The Burdick track. Do you stand by that?
Posted on 11/01/2003 4:14:09 AM PST by I Am Not A Mod
AUSTIN -- Texas will be under the microscope this week in the fight over teaching evolution in public schools as the State Board of Education votes on adopting biology textbooks that have been at the center of the debate.
The board meets Thursday and Friday and is set to consider proposed changes submitted by 11 publishers. The board's decisions -- which could determine which textbooks publishers offer to dozens of states -- will end a review process that has been marked by months of heated debate over the theory of evolution.
Religious activists and proponents of alternative science urged publishers to revise some of the 10th-grade books and want the board to reject others, saying they contain factual errors regarding the theory of evolution. Mainstream scientists assert that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a cornerstone of modern research and technology.
Board members can only vote to reject books based on factual errors or failure to follow state curriculum as mandated by the Legislature.
"There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the California-based National Center for Science Education.
Among those questioning the textbooks are about 60 biologists from around the country who signed a "statement of dissent" about teaching evolution and said both sides of the issue should be taught. Several religious leaders also testified against teaching evolution.
Any changes to the textbooks will have implications across the country.
Texas is the nation's second largest buyer of textbooks, and books sold in the state are often marketed by publishers nationwide. Texas, California and Florida account for more than 30 percent of the nation's $4 billion public school book market. Three dozen publishers invest millions of dollars in Texas.
One of the most vocal advocates of changing the textbooks is the Discovery Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Seattle. Institute officials have argued at board hearings that alternatives to commonly accepted theories of evolution should be included in textbooks to comply with a state requirement that both strengths and weaknesses are presented.
"These things are widely criticized as being problematic. They aren't criticisms we made up; they're criticisms widely held in the scientific community," said Discovery Institute fellow John West.
Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, said there are no weaknesses in current textbooks' explanation of evolution. Publishers are required to cover evolution in science books.
The institute has referred to a theory dubbed intelligent design -- a belief that life did not evolve randomly but progressed according to a plan or design. No book on the mainstream market presents the intelligent design theory of evolution.
"We know that this is a very contentious issue. We know that, but the sorts of things we were proposing we thought were moderate," West said.
Samantha Smoot, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, which monitors religious activists, argues that the Discovery Institute's arguments are rooted in religion. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that the teaching of creationism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state.
"It says that the theory of evolution can't explain the diversity of life on this planet and that there must have been a designer," Smoot said. "That is a very valid and commonly held religious perspective, but not one that is upheld by scientific evidence. Therefore it's not one that belongs in science classrooms."
The Discovery Institute has maintained that its arguments have no religious foundation, but Smoot disagrees.
"The concept of intelligent design was crafted specifically to get around legal prohibitions against teaching religion in public schools," she said. "And as long as proponents of intelligent design deny that they're referring to God when they talk about the designer, they hope to be able to pull this off."
At least one publisher has submitted changes in line with the institute's recommendations.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston has submitted a change that directs students to "study hypotheses for the origin of life that are alternatives" to the others in the book. Students also are encouraged to research alternative theories on the Internet.
That's partly because creationism/ID is not a well-defined system. Maybe someday it will be, but I'm sceptical.
Specifically, since no limits are placed on the hypothetical 'designer' (lotsa people equate this with the Christian God, Who has no limits), any observation, experiment, etc, can be 'explained' by saying "Well, that's just the way [the dseigner] did it". If you accept this, there is no way, *in principle*, that the hypothesis could ever be tested against the real world and possilbly discarded.
Behe (who is an evolutionist but doesn't accept abiogenesis) doesn't believe that "irreducibly complex" systems can, even in principle, be the product of evolution. What's been falsified are his specific claims that the bombadier beetle, blood clotting, and flagella are "irreducibly comlex". What's worse, he's never submitted a paper defining this term to any peer-reviewed journal, so it really hasn't had to run the gauntlet like legit science does.
My *guess* is that he knows it's substandard work, but that he likes the attention, honoraria, and frequent-flyer miles he gets from the lecture circuit. My *sense* is that he's more cynic than he is delusional. but I may be wrong, I certainly have never met the man.
A precambrian rabbit fossil.
That wouldn't disprove evolution. You'd either say the rabbit fossil was "misplaced", that layer wasn't the precambrian, or that rabbits were a special case.
An elephant fossil in Hawaii
That wouldn't disprove evolution. You'd either say that the land was connected to a continent at one point, or that the elephant wandered onto an iceberg and drifted to the island.
