Posted on 12/20/2005 7:54:38 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Fox News alert a few minutes ago says the Dover School Board lost their bid to have Intelligent Design introduced into high school biology classes. The federal judge ruled that their case was based on the premise that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was incompatible with religion, and that this premise is false.
Go back and write your post in standard English; I refuse to waste my time trying to decipher your gibberish.
I still don't see why a species can't change so much that it is reclassified in another taxa. Species, class, and every other level of taxonomy are divided only by characteristics; it's a scientific application of "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."
Providing you with an intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries is, I am afraid, beyond the scope of this discussion, for what I hope are obvious reasons. I must admit I rather assumed that anyone trying to pass themselves off as a conservative on this forum was at least vaguely familiar with this subject area.
Feel free to do a little homework. I guess you could just google around but you'd be better off engaging the subjects with a little more formal mode of inquiry.
Study the history of Marxism & Freudianism & Darwinism from the point of view of their rise and acceptance amongst the intellectual and academic elites in the West. This might not be a terrible place to start: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9603/opinion/thistime.html
"Why not less complex?"
Because that's not what the theory of evolution requires. It absolutely requires the addition of complexity. You start with primordial soup. You end with human beings. Actually, we're at human beings now, but the theory says that something else will come after us. Unless you are saying that human beings are less complex than primordial soup (Bill Clinton not withstanding), there has to be complexity added in there somewhere.
Do you even know what you're defending?
"That's the one that says that man is nothing more than primordial soup with delusions of grandeur and doesn't provide evidence to back up its claims. It's not discredited yet, but we're working on it."
Before you can refute something, you must first understand it. It is clear that you do not understand the Theory of Evolution. Perhaps you should leave all this to those who do.
Your statements regarding the Theory of Evolution are simply incorrect. Therefore, any refutation of those mistaken ideas is worthless, since it has nothing to do with the theory in the first place.
Go. Read. Learn.
Being disconnected from reality affords you that luxury, but it comes at a heavy price.
Who cares if the school board is breathtakingly inane. They are the duly elected representatives of the people of that district.
Which does NOT empower them to violate the Constitutions of the United States of America and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as the court has held in this ruling.
If the people of that district agree that they are breathtakingly inane then the people of that district have the power to recall them and vote them out.
Which is EXACTLY what the voters of Dover DID, or have you not been paying attention?
Either way it is manifestly NOT the business of the federal court to rectify inane rulings from local politico's.
Inanity wasn't the basis on which the court "corrected" the Dover School Board, it was the UNCONSTITUTIONALITY of the School Board's action that got it overruled by the court.
Why have school boards and city councils at all? Let's just let federal judges tell us what is best for us.
Did you miss Civics Class the day they discussed the role of the courts WRT actions of other branches of government that are violative of the Constitution? Somebody has to make that legal determination, not a popular determination, of what laws and other governmental actions mean, and what the Constitution means, and that role is held by the courts in this country.
Judicial tyranny is tyranny whether it's from the right or the left
Judicial activism isn't the only form of tyranny -- executive and legislative branches of government are just as capable of tyranny as courts, and this court found the evidence overwhelming that the Dover School Board tried to commit an action violative of both the Federal and State Constitutions, which is to say that Judge Jones ruling protects the people of Dover (who repudiated the School Board's ID policy by voting out of office every pro-ID member of the board up for reelection) from the tyranny of petty officials who connived with a Law firm to impose their preferred religiously based ideas on the science classes of their district. All forms of tyranny are pernicious, not just that which flows from activist judges, which surely Judge Jones is not, as can be seen from the words taken directly from the court's ruling in this case:
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
If you can't read that, your an idiot!
Trust me, the Scientologists would love to have their bogus religion taught in the schools. So would the Muslims. All religions seem to seek expansion. Sad.
Bogus? Which ones aren't bogus? Is your's bogus? You seek expansion with every single post, your tag-line is the attempt. Everyday, all day, on this forum, you seek expansion, while deriding other's attempts. And THAT is truly sad.
