Posted on 04/05/2005 7:42:56 AM PDT by bedolido
SEATTLE - (KRT) - Three years ago, the Ohio Board of Education invited a small but influential Seattle think tank to debate the way evolution is taught in Ohio schools.
It was an opportunity for the Discovery Institute to promote its notion of intelligent design, the controversial idea that parts of life are so complex they must have been designed by some intelligent agent.
Instead, leaders of the institute's Center for Science and Culture decided on what they consider a compromise. Forget intelligent design, they argued, with its theological implications. Just require teachers to discuss evidence that refutes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as well as what supports it.
They called it "teach the controversy," and that's become the institute's rallying cry as a leader in the latest efforts to raise doubts about Darwin in school. Evolution controversies are brewing in eight school districts, half a dozen state legislatures and three state boards of education, including the one in Kansas, which wrestled with the issue in 1999 as well.
"Why fight when you can have a fun discussion?" asks Stephen Meyer, the center's director. The teach-the-controversy approach, he said, avoids "unnecessary constitutional fights" over the separation of church and state, yet also avoids teaching Darwin's theories as dogma.
But what the center calls a compromise, most scientists call a creationist agenda that's couched in the language of science.
There is no significant controversy to teach, they say.
"You're lying to students if you tell them that scientists are debating whether evolution took place," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that defends teaching of evolution in school.
The Discovery Institute, she said, is leading a public-relations campaign, not a scientific endeavor.
The Discovery Institute is one of the leading organizations working nationally to change how evolution is taught. It works as an adviser, resource and sometimes a critic with those who have similar views.
"There are a hundred ways to get this wrong," said Meyer. "And only a few to get them right."
Ohio got it right, he said, when its state Board of Education voted in 2002 to require students to learn that scientists "continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory."
Scott said it was a small victory at most for intelligent-design supporters, but Meyer considers it a significant one - a model other states should follow. Minnesota has adopted similar language.
The School Board in Dover, Pa., however, got it wrong, Meyer said, when it required instruction in intelligent design. (The matter is now in court.) Intelligent design isn't established enough yet for that, Meyer said.
He also criticizes the Georgia school board that put stickers on biology textbooks with a surgeon-general-like warning that evolution is "a theory not a fact." The stickers were a "dumb idea," he said bluntly. (A Georgia court ruled they were illegal, and the case is under appeal.)
In Wisconsin, the institute hopes it helped the school board in the small town of Grantsburg switch to a teach-the-controversy approach.
In each place, the institute says it responded to requests for help, although it's working to become more proactive, too. Some critics suspect the ties are even closer.
The Center for Science and Culture opened in 1996 as a part of the already-established Discovery Institute, which also studies more earthbound topics such as transportation, economics, technology and bioethics.
Founder Bruce Chapman - who has worked as an official in the Reagan administration, head of the U.S. Census Bureau and Washington's secretary of state - became interested in intelligent design after reading a piece Meyer wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
Meyer, then a philosophy professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., was defending a California professor in trouble for talking about intelligent design in biology class. To Chapman, it was an issue of academic freedom.
He invited Meyer to come speak at the institute. The more they talked, the more Chapman and others at the institute became interested in offering a home to Meyer and others interested in intelligent design.
Intelligent design appealed to their view that life isn't really as unplanned or unguided as Darwin's theories can make it seem.
"It interested me because it seemed so different than the reductionist science that came out of the 19th century ... that everything could be reduced to chemistry," said John West, a political scientist and center associate director.
The private institute has an annual budget of about $3.2 million, and plans to spend about $1.3 million on the intelligent-design work, Chapman said, mostly to support the work of about three dozen fellows.
The Fieldstead Charitable Trust, run by Christian conservative Henry Ahmanson and his wife, is one of the largest donors to that effort. Chapman declines to name more.
Meyer, the center's director, is a tall, friendly man who has undergraduate degrees in geology and physics and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, where he wrote his doctorate on the origins of life.
He says he's no creationist. He doesn't, for example, believe in a literal reading of the Bible, which would mean the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
He doesn't dispute that natural selection played a role in evolution; he just doesn't think it explains everything.
He often points to the Cambrian Period, a time more than 500 million years ago when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. Meyer and other Discovery Institute fellows say those groups show up too fast, geologically speaking, to have come about through natural selection. That's one of what they see as controversies they want taught in school.
Scientists, however, say the Cambrian Period may not be completely understood, but that doesn't mean the theory of evolution is in trouble.
"They harp and harp on natural selection, as if natural selection is the only thing that evolutionary biologists deal with," said Scott. "Who knows whether natural selection explains the Cambrian body plans. ... So what?"
Scientists consider Meyer a creationist because he maintains some unnamed intelligence - and Meyer said he personally thinks it is God - has an active hand in creating some complex parts of life.
"I don't know what else to call it other than creationism," said Michael Zimmerman, a critic and dean at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Meyer, however, said he's a scientist who starts with scientific evidence, not the Bible. His goal - a big one - is to change the very definition of science so that it doesn't rule out the possibility that an intelligent designer is actively at work.
"Science should be open to whatever cause ... can best explain the data," Meyer said.
That would be a major change for science, which limits itself to the natural world. Scott said it would be a "science stopper."
"Once you allow yourself to say God did it, you stop looking for naturalistic explanations. If you stop looking, you won't find them," she said.
