Dover CARES sweeps election (Intelligent Design loses big)

teaching science in elementary school. All too often, no, make that almost always, "science" is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized.

Actually, most elementary level science teaching is a variety of lab experiments and usually very exciting to young students compared to say math or spelling which is taught as a bunch of dry, boring facts to be memorized.

Always nice to see you secular, anti-christ, anti-american neo-darwinist zealots are alive and well. With you wackos at the helm the Reformation never would have occurred!

Any criticism or alternative theory is to be discreditied via a religious smear. Unable to explain your precious evolution on a molecular level, unable to prove your theory of macroevolution, unable to state evolution in a LAW, you resort to personal invective and castigation.

Trying for the record of how many things you can get wrong in a single post?

Hint, you could add; "a circle is not an ellipse, planets move in wildly elliptical orbits, etc. If you really really try, you may beat the record.

The election is a backlash to the "bad press" caused by the trial IMO.

It wasn't the free press that caused the dishonest creationists to get up on the stand and perjure themselves over and over.

At least they can't make the curriculum any more one-sided.

Yes, how *dare* they teach science...

Decades of brainwashing still hasn't convinced the majority of the subjects.

The only "brainwashing" is being done by the constant lies and propaganda of the AECreationists. If it weren't for their unending lies about science in general and evolution in particular, evolutionary biology would be no more widely questioned than most other scientific fields. In countries where there isn't such widespread propaganda, evolution is very widely accepted and non-controversial.

But in any case, truth is hardly determined by popularity, and you should be ashamed of making any such implication. It's also instructive what other things a majority of the American public believe that Just Ain't So, including very basic and noncontroversial matters of basic science. The American public's actual understanding and grasp of science in general is pretty abysmal, so you're treading on very thin ice by trying to cling to the alleged "wisdom" of the general public when it comes to scientific matters. But hey, if that's all you have, I can see why you might beat the drum for it.

Public lack of knowledge notwithstanding, however, evolutionary biology is supported by vast mountains of evidence, and has been validated in countless cross-confirming independently ways. Deal with that, if you can, and stop disingenuously pushing this "popularity determines truth" garbage. If you're really a fan of Aquinas, you wouldn't try to pull this kind of stunt. You know how he'd feel about that.

I have no idea why some folks adopt stuff like this as somehow 'conservative.'

Trying for the record of how many things you can get wrong in a single post?

Hint, you could add; "a circle is not an ellipse, planets move in wildly elliptical orbits, etc. If you really really try, you may beat the record.

I predict the odds of him doing so are 1 in 1⁷²⁰....

Heh! :-)

<< I'll concede to any creationist right away that I can't prove the earth wasn't created 6000 years ago with the appearance of billions of years of age & evolution... >>

Or last Saturday, for that matter!

Behe has enough guts to go against the whole cult in the public arena.

And Erich Von Daniken had enough guts to go against the whole cult of conventional archaeology and anthropology in the public arena.

First of all you need to get your terminology correct. Someone could be a proponent of ID and not be a creationist.

Nonsense. IDers believe that life was created by some creator which designed it. They're creationists.

However, this childish game of trying to say that ID is reworked creationism is false.

Yeah, pull the other leg now:

I see ID as merely a compromise solution and hardly a great assault on science.

Being a "great assault on science" is pretty much *all* that it is, actually. Ask an IDer for evidence *for* ID, and all you'll get will be arguments *against* science.

Whatever, that being said. It would appear that the media attention this trial has brought on Dover has been an embarrassment for many that normally would have passively accepted ID being introduced without caring.

...as well it should.

The election is a backlash to the "bad press" caused by the trial IMO.

...and the "bad press" is a result of honestly covering the dishonesty of the IDers.

However, regardless of the reason(s), the people of Dover have spoken by the election process. For the time being, that must be respected until the next election.

...and therein lies the problem, which jwalsh07 failed to see earlier in the thread. Forcing religion into the public schools is a violation of the First Amendment (yes, even by original intent -- try reading some Madison and Jefferson on this topic). This is *not* something that can just be done or not done at the whim of the voters.

