Posted on 07/07/2006 2:39:21 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
A Seattle-based research group that advocates intelligent design said today it will campaign to educate Kansans that the science standards approved by the State Board of Education are sound.
“Kansas citizens need to have accurate information about what the science standards do,” said John West, associate director of the Center for Science & Culture for Discovery Institute.
West said the group will start an information campaign over the Internet immediately and possibly start a radio campaign. He declined to say how much the center would spend.
The decision puts the Discovery Institute in the center of hotly-contested State Board of Education school board races.
The board’s 6-4 decision to approve science standards that question evolution has been a major issue in the five board places that are up for grabs this year. The science standards are used as guidelines to what students learn in Kansas public schools.
Mainstream scientists have said the standards criticize evolution in a way that could introduce intelligent design in science classrooms. Intelligent design posits there was a master force that designed life.
They are called the natural sciences for a good reason. The presumption of naturalism in science has worked well for centuries, and there is no convincing reason to alter it now, other than the fact that it upsets the sensitivities of certain people.
Naturalistic evolution has succeeded in making a myriad of specific, successful predictions; hence its success. Can you think of one, just one, specific example of a prediction of data ever made assuming a supernatural cause? (By specific, I don't mean a sweeping generalization about life on earth; I mean, something like, what specific fossil might be found in a particular region, or the location of a specific protein in a DNA sequence.)
Until then, there's no motivation to call ID science, other than the fact that the theory that actually works (evolution) has consequences some consider upsetting. Scientists don't give up pursuit of knowledge just because of popular sentiment.
This claim is utterly ridiculous. No scientist (at least in the Western World) is prevented from publishing or presenting data & theories because they have religious beliefs, so long as their science remains grounded on a empirical & logical basis.
Actually, it's not clear that she listened to both "closing arguments." Sounds like she relied on three anti-evolution people and believed that was an appropriate approach to the issue. She doesn't understand how shallow the "knowledge" obtained from this approach is. Her oversize ego is in the way.
Her stock has taken a huge dive with me.
The following quotation is among the dumbest statements I've read in a long time.
"Their grandiose self-conceptions to the contrary, the cult [the 'evolution cult'] members are rarely scientists at all....While I'm sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. "
An objective person would acknowledge this statement for the absurdity it is. Had it been made by Susan Estrich or another liberal, people here would be all over it. I predict it will be defended simply because it came from Ann.
Does anyone know what was so offensive about #5 as to trigger its removal?
I wonder at her incompetence in using information from Behe and Dembski without researching the material farther than secondary sources. Accepting information from Behe and Dembski about their own work is one thing, blindly accepting their word on scientific work is another. (This statement does of course imply that Behe's and Dembski's work is *not* scientific :-))
No clue. Early posts are often addressed to me, because I started the thread. But I don't remember #5 at all.
Secondly, once you *generally* trust someone, you are much less likely to perform due diligence regarding their other claims.
Recall again that when your profession is political polemics, or opinion, the *level* and *degree* of fact-checking is of a completely different type than that found in science. In politics, it only has to be "defensible"-- i.e., yes, person X really spoke quote Y, here's the Fox News videotape. But in science one has to verify the accuracy and, well..."veridical" or "veriferous" nature of the contents of the quote, not merely its existence. Ann apparently wasn't used to having to do this.
Cheers!
Given what Anthony Kennedy - say nothing of four other SCOTUS justices - can believe about the Geneva Conventions, we all of us nationwide have plenty to worry about aside from controversies over education.But to the merits of the theory that complex, specialized organs like the eye - or even "simple" cells - accidentally assembling themselves, I'm put in mind of the statement in my thermodynamics placing a probability on the proposition that a red hot iron ball, if dropped into a bucket of water, would "bounce" back to its original height and temperature due to random action of the molecules of water.
Of course the probability the book assigned to that result was very, very, very small, but the idea that it was not zero was pretty amazing to consider. And it just illustrates the point that some things can be theoretically possible and still never happen because their probability of occurrance is just too low.
If you dropped a bowling ball into a bucket of water and instead of immediately sinking to the bottom it initially bounced back up to its original height, you would conclude that a miracle had occurred. And that is what I hear Ann Coulter saying - that if the fossil record reveals basically worms, then suddenly in geological time it reveals complex animals, whatever word you use for it is simply a euphemism for a miracle.
Nothing is random if you can look close enough at its causes; evolution starts with the idea of randomness. And "chance" is the name of a Roman deity. It can be viewed as just a way of avoiding the word "miracle."
It was Coyoteman explaining his background with dating techniques, and a statement that Ann Coulter is wrong.
Then of course it got deleted.
When they held hearings on the standards, they imported an expert from Turkey to testify.
Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish activist writer with a master's degree in history, and is affiliated with a Turkish organization and religious cult which was instrumental in virtually eliminating evolution from the curriculum of schools in that country. High school biology classes in the secular nation of Turkey now teach a form of Creationism.
This is one step in the direction of the Islamic republic of Turkey, something I really don't wanty to see.
I don't recall posting that early on this thread (#5). I had a comment that Coulter was wrong on an adjacent thread. (But then, if I didn't have a bad memory I'd have no memory at all...)
Perhaps it was a comment dealing with master force or some such. I thought there was one of those earlier than the post 30 range?
Something like a third of the references in the evolution part of Godless are to the NY Times, which she thoroughly trashed in Slander.
It's bothersome to have them wrap themselves with that fine word. I'd prefer to call the creationist school board members what they truly are -- theocrats running as conservatives.
I've started using "anti-evolution activists". It covers both ID and creationism, and it correctly classifies them as political activists rather than scientists.
That's good. But really, it's all part of a larger anti-science movement which has support in both parties. The dems have their slice of it in various junk-science fads like global warming and anti-nuclear power. Things were more clear back when the anti-evolution people were democrats, cheering for William Jennings Bryant in the Scopes trial.
A 'donation' could probably get you in ...
If you want to play a slightly more elaborate game, tell them that your estate planner is dead set against your leaving them anything in your will, unless he can see an audited financial statement.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.