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.
The fossil record shows that kinds appear over time, they were not present from the beginning of life on earth. Furthermore new kinds look similar to existing kinds. Cows and horses don't suddenly appear in the cambrian for example. The first mammals are primitive kinds. Horses appear after horse-like kinds already exist. Even ID proponents accept the progression of life over time (the non-creationist ones). They just disagree over the mechanisms that caused this change.
So what is the barrier that stops change at some limit?
If ID promoters actually did real science, they'd instantly win Nobel prizes if they could describe the mechanism that did this and prove it's existence.
Without any such mechanism, there's no reason to think that small changes in species populations don't accumulate forever.
IDers don't do science, they only tear down science.
There are >150 years of fossil evidence. Scientist argue about some of the fine points, but the overall pattern is becoming pretty clear.
The reason we are having this debate is that some people with specific religious beliefs are entering the fray. They generally know little about the actual fossils, but their belief leads them to try to denigrate the scientific process in order to cast doubt on the results.
Quite true. That one fact just goes to show that human designers, which is what ID is based on, cannot consider all possibilities in their designs consequently they miss advantages. Evolution on the other hand is built just as our human knowledge is, new knowledge is based on a foundation of prior knowledge, with a few random ideas thrown in. After humans have been designing things for as long as evolution has, I'm sure we'll be able to handle more complicated designs. Unfortunately for ID, our inability to see all possibilities means we can not currently determine what could be designed unless it happens to resemble human designs. No guarantee that aliens would design like we do or would not emulate nature in their designs.
"If a Ferrari engine couldn't just happen, how in hell are those kinds of things supposed to?"
Do what engineers do [evolution], break large jobs up into many small easily handled jobs [cells], start with the smallest jobs possible [bacteria/virii/prions], use trial and error to determine the best fit [mutation and selection], base new designs on modified old designs [common descent], and take a very long time [3.8 billion years].
Another one for my "they've got to be kidding me!" file.
This is what gives academics a bad name.The latter part of this headline is clearly and unambiguously an opinion, not a fact; and just as clearly beyond the ken of a "biology expert".
Do you have an actual example of this happening. (ie someone on the science side of the debate conflating YEC with creationism in general) I ask because the person whose post you originally complained about, who equated creationism with YEC per se, is himself a creationist.
And don't you believe that God controls "natural forces"?
Saying that species evolved by "natural forces" and saying that "God created species" in my mind is saying the same thing.
People always get angry at me when I suggest this exact same possibility. Atheists don't like it and neither do Christians in general. It is a lonely position to take.
LOL!
Some people have both obsessions and way too much free time!
I hope that I don't live near you. Apparently you believe that the only thing stopping you from raping and pillaging is your religious belief and the attendant rejection of evolution. Please let us all know if you ever get a crisis of faith.
Check into Cosmology and Quantum physics for that one.
Not necessarily. Many Evolutionists/Darwinists believe exactly that.
Ah, creative editing to change the meaning of one's opponent's words. Lovely.
Really?
Didn't the "Intelligent Designer" create life? ID is another way of stating that we were created, and is therefore "creationism", whether or not it includes specific references to the Bible and Genesis.
Or access to some fairly decent database and web design software.
Actually he can kill you, rape your daughter and slay your infant son. All he needs to hear is the magic word 'Midianite' and he's off to the races.
Stopped reading about there.
If youre smart enough to get into Harvard, you should be smart enough to stay out.
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