An object lesson in what happens when Republicans abandon limited government conservatism and try to impose a sectarian agenda. Let's hope we can learn enough to 2005 to get this out of our system by 2006.

What I don't understand is how some folks frame this as a conservative issue. It's clearly not. In fact, I don't know exactly what it is.

ATTENTION KARL ROVE: Creationism is a hopeless issue! Keep it out of Republican election campaigns. Wanna keep winning elections? Dump ID!

Actually, it's pretty obvious he *has* dumped it -- and had never adopted it in the first place.

In fact, I often wonder whether the "You've gotta be an AECreationist to be a 'real' conservative" folks have ever noticed that the most prominent conservative commentators have all studiously avoided ID/AECreationism entirely.

You never hear Rush Limbaugh, for example, railing against evolution. And despite the press spin on President Bush's answer to the ambush question about ID, he actually *sidestepped* it, and pointedly refused to actually advocate ID or denounce evolution. And so on, and so on. The vast majority of conservative political commentators, pundits, and politicians treat ID/AECreationism like an embarrassing hot potato, best left locked up in the attic along with crazy Aunt Harriet.

There is a conservative case for science, and I intend to go on making it. Intelligent Design is not a part of that case. The entire net effect of the I.D. movement is to make it harder for scientists to take conservatism seriously. These latter-day William Jennings Bryans (and that, by the way, was a man who would have socked you on the jaw if you called him a conservative) are doing nothing for conservatism.

...and that's it in a nutshell. I've been saying that for years, just not as well.

LOL! I love how scientific-illiterates can call ID "garbage,"

It *is* garbage, and you sort of "forgot" to mention the vast numbers (an overwhelming majority) of very *non*illiterate scientists who agree on that point.

Why would you want to be grossly dishonest like that?

Please respond.

when there are Ph.D-level working scientists who *do* consider it science.

Yeah, about ten at the very most (out of millions of working scientists), who are raking in the cash selling their mass-market books on the subject to the AECreationists hungry for some sort of "validation". Heck, I've been tempted to do the same myself, except *I* have too many ethics.

Did you have some sort of actual point to make?

Forcing religion into the public schools is a violation of the First Amendment (yes, even by original intent -- try reading some Madison and Jefferson on this topic).

Religion is not banned in public schools. Whatever gave you the idea that it was?

And the motivations of scientists are not dispositive of anything. BBT was the work of a Catholic Monk. Under your expansive view of the "establishment clause" Lemaitre's work would have been banned in public schools because his peers initially disagreed with the view that there was a beginning.

So tell me, when would a Catholic Monks scientific work, quite possibly influenced by his world view, be acceptable for a science class. Perhaps when a federal judge gave the go ahead?

ouch...getting personal there!

So tell me, when would a Catholic Monks scientific work, quite possibly influenced by his world view, be acceptable for a science class.

Of course -- once his peers had a chance to look at his work . The religion of the scientist is not in question. Putting religion in science classes is.

All these 'scientists and scholars' here attack Behe and these others.

For good reason.

But maybe the ones here are not what they say they are.

Maybe your cheap innuendo makes you look desperate and pathetic.

Behe has enough guts to go against the whole cult in the public arena.

There's no "cult", and truth is not determined by "guts". Behe is simply out to lunch on this subject, and it bothers his worshippers when we point out his errors and they have no adequate response. Here, try to learn something for a change (from past posts of mine):

Behe is actually, unfortunately, either a charlatan or an incompetent. Here's just the most recent example of Behe spewing tripe as if it were gospel. And the fallacies in his books are equally easy to spot, if you actually know something about the topic, which I guess is why the creationists swallow it so uncritically... Here are a couple of my recent critiques of Behe's errors:

Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe (biologist)
I've read that too. Behe seems sincere enough, at least, but in his zeal he produces shoddy, flawed work, while wildly overstating what he can actually support (if at all). Here are some of my prior posts on the problems in Behe's book and other statements/publications:

