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.
Hard drives were being designed this way a decade ago. It has generated some of the most reliable/durable designs in the industry. It produced good baseline designs that the engineers could then tweak into a production designs; the evolutionary designs were solid, but there were usually a few bits that were noticeably suboptimal in evaluation and which could be fixed without breaking the design if care was taken.
sounds similar to the "designs" produced through biological evolution. the knee, as an example.
just one note: I'd hesitate to dignify Egyptology with the name "science" or "history"
Science in Merriam Websters dictionary; " a department of systemized knowledge as an object of study, (the science of theology).
"knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method"
Of course that includes a wide varied of subjects. And there are many very reputable creation scientists that would differ with your charcterization of the toe debate being over. They are no less qualified than any other scientist.
As the word (and meaning of) "science" stems from Latin, I'll now mildly one-up you with the Harper Collins Latin Concise Dictionary:
scio, scire, scivi, scitum - vt to know; to have skill in; (with inf.) to know how to; quod ~iam as far as I know; -ito you may be sure
you should be able to see that "scio" means "to know" as in: facts and figures, mechanisms, practical applications, real-world causality and consequence. It is clearly NATURALISTIC in its denotation. This is backed up with the denotations of the related words sciens (knowing, with purpose, deliberate), scientia (knowledge, skill), scisco (to inquire, to learn, to question), scitor (to inquire), and seems to have been derived directly from scindo (to cut open, to divide, to part, to dissect). <
Let's compare the root meaning of science with the following alternative Latin words having bearing on this discussion:
cognosco, cognoscere, cognovi, cognitum - (vt)
to get to know, learn, understand; to know, recognize, identify; (law) to investigate; (military) to reconnoiter
As opposed to scire, this indicates "to know" in a general, vernacular sense, and "to know" in a philosophical sense, as from study of Hellenic ditherings - it is, after all, directly derived from Greek "gnosis"
It is a long step away from the pragmatic knowledge indicated by scio
cogito, cogitare, cogitavi, cogitatum - (vt, vi) to think, ponder, imagine; to feel disposed; to plan, intend
credo, credire, cerdidi, creditum - (vt, vi) to entrust, lend, have confidence in; to believe; to think, suppose; ~eres one would have thought
Now, look, fabian - the Romans were a brutally pragmatic people, and their language reflected this. THEY were wise enough to distinguish between knowledge based on hard practical facts and "the other kinds of (cough!) 'knowledge'" imputed in the airy omphaloskepticisms of the philosophers and the pronouncements of self-described religious authorities.
It is a pity that Webster was not so wise as the Romans, really - it is, but that is not my problem.
Someone descirbed ID as "creationism dressed up in white lab vestments".
Observation, not presupposition. The Flood story in the Bible was known to be false by 1830 or so. There's just no way to reconcile the rocks and soils with such an occurence. Here's an interesting discussion of the geology in one place: Is Frenchman Mountain Evidence of Noah's Flood
yep - "creationism in a lab-coat"
as to all this thread's buzzings about how science is something other than, well, yanno... SCIENCE:
Q: whaddaya get when you wrap a lab coat around a cow?
A: a cow in a lab coat, not a scientist.
as with Bovines, so with Ovines.
Sciolism might be an interesting word to trace.
hrmn.
first principles: does that word actually exist in any modern language?
ah:
"sciolism: A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability."
Apparently not in contemporary American. It was a common word a century ago, usually in the form sciolist or sciolism.
appears to be from "sciolus" - smatterer
Aha! Not real far in meaning from sophism, and not far from dilettantism.
Smattering--how much Russian I know.
sciolus is from "Late Latin"
I'm not familiar with Late or Church Latin - was taught on Virgil et alia
actually, it has the flavor of a good epithet.
better than dilettante or sophist, it rolls off the tongue with bite.
I shall save, and savor, this word you have given me.
thanks.
I have a similar problem with Homeric Greek.
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