A pseudogene in a chimp and an orangutang but not in a person
That wouldn't disprove evolution. You'd simply say that was a mutation in the person.
A 'missing link' between birds and mammals (don't get your hopes up, the platypus bill only looks like a bird's)
That wouldn't disprove evolution. You'd simply change your tree. Hasn't that already happened a few times in other species.
A pseudogene in a cow and a whale but not in a hippo.
Again, you'd simply say the one is a mutation. But the following page has an interesting discussion on whales and hippos and how they make a strong case for common design as opposed to evolution. It's about half way down look for a bold faced "Whales". Whales
So I don't see anything in any of those examples that could falsify evolution. The cambrian explosion ought to falsify it but evolutionists ignore it.
Never studied Darwin in school, that I recall, excepting a "Great Books of the Western World" course where we read an abridged version of The Origin. My understanding of Darwin's views on religion are based on having read any number of biographies, other scholarly works regarding Darwin, Darwin's autobiography, his notebooks on "Metaphysics and Morals," and many of his letters.
The important point is where his thinking arrived at the end of his life.
At the end of his life Darwin was a non-Christian agnostic, as he had been for about the last three decades of his life. If you're thinking about the story of Darwin's deathbed reversion to Christianity, it's a myth.
Well here are examples that don't fit the evolutionist theory and yet they get labeled misplaced or anomalies. From the following web site Misplaced and anomalies. It appears that anything that doesn't fit the evolutionist expectations gets ignored as an anomalie or a misplaced fossil. The tree fossils are the ones that I've most commonly heard the "misplaced" terminology applied. They couldn't have stood there while millions of years of sediment formed around them. So either the stratas got deposited quickly or the fossil is "misplaced".
Dr. Clifford Burdick, a geologist, discovered the footprints of a barefooted child, one of which contained a compressed trilobite (A. E. Wilder-Smith, The Natural Scientists Know Nothing of Evolution, Master Books, San Diego, CA, 1981, p. 166). Trilobites supposedly became extinct 230 million years before the appearance of man.
William Meister, on June 1, 1968, found fossils of several trilobites in the fossilized, sandaled footprint of a man. (W. A. Criswell, Did Man Just Happen? Zondervan Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI, 1973, p. 87). Trilobites supposedly became extinct 230 million years before the appearance of man.
Polystratic Trees, fossilized trees which extend through several layers of strata, have been found in Saint-Etienne, France and other places. For a fossil to form it must be buried quickly, otherwise it would have decomposed while waiting for the strata to slowly accumulate around it. This is an anomaly which can't be explained by the normal process of fossil formation. In some cases polystratic trees bridge a presumed evolutionary time span of millions of years. Polystratic trees are evidence that sedimentary strata were not laid down gradually over millions of years. (R. L. Wysong, The Creation-Evolution Controversy, Inquiry Press, Midland, MI, 1981, p. 300-301.)
In Glacier National Park, Pre-Cambrian limestone (supposedly 1 billion years old) is lying on top of a Cretaceous shale formation (supposedly 100 million years old). Geologists attempt to explain this anomaly as an overthrust, where a fault causes the older strata to be thrust over the younger strata. However, this "misplaced" limestone is 350 miles long and 35 miles wide, and shows no signs of grinding or sliding that a true overthrust would produce. This discrepancy cannot be explained by overthrusting. (Scott M. Huse, The collapse of Evolution, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI, p. 15-16).
During mining operations in a quarry in Lompoc, California in 1976, workers discovered a fossilized skeleton of a baleen whale. What is so unusual about this discovery is that the whale fossil wasn't lying horizontally, but vertically--standing on its tail! The entire fossil is about eighty feet long and was gradually exposed as the quarry was being mined. The whale had to have been buried quickly to become fossilized, otherwise the skeleton would have decomposed. This proves that the huge amounts of sediment surrounding the whale were not deposited over eons of time, but very quickly. (Dennis Gordon Lindsay, The Birth of Planet Earth and the Age of the Universe, Dallas: Christ for the Nations, 1993, p. 18-20.)
A 75-foot trail of human footprints have been found in Tanzania in a layer of volcanic ash, which was dated at 3.75 million years old. T. D. White in describing the footprints said, "Make no mistake about it…they are like modern human footprints. If one were left in the sand of a California beach today, and a four-year old were asked what it was, he would instantly say that somebody had walked there. He wouldn't be able to tell it from a hundred other prints on the beach, nor would you." (D. Johanson and M. A. Edey, Lucy the Beginnings of Humankind, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1981, p. 250, as sited in Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record by Duane T. Gish).