The next idea you probably will not like, and that is irreducible complexity.
As an "idea" I like it just fine, and so do evolutionary scientists. The problem is that Behe (and the creationists who follow him) have created a "straw man" version of "IC" which is quite simply incorrect -- but appears to give the conclusion they want.
The original notion of "IC" goes back to Darwin himself. He wrote:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
-- Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species", 1859
That's "Irreducible Complexity" in a nutshell. It's not as if Behe has pointed out anything that biologists (or Darwin) didn't already realize.
But let's examine Darwin's description of "IC" in a bit more detail (emphasis mine):
No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms, long since become extinct.
We should be extremely cautious in concluding that an organ could not have been formed by transitional gradations of some kind. Numerous cases could be given amongst the lower animals of the same organ performing at the same time wholly distinct functions; thus the alimentary canal respires, digests, and excretes in the larva of the dragon-fly and in the fish Cobites. In the Hydra, the animal may be turned inside out, and the exterior surface will then digest and the stomach respire. In such cases natural selection might easily specialise, if any advantage were thus gained, a part or organ, which had performed two functions, for one function alone, and thus wholly change its nature by insensible steps. Two distinct organs sometimes perform simultaneously the same function in the same individual; to give one instance, there are fish with gills or branchiae that breathe the air dissolved in the water, at the same time that they breathe free air in their swimbladders, this latter organ having a ductus pneumaticus for its supply, and being divided by highly vascular partitions. In these cases, one of the two organs might with ease be modified and perfected so as to perform all the work by itself, being aided during the process of modification by the other organ; and then this other organ might be modified for some other and quite distinct purpose, or be quite obliterated.
The illustration of the swimbladder in fishes is a good one, because it shows us clearly the highly important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely flotation, may be converted into one for a wholly different purpose, namely respiration. The swimbladder has, also, been worked in as an accessory to the auditory organs of certain fish, or, for I do not know which view is now generally held, a part of the auditory apparatus has been worked in as a complement to the swimbladder. All physiologists admit that the swimbladder is homologous, or 'ideally similar,' in position and structure with the lungs of the higher vertebrate animals: hence there seems to me to be no great difficulty in believing that natural selection has actually converted a swimbladder into a lung, or organ used exclusively for respiration.
[Example snipped]
In considering transitions of organs, it is so important to bear in mind the probability of conversion from one function to another, that I will give one more instance. [Long detail of example snipped] If all pedunculated cirripedes had become extinct, and they have already suffered far more extinction than have sessile cirripedes, who would ever have imagined that the branchiae in this latter family had originally existed as organs for preventing the ova from being washed out of the sack?
-- Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species", 1859
Darwin makes two critical points here:
1. A modern organ need not have evolved into its present form and function from a precursor which had always performed the same function. Evolution is quite capable of evolving a structure to perform one function, and then turning it to some other "purpose".
2. Organs/structures can reach their present form through a *loss* of function or parts, not just through *addition* of function or parts.
Despite the fact that these observations were laid out in 1859, Behe's version of "Irreducible Complexity" pretends they are not factors, and defines "IC" as something which could not have arisen through stepwise *ADDITIONS* (only) while performing the same function *THROUGHOUT ITS EXISTENCE*.
It's hard to tell whether Behe does this through ignorance or willful dishonesty, but the fact remains that *his* definition and analysis of "IC" is too restrictive. He places too many "rules" on how he will "allow" evolution to reach his examples of "Behe-style IC" structures, while evolution itself *IS NOT RESTRICTED TO THOSE RULES* when it operates. Thus Behe's conclusion that "Behe-style evolution" can not reach "Behe-style IC" hardly tells us anything about whether *real-world* evolution could or could not have produced them.
For specific examples, Behe's example of the "Behe-style IC" flagellum is flawed because flagella are composed of components that bacteria use FOR OTHER PURPOSES and were evolved for those purposes then co-opted (1, 2), and Behe's example of the "Behe-style IC" blood-clotting process is flawed because the biochemistry of blood-clotting is easily reached by adding several steps on top of a more primitive biochemical sequence, *and then REMOVING earlier portions which had become redundant* (1, 2).
Even Behe's trivial mousetrap example turns out to not actually be "IC".
The usual qualitative formulation is: "An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced...by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system, that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional..."
Note the key error: By saying that it "breaks" if any part is "missing" (i.e. taken away), it is only saying that evolution could not have reached that endpoint by successively only ADDING parts. True enough, but Behe misses the fact that you can also reach the same state by, say, adding 5 parts one at a time, and then taking away 2 which have become redundant. Let's say that part "A" does the job, but not well. But starting with just "A" serves the need. Then add "B", which improves the function of "A". Add "C" which helps A+B do their job, and so on until you have ABCDE, which does the job very well. Now, however, it may turn out that CDE alone does just fine (conceivably, even better than ABCDE does with A+B getting in the way of CDE's operation). So A and B fade away, leaving CDE. Note that CDE was built in "one change at a time" fashion, with each new change improving the operation. HOWEVER, by Behe's definition CDE is "Irreducibly Complex" and "could not have evolved (been built by single steps)" because removing C or D or E from CDE will "break" it. Note that Behe's conclusion is wrong. His logic is faulty.
The other error in Behe's definition lies in this part: "...any precursor to an irreducibly complex system, that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional". The problem here is that it may be "nonfunctional" for its *current* function, but perfectly functional for some *other* function helpful for survival (and therefore selected by evolution). Behe implicitly claims that if it's not useful for its *current* function, it's useless for *any* function. The flaw in this should be obvious.
"Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on."
True as far as it goes, but but this is hardly the same as Behe's sleight-of-hand in the first part of his statement, which relies on the false premise that a precursor to a structure is 100% useless for *any* purpose if *taking away* (but not adding) one part from the current purpose makes it unsuitable for the current purpose. Two gaping holes in that one...
Behe (an anathematized name)
For reasons I've outlined above.
talks of the bacterial flagellum, which contains an acid-powered rotary engine, a stator, O-rings, bushings, and a drive shaft. The machinery of this motor requires approximately fifty proteins.
Except that it doesn't. As many biochemists have pointed out, other organisms have function flagella (even *as* flagella) with fewer proteins (and/or different proteins). That flagellum isn't even "IC" by Behe's own definition since you *can* remove proteins and have it still work as a flagellum. [...]

