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.
Someone should ask this so called scientist why the theory that divine intervention caused them to win is not a valid scientific theory.
There's no way to test for devine intervention, that's why it's not scientific.
You can't have a scientific process without forming a hypothesis and attempting to prove and disprove it.
Right. You also have to have a means of attempting to prove or disprove it.
The theory of evolution has never been proven. There is a lot of evidence that appears to support it, though the evidence really leaves a lot to blind faith.
For the perhaps billionth time this month, no scientific theory is ever proven. Why should the theory of evolution be different?
Intelligent design is also an unproven theory. It explains many things that haven't been explained well any other way, but it also leaves a lot to blind faith.
ID does not rise to the level of a scientific theory because it can't be tested by any known method, and it predicts nothing.
These are the two leading theories on this topic, and it appears that a great many people believe that a combination of the two might be more accurate.
There are no scientific theories of ID.
Teaching evolution as fact, not a theory, does a disservice to people. People who discount intelligent design and push evolution are not doing so based on science, but based on a strongly held belief that God does not exist, that they are unwilling to have questioned.
My son took biology last year and the theory of evolution was taught as the theory of evolution.
That people who do not accept ID believe that God does not exist is contrary to fact. There are many right here on FR who believe in God, who understand that the theory of evolution is science, and that ID isn't.
You forgot dull-witted.
Maybe all of this debate will do some good and draw attention to the sorry state of science education in America. We've seen it demonstrated that many don't even understand the scientific method, let alone the intricacies of various scientific theories. Perhaps if all high school freshman (or whatever) were required to take a course on "What is Science?" this debate would be over.
If you believe that, you clearly haven't read the Journal of Evolutionary Biology or the Journal of Classification, or Cladistics, or the Journal of Theoretical Biology, or Molecular and General Genetics or any of a couple dozen other scientific journals in, say, the past 150 years. They're filled with controversies and fights and criticisms of individual theories. Please, join the fights! But what you cannot criticize is the scientific method, and that's what the creationists and ID-proponents are doing.
Before I get jumped for spelling, that should be "freshmen".
Perhaps they should all become self flagellists.
Thanks. :)
"Perhaps if all high school freshman (or whatever) were required to take a course on "What is Science?" this debate would be over."
Have you seen many science texts, as used in High Schools? Virtually every one of them begins with a chapter on what the Scientific Method is. Biology, Chemistry, Physics...they all start with that first chapter.
An entire course is not needed. The chapter will do.
Survival of the best PR and luck.
Then it is obviously not sinking in. If it did, would this debate even exist?
perhaps if all grade and high-school science TEACHERS were required (as a significantly higher requirement than their possession of an "education degree") to know what science is, we wouldn't have this little problem.
Troll Alert!
Be careful everyone. This is the troll who got ModernMan suspended over nothing!
If you had said that atheists believe there is no life after death, AND they have no ethical or moral priciples, therefore they can rape and pillage, you'd have made your point.
Rapine and pillage isn't a factor in "survival of the fittest", having a trait that helps you resist malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa is.
Your position is a transparent attempt to connect the ToE to immorality, which does nothing to the theory but does expose your ignorance of the subject matter.
"Then it is obviously not sinking in. If it did, would this debate even exist?"
Oh, probably. There is a fundamental battle between science and religion for some folks. You're probably right about the definition of science stuff not sinking in. It seems that very little sinks in for most students in our schools. Only those who take an interest will remember that chapter.
They go on to work in scientific fields, I guess.
Religion is not science, nor is science religion.
I wonder what some of these folks would think if religion WAS taught in our public schools. Who would be teaching it? I suspect that many would fight just as hard about HOW religion was taught. Better that it be taught at home and in churches, IMO.
It is called ID to silence critics who claim there is no scientific basis for this "theory". Guess what? They are right. The Creationist and ID camps have the same "scientific" base.
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