On the road to extinction [Evolution & Creationism in Kansas]

A 5-5 deadlock on the State Board of Education has been broken with the election of two conservatives Tuesday who do not have opposition in the November election.

The board previously was controlled by conservative members who decided that creationism should be taught with evolution in the science classes of the state's schools. That was reversed when moderates were elected. The board member from Kansas City, Kan., was not up for re-election this year. One conservative who was elected Tuesday to the board was an incumbent.

A new conservative board member from Clay Center, Kan., has been quoted by newspapers as saying she supports creationism being taught in science classes, along with the theory of evolution. The state board sets the science standards for schools, setting out what should be taught at different levels.

The past debates focused on whether religious ideas should be included in science classes, or should be reserved for religion or social science classes.

While we can't predict the future, we can say, from past experience, that the evolution controversy will intensify on the state board after the new members are sworn in. Kansas, by teaching religion in public school science classes, will almost certainly receive negative international attention again.

For mixing religion, politics and education, the State Board of Education is now on the endangered list, and it will probably go the way of the dinosaur. Very likely, some in the Kansas Legislature will not deem it fit for survival.

Your whole post is a keeper. Perhaps on your freeper homepage. You've stated the apparent religion/science conflict as well as I've ever seen it expressed. Well done. However, I suspect there will always be unknowns for which religion can -- and perhaps should -- provide comforting answers. But they will be "first cause" isues, at the unexplored frontier of origins questions, and not in the everyday nuts and bolts of the natural world. Those who focus on the trivia, such as the bombadier beetle and the platypus, are doomed to disappointment.

In my opinion, what we should be going about now is finding practical non-theistic substitutes for the valuable institutions and ideas over which religion once held full sway.

I think that's the sort of thing that Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism was an attempt to work out. She did rather well with it, although there are still kinks to be worked out. Anyway, if mysticism ultimately withers as most of its traditional explanations are superseded by demonstrable natural processes, there is still a great role for philosophy, of which ethics is an essential component.

Some of the thoughts in your post 296 were expressed by someone else. He says it differently, but not any better than you did it:

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behaviour on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress ...

I copied that from this website Albert Einstein, which attributes it to this source: Albert Einstein, "Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium", published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941

First off, thank you for your frank and honest response as to what you believe. I was ‘discussing’ with my wife last night why I find it necessary to spend time on the computer discussing ‘these’ topics. Anyway, I just let her read your post and she was – ‘speechless’ (and if you knew my wife… well…) Here we a professor who parents send money to (indirectly) so their children can learn – what? Surely ‘your beliefs’ don’t spill into the classroom when a student asks a teleological question.

OK, now that the niceties are out of the way (again, thank you - LOL). It’s great to see we are back on topic which is the fear of religious beliefs being taught in school.

I have not always been a Christian. I was brought up in a Christian (Lutheran) and conservative household. My father hosted a conservative religious radio program and my mother cooked for 300+ every Wednesday at the church across the street from my High School. It was a little too much for this ‘rebellious youth’ and after continuously loosing debates with my father at the dinner table while just as continuously eating church leftovers (conveniently labeled with the date from one of our four freezers), I moved out a devout atheist eventually turning Gnostic. I have been a Christian only the last 6 years. But enough about me…

You may write this off as the prejudice of an agnostic naturalist, if you like, but that's not the position I started from; I had excellent training in Catholic doctrine. It is the position I find myself increasingly persuaded by. In my opinion, what we should be going about now is finding practical non-theistic substitutes for the valuable institutions and ideas over which religion once held full sway.

Science becoming a substitute for religion?
Humor break:

Meanwhile back at the typical Naturalists household:
Father: Sara, I demand you stop seeing the boy. Don’t you know he is a Materialist and they are only interested in one thing!

Today in our headlines:
Nihilists Declare A Jihad Against Scientism
Science Literalists Want Only Scientism Taught In Schools

Seriously though, you nailed it as far as what can happen if no teleological arguments are allowed for check and balance to science. I don’t come into schools and demand teleology but science demands non-teleology… What does this mean? You have faith that science will eventually figure it all out but this is still faith and a fairly new line of thinking in regard to modern science.

Science replacing religion though? It seems some share your faith so why not have kids nod their heads mindlessly while chanting:

We're getting quite close to the point where science could provide a consistent account of everything, from the moment of creation to the present day. Ooohmmm
Physics will tell us how it all began, biology will fill in the few remaining gaps in evolution, chemistry will tell us how life first arose, and neuroscience will provide a predictive model for human thought and behavior. Ooohmmm
Signs of God's presence in the Universe, miracles and so on, will be more and more discredited. Ooohmmm
If we're thinking, choosing machines, and we're in God's image, what is God? Ooohmmm
Religion [will] be relegated to the role of purveyor of moral precepts, and have to abjure any epistemological or metaphysical role entirely. Ooohmmm
Praise be to ‘Ohm’ leader of the resistance. Ooohmmm

Now ironically I share your optimism in science. I believe that the more we discover about life and our universe the more obvious design in everything we will find. But our major difference is I don’t discount natural causes as having a role in everything. In fact I don’t have a problem with you teaching and would not try to stop you from teaching because you are an agnostic naturalist.

I have a problem with ‘science as a whole’ only allowing for agnostic non-teleological naturalism to be taught regardless of what ‘design’ is found because it only allows for you prophesy and faith to be fulfilled.

