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.

[Southack]

"1) Bacteria do indeed exchange genetic information by a process called conjugation. ... 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." - VadeRetro

Oh, brother...

OK, lets start out with some basics, we'll build from there once you demonstrate comprehension of such things as:

http://www.wsu.edu/~thorglab/biol301/lectures/lecture0225.html

"Conjugation is the transfer of DNA from one bacterium to another. The F factor can insert into the E. coli chromosome to result in the formation of Hfr bacteria, which donate the chromosome at high frequency to F- bacteria. The F factor inserts at different points in different Hfr strains. The transfer begins in a portion of the F factor and ends with the rest of the F factor being transferred. Time of entry mapping can be used to order genes for a particular Hfr strain. By combining results from multiple Hfr strains it is possible to construct a detailed map ordering the genes.

The F factor may sometimes carry pieces of bacterial DNA with it if it leaves the E. coli chromosome. Such elements are termed F’ (F prime) plasmids. They allow the production of bacteria which are "partial diploids". Such bacteria are important in some genetic studies in which the dominant or recessive nature of mutations is important in making inferences about their function."

[VadeRetro]

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.

Placemarker to remind myself to explain tomorrow why bacterial conjugation makes sense and facilitates fast adaptation if mutations are happening.

[Alacarte]

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

There are a couple pro-evo's here who sound like they may have some biology background. But I'm always amazed at the ceationsist/IDers who cut-n-paste biology arguments against evolution, as if we were debating football strategies. I'm afraid biology is a little too complicated for people with no training to debate specific mechanisms on a forum. I think this all stems from a misunderstanding of how science works.

They have no problem getting on a plane that is a product of pure science, but don't trust those evil biologists.

[WildTurkey]

In that one post, you posted ten times more than you have posted about your "probabilistic theory" in this whole thread, in spite of repeated requests for you to enlighten us on the calculations, or at least provide the results.

[WildTurkey]

They have no problem getting on a plane that is a product of pure science, but don't trust those evil biologists.

Or taking that flue shot which is modified each year to work on new and stronger strains ...

[VadeRetro]

Allele-hiding would be dead if every bacterium were a 20-oid for every gene. Hello?

Just leave the dumb-dumbisms here. I'll get to them when I get to them.

[Southack]

"conjugation. ... does not create pairs of potentially dominant recessive genes." - VadeRetro

One wonders if tomorrow you'll still be holding onto the above scientific falsehood (you know, you...that guy who claims that he always corrects himself to the scientifically correct facts).

Yawn...

Still not a worthy challenger for me on this thread...and I've even pinged your still-silent buddies a couple of times to help you and js1138 out.

Sigh.

[Alacarte]

Still not a worthy challenger for me on this thread...

Pretty strong language from the guy who posted the monkey probability thing and said that it proved ID.

[Southack]

"Pretty strong language from the guy who posted the monkey probability thing and said that it proved ID."

Mischaracterizations won't make you worthy, either.

I posted the math for the probability of sequencing long series of data (or instructions, doesn't matter) without aid/bias.

What the math reveals is not that ID is proved, contrary to your misreading above, but rather, that some form of bias, natural or intelligent, is required.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Is the Darwintern going to send out agents to commit natural selection?

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Dogma is still dogma and is based on a premise that a chosen position is unassailable. Sounds rather cultish to me.

[WildTurkey]

Dogma is still dogma and is based on a premise that a chosen position is unassailable. Sounds rather cultish to me.

I know. That is what makes the creationists look like kooks.

[WildTurkey]

I posted the math for the probability of sequencing long series of data (or instructions, doesn't matter) without aid/bias.

No. You provided a link to a thread 685 posts long that REFUTED your claim.

[WildTurkey]

Still not a worthy challenger for me on this thread...

It's impossible to challenge someone that will not provide his basic premise.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

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?

LOL love this one. You have yet to tell me how "reason" (I assume that you mean "logic" on this one) can possibly undermine ID without bringing forth the paradox that I've mentioned.

Er, if you believe that experimentation and observation are not ID tools, then, by logical extension, you also have to agree that no experimentation or observation is ever intelligently designed. Considering the phenomonal quantity of shoddy work and out and out fraud perpetrated by anti-IDers since Piltdown man, I might just have to concede this point...

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

I know. That is what makes the creationists look like kooks.

Apparently ID is a mirror - and anti-IDers don't like what they see in it.

[jwalsh07]

So, you're saying the judge putting a stop to a school board lying to our kids and our supporting his decision makes us nannny staters?

Thats exactly what I'm saying Grandma. And I will continue to say it until you provide the Constitutional authority for the fedgov meddling in local school affairs.

I'm waiting for the white rabbit, now.

No need to wait, you and your compadres can simply bring a federal court case demanding your right to white rabbits. Rest assured the oligarch will find that right in the 14A's penumbra.

[jwalsh07]

Interesting how you defend false propaganda in the name of creationism.

You don't get it and you never will. To you the Constitution is a door mat.

[unlearner]

"Sacrifice" is a correct Biblical description.

The verse in Job looks figurative and poetic. Do you think that the Bible should not have these?

I hope that is not what you mean when you challenge the literal interpretation of scripture.

Would you put the same demands on a physics book? Just because a physics book might use an analogy does not give the reader a license to construe the entire book as symbolic or metaphorical.

Somehow I do not think your offended by the science issues as much as maybe some personal ones. Maybe you have had some bad experiences with someone who claims to be a Christian.

[Junior]

...fedgov...

Maybe you should also include a few, random CAPITALIZED words, and the occasional smattering of multiple exclamation points.