Posted on 03/17/2013 12:11:01 PM PDT by eagleye85
Intelligent design is just another form of creationism, creationism is profoundly unscientific, and such unscientific views do not belong in public classrooms. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of activist Zack Kopplin, a student at Rice University who began his battle against a Louisiana academic freedom law (the Louisiana Science Education Act) while in high school. He is the 2012 winner of the “Troublemaker of the Year Award.”
“Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our school biology classrooms to ‘critique controversial theories like evolution and climate change,’” said Kopplin in a March interview on the Bill Moyers show. “Now, evolution and climate change aren’t scientifically controversial, but they are controversial to Louisiana legislators, and, basically, everyone who looked at this law knew it was just a back door to sneak creationism into public school science classes,” he continues (emphasis added).
As discussed in a previous blog entry, the media likes to condemn as right-wing and fundamentalist the crowd that prefers creationism to evolution. Through the course of an article by the UK’s The Guardian we learn that such laws as those proposed in Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Oklahoma are the product of a religious lobby, further the creationist agenda, and would be a feather in the caps of these two interest groups if these laws were to pass. Readers also learn that these states could be boycotted for their creationist educational laws. Kopplin, of course, is cited in the article for his opposition to the Louisiana law mentioned above. “It can be embarrassing to be from a state which has become a laughing stock in this area,” asserted Kopplin to the UK Guardian this January.
This month the media celebrates Kopplin’s “anti-creationism” activism with a full interview on the Bill Moyers show and an interview for the Washington Post. “Today’s fundamentalists, with political support from the Right-wing, are more aggressive than ever in crusading to challenge evolution with the dogma of creationism,” asserted Moyers in his introduction. “But they didn’t reckon on Zack Kopplin.”
“Going to college is tough enough without leading a campaign to stop creationism from being taught in school as an alternative to evolution, but that’s what Zach Kopplin, 19, has been doing for several years,” praises Valerie Strauss in her March 17 article.
“Evolution is, of course, the central principle around which all of the biological sciences revolve, and creationism is not a scientific alternative,” writes Strauss. “But religious fundamentalists continue to push for creationism to be taught in schools,” she continues (emphasis added.)
In the interview with Moyers, Kopplin rejects several forms of creationism, saying that “Intelligent design specifically rejects evolution, especially on a large scale.”
“Creationists like to break it up into micro/macro evolution. That’s not a legitimate thing,” he asserts. As for creationism, “Essentially, it’s a denial of evolution mainly based off a literal interpretation of Genesis.” Kopplin’s latest vendetta? Voucher programs. ““And so it’s become pretty clear: if you create a voucher program, you’re just going to be funding creationism through the back door,” he said to Moyers. You can real the CATO Institute’s Neal McCluskey’s response to Kopplin here.
“No, potentially serious, negative, unintended consequences could accompany freezing people out of religiously based education,” writes McCluskey. “For instance, traditional Christian morality calls for married, two-parent families, and one of the few things in social science that one would call pretty firmly established is that coming from such a family gives a child a significant leg up. Religious people also tend to have much greater stocks of social capital than the nonreligious, also generally a plus.”
“In light of those things, would it be worth undermining religion because you think creationism is nonsense?”
And oh, you flatter me, but the name’s not Einstein...
“Has Science ever “observed” evolution?”
It is my understanding, based on admittedly limited reading, that random mutation and natural selection has been observed to give organisms an advantage for survival in some environments. So in this case, I would say, yes, evolution has been observed.
However, it is also my understanding that in every case that this has been observed, the mutation has actually damaged an existing gene causing loss of function. Thus evolution of new, more advanced systems, or new genes with new functions, has not been observed.
Well where I find them is google...here is a page presenting information from the perspective of dino bones being only thousands of years old.
Perhaps the other techniques are accurate, and perhaps they are not. But they only apply to rock, not to bones. As I understand it, usually this means measuring the proportions of sister elements in a decay chain in near by volcanic rock with the assumption that the element was previously uniform in the sample taken in order to date a layer of volcanic rock, and then extrapolating the position of the rock to the position of the bone. The half lives involved put the dating technique beyond the reach of historical methods of testing its voracity. Its a very clever approach, and I am sure it is done with as much care as possible...but I am not completely sold on it as being better....unless by "better" you mean unable to come to a conclusion that the bone is only thousands of years old because of the nature of assumptions going into the test.
And yes there have been C14 tests conducted on the bones, and the results always seem to be less than 60K. This could simply mean that C14 dating is not actually as good as previously thought. Or it could mean the bones were younger than thought. In the first case, it is a chance to improve methods by lowering upper bound to the accuracy of C14 testing....however it doesn't matter when people who do such tests can't publish their work in scientific journals, apparently because the results are toxic to the prevailing paradigm.
