Posted on 11/07/2002 7:07:47 PM PST by Nebullis
The AAAS Board recently passed a resolution urging policymakers to oppose teaching "Intelligent Design Theory" within science classrooms, but rather, to keep it separate, in the same way that creationism and other religious teachings are currently handled.
"The United States has promised that no child will be left behind in the classroom," said Alan I. Leshner, CEO and executive publisher for AAAS. "If intelligent design theory is presented within science courses as factually based, it is likely to confuse American schoolchildren and to undermine the integrity of U.S. science education."
American society supports and encourages a broad range of viewpoints, Leshner noted. While this diversity enriches the educational experience for students, he added, science-based information and conceptual belief systems should not be presented together.
Peter H. Raven, chairman of the AAAS Board of Directors, agreed:
"The ID movement argues that random mutation in nature and natural selection can't explain the diversity of life forms or their complexity and that these things may be explained only by an extra-natural intelligent agent," said Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden. "This is an interesting philosophical or theological concept, and some people have strong feelings about it. Unfortunately, it's being put forth as a scientifically based alternative to the theory of biological evolution. Intelligent design theory has so far not been supported by peer-reviewed, published evidence."
In contrast, the theory of biological evolution is well-supported, and not a "disputed view" within the scientific community, as some ID proponents have suggested, for example, through "disclaimer" stickers affixed to textbooks in Cobb County, Georgia.
"The contemporary theory of biological evolution is one of the most robust products of scientific inquiry," the AAAS Board of Directors wrote in a resolution released today. "AAAS urges citizens across the nation to oppose the establishment of policies that would permit the teaching of `intelligent design theory' as a part of the science curriculum of the public schools."
The AAAS Board resolved to oppose claims that intelligent design theory is scientifically based, in response to a number of recent ID-related threats to public science education.
In Georgia, for example, the Cobb County District School Board decided in March this year to affix stickers to science textbooks, telling students that "evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things." Following a lawsuit filed August 21 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, the school board on September 26 modified its policy statement, but again described evolution as a "disputed view" that must be "balanced" in the classroom, taking into account other family teachings. The exact impact of the amended school board policy in Cobb County classrooms remains unclear.
A similar challenge is underway in Ohio, where the state's education board on October 14 passed a unanimous, though preliminary vote to keep ID theory out of the state's science classrooms. But, their ruling left the door open for local school districts to present ID theory together with science, and suggested that scientists should "continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." In fact, even while the state-level debate continued, the Patrick Henry Local School District, based in Columbus, passed a motion this June to support "the idea of intelligent design being included as appropriate in classroom discussions in addition to other scientific theories."
The Ohio State Education Board is inviting further public comment through November. In December, board members will vote to conclusively determine whether alternatives to evolution should be included in new guidelines that spell out what students need to know about science at different grade levels. Meanwhile, ID theorists have reportedly been active in Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, New Jersey, and other states, as well Ohio and Georgia.
While asking policymakers to oppose the teaching of ID theory within science classes, the AAAS also called on its 272 affiliated societies, its members, and the public to promote fact-based, standards-based science education for American schoolchildren.
Hey, I've got a question: Where can I get some decent Windows-based software for doing genome comparisons? (preferably something with a big help file. :-) How much of an education in molecular biology would one need to figure out one of these programs & do some basic comparisons?
For that matter, what's a good Windows-based data visualization tool? I want to make cool-looking visualizations of genome data like I sometimes see in journal articles.
The character of contemporary science is defined by its objects. It need not be exclusively devoted to matter and motion. The idea that only particular objects are worthy of our science is in no small way due to the rapid increase of knowledge of particular objects.
Absolutely false and you know it. In fact the greatest discovery of the human genome project was that while we have only some 30,000 odd genes they produce some 100,000 different proteins. This gave definite proof that the DNA called moronically by the evolutionists 'junk' was the real engine of living organisms. It destroyed completely the gene-centric idea of the operation of organisms and showed that DNA is indeed a programming code which controls the functioning not just of the genes, but of the entire organism.
In fact, this is not quite correct. My daughters, from grade-school on, had "science" classes that included increasingly complex concepts from the major disciplines.
They know how to think from the day they are born...
I'm going to surprise even myself and agree with you on this point.
