Posted on 09/22/2005 8:25:42 PM PDT by Crackingham
A court case that begins Monday in Pennsylvania will be the first to determine whether it is legal to teach a controversial idea called intelligent design in public schools. Intelligent design, often referred to as ID, has been touted in recent years by a small group of proponents as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution. ID proponents say evolution is flawed. ID asserts that a supernatural being intervened at some point in the creation of life on Earth.
Scientists counter that evolution is a well-supported theory and that ID is not a verifiable theory at all and therefore has no place in a science curriculum. The case is called Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Prominent scientists Thursday called a teleconference with reporters to say that intelligent design distorts science and would bring religion into science classrooms.
"The reason this trial is so important is the Dover disclaimer brings religion straight into science classrooms," said Alan Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of the journal Science. "It distorts scientific standards and teaching objectives established by not only state of Pennsylvania but also leading scientific organizations of the United States."
"This will be first legal challenge to intelligent design and we'll see if they've been able to mask the creationist underpinnings of intelligent design well enough so that the courts might allow this into public school," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which co-hosted the teleconference.
AAAS is the world's largest general science society and the NCSE is a nonprofit organization committed to helping ensure that evolution remains a part of public school curriculums.
The suit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of concerned parents after Dover school board officials voted 6-3 last October to require that 9th graders be read a short statement about intelligent design before biology lessons on evolution. Students were also referred to an intelligent design textbook to learn more information about the controversial idea. The Dover school district earlier this month attempted to prevent the lawsuit from going forward, but a federal judge ruled last week that the trial would proceed as scheduled. The lawsuit argues that intelligent design is an inherently religious argument and a violation of the First Amendment that forbids state-sponsored schools from funding religious activities.
"Although it may not require a literal reading of Genesis, [ID] is creationism because it requires that an intelligent designer started or created and intervened in a natural process," Leshner said. "ID is trying to drag science into the supernatural and redefine what science is and isn't."
You go from a method of taxonomic ordering which is simply a system of labeling designed to help us more easily understand relationships, to evolution not being a science? Where the heck is the logic in that?
Given the continuity of nature, the taxonomies we currently use are about as simple as we can make them. In fact, a number of taxa have been added since Linnaeus to help us classify previously unknown organisms.
You seem to be specializing in the old game of Stump the Dummies. Is everything a miracle in your world?
Poison is easy. Poison is adaptive for the species that use it. Degrees of toxicity are observable in plant and animal species. Some species work on being bigger, smarter, or faster. Some species work on being thornier or just faster-reproducing. Some species are poisonous. It's adaptive. A little can be good. More can be better. There is no hurdle here. Hello?
If someday I can't explain something, what do you win? My position in a nutshell:
Your ignorance and your militant refusal to imagine the obvious is YOUR PROBLEM.
Relationships are not evidentiary. They are assumed. As such they are not measurable as phenomenon.
"In what way, orionblamblam?
Sorry to interrupt, but there are a number of things wrong with calculations such as Schroeder's.
- He makes an assumption that 300 is the minimum size to support life because he takes his numbers from extant bacteria. The origin of life would not have been the same as any current organism, in fact we have no idea the minimum necessary.
- He makes the assumption that only one combination and order of AAs will support life. The probability calculation he uses does not take into consideration that there may be a large subset of all combinations possible that will work.
- He makes the assumption that the first trial must be successful, instead of considering the number of concurrent trials possible.
- He also ignores the number of sequential trials possible.
- He assumes that given an initial AA that the probability of every other AA being next is equally likely.
Now in spite of the initial conditions I just listed, my belief is that since we do not have accurate numbers for any of them any calculation at all is a waste of time.
Stop feeding the Trolls.
Aside from the other solutions to your little quiz that have already been given, the side an object passes another can determine the direction of 'spin' as they begin to orbit one another. As gravity pulls a number of objects together spin can be imparted on the collection of objects.
In other words, the direction of spin need not be a product of the initial Planck era of the expansion of space.
"#2: Why are some spiral galaxies farther away than non spiral galaxies?
You ask this before asking why some Galaxies are spiral and some are not? Perhaps you should explain why Galaxies take different configurations, then explain why they should be different distances away? The assumption that globular and other non-spiral Galaxies are less evolved or more evolved (sorry I couldn't help myself) than spiral Galaxies and therefore are supposedly of different age so should be at different distances is a bad assumption and completely ignores the reasons for the different shapes.
As a question of my own:
#1 What happens when 2 Galaxies collide. How about 3 Galaxies?
