Posted on 02/05/2005 11:37:51 AM PST by gobucks
ELKTON - Charles Darwin and his intellectual descendants have taken a lashing here lately.
With the Cecil County Board of Education about to vote on a new high school biology textbook, some school board members are asking whether students should be taught that the theory of evolution, a fundamental tenet of modern science, falls short of explaining how life on Earth took shape.
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The politically conservative county of about 90,000 people bordering Pennsylvania and Delaware is joining communities around the country that are publicly stirring this stew of science, education and faith.
*snip*
At the Board of Education's regular monthly meeting Feb. 14, the five voting board members are scheduled to decide whether to accept the new edition of the book and might discuss Herold's call for new anti-evolution materials in addition to the book.
*snip*
The consensus in mainstream science, represented in such organizations as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History, was, in effect, captured in 31 pages of text and illustrations published in November in National Geographic magazine. In big red letters, the magazine cover asks: "WAS DARWIN WRONG?" In bigger letters inside, the answer is: "NO. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming."
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Joel Cracraft, immediate past president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, compared the scientific agreement on evolutionary theory to "the Earth revolving around the sun."
*snip*
Then there's the matter of teaching the meaning and method of good science.
"The issue is science," Roberts said. "What is science, and, if there's a conflicting view, does it meet the rigor of science we're seeking?"
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
I don't care who you sleep with, guy. Just watch her sword.
Have Dog breeders yet predicted when selective pressures will result in something other than a dog? Have microbiologists yet predicted when selective pressures will result in something other than a microbe?
So...have Christians accepted the fact that God created the "heavens" 15 billion years ago...and the earth 4.5 billion years ago, which is exactly 4.49999891 billion years before he decided to create Jesus?
Just wondering.
That is still selecting for desired traits within a set. I am more interesed in 'creating a flying pig', as Dawkins would say, without gene-splicing.
Then, I would be more comfortable with proponents of evolution being considered in the 'hard' sciences.
What sets me off is when it is claimed, by inference, that evolution in all aspects is as certain as the sun rising in the east. It is not.
It is a lot of parts together, yet studied enough it evolves a coherent meaning. Alfredo, by the way. Alfredo sauce.
Another handy source on the translation wrt science is: Age of the Universe
Point well taken. I hate it when scientists use evolution as an explanatory device. But, the predictability of evolution is dependent upon knowing the selective pressures of the future. I come up short in that ability.
How would I go about it from an atheist's point of view? That's a good question but is an important one to answer. It is an important issue for pro-life people to address because an argument must be universally true in order to be accepted. And the religious argument will not be universally accepted - since your interpretation of religion may be different from someone elese. I would go about it thus.
All morality can ultimately be reduced to an application of the Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You don't need Ten Commandments, only that one, since everything stems from it. You don't need religion to follow that and it doesn't matter what ideology someone holds. An atheist can obey it just as much as any religious person. If everyone would obey that rule, there would be world peace forever. You can make moral case that to abort a fetus would be the same as aborting yourself.
So that's how I would argue that if I was going at it from an atheist's point of view. You can also present a scientific case against abortion based on the basic embryological development. We know the fetus feels much pain, we can detect a heart beat and brain waves at 8 weeks.
Now I'm Catholic and believe in God. I should probably be a better Christian. But I do not like the religious argument because it eliminates rational thought and moral choice - "I'm following because God wants me to". And to follow Him implies that I am doing it for a reward - a reward in the afterlife. The atheistic position is based on a moral choice of the self and is not motivated by the reward for an afterlife. I'm choosing to be pro-life despite the absence of an afterlife. That's what I would say.
Furthermore, I don't like the religious argument because some religions are bad and sometimes their God or gods can be immoral - as we see in certain religions, such as ones that in the past demanded human sacrifice, and, in the current era, Islam. God is also subject to the Golden Rule. When he doesn't follow it, I will not follow Him and will not respect Him.
Had it not been except for random accident, you could have been born in the Muslim world. If you had followed the religious arguments of such an upbringing, you would be a very different person than the one you are - I assume you don't decapitate people or commit honour killings. The Muslims that we like to complain about so much aren't any different from you or me. The only difference is that their upbringing made them believe in a religion that predisposes to violence. So to heck with the religious argument.
You have just designated youself as a candidate for excommunication from the church of hard science. Doubtless you have never written any peer-reviewed papers in a scientific field. I smell a bible under your belt.
Welcome back. Hope you had a great time.
Well, I've had a hankering to be a lumberjack and let other schmucks argue over whether or not Pamela Anderson will grow larger assets due to evironmental pressures......
....and the most interesting fact is not that fraud has occurred, but that the community as a whole was so rabidly enthusiastic about embracing those frauds. It's as if ......they had an agenda to prove something (and isn't that precisely what the Evos criticize the Creos and IDers for?)
The self-organizing principle in economics involves conscious minds making rational and intentional decisions (also known as INTELLIGENT DESIGN). How could you miss that?
First of all your logic is faulty because man could invent a false conception of a true God and still attribute true concepts to that false god. And second of all there are no "if, then" statements in the Declaration of Independence.
The princple that rights flow from God is both historical and present day American principle.
Now, if you think that needs changing, you can look forward to me fighting you every inch of the way.
Regards.
I can't really say much about the 2nd Law of Thermodyamics argument because you have questioned my sources (Schneider [Shannon], Jaynes and Adami [Kolmogorov]) and I am awaiting a response from the resident experts on the Forum to confirm these authorities and my understanding of their publications. For those interested in my position here is the link: post 1773 on the hysterical thread.
Concerning the eyes and irreducible complexity, I do have a few remarks.
First, there are two general types of complexity - least description (Kolmogorov, self-organizing or cellular automata, and physical complexity) and least time (functional complexity, irreducible complexity, specified complexity and metatransition - a kind of punctuated equilibrium). A summary of each type with source links is posted at 875 on the Plato thread.
My personal favorites - because they are can be quantified and are widely accepted - are Kolmogorov and functional complexity.
Secondly, the issue with eyeness goes more to the fact that eyes developed concurrently across phyla, including between vertebrates and invertebrates. Experiments sharing eyelessness genes between a mouse and a fly are evidence. This is contrary to the original formulation by Darwin but may be explained by immutable (or mutation resistent) master control genes.
But if such is the case, one is left wondering why that should be. Moreover, it would indicate that evolution is not happenstance at all ("random") but rather directed. IOW, it goes to the Intelligent Design argument.
Q: What is it that makes functional complexity so difficult to comprehend?
S: The evolution of living creatures appears to require an essential ingredient, a specific form of organization. Whatever it is, it lies beyond anything that our present knowledge of physics or chemistry might suggest; it is a property upon which formal logic sheds absolutely no light. Whether gradualists or saltationists, Darwinians have too simple a conception of biology, rather like a locksmith improbably convinced that his handful of keys will open any lock. Darwinians, for example, tend to think of the gene rather as if it were the expression of a simple command: do this, get that done, drop that side chain. Walter Gehring's work on the regulatory genes controlling the development of the insect eye reflects this conception. The relevant genes may well function this way, but the story on this level is surely incomplete, and Darwinian theory is not apt to fill in the pieces.
The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined." The significance of this statement must not be lost. We are being asked to reexamine the idea that evolution is a free agent. The convergence, the similarity of these genes, is so great that it could not, it did not, happen by chance random reactions.
Weiss: How the Eye got Its Brain
Interview with Gehring: Master Control Genes
A lie in and of itself Professor. I would guess that I know just as many Christians and non believers as you do and my experience is that the distribution of liars is pretty equal across the board.
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