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.
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.
Perhaps I should have been more clear. You are thus far simply repeating without modification a point which I have explained is fallacious.
You do not have a paradox. The ID movement did not create intelligence or design or even the use of one's intelligence in the activity of designing. The methods of science owe this motley collection nothing. They have put together a shoddy thesis that certain things (even rather simple things which have certain properties) cannot evolve, that there is no possible naturalistic undesigned scenario for their creation, etc.
The refutation of this idea (or even the "God left it looking like THAT, then," theory were such a thing ever possible) would undermine nothing. The methods and tools of science are not underpinned by such silliness.
Thus, your paradox is not a paradox. Thus, you have now I trust been answered, or will at least address in your next reply what in my analysis fails as an answer. This you so far have not done, but have simply waved your "paradox" as the answer to its refutation.
Oh, so you think you have a right to lie? Good Grief.
Yes. Any physics book that taught that the earth had four corners should be burned.
Grow up Junior. Either put forth some documentation granting power to the feds over local schools or be a good little nanny stater and just go away.
Same for you, make an argument. Hell, at least attempt to make an argument that the Federal Government has powers over local school boards. You guys are constitutionally weak.
"conjugation. ... does not create pairs of potentially dominant recessive genes." - VadeRetroWow! Damn! In the course of once again reminding you that a bacterium is not by nature a diploid organism, I once again failed to cover myself against the Tah-Dah attack.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).
Note, however, that I long ago conceded that you found a form of dominance/regression in the PNAS article. You have simply reintroduced the same datum in the form of an article mentioning one possible origin of such. I already mentioned that, in the post you have been waving around.
Here's a hint for your next Google for your next "Well, how about THIS!?" I mentioned it as well in the same earlier post but I'll repeat it. Another source of "partial diploidy" will be "duplication mutations," the creation of duplicate regions of the genome during the transcription process.
Oh, that's right! You can't use that. Your thesis is that mutations don't exist.
The sun.
You know, the best argument for the Federal Government intervening in the local public schools is when the creationists try to put religion into the science class.
Spoken like a true nanny stater.
So, what is this conjugation thing? Does it make sense in a Southack world? Does it make sense in an evolutionary world?
In a Southack world, there apparently are no mutations. Let's go back to those experiments in which it looks like a monoclonal colony demonstrates the seeming ability to evolve new adaptations. (Various antibiotic resistances, the ability to metabolize new compounds as food, etc.)
Given that all the cells are the descendants of a single founder, the observed degree of flexibility is hard to account for without true genetic novelty, or mutation. That founder's genome--and we know this for sure--only has so many genes, no matter how they do or don't get passed along or recombined.
But why do the bacteria have this conjugation thing between two organisms if ordinary fission works just fine?
Short and sweet, it can take an accumulation of mutations to realize an advantage. Maybe there's one mutation that creates an extra copy of the part of the genome. Call it "partial diploidy." Now you've created some resilience against [creo mantra alert!] the horrific damaging effects of random mutation etc. etc.
Let's say you have a duplicate copy of a small chemical pathway, the genes to produce a protein and something else which acts as its receptor. Selection can now drift this duplicate pathway in the genetic code to a new function, as seems to have happened in such cases as hemoglobin (blood oxygen transport) arising from myoglobin. Further mutations can coopt this new pathway, which was originally just a copy of the old pathway.
But only in a lineage in which the previous mutations exist. It takes an accumulation of mutations.
In a cloning situation, bacterial fission, all the changes have to occur on each branch. If one necessary mutation happens on one branch and another happens on a sibling branch, neither lineage yet has anything useful.
But what if organisms, even highly unrelated ones, could just swap genetic material once in a while? This need not be part of any act of reproduction, but it can. Bacteria by our standards are almost continually reproducing themselves.
Another term for bacterial conjugation is "lateral transfer." It makes wonderful evolutionary sense, very useful for rapid adaptation.
But not in a Southack world. You have to have mutated alleles to pass around. It won't buy you a thing if there are no mutations.
But we don't have to worry about that. The same literature being dumped onto this thread in support of endless assertions that a bacterium can hide an allele once in a while contains a far greater profusion of evidences for the existence of mutation.
Your passages do not indicate the sun was created on the fourth day. Only that there was a fourth day, and it was good.
Clearly day and night were in the beginning. God saw the earth as darkness and on the first day created light and called the light day and then divided into darkness which he called night. Can it be any clearer?
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.
We laughed a lot, and now that I've have a few moments to go back and read your responses, it's clear the derision was justified.
I didn't said bacteria don't have recessive traits. You read it that way, but that wasn't what I said.
What I said was "Explain to us how recessive traits work in bacteria." I'm still waiting. The question still stands.
We were discussing mutations in a colony of bacteria that started with one individual. You asserted the antibiotic resistance gene was already present, and then mentioned recessive traits.
So back to the original post: Explain to us how recessive traits work in bacteria.
Oh, BTW, the use of "fedgov," like the use of the term "fiat money" or random CAPITALIZATIONS and multiple exclamation points, is indicative of a conspiracy kook -- and no one takes conspiracy kooks seriously. You might not like it, but that's the way you come across.
More importantly, explain how antibiotic resistence was already present in the case you cited in #680.
Very good Junior. Based on this paragraph, I take it you now disagree with the federal judges ruling which would be the conservative and constitutional position to take.
Oh, BTW, the use of "fedgov," like the use of the term "fiat money" or random CAPITALIZATIONS and multiple exclamation points, is indicative of a conspiracy kook -- and no one takes conspiracy kooks seriously. You might not like it, but that's the way you come across.
LOL. Abbreviating federal government to fedgov equals "conspiracy kook" is about as kooky as it gets.
I did notice that you took this kook seriously enough to back away from nanny statesville. :-}
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