#2 What happens when one Galaxy just misses another Galaxy?
#3 What happens when you restrict your information sources to creationist sources rather than science sources?
He is conflating the study of how we gain knowledge with actually gaining knowledge as if the philosophy is necessary for the acquisition.
Stop feeding the Trolls.<<
b_sharp please....
js1138 said:
I am aware that afer several centures of successful science, philosophers have attemped to rationalize what it is that scientists do. They haven't been very successful. there is no philosophical definition that helps scientists create new techniques for investigation.<<
I replied.
I'm so happy to find that scientists ignore logic and reason.
My friends are really going to be on the floor on this post.
Are you getting on js1138's "scientists do not need logic or reason" too?
By the way, I've never been Zotted. You are changing definitions again. Spoken like a true faith based evolutionist.
Epistemology forms the basis for how we know what is true or false. I don't mind if you don't think it is important to science or knowledge acquisition in general.
Without using epistemology, you become irrational, by definition. I know of very few scientists that are clamoring for more irrationality in science, do you?
Of course irrational solutions sound kind of supernatural to me.
LOL
You guys are funny.
DK
One must follow what is common; but, even though the Logos is common, most people live as though they possessed their own private wisdom. (Fragment 2)Cornelis Loew (not E. R. Dodds as I earlier suggested) cites Fragment 2 in Myth, Sacred History, and Philosophy, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1967, p. 227. In this work, he uses Eric Voegelin’s translation:
But though the Logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.The Voegelinian translation is, I believe more faithful to the original Greek in terms of the sheer compactness of its language.
Voegelin’s translation of Heraclitus’ Fragment 1 is worth giving here also:
Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it – not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it – at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth. My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as forgetful and heedless in their waking moments of what is going on around and within them as they are during sleep.Certain other of Heraclitus’ Fragments are worthy of note in this connection:
Those who are awake have a world one and common, but those who are asleep each turn aside into their own private worlds. [Fr. 89]Loew observes that “these are striking sentences. Omit the notion of a divine law and Heraclitus sounds very modern; he seems to say that the one common world, which is the corrective for our tendencies to be sleepwalkers in our private worlds, is that with which science deals. The oracles become a call for empirical objectivity over and against emotional subjectivity. But this is not what Heraclitus is saying. The social universality of the human logos is not the universality of scientific language and method, although if Heraclitus were living today he would in no way belittle the impressive and productive results achieved by scientists because their ‘logos’ makes possible dependable worldwide communications within the scientific community. Heraclitus had in mind the community of the polis [i.e., the type of political society of ancient Greece, which was understood as manifesting the dynamic relationship obtaining among the participants in a great hierarchy of being: divine – human – social – natural], its daily life, and its need to be attuned to the one divine logos by which all human laws are nourished.”It is not meet [i.e., fitting] to act and speak like men asleep. {Fr. 73]
Those who speak with the mind must strengthen themselves with that which is common to all [i.e., the Logos], as the polis does with the law and more strongly so. For all human laws nourish themselves from the one divine – which prevails as it will, and suffices for all things and more than suffices. [Fr. 114]
Shades of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence here – to my ear, at least. Certainly Heraclitus thought that men who have “turned aside into their own private worlds as if asleep” were no longer fit to be “public men.”
A couple more fascinating Fragments from a fascinating thinker:
From all is One, and from One is all. [Fr. 10]Voegelin has said that Heraclitus is Plato’s “long shadow.” Indeed, Plato articulated the theme of death-in-life and life-in-death, long before the coming of Christ.Immortals – mortals, mortals – immortals, they live each other’s death and die each other’s life.” [Fr. 42]
Well, just some “grist for the mill” for any interested thinkers out there. Or not, as the case may be.
Thank you so much for the many excellent articles you posted today, Alamo-Girl! And again, thank you for the great link.
However, experiment shows that were some super-being to know such, she could not communicate it to anyone and she would have to travel faster than light just to keep up.
I never claimed they were. Whether or not taxonomy, or its described relationships, are evidentiary does not affect the status of evolution one way or another. You made a jump in logic in claiming evolution is not science based on the complexity, and Occam's views, of taxonomy.
That is not what I did. I made a "jump" based on evolution as a description of phenomenon rather than being phenomenon.
"Epistemology forms the basis for how we know what is true or false. I don't mind if you don't think it is important to science or knowledge acquisition in general.
