Posted on 04/10/2005 3:53:04 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A pro-evolution group has organized what appears to be a successful boycott of Kansas hearings on intelligent design.
Alexa Posny, a deputy commissioner with the state department of education, told the Kansas City Star that only one person has agreed to testify on the pro-evolution side for the hearings scheduled for May.
"We have contacted scientists from all over the world," Posny said. "There isn't anywhere else we can go."
Harry McDonald, head of Kansas Citizens for Science, charged that the hearings, called by a conservative majority on the state board of education, have a pre-ordained outcome.He said that testifying would only make intelligent design appear legitimate.
"Intelligent design is not going to get its forum, at least not one in which they can say that scientists participated," he said.
Backers of intelligent design, the claim that a supreme being guided evolution, say it is a theory with scientific backing. Opponents believe it is an attempt to smuggle religion into public education.
Lamarkian evolution is non-random variation which anticipates or responds to need.
Monarchical Republic placemarker
Please point out when, between the time the Romans expelled their monarch and set up the Republic, and the time the Republic was dissolved to become the Empire that Rome had a monarch.
Actually, ID gives no more meaning to free will than straight evolution. Being independent of God does not equal being designed by God. Once more, your powers of logic have decreased considerably over the past few years.
I must go stain this afternoon and thus cannot do more research into your description, but thanks for the reply!
This is simply not true. There is no idea so stupid that it is not believed by a lot of people. Pick up a copy of Skeptical Enquirer. Huge numbers of people believe Uri Geller can bend spoons with his mind, and they are undeterred by videotape of him using his hands and lying about it.
I think that everyone in a pre-college program should be taught how science works, what the standards of evidence are, how science seeks knowledge. They should be taught a bit about the history of science and should have the major controversies placed in a historical context.
The place for this is in a history of science class or a theory of knowledge class. Such classes actually exist, by the way.
But the "controversy" you believe should be taught in science class is so convoluted that you haven't been able to explain it to us, despite years of trying. I'm still unaware of what kinds of experiments ID researchers would perform if they had the funds.
I'd like to see one proposal for a study, complete with hypothesis and methodology.
Does the word "Caesar" not translate to "king" in your textbooks? Didn't the fact that it became an Empire, imply an Emperor? Did you miss the whole "overruling the Senate" thing that Brutus's friend performed?
The downfall of the Republic is exactly why the Founding Fathers took care to NOT mimic the ideal old Roman Republic.
157-86 BC Gaius Marius: I seem to recall this man here enjoying a rather dictorial rule for some time.
I will say it was maybe a poor choice of wording, to say "monarch" with exclusion. But the rule of one man over the proceedings (dicatorship) of the courts and laws is what our Founding Fathers did not want to happen.
Caesar, if you beleive Robert Graves, originally meant 'hairy man'.
The Republic is usually considered to have ended at the battle of Actium, 31 BC. The only Caesar with absolute power prior to that date was C. Julius, and even so he was elected 5 times.
What was the mechanism for evolution?
"Lamarckism" or "Lamarckianism" is now often used in a rather derogatory sense to refer to the theory that acquired traits can be inherited. What Lamarck actually believed was more complex: organisms are not passively altered by their environment, as his colleague Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire thought.
Instead, a change in the environment causes changes in the needs of organisms living in that environment, which in turn causes changes in their behavior.
Altered behavior leads to greater or lesser use of a given structure or organ; use would cause the structure to increase in size over several generations, whereas disuse would cause it to shrink or even disappear.
This rule -- that use or disuse causes structures to enlarge or shrink -- Lamarck called the "First Law" in his book Philosophie zoologique.
Lamarck's "Second Law" stated that all such changes were heritable. The result of these laws was the continuous, gradual change of all organisms, as they became adapted to their environments; the physiological needs of organisms, created by their interactions with the environment, drive Lamarckian evolution.
Now you can quibble about whether use actually "enlarges" a structure -- obviously use of muscles enlarges them. You could argue where this is directly heritable. But the central feature of Lamarkianism is that changed need is communicated to the germ cells and affects the next generation in a non-random fashion. The next generation will be better adapted because the germ cells have learned something.
Research is ongoing concerning the very issues raised by Intelligent Design supporters - rise of complexity in biological life, life v non-life/death, autonomy, semiosis, information in biological systems.
I suspect the investigators themselves (Rocha, Adami, Schneider et al) obtain funding because they embrace evolution and scientific materialism. But the end result will be same as if the ID science fellows had the funding and did the research without embracing evolution and scientific materialism.
The key difference is not evolution - neither set of investigators dispute evolution generally. The difference is that one group embraces scientific materialism and the other does not. That is very telling, btw.
My two cents...
Caesar was a family name. The republic was dead at that point.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, right? Doesn't the sun 'move' from the perspective of a person on earth? So as a man, like Joshua on earth, what does it mean to you when the sun stands still? There are too options, either the earth altered its rotation or the sun stopped rotating around the earth. Both can be literal interpretations but you choose the more unlikely one.
By the way, the literal interpretation is still an interpretation so I don't know how you read the Bible much less anything else without interpreting it.
The rules of research are the same whether you are a materialist or not.
I invite you to think about the consequenses of stopping the earth's rotation.
There are flood geologists who hope to prove the flood story with evidence.
What evidence do you suppose would be left behind by a stoppage in the earth's rotation?
Your excerpt of the Lamarck theory is precisely my understanding of Larmarckian evolution theory which I do not equate to "non-random variation which anticipates or responds to need">.
The latter would include the master control genes (Gehring), semiosis, complexification methods, etc. which are not acquired traits but "built in" or "designed" depending on one's theology/ideology.
Must go stain now, catch you later.
Rex does mean "king" but what does "Caesar" translate to? ("hairy one" literally) but how is it used? As a name, or a title?
How about Tsar(Czar) or Kaiser? Derived from "Caesar" (and in context, meaning "tyrant")
Sure. Both happened long after the demise of the Roman Republic.
Sorry if I stretched Lamarkianism. I tend to equate it with any hypothesis that says variation responds to need.
"The emperor's legal authority derived from the extraordinary concentration of individual powers and offices extant in the Republic rather than from a new political office" -Wikipedia.org
This means the classical term for "Roman Emperor" may be interpreted to state "the head of the Roman state, who had a roll from the original Republic."
"Roman Empire" is a misnomer, but dictators the "Emperors" were.
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