For a far more realistic look at the evolutionary "invention" of the flagellum, see Evolution in (Brownian) space: a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellum , which I linked earlier in this post. From the abstract:
The model consists of six major stages: export apparatus, secretion system, adhesion system, pilus, undirected motility, and taxis-enabled motility. The selectability of each stage is documented using analogies with present-day systems. Conclusions include: (1) There is a strong possibility, previously unrecognized, of further homologies between the type III export apparatus and F1F0-ATP synthetase. (2) Much of the flagellum’s complexity evolved after crude motility was in place, via internal gene duplications and subfunctionalization. (3) Only one major system-level change of function, and four minor shifts of function, need be invoked to explain the origin of the flagellum; this involves five subsystem-level cooption events. (4) The transition between each stage is bridgeable by the evolution of a single new binding site, coupling two pre-existing subsystems, followed by coevolutionary optimization of components. Therefore, like the eye contemplated by Darwin, careful analysis shows that there are no major obstacles to gradual evolution of the flagellum.

And:

For an analysis of numerous errors and such in Dembski's Design arguments/examples, see Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski's book No Free Lunch. It also contains material on the flagella issue you raise next.
As for Behe (the other author):
One small example is the flagella on a paramecium. They need four distinct proteins to work.
Actually they need a lot more than that. And as far as I know, Behe never used the cilia on paramecia as his example, he has primarily concentrated on bacterial flagella.
They cannot have evolved from a flagella that need three.
Contrary to creationist claims (or Behe's) that flagella are Irreducibly Complex and can not function at all if any part or protein is removed, in fact a) there are many, many varieties of flagella on various species of single-celled organisms, some with more or fewer parts/proteins than others. So it's clearly inaccurate to make a blanket claim that "flagella" in general contain no irreplacable parts. Even Behe admits that a working flagella can be reduced to a working cilia, which undercuts his entire "Irreducibly Complex" example/claim right off the bat.
For a semi-technical discussion of how flagella are *not* IC, because many of their parts can be eliminated without totally breaking their locomotive ability, see Evolution of the Bacterial Flagella
But even if one could identify, say, four specific proteins (or other components) which were critically necessary for the functioning of all flagellar structures (and good luck: there are three unrelated classes of organisms with flagella built on three independent methods: eubacterial flagella, archebacterial flagella, and eukaryote flagella -- see Faugy DM and Farrel K, (1999 Feb) A twisted tale: the origin and evolution of motility and chemotaxis in prokaryotes. Microbiology, 145, 279-280), Behe makes a fatal (and laughably elementary) error when he states that therefore they could not have arisen by evolution. Even first-year students of evolutionary biology know that quite often evolved structures are built from parts that WERE NOT ORIGINALLY EVOLVED FOR THEIR CURRENT APPLICATION, as Behe naively assumes (or tries to imply).
Okay, fine, so even if you can prove that a flagellum needs 4 certain proteins to function, and would not function AS A FLAGELLUM with only 3, that's absolutely no problem for evolutionary biology, since it may well have evolved from *something else* which used those 3 proteins to successfully function, and only became useful as a method of locomotion when evolution chanced upon the addition of the 4th protein. Biology is chock-full of systems cobbled together from combinations of other components, or made via one addition to an existing system which then fortuitously allows it to perform a new function.
