Posted on 10/05/2005 3:53:39 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
HARRISBURG, Pa. - A philosophy professor and two science teachers were expected to testify Wednesday in a landmark trial over a school board's decision to include a reference to "intelligent design" in its biology curriculum.
Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, is being called as an expert witness on behalf of eight families who are trying to have intelligent design removed from the Dover Area School District's biology curriculum. The families contend that it effectively promotes the Bible's view of creation, violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
Forrest's testimony was expected to address what opponents allege is the religious nature of intelligent design, as well as the history and development of the concept, according to court papers filed by the plaintiffs before the trial.
U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III was also expected to hear testimony from Bertha Spahr, chairman of Dover High School's science department, and biology teacher Jennifer Miller.
Under the policy approved by Dover's school board in October 2004, students must hear a brief statement about intelligent design before classes on evolution. It says Charles Darwin's theory is "not a fact," has inexplicable "gaps," and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook for more information.
Intelligent-design supporters argue that life on Earth was the product of an unidentified intelligent force, and that natural selection cannot fully explain the origin of life or the emergence of highly complex life forms.
The plaintiffs are represented by a team put together by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The school district is being defended by the Thomas More Law Center, a public-interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich., that says its mission is to defend the religious freedom of Christians.
The trial began Sept. 26 and is expected to last as long as five weeks.
The ID proponents have no idea what they have unleashed. They have forced all of us to learn more and sharpen our arguments. They have committed themselves to basing an article of their faith on knowledge that can be studied and challenged by the methods of science.
These are rookie errors.
Behe is too busy selling books to fools to show up for a testimony that will expose him as a charlatan.
Then you would have a big wad of money and subject matter for another book you can promote on Art Bell's old show.
Is the first sentence all you read?
I've made that exact point on numerous occasions. If this statement is true, and I believe it is, evolution cannot explain life as it exists today.
Neither biology nor logic are your strong points, are they? In fact just what are you basing your pronouncements on? You don't seem to have any knowledge of the science. Just what is the value of your opinion that your keep favouring the forum with? Repeatedly expressing your opinion without evidential support is an argument from authority, so explain to us why we should respect your authority in these matters.
They'd probably think the "materialistic naturalistic conspiracy" had gotten to you in some way.
Based on newspaper articles, he is scheduled to testify. I suspect he is looking forward to testifying. Don't be surprised if he does well.
Amen, brother! She was a real cutie pie. I think we lost her over an abortion thread (she was pro-choice, IIRC, and she made no effort to hide it).
That is the claim that Pandas makes repeatedly as a "prediction" of evolutionary theory. However it is simply not true that any evolutionary biologist has ever made such a prediction (significantly, Pandas does not cite any references for its claims). Pandas then examines the data and shows that the frog and human sequences are equally distant from that of the worm. That, it argues, is contrary to the evolutionary prediction.
This is simply not true. I honestly do not know if the authors of Pandas intentionally misrepresented evolutionary predictions or if they simply did not understand them.
I don't have my copy of Pandas with me, but this whole section is obviously cribbed from Michael Denton's (since self-repudiated) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. I'm not sure what edition Pandas is in now, but I know that at least as of the second edition there was a blatant error carried forward from Denton's book. There is an illustration that shows "humans" and "apes" as "equally separated" groups; that is non-overlapping groups in a Venn diagram. The reference in Pandas is to Denton's book, but when you look in Denton's book his reference is to a particular table in Susan Dayhoff's venerable Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure (if I'm recalling that title correctly). However when I looked up the Dayhoff table years ago (I think it was for one of the globins) I found that human and chimpanzee versions of the protein were identical whereas the gorilla differed from both in one or two amino acids. IOW, even allowing for the faulty Pandas interpretation of the molecular data, humans and chimps should have been in the same group "equally isolated" from other apes!
