Posted on 01/22/2005 7:38:12 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it's a handful of judges -- "activist judges" in the view of their critics -- who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America's public-school classrooms.
The ruling this month in Georgia by Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper ordering the Cobb County School Board to remove stickers it had inserted in biology textbooks questioning Darwin's theory of evolution is being appealed by the suburban Atlanta district. Similar legal battles pitting evolution against biblical creationism are erupting across the country. Judges are conscientiously observing the constitutionally required separation of church and state, and specifically a 1987 Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of creationism, a religious belief, in public schools. But seekers of scientific truth have to be unnerved by a November 2004 CBS News poll in which nearly two-thirds of Americans favored teaching creationism, the notion that God created heaven and earth in six days, alongside evolution in schools.
If this style of "science" ever took hold in U.S. schools, it is safe to say that as a nation we could well be headed for Third World status, along with everything that dire label implies. Much of the Arab world is stuck in a miasma of imam-enforced repression and non-thought. Could it happen here? Our Constitution protects creativity and dissent, but no civilization has lasted forever, and our current national leaders seem happy with the present trends.
It is the creationists, of course, who forecast doom if U.S. schools follow a secularist path. Science, however, by its nature, relies on evidence, and all the fossil and other evidence points toward an evolved human species over millions of years on a planet tens of millions of years old [ooops!] in a universe over two billion years in existence [ooops again!].
Some creationists are promoting an idea they call "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinism, eliminating the randomness and survival-of-the-fittest of Darwinian thought. But, again, no evidence exists to support any theory of evolution except Charles Darwin's. Science classes can only teach the scientific method or they become meaningless.
Many creationists say that teaching Darwin is tantamount to teaching atheism, but most science teachers, believers as well as non-believers, scoff at that. The Rev. Warren Eschbach, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa., believes that "science is figuring out what God has already done" and the book of Genesis was never "meant to be a science textbook for the 21st century." Rev. Eschbach is the father of Robert Eschbach, one of the science teachers in Dover, Pa., who refused to teach a school-board-mandated statement to biology students criticizing the theory of evolution and promoting intelligent design. Last week, the school district gathered students together and the statement was read to them by an assistant superintendent.
Similar pro-creationist initiatives are underway in Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. And a newly elected creationist majority on the state board of education in Kansas plans to rewrite the entire state's science curriculum this spring. This means the state's public-school science teachers will have to choose between being scientists or ayatollahs -- or perhaps abandoning their students and fleeing Kansas, like academic truth-seekers in China in the 1980s or Tehran today.
LOL, a biological computer! Are those legos? That's a popular perky news clip for the good morning America crowd. There's nothing behind it.
And I have already give you a link that refutes it all. I guess that makes us even!
The thread is 685 posts long. Get real and post your math.
No, that statement is too broad. "No matter how life came to be?!"
Given a self-replicating machine, a DNA-computer, a computer virus, or even an artificially intelligent software program, Evolution would fall short of explaining the Origin.
Why then would one extrapolate such a theory into other realms, much less claim dogmatically that said theory "must" have happened?
And in that thread is proof of the errors of your math. Post 650 there abouts.
No, your link gave 5 errors that made all Creationist math calculations wrong...none of which were made in the math in the link that I gave you.
I was just teasing you before when I said you didn't understand Evolution. But you really don't. Seriously. And that sentence proves it conclusively.
Let the record show that Southack hasn't a clue what he's talking about. I'll stop here unless you can get back to me and tell me what's wrong with your sentence. Perhaps you just misspoke. (but I doubt it)
Thank you for providing a link to a source that totally refutes your contention.
Tell me, precisely *how* do you claim that we can have a species originate without having a new life form originate?
Your link totally refutes your contention. See posts near 650.
Simply keep clicking upon View Replies. All such "proofs" were conclusively debunked in that thread.
I think I made it clear in 406.
The model you gave is a random linear process. The word "unaided" refers to the changes in the process being random. Until you have a model of containing the actual funtionality and relationships within the whole mechanism, there is no math describing anything other than quantification of the known parts. You are promoting a model for something, that is fundamentally not known, let alone understood.
Correct. Your "proofs" were conclusively debunked in the thread. Thank you for the link.
Southhack provided a link to a thread that totally debunks his contentions. No need to go any further.
Yup. You beat me.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0224_030224_DNAcomputer.html
Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes
Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA.
A year ago, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips. Now the team has gone one step further. In the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.
The design is considered a giant step in DNA computing. The Guinness World Records last week recognized the computer as "the smallest biological computing device" ever constructed. DNA computing is in its infancy, and its implications are only beginning to be explored. But it could transform the future of computers, especially in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications.
Use (any) random number generator. Seed the generator with your computer's real time clock or a transform thereof. Run generator for 25 plust the last two digits of the DJI30 for the previous day or the number of cents in the total reported reserves for all 13 Federal Reserve Banks (this was used by the Mafia numbers racket and thus must be good.)
The mathematical model that I gave to you is valid for calculating probabilities for any and all unaided processes correctly sequencing data or instructions.
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