Yes you sound exactly like the people who could not give up the Ptolemaic model. After all scientists were sure that Ptolemy was right for over a thousand years, and how could a thousand years of scientists possibly be wrong? Your arguments are not scientific, they are appeals to authority, they are logical fallacies, and they are wrong.
Any experiment should be repeatable. Has anyone else been able to duplicate those results?
Moreover experiments that are repeatable that show unexpected results should be repeated rather than shunned. In the case of dino bones there seems to be a battle for resources. Some labs refuse to test them because after all, C14 tests are not applicable to bones that are millions of years old. In one case I read about, some young earth creationists actually sent unlabeled dino bones to a top lab for testing...so that the lab did not know the samples were from dinosaurs and tested them without pre conceived bias.
As far as I have been able to read, all tests of dino bones so far, of which I am not sure how many there are...and keep in mind most dino bones are fossilized, thus can not be tested this way...have been found to be within the testable limits of C14...less that 60K years. Some are listed on the link I provided.
I didn't review all the information, but what I did see all appeared to be single-instance reports, with no record of independent tests on the same sample producing the same results.
Keen scientific mind at work, there.
I doubt too many scientists would go out on a limb like that, they wouldn't want to look stupid! You don't mind, though, because you are not a scientist, you are a nobody, so you don't care about your reputation. You have the luxury to say whatever stupid unscientific garbage you want anonymously on the internet!
I did not review all the information either. I have read of studies at the layman level on the subject, that may or may not be referencing some of the same tests. It seems to be the case (and I am open to correction from those that have looked more deeply into it) that there are other examples, all of which indicate the bones are young enough to get a meaningful C14 reading. I do recall one page going into details of testing procedure, indicating more than one test being done on each bone, and more than one kind of test being done and so forth. Perhaps I can find that page again, but I reckon anybody who has time and is also curious could too...and I should be writing code right now.
Sure, how about the woman who first discovered it: "Schweitzer offers hypotheses for how the tissue could have survived so long. One is that the densely mineralized bone, combined with as-yet-undiscovered geological or environmental processes, protected the structures within." The "soft tissue" found was enclosed within mineralized bone, remember, and in only tiny fragments. But the real answer is "we don't know yet"--nobody's pretending it wasn't a surprise. But I know creationists are uncomfortable with the answer "we don't know yet."
Even one single experiment?
Like what? Are you expecting scientists to try to preserve soft tissue for millions of years just to prove to you it's possible? Will you be around when they do?
Any shred of scientific evidence?
Uh, yeah: THE SOFT TISSUE THAT'S BEEN FOUND IN 65 MILLION YEAR OLD DINOSAUR BONES. That's the evidence.
Now, a question for you: how old do you think the dinosaur bones are? I notice you haven't answered stormer's question about how you know soft tissues can't last millions of years, but maybe mine is easier.
At least you can admit YOU DON'T KNOW. That's the most intelligent statement you have made.
THE SOFT TISSUE THAT'S BEEN FOUND IN 65 MILLION YEAR OLD DINOSAUR BONES. That's the evidence.
And you people wonder why everyone says that you Darwinists use circular logic. That's circular logic, pal, and if you can see that, then you are even stupider than I thought.
I didn't answer his question because he couldn't answer mine. From the same article you just posted: "After all, according to scientific estimates, T. rex fossils are 65 million years old. Soft tissue and amino acids should last only a fraction of that time."
In short you think its impossible that the scientists who date fossils could possibly be wrong, but you have no problem saying that the scientists who say soft tissue couldn't last millions of years are wrong. Why? Because one of these claims gores your SACRED COW. You are not interested in science, you are interested in forcing your ideology on others with the power of the government in league with homo fags like Zach Kopplin.
Not only are you ignorant, you can’t even keep a civil tongue in your head. You don’t seem to have any idea how dinosaur bones were dated in the first place. If the 65 million years age is wrong, then the age of the rocks around the fossils is wrong. And that means either radiometric dating is wrong, or the principle of superposition is wrong. Which is it?
And my statement about the evidence is not circular logic, because the bones and rocks—the stuff around the tissue—were independently dated. Again, if you don’t accept the age of the bones, you should say why you reject the age of the rocks as well—you can’t reject one without the other. It’s like when they found life at the bottom of the ocean, where they didn’t think anything could live: it was evidence that things *could* live there, not somehow proof that it wasn’t really the bottom of the ocean.
So like I said: how old do you think dinosaur bones are?
I know you want me to say that dinosaur bones are definitely less than 6000 years old, but I don't think that. My skepticism of Darwinism is rooted in science, not religion.
If you've followed this thread, then you know that dinosaur bones have been carbon dated to thousands not millions of years. Now why is it that carbon dating is no good for dinosaur bones? It's supposedly because carbon based life decays away to nothing in mere thousands of years, not millions.
Hold the phone though! Now you are telling me that all the science about carbon decay rates is wrong, and that actually carbon based tissue can last millions of years!
