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.
It's always good to meet another person who understands evolution!
Exactly!
In fact the simplest one celled animal is more complicated than the Ferrari engine.
Exactly!
If a Ferrari engine couldn't just happen, how in hell are those kinds of things supposed to?
Because non-replicating machines are created by an intelligent designer while replicating entities are the product of biological evolution.
Only if you mistake an auto engine for a living thing that reproduces itself.
That's a different argument, isn't it? First, we have a Ferrarri engine as an example of why evolution could not take place. That gets blown, so you post something about life being so complex that it could not have happened without some sort of divine intervention.
the Theory of Evolution says absolutely nothing about the origins of life. It deals only with the topic of speciation and its causes.
So, if life itself was created by some divine intervention, that does not alter the theory, since it doesn't deal with the origins of life at all.
Myself, I don't believe in supernatural entities, so I don't know how the first lifeform appeared. Neither do those who study evolution. There are hypotheses, but there's no way to study them. One hypothesis for the origins of life involves some sort of supernatural entity, but there's no way for science to study that, either.
Evolution can be observed. The creation of the first lifeform cannot. Therefore one may be studied, and the other cannot.
Perhaps one day, someone will figure out an experiment that creates a lifeform from non-living materials. If that happens, then we may learn more. Until then, we just have to say we don't know, scientifically.
Religionists have another point of view on the subject. They're welcome to it, but it's not science and so does not belong in science classes.
Only if they were being intellectually honest would they refer to ID as creationism.
ID posits the existence of a designer (read: creator). It is, of course, creationism, without allowing a discussion of the designer (read: creator).
Did the designer not create the designs? If the designer did, of course the designer is the creator, hence ID is a theory based on creationism. If the designer did not create the designs, why would we even be having this discussion.
Please ID'ers, follow your own logic. Fine if you don't want to call it a theory of Christian creationism, but call it what it is, a creationist theory (wherein we avoid all discussions of the designer/creator as they are not "relevant").
I thought creationism was the belief that man and dinosaurs lived together and that the world is only a few thousand years old.
Ahem....NOT ALL CREATONISTS BELIEVE THE EARTH IS ONLY 6,000 YEARS OLD. Evolutionists need to get that idea out of their head. There is nothing in the Bible that states WHEN the Earth was created. Some guy, somewhere, worked backwards throught the genealogies listed in the Bible starting with the birth of Christ and calculated it based on the ages of the ancestors listed. It was strictly a human idea and I am not familiar, myself, with any denominations that teach it and require it to be believed. It is not part of the teaching of the Bible. (Sorry to yell at you.)
Oh, I don't know. Maybe it evolved from a Morris Minor engine. [A little humor]
Actually this is a specious argument. Everyone knows Ferrari engines do not have any DNA.
You've set up a meaningless either/or. I choose neither. When you cease fundamentally misstating the evolutionist position, maybe you'll get an answer.
We all recognize the sharp differences of opinion on the crevo threads, but if everyone will make an effort to focus their comments on the issues, rather than the personal characteristics of the folks with whom they disagree, the threads will be far more pleasant.
Carry on.
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 wasn't divine intervention, it was a test of the Yankees by letting the devil have his way for a season. God is still a Yankees fan ...
Really??? With all the robotics used in manufacturing, you're saying it's impossible to build robots that in turn build more robot-building robots? (Or rather, that if you do, the robots somehow become products of biological evolution?)
And that is a fact.
That evolution is not a theory is also a fact.
May we invite SeaLion and ModernMan to join the conversation?
It seems to me that ID is not only unscientific, even anti-scientific, but is in fact a weak cop-out.
every ID argument I have yet read centers on the notion that IF humans cannot explain an extremely complex "something", THEN there MUST be a "designer"
There are a couple of idiotic assumptions in this notion.
1. the assumption that because humans cannot explain something NOW equates to humans not being able to explain it EVER
2. the assumption that ALL natural processes MUST be explainable through use of the human intellect
3. those facts and processes which cannot be explained in infinite detail right the hell now by natural scientists MUST automatically be considered the fruits of a superior being's efforts
hrmn...
Let's step away from speciation for a moment and examine another complex event, applying the assumptions: the particulars of lightning strikes.
Natural science cannot (right now) explain why lightning hits this tree over here but not that tree over there.
Natural science cannot (right now) explain why one lightning strike yesterday killed this guy on this slab, but another lightning strike today just blew this gal's clothes off and knocked her out.
Natural science cannot (right now) explain why a lightning strike on a soccer field knocked down a bunch of players, but only put one of them in a serious bucket of hurt.
hrmn...
Going by the assumptions inherent to ID, this "proves" the existence of a capricious and aim-impaired Jove.
It's hogwash, pure and simple - whether dealing with the breakdown of atmospheric dielectric or the sum history of mutations and selections.
"imperfectly" reproduces itself.
an important distinction ;)
I forgot that auto engines are perfect reproducers.
;)
My gut feeling (derived from numerous debates with them) is that a majority on the creationist side in FR *DO* believe that the world is only 6000 years old. They see that as the only possible way of reading the Bible, and many appear to regard those who disagree with them in this as non-christian. Almost without exception these people have co-opted the term ID as describing their position (They think that makes their position sound more scientific; it doesn't). If you don't agree with that your argument is with them, not those on the mainstream science side of the debate.
Do your robots have DNA? Otherwise, they're intellegently designed and will not evolve. We're talking biology here.
Really. I can't think of two posters who were less inclined to issue personal attacks, yet they were banned or suspended for entirely mysterious reasons.
So how did the Universe and all its predictability evolve? Inquiring minds want to know that first.
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