To fund a church is one of the best type of company you can have. Ron Hubbard had that idea, too.
Another activist judge!
Posted on 01/10/2006 4:51:17 AM PST by tpeters
Welcome to Science Court
The ruling in the Dover evolution trial shows what the legal and scientific processes have in common--intellectual rigor
Chris Mooney; January 9, 2006
Legally speaking, Judge John E. Jones III's ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District--Pennsylvania's much-discussed lawsuit over the teaching of "intelligent design"--can only be called conservative. The decision draws upon and reinforces a series of prior court precedents, all of which barred creationist encroachment upon the teaching of science in public schools.
In another sense, though, Jones' ruling is revolutionary. We live in a time when the findings of science themselves increasingly seem to be politically determined--when Democrat "science" is pitted against Republican "science" on issues ranging from evolution to global warming. By contrast, Jones' opinion strikes a blow for the proposition that when it comes to matters of science, there aren't necessarily two sides to every story.
Over the course of a lengthy trial, Jones looked closely at the scientific merits of "intelligent design"--the contention that Darwinian evolution cannot explain the biological complexity of living organisms, and that instead some form of intelligence must have created them. And in the end, the judge found ID utterly vacuous. "[ID] cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory," Jones wrote, "as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community."
ID critics have been making these same observations for years; so have leading American scientific societies. Meanwhile, investigative reporters and scholars studying the ID movement have demonstrated that it is, indeed, simply creationism reincarnated--all religion and no science. On the intellectual merits, ID was dead a long time ago. But before Judge Jones came along, it's astonishing how hard it was to get that acknowledged, unequivocally, in public discussion of the issue.
Up until the Dover trial, well-funded ID proponents based at Seattle's Discovery Institute had waged a successful media campaign to sow public doubts about evolution, and to convince Americans that a true scientific "controversy" existed over Darwin's theory. And thanks in part to the conventions of television news, editorial pages, and political reporting--all of which require that "equal time" be allotted to different views in an ongoing political controversy--they were succeeding.
For example, a national survey conducted this spring by Ohio State University professor Matthew Nisbet in collaboration with the Survey Research Institute at Cornell University found serious public confusion about the scientific basis for “intelligent design.” A slight majority of adult Americans (56.3 percent) agreed that evolution is supported by an overwhelming body of scientific evidence, but a very sizeable proportion (44.2 percent) incorrectly thought the same of ID.
Ritualistically "balanced" news media coverage may not be the sole cause of such confusion, but it’s can hardly have helped. Consider just one of many examples of how journalists, in their quest for "objectivity," have lent undue credibility to ID. The York Dispatch, one of two papers covering the evolution battle in Dover, Pennyslvania, repeatedly summarized the two sides of the "debate" thusly: “Intelligent design theory attributes the origin of life to an intelligent being. It counters the theory of evolution, which says that people evolved from less complex beings.” Here we witness the reductio ad absurdum of journalistic "balance." Despite staggering scientific consensus in favor of evolution--and ample documentation of the religious inspiration behind the "intelligent design" movement--evolution and ID were paired together by the Dispatch as two competing "theories."
Judge Jones took a thoroughly different approach, actually bothering to weigh the merits of competing arguments. He inquired whether an explanation that inherently appeals to the supernatural--as "intelligent design" does--can be scientific, and found that it cannot. He searched for published evidence in scientific journals supporting the contentions of the ID movement--and couldn't find it. And in his final opinion, he was anything but "balanced."
We have seen this pattern before. During the early 1980s, the evolution trial McLean v. Arkansas pitted defenders of evolutionary science against so-called “scientific creationists”--the precursors of today's ID proponents. Today, few take the claims of "scientific creationism,” such as the notion that the earth is only a few thousand years old, very seriously. At the time, however, proponents of “creation science” were treated very seriously by members of the national media covering the trial. According to a later analysis of the coverage by media scholars, reporters generally tried to create a “balance” between the scientific-sounding claims of the “scientific” creationists and the arguments of evolutionary scientists.
But in the McLean decision, judge William Overton did no such thing. Rather, the judge carefully investigated whether "creation science" fit the norms of science at all--and found that it did not. Overton therefore concluded that the attempt by the state of Arkansas to include "creation science" in science classes was a transparent attempt to advance a sectarian religious perspective, as barred by the First Amendment. Now, Judge Jones is following in Overton's footsteps very closely. In his decision, Jones cites the McLean case repeatedly.
If there's an underlying moral to be derived from Judge Jones' decision, then, it may be this. It's very easy to attack well-established science through a propaganda campaign aimed at the media and the public. That's precisely what "intelligent design" proponents have done--and they're hardly alone in this. However, it's much more difficult for a PR attack on established science to survive the scrutiny of a serious, independent judge.
