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.''
Are there any loan words from Ancient Egyptian into Biblical Hebrew? One would expect an enslaved people to get at least a few words from their masters.
The fact that Egyptian and Hebrew are both in the AfroAsiatic language phylum means that there will be some cognate words, so the problem of identifying loan words is harder than it would be if the languages weren't related.
Ironically, the only word that comes to mind (to me, who knows nothing about Semitic or Egyptian) is Moses. It appears in names like Thutmose (a pharaoh).
Why would a deliberate creation include nonfunctional copies of one of the genes for the enzymes that are needed to make ascorbic acid?
See post 2824.
Why is this mutation found only in the great apes, including people. Do you think a non "biased" researcher would produce different data?!
One of the points here is that the 90% match doesn't say all that much. It's the details (in this case, DNA errors that are common to various species) that shout "common descent". The logic here is the same as that used by publishers of maps; they'll include a few deliberate mistakes to catch copyright violations.
Please read this often-linked-to essay for more details.
And the woman just happened to be a tent revivalist. Who just happened to be in a position to get bigger crowds, (which just happened to result in bigger collections), by making an unsupported claim of converting someone famous.
By their fruits...
Wikipedia, now there's an expert on disputed stories.
Cheers!
now there's an expert on disputed stories.
It's not a disputed story. It's been denied by everyone who actually knew Darwin and debunked by both sides of this debate.
Even "Answers in Genesis" admits that it isn't true, yet it gets trotted out with great regluarity by creationists on these threads who either don't know or don't care that it's a lie.
If it isn't true find a site not well known for bias.
WikiPedia is a hotbed of propaganda.
If you have a better source, then list it. If not don't be surprised if people ignore your source.
First of all, surely you realize that it is the burden of the people making he claim that Darwin recanted to prove it, not our burden to disprove it?
Nobody has put forward any evidence that this actually happened - to the contrary, most posters can't back it up with anything more than "I read it somewhere."
Regardless, I am happy to give you another source. Surely you believe Answers in Genesis? No friend of evolution, the site is actually honest enough to admit that this was a fraud.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/darwin_recant.asp
"(I)t is a pity that to this day the Lady Hope story occasionally appears in tracts published and given out by well-meaning people."
Answers in Genesis has never been considered a dependable source by evolutionists I've spoken with I wouldn't go there either, I'd want an unbiased source.
Also I don't doubt that on one's deathbed they may be quite prone to make a last confession just in case.
Also I don't doubt that on one's deathbed they may be quite prone to make a last confession just in case.
Too bad that's not what Lady Hope said happened. She claimed that he recanted six months before his death.
It still doesn't matter. There are no "unbiased sources" who say that it happened. The burden of proof is on people perpetuating this story, and none has been offered.
If you can substantiate her tale, please do so. Otherwise, stop helping to spread lies.
I'm hardly spreading lies by insisting you back off of traditionally biased sources to make a point.
Actually, I said you were *helping* spread lies, by insisting that we provide "proof" of something that didn't happen.
You offered proof by citing sources. Once the cat's out of the bag it's a valid question that you cite non-biased ones.
Such a Grand Unfounded Speculation on your part.
Hi there!
"Science adjusts theories to fit evidence."
While evolution adjusts evidence to make theory fit, aka making the shoe fit.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
So bizarre how many creationists desperately cling to a totally unsupportable lie, no matter how insignificant.
You mean like this possible Nobel Price contender?
"The non-biblical account would have us believe that all life originated from a single common ancestor -- a slime mold -- and give or take a billion years, we’re expected to believe that the descendants of this slime mold climbed out of the ocean and stood up and started giving lectures," Damadian says. "Do the math on that. The sheer statistics of that violate any sense of reality." Raymond Damadian, builder of first MRI scanner.
Damadian has also served as a technical adviser to the Institute for Creation Research, which rejects the standard model of evolution.
"Garbage, you deny it fine you demand evidence it may well get presented to you but so far most folks I see vehemently against ID are themselves calling it juck science in a very dismissive fashion. Not really in a fair and objective sense.
I too consider ID as put forward by Behe, Dembski, et al to be junk science. It is being advertised much as pseudoscience such as Homeopathy is being advertised and justified. ID proponents claim it will explain everything, is the best at what it does and is being suppressed by a vast pro-scientist academic, political and media conspiracy. If only people would give it a chance, they would see that it is truly remarkable.
Yet when I investigate ID's claims, I find it to be illogical, based on false assumptions and barren of any scientific validity. I find Behe's arguments for IC specious and unfounded, and Dembski's construction of definitions contrived. Nothing from the ID camp enables scientists to consistently and reliably differentiate between intelligent causation and natural causation.
"You would be less than honest to not agree that Evolution theory has a lot of questions unanswered, it raises a lot of questions in its own findings and some of it is hypothesis...is it not? Or are you willing to tell me evolution theory has every answer?
