Posted on 12/26/2005 8:37:06 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Questioned about the national debate over ''intelligent design,'' [Florida] Gov. Jeb Bush last week said he's more interested in seeing some evolution of the science standards that Florida public school students must meet.
He wants those standards to become more rigorous -- and raising the standards should take priority over discussing whether intelligent design has a place in the public schools' curriculum, he said.
Nationally, the discussion over whether to teach intelligent design -- a concept that says life is too complex to have occurred without the involvement of a higher force -- in public school classes heated up after U.S. District Judge John E. Jones ruled that it smacked of creationism and was a violation of church and state separation. (President Bush appointed Jones to the federal bench in 2004.)
Jones, in his decision, wrote that the concept of intelligent design ''cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,'' according to a Knight Ridder News Service report published Wednesday in The Miami Herald. [PH here: For a more reliable source than the Herald, here's the judge's opinion (big pdf file).]
In Florida, education officials and science teachers will be reviewing the state's science curriculum in 2007 or 2008, after the governor has left office, and ''it is possible that people would make an effort to include [intelligent design] in the debate,'' Gov. Bush told The Watchdog Report on Wednesday. ''My personal belief is we ought to look at whether our standards are high first,'' he said.
SCIENCE FIRST
``The more important point is science itself and how important it is, and we right now have adequate standards that may need to be raised. But worse: Students are not given the course work necessary to do well with those standards.''
Bush, after meeting with Coral Gables Mayor Don Slesnick and city commissioners concerning the community's widespread power outages after hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, also noted that the federal ruling came in a case that involves Pennsylvania's Dover Area School District.
''It is one school district in Pennsylvania,'' he said.
POINT OF VIEW
The Watchdog Report asked a follow-up question: Does the governor believe in Darwin's theory of evolution?
Bush said: ``Yeah, but I don't think it should actually be part of the curriculum, to be honest with you. And people have different points of view and they can be discussed at school, but it does not need to be in the curriculum.''
More like 5-6 million years, but why split hairs over a few orders of magnitude, right?
Here's a fun game: Which of these "apes" are not like the others? See if you can identify which fossil skulls belong to humans, and which are apes.
Those that become anemic are those with two 'sickle cell' genes. Those with just one 'sickle cell' gene were affected less by the parasite. When this beneficial mutation developed, there was no such thing as DDT.
Certainly the eqyptians would have a reason to cover up exodus with revisionist history as well would they not?
I completely agree that there is archaeological evidence supporting an exodus of some sort from Egypt. My question was whether you were claiming that it supports the Biblical account, and if so then how do apparent discrepancies such as what people actually left Egypt, did they escape or were they driven out, where did they go, and even what period in time did it occur, get reconciled so that the Bible's account is the truth?
As for whether the Egyptian account might be the revisionist version, that would mean they would have to have written their version some 300-400 years before it even happened and somehow what they claimed ended up being corroborated by all the other physical archaeological evidence from the time period for that area.
Which of two conflicting stories is more likely to be altered - one written at the time and jibes with everything else we can find or one that claims it happened several hundred years after the other account was written and wasn't committed to writing until nearly a millennium after the fact?
But we do.
But it is also incumbent upon us to reject false findings that are only intented to destroy a religion, a people and its culture. The ToE ultimate goal is exactly that, and we reject it, of course.
Belief gets in the way of learning.Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973
He wasn't dodging the question, he was saying the question was spurious. I agree.
Your question shows that you know very little about the Theory of Evolution.
"To avoid charges of anti-religious bigotry, show examples of "scientific" errors and show how they were discovered and refuted...
Clearer thinking is always a good idea.
Excellent suggestions. They may have to add another class or shorten the list of science facts taught in current classes to get it all in, but I agree that critical thinking at that level is more important than simply digesting context free facts.
You can't elevate ID to an equally valid explanation simply because you want to. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of alternate explanations to evolution, from Scientology to ancient Indian legends. Would you have the schools teach them all? Treat them all as equally valid explanations?
me: "It's laughable to pose a theory that makes a connection to monkeys from a billion years ago."
You: "More like 5-6 million years, but why split hairs over a few orders of magnitude, right?"
Exactly! Why split hairs if the devil ain't in the details or the number of years. The point is that there is no connection between humans and monkeys.
Thanks for agreeing with me.
Only because it isn't an issue with the religious wing of the conservative base. If it were to become an issue with them, then it would be necessary to address it.
Judge Jones will not be the final word on this. His ruling is so flawed as to be easily ignored.
"Your question shows that you know very little about the Theory of Evolution."
Whatever little I know is enough to know that the ToE is all speculation put forth by charlatans and various assorted fakes and frauds.
Now, how much do you know of my profession or my fluency in foreign languages?
Here's an interesting way to look at this from Richard Dawkins:
Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards. … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on. … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.
Note the use of the term relatively sudden.
I guess the question depends on your definition of 'explosion'.
My point is the creation representation of the Cambrian radiation as happening all at once is unfounded.
There are roughly 36 phyla give or take a couple depending on who is doing the classification. Of those 36, a large segment are worm-like with small variations between each phyla (including chordata). A smaller but still significant group of phyla are sponge-like. If the average person were to view the original representatives of all the phyla and compare them to the modern representatives of those same phyla, they would come to the conclusion that the average variation during the Cambrian looks to be less than the variation between modern and archaic forms of a specific phylum.
Only if you compare the typical modern forms of various phyla does the variation look highly significant. This appears to be why most people are shocked by the rapidity of the development of current phyla, they immediately compare modern chordata (fish, mammals, reptiles, birds, etc.), insects, sponges and worms with their large apparent differences, rather than the fossils with their much smaller differences.
Not exactly my point (perhaps I should have explicitly included the </sarc> tag).
So which of these belong to apes, and which are humans, if the difference is so discrete?
Nice point! (Perhaps one day a piece of interactive software can graphically demonstrate this point...)
By that logic, nothing has been invented since the raw materials have always been around.
Why is falsifiability 'phony baloney'?
That must be a new thing. All three of my kids have attended public schools, and I can categorically state without fear of contradiction that they NEVER, NOT ONE OF THEM, ever had to "dismiss catagorically any possibility of religion" or "acknowledge atheism to pass exams".
Trust me on this.
Kudos to your school, too bad it isn't universal.
Safest way to avoid it? Don't give your kids to the athiest nanny-state.
That by itself is an important point. (i.e. different life forms are not as easy to discretely categorize as one might like)
I know you realize this, but just thought I'd also point out (to anyone else reading) that there are 36 or so animal phyla; fungi, plants, protists, prokaryotes, archaea, etc. are not included in this total. Another important point, is that in addition to taking tens of millions of years, the Cambrian explosion specifically affected macroscopic, animal life (a relatively small niche on the genetic 'tree') - it is only a universal explosion of diversity from the 'prejudiced' point of view that macroscopic animals are somehow a "directed goal" of evolutionary development (an understandable 'prejudice', considering that we fall in that category, biologically speaking).
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