Ayatollahs in the classroom [Evolution and Creationism]

Berkshire Eagle (Mass.) ^ | 22 January 2005 | Staff

[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.

[VadeRetro]

The question which you are dancing around is:

I have answered the question. You are looking very stupid here. I have already made two statements.

1) Bacteria do indeed exchange genetic information by a process called conjugation. All the regulars of the evo crew are fully aware of this phenomenon. It has been on thread after thread for years here.

It is not sex as we eukaryotes understand it. It does not create pairs of potentially dominant recessive genes. It remains true that bacteria do not routinely have such.

That is important for your premise that recessive allele hiding accounts for the seeming mutability of bacteria. That idea would in fact be preposterous even if bacteria had 20 copies of every active gene, one to be dominant and 19 to hide around waiting for a moment when they might become adaptive. And we would have heard it by now if any bacterial genome looked like that. It would have been in a PNAS article, for instance.

Furthermore, as ignored in my last post, your allele-hiding model makes bacterial conjugation utterly inconsequential in a monoclonal colony. That's just what you liked about it, why you latched onto it originally. It creates no new information but merely passes existing genes around.

But you can't hide enough alleles in that founder's genome. Your premise is false.

I have now gone over it such that even a Southack should be able to understand it. But, if you still don't understand, let me know in what part the words were too big. Got that, Larry?

[js1138]

Now I'm going to teach you that bacteria exchange genetic information sexually.

In a colony descended from a single individual?

By the way. I herby withdraw and rescend any apologies, stated or implied, regarding the word "recessive". You do not understand the word in either of the two contexts in which it has been cited.

You blather about exchanging information among individuals that have no genetic differences except those conferred by mutation. You blather about "recessive" genes implying there is hidden information, when the source you cite explicitly says the variation is the result of mutation.

[iconoclast]

I know who Harrison Ford is! Does that make me an actor?

Hardly, but it supports my surmise that your not quite dry behind the ears.

[VadeRetro]

It is not sex as we eukaryotes understand it. It does not create pairs of potentially dominant recessive genes. It remains true that bacteria do not routinely have such.

Kinda wish now I had numbered this paragraph 2)! BWAHA!

[VadeRetro]

While someone Googles furiously for his next "Tah-dah!" to prove he isn't dumb, I'm out for a better-late-than-never bite to eat.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

<sigh> I'm not going to get into those arguments. I haven't for a long long time. I will say that there is plenty of controversy about transitional forms and what actually constitutes a species. In fact, even amongst hard core evolutionists there is a lot of personal opinion involved.

That's not my point. For the last couple of years, I've been pointing out an interesting paradox which anti-IDers will dismiss out of hand, but will never answer. Simply, because they cannot.

All your arguments for transitional forms and fossil record, experimentation, etc. does not disprove the basice premise of ID. However, if anti-IDers use ID tools (fossil record, transitional forms, experimentation, etc.) to disprove ID, then by logical extension, they have also invalidated the ID tools used to disprove ID. Which means that they have basically blown a whole body of work (fossil record, transitional forms, experimentation, etc.) out of the water.

You can't fudge the rules to obtain the results that you desire and still expect to be greeted with any respect.

I will listen with respect to your notions of transitional forms, I will look at the results (as well as the methodology) of your experiments and I will study your empirical observations. All this, I'll do with respect, though I may disagree with some of the conclusions drawn.

However, when you make conclusions which are not supported by the available data, you are leaving the realm of science and entering the domain of religion. In this case, different rules apply. This means that evolution has to be judged by the same rules that religion is.

[Alacarte]

Hardly, but it supports my surmise that your not quite dry behind the ears.

Well, if you really want to test me, I'm a computer engineer who designs systems for jet fighters. Ask me anything about computers or aircraft navigation or air-to-ground ballistics and I'll give you an answer.

What's your area of expertise so I can ask you questions? Not sure how much I know about fast food, but I'll give it a shot.

I think you have it backward, I know enough about science to know that taking data from a field I have absolutely no training in, like biology, then drawing my own conclusions from it, is the height of arrogance... or stupidity.

Unlike you IDers/creationists, who think highschool biology makes you qualified to take scientific data, draw your own conclusions, then call the scienitsts who discovered the data in the first place, liars! If they are all such big liars, then stop stealing their data!

Go do your own research based on the 'theory' of ID. As soon as your camp starts coming up with antbiotics and vaccines like biologists do, I'll take you seriously.

[e p1uribus unum]

Just for the record I know who Harrison Ford is.

