Posted on 12/30/2005 2:29:22 PM PST by PatrickHenry
In this last month of the year, when many Americans' thoughts are turning to holidays -- and what to call them -- we may miss another large story about the intersections of religion and public life. Last week a federal appeals court in Atlanta listened to oral arguments about a sticker pasted, and now removed, from suburban Cobb County, Georgia’s high school science textbooks warning that evolution is a "theory, not a fact." The three-judge panel will take their time deciding the complex issues in the case. But on Tuesday, a federal district court in Pennsylvania ruled the Dover Area ( Penn.) School Board’s oral disclaimers about scientific evolution to be an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The school district's statement to students and parents directed them to an "alternative" theory, that of Intelligent Design (ID); the court ruled found "that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism." (Kitzmiller opinion, p. 31.) Apparently in a case about evolution, genealogical metaphors are unavoidable.
Seemingly every news story about the modern trials feels it necessary to refer to the 1925 Tennessee Monkey Trial, the clash of the larger-than-life legal and political personalities of William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow in the prosecution of high school teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in violation of state law. As an historian who has written about evolution, education, and the era of the Scopes trial, I will admit the continuities between 1925 and today can seem striking. But, these continuities are deceiving. Though the modern court challenges still pit scientists supporting evolution against some parents, churches, and others opposing its unchallenged place in public school curriculum; the changes in the last eighty years seem even stronger evidence for a form of legal or cultural evolution.
First, the continuities. In the late 19th century religious commentators like the southern Methodist editor and professor Thomas O. Summers, Sr. loved to repeat a little ditty: "When doctors disagree,/ disciples then are free" to believe what they wanted about science and the natural world. Modern anti-evolutionists, most prominently under the sponsorship of Seattle's Discovery Institute, urge school boards to "teach the controversy" about evolution, purposefully inflating disagreements among scientists about the particulars of evolutionary biology into specious claims that evolutionary biology is a house of cards ready to fall at any time. The court in the Dover case concluded that although there were some scientific disagreements about evolutionary theory, ID is "an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion" not science. In a second continuity, supporters of ID reach back, even before Darwin, to the 19th century theology of William Paley, who pointed to intricate structures like the human eye as proof of God's design of humans and the world. Though many ID supporters are circumspect about the exact identity of the intelligent designer, it seems unlikely that the legions of conservative Christian supporters of ID are assuming that Martians, time-travelers, or extra-terrestrial meatballs could be behind the creation and complexity of their world.
While these issues suggest that the Scopes Trial is still relevant and would seem to offer support for the statement most often quoted to me by first year history students on why they should study history -- because it repeats itself -- this new act in the drama shows some remarkable changes. Arguing that a majority of parents in any given state, acting through legislatures, could outlaw evolution because it contradicted their religious beliefs, William Jennings Bryan campaigned successfully in Tennessee and several other states to ban the teaching of evolution and to strike it from state-adopted textbooks.
Legal challenges to the Tennessee law never made it to the federal courts, but the constitutional hurdles for anti-evolutionists grew higher in 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas. that an Arkansas law very similar to the Tennessee statute was an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The law's purpose, the court found, was expressly religious. So anti-evolution was forced to evolve, seeking a new form more likely to pass constitutional muster. Enter Creation Science, a movement that added scientific language to the book of Genesis, and demanded that schools provide "equal time" to both Creation Science and biological evolution. Creation Science is an important transitional fossil of the anti-evolution movement, demonstrating two adaptations: first, the adoption of scientific language sought to shield the religious purpose of the statute and second, the appeal to an American sense of fairness in teaching both sides of an apparent controversy. The Supreme Court in 1987 found this new evolution constitutionally unfit, overturning a Louisiana law (Edwards v. Aguillard).
Since the 1987 Edwards v Aguillard decision, the anti-evolution movement has attempted several new adaptations, all of which show direct ties to previous forms. The appeal to public opinion has grown: recent national opinion polls reveal that nearly two-thirds of Americans (and even higher numbers of Alabamians) support teaching both scientific evolution and creationism in public schools. School board elections and textbook adoption battles show the strength of these arguments in a democratic society. The new variants have been far more successful at clothing themselves in the language -- but not the methods -- of science. Whether by rewriting state school standards to teach criticisms of scientific evolution (as in Ohio or Kansas) or in written disclaimers to be placed in school textbooks (as in Alabama or Cobb County, Georgia) or in the now discredited oral disclaimers of the Dover Area School Board, the religious goal has been the same: by casting doubt on scientific evolution, they hope to open room to wedge religion back into public school curricula. [Discovery Institute's "Wedge Project".] But as the court in yesterday's Dover case correctly concluded, Intelligent Design is "an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion" not science. Old arguments of a religious majority, though still potent in public debate, have again proven constitutionally unfit; Creationists and other anti-evolutionists will now have to evolve new arguments to survive constitutional tests.
