Posted on 08/20/2005 5:45:53 PM PDT by Nicholas Conradin
By SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
LeftCoast started halfway plausible, a guy taken with the anthropic principle stuff. But grab-bag quote mining from people all over who have earned their fame for matters other than what you are citing smells funny at once. Quote-mangling is just a no-no. Do that and your credibility is dead.
LCNC, you just died.
Fine, but then not even evolutionary biologists claim that it occurred "by accident". There are more processes at work in evolution and other natural processes than mere "accident".
It's worse than that. As best I can tell, the Prigogine "quote" is sourced to a November 1972 "Physics Today" paper. The problem is, the quote doesn't even even appear in that paper at all! I give a link to the article near the bottom of my refutation of similar fabrications/quote-mined gems from Prigogine, et al, in my debunking HERE:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1383676/posts?page=112#112
Apparently, the anti-Evos can't keep their hands off of Prigogine; they are obsessed with quote-mining and quote-fabricating the guy to death.
What's funny is that Prigogene's Nobel work is the absolute death of creationist "Second Law" arguments. He kills all their claims that complexity can never arise without the intervention of an intelligence.
[Thunderous applause!]
It's not really a question of how smart you are, it's a question of how intellectually honest and self-critical you are. Ich and PH have bent over backwards to provide you with an understandable explanations of the arguement for evolutionary theory, along with pointers that would take you all the way baok to original sources, if you wish. This response is ingenuous, nasty, and embarassingly undignified in it's irrelevance and unresponsiveness, and general lack of good will.
I'm just a lowly engineer.
Who, unable to defend his own stance with anything much beyond temper tantrums, now begs his deponents to provide him with the juice for an irrelevant ad hominem attack.
be nice if DonH, VadeRetro, and Patrick Henry gave us their occupations so we would know what kind of really smart, advanced science professionals we are dealing with. Thanks in advance.
Not relevant. Either we are presenting you with science's arguments, and the cites lead you to verification of that, or they don't...it's just a matter of looking.
And as far as going to the links, I have done that many times before.
I rather suspect not; if you had, there would be more depth, variety and subtlety to your arguments. I think you are reading talking points from a creationist ammo site somewhere.
I am not a newbie to this debate, and I've heard all the arguments before. So spare me that Iu am missing all the "proof."
There is no such thing as proof in the natural sciences, and since you don't give a tinker's poop about the evidence, it's even more totally irrelevant what our occupations are, isn't it?
I have at least a vague familiarity, and I don't offer up ghost cites from imaginary friends as if it were evidence.
You've been posting comments and quotes by scientists that rely on these very phenomina and processes to support your contentions, whatever they are. The links you gave also contain very poor info. What do you think is being fine tuned?
How about instead of teaching either of those, we instead teach the well-established science of evolutionary biology.
Great tagline!
You should bookmark/link Ichneumon's post 291. It's a great source for real Einstein quotes.
That fact alone is part of the answer to why they like to misquote him so much; to the extent they can fabricate or quote mine a quote from Prigo that superficailly seems to contradict Prigo, they nullify the value of citing Prigogine by evos. It then becomes a matter of "dueling quotes" ("my Prigo quote is bigger than YOUR prigo quote!"), and at worst, they get a draw out of the confrontation.....
.... unless someone bothers to look up what Prigo, et al actually wrote!
The other reason they like Prigo so much is that he goes on at some length in the introductory passages of his papers pointing out how the thermodynamics of systems in equilibrium can't account the sorts of spontaneous order that we see in biological systems. Of course, the reason Prigo dwells on this point is to set the stage for his work in the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems, in which he demonstrates that such systems DO have the ability to spontaneously generate order, and for which he won a Nobel.
The quote-miners find lots of juicy stuff by lifting Prigo's comments out of context and parading them around in front of the ill-educated, the naive, and the addled, hoping nobody will notice their mendacity.
Nice post. Thanks for the quotes.
Their hysteria is about "FUNDING". Funny thing about the evolutionists they call the very people who fund them ignorant, and they are the ones who have been in charge of teaching for the past 40 years.
The gig is coming apart, watch them squeal.
It is all so irrational!
"As we know, the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution."
... Spock, "Wolf in the Fold," stardate 3615.4..
Yes, but it doesn't quite fit into The List-O-Links. So we'll have to rely on Ichneumon to keep track of it.
Just read the article, it struck me as a surprisingly restrained for an NYT ad hominum article. You can tell they are horrified by the apparent conspiracy of wealthy religious-minded conservatives trying to undermine the enlightment our world has enjoyed for centuries.
It also inadvertantently oozed with the secular blindspots of the Times writers and editors. For instance, they found the phrase 'AMDG' to be very noteworthy, informing us that "Pope John Paul II etched (it) in the corner of all his papers." While AMDG isn't very common now, when I grew it, it wasn't unusual at all... not just something one would see in the Vatican.
Maybe Dan Brown should join their editorial board to really punch up their stories!
-- Joe
Mein Gott. Lately this has become a target-rich environment
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