there are Rules, yanno...
Posted on 07/27/2006 3:00:03 PM PDT by BrandtMichaels
What are Darwinists so afraid of?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: July 27, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jonathan Witt © 2006
As a doctoral student at the University of Kansas in the '90s, I found that my professors came in all stripes, and that lazy ideas didn't get off easy. If some professor wanted to preach the virtues of communism after it had failed miserably in the Soviet Union, he was free to do so, but students were also free to hear from other professors who critically analyzed that position.
Conversely, students who believed capitalism and democracy were the great engines of human progress had to grapple with the best arguments against that view, meaning that in the end, they were better able to defend their beliefs.
Such a free marketplace of ideas is crucial to a solid education, and it's what the current Kansas science standards promote. These standards, like those adopted in other states and supported by a three-to-one margin among U.S. voters, don't call for teaching intelligent design. They call for schools to equip students to critically analyze modern evolutionary theory by teaching the evidence both for and against it.
The standards are good for students and good for science.
Some want to protect Darwinism from the competitive marketplace by overturning the critical-analysis standards. My hope is that these efforts will merely lead students to ask, What's the evidence they don't want us to see?
Under the new standards, they'll get an answer. For starters, many high-school biology textbooks have presented Haeckel's 19th century embryo drawings, the four-winged fruit fly, peppered moths hidden on tree trunks and the evolving beak of the Galapagos finch as knockdown evidence for Darwinian evolution. What they don't tell students is that these icons of evolution have been discredited, not by Christian fundamentalists but by mainstream evolutionists.
We now know that 1) Haeckel faked his embryo drawings; 2) Anatomically mutant fruit flies are always dysfunctional; 3) Peppered moths don't rest on tree trunks (the photographs were staged); and 4) the finch beaks returned to normal after the rains returned – no net evolution occurred. Like many species, the average size fluctuates within a given range.
This is microevolution, the age-old observation of change within species. Macroevolution refers to the evolution of fundamentally new body plans and anatomical parts. Biology textbooks use instances of microevolution such as the Galapagos finches to paper over the fact that biologists have never observed, or even described in theoretical terms, a detailed, continually functional pathway to fundamentally new forms like mammals, wings and bats. This is significant because modern Darwinism claims that all life evolved from a common ancestor by a series of tiny, useful genetic mutations.
Textbooks also trumpet a few "missing links" discovered between groups. What they don't mention is that Darwin's theory requires untold millions of missing links, evolving one tiny step at a time. Yes, the fossil record is incomplete, but even mainstream evolutionists have asked, why is it selectively incomplete in just those places where the need for evidence is most crucial?
Opponents of the new science standards don't want Kansas high-school students grappling with that question. They argue that such problems aren't worth bothering with because Darwinism is supported by "overwhelming evidence." But if the evidence is overwhelming, why shield the theory from informed critical analysis? Why the campaign to mischaracterize the current standards and replace them with a plan to spoon-feed students Darwinian pabulum strained of uncooperative evidence?
The truly confident Darwinist should be eager to tell students, "Hey, notice these crucial unsolved problems in modern evolutionary theory. Maybe one day you'll be one of the scientists who discovers a solution."
Confidence is as confidence does.
And what to include in a high school curriculum is a political question of great interest to conservatives.
there are Rules, yanno...
as I said... I accept them, provisionally, with grumbles and discomfort and a deep yen to have samples of each bottled for direct analysis.
while math is a lovely tool, I remember the bumblebee error, so I really do prefer math *supported with empirical data* to math alone.
Why in particular should one accept the thousands of science textbooks as more authoritative and accurate than the biblical texts? Is it their great number? Is it because you were not present to experience six days of creation and thus weigh your experience in time as more authoritative?
You asserted, "The basis of Christianity is the New Testament, nothing else." I'm sorry but that is just not accurate as a Christian perspective. See Luke 24:27 where the Bible relates that Jesus tells how His coming and purpose is throughout Moses and the prophets. Then Paul, throughout the letters, and Hebrews, and Romans ... all are sprinkled with reference to The Christ from the source the disciples had in that day, the Hebrew scriptures.
Because the errors in science textbooks are revised and corrected.
Sorry old chap, until your post I didn't have a computer stored picture of the Lady. At sixty, and having read her book and about her modeling techniques (that one should cause some confusion, eh!), I think she's one of the most gorgeous creatures I've ever laid eyes on.
all that and brains too...
Jeepers, HayekRocks. Do you mean to suggest that science is so "holy" that it is profaned anytime and everytime a philosopher should lay one single finger on it?
If that is so, what ought a philosopher to say to the raft of "closet metaphysicians" that populate modern biology -- such as Monod, Lewontin, Dawkins, Pinker, Crick, et al.?
Fair's fair, guy. Please advise!
If that is the case, then why believe a text just because it is subject to error since without such error its correctable value vanishes?
Math follows the GIGO principle. It will give perfectly correct answers for profoundly flawed models.
Contrary to what was thought in the 1970's, RNA can act as a versatile catalyst itself. It does not require enzymes. Dr. Yockey may have lost sight of the dependence of his own conclusions on assumptions. He also has apparently forgotten that simple inorganic catalysts can accomplish the same transformations that enzymes do. Many of the most primitve enzymes are actually protein wrapped about a tiny nodule of iron and sulfur, as if the nodule came first and the protein later on, perhaps to tune the properties of the nodule.
My reading tells me that most abiogenetic hypotheses now involve spaces of limited dimensionality; surfaces, or interstices. In such spaces, the chemistry is exceedingly different. In the abiogenetic banquet, the soup course is over. :-)
I am very grateful for your immediate response to my request. Yockey should be on my reading list, even though his perspective seems to be a little dated.
I had no idea Mr. Gilder was considered a philosopher. I see him more as a pop science writer.
If that is so, what ought a philosopher to say to the raft of "closet metaphysicians" that populate modern biology -- such as Monod, Lewontin, Dawkins, Pinker, Crick, et al.?
In my experience, which is somewhat limited, few philosophers take them seriously as philosophers.
yeh.
Then you must not be a philosopher. :^)
Speaking as one of those -- by temperament, training, and experience -- perhaps you should note that philosophers attentive to developments in modern science are acutely aware of the "ontological reductionism" implied by the doctrine of scientific materialism, a/k/a metaphysical naturalism. For the thinkers I named (a partial list indeed, two of whom are Nobel laureates no less), we are no longer speaking of a scientific method -- i.e., methodological naturalism -- but of a full-scale worldview, or cosmology, that holds the entire universe reduces to one single principle, the material. If that is not a "philosophy," then what would you call it, HayekRocks?
Need I add that this "philosophy" encroaches not only on the domains of metaphysics and cosmology, but on theology as well?
It is, whether you think so or not.
And my reading tells me that abiogenesis is immediately akin to tortoise's famous "purple elephant under the bed." If Yockey's insights are correct, then not only is the soup course over, but the whole banquet is over.
But if folks want to keep looking for the purple elephant, I have no objection whatsoever.
If you have a bone to pick with Yockey -- whom I regard as not only not passe, but as breaking new, important, potentially liberating ground -- then it would be best for you to take it up with him directly: Certainly he can defend his work far, far better than I can.
But do read his book first!
Thanks ever so much for writing, HayekRocks!
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: -
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And every single one of them is right!"
The Gunfight at the OK Oral.
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