Snide bee
Posted on 04/22/2005 4:21:47 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Evolution found a home Thursday in the oldest church in Kansas during a forum about the controversy over science instruction for public school students.
"There is no conflict between evolution and the Christian faith," said the Rev. Peter Luckey, the senior pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt.
Luckey was preaching to the choir during a five-hour forum that featured scientists, teachers and politicians who argued in favor of teaching students evolution because it is the foundation of science, knowledge of which will be needed to compete for jobs in the growing bioscience industry.
About 75 people attended the forum at Plymouth, which was founded in 1854 and was the first established church in the Kansas Territory. Attempts to inject intelligent design -- the notion that there is a master planner for all life -- into science class should be rejected, they said.
"Intelligent design is nothing but creationism in a cheap tuxedo," said Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.
‘Think critically'
The forum was another round in the debate that has thrust Kansas on the national stage.
With control of the State Board of Education in conservative hands [AAARRGGHHH!!], state officials again will consider science standards that will guide teachers.
A committee of scientists has drafted standards that include evolution teaching, but a minority report, led by proponents of intelligent design, wants criticism of evolution included. A State Board of Education committee, comprising three conservative [AARRGHH!!] board members, plans six days of hearings that will revolve around that debate.
The speakers at Thursday's forum were adamant that evolution instruction not be reduced, watered down or dumbed down.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' science adviser, Lee Allison, said when the state approved a $500 million bioscience initiative, it included a provision to recruit top scholars who met the standards of the National Academy of Sciences, which supports evolution without equivocation.
"The state really has taken a position on this in a broad, bipartisan way," Allison said.
Charles Decedue, executive director of the Higuchi Biosciences Center, said teaching evolution was critical because bioscience companies want to locate in places where the work force has received a solid education in chemistry, physics and biology.
"They want people who can think critically," he said.
‘Hayseed state'
Andrew Stangl, a Kansas University sophomore, said his high school science teachers in his hometown of Andover refused to teach evolution.
He bought books and taught himself. He said fear of teaching evolution would hurt the United States in the long term. "I don't want to see other countries pass us by. We are going to economically suffer as a result," he said.
In 1999, Kansas made international news, much of it negative, when a conservative [AARRGGHH!!] board de-emphasized evolution. The 2000 election returned moderates to power, and evolution was reinstated. But with conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] back in control, international criticism was starting again, several panelists said.
Rachel Robson, a doctoral candidate at KU Medical Center, said one of her friends was applying for a job with a Japanese company, and the company officials made fun of Kansas and questioned whether good scientists could come from there.
Thursday's forum attracted national attention from National Public Radio and NBC.
Krishtalka said even though the battle over evolution was going on in several states, "Kansas will be tarred and feathered by the media as the hayseed state."
Carol and Tom Banks, of Prairie Village, attended the forum, saying they were getting tired of conservatives [AARRGGHH!!] controlling the political agenda.
"If intelligent design were taught, that would be teaching religion in public schools," Carol Banks said.
But Jerry Manweiler, a physicist from Lawrence, said he supported teaching intelligent design. "It's important to know the theory of evolution, but it's also important to understand the nature of God," he said. Manweiler said he was put off by the forum speakers' "lack of humility."
Don Covington, vice president of networking for Intelligent Design Network Inc., said he disagreed with the speakers.
"They want their kids to know how to think, but you can't develop critical thinking skills when you tell them to memorize Darwin," he said.
• May 5-7: Science standards hearings in auditorium of Memorial building, 120 S.W. 10th St., Topeka. Time to be determined later.
• May 12-14: Science standards hearings, time and location to be determined later.
And this would explain why (seemingly ancient) ant trails have been discovered that run on literally for scores of miles, seemingly connecting many divers colonies. But how do chemical signals account for the way the ants behave in "emergency situations," such as the case where the colony/queen is under attack? Presumably the ants are widely distributed such that scent cues (which require more or less direct or at least close contact) would not be available to direct their behavior. If that is the case, then what does?
Well then, please give me the word the way you define it and we can get back to business.
Do you mean to suggest that it is illegitimate for a person to make an observation and give a description of it, unless some "expert" has blessed it? That is, only experts generate references?
No, Uri Geller has things to say also. And millions of people read horroscopes and visit fortune tellers.
But if you want me to accept as fact the claim that ants do things that are inaccessible to known physical laws, than I want a reference that is credible.
I think it's been demonstrated that insects release "semiochemicals" into the air for rapid communication. Similar chemicals common to other creatures are known as pheromones. (Of course, it could be dryads ...)
But only if you're determined to "mix metaphors." :^)
Many known physical laws have only been "known" for a relatively short time -- a couple/few centuries. With the above statement, are you suggesting (prophesizing???) that everything that can be "known" is now known, and therefore there is no possibility of additions to knowledge in the future?
What would science do with itself, if that were the case? Wouldn't scientists wake up at night screaming, in cold sweats, horrified and lamenting that they no longer have anything to do?
But if your cosmology does not include the concept of chemistry, or considers it too reductionist, then you would be inclined to exhaust the search for garden fairies before turning reluctantly to conventional science.