That hardly means that courts are more qualified than scientists to determine the validity of evolutionary theory, or other scientific findings. But in their investigative rigor, their commitment to evidence, and their unhesitating willingness to decide arguments on their merits, courts certainly have much more in common with the scientific process than many of today's major media journalists do. The fact that today Judge Jones has become America's leading arbiter of what counts as science certainly underscores his own intellectual seriousness. But it also exposes the failure of other gatekeepers.
Fair enough
I like the layout.
Thanks. I wanted to do something different.
My knees stiffen up in restaurants, theaters, and many cars. I hate having my feet dangle over the edge of the bed so I'm forced to buy extra long beds. Sometimes I wish I had detachable legs.
As far as I know the only advantage to being tall is in playing basketball and football.
My son may not have inherited my height, but he is lucky enough to have inherited my wife's intelligence. It really is hell being the least intelligent in the house. :(
It's OK. I've got you covered.
My oldest daughter is 6'1". My son is 6'7". My youngest daughter is 5'9" and still growing.
My cat is still very tiny but she's 11 years old and has plenty of attitude.
Beware the "Princess of Paranoia" placemarker
Yes.
"Where then is intelligent life besides Earth?
You misunderstand the argument. The argument is the probability of the existence of a planet circling a star, with the same energy output as Sol, at ~93 million miles radius and circled by a moon or moons that affect the tides equal to Luna. Your probability assertion is based on the premise that only this particular planet in this particular solar system in this particular galaxy out of the billions that could exist could be the home of humanity. The correct premise is that Earth is not a special planet, simply the one that had the necessary conditions for us to inhabit.
The difference in probability is similar to, (but not exact) the difference in probability between blindly picking a single green painted coin out of a bucket of unpainted coins and picking a unpainted coin out of the same bucket.
"Where is life? You are going to have a baby. But you did not grow one out of the Earth. It is not evolving into another being altogether.
If you believe that the only way we can come to the conclusion that we evolved from other animal precursors is by literally reproducing the sequence of organisms then you have just removed all science and all history, including the Bible from trusted sources. You have also ignored one of humanity's great abilities, the ability to observe, analyze, calculate and draw conclusions from insufficient or incomplete information.
"And where are all those missing links between what the dinos were and what they became. If they went extinct that mean they died off. SO how can they have evolved if they no longer existed?
We have many transitional fossils for many lineages, including dinosaur to bird.
Your misunderstanding of evolution is quite evident in your second and third sentences. You also make a logical error. You assume that the only way for an organism to disappear from the fossil record is to die out. There is a simpler means than extinction; if a species evolves into another species with a different name then the original species no longer exists under its original name, it in effect disappears. However this is not what happened with dinos and birds. The dinos, which were not an amorphous group by any means, had a large subgroup called Theropods from which the birds evolved. Only a small subpopulation of the Theropods actually evolved into what we now call birds, the others evolved into other dinosaurs and eventually became extinct. BTW, many consider birds to be extant dinosaurs so the dinos did not go completely extinct.
"Almost 80% of the US believe in God.
Which is totally irrelevant to the veracity of the ToE.
Yes, thank you.
Lordy, what the heck you feeding them kids?
"My cat is still very tiny but she's 11 years old and has plenty of attitude.
My 10 year old cat is the size of a large kitten and so full of *attitude* we had to have *all* her claws removed. I was getting tired of being scratched and bitten, now I just get bitten.
American beef and potatoes. Plus lots of fruits and vegetables. ;)
I've convinced the kids that chicken is a vegetable. The wife is not amused.
You don't find me in that crowd. I grew up in the 50s and went to a church affiliated college. I'm not personally offended by a touch of religion in school. I just don't want nonscience taught in sciences classes.
I only mention theocracy when someone brings up the good old days and tries to argue that people are better behaved when government supports religion. Given a choice, I would want a completely secular government.
Another soul touched His Noodly Appendage!
Ramen, brother.
"You are permitted in time of great danger to walk. with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.”
LOL!
I'm planning on teaching my unborn son or daughter that Count Basie and Art Pepper are "children's music" after he/she's born....
ROTFLMAO!!!
Chicken is my second favourite 'meat' after good Canadian (Saskatchewan) beef. Not that wimpy warm weather American stuff.
Good choices!
Hope that works out.
We eat a lot of chicken too.
But steak off the grill is still number one.
I grilled steaks for the wife every week while she was pregnant. In the winter here north of Chicago, it's hard to get the grill going even when I used gasoline.
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