Posted on 08/07/2005 6:25:03 AM PDT by RepublicNewbie
In the "Monkey Trial," 80 years ago, the issue was: Did John Scopes violate Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution? Indeed he had. Scopes was convicted and fined $100.
But because a cheerleader press favored Clarence Darrow, the agnostic who defended Scopes, Christian fundamentalism -- and the reputation of William Jennings Bryan, who was put on the stand and made to defend the literal truth of every Bible story from Jonah and the whale to the six days of creation -- took a pounding.
Overthrowing centuries of science through the legal system. Now that's an interesting concept. I hope you will not be too shy to reveal your identity when you win a Nobel Prize for discovering that biology isn't a science.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA! Why not just give up now, troll?
Or how about the Cambrian Explosion?
How about "deep roots and tiny prototypes?"
How about the "blood clotting cascade"?
Your statement exposes only your own ignorance. When you've got at least a rudimentary understanding of the theory, try again.
This is simply the inverse of what you propose and equally as valid.
It is in no way valid. If the theory of evolution had no explanatory power, it would have been discarded long ago as useless.
So then, I say that evolution is a science fraud. Many of the underlying issues presented here and elsewhere are causing the scientific community to question the efficacy of evolution. Yet there will always be secular fundamentalists that adhere to everything that opposes the idea that there might be a higher power, a creator, an intelligent desinger, a God...
Yes, you keep saying it, but you haven't demonstrated it. I understand that a lot of people claim "evolution is a theory in crisis." It's a claim that dates back to about fifteen minutes after Darwin proposed it. When the theory is replaced, I'll be just fine, because if and when that happens, the new theory will be science. (ID doesn't qualify). And for perhaps the billionth time on FR, the theory of evolution has no more to do with the existence of God than any other scientific theory. Shall we cite Pope John Paul II again, or was he an atheist, too?
To this I say, continue to offer your sophisms and soliloquy, I'm sure they will continue to comfort you. This simply demonstrates to me more and more that evolution as anything approaching real science is an indefensible fraud.
When you've got at least a rudimentary understanding of the theory, try again. But I repeat myself.
Interestingly, I get to work on a federal case from time to time, and this entire discourse is showing me that evolution is in legal jeopardy. At this point, from a legal standpoint, I can prove that evolution does not meet the legal standard for science as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Well, that settles it, then! There's a right to abortion in the Constitution, and evolution isn't science! Bravo, Supremes!
Now it's just a matter of showing an alternative, what evolution IS, and the more I work it out, the more it appears to be religious dogma.
Oh, details, details. To the man with nothing but a hammer, every problem is a nail. But you know that.
I still have a bit of legal research to do here, but I may be able to pigeonhole it into secular humanism (a recongnized religion), and possibly even paganism as there is a component of earth worship...
Tell it to John Paul II. I don't imply Roman Catholicism is the one true religion; my point is that the Pope's refusal to rule out belief in the theory of evolution for Catholics demonstrates that evolution isn't another religion.
Interesting discussion. Thanks for the input and I still await the discussio of the issues I have raised. As of yet I have not seen any of those issues addressed. Please do, as that would be interesting if in some school challenge there is no SCIENTIFIC rebuttal...
I'm glad you enjoyed it. If you think your issues haven't been addressed, you're not reading the posts addressed to you. Why am I not surprised?
Thanks again!!! And keep up the great work!!
You'r welcome! Try and keep up!
I'm not in the least surprised that you don't want to address the question. The problem, though, is that it's not a dodge; it's a basic hurdle for any scientific theory. If you can't present your theory in falsifiable terms, it isn't a scientific theory.
Don't take my word for it -- look it up.
While I'm complimented that you discern "literary practice" in my posts, I'll happily agree to ignore you further.
That's part of it, but should really add Phylum Level Evolution. The author, by the way, is a former YEC who in the course of a career in oil exploration geology woke up and smelled the coffee.
Overthrowing centuries of science through the legal system. Now that's an interesting concept.