Epistemology is the study and attempted explanation of how we determine knowledge. It is a result of our actually using rational thought and logic, not the other way around, unless you are proposing that Epistemology is actually a methodology.
"Are you getting on js1138's "scientists do not need logic or reason" too?"
This is a new one; scientists eschew logic and reason because they ignore a philosophy? You truly are conflating the philosophy with the phenomenon it tries to explain.
You haven't noticed, but I haven't been making claims about logic. I have simply been stating the historic fact that scientists are not trained in philosophy, on the whole don't really care what philosophers think, and make progress without knowing much except how to solve problems in their specialty. Generally this requires an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that's been done in a field for the last hundred years or so.
Science invented and refined its own methods without much analysis or input from philosophers until about 1920. There have been numerous attempts to define the process of induction, but none of them describe what scientists actually do when formulating new hypotheses.
I don't wish to mock philosophy. It has an important place in evaluating the claims and results of science. I just don't see that it has much impact on the production of original ideas.
Two incidents around the world for numerous reactors and years in operation? It seems the good Doctor has very high standards...for those that disagree.
RO's don't have just a BS degree. Many are Naval Academy science graduates chosen by Hyman Rickover. They are then assigned to nuclear training. The cost back when I was in college was hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here's what the Health Physics Society has to say about some of the advanced training:
Q:I am trying to find out about the experience requirements for an instant SRO (Senior Reactor Operator). If an individual has a master’s degree in electrical engineering, what are his plant experience requirements per ANSI/ANS-3.1-1993? I have read in the Nuclear Regulatory Guide 1.8 and NUREG 1021 that the experience requirement for an instant SRO is three years, but experience is granted for academic time. Does the six-year engineering time cut the SRO experience time down to less that three years?
A:The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) Regulatory Guide 1.8, Revision 3, states that experience for an instant Senior Reactor Operator is three years of responsible nuclear-plant experience, of which a maximum of two years can be achieved via training. In addition, NRC Regulatory Guide 1.8, Revision 2, requires four years of power-plant experience of which a maximum of two years can be achieved via training.
Also, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operation (INPO) document ACAD 00-03 Revision 1 requires three years of responsible nuclear plant experience of which a maximum of two years can be achieved via training.
If you need additional specific information regarding further qualifications, I recommend contacting the NRC further.
Cynthia G. Jones, PhD<<
So Doctor, was anyone willing to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars on your academic training prior to your PhD?
Hey look at it this way, you are perfectly capable of looking up the above information and you did not. Just to take a cheap shot.
I'm not laughing at you, really. Just your posts!!!
LOL
DK
Yes, and afterwards too.
i read through the entire thread and have to comment on the faith of the non believers in id...they cannot find it in themselves to be able to believe in an eternal god who required no maker, but can accept that a particle of something, made by no one, blew up one day and emerged as our universe....now that's faith!!!!!
Of course it is condescending. The scientific method is based in Epistemology.
Doh!
You are confusing the active formal study with the use of epistemology. You cannot test a theory without using epistemology. You may want to call it the scientific method, but it is still epistemology.
Doh!
I will repeat this quote because you really ought to read more.
>>Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. It attempts to answer the basic question: what distinguishes true (adequate) knowledge from false (inadequate) knowledge? Practically, this questions translates into issues of scientific methodology: how can one develop theories or models that are better than competing theories? It also forms one of the pillars of the new sciences of cognition, which developed from the information processing approach to psychology, and from artificial intelligence, as an attempt to develop computer programs that mimic a human's capacity to use knowledge in an intelligent way.<<
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/EPISTEMI.html
Back off? You called me a troll, albeit in small letters, and you did it to another poster. You did not even have the honesty to use discourse directly to me. Don't start of fight, unless you're willing to be in it.
My friends are just on the floor with this thread!!!
DK
I'm not going to continue this discussion much longer, because I've just about say all I want to say on the topic.
Science invented and perfected a method of gaining knowledge that is truly independent of formal logic. That does not mean that scientists are illogical or that they do not use formal logic in their work, but it does mean they have added a new and effective technique.
They have found a way to harness guesses and hunches and even wishful thinking to the task of finding reliable knowledge. It works because it is iterative and continuous. Guesses and hunches become formal propositions with consequences and predictions. Predictions are tested, and the hypotheses are refined.
This process is really quite new in human history, and is really quite different from the methods of formal logic and analysis.
So Doctor, was anyone willing to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars on your academic training prior to your PhD?
Yes, and afterwards too.<<
So why do you take cheap shots?
DK
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