I watched my first child in the process of "discovering" herself in the first few weeks after she was born. I will just say it was amazing to see her find her hands and arms and figure out their uses.
Also, I did some volunteer teaching at my daughters' grade school from 3rd to 5th grades (brought in my telescope and we looked at sunspots and discussed the solar cycle, etc.). I was very impressed not only with their curiosity, but the insight involved in their questions.
One of the best tests of a scientific theory is to see how effective it is in making predictions. Can you give me an example of a prediction that macroevolution makes?Here's another macroevolutionary prediction (two, actually):Sure. I wrote about this on an earlier thread. Here, post 160.
THE FUTURE OF MANKIND
Two questions are frequently asked about the future of mankind. The first one is, What is the probability that the human species will break up into several species? The answer is clear: none at all. Humans occupy all the concievable niches from the Arctic to the tropics that a humanlike animal might occupy. Furthermore, there is no geographic isolation between any of the human populations. Whenever geographically isolated human races developed in the last 100,000 years, they interbred readily with other races as soon as contact was reestablished. Today there is far too much contact among all human populations for any kind of effective long-term isolation that might lead to speciation.
The second question is, Could the now existing human species evolve as a whole into a "better" new species? Could Man become superman? Here again, one cannot be hopeful. To be sure, there is abundant genetic variation within the human genotype to serve as material for appropriate selection, but modern conditions are very different from the time when some populations of Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens. At that time, our species consisted of small troops, in each of which there was strong natural selection with a premium on those characteristics that eventually resulted in Homo sapiens. Furthermore, as in most social animals, there was undoubtedly strong group selection.
Modern humans, by contrast, constitute a mass society and there is no indication of any natural selection for superior genotypes that would permit the rise of the human species above its present capacities. With selection for improvement no longer being exercised, there is no chance for the evolution of a superior human species. Indeed, some students of this problem fear that a deterioration of our species is inevitable under the conditions of a mass society. However, genetic deterioration is not an immediate danger, considering the high variability of the human gene pool.
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (2001), pg 261
This is also restrictive to the character of science, for it determines that its object conforms only to present evidence. Patrick Henry is correct on this.
You might be happy with this.
E-SKEPTIC FOR JUNE 21, 2002 Copyright 2002 Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, e-Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com and skepticmag@aol.com). Permission to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment. We encourage you to broadcast e-Skeptic to new potential subscribers. Newcomers can subscribe to e-Skeptic for free by sending an e-mail to: join-skeptics@lyris.net --------------------------------- Greetings fellow e-Skepticers, and happy summer solstice, the longest day of the year. May the sun god continue to shine on us all. The following is a result of a recent interesting coincidence that goes a long way toward understanding on evolution works. DARWIN, HAMLET, AND HOW EVOLUTION WORKS: AN INTERESTING (BUT NOT UNEXPECTED) COINCIDENCE By Michael Shermer Here is an interesting coincidence on Darwin, Hamlet, and how evolution works, that itself needs no "intelligent designer" to explain. In the latest issue of Scientific American, the Editor-in-Chief John Rennie wrote a brilliant article entitled "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense," debunking creationist arguments (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EED F&pageNumber=4&catID=2). In that article he used an example from my book, Why People Believe Weird Things, from Chapter 10 "Confronting Creationists: Twenty-Five Creationist Arguments, Twenty-Five Evolutionist Answers" (also published as a separate pamphlet and available at www.skeptic.com). In that chapter I cite a computer program designed and run by a friend and colleague of mine when I was teaching at Glendale College, Richard Hardison, on how long it would take a monkey to randomly type "To be or not to be." It would take 26 to the power of 13 trials for success, which is 16 times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the 4.5 billion years of our solar system. But Hardison designed a computer program that acts like natural selection: it preserved the gains and eradicated the mistakes. In other words, the computer "selected" for or against letters as they were randomly produced (if "T" preserve, if "Z" skip), and took an average of only 335.2 trials to produce the sequence TOBEORNOTTOBE. It took only 90 seconds. Hardison calculated that the entire Hamlet play could be done in 4.5 days. This appeared in Richard Hardison's spiral-bound course reading material in 1984 for a course he and