Posted on 12/20/2005 7:54:38 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Fox News alert a few minutes ago says the Dover School Board lost their bid to have Intelligent Design introduced into high school biology classes. The federal judge ruled that their case was based on the premise that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was incompatible with religion, and that this premise is false.
As it happens, yes. Absolutely and resoundingly. Still, the old board's actions were unconstitutional and the court still needed to rule.
In the Dover case, ID finally got their debate with scientists, and they got schooled but good. No theatrics, just good and honest exchange of ideas, and they were found wanting ON EVERY LEVEL. There is no whitewashing from the DI that can change that.
"Science merely describes WHAT and HOW God did what He did. It does not delve into WHY.
It is no more incompatible with a creator than looking to see how yeast makes bread rise is incompatible with there being a baker of bread."
Very well said! If everyone would come to recoginize this point there wouldn't be so much friction on here.
I understand that considerable genetic differentiation between humans and other primates have been found. It has been found to such an extent that the smooth evolution theories have been problematized.
Nonetheless, it seems that the evolutionists simply respond--
its more complicated than that and dismiss questions as assertions from unreasonable fundamentalists.
I have to say my faith in evolution is declining with the noxious treatment of ID proponents.
News from your alternate universe. Care to tune us in?
ROFL! No, this is not the case. Of all the methods humans have ever devised to try to acquire knowledge or find truth, the scientific method is the one that *LEAST* resembles "faith in action", it's the one that is the *farthest* from just relying on "faith".
I dunno. The Constitution? Federalism? Limited Central Government? Local control of local money?
Nah. Washington technocrats and the guys in the robes are much better situated to decide local issues, wouldn't you agree?
One theory has about 150 years of fulfilled predictions behind it. The alternative hypothesis is highly unlikely to ever make a prediction. One theory, in other words, is necessary to understanding what has happened and is happening. That alternative hypothesis thing isn't necessary at all.
I'd think you'd have to have copies of the same bacteria from prior to nylon to show that the enzyme didn't already exist in some of them doing the job of digesting something else...or having a degree of variability giving it different looks in different individual bacteria.
Fester, do you really believe that? I mean, you're as hard to get through to as a Democrat that thinks if we just be nice to the terrorists they'll go back to Iran and stop the killing.
Now, concentrate with me on this.
Just because humans can "design" things, is irrelevant to whether life was "designed" by a deity.
You see, humans weren't around back then, and there's no evidence we can examine that any deity was, so we have to use evidence we can see here and now. And what we see is a process science has called evolution.
How the first life came to be is a bit more murky. Maybe a deity did that. There's no evidence of that, and I don't think it was necessary given the rules of chemistry, but maybe so.
That leaves the question of where the universe and those rules of chemistry came from. Maybe a deity did that to, but I see know reason to think so, because it's far more difficult that a deity came into existence from nothing first, than to believe that the universe exists in the first place (I really don't buy into the Big Bang, that was initially promoted by religious people, and a steady state universe that has existed for eternity is far more believable to me)
[...Darwin reimbraced Christianity before he died...]
A few more details on the spread of the story and its subsequent rebuttal, taken from the book "The Survival of Charles Darwin: a Biography of a Man and an Idea" by Ronald W. Clark, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985 (p. 199)
`Shortly after his death, Lady Hope addressed a gathering of young men and women at the educational establishment founded by the evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody at Northfield, Massachusetts. She had, she maintained, visited Darwin on his deathbed. He had been reading the Epistle to the Hebrews, had asked for the local Sunday school to sing in a summerhouse on the grounds, and had
confessed: "How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done." He went on, she said, to say that he would like her to gather a congregation since he "would like to speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation, being in a state where he was eagerly savouring the heavenly anticipation of bliss."
`With Moody's encouragement, Lady Hope's story was printed in the Boston "Watchman Examiner". The story spread, and the claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the "Reformation Review" and in the "Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland" in February 1957. These attempts to fudge Darwin's story had already been exposed for what they were, first by his daughter Henrietta after they had been revived in 1922. "I was present at his deathbed," she wrote in the "Christian" for February 23, 1922. "Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. . . . The whole story has no foundation whatever."' (Ellipsis is in the book)
Clark's source for Lady Hope's supposed quotations of Darwin is given as "Down, the Home of the Darwins: The Story of a House and the People Who Lived There" by Sir Hedley Atkins KBE, published by Phillimore for the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1974.
Henrietta's rebuttal is referenced more fully as: Mrs R B
Litchfield, "Charles Darwin's Death-Bed: Story of Conversion Denied," "The Christian", February 23, 1922, p. 12.
Now there's a clear-cut hardware problem if I ever saw one! A cautionary tale for sure.
Because google is our friend :)
I found this:
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,57892,00.html
Chimpanzees seem almost human, and scientists have maintained for decades that chimps are, in fact, 98.5 percent genetically identical to humans.
But the results of a new study call that figure into question, with a finding that there are actually large chunks of the human and chimp genomes that are vastly different.
Researchers at a company called Perlegen Sciences in Mountain View, California, used a powerful biological computer chip that can scan the entire genetic makeup of an organism, that is, its whole genome. The results, published in Monday's issue of Genome Research, show that chimps and humans are much more different than scientists previously thought.
Don't worry-- I am sure this is total fundamentalist nonsense.
?????????
Human and chimps have 99+% identity in the coding regions of the DNA. Overall they are 98% identical. The difference is in non-coding regions - area that are increasingly being shown to be involved in regulation of development.
So, what do you mean by "considerable genetic differentiation"?
This case was about Dover and nowhere else.
Obviously, it wasn't. This wasn't about teaching both sides in a local dispute about who owned that old house down the street and whether or not it should be preserved as an historic monument. IMO, how scientific theories are taught in government funded schools is not only a local issue, but an issue that involves the interests of the nation as a whole.
There is no weaseling and nothing inconsistent in Darwin's position.
I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing...
I do believe I've read that Darwin at one time studied (thought) to become an Anglican clergyman.
It would be consistent with that early life to return to the faith later in life. There is a spiritual poverty in evolutionary theory that naturally leads to despair and hopelessness.
I hate to think of anyone spending eternity separated from God.
All that, however, doesn't make the story of any conversion true. It sounds like his daughter's would be the best account.
The enzyme very likely did exist previously to nylon but with another, somewhat related, use. Nylon is a polyamide and amidases are very common in all organisms. I suggest you look up the concept of "enzyme recruitment" and E.C.C. Lin. The enzyme, however, may not have existed in the current bacterium since horizontal gene transfer is quite common in bacteria.
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