Posted on 11/09/2005 4:31:43 PM PST by Aussie Dasher
(AP) Revisiting a topic that exposed Kansas to nationwide ridicule six years ago, the state Board of Education approved science standards for public schools Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
The board's 6-4 vote, expected for months, was a victory for intelligent design advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.
Critics of the proposed language charged that it was an attempt to inject creationism into public schools in violation of the separation between church and state.
The board's vote is likely to heap fresh national criticism on Kansas and cause many scientists to see the state as backward. Current state standards treat evolution as well-established — a view also held by national science groups
(Excerpt) Read more at worthynews.com ...
I don't think I said I was interested.
That's what I thought.
Uh, people die, too. Your math sucks.
You should have bought the $79.95 creo DVD. Then you could have quoted some detailed false statements into your post.
I substitute taught today for a biology teacher in NJ. They were in the middle of the Darwin/Evolution unit. The teacher left a big project for them about the giraffe neck, and how it came to be long via "survivial of the fittest."
Anyway, I threw her plans in the rubbish bin and gave my own lecture. God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th. He took a rib from Adam to make woman. Many of the kids had never heard this before. I'll prob. get fired.
You actually expect me to believe this? Now why should I not think you are a DU troll?
You forgot your </humor> tag.
Sorry, already paid $80 for a Dawrinian nonsense textbook in college.
I really doubt that you have had any formal classroom education in "Darwinsism".
You have no idea what education I've had. Best think before you spout.
I still bet you have no formal education in "Darwinism".
Based on your recent post, I would say that whatever education you have had was a waste of money ...
I read plenty of biologists who think Darwin is crap. Virtually all of the ID biologists say it's garbage. But suit yourself.
For the science room, no free speech
By Bill Murchison
Dec 28, 2005
Will the federal courts, and the people who rely on the federal courts to enforce secular ideals, ever get it? The anti-school-prayer decisions of the past 40 years -- not unlike the pro-choice-in-abortion decisions, starting with Roe vs. Wade -- haven't driven pro-school-prayer, anti-choice Americans from the marketplace of ideas and activity.
Neither will U.S. Dist. Judge John Jones' anti-intelligent-design ruling in Dover, Pa., just before Christmas choke off challenges to the public schools' Darwinian monopoly.
Jones' contempt for the "breathtaking inanity" of school-board members who wanted ninth-grade biology students to hear a brief statement regarding Darwinism's "gaps/problems" is unlikely to intimidate the millions who find evolution only partly persuasive -- at best.
Millions? Scores of millions might be more like it. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in evolution unaided by God. A Kansas newspaper poll last summer found 55 percent support for exposing public-school students to critiques of Darwinism.
This accounts for the widespread desire that children be able to factor in some alternatives to the notion that "natural selection" has brought us, humanly speaking, where we are. Well, maybe it has. But what if it hasn't? The science classroom can't take cognizance of such a possibility? Under the Jones ruling, it can't. Jones discerns a plot to establish a religious view of the question, though the religion he worries about exists only in the possibility that God, per Genesis 1, might intrude celestially into the discussion. (Intelligent-designers, for the record, say the power of a Creator God is just one of various possible counter-explanations.)
Not that Darwinism, as Jones acknowledges, is perfect. Still, "the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent scientific propositions."
Ah. We see now: Federal judges are the final word on good science. Who gave them the power to exclude even whispers of divinity from the classroom? Supposedly, the First Amendment to the Constitution: the odd part here being the assumption that the "free speech" amendment shuts down discussion of alternatives to an establishment-approved concept of Truth.
With energy and undisguised contempt for the critics of Darwinism, Jones thrusts out the back door of his courthouse the very possibility that any sustained critique of Darwinism should be admitted to public classrooms.
However, the writ of almighty federal judges runs only so far, as witness their ongoing failure to convince Americans that the Constitution requires almost unobstructed access to abortion. Pro-life voters and activists, who number in the millions, clearly aren't buying it. We're to suppose efforts to smother intelligent design will bear larger, lusher fruit?
The meeting place of faith and reason is proverbially darkish and unstable -- a place to which the discussants bring sometimes violently different assumptions about truth and where to find it. Yet, the recent remarks of the philosopher-theologian Michael Novak make great sense: "I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and religion." A discussion isn't a sermon or an altar call, is it?
Equally to the point, what does secular intolerance achieve in terms of revitalizing public schools, rendering them intellectually catalytic? As many religious folk see it, witch-hunts for Christian influences are an engrained part of present public-school curricula. Is this where they want the kids? Might private schools -- not necessarily religious ones -- offer a better alternative? Might home schooling?
Alienating bright, energized, intellectually alert customers is normally accounted bad business, but that's the direction in which Darwinian dogmatists point. Thanks to them and other such foes of free speech in the science classroom -- federal judges included -- we seem likely to hear less and less about survival of the fittest and more and more about survival of the least curious, the least motivated, the most gullible.
Your question is not a valid argument, I can ask for a statistical chance of any unmeseurable thing happenning.
How about we discuss the probability of God instead ?
It would not proove anything since things that are unlikely have happenned many times in history.
Statistics is a study of things that have happenned.
The studies can and are used to predict the chance of something "measurable" happenning in the future.
I'm confused about your objection. It is my understaning the statistics in this case are being used to measure the chances that certain events occured. In other words, its being applied to events that actually happened. Why do you object to that study?
I do not object to using statistics to study something which cannot be measured, I simply state that statistical studies that do not use measurable events are worthless. Anyone who has taken a basic statistics class knows that.
If you have some statistical events for what you want to study then you can use statistics for what you propose.
Do you have statistical events to base your study on ?
Statistics without concrete data could be used to show whatever you want. Statistics are sometimes wrongly used but a study of the data can show that the conclusions reached were flawed. Without data it would be impossible to study the data to know wether it is valid or not.
Conclusions that are impossible to verify are the same as appeal authority. Arguments based on God(s) are all equally wothwhile/worthless since there is as much evidence for one as there is for the next, which is to say there is none.
Couldn't stats be used to measure the events that occured from single cells to say a dog as evolution identifies each event?
If you could replicate evolution in a lab and replicate the conditions at the time of a certain evolutionary step you might be able to calculate the probability of that particular evolutionnary step. But that experiment is so complex that the probability of making a mistake would be very high and which would make the results very uncertain.
In short, Your idea is impractical to the highest degree.
Maybe that's because you do not understand statistics.
Pulling numbers out of thin air is not science. Science is about explainning what as been observed, not prooving beliefs.
If you want to get evolution out of school then find a better "scientific" theory to replace it. ID isn't scientific and therefore not an option.
This is pointless, I'm out of here.
I use stats all the time as an auditor. I understand its power. Its a tool that can be used to understand evolution because evolution has established certain events. The idea that folks object to its application in this field is amazing. Not scientific at all.
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