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.
No, no, no...don't pour one on me...
Oh never mind.
but look what I did to this thread!?!?!
Of course it's wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Were you there?
Light speed used to be faster.
Sediment from St. Helens was carved by water, really really fast.
The flood was wet.
I'm right, you aren't.
Good satire!
(Ah, I love the sound of beta decay in the morning!)
Actually, two guys were standing in the end zone of Memorial Stadium, and one asked the other 'Why is there a big Z in the middle of the field'?
"Goldilocks," my foot. "Pyritelocks" was more like it.
So if he really cared about his daughters happiness rather than his position at church he'd encourage his daughter to marry one of them "evolutionist atheists"
Ha! You have f.Christian in a frenzy over on LP. He must be off his meds again.
...better to get a sperm count first, though. Can't tie yourself to a male of uncertain evolutionary fitness.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.
Hot damn! I think I'll pop over, sign up and taunt him!
Sorry about that chief, I had a stigmata in my eye.
That differs from his usual state ... how?
Actually, I rather like the name the team originally had, but I guess early PETA types objected to "Bugeaters."
s'ok, b. thanks for watching. your lord and master - Foamy.
It's all RWP's fault. He started it with the double post about the wheelbarrow full of rocks.
rock-u-mentally?
izzat like screwin wi' summun'z mind?
do these barrows-full of rocks truly explain the incipient chaos which threatens and agitates the scanty flames of the lamps that struggle against the darkness of scientific ignorance...
sorry - can't do it. no more. it hurts.
There were just too many rocks. Rocks can be like that, even expensive marble rocks from the Italian Riviera. There were rocks there that day, the day she told me. Rocks on the hot, perfumed beach, where the Meditteranean beauties copulated with the sun. Rocks on the olive-covered hills. Rocks. Huh!
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