"It's not wise to lie under oath in a federal court."
Judges tend to be kind of unhappy about those things.
I once had a perp demand that the judge recuse himself after the perp was charged with perjury--he said that the judge was prejudiced by the fact that he lied in his court.
Guess how THAT one flew with the appellate court...
Evolution does require a leap of faith for those who can not comprehend numbers greater than a billion.
Creationism seems almost logical by comparison.
Further, all our science assumes the laws of physics remain constant over time. It is not a guaranteed assumption.
Creationism does not belong in science class, but go easy on those people who are unfamiliar with very large numbers who can not make the leap of faith that is required to believe in evolution.
By saying, "until someone comes up with a falsifiable test," you've set up conditions the Judge will not allow. He and his ilk discard, ipso facto, the possibility that such a test could ever be devised. He is not neutral on the subject. He, unlike science, does not leave it an open question.
"Because that's not what the theory of evolution requires. It absolutely requires the addition of complexity."
Did anyone charge you for your science education? If so, sue that person or corporate entity--you were defrauded.
THANK YOU!!!!
LOL. Hilarious!
A theory is an established paradigm that explains all or much of the data we have and offers valid predictions that can be tested.
in science, a body of descriptions of knowledge is usually only called a theory once it has a firm empirical basis, i.e., it
1. is consistent with pre-existing theory to the extent that the pre-existing theory was experimentally verified, though it will often show pre-existing theory to be wrong in an exact sense,
2. is supported by many strands of evidence rather than a single foundation, ensuring that it probably is a good approximation if not totally correct,
3. makes predictions that might someday be used to disprove the theory,
4. is tentative, correctable and dynamic, in allowing for changes to be made as new data is discovered, rather than asserting certainty, and
5. is the most parsimonious explanation, sparing in proposed entities or explanations, commonly referred to as passing Occam's Razor.
Sorry, your opinion on that is just that. Maybe you can take a stab at telling me the difference between "scientific theory" and theory. All the rest have scoffed,,,,and then retreated.
As used in science, a theory is the goal of research. As I have posted before, we use the definition more like this:
Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"When we deal with a theory we do not mean a "guess," even though that is how a theory is often seen in the vernacular. "Well, that's your theory" incorporates that latter usage. Hypothesis is probably closer, but still not exact:
Hypothesis: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices"A very good explanation of the way science operates was provided on another thread. Its a bit long, but seems pretty clear.
From an NSF abstract:
As with all scientific knowledge, a theory can be refined or even replaced by an alternative theory in light of new and compelling evidence. The geocentric theory that the sun revolves around the earth was replaced by the heliocentric theory of the earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun. However, ideas are not referred to as "theories" in science unless they are supported by bodies of evidence that make their subsequent abandonment very unlikely. When a theory is supported by as much evidence as evolution, it is held with a very high degree of confidence.In science, the word "hypothesis" conveys the tentativeness inherent in the common use of the word "theory.' A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world. Through experiment and observation, hypotheses can be supported or rejected. At the earliest level of understanding, hypotheses can be used to construct more complex inferences and explanations. Like "theory," the word "fact" has a different meaning in science than it does in common usage. A scientific fact is an observation that has been confirmed over and over. However, observations are gathered by our senses, which can never be trusted entirely. Observations also can change with better technologies or with better ways of looking at data. For example, it was held as a scientific fact for many years that human cells have 24 pairs of chromosomes, until improved techniques of microscopy revealed that they actually have 23. Ironically, facts in science often are more susceptible to change than theories, which is one reason why the word "fact" is not much used in science.
Finally, "laws" in science are typically descriptions of how the physical world behaves under certain circumstances. For example, the laws of motion describe how objects move when subjected to certain forces. These laws can be very useful in supporting hypotheses and theories, but like all elements of science they can be altered with new information and observations.
Those who oppose the teaching of evolution often say that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact." This statement confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.
Modified from RadioAstronomers's post #27 on another thread.
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