How do they know the broken sharp stone are tools? Was there a handle strapped to one of them?
Too much guessing called science, this specimen in invalid.
The way archaeologists know about stone tools is they learn to make them, and they carefully examine the pieces produced when tools are made. Some people specialize largely in that one particular field. One of my professors had a room full of broken rocks gathered from streams, debris fields, alluvial deposits and all sorts of other places. After much study he was able to determine which were purposefully made and which were natural.
Microwear analysis is a useful technique as well. Under a microscope (often an electron microscope) you can tell if there is wear, and if it is regular. (This is also useful for examining teeth, to get some idea of diet.)
So, not as much guesswork as you might have thought. And that is just the beginning of the studies available.
This specimen is only invalid if you have closed your mind to learning.
When you don't know anything, it's very easy to imagine that there's nothing to know.
When you don't know anything, it's very easy to imagine that there's nothing to know.
Then there are these scientists. Some of them spend all their time researching their chosen fields. They get to know an awful lot after 40 or 50 years.
Were you there? No? Then it's all guesswork and fraud. Buncha godless commie homo trolls.
</internet idiot mode>
Then there are these scientists.
Were you there? No? Then it's all guesswork and fraud. Buncha godless commie homo trolls.
</internet idiot mode>
That's a joke, right?
Note: You spelled googol correctly. Google spells googol incorrectly.
You don't have to wait long
Apparently I do, because I'm *still* waiting.
All around you, you can see complicated items, which have function and purpose.
Such as? And even if you get around to providing some specific examples, that would not support your conclusion unless you could also provide additional evidence that things with "purpose and function" are necessarily the product of intelligence, and could not possibly exist by any other means. Until you can do that, you're just engaging in the fallacy of circular reasoning, or begging the question.
They can be proven without a doubt to have been created by intelligent beings.
They can? Cool! Present your proof.
Please present your evidence which supports the conclusion that the most complicated and purposeful items known (living things) have been spontaneously constructed by time and chance.
You mean besides the fact that we've watched new living things form by evolutionary processes? And the fact that living things form naturally? Last time I checked, puppies aren't built by committees, and in fact new ones pop up without any intelligent intervention at all.
Additionally, there is the massively overwhelming volume of evidence, along multiple cross-confirming lines, that living things are "constructed" in exactly the way that one would expect if they arose by evolutionary processes, and *not* at all in the way one would expect if they had been "created" by "design", *and* that they have, indeed, originated in such a manner (as shown by their histories). See my homepage, or perhaps this post for starters.
I asked this long ago, but there was no answer -- What is the purpose of a duck?
What is the purpose of a duck?
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_18002,00.html
To make more ducks.
How does a duck know what direction south is?
And how to tell his wife from all the other ducks?
You can cut a chicken's head off
and it will keep on running and twitching
[CHORUS]
When everything seems planned out
when everything seems nicely planned out
well the human race will come and smack your face
How come all my body parts so nicely fit together?
All my organs doing their jobs, no help from me!
A person pulls a spider's leg out
To watch it keep on moving and twitching.
Satan lives here: on grain and earth, rain and air.
How come I just smoke and smoke and smoke
and curse every butt I spit out?
All night long I grind my teeth and I wake up when I cough
You can put me in and iron lung
and I will keep on breathing and twitching.
Crash Test Dummies
you're right.
You honestly expect someting that is supposed to be 1 MILLION years old to not age or wear so that after 1 MILLION years it still looks like it did when it was made? Enough to identify it?
You guys are hilarious! :)
No, Really, some of the theories are so funny, because no one in their right mind expects an American Indian arrowhead from the 1600's to be found as intact as any of these so-called stone tools from Lake Turkana appear to be...
Jenny, the human jaw bone when viewed from above is almost parabolic, while the ape jawbone is u-shaped.
2006 - Year of the Ape!
Because he's an extra in the new movie "The Ringer"? What do I win?
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