Posted on 09/06/2005 5:11:42 AM PDT by billorites
It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves. One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong." As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state. Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy. Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night. Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened? So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why. If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect. The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection. In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish. What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway. The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available. Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water. As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours. Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created. If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs. In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten. There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics. The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system. Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy. Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America. Arguments worth having ... The "Cambrian Explosion" Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently. The evolutionary basis of human behaviour The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans. Sexual versus natural selection Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection. The target of natural selection Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate. Natural selection versus genetic drift Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.
The giraffe illustration is vivid in my memory. On the other hand (speaking of the convergence of politics and education), I wasn't taught that homosexuality is hereditary.
I'm just pointing out that neither of us has full information on what is being taught in the guise of "science" in the government schools overall, and therefore every post is likely to contain some unverified assumptions.
This is like calling a child's kneading of play-doh and the creation of a poured concrete structure the same thing. Such dual definitions are fancy footwork, but they don't address the substantive 'philosophical' questions.
(This is like calling a child's kneading of play-doh and the creation of a poured concrete structure the same thing.)
No, it's less than that.
Evolution is not a dual definition. It has one definition: change in a population. If you want to talk about one specific type of change then you can specifically say "evolution of new features", or "evolution of new species", etc.
Well then there are philosophical questionings about whether certain parts of 'evolution' can, or could, be.
Some expressions of it appear to wear that face. For example our own Arooooooo, who is constantly recounting various creation stories. At a point, this is congruent with the behavior of one who wants to relativize everything.
ID says nothing about creation or any particular creation account. It is information theory.
Then you need to completely rethink your entire schtick. Because creationists, IDers and everyone else accepts this kind of evolution and is glad to teach it. Therefore, all these folks can't be so stupid and wickid if they want to keep teaching evolution in the classroom.
Oh, yes! There is no discrimination against ID in the academic journals. Anyone could freely publish if they wanted to:
Researcher claims bias by Smithsonian A former editor of a scientific journal has filed a complaint against the Smithsonian Institution, charging that he was discriminated against on the basis of perceived religious and political beliefs because of an article he published that challenged the Darwinian theory of evolution.By Joyce Howard Price
The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - February 13, 2005
"I was singled out for harassment and threats on the basis that they think I'm a creationist," said Richard Sternberg, who filed the complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel.
Smithsonian officials deny the accusations.
"We at the Smithsonian consider religion a matter of personal faith. The evolutionary theory is a matter of science. The two are not incompatible," said Randall Kremer, a spokesman for the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.
Mr. Sternberg, who holds two doctorates in evolutionary biology, says he's been told by the Office of Special Counsel that "they take my complaint seriously and are investigating." The special counsel's office said it cannot discuss the case.
Mr. Sternberg, 41, is employed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a part of the National Institutes of Health. But as part of his duties there, he spends half of his time at the Smithsonian as a research associate.
From December 2001 until last fall, he also served as managing editor of an independent journal published at the Smithsonian called the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
Mr. Sternberg said his troubles started after the appearance of the August 2004 issue of the journal, which included a peer-reviewed article by Stephen C. Meyer. The article, titled, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," made the case for a theory known as intelligent design, or ID.
ID contends that the origins of some biological forms are better explained by an unspecified intelligent agent than by natural processes, such as natural selection and genetic mutation, which are hallmarks of Darwinism.
In his report, Mr. Meyer, a fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, argues that ID is a more likely explanation than evolution for the biodiversity in the Cambrian period about 530 million years ago. He points to the "explosion" of phyla, which "suddenly appeared within a narrow 5- to 10-million-year window of geological time" during that period.
"To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner ... implies the absence of clear transitional intermediate forms connecting Cambrian animals with simpler pre-Cambrian forms," Mr. Meyer wrote in his defense of ID.
The report was "peer-reviewed" by three outside scientists, Mr. Sternberg said, "but employees at the Smithsonian, who had a sharply negative reaction to the report, insinuated that editorial malfeasance occurred on my end. I protested vigorously."
He says he gave up his post as managing editor of Proceedings in September but continued to be harassed by Smithsonian officials. Mr. Sternberg says he was penalized by the museum's Department of Zoology, which limited his access to research collections and told him his associateship at the museum would not be renewed because no one could be found to sponsor him for another three-year term.
Because of his shortened tenure, Mr. Sternberg says he will not have time to complete his research on crustaceans.
He also said one zoology official told him the museum "is not comfortable with religious fundamentalism and with creationism, so you are being treated differently."
Mr. Sternberg also says he was "called on the carpet" by his bosses at NIH after they were besieged by phone calls and e-mails from Smithsonian staffers, seeking his ouster. He said one Smithsonian official even wanted to know if he is a "right-winger."
"My lawyer called some people on Capitol Hill," who intervened and saved his job at NIH, Mr. Sternberg said.
Mr. Kremer, the Smithsonian spokesman, denied that Mr. Sternberg's supervisor at the museum or any other museum officials called NIH to get him fired. He also insists Mr. Sternberg still has access to the collections he needs for research.
"Research associates are here at our pleasure ... but every effort was made to ensure there was no discrimination, even though he (Mr. Sternberg) published something a lot of people didn't agree with," Mr. Kremer said.
I post Native American and other creation stories. The reaction I usually get from the CS/ID folks is essentially "cute, but that's not our kind of creation story."
If we are dealing just with "information theory," why is this the case?
I think what happened is that CS was tossed by the Supreme Court, so ID had to be "created" to take its place. There is no theory there--it is a direct assertion that the Christian God created everything along the lines of Genesis, but (wink, wink) we'll pretend we are just interested in ID and fixing evolution and the scientific method so the Supreme Court will give us a pass this time.
The fact that we don't even question the Supreme Court's authority to rule on school curriculum demonstrates (as I say so often ...) that our schools have lots bigger problems than Darwinism can solve.
How is its premise incorrect?
In the art of argument, It's not incumbent on the listener to disprove a thesis that is not expounded on by the person putting forth the thesis. You immediately occupy a position of dialectical weakness when you fall for constructing refutations of a broad statement for which specific support is not given.
The thesis put forth is that teaching intelligent design would be "disastrous" yet nowhere in the article is it explained exactly how this would, in fact, be a disaster.
The article never explains exactly how this "disaster" would occur. It's merely a straw man argument for bashing on religion.
Actually we're deniers of "JUNK science."
Tell you what, you name for me one single "missing link" that's been "discovered" that hasn't been proven to be a hoax and I'll buy into your "theory" of evolution.
Show me ONE, JUST ONE, single piece of evidence that anything in this physical realm has "evolved" from anything else (just so you know. I'll not accept the BS lies that adaptation "is" evolution. You and I both know that is total crap) and I'll buy into your "junk science" theories.
SHOW ME the 4 or 5 million year old laboratories that have been collecting the "data" that you all use to draw your BS conclusions.
And one more thing... stop pretending that Biologists buy into your ilk's junk science. REAL Biologists want nothing to do with your BS theories and "junk science."
JMHO
Here's a whole bunch. Welcome to the rational world:
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