As we have seen, the claim that every one of the components must be present for clotting to work is central to the "evidence" for design. One of those components, as these quotations indicate, is Factor XII, which initiates the cascade. Once again, however, a nasty little fact gets in the way of intelligent design theory. Dolphins lack Factor XII (Robinson, Kasting, and Aggeler 1969), and yet their blood clots perfectly well. How can this be if the clotting cascade is indeed irreducibly complex? It cannot, of course, and therefore the claim of irreducible complexity is wrong for this system as well. I would suggest, therefore, that the real reason for the rejection of "design" by the scientific community is remarkably simple – the claims of the intelligent design movement are contradicted time and time again by the scientific evidence.
One of the fallen, then.
My hat's off to the designer of Leishmaniasis.
Read it again. Slowly and carefully. Then, as you're ready to hit the sack, kiss Darwin's bust nighty night. He'll appreciate it, and so will the rest of his followers.
Not the flagellum again!
If it was the end of evolution as we know it, evolution would be overturned over ten years ago, when Behe first started peddling this trash. However, the only thing gone is Behe's credibility as a scientist.
The flagellum, while its evolution is not yet well understood, is not irreducibly complex by Behe's own definition. Thewre is no cadre of ID scientists working on anything. There's a cadre of a few charlatans writing books and getting speakers fees from the gullible and religious. Dembski, their hero, is out of a job; Baylor told him they wouldn't renew him after they found out what he was about, and his contract finally ran out. Meyer isn't a scientist, he's a philosopher. Johnson is a lawyer - neither of them has a clue about science in practice. Wells is a Moonie who opposes evolution because his Messiah, Reverend Sun-Myung Moon, disapproves of it (how could a god have evolved?) The only one of any of the IDers mentioned who has ever set foot in a lab (other than to visit) is Behe, and he publishes only rarely. Most of Behe's 'irreducibly complex' examples can be trivially shown not to meet his own definition of irreducible complexity.
Still, the imminent demise of evolution continues.
The world? Okay, let's kick down that ol "subtle and deep thought" pedal right to the hard pavement on this virtual shovelhead.
So then here it is: The very physics of the universe being as intricately fine, beyond any rationally ability to so occur as happenstance. Can only mean intelligence of the unimaginably highest order.
Yes.
If you had read the article at my link, you would know that it refuted Miller's piece, to which you referred.
Well, this sent the Darwinians scrambling. Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University who argues in favor of Darwinian evolution, made a splash when he announced (and he bolded the language in his article) that "the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex." Miller cited a cellular structure known as the type III secretory system (TTSS) that allows certain bacteria to inject toxins through the cell walls of their hosts. This "nasty little device," in Miller's words, is a feature of several bacteria, including Y. pestis, the bacterium that is responsible for bubonic plague. According to research cited by Miller, the TTSS is made up of several proteins that are "homologous" to a set of proteins from the base of the flagellum. Miller argued that the injector pump is probably an "evolutionary precursor" to the flagellum, and it is fully functional although it has fewer parts. Therefore, "the claim of irreducible complexity has collapsed, and with it any 'evidence' that the flagellum was designed." The "flagellum has been unspun," Miller concluded.
But there was a little problem with Miller's declaration of victory. As it turns out, the bubonic plague bacterium already has the full set of genes necessary to make a flagellum. Rather than making a flagellum, Y. pestis uses only part of the genes that are present to manufacture that nasty little injector instead. As pointed out in a recent article by design theorist Stephen Meyer and microbiologist Scott Minnich (an expert on the flagellar system), the gene sequences suggest that "flagellar proteins arose first and those of the pump came later." If evolution was involved, the pump came from the motor, not the motor from the pump. Also, "the other thirty proteins in the flagellar motor (that are not present in the [pump]), are unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system." Undirected evolutionary processes do not produce 30 novel proteins, of just the needed kind, to laze around idly in the cell for millennia so that a pump could some day transform itself into a motor. In short, the proteins in the TTSS do not provide a "gradualist" Darwinian pathway to explain the step-by-step evolution of the irreducibly complex flagellar motor. Miller's spin has been unspun.
I'm an engineer, not a biologist. I haven't the credentials to prove or disprove either argument. Do you?
Hey, scientific ignoramus, buy a clue from beyond the 17th century, Newton's Law are false.
Oops, make that "Laws" before someone shoots me.
Newton's laws aren't actually false. They are just in need of some good, old-fashioned postmodern deconstruction.
Okay, they are limited in scope, incomplete, or perhaps, just mundane.
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