Posted on 08/28/2005 4:07:56 AM PDT by snarks_when_bored
You're going to have to be patient. I've been asking for three weeks what ID advocated would teach if they ran the science classes.
Saying that Darwinism doesn't have everything explained makes a rather short lesson plan.
What is it they would teach?
I'll keep trying and let you know if I ever get a coherent response.
This notion that TOE is not good science but that Creationism and/or ID should be taught alongside TOE in a science class is absurd.
That ID should be taught in place of TOE in science classes is the only logical position if you think ID is good science. But as you ask...what exactly would be taught? I'd like someone to tell how ID would be taught in place of TOE so I can have an opportunity to question ID theory as taught.
...molecule-to-man is an assumption and does not address how to create the molecules they are tinkering with.
If you read the article I linked to, you'll note that the lab guys are talking about constructing organisms molecule by molecule. They're not talking about making molecules from scratch. Why would they be? There's no need to do that. Nor was there any need to do that when the Earth was young; there appears to have been a wide array of molecules of many sorts available in the early soup from which life arose.
ID biology would use a book listing various species, probably with pretty pictures. They'd be arranged in alphabetical order, because that makes as much sense (to an ID-devotee) as other kind of arrangement. And under each pic would be a caption saying, more or less: "Toad, yet another special creation of the Designer." Tests would require being able to identify the pictures correctly.
Someone in an old thread said that without the theory of evolution, biology is little more than birdwatching.
In the Year 2005--just one little sliver of time in the existence of the universe--one observes the "foolishness" and arrogance of human beings who, limited by the human brain's capacity for assimilating and incorporating adequate data for rational evaluation and understanding of profound questions about the origins of their universe, deem themselves "keepers" of the gate for the minds of rising generations.
You seem to be saying that humans are arrogant and foolish to assume that they know anything at all about the origins of our cosmos worthy of being taught to their children. If I'm interpreting you correctly, this seems silly. Would you suggest that we don't teach our children what we currently think will best prepare them to understand the world they inhabit (understanding always that what we teach them may be subject to revision as we learn more)? I hope not.
Besides, stoical skepticism will never be as popular as the notions of the likes of Sixpak Chopra and Pat 'Hitman' Robertson.
(laughing) Yeah, them boys tell a good tale...
ID biology would use a book listing various species, probably with pretty pictures. They'd be arranged in alphabetical order....Tests would require being able to identify the pictures correctly.
I see. So ID biology could be taught in first grade with no further instruction required after that.
Think of the instruction time that will free up in grade school and high school. This instruction time can then be devoted to really important things like the pseudo-social sciences, minority culture/ethnic group studies, popular film/music studies, and sensitivity training.
Researchers Creating Life From Scratch.Huh?????
Oh, the foolishness of the wise!
Pooh-pooh the idea if you wish, but I'd advise you to go ahead and buy some stock in any Venter company that decides to do an IPO! Better rich than sorry.
Pebble counting placemarker.
sigh....and what (or who) made the soup?
That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it? We're discussing (among other things) whether molecules which were undeniably present in large numbers on the early Earth are capable of having ultimately combined on their own in a way that led to self-replicative structures that over billions of years developed into the vast variety of organisms that we currently observe. Evolutionists maintain that that's what happened, and they're engaged in the huge task of trying to understand as completely as possible how that happened. Intelligent Design proponents maintain (as far as I can tell) that a deity somehow whipped up all of the vast variety of life in a jiffy and made it seem as if it really took billions of years. Mostly, they spend their time trying to think up ways to discredit the work of evolutionary biologists and at the same time avoid tricky questions about the 'young Earth' and stuff like that.
And as for this:
Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?
Organic chemists regularly construct complex molecules by a variety of processes, for example, polymerization. And in a few years, our nanotechnologists are going to be much better at putting together all sorts of materials, one atom at a time. And, lest you try to push the question back further, transmutation of one atom into another is rather straightforward to accomplish in particle accelerators and the like. And, yes, particles can be produced out of pure energy. But do we produce the energy itself, you ask? That's not the question we're discussing, I say! (smile)
read later
That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it?
This is the same old worn-out rhetoric we repeatedly see from the anti-science know-nothings: that Evolution is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of the raw materials (first living cells).
This is equivalent to standing on a soap-box and screaming that Hydrology is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of water, or that Gravitational Theory is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of mass.
"Hydrology -- a theory in crisis!"
That loud noise you're hearing is the lovely sound of shifting goalposts.
No it's not like that at all.
Gravitational Theory and Hydrology really don't include the phenomenon of change, but the phenomenon of change is the core of evolutional theory. Since the phenomenon of change is at the very core of evolutionary theory it begs the question, exactly when and how did evolution start?
Evolutionists should not blow off that question as they normally do with "the same old worn-out rhetoric we repeatedly see" like, "you do not have the proper understanding of evolution", "evolution is not meant to explain the origin of raw materials" etc.
This is what makes the The Origin of Life Prize® so interesting, there are some honest evolutionists who know the origin of life question has to be answered and that so far they have no answers.
---------------------------------------------------------
Clarification of what the Foundation is looking for. We are primarily interested in how certain linear digital sequences of monomers acquired three-dimensional dynamic function. The Prize offer is designed to stimulate focused research on the origin of initial genetic instructions themselves. So much of life origin work centers around biochemical factors. But biopolymers catalyzed by clay surfaces, for example, do not necessarily contain any functional (prescriptive) information. How does an algorithmically complex sequence of codons arise in nature which finds phenotypic usefulness only after translation into a completely different language (AA sequence)? How did natural process produce so indirectly the hundreds of needed three-dimensional protein catalysts for life to begin?