I suppose cosmology does matter, which is why science has made progress in the last century or two.
I see you aren't in any hurry to reveal your source for your beekeeper story.
Okay, I'll disentangle the reference: Austeja is a goddess of bees in Lithuanian mythology. But if you were to ask ol' William of Occam, he'd probably go with the sociochemicals.
It was on early-morning TV news today. I heard the story, but (because I was getting ready to go to work), I didn't take notes.
Said beekeeper, however, did not put her observations into the context of a field. That was my doing. It seemed to well account for the experiences she was describing.
Well that's science for you. Beekeeper ladies on morning TV. You and Alamo-girl are into math. I can't wait for the quantitative analysis.
I'm beeing snide here, but this is serious stuff. You are arguing for overturning entire cosmologies on the basis of an anecdote told on a morning TV talk show.
Snide bee
Ascribing a god to a physical object is man's first approximation to understanding the world. IMHO the activity thus is not to be disparaged by us "more enlightened" thinkers.
I can imagine a future time -- say a millennium or two down the road -- when even "more enlightened thinkers" than we are would maybe look back at us presently-living (but by then long-dead) humans and would chortle at our superstitious beliefs. [I have some candidates to propose, but won't do that here.]
You wrote: "The Hebrews, by sweeping all that away and positing only one God, made an almost unbelievable intellectual leap. But that's not at all what I'm discussing here, and in rejecting the primitive notion of dryads (as did the Hebrews) we are not rejecting theism."
That truly was an extraordinary leap in being, not only in intellectual progress, Patrick! The one thing that the ancient Hebrews had in common with their more primitive forebears is the unshakeable conviction that at the bottom of everything in the Universe is God: Life and all of truth are divine principles.
In post-modern times, an interesting thing has happened: God has been putatively exiled from the natural world: There are no longer dryads in the trees. (Although as recently as the Nineteenth century, William Blake could still claim that the trees were "full of angels.") Today it is widely believed that Nature is absolutely independent of any kind of divine activity.
But the interesting thing about this is, while this understanding may push God out of the world of empirical phenomena, it can't push Him out of the physical laws that science employs to study the natural world. God is the ultimate foundation of Truth; thus the physical laws are utterly contingent on the God Who validates them by means of His Truth.
So in our imaginations, God may have been pushed out of phenomena; but it seems very clear that He has not been entirely pushed out of the Universe. Were that to be the case, then the idea of "law" would become unintelligible, and science would have nothing to do -- and no world to describe anymore.
I don't imagine that you are "rejecting theism." It's just you may think it belongs in church. But science ultimately rests on divine revelation just as much as any other human endeavor does.
Yes indeedy, js!!! This is called "the process of creative destruction." Science ain't "done" till it's "done." And we ain't there yet.
Science typically does not rest on its own laurels. Why should it start now? There's still plenty of "stuff" to find out about the Universe!!! Or do you think we humans already know everything there is to know?
Plus I think a long-time, experienced beekeeper is a good person to listen to, if I want a description of apiarian behavior. Whether I saw her on TV, or read her in a book, is entirely incidental.
Excerpt:
Ever since the biologist Karl von Frisch discovered the dance of the honey bees in the 1920's, biologists have wondered how the honey bee with its little brain could "talk" in such an "intelligent" way. Professor Barbara Shipman of the Math Department has proposed a new and very controversial explanation.Barbara's father does research on the physics of honeybee bahavior and is employed by the Department of Agriculture. When she was nine years old, he told her about the dance of the honeybees. But Barbara was also interested in mathematics, and she went on to get her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Arizona. Her thesis was on the dynamics and geometry of spaces called flag manifolds. It would seem that she had drifted very far away from the dance of the honeybees. But, after coming here to the University of Rochester, she saw something that she did not expect. In the geometry of a six dimensional flag manifold, she saw the dance of the honeybees. To be more specific, she saw a family of curves, some of which traced the round dance and some of which traced the waggle dance. Without looking for it, she had stumbled upon a mathematical model for the dance of the honeybees! The model even predicted that the dance would come in two forms, waggle and round. Wow!
But why should a six dimensional flag manifold have anything to do with honeybees? Surely, their little brains do not think in six dimensions. What could be going on? Up to this point, Barbara was on safe ground. Nobody could argue that her model did not match the dance. It clearly did. Just look at the curves in the manifold and watch the bees. It was the same thing.
But Barbara wanted to understand why the model worked, and to do so, she proposed a daring explanation. Physicists use these same flag manifolds to understand some of the phenomena associated to quarks, fundamental particles two of which are the building blocks of ordinary matter. Barbara believes that this is not an accident. She proposes that bees have a "sixth sense" that gives them direct access to the quantum world of subatomic particles.
First we came out of the trees, and now we've swept the dryads from the trees. Soon we'll move out a bit further and take our place in the larger universe. In His image indeed.
We are "in His image." And so, to a certain extent, is the Universe as a whole -- certainly Plato thought so.
But an image is a reflection, not "the real thing" itself. I think it is vitally important that we not lose sight of this critical distinction. A certain humility (not to mention gratitude) makes for the best policy. JMHO FWIW
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