Posted on 08/16/2004 9:40:47 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Samuel Chen was a high school sophomore who believed in freedom of speech and the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. He thought his public high school did, too, but when it came to the subject of evolution -- well, now he's not so sure.
In October 2002, Chen began working to get Dr. Michael Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, to give a lecture at Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.
Chen, who was co-chair of a student group that tries to stress the importance of objectivity on controversial issues, knew that Behe would be perfect, since the group was examining evolution as a topic. The author of Darwin's Black Box, a critique of the foundational underpinnings of evolution, Behe had presented his work and debated the subject in universities in the U.S. and England.
Behe agreed to come in February 2004 and give an after-school lecture entitled, "Evolution: Truth or Myth?" As the school year drew to a close in 2003, Chen had all the preliminaries nailed down: he had secured Behe's commitment, received approval from school officials, and reserved the school auditorium.
Then he found out just how entrenched Darwinist orthodoxy was in the science department at Emmaus. By the following August, Chen had entered into a six-month battle to preserve the Behe lecture.
As the struggle unfolded, it became obvious that those who opposed Behe coming to Emmaus didn't seem to care about his credentials. In addition to publishing over 35 articles in refereed biochemical journals, Darwin's Black Box was internationally reviewed in over 100 publications and named by National Review and World magazine as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.
Instead, it was Behe's rejection of Darwinism -- in favor of what is called "intelligent design" -- that drove opposition. According to the Discovery Institute, of which Behe is a fellow, this theory holds "that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
The head of the science department, John Hnatow, sent a statement to every faculty member in the school stressing that Emmaus held to the official policy of the National Science Teachers Association. That policy states: "There is no longer a debate among scientists about whether evolution has taken place."
It appeared there would be no debate at Emmaus, either. Some of the science teachers would not even allow Chen to address their classes and explain to students what Behe's lecture would be about.
Chen said various tactics were apparently used to undercut the event, including an attempt to cancel the lecture and fold the student organization without the knowledge of Chen and other members; requiring that the necessary funds for the lecture be raised much faster than for other student events; and moving the lecture from the auditorium to the school cafeteria.
One science teacher in particular, Carl Smartschan, seemed particularly riled about the upcoming lecture. Smartschan took it upon himself to talk to every teacher in the science department, insisting that intelligent design was "unscientific" and "scary stuff." He asked the principal to cancel the lecture, and then, when the principal refused, asked the faculty advisor for the student group to halt the lecture. Smartschan even approached Chen and demanded that the student organization pay to have an evolutionist come to lecture later in the year.
Smartschan's campaign to get the Behe lecture canceled was surprising to Chen because the event was scheduled after school, and not during class time, and was sponsored by a student group, not the school itself. Nevertheless, Chen persevered. The lecture was a success, attracting more than 500 people.
In the process, however, Chen's struggle took its toll. His health deteriorated over the course of the controversy, to the point where he collapsed three times in one month, including once at school. "My health has been totally junked," he told AFA Journal.
Brian Fahling, senior trial attorney and senior policy advisor for the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, is advising Chen on his options for the coming year. Fahling said, "Schools are not allowed to interfere with viewpoints with which they disagree, and schools cannot disrupt the right of the students to participate in the academic and intellectual life."
Despite the hardship, Chen said he would do it all over again because the issue is so important. "I feel that there's a dictatorship on academic freedom in our public schools now," he said, adding, "I refer to evolution education as a tyranny .... You can't challenge it in our schools. Kids have been thrown out of class for challenging it."
That tyranny can be intimidating to students. "Some of the students who support me are afraid to speak out, especially because they saw how the science department reacted," Chen said. "They have a fear of speaking out against it in their classes."
On the other hand, he added that some students "are now questioning evolution, some for the first time."
That may be the first step in the overthrow of Darwin's dictatorship.
'course, this all assumes a definition of "information". Is there a generally accepted definition of "information" in the context of a genome? I suspect not.
Ichneumon has already responded to this. Your original post wasn't addressed to me, so I didn't spend much time on it. I want to add that the expression "coded information" has sent many a novice into a frenzied search for the "message" that the "Great Ones" have slipped into our cells. That's a misunderstanding of the word information, which to those in the field refers to the arrangment, but not to some concealed message.
