" does not make you Shakespeare.
We have recently designed one self replicating system based on the leucine zipper motif of GCN4. One 32-residue alpha-helical peptide serves as a template to organize two constituent fragments in the proper orientation prior to ligation. Condensation of the two fragments produces a second template which can serve as a template for another such reaction
The first paragraph seems to be a so what? And the second seems to cite the experiment I describe. That experiment "coaxes" one bond to form. Quite a self-replicating feat!(har)
The Ghadiri peptide, at 32 amino acids, is the smallest known self-replicating peptide (AFAIK). Your response is to complain that its replication is not general enough. <shrug>
Of course, when the replication essentially consists of the formation of one single bond. That is no "replication". That is a tinker-toy.
Here is an opinion on these type reactions.
If you want to get two molecules to react, positioning them in the right way could get you there quite efficiently. Using this simple chemical insight and some clever retrosynthetic thinking, Reza Ghadiri and his group at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, created a completely new research field some six years ago. Knowing an existing biological structure, eg the coiled coil (two a-helices wrapped around each other), they described one strand of it as the template. This strand helps the positioning of the other one, which we could call the target strand. They cut the target strand in half and activated the ends so that the halves can react to form the whole. Then they demonstrated that the template can serve to position the halves, thus speeding up their reaction to form the complete target strand.
...
The availability of such peptides provides a unique opportunity to study complex molecular behaviour in a simple system. Some of the processes involved will be spookily reminiscent of things happening in the living cell. For example, Ghadiri's group reported the emergence of 'symbiosis' - two distinct self-replicators enhancing each other's success - in their early work on peptide hypercycles.1 However, one should not be tempted to transfer these findings to the still largely mysterious field of the origin and pre-cellular evolution of life. Biological molecules do not actually replicate themselves, but rather replicate each other. Furthermore, most researchers see RNA as a more promising candidate for the principal role in the early molecular stages of evolution. Thus, self-replicating peptides may have little to teach us about the roots of the tree of life, but they do add some interesting new branches to the tree of chemistry.
To overcome this fundamental problem, Chmielewski's group has now systematically reduced the stability of the coiled-coil complex by as much as they could without endangering the binding of the fragments necessary for positioning. They achieved this goal by shortening their self-replicating peptide E1E2 to a length of 26 residues, which they believe to be minimal for the desired reaction to occur.3 Studying the self-replicating capacity of the new peptide, called RI-26, they observed catalytic efficiency (catalysed rate constant:uncatalysed rate constant) of 100,000, which is more than 20 times higher than the previous record for self-replicating molecules. This efficiency approaches the range found in natural enzymes.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.