I don't believe I've ever stated that the Theory of Evolution has all the answers. I do believe it is far and away the best at answering questions about how species develop. What I have witnessed from the ID and creationist camps are questions that are 'rigged' and meaningless, generally through taking liberties with the presentation of those questions in the form of strawmen.
"If not then you are no different here. You demand that Evolution Theory (ET) is the ONLY answer and it has to fit a lot of what you already know yet you do not see any of it as possibly wrong when all the time the corporate knoweldge on the subject is being revised and in some cases dashing previous rock-solid theory and present whole new ones. Age of the earth was nearly doubled by a mistake in measurement...was it not?
The measurements science uses are based on the best technology of the time. As technology becomes more precise, those measurements will be revised, coming ever closer to, but never reaching an absolute correctness. This does not mean that science is wishy washy or can't make up its mind. Nor does it mean that science is wrong. What it means is that science is self correcting.
"And I am sure you can tell me of others. Evolution does not have all the answers, and even with the limitations on our scientific capability ID does not have it all either...which is why it is a theory in work JUST like evolution theory.
The problem is with the definition of theory. Theories are subtractive in nature, starting as a number of unverified, speculative hypotheses which are little more than educated guesses based on prior work. One by one the hypotheses are shown to be in error and either dropped or fixed. At the end, those hypotheses that survive this end up comprising a theory. To eliminate these hypotheses, they have to be falsifiable and testable. So far, nothing I have seen allows ID to be falsified or tested. In fact using Dembski's filter on real world applications has resulted in too many false positives to be useful.
"Where does it limit the earth as the only one? In this system it is a fact...I do not see that ID says only earth in the whole universe though I do not doubt some say that. I very much agree that life could exist elsewhere but that the human existance right now can only be proven to exist here and the earth MUST be where it is for this to happen.
Creationists are fond of using probability calculations to show how something could not be anything but the result of a designer. This is no different when they try to show that our galaxy\solar system\binary planet has been designed to support human life. This is an error in the application of probability. It is this error I tried to show in my little silver ball analogy. It is the difference between 'you' winning a lottery and 'anyone' winning a lottery.
Evolution is not really 'chance'. What 'variation' occurs in the genome at any given time may be pseudo-random, but the various types of selection are not random in any sense of the word. IDists use apparent complexity as an indication of design. They make an unwarranted assumption that only intelligences can produce what appears to be design. Before they can use complexity as a measure of a designer, they have to show, unequivocally, that complexity is exclusive to intelligence. As it stands, we've seen nature produce complexity that 'looks' designed.
"Where can evolution prove that chance or selection made the simple complex? It cannot...it relies on chances being good that the right things happened at the right time and place. How did organisms evolve to the point where they needed an eye if there was none before it required? While only one question it does beg an answer. We can not find a lot of such questions answered with certainty at all. Thsi alone amazes me and yet I think you have as much faith in chance as I do a designer on the subject.
I have little faith that chance will produce what I want. I do have faith in my ability to logically reconstruct how an eliminative process such as selection combined with a high rate of variation such as mutation gives us can result in morphological change to such a degree that we define the start organism and end organism as separate yet related species.
As far as complexity is concerned, in what way is a bacterium less complex than us? The number of parts, the ability to survive, the ability to reproduce, the ability to create? It is very difficult to answer questions about complexity when the word has so many different meanings and applications. If you consider simple genome size or chromosome number or even gene number as indicators of complexity, humans are not the most complex in any way.
All it takes for a morphological change to be observed is a simple change in a codon, gene, chromosome number, or an insertion by any number of means in the coding or control ares of the genome.
The transition in fossils in a number of lines, including those of the cetartiodactyls, show much more than just 'possible' connections. If those fossils just showed one or two transitional features, there would be room for doubt. In the case of whales, we have a continuous line of fossils that show 1) an elongation of the head, 2) movement of the head/neck joint from the lower rear to rear position, 3) movement of the nostrils from the front of the snout to the top of the head, 4) change in the ear from above water use to below water use, 5) change in leg length from long to short in the front, and gone in the back, 6) change in back leg/pelvis connection from connected to unconnected, 7) change in spine from rigid to flexible. There are a few more shared features that I won't bother to list, I think this is enough for a start.
"It is not evidence of evolution it is evidence of variation. Let me ask you this....are all dogs related? If yes, you will find variations like what you say, if no then you arguing that evolution exists in a fabulous form right in front of our eyes...but I dont hear ET folks saying that.
I take then that you consider Hippos and Whales to be the same 'kind'? What 'kind' do you consider platypuses to belong to? How about manatees and dugongs?
Evolution is happening all around us all the time, and yes, adaptation is part of evolution. You have been fed false information about what evolution encompasses. The theory of evolution was originally based on the observation of adaptation in finches, pigeons and barnacles. How could adaptation now not be part of the theory?
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