And, lo and behold, it turns out that the "base and pivot" of the bacterial flagella, along with part of the "stalk", is virtually identical to the bacterial Type III Secretory Structure (TTSS). So despite Behe's claim that flagella must be IC because (he says) there's no use for half a flagella, in fact there is indeed such a use. And this utterly devastates Behe's argument, in several different ways. Explaining way in detail would take quite some time, but it turns out that someone has already written an excellent essay on that exact thing, which I strongly encourage you to read: The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of "Irreducible Complexity" .
(Note: Several times that essay makes a reference to the "argument from ignorance", with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with it. I'd like to point out that contrary to the way it sounds, Miller is *not* accusing Behe et all of being ignorant. Instead, he's referring to this family of logical fallacies, also known as the "argument from incredulity".)
That is called irreducible complexity.
That's what Behe likes to call it, yes. But the flagella is provably *not* IC. Oops for Behe. Furthermore, while it's certainly easy to *call* something or another "Irreducibly Complex", proving that it actually *is* is another matter entirely.
As the "Flagellum Unspun" article above states:
According to Dembski, the detection of "design" requires that an object display complexity that could not be produced by what he calls "natural causes." In order to do that, one must first examine all of the possibilities by which an object, like the flagellum, might have been generated naturally. Dembski and Behe, of course, come to the conclusion that there are no such natural causes. But how did they determine that? What is the scientific method used to support such a conclusion? Could it be that their assertions of the lack of natural causes simply amount to an unsupported personal belief? Suppose that there are such causes, but they simply happened not to think of them? Dembski actually seems to realize that this is a serious problem. He writes: "Now it can happen that we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses [which here, as noted above, means all relevant natural processes (hvt)]. Alternatively, we might think we know the relevant chance hypotheses, but later discover that we missed a crucial one. In the one case a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken" (Dembski 2002, 123 (note 80)).
For more bodyblows against the notion of Irreducible Complexity, see:
Bacterial Flagella and Irreducible Complexity
Irreducible Complexity Demystified
Irreducible Complexity
Review: Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box"
The fatal flaws in Behe's argument were recognized as soon as his book was published, and countless reviewers pointed them out. And yet, creationists and IDers, who seem to rely mostly on the echo-chamber of their own clique and appear to seldom read much *actual* scientific sources, still seem blissfully unaware of the problems with Behe's thesis, and keep popping in on a regular basis to wave the book around and smugly yell something like, "See, evolution has already been disproven!"
What's funny is that by Behe's own argument, a stone arch is "irreducibly complex" because it could not have formed by nature *adding* sections of stone at a time (it would have fallen down unless the entire span was already in place -- and indeed will fall down if you take part of the span away):
Needless to say, what Behe's argument is missing in the case of the stone arch is that such arches form easily by natural means when successive layers of sedimentary rock added on top of each other, and *then* erosion carves a hole out from *under* the arch by *removing* material after the "bridge" of the arch itself *was already there*.
Similarly, Behe's arguments about why certain types of biological structures "could not" have evolved fall flat because he doesn't realize that evolution does not only craft features by *adding* components, it also does so by *lateral alteration*, and by *removing* components.
Behe's "irreducible complexity" argument is fatally flawed. It only "proves" that a *simplified* version of evolution (as envisioned by Behe) couldn't give rise to certain structures -- not that the *actual* processes of evolution could not.

