Are the pigeons in London really different than the pigeons in New York City?
Posted on 08/02/2005 4:16:26 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools.
Bush declined to state his personal views on "intelligent design," the belief that life forms are so complex that their creation cannot be explained by Darwinian evolutionary theory alone, but rather points to intentional creation, presumably divine.
The theory of evolution, first articulated by British naturalist Charles Darwin in 1859, is based on the idea that life organisms developed over time through random mutations and factors in nature that favored certain traits that helped species survive.
Scientists concede that evolution does not answer every question about the creation of life, and most consider intelligent design an attempt to inject religion into science courses.
Bush compared the current debate to earlier disputes over "creationism," a related view that adheres more closely to biblical explanations. While he was governor of Texas, Bush said students should be exposed to both creationism and evolution.
On Monday, the president said he favors the same approach for intelligent design "so people can understand what the debate is about."
The Kansas Board of Education is considering changes to encourage the teaching of intelligent design in Kansas schools, and some are pushing for similar changes across the country.
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas. The answer is 'yes.'"
The National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both have concluded there is no scientific basis for intelligent design and oppose its inclusion in school science classes. [Note from PH: links relevant to those organizations and their positions on ID are added by me at the end of this article.]
Some scientists have declined to join the debate, fearing that amplifying the discussion only gives intelligent design more legitimacy.
Advocates of intelligent design also claim support from scientists. The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle that is the leading proponent for intelligent design, said it has compiled a list of more than 400 scientists, including 70 biologists, who are skeptical about evolution.
"The fact is that a significant number of scientists are extremely skeptical that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life," said John West, associate director of the organization's Center for Science and Culture.
Your still not addressing the impact such a large number would have on an area that could not support them.
No, it is not science because "some unspecified entity doing X with unknown methods and for inscrutable purposes" is compatible with any observation, i.e. it doesn't explain anything.
The ToE predicts a nested pattern and indeed we do observe a nested hierarchy which can be arrived at using multiple lines of evidence.
ID on the other hand is compatible with a nested pattern as well as with any other pattern. Now if we had a model of this designer which makes certain predictions about what we should and especially shouldn't observe that would be a completely different situation but ID-ist try very hard to not specify this designer.
Um, I believe your wife is wrong. The Israelites made it to Canaan, had a glimpse, and then spent fourty years.
I would be much happier if he would post links. A pageful of links is just as good as ten pages of text.
Yeah, they want sound bites like "goo to you via the zoo" but that's not how science is done.
While I laugh my "creative spelling" off a bit, I ask you this:
Exactly which "Greece" are you refering to?
Athens held the claim for being a "free democracy" in the same sense that China can claim to be a "People's Republic"
And while Socrates was an opponent of Democracy as practiced by Athens, he also held that (as you pointed out) we all guided our selves on an individual level.
(Of course, having read his last days, I can assure you that it was CLAIMED he did not approve of democracy as a whole. He himself, did not agree nor disaree. I was lead to the conclussion that he did not support Athenian democracy as it was. He DID say it would be better to have a dictatort... but I am yet to find that he disargeed with democracy as a whole.)
Sparta may have been something you overlooked though. What with devinations and sacrifices playing a part in their day-to-day lives.
And of course, I guess you missed the entire existance of Cities that were neither Sparta nor Athens. Most of which proclaimed their own founding deities.
And as for the existance and supremecy of one's daimonion: yes, he did. Now, what was part of his figuring of coming to every answer? Ah yes, dialectical thinking. The man proclaimed that any man knows every answer... if ASKED the proper question. His philosophy relied on others to achieve the awareness of perfection. A lesser part that was a part of the greater whole.
I can't remember, how many people was it you said you thought Canaan could support?
Do you find this to be an effective debating technique?
Yes I do. It's very effective in making it obvious when people are making confident absolute claims that they know they can't actually back up. When people run away from an invitation to put some money on the line, it becomes clear to all that the person's original claim was an overstated bluff.
Because I don't.
That's because you misconstrue its purpose.
This isn't a question of who has the bigger testicles, or who is willing to pony up the most cash on an anonymous on-line board. You can't bully me into agreeing with you
Nor am I trying to.
I'm familiar with the arguments -- I've read the relevant literature,
Please provide three relevant citations to the primary literature.
although if you'd like to supply more, I'd be happy to read it -- and I continue to believe that there is no evidence to suggest that life came into being through a natural process.