Human footprints and been found in the same strata as dinosaur prints in the Paluxy River Bed in Glen Rose, Texas. The prints are within a few yards of each other, and sometimes even cross each other. Dr. Camp from the University of California and Dr. G. Westcott of Ypsilanti, Michigan have pronounced them genuine. The human footprints continue under shale that has been bulldozed away, proving they could not have been carved in the formation. (Winkie Pratney, Creation or Evolution? The Fossil Record, Pretty Good Printing, 1982).
Human skulls, gold chains, and an iron pot have been found in coal. In the coal collection in the Mining Academy in Freiberg, there is a human skull composed of brown coal and manganiferous and phosphatie limonite. This skull was described by Karsten and Dechen in 1842. (Otto Stutzer, Geology of Coal, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1940, p. 271). In 1889 a Mrs S.W. Culp broke open a chunk of coal and found a 10 inch, eight-carat gold chain embedded within. ("A Necklace of a Prehistoric God", Morrisonville Times, Illinois, June 11, 1891).
Two fossilized human skeletons have been found in Cretaceous sandstone at Moab, Utah. The fossils were found in strata supposedly 65-100 million years before humans were said to have evolved. (Burdick, C.L., "Discovery of human skeletons in Cretaceous Formation", Creation Research Society Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2, September 1973, pp. 109-110.)
Dinosaur fossils have been found 400 miles from the South Pole. The polar plains now scoured by frigid winds and sub-zero temperatures were warm enough 200 million years ago to be the home to large meat-eating dinosaurs, according to researchers. It was the first dinosaur found on the mainland of Antarctica. (Associated Press, May 6, 1994).
The Meister Trilobite, a more conventional view.
In short, the trilobites in the specimen are real enough, but the "print" itself is dubious. After mainstream rebuttals of this find were published in the 1980's (Conrad, 1981; Stokes, 1986; Strahler, 1987), most creationists quietly and wisely ceased promoting this specimen. However, a few individuals continue to advocate it as an out-of-order fossil.
How many of your other examples are covered here?
Why don't we just ask him to pick one he really believes in, one for which he won't just slide off into another topic when it gets exposed as fraud or deliberate(?) misinterpretation?
Someone who claims that they do not know whether or not God exists.
These (the best examples -- e.g. the trails at the "Taylor Site") all turned out to be dinosaur footprints. Many of the ones mistaken for human tracks were of an "elongate" type, made when three-toed dinosaurs apparently walked with their metatarsuls (heels) contacting the ground. (They more typically walk up on their toes. The unusual gait may have been associated with a feeding pattern, or to provide better traction in mud. It has been observed at other sites.)
The superficial human appearance was caused either by mud collapse when the prints were made, filling in the toes (see figure below) or by the infilling only partially eroding when the fossilized tracks were exposed. In this regard, the slight chemical differences of the infilling of the long exposed trackways at the Taylor Site actually caused the material to oxidize and turn red against the white limestone substrate, so the that "human" tracks showed clear dinosaur toes!
Figure 1. Variations of Bipedal Dinosaur Tracks
A. Bipedal dinosaur in digitigrade stance
B. Typical bipedal dinosaur track
C. Bipedal dinosaur track with partial metatarsal impression
D. Bipedal dinosaur in plantigrade stance
E. Elongated dinosaur track with full metatarsal impression
F. Elongated dinosaur track with digit marks obscurred by mud back-flow
G. Elongated dinosaur track with indistinct digits. May be the result of a firm substrate, erosion, secondary infilling, or a combination of factors. Note resemblance to a human footprint.
The figure is from a report by Glen Kuban, who has studied these tracks extensively. (I've assisted him in exposing and measuring trackways in the past.) Significantly he is an evangelical Christian who, intrigued by John Morris' ICR book Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs (And The People Who Knew Them), initially came to Glen Rose hoping and fully expecting to prove the "mantracks" genuine. His own investigations made him a skeptic.
Indeed they were. It's called "continental drift". Antartica used to be located near the equator. This is a problem (for evolution) how?
Every year or so, Maharishi U. publishes a full-page ad in major newspapers attempting to show ... some connection between 'em. some kinda one-to-one correspondence between Sanskrit letters or mantras or someting and quarks, leptons, or something.