Mathematically, it is impossible to go backwards from 20 AA to 64 codons. There is no way to know which of four or six codons, for example, coded a given AA when one tries to go backwards against the "Central Dogma." Prescriptive Information has been lost. Various models of code origin often pursue primordial codon systems of only two nitrogen bases rather than three. At some point, such a two-base codon system must evolve into a three-base codon system. But catastrophic problems such as global frame shifts would have resulted from such a change midstream in the evolution of genetic code.
Environmental selection, if existent at all in a prebiotic environment, is nothing more than after-the-fact differential survivability/reproduction of certain stochastic ensembles in certain environments. How did initial genetic code-certain sequences of codons-come to specify only certain three-dimensional sequences of amino acid strings that "work"?
The winning submission will likely provide both a novel and cardinal conceptual contribution to current biological science and information theory.
The Foundation welcomes theoretical models of a more direct primordial instruction system (one that might have preceded codon transcription and translation) provided the model provides explanation of continuous transition (abiding by the "continuity principle") to current prokaryotic and eukaryotic empirical life.
Inanimate stepping stones of abiotic evolution are essential components to any natural process theory of the molecular evolution of life. Full reign must be given to the exploration of spontaneously forming complexity and to self-ordering inanimate systems. But reductionistic attempts to provide models of life development must not sacrifice the very property of "life" that biology seeks to explain. Coacervates, micelles, vesicles, and various primordial quasimembrane models, for example, may resemble membrane equivalents and merit considerable ongoing research, but should not be confused with the active transport membranes of the simplest known free-living organisms.
-----------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------
e. By sustained, free-living "life," the Foundation means any system which from its own inherent set of biological instructions can perform all nine of the following functions:
1. Delineate itself from its environment through the production and maintenance of a membrane equivalent, most probably a rudimentary or quasi-active-transport membrane necessary for selective absorption of nutrients, excretion of wastes, and overcoming osmotic and toxic gradients,
2. Write, store, and pass along into progeny prescriptive information (instruction) needed for organization; provide instructions for energy derivation and for needed metabolite production and function; symbolically encode and communicate functional message through a transmission channel to a receiver/decoder/destination/effector mechanism; integrate past, present and future time into its biological prescriptive information (instruction) content,
3. Bring to pass the above recipe instructions into the production or acquisition of actual catalysts, coenzymes, cofactors, etc.; physically orchestrate the biochemical processes/pathways of metabolic reality; manufacture and maintain physical cellular architecture; establish and operate a semiotic system using "signal molecules"
4. Capture, transduce, store, and call up energy for utilization (work),
5. Actively self-replicate and eventually reproduce, not just passively polymerize or crystallize; pass along the apparatus and "know-how" for homeostatic metabolism and reproduction into progeny,
6. Self-monitor and repair its constantly deteriorating physical matrix of bioinstruction retention/transmission, and of architecture,
7. Develop and grow from immaturity to reproductive maturity,
8. Productively react to environmental stimuli. Respond in an efficacious manner that is supportive of survival, development, growth, and reproduction, and
9. Possess relative genetic stability, yet sufficient diversity to allow for adaptation and potential evolution.
All classes of archaea, bacteria, and every other known free-living organism, meet all nine of the above criteria. Eliminate any one of the above nine requirements, and it remains to be demonstrated whether that system could remain "alive."
RNA strands, DNA strands, prions, viroids, and viruses shall not be considered free-living organisms, since they fail to meet many of the above well-recognized characteristics of independent "life."
Even in historical science, there must be some degree of empirical accountability to our theories. Proposing a mechanism that explains the origin of life must not consist of "defining down" the meaning and essence of the observable phenomenon of "life" to include "nonlife" in order to make our theories "work." Any scientific life-origins theory must connect with "life" as we observe it (the "continuity principle"). Science will never be able to abandon its empirical roots in favor of purely theoretical conjecture. On the other hand, science must constantly guard itself against Kuhnian paradigm ruts. We must be open-minded to the possibility that life has not always taken the form that we currently observe. We must take into consideration the problems inherent in any historical science where the observation of past realities is impossible.
Biophysicist Hubert P. Yockey makes the unique observation that "there is nothing in the physico-chemical world [apart from life] that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences. The existence of a genome and the genetic code divides living organisms from non-living matter." (Computers and Chemistry, 24 (2000) 105-123). This may well constitute the most concise and parsimonious dichotomization of animacy from inanimacy available in the literature. We must remember, however, that the full compliment of nucleic acid code, ribozymes, and protein enzymes are still present immediately after cell death. Life, therefore, would appear not to be reducible to coded prescriptive information (instruction) alone. Life is also not "a bag of enzymes." "Life" is characterized by ongoing homeostatic metabolic process and algorithmic function, including development, growth, and reproductive potential. The inability of mules to reproduce has no relevance to discussions of protocellular viability.
---------------------------------------------------------
Would the discussion here on this thread be out of place in a public school classroom?
But the theory of evolution is NOT contingent upon the answer to that question. That's the point. Hydrology isn't contingent upon where water came from; gravitation isn't contingent upon where matter came from. They are all compatible with ANY explanation of how the raw materials got here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
