Posted on 09/27/2005 9:10:31 AM PDT by Crackingham
Dover Area School District's federal trial began yesterday in Harrisburg with talk ranging from divine intervention and the Boston Red Sox to aliens and bacterial flagellum. After about 10 months of waiting, the court case against the district and its board opened in Middle District Judge John E. Jones III's courtroom with statements from lawyers and several hours of expert testimony from biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth Miller.
On one side of the aisle, several plaintiffs packed themselves in wooden benches behind a row of attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, Pepper Hamilton LLC and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. On the other side of the aisle, nine school board members, only three of whom were on the board when it voted 6-3 to include a statement on intelligent design in biology classes, piled in behind lawyers from the Thomas More Law Center. Assistant superintendent Michael Baksa and superintendent Richard Nilsen shared a bench with Michael Behe, a Lehigh University professor expected to take the stand in defense of intelligent design.
SNIP
Miller, whose resume is several pages long and includes a stint as a professor at Harvard University, was the first witness called for the parents. Miller co-wrote the Prentice Hall textbook "Biology" with professor Joe Levine. The book is used by 35 percent of the high school students in the United States, Miller said. His were some of the thousands of biology books in which school officials in Cobb County, Ga., ordered stickers to be placed, warning that evolution is only a theory, "not a fact." Miller also testified in a lawsuit filed by Cobb County parents, and a judge later ordered that the stickers be removed.
Yesterday, the scientist's testimony was at times dominated by scientific terminology, though he jokingly told ACLU attorney Witold Walczak he would do his best to explain things in the layman's terms he uses with his mother.
Miller said intelligent design supporters think an intelligent designer must have been involved in the creation of life because science can't yet prove how everything evolved. He said the intelligent design idea that birds were created with beaks, feathers and wings and fish were born with fins is a creationist argument.
Intelligent design supporters often cite "irreducible complexity" in their research, he said. "Irreducible complexity" means that a living thing can't be reduced by any part or it won't work at all. So those living things could not have evolved in the way Darwin suggested; they had to be created with all of their existing parts, Miller said.
Intelligent design proponents often cite the bacterial flagellum, a bacterium with a tail that propels it, Miller said. Behe and his colleagues claim bacterial flagellum had to be created with all of its parts because it couldn't function if any of them were taken away, Miller testified. But scientists have proved that the bacterial flagellum can be reduced to a smaller being, a little organism that operates in a manner similar to a syringe, Miller said.
One of the biggest problems with the scientific viability of intelligent design is there is no way to experiment with the presence of a supernatural being because science only deals with the natural world and theories that are testable, Miller said.
Some people might suspect divine intervention last year when the Boston Red Sox came back to win the World Series after losing three games in a row to the New York Yankees in the playoffs. It may have been, but that's not science, he said. And intelligent design proponents haven't named the "intelligent being" behind their supposition, Miller said. They have suggested, among other things, that it could be aliens, he said. He said there is no evidence to prove intelligent design, so its proponents just try to poke holes in the theory of evolution.
In some if the previous creation/evolution threads that has happened but I don't remember specific names. I could go through them again but it would take some time.
Fruitcakes. All of em.
First, I made no claims about being a person who believes in ID, but more importantly you have just thrown something out there as a "scientific theory" about life creation that is as "off the wall" as any of other stuff being condemned on here. If all there is to creating life is what you suggest, it should be easy to do in a lab. Do we have any experiment that verifies methane gas/electricity and primordial soup equals earth life?
Bravo.
Please let us all know if you ever get a crisis of faith. Perhaps you should also notify your local police department that the only thing stopping you from venturing on a life of rapine and slaughter is your religious beliefs. They may want to keep a close eye on you.
Survival of the fittest does not mean the survival of the most violent. Any fitness has to result in a reproductive advantage. Please, don't build silly little straw structures.
It didn't make itself. It evolved after zillions of generations.
However, "survival of the most violent" is exactly the impression that one gets from the Old Testament, so you can see where these people get their ideas from.
Try not to build false dichotomies with organizations Narby. Even bad things can on occasion do good things.
It would be like calling evolution 'progressive adaptation,' and trying to pass it off as something different.
It is not the first time we've seen that argument, and it won't be the last. It appears at least once a month I reckon, and usually attracts applause from others on the creationist side. I've never yet seen that argument flamed by a creationist (but in general creationists appear to be very careful not to flame the obviously flawed arguments of other creationists; it's like any lie is good enough, if it rejects evolution.)
Oh, I know. It's just that the continued survival of these organizations requires that they occasionally have successes. And the IDers have just handed them an easy success. I'm sure they'll all gather donations for years after this based on their apparent ability to deliver.
The prof's a political hack saying what he said for partisan purposes.
ID is not creationism.
It doesn't even say that the Intelligent Designer has to be sentient.....it could be an organizing principle.
inquiry: exactly which "evolutionist" can you accurately cite as having ever said that a human cell "made itself"?
you would do well to attempt to read and understand what is actually stated by your opponents before trying to refute it.
That's very similar to how the left operates. They refuse to flame the real whackos on their side, like Cindy Sheehan when she says stuff like the foriegn fighters in Iraq are "freedom fighters". They just ignore it, because the whacko is on their side.
The word you are looking for is conjecture or hypothesis, not theory. To call ID a theory devalues real scientific theories, which are the end-point and ultimate purpose of scientific investigation. Nothing in science ranks higher than a theory.
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