[Behe:] An example of an irreducibly complex cellular system is the bacterial flagellum: a rotary propeller, powered by a flow of acid, that bacteria use to swim. The flagellum requires a number of parts before it works - a rotor, stator and motor. Furthermore, genetic studies have shown that about 40 different kinds of proteins are needed to produce a working flagellum.
Behe's either a liar or an idiot on this point. Far from being "irreducibly complex", many simpler versions of working flagella get along just fine, as do several subcomponents of the particular flagellum which Behe uses as his poster-child. And *both* points violate the requirements which Behe states are necessary conditions for a system to be "irredicubly complex". Oops!
[Behe:] The intracellular transport system is also quite complex. Plant and animal cells are divided into many discrete compartments; supplies, including enzymes and proteins, have to be shipped between these compartments. Some supplies are packaged into molecular trucks, and each truck has a key that will fit only the lock of its particular cellular destination. Other proteins act as loading docks, opening the truck and letting the contents into the destination compartment. Many other examples could be cited. The bottom line is that the cell - the very basis of life - is staggeringly complex.
This is no argument against evolution. Evolution, by its nature, produces "staggering complexity". Behe is simply engaging in the "argument from incredulity" fallacy.
[Behe:] But doesn't science already have answers, or partial answers, for how these systems originated? No. As James Shapiro, a biochemist at the University of Chicago, wrote, "There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations."
Again, Behe is either lying, or an idiot. Even at the time he wrote this, there were many "detailed Darwinian accounts" for the evolution of many biochemical systems.
[Behe:] A few scientists have suggested non-Darwinian theories to account for the cell, but I don's find them persuasive. Instead, I think that the complex systems were designed - purposely arranged by an intelligent agent.
Behe's biased personal opinion is no more than exactly that.
[Behe:] Whenever we see interactive systems (such as a mouse trap) in the everyday world, we assume that they are the products of intelligent activity.
The really funny thing is that even Behe's own chosen "look-see" example of "irreducible complexity" isn't. A standard mousetrap is *NOT* irreducibly complex. If Behe could get even *this* simple example wrong, how can we trust him with the harder stuff? We can't.
[Behe:] We should extend the reasoning to cellular systems. We know of no other mechanism, including Darwin's, which produces such complexity. Only intelligence does.
Behe may or may not be competent in his own field of biochemistry, but he's clearly out of his depth in this one -- evolution *can* and *does* produce "such complexity". Behe is grossly ignorant of information science.

I think all the problems would go away if the 50's science fiction authors were required reading for all high school students.

This includes their fiction and their non-fiction.

I'm not sure who I'd be without Red Planet, The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline, The Cold Equations, ...And Then There Were None, all of Asimov's science essays..

Compare that to those dull, dull dull English lit books (even our Shakespeare was bowdlerized)

The Fleeing Cur is the lamest of trolls.

I know, I just enjoy pointing that out.