Posted on 08/13/2008 9:44:45 AM PDT by Sopater
A federal judge has ruled the University of California can deny course credit to Christian high school graduates who have been taught with textbooks that reject evolution and declare the Bible infallible, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles ruled Friday that the school's review committees did not discriminate against Christians because of religious viewpoints when it denied credit to those taught with certain religious textbooks, but instead made a legitimate claim that the texts failed to teach critical thinking and omitted important science and history topics.
Charles Robinson, the university's vice president for legal affairs, told the Chronicle that the ruling "confirms that UC may apply the same admissions standards to all students and to all high schools without regard to their religious affiliations."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
You should learn how to accept defeat like a man. The only person you are making a fool of is yourself.
==Don’t tell me that Darwinism doesn’t have the purpose of refuting Christianity.
What’s even worse is the so-called Christians who are helping them do it.
Nope, no scientist has ever been denied a job, fired, denied tenure, or denied his ability to make a living for questioning evolution or proposing ID or creationism.
It’s all a paranoia.
==What does your unproposed mechanism have going for it that makes it superior? Certainly not evidence
I thought we had been over this before. Here’s a bit of what I’m talking about right here:
https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/b360905554fdb7d985256ec5006a7755?OpenDocument
Now, who would take joy in Christians compromising the scripture? wow... can’t think of who that would be...
Pre-existant information and ability. You have yet to show me that it wasn't there.
But nothing in the heat stress protein had anything to do with epigenetic DNA methylation.
I guess when all you have is a hammer problems look like nails.
I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy, they are increasingly open and brazen about it these days. From Lewontin, cited above:
“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Oh, it’s not a “conspiracy”.
It’s just a presupposition and viewing the evidence from that base assumption.
ID’s goal is to destroy science?
(and why capitalize it if it isn’t a religion?)
Now who’s paranoid?
Science is based on assumptions of Creation (order, predictability, discoverability)
and Christianity thrives in science in that discoveries and observations reveal the glory of Creation.
==But nothing in the heat stress protein had anything to do with epigenetic DNA methylation
Are you sure? I don’t know much about the subject, but I found paper after paper studying how epigenetics relates to your heat shock proteins. Here’s just one example:
“Epigenetic and classical activation of Entamoeba histolytica heat shock protein 100 (EHsp1”
http://www.epidna.com/showabstract.php?pmid=16263115
Here’s another reference to the connection to heat shock and epigenetics from the link I sent you above. You know the link...it’s the one that prompted you to say “But nothing in the heat stress protein had anything to do with epigenetic DNA methylation...I guess when all you have is a hammer problems look like nails.”
Does the following mean that your third example has also bit the dust?
From the article:
According to Vercelli, the environmental susceptibility of epigenetics probably explains why genetically identical organisms such as twins can have dramatically different phenotypes in different environments. She points to the agouti mice, as well as another recent cluster of studies on a heat shock protein, Hsp90, in Drosophila melanogaster, as “model systems that have very eloquently demonstrated” the critically important role that epigenetic inheritance plays in this kind of gene-by-environment interaction.
Hsp90 regulates developmental genes during times of stress by releasing previously hidden or buffered phenotypic variation. Douglas Ruden of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, says he noticed some weird fruit fly phenotypes—things like appendage-like organs sticking out of their eyes—at about the same time that a paper appeared in Nature connecting Hsp90 activity in Drosophila to genetic variation.8 In that paper, Suzanne Rutherford and Susan Lindquist, then at the University of Chicago, presented compelling evidence that Hsp90 serves as an “evolutionary capacitor,” a genetic factor that regulates phenotypic expression by unleashing “hidden” variation in stressful conditions.8 Even after restoring normal Hsp90 activity, the new phenotypes responded to ten or more generations of selection. The scientists concluded that, once released, even after normal Hsp90 activity was restored, the previously buffered variation persisted in a heritable manner, generation after generation.
https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/b360905554fdb7d985256ec5006a7755?OpenDocument
The adaptation of the experimental population to heat stress had them going though every single change in that protein until the successful combination was hit upon. This is DIRECTLY an example of natural selection of genetic variation and had NOTHING to do with methylation of DNA, which is good at turning genes on and off (which is also the function of heat shock proteins) but not so good at changing the gene so it produces a protein that functions better at higher temperatures.
Could you please reference the study in question. Suddenly, I’m interested.
But my point is that epigenetic processes control if genes go on or off, they do not change the prevalence of the gene in the population like natural selection does, or change the protein coded for by the gene the way mutation does.
As is in the case of the *Goddidit* argument.
They just relabel it as singularity, state that they don't know where it came from, how it got there, how "long" it was there before it expanded, why it expanded, expect everyone to "oooh" and "ahhhh" over their brilliant insight, and then mock creationists for believing the God orchestrated it instead of it happening all by itself.
Well, philosophical naturalism (i.e., evolution) is rationally inferior to creationism. A creationist has the choice of invoking 'goddidit' or natural laws.
An evolutionist does not have this option, but must 'create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated' according to Lewontin.
Yes, the evidence continues to mount that biological reality is that the organism and the cell are managing the DNA database, rather than the DNA database driving the cell and organism.
This, of course, is the 'chicken and the egg' question at the very foundation of life and again points to the chicken as the correct answer.
Correction: A Scientist doesn’t have that option.
No Scientist can still be a Scientist and say “this physical phenomenon is best explained by supernatural agency”.
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