Posted on 09/24/2005 7:20:09 AM PDT by gobucks
The brawl between evolutionists and religious neo-conservatives over how life began is coming down to the survival of the slickest.
For about 150 years Charles Darwin's evolution theory has held sway. But a new American theory, intelligent design, is getting a lot of press as scientists and intellectuals rush to the barricades to dismiss intelligent design as little else than "creationism" rebadged.
Already a DVD featuring American scientists claiming intelligent causes are responsible for the origin of the universe and life has become Australia's biggest-selling religious video and intelligent design is starting to permeate school courses.
Next year, hundreds of Catholic schools in the dioceses of Sydney, Wollongong, Lismore and Armidale will use new religious education textbooks that discuss intelligent design. At Dural, year 9 and 10 students at Pacific Hills Christian School have begun learning about intelligent design in science classes.
The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, says it is inevitable other schools will follow suit. Until last month, few Australians had heard of it. But debate broke out internationally on August 1 when the US President, George Bush, told reporters he supported combining lessons on evolution with discussion of intelligent design. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush said.
Last month, the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, gave intelligent design ministerial imprimatur, telling the National Press Club he thought parents and schools ought to have the opportunity - if they wished - for students to be exposed to intelligent design and taught about it.
Nelson's office said his comments were unplanned.
But his interest had been pricked by a parliamentary visit on June 20 by Bill Hodgson, head of the Sydney-based campus Crusade for Christ, who left a copy of a DVD Unlocking the Mystery of Life with Nelson.
The DVD featured a US mathematician, William Dembski, and other leading American intelligent design proponents claiming the complexity of biological systems is proof of an organising intelligence.
"ID is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence," Dembski said.
The DVD is distributed in Australia by a Melbourne-based Christian group, Focus on the Family. Its executive director, Colin Bunnett, says until Nelson's comments only 1000 copies had been sold over four years. "But it's taken off. We've sold thousands in the last few weeks," he says.
The intelligent design debate has more resonance in the US, partly because teaching about the beginning of life is problematic. A Harris poll in June found that 55 per cent of American adults support teaching evolution, creationism, and intelligent design in public schools yet many who favour a literal interpretation of the Bible found it difficult to accept Darwin's The Origin of Species.
One teacher, John Scopes, was convicted for violating a Tennessee ban on teaching evolution in 1925's famous "monkey trial". It was not isolated legislation. In 1968, when the US Supreme Court struck down similar laws, some states began pushing the teaching of "creationism" alongside evolution.
In Australia, the issue has been less hard-edged. The last tussle was in 1978 when Queensland's Bjelke-Petersen government bowed to creationists' opposition to social science courses. Of late, leading scientists have rebuffed intelligent design. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Doherty says it has no place in a science curriculum and the physicist Paul Davies rejects it as creationism in disguise.
Dembski, an associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University in Texas, the world's largest Baptist university, said it should be taught with evolution in schools but not be mandated.
"Evolutionary theory and intelligent design both have a scientific core: the question whether certain material mechanisms are able to propel an evolutionary process and the question whether certain patterns in nature signify intelligence are both squarely scientific questions," Dembski says. "Nevertheless, they have profound philosophical and religious implications."
‘like Darwin, Marx thought he had discovered the law of development. He saw history in stages, as the Darwinists saw geological strata and successive forms of life. ... both Marx and Darwin made struggle the means of development. Again, the measure of value in Darwin is survival with reproduction—an absolute fact occurring in time and which wholly disregards the moral or esthetic quality of the product. In Marx the measure of value is expended labor—an absolute fact occurring in time, which also disregards the utility of the product. Both Darwin and Marx [also] tended to hedge and modify their mechanical absolution in the face of objections.’---Barzun, J., Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage.
And yet Lewontin agreed with gobucks, and many other antievolutionists here, on the level of principal that scientific theories should be analyzed politically. He just disagreed about the outcome of the analysis.
It is well known that Marx and Engels favored Evolutionary Theory as a basis for their political theories.
Marx and Engels were Lamarkians. The weren't adherents of Darwin's TOE. The author is doing verbal acrobatics to try to tie them together.
Macroevolution is evolution at or above the species level. Microevolution is evolution below the species level. If a new species come into being then that is macroevolution by definition. Since the emergence of new species has been observed, or can be securely infered, in multiple instances, we actually know that macroevolution happens.
What amazes me is that the two camps, Creationism and Evolution, are adhered to by those who either cannot, or will not, see the compatibilty of the "systems".
So, Marx and Engels were DINO's? (Darwinists In Name Only?)
"How is this different from the 'Evolutionists' and 'Nazis' in a single post tactic?"
Well, you don't see THAT tactic at Democratic Underground, that is for certain.
George Bush as a candidate does none of the things you mention. GWB hires people to "determine certain demographic questions".
I respect the man but he does not make the sun shine.
Aussies, like everybody else, have found that a cynical outlook does little to offset the desire for closeness.
Evolution, when adopted fully, makes a lot of folks feel pretty lonely.
Pond scum does not evolve into anything. Hitler was a small, drug addicted, most likely gay troll.
Marx and Engels were DINO's? (Darwinists In Name Only?)
Like most sociopathic political animals, they cut and pasted any rhetoric that they thought might resonate in the heads of their followers, or prospective followers.
This has nothing to do with the validity of the TOE.
No one has ever demonstrated that evolution could produce new kinds.
Of course, that's only true because creationists can't define "kind." Pretty clever debating tactic, no?
I'm not sufficiently familiar with Marx and Engels' writings on the subject, but this was certainly true of many later communists. They seized on minor and equivocal lamarkian elements in Darwin's writings and thereby often called themselves "Darwinists" (for instance Lysenko did so) even while they rejected the key and distinctive elements of Darwinism such as natural selection and (especially) random variation.
Gee, that's funny. Knowing that I'm related to pretty much all life on Earth has the opposite effect on me.
Evolution is not a system. It's just a theory, with lots of supporting evidence, about how life diversifies and adapts. That's it. It's not a worldview. It's not a religion. It's not a philosophy.
One of the problems here is that people think it's more than it is. If I had a penny for every timne some creationist freeper spoke of evolution as a theory for the origin of life, I'd be rich.
Marx was alot more interesting, as a person, than you would think.
Remember Engles finacially supported him for most of his life. At one point Engels "knocked up the maid" and bluntly stated that he could not and would not support the girl because she was not in the same social class as him.
Overall, when reading about M&E you somewhat feel sorry for Marx. He had it pretty rough and did truly believe in the crap he spouted. Engles, on the other hand, doesn't get the thrashing he deserves.
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