People will wake up to this fact and I predict this to happen within the conservative party for obvious reasons. Morality without teleological foundations is just a thought exercise as proposed by Einstein with his ‘Theory of Relativity’. It merely depends on where you stand at this moment.

I have no problem with ‘us’ deciding to disagree because you are obviously entitled to you beliefs. Society on the other hand should not be forced to slowly believe this ‘faith in science’ solely because science will allow no alternative. Why should we now throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I would support you if you had a problem with science only allowing teleological explanations for life and the universe. I also know that saying there cannot be any teleological explanations is not scientific.

Remember the assertion that developed bacterial resistance was evidence for speciation?

Bacterial Persistence as a Phenotypic Switch

Submitted on April 21, 2004
Accepted on July 16, 2004

Bacterial Persistence as a Phenotypic Switch

Nathalie Q. Balaban ¹, Jack Merrin ², Remy Chait ², Lukasz Kowalik ², Stanislas Leibler ²

¹ Laboratory of Living Matter, and Center for Studies in Physics and Biology, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021, U.S.A.; Racah Institute for Physics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
² Laboratory of Living Matter, and Center for Studies in Physics and Biology, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021, U.S.A.

A fraction of a genetically homogeneous microbial populationmay survive exposure to stress such as antibiotic treatment.Unlike resistant mutants, cells re-grown from such persistentbacteria remain sensitive to the antibiotic. We investigatedthe persistence of single cells of Escherichia coli using microfluidicdevices. Persistence was linked to pre-existing heterogeneityin bacterial populations as phenotypic switching occurred betweennormally growing cells and persister cells having reduced growthrates. Quantitative measurements led to a simple mathematicaldescription of the persistence switch. Inherent heterogeneityof bacterial populations may be important in adaptation to fluctuatingenvironments, and in the persistence of bacterial infections

Name a scientific theory that offers an alternative to evolution, i.e., explains the diversity of life on Earth. What does this alternative theory predict, and how is it falsifiable?

Here is a hint.

A 21st Century View of evolution

As I see it, a 21^st Century view of evolution has to include the following features:

• Major evolutionary change to the genome occurs by the amplification and rearrangement of pre-existing modules. Old genomic systems are disassembled and new genomic systems are assembled by natural genetic engineering functions that operate via non-random molecular processes.

• Major alterations in the content and distribution of repetitive DNA elements results in a reformatting of the genome to function in novel ways --without major alterations of protein coding sequences. These reformattings would be particularly important in adaptive radiations within taxonomic groups that use the same basic materials to make a wide variety of morphologically distinct species (e.g. birds and mammals).

• Large-scale genome-wide reorganizations occur rapidly (potentially within a single generation) following activation of natural genetic engineering systems in response to a major evolutionary challenge. The cellular regulation of natural genetic engineering automatically imposes a punctuated tempo on the process of evolutionary change.

• Targeting of natural genetic engineering processes by cellular control networks to particular regions of the genome enhances the probability of generating useful new multi-locus systems. (Exactly how far the computational capacity of cells can influence complex genome rearrangements needs to be investigated. This area also holds promise for powerful new biotechnologies.)

• Natural selection following genome reorganization eliminates the misfits whose new genetic structures are non-functional. In this sense, natural selection plays an essentially negative role, as postulated by many early thinkers about evolution (e.g. 53). Once organisms with functional new genomes appear, however, natural selection may play a positive role in fine-tuning novel genetic systems by the kind of micro-evolutionary processes currently studied in the laboratory.

Here we a professor who parents send money to (indirectly) so their children can learn – what? Surely ‘your beliefs’ don’t spill into the classroom when a student asks a teleological question.

I'm not teaching Sunday School. They learn biology and chemistry. They most certainly do not learn religion.

And no, my beliefs have not 'spilled' into the classroom, and I resent the implication. I have emails I could post here from Christian students at UNL thanking me for publicly defending Christianity from anti-Christian faculty bigotry (they always assume I must be Christian for doing so, and am somehow 'brave' for speaking up). When I was contacted by the student ID club to be their faculty advisor (again, on the same assumption that if I speak up for Christians I must be an evolution skeptic) I found a professor whom I knew to be an IDer to advise them on it, even though I think they're misguided. When I taught 'The Chemical Basis of Evolution' last fall, we most certainly discussed origins, and we looked at panspermia and other extraterrestrial origins for life. We did not consider non-naturalistic origins, for sure, but I emphasized that all theories of the origin of life are extremely speculative at the moment. I teach my subject with honor and integrity, Heartlander, and resent any implication to the contrary. Not only are students not aware of my religion or lack of same; I doubt any of them could guess from what I say in the classroom that I'm conservative. (Since I'm really the only outspoken conservative on campus, and get quoted in the Nebraska newspapers frequetly as a result, most of them know I'm conservative, however)

I will say, though, that my interactions with Christians on this forum have made me ask myself why I'm defending Christians at all.

You can mock what I wrote, as you wish; it was only my personal speculation about the future interactions of science with religion. I can fully understand why a Christian would find it threatening. Unlike you, however, I don't have a dog in this hunt. If, somehow, we found non-naturalistic phenomena, science would deal with them. I happen to think science will squeeze out religion, at least as religion applies to epistemology and metaphysics; but I am also willing to acknowledge that this will cause problems.

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"God does not play dice with the universe." Bump

Bacterial Persistence as a Phenotypic Switch