I recall a long ago science fiction story about an actual message, however. Some creatures were in a battle, and needed to communicate with HQ, but all their stuff was inoperable, so they slipped a code into a handy creature's DNA and tweaked it to send it on the road to evolving into an intelligent species. (The story involves both a hidden message and an Intelligent Design.) It took millions of years, but the little lizzard's descendants did become intelligent tool-makers, and eventually built a starship and sent a courior to the long-ago HQ, landed, went into the capitol, and announced (if I recall): "The war is over, and we've defeated the snarfs." At that point, it's destiny fulfilled, the critter's programmed purpose ended and it just ran around on the ground chasing its tail. Anyway, when biologists talk about the "genetic code" that's definitely not what they mean.
"The ID movement is significantly different than the Creationist movement."
That is such a load of crap I wonder if you had to back a dump truck up to your computer to get it all in.
It's simply too trendy.
Old-school, British punk:
Oi!
Dembski has been doing some work in this field. You might find this interesting: http://www.designinference.com/documents/2004.08.Variational_Information.pdf
Someone disagrees with you on this thread.
(Everyone please hold your applause for Ag -- just toss money)
Some people require external force to keep on the straight and narrow, lacking such attributes as self control and self discipline. Unfortunately, they are also the most likely to believe everyone else is exactly like them, hence their claims that "without God, we'll be murdering each other and copulating with animals" which may be true for them, but not necessarily for the rest of us.
Don't make the mistake of thinking I am a creation scientist. I don't find it surprising or unusual that evolution makes predictions that are shown to be true. As I said, there are observations that support evolution.
However, there are observations that are pretty devastating to evolution.
The phylogenetic tree constructed before the structure of genes was known predicts that a mutation found in people and baboons will also be found in chimps and gorillas. So far, the evidence supports this remarkable prediction.
How is it such a blinding revelation that things that group have similar genes? And how can something be called a mutation if you did not witness the mutation?
Did staph a by coincidence acquire the mutation to make it penicillin resistant at the same time we started using antibiotics? Or has the "mutation" been there as long as staph a, in which case it isn't mutation, but simple genetic diversity?
My problem isn't that there is a theory of evolution. My problem is that some of its adherents behave like their own worst caricature of wild-eyed religious nuts.
Aric2K? Is that you? If so, welcome back. It's nice to see JR is allowing some of you guys back.
It ain't gospel. It's the best current theory. And 'there was nothing, then it exploded', is just a wee bit of a simplification.
thank you for the correction on "sequence of genomes" vs "genome's sequence"
i guess the creationists next argument brings in "beneficial mutation" (or lack there of) but we don't need to go into that here (i've found a fairly decent rebuttal at http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/order.html )
i would be curious if anyone has computed a potential "age-of-life" based purely on computation using currently accepted theories. right now we have estimates as to how old the earth/universe is based on geology/astronomy etc.
if one were to take abiogenesis as the best explanation (of origin) available at this point, based on chance and statistics using beneficial mutation, and natural selection, and life span, how long would it take to go from the simplest life-form (one that came from non-life) to the complexity of the genome sequence in a human being?
amen. i try to ignore the "wild-eyed religious nuts" of both sides - what you end up with is not many people left on either side to have a rational discussion.
thank you. i was referring to information in the sense of order/arrangement/code, not some concealed/actual message. by "code" i mean it is some type of input to a system which ends up building a life-form from a single cell.
I'll concur, socialism and communism simply cannot work, as humans are hard wired against it. Alphas exist and weak specimens exist and never the twain shall meet.
However, to leap from that to (paraphrasing) "therefore we need an irrational, supernatural belief/retribution system," is, I think, selling humans short.
Theocracies are also out the window (see: Taliban, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, etc) and even christianity failed pretty miserably in the so-called Dark Ages.
So where does that leave us?
It's also a stretch to "guarantee" that every trial lawyer and ACLU lawyer is an atheist. I trust you were knowingly using hyperbole to bolster your point. Heck, John Edwards goes to church every Sunday... and don't you forget it! (And John Kerry was in Vietnam).
I had an outline for an (alas unwritten) science fiction story in which an intelligent computer virus preserves and reproduces itself via human DNA.
LOL!
600? (just had to try! :-))
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