My grandkids are nearly old enough to see Star Wars.

I checked behind my ears just this morning and it was dry back there.

[Diverdogz]

While someone Googles furiously for his next "Tah-dah!" to prove he isn't dumb, I'm out for a better-late-than-never bite to eat.

Now THAT is funny!

[WildTurkey]

For Example, the plants are created on day 3, but not until day 4 is the Sun brought into play. How can plants, or any life for that matter, exist without the Sun.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

[WildTurkey]

If making a dogmatic statement is not arguing, then indeed you have a point.

The only "dogmatic statement I have made (ID) is that it belongs in the religion/philosphy class and not in the science class. I mean if the ID's wanted to, they could put together some great materials for those classes.

[WildTurkey]

God gave His Son Jesus.

As I recall, God did not sacrifice His Son. He put His Son on earth for a few short earth years and then brought Him back to Heaven.

Maybe you misunderstood what I was saying about your Bible quotations. I know that the verses you referenced do not include the phrase "he shook it by grabbing its edges". I am unaware of any Bible verses that have that phrase or some similar phrase.

I was paraphrasing Job 38:13 which uses ends/corners/edges depending on the version.

[VadeRetro]

All your arguments for transitional forms and fossil record, experimentation, etc. does not disprove the basice premise of ID.

That's only because nothing ever can.

However, if anti-IDers use ID tools (fossil record, transitional forms, experimentation, etc.) to disprove ID, then by logical extension, they have also invalidated the ID tools used to disprove ID.

No one ever answers you on that? Let me be the first to tell you that the use of one's reason to systematically investigate nature does not "invalidate itself" even if it does somehow undermine somebody else's contention that we had to have been zapped into existence by some higher intelligence. Why should it?

In fact, I've already tried to tell you as much on this thread. What you mischaracterize as "ID tools" are not the gifts of Behe, Dembski, etc. nor does their validity in any way follow from the consequences of the rather shoddy work the ID movement has done.

ID didn't invent intelligence, it just misapplied the concept.

[WildTurkey]

I've always equated atheism and paganism with Hitler

Hmmm.. Hitler considered himself to be a Christian, which philosophy lead to much of his cruelty.

[WildTurkey]

(we'll see if they remain silent to your errors again)

We are STILL waiting for you to provide the math (at least the conclusion) to the probabilistic calculations you touted ...

[WildTurkey]

All your arguments for transitional forms and fossil record, experimentation, etc. does not disprove the basice premise of ID.

And you have provided no proof for the presence of ID. When you can, then we can submit it to peer review and if it passes the scientific method, we will teach it in the science class.

[WildTurkey]

Unlike you IDers/creationists, who think highschool biology makes you qualified to take scientific data, draw your own conclusions, then call the scienitsts who discovered the data in the first place, liars! If they are all such big liars, then stop stealing their data!

I think most of them slept through high school and no rely on the creationists' web-site for their "learning".

[Southack]

Now I'm going to teach you that bacteria exchange genetic information sexually. - Southack

"In a colony descended from a single individual? ... You blather about exchanging information among individuals that have no genetic differences except those conferred by mutation." - js1138

Genetic differences or similarities don't necessarily stop conjugation. One bacterium inserts its pili (a tube) into whatever other bacterium merely happens to be nearby.

Genetic information is then exchanged; whether new genetic information is or is not in that exchange of genetic information is irrelevant; the genetic exchange happens regardless.

...But this answer takes us away from where we were...waiting for *you* to support your wild-eyed claim that bacteria don't have recessive traits (hint: look up "loss of function" mutations or "null mutations").

I'm not going to let you continue to spread your scientific falsehoods such as that bacteria don't exchange genetic information sexually or that bacteria don't have recessive genetic traits, so the sooner you admit your errors, the less painful this is going to be on you (though Jung might argue that the pain is required for your consciousness to finally expand).

(can I cite Jung and *still* be called "dumb" by my students, one wonders?!)

[WildTurkey]

For Example, the plants are created on day 3, but not until day 4 is the Sun brought into play. How can plants, or any life for that matter, exist without the Sun.

Book 01 Genesis

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

001:001 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
001:002 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
001:003 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
001:004 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
001:005 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
001:006 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
001:007 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
001:008 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
001:009 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
001:010 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
001:011 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
001:012 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
001:013 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

[Southack]

"Bacteria do indeed exchange genetic information by a process called conjugation. All the regulars of the evo crew are fully aware of this phenomenon. It has been on thread after thread for years here."

You must be deliberately overlooking js1138's posts, then.