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 even if science did seek ID, we still can't know everything because we don't have the Mind of God. The universe will remain unintelligible.
But computers are still pretty cool. I wouldn't want to have to give mine up.
But it probably amused you, and I only psst for my own amusement meself.
You posted a list of questions - I then responded with the list of answers that SpongeBob gave when taking the verbal portion of his boating test for the 38th time ;)
I thought you probably had a good reason. Otherwise I would have posted the bunny wearing a pancake pic.
I had a reason, would not call it a good one ;)
Your post has no bearing on the correctness of evolution.
Any reason you can walk away from, is a good one
What flaws? Describe them.
As you and I have pointed out, the areas of controversy in biology do not include the things that anti-evolutionists concern themselves with, such as the age of the earth and common descent.
Stephen Gould. - He wrote numerous books on that exact subject.
Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean universe - which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.Galileo (1623)
And answered the question.
? Huh? Please don't put words in my mouth. I said what I meant, and meant what I said: If you're truly interested, you can find them just like I did.
Your attempt at ad hominem attacks are proving my point.
The fact remains there are serious, thinking people who have problems with Darwinism.
Calling them "anti-science" is demagougery, and doesn't deal with their observations.
I won't try and convince you otherwise, you can find it yourself if you want to be open.
Otherwise, I'll engage people as I encounter them and plant a seed.
Good luck.
More sophomoric psychobabble musings? You really need to learn the subject at hand.
Yeah, I'm kinda wishing that I hadn't said "one-and-only". They did contribute more than one thing to the civilized world long ago, but I can't think of anything recent. In any case, "one-and-only" is just flat wrong.
You had to go back almost 500 years to find an example, eh? By the 19th century, Jews in Germany were largely emancipated, and were surpassing other Germans in many fields (creating jealousy in the process; leftism is largely the politics of envy). They contributed greatly to Germany's advanced state of technology, and fought for her in WWI. You want to know the real source of Nazi ideology? Look into the academic climate of 19th cent. Germany (that's a little closer to Hitler in time, isn't it?), especially Marxism, which was the economic foundation of National Socialism. That's why the left prefers the contraction Nazi: to disguise the fact that the movement was socialist. Marx was a vicious anti-Semite. Look it up, right here on FR.
You're playing dodge ball again. We were talking about eyes and complexity (or simplicity, in the case of plants). Try answering my question: Do you know how a plant "knows" to turn its leaves toward the light?
Let's turn that around, shall we:
"Until some EVO researcher actually produces some POSITIVE evidence for the evolutionary appearance of first forms, then evolutionists do not have a dog in this hunt."
At this point, EVO's usually recoil in horror and whine, "Evolutionary Theory doesn't deal with first forms, you six-day-creation-believing Luddite!".
Indeed, it does not (and I do not believe the universe was created in six 24-hour days, and certainly am not a Luddite). Intelligent Design does, however, account for first forms and can also explain why there are physical laws and constants in the universe. Indeed, without these laws and constants it is unlikely the universe would exist at all. And ID can well include micro-evolution as part of the intelligent design ("Why not macro-eolution, you uni-brow, mouth-breathing, fundamentalist?", the EVO's question angrily. Well, EVO's are very big on empirical evidence, and we have no evidence that any kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, or species has evolved into an entirely different kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, or species. You see, evolution must account for not only how a white moth became a black moth, but how plants became animals, or vice versa. Now show me THAT is the fossil record and I might begin to question my beliefs, lol! And I have two eyebrows, I only mouth-breathe when I have a stuffed-up nose, and while a believer, I am certainly not a fundamentalist in the way some EVO's define bitterly spit out the word). Evolution is a rather beautiful part of ID, if you ask me. If nothing else, ID is a much more complete explanation of how we got here today, in our present form.
There. I think I've made a salient point or two without once hurling an insult.
If I were to put a little sand in the oyster of some of the EVO's here at FR, I would ask Mr. Henry why the SCIENCE ping list is "an elite subset" of the EVOLUTION ping list, rather than the other way around? Now tell me, who's got a "religion", lol??
And I might also suggest, just to help the oyster make another pearl, that perhaps certain Freeper EVO's might recognize their elite-subset selves in red text on this thread and its sequel.
Okay, EVO's! To arms! To arms! You know the drill!
Find the misspelled word in my post or minor grammatical error that will allow you to rationalize discrediting me entirely! Maybe it's early in the post, and you can comment on how "you read no further"!
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