WOW! So nice of you to admit your bias. You can state ahead of time what your conclusion will be before you even see the literature.
That isn't to suggest that it didn't or couldn't happen, but that there isn't evidence to suggest that it did happen.
Sure there is, no matter how many times you repeat that falsehood. Thus your blustering excuses about why you won't risk any cash on being demonstrated wrong.
I know that incredibly complex viruses exist.
Irrelevant to this discussion.
I know that amino acid synthesis happens naturally.
Irrelevant to this discussion.
But saying that something could happen and did happen are two different things,
No kidding.
and scientists investigating the possibility of abiogenesis have not proved that it is even possible.
Science does not deal in "proofs".
Now, are you going to stop posting false claims that you can't actually support and aren't willing to stand by confidently enough to lay some cash on the table? Or are you going to just keep repeating your presumptions as if they were fact?
Are the pigeons in London really different than the pigeons in New York City?
I wouldn't exactly call the mob that killed Socrates to be the leaders of a "free society"
But ok.
Think of it this way: if they were truly the first "free society" why didn't the Founding Fathers mimic them?
Think carefully. You need to keep in mind, we only borrowed very little from greco thinking to form our foundations.
That happens all the time from gene splicing in labs to cultivating roses in gardens. Has evolution been falsified?
Basically, the idea is that life evolved ... direction or a lack thereof isn't all that imprtant . . .
So if you don't know how all life evolved from a common ancestor why would you think it did?
For instance, socks go missing whenever I do the laundry. . .
That's an interesting illustration. For instance, your claim has strong odds of not being true. I suspect there are times when you do the laundry that socks don't go missing.
If one can be skeptical of claims of missing socks, one should certainly be skeptical of broad claims of science.
Anyway, the supernatural can be avoided when discussing socks. That's not really the case in questions as to how life came about and what we should do with our own.
That's incorrect. You have confused "organic" with "animated."
A corpse in a grave is organic, but not animated. QED.
The very first life form must, by definition, have been inanimate matter that become animated.
No, but then they're not genetically isolated either. Pigeons, for whatever reason or another, are brought all over the world all the time, which is why you find them in most every city in the world, despite being native only to Europe and small parts of Southwest Asia and North Africa.
So we can't account for evolution but we now it occurred? That sounds like a faith :-)
In flamewars, people don't want to read links. They want to score points.
That just makes it easier for the creationists to ignore.
A pageful of links is just as good as ten pages of text.
No, it isn't. At least when it's posted inline, the creationists realize how foolish they look when they post lame one-liners as attempted hand-waving "rebuttals", since they know everyone else on the thread has *seen* the size of even a tiny *taste* of the mountains of evidence for evolution.
When it's just links, they can lie about the strength of the evidence secure in the knowledge that 95+% of the lurkers won't have actually followed the links and looked at it.
Now, however, they're fully aware that their lies will be obvious to everyone on the thread. And that's hilarious, since they still try it anyway.
You'd have been wiser to do here what you did on yesterday's thread -- slink away after you were hammered on the facts and caught making grossly ignorant accusations.
But no, here you are again, making the same sort of one-liner schoolyard taunts all over again, instead of repeating the behavior that got you hammered on the facts last time.
So, we have 2 million people in 400,000 carts with 4 million animals. Let's give an average spacing of roughly two meters per person and animal, such that each individual is at the center of a square (for the sake of simplicity) four meters on a side, or 16 square meters. We'll roll the carts into this (no pun intended) so all we'll count are the animals and the people. This entourage takes up an area of 96,000,000 square meters. As there are 1 million square meters in a square kilometer, this comes out to 96 square kilometers, or a box roughly 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers.
I doubt, however, that the Israelites are working their way across the desert in a square. Asphalt mentioned that he believes the Red Sea parted a distance of two miles (3.2 kilometers). We'll say our column is three kilometers across, which would make it 32 kilometers long (about 20 miles). It would cover about its own length every day, but communication between the head and tail would be problematic, and it wouldn't be fun to be tail-end charlie (not after 6 million people and animals had passed before you).
On a more practical note, it would mean that the Red Sea stayed parted for more than a day while the Israelites crossed.
Now what kind of sense would that make? They settled in Canaan and were there centuries later. They didn't just pack up and leave after 40 years. Where would they have gone? Back to Egypt?
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