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.
Well the rules appear to be different for the Evo subject - simply because much of the outright fraud continues to be presented factually in public-school (and even university level) textbooks. I have not noticed this trend with any other area of science.
As you are aware I have been posting my views for quite some time. I have also been a lurker since the very early days of FR. I have yet to see the pro-evo crowd define their evo theories that they so vehemently defend nor and true depth regarding predictions supporting same
Well that certainly hasn't been proven
Starboard.
Port.
Skipper.
Deck.
Cabin.
Galley.
Keel.
1924.
There can be a lag between perpetration and discovery of the fraud in any scientific area of study. Can you please cite a reference where known frauds have been in textbooks? The "moths" thing has already been dealt with on this thread.
We can now state the second law of thermodynamicsa in the following form:
A transformation whose only final result is to transform into work heat extracted from a source which is at the same temperature throughout is impossible. (Postulate of Lord Kelvin)
The second law can also be expressed as follows:
A transformation whose only final result is to transfer heat from a body at a given temperature to a body at a higher temperature is impossible. (Postulate of Clausius)
Argue with Fermi if you like; he owns thermodynamics.
The nice thing about citing god as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove.Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On
You appear to dislike technology, if this is so why are you on the Internet?
May very well be true, and I hope it is, but IMO he is doing a poor job of representing himself on both accounts. Someone who either misunderstands or misrepresents the distinction between a christian and a jew is either lacking in knowledge or lacking in integrity or both. Either way it doesn't matter much - things had devolved to drive by postings.
My understanding of evolution is better than most and not nearly as complete as I would like. I read various articles linked by the folks on PH's ping list when I have the chance. My post 694 should shed light. Lastly, yes I was. Thanks for the reply. Regards, 70x7
One would think that, if you truly believe what you are saying, that you would jump at the chance to prove your point.
But you don't.
ASLTW
You don't know what a theory is, do you? You really aren't qualified to speak on the subject any more than a blind person can review a Picasso.
Educate yourself (there have been many links posted to help you with this) and then get back to us.
You must stop showing your ingnorance. TToG is a very hotly debated topic in scientific circles. The fact you can see something fall is an inference of gravity, just as the follsil record is an inference of Evolution.
All of science is based on theories which are based on inference.
Apologies CG, I had meant to include you in the reply - rules are rules...
In other words. you've got Jack Chick.
Martin Luther.
Name an atheist who supported slavery in the era leading up to the Civil War. [hint - this is a hard question] Now name a Christian who did. There were both Christian and atheist abolitionists.
Science does not have a text whereby it may judge the truth of a matter. Whatever structures science may have to ferret out fraud may be fraudulent, too. Is it supposed to be some kind of wonder that science perpetrated a fraud, and then corrected it? To the extent science seeks out something other than intelligent design it will not make heads or tails of an intelligible universe. The physical world behaves according to laws established by a lawgiver. To the extent science chooses to discard this paradigm (which happens to be in accord with the biblical texts) it will veer into either fraud or philsophies of vapid, perhaps harmful, import.
The Lord God is praising himself? conceited much?
Fallible men wrote the Psalms (and the rest of the Bible)
There are but they don't disprove evolutionary biology or help the anti-science cause.
Plus I doubt that you know what they are. A few interesting examples are that the number of animal phyla have not been agreed upon, that the number of plant phyla is even more hotly contested, publishing of Proterozoic Eon fossils is way too slow, and the difficulties in calibrating the biological clock for molecular DNA and RNA evolution.
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