So then the carbon dating of dinosaur bones must be wrong for some other reason right? Because it can't possibly be right or else that would mean YOU are wrong, and that is impossible, right? So radiometric dating is gospel, but carbon dating is worthless, is that what you're saying? We should not trust the carbon dating of dinosaur bones because we already KNOW that they are millions of years old so instead we should just date rocks nearby and ASSUME they are the same age as the fossils?
That is the problem with Darwinists, they rely on assumptions, circular reasoning, and huge non-sequitur logical leaps.
You are not willing to go where science leads you, your conclusion is predetermined and you exclude any evidence to the contrary. That's not science.
So you don't know how old they are, but you know for sure they can't be 65 million years old, because you know soft tissue can't last 65 million years, though you won't say how you know that. Got it.
I know you want me to say that dinosaur bones are definitely less than 6000 years old, but I don't think that.
No, wasn't waiting for that. What I was going to ask you, no matter what figure you gave (unless it was like 100 years), was how you knew soft tissue could last that long but not 65 million years.
If you've followed this thread, then you know that dinosaur bones have been carbon dated to thousands not millions of years.
Well, I know that one group of creationists claims to have done that but haven't (apparently) published their work or made it available to others to try and duplicate.
Now you are telling me that all the science about carbon decay rates is wrong, and that actually carbon based tissue can last millions of years!
The "carbon decay rate" involved in carbon dating has nothing to do with the degradation of carbon-based tissue. You're revealing a rather poor understanding of how these dates are arrived at.
we should just date rocks nearby and ASSUME they are the same age as the fossils?
You claim your skepticism of Darwin is rooted in science, but you don't show much of a scientific approach to these problems. As I said before, do you have a specific criticism of the principle of superposition or of radiometric dating of rocks? If not, what's your problem with ASSUMING that if a fossil is on top of a rock of age x and under a rock of age y, its age is between x and y?
You are not willing to go where science leads you, your conclusion is predetermined and you exclude any evidence to the contrary.
Hundreds of years of science have led to our understanding of how old the rocks are and how old the fossils are. I think it's foolish to discard all that on the basis of one surprising finding. (And frankly, to me, it's never been all that surprising. A few tiny scraps of collagen still present in the interior of a long-buried bone? Big deal.)
That really seems to be the case here, however. At the very least, you (and others) are jumping the gun by calling it evidence for evolution.
Tail clips taken for DNA analysis confirmed that the Pod Mrcaru lizards were genetically identical to the source population on Pod Kopiste.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080417112433.htm
"All of this might be evolution," Hendry said. "The logical next step would be to confirm the genetic basis for these changes."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080421-lizard-evolution_2.html>
I'm not sure which of the articles best describes the genetic situation, but if the genetic information was already there and just triggered by diet and environment (and my guess is that is almost certainly the case), then it's more in line with the creation model than evolution.
The NatGeo article starts off with "Italian wall lizards ... are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out." I would translate that "our theory says this should take millions of years, but it only took 36." The most common question creationists get is "How did noah get all of the animals on the ark?" How many animals needed to be on the ark to produce the diversity we see today? Fewer than you'd think.
I didn't mean to ignore the flu shots, but it's bed time. Quick answer - The flu shots are basically selecting between known strains and forcasting which ones will be predominant in a given year. There's no help from evolutionary theory in that.
Are viruses living? That's debatable, but on their own the answer seems to be no. Do they tend to swap genetic code? Yes. Does that make them more complex? No, they just become harder for the host to recognize and attack. Does mutation of viruses resemble the type of mutation that would be required for creating complex life forms from simple ones? No.
On what basis do you say that?
if the genetic information was already there and just triggered by diet and environment (and my guess is that is almost certainly the case)
We've got a structure that occurs in less than 1 percent of all known species of scaled reptiles and never before in this species. Evolution would say that the information for the structure was newly generated. If creationist/intelligent design researchers want to dispute that, it's easy: just investigate the genetics of the source population and identify and locate the information that was already there that generated the new structures.
Somehow, they never take up that challenge.
Sedimentary rocks make up the layers of the Grand Canyon and these are not dateable by radiometric dating. All the canyon layers are ocean bottom sediments, filled with fossils of ocean-dwelling creatures and plants almost a mile high from top to bottom. The Cardenas Basalt bottom layer (below the Cambrian explosion) is usually dated with Rhobidium -Strontium and calculated to be about 1 billion years old. Much later after the Grand canyon was already formed, igneous rocks were formed from a volcano on top of the canyon, that Indians saw erupt, only about 1000 years ago. (The volcano lava flows have Indian artifacts in them, and go over the canyon walls.) These rocks were dated using the same method in the lab and were assigned an age of 1.3 billion years old. How can the very top, volcanic rock be older than the very bottom layer basalt rock?
Rubidium strontium half life is almost 50 billion years - the method has a very high margin of error when measuring young rock.
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