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.
"that Diamond cited CHOMSKY at all still has me floored."
Well, there is that. Chomsky isn't someone I'd quote in a discussion about atheism too much, if I were arguing against atheism. Or liberalism. Or socialism. Rather amusing.
And that other pesky little Wedge Document.
If only they'd stop listening to everything IDers have written in the past, and focus on what they're saying right now!
Even if this were true, it would probably be because atheists don't have any universal set of superstitious beliefs to interfere with science. Of course, there are many non-fundamentalist religious people who accept the ToE.
Now, virtually all creationists are religious. Coincidence?
If the dogma that humankind is simply the result of chemical and biological accidents
This has nothing to do with evolution.
shocked to the core, I am.
even leaving his politics and social philosophies aside, Chomsky is a bloviating motard.
I now think that you are trolling for a response. I don't believe that a functional adult could be as sick-minded as you are pretending to be.
Simply not true. See, for example, Joseph Stalin. Moreover, even if it were true, which it most certainly isn't, so what?
If the dogma that humankind is simply the result of chemical and biological accidents
Who said anything about an accident? Natural selection is about as un-accidental as anything can possibly be.
why are these threads so many, so long and hotly debated, and why is this even an issue in society at large?
I'm afraid you've lost me there. The topic is worth arguing about because its a subject that lots of people argue about? That seems somewhat circular.
"even leaving his politics and social philosophies aside, Chomsky is a bloviating motard.
"
No doubt, and certainly not a creationist, by any means. The word "evolution" appears in virtually all his writings, and he's not arguing against it. It's a real stretch to find passages to quote out of context that appear to counter evolution. I'm surprised anyone has done it.
Wow. Lucky me. And all this time I thought my morals were in my jeans.
I wouldn't cite Chomsky as an authority on anything save as an exemplar of how a worthless snotbag can bamboozle college-kids and eternal adolescents into making him rich and famous.
geesh.
what's next? Some damn L.Ron Hubbard, for spice?
"what's next? Some damn L.Ron Hubbard, for spice?
"
NO! PLEASE! NO! Now that would cause me to leave the thread, for certain.
Well at least this forum allows us to discuss the truth and debate back and forth. I work with a guy who gets ruffled and wants to fight if he sees me reading an evolution or human origins book. "Six days means six days." This guy doesn't even go to church! He's a cussing drunk who lives to fish but his ingrained superstitions cause him to ruffle up at the mention of Darwin.
Let's not go overboard. His theory of universal grammar is the basis for modern linguistics. A guy can be a genius in one area and a worthless snotbag in every other respect.
As long as you are still able to think after all the spinning required.
Precisely why these people can never, ever be allowed to retake control of our society. Salem was just a dry-run.
"His theory of universal grammar is the basis for modern linguistics. A guy can be a genius in one area and a worthless snotbag in every other respect."
Indeed. I met the man once, back in the early 70s, at a cocktail party. An insufferable bore in normal conversation. After about 15 minutes, I sought another conversation group.
Chomsky made a lot of ant-evolution statements in the 1970's. It goes back to his feud with B.F. Skinner. Skinner proposed that evolution and animal learning were commensurate, the same phenomenon with different infrastructures. He wrote a 900 page tome explaining how human language could be learned, essentially through natural selection. Chomsky pretty much destroyed the notion that language was learned on a blank slate.
Unfortunately for Chomsky, that left evolution to account for the language learning structures in the brain, and evolution, according to Skinner, is the same process as learning. So Chomsky went on record denying that animals had any language facility at all, and whatever humans had was too complex to have evolved.
It's interesting to see old scientific feuds playing out over the decades. My first exposure to Chomsky was reading an article of his denouncing evolution. That was long before I heard about his politics.
Noam Chomsky is the Bulwer-Lytton of socioploitical barflies
Well, he later backed way off his anti-evolution kick. It's interesting to see how attitudes change.
In any case, between Skinner and Chomsky, I would rather not be standing at all. Talk about monumental egotists. No thanks.
I'm with you on that!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.