I'm not going to risk visiting their website, check it out yourself!
We did not--we and pond scum evolved together from something else.
or that pond scum spontaneously came into existence.
Indeed. Which is why modern science does not subscribe to this thesis. Pond scum came into existence gradually, just like all other presently living entites. As did all the single-cell DNA-based precursors to pond scum to which you are actually alluding.
ID does however, have testible predictions such as "irreducable compexity".
I can summarize ID's best arguments in a nutshell--"If I can't think of how to do it, it must be impossible."
Behe is the most pursuasive and technical of the ID'ers, and so far, Behe's prediction score is failures - 5, successes - 0. All the rest pending. Unless you have established a test or prediction that has a reasonable chance of failing if false, sometime, say, in the next thousand years, you ain't gettin' a passing grade in experiment construction.
1: The doctrine that neither the nature nor the existence of God, nor the ultimate character of the Universe (that is, whether it is material or ideal), is knowable. This doctrine was formulated by Huxley to distinguish his position from atheism, which positively rejects belief in God's existence.
Please note, it doesn't deny that God exists, only that humans can not know him whether he does or not. But that's only one definition, and Huxley's, which Darwin did not buy into.
2: Any doctrine, which while professing belief in God's existence, denies to a greater or lesser extent the knowableness of his nature. Thus, Mansel held that man is compelled to believe in God's infinite being though he is unable to comprehend it. Spencer's agnosticism is of this type, affirming, as it does, the existence of an Unknowable.
Darwin thought better of Spencer overall, but he didn't buy this one either, and he was very clear on the point in his letters to Fiske, and Fiske, after his discussions with Darwin, so too. .
3: Any doctrine which affirms the impossibility of any true knowledge from the fact that all knowledge is relative and uncertain. It may arise from belief in the relativity of knowledge either as revealed in preception of sensible phenomena, or as shown in the element of error in abstract conceptions.
This is nice too, but it doesn't approach any of the key issues in Fiske's work on Darwin and theology on the matter. Simply put, Darwin had some serious doubts about how God worked in the world, particularly in light of sin, and above all, the major issue of the day, slavery. Note that in England, in the previous century the list of those who indulged in the business of fleshmongering included everyone who was anyone, and this bothered Darwin's rather traditional notion of sin and repentence regarding his various ancestors and their relatives.
Fiske, of course, deals with this a good bit in his historical work, and in his interpretations of the religous implications of history in light of Darwin's theory.
Now, here is the nut of your problem. Those guys you are reading were largely typical of their era and largely racist. As for Darwin's autobiography, it was edited by one of his female relatives and published sometime after his death. To what extent he was actually involved with it in his final years is questionable, but we do know that the editor was a Marxist and not particularly Christian, and Darwin did note that before his death. It's not surprising you mention the old saw of his alleged death bed conversion. This story only popped up after the Marxists started printing that he didn't believe in God. Do you boys always believe everything you find printed by Marxists? Really? You would be surprised how many University Marxists edit third party books, or abridge first party books. The particular Marxist story of Darwin's denial of Christianity comes from a Marxist who once came to his house and was soon shown the door, and the bedside conversion comes from a similar witness. The comments of Fiske come from spending months living in Darwins house with Darwin. I count that as a difference in quality, you may dispute it, but I won't buy that disputation.
But then, we are back to where we started, when I noted that Darwin considered that intimate knowledge of natural selection in the world of wild animals (not domesticated ones - including man) to intimate knowledge of God in the world. Fiske also, and both of them came to the conclusion that not only does God live in the world, but that there is no such thing as free will. By that they meant that everything that happens, happens because God wills it, it is his plan, and his mystery. Including man and his works. Chew on that a bit.
Is your Christian faith as strong as Darwin's alleged Agnosticism? (yes, Darwin used the word on occasion, but like an agnostic, we can't ever be sure exactly just what he intended in those couple of instances where he used it) Note, Fiske was definitely not an Agnostic, and Fiske had no issues with Darwin around that alleged discrepancy.
By all means, please point out which scientific papers in biology technical journals, or in "Science" or "Nature" suggests the falsification of ID? I have not heard of any such thing, and I pay pretty close attention. If ID, or the more sensible brands of creationism were falsifiable, we'd have been done with these silly bickerings over them long ago.
Someone who claims that they do not know whether or not God exists.
Someone who is, at best, tepid as to whether it's a good idea for God to exist is also generally counted as an agnostic.
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