Scott said science isn't an atheistic worldview. In science, she said, "It is equally inappropriate to say God did it, or God had nothing to do with it."
The institute's call to "teach the controversy" meets strong resistance.
"There's no controversy about whether living things have common ancestors," Scott said. "There's no controversy about whether natural selection is very important in creating the variety of organisms we have today."
While the institute touts its list of 370 scientists who have signed a statement saying they have some doubts about Darwin's theory of natural selection, Scott's organization, in a parody of that effort, has a list of 500 names limited to scientists named Steve or Stephanie, in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known biologist who once wrote that evolution is "one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science."
Public opinion is mixed. Many Christian denominations, including Catholics, see no contradiction between evolution and their faith, but a Gallup Poll last November found that only about a third of the respondents think Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported by scientific evidence.
Meyer hopes the Kansas Board of Education will invite the center to speak at its hearings in May. Speakers will be asked to address the issue the center wants to highlight: whether Kansas' science curriculum helps students understand debate over controversial topics such as evolution.
Kansas Citizens for Science, however, has urged a boycott of the hearings, saying the proposals have been "rejected by the science community at large."
Sometimes it takes a two-by-four. And often even that doesn't work.
But what is Smokey the Bear's MIDDLE name??
By GOD; that SETTLES it then!!
I'll not be holdin' me breath until that time though.....
I'm not "avoiding" them -- it's just that you're constructing a strawman, and I saw no point in addressing it. I see that it's necessary to provide further detail on the matter. The strawman is in the way you define the motivation and goals of the putative designer. In essence, you're saying that the only possible design agent is an omniscient designer who would never design anything that would go extinct.
However, we know from our own experience that we often design things to serve some singular purpose, and we forget about the thing once we no longer have a use for it, and thus we know that there is no strict requirement for a designer to be either omniscient, nor for him to "design for forever."
In terms of the sabertooth cats themselves, the achievements of the modern biotech industry -- not to mention the practice of selectively breeding animals to achieve certain desirable traits -- seem to indicate that there is no intrinsic barrier to an intelligent breeder deciding to create a breed of large cat with long teeth. I'm not saying that this did occur, but there is no technical reason why it could not have happened, either. Indeed, humans have frequently done very similar things.
The most recent theory I've seen for the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth is that they were done in by a combination of human predation and disease. The extinction of the saber-toothed cats would likely have followed as a consequence of the loss of their primary food source -- but that has nothing to do with how they got their long teeth in the first place.
The Dawkins program to produce the string "Methinks it is like a weasel" involves three processes: 1. Random variation -- on each "generation", 1/8th of the character strings in the "population" (size selected by user) have one of their text characters completely randomized to some other character. 2. Selection -- the character string which has the most "correct" characters (or if more than one such string exists, the most recent such) is flagged, and a) will be "bred", and b) won't itself be mutated or replaced by one of its own "offspring". 3. Reproduction -- the current "most fit" character string undergoes "sexual reproduction' with randomly chosen other strings, and the resulting offspring replace the "mates". (This is actually more akin to biological lateral gene transfer.) So all three of the processes necessary for evolution to take place are in the Dawkins program. And, as predicted by "evolutionists", the results are swift and sure -- the mutating, reproducing, subject-to-selection population very quickly (within seconds) produces a Shakespeare text string which the creationist "pure random" methods would not have produced before the Earth permanently froze over. |
Personally, I like the monkeys chances for typing "To be or not to be, that is the question."
No guts, no glory, so please try.
This begs the question of whether "naturalistic explanations" are the proper goal of science. Perfectly religious folk up until the 20th century had a perfectly good time doing science, while believing in a creator. "Naturalism" has not always been the underlying presupposition of science, and science did quite well.
Horseshoe crab placemarker.
I was an atheist in my youth and later gravitated to the God started it and billions of years later, voila.
However, as a born-again Christian, I began to realize that the foundations of most Christian doctrines (sin, death, disease, sacrifice, and so on) are based upon the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
For Christians who believe that Adam sinned and brought sin and corruption into the world, the time before Adam could not have been filled with death, destruction, disease, and violence. If Adam was the result of millions of years of death, disease, and evolution, the whole concept of the FALL makes no sense at all. Our faith would be based upon an illogical, nonsensical framework. Whence cometh sin?
Just something for Christians to consider.
And that's a problem for whom?
"Perfectly religious folk up until the 20th century had a perfectly good time doing science, while believing in a creator."
Yes, it seems that the search for the truth can take place in different ways. If you understand your bias then you may find the truth but if you discard answers because of where they lead you will have problems.
"Darwinists are adopting their own "blind faith approach" to any questions about evolution. "
Rephrased: Darwinists AND Creationists are adopting their own "blind faith approach" to any questions about evolution.
There is no reason to reject the notion that evolution is a mechanism of God's creation.
I have read a piece that asks, "How could a wood-pecker mutate and survive each mutation?" The point being that having a long skinny tonge for getting insects out of small beak pierced holes in trees is worthless unless you have 100 other adaptations simultaneously that make the tonge an asset to getting food rather than a "bottle-neck".
Yeah, just-so stories are nice. Take your choice, ground - up, tree - down, convergent evolution, divergent evolution, etc. Whatever you need it's there in the magic hat.
"Whatever you need it's there in the magic hat."
I think that magic is the key. The random chance is really the magic in the equation - call it chance -- but it is magic.
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