Here's something else I found from a message I wrote many eons ago on some bulletin board or another regarding an interesting difference between the first and second editions of Pandas:
Ronnie Hastings and I gave a presentation for our local skeptics group on the creationist textbook _Of Pandas and People_, by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon. [...]Ronnie, however, had gone through the second edition more thoroughly, and based his presentation on a review of the differences between it and the previous version.
One of the more interesting differences concerned _H. erectus_. The first edition strongly (though not unequivocally) favored the view that _H. erectus_ was human. It suggests that:
"Perhaps _Homo erectus_ and _Homo sapiens_ are really a single species, and, like Neanderthal man, _Homo erectus_ should be reclassified under _Homo sapiens. It is never wise to be dogmatic about our interpretations; it is especially so here, since the data allow so many interpretations." (p. 112)"_H. erectus_ and _H. sapiens_ are so similar that it is possible to consider them as one human species as shown." (p. 113)
The second edition, however, claims, in direct contradiction to the first, that "[_H. erectus_] had significant anatomical differences from modern man that have prevented its classification as _H. sapiens_." (p. 110)
The real clincher, however, comes in the conclusion... In this case it is baldly stated, without considering the possibility of alternative "design proponent" interpretations (apparently ignoring both the conclusions of the first edition as well as its caution about "dogmatic ... interpretations"), that:
"Design adherents, however, regard _H. erectus_, as well as the other hominids discussed in this section, as little more than apes, and point instead to the abrupt appearance of the culture and patterns of behavior which distinguish man from the apes." (pp. 112-113)
i read your entire post. The remainder was simply an attempt to rationalize why the fisrt sentence isn't always true.
Those dots aren't even in the same galaxy. You derive that opinion on Barbara Forrest, not from anything she said, or even anything the guy who reviewed her book said, but because Warren Throckmorton sarcastically called Haward Dean a biotheologian - that's bizarre.
I've made that exact point on numerous occasions. If this statement is true, and I believe it is, evolution cannot explain life as it exists today.
It may at first superficial glance appear that way to someone who tries to draw conclusions about biology without actually having bothered to *learn* anything about biology (*cough*), but your simplistic presumption actually turns out not to be the case.
"Same species" is, essentially, a measure of the degree of genetic compatibility (i.e. "genetic distance"), and as such is a nontransitive property. A can be the same species as B, B can be the same species as C, C can be the same species as D, even though A is *NOT* the same species as D.
That sounds strange at first glance, but it's really not. "Same species as" can be thought of as "close enough, genetically, to interbreed". So while A can be "close enough" to B, and B can be "close enough" to C, etc., the *total* genetic distance between A and D can be far enough to preclude successful interbreeding.
This is no more strange than saying that city A is close enough to city B to make the trip between them on one tank of gas, and city B is close enough to city C to make the trip between them on one tank of gas, *but* A is not close enough to C to make the trip on one tank of gas.
So even though each new generation is still "the same species as" (i.e., close enough genetically) as their parent generation, (and this applies to *any* parent/offspring pair of generations) they're not genetically *identical*, and over many, many generations the accumulating small genetic changes can reach the point where "Generation N+1000" is different enough from the original "Generation N" that they've become a new species from that original population.
This doesn't just occur over time, either -- there are populations of animals, such as the Green Warbler, where the population wraps around some large geographic obstacle, like a mountain. Each local population in the "ring" can interbreed with the very slightly different local population to the "left" and "right" of it, *BUT* at the point where the "arms" of the circle meet up on the other side of the obstacle, the "ends" are different enough from each other that they *don't* interbreed despite living in overlapping populations.
Biology isn't as simplistic as you're trying to make it out to be. And believe it or not, biologists have spent over a century working out the details of these issues which you came up with on your lunchbreak and thought were "killer" new observations which would make evolutionary biology "impossible"...
New tagline placemarker
The offspring are slightly different from the parents. You are not a clone of your dad, are you?
Logic is a very strong point with me. Can't say the same about you.
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