I co-taught on the history of great ideas; it was then published in 1985 in book form as "Upon the Shoulders of Giants," (University Press of America) published in a second edition in 1988 (as cited in my own book). If that computer sequence sounds familiar to readers, it is because Richard Dawkins did something very similar in his book The Blind Watchmaker, except he used a different phrase--"Methinks it is like a weasel"--completely independent of Hardison, and neither one of them knew about the other's program. Dawkins book came out in 1986; he produced his program in 1984. There is no way he could have known about Hardison's work because it wasn't published in any form that would have been available to anyone but the students in our class. And Hardison didn't know about Dawkins' program. But how interesting or unusual a coincidence is this? Dawkins and I had an e-mail exchange about that, and here is his rather satisfactory explanation requiring neither Jungian synchronicity nor paranormal shenanigans: "Thank you for clearing up the mystery. Yes, the coincidence is fascinating. But it is not all THAT surprising, and you have spotted that it makes a good lesson in paranormal debunking. Once one has grasped (from Darwin) the paramount importance of ratcheted CUMULATIVE selection when faced with the Argument from Statistical Improbability, one's thoughts naturally turn to the famous monkeys who have so often been used to dramatise that Argument. It becomes the obvious simulation to do, to get the point across to doubters. It can easily be done with a little BASIC program, and that is what both Hardison and I did, at what must have been almost exactly the same time, 1984 or 1985. As for the superficial details, those pesky monkeys have always typed Shakespeare. Hamlet is his most famous play. To Be or Not to Be is the most famous passage from that play. I would probably have chosen it myself, except that I thought the dialogue between Hamlet and Horatio on chance resemblances in clouds would make a neat intro: hence Methinks it is like a Weasel. Reverting to Richard Hardison, the one thing he did which I did not (and I am now kicking myself for not thinking of it) was to extrapolate to the time it would take to type the entire play. The speed at which computers happened to run in 1985 is, of course, not particularly interesting now: just an arbitrary point on the Moore's Law curve. But it would now be interesting to do the extrapolation again for (a) modern computers and (b) monkeys. Make some sort of conservative estimate for how much slower a monkey is than a computer. 4.5 days would expand to -- what? -- tens of millions of years? Hundreds of millions? It will still be very very short compared to the random monkey without cumulative selection." ---------------------- Here is the section from Hardison's 1985 edition, with the narrative passage from pages 123-124 and the computer program from Appendix E. I typed the entire thing in for interested readers. Remember, this program was for a computer from the early 1980s--very primitive! IN "UPON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" BY RICHARD HARDISON, 1985, University Press of America, pp. 123-124: "Taking exception to the view that orderliness could be chance-determined, the anti-evolutionists point out that while the monkeys might type Hamlet in theory, they could not do so in the real world, for the time required would be much too great. Let us imagine an intrepid monkey punching away at a typewriter keyboard. For the monkey to stumble onto just the few words, "To Be Or Not To Be" would require a prohibitive improbability. Mathematical expectancy would lead us to anticipate some 26 to the 13th power number of trials before the litttle rascal prints out the desired sequence and sends his typewriter off for a much-needed ribbon replacement. This number of trials is so large that it is roughly 16 times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the four and one half billion years of the solar system's existence. These enormous numbers apply for just the first 13 letters of Hamlet's siloloquy, and for every additional letter, the odds against continued success grow by leaps and bounds. More significant still is the fact that producing Hamlet is child's play when compared with constructing the human eye or inventing the process of reproduction. Rather discouraging. However, this just isn't the way evolution works. To the contrary, nature keeps the successes and discards the failures. The gains are perpetuated, so to continue the typewriter analogy, when our simian friend happens upon a T, that letter is kept and he goes on randomly typing until he strikes an O, which in turn is retained. And so on. What then are the chances of arriving at the opening line of Hamlet's question with this scheme of modified randomness? At first glance, this may seem the kind of problem that is not suited to calculation (since one end of the distribution curve is infinite) but it is possible, using a simple formula that is proved by calculus and infinite geometric series, to arrive at the theoretical number of trials that would be expected (338), and it is also possible to program a computer to test the calculations empirically. Let us have the computer randomize alphabet selection until a T is drawn. Then it will be programmed to do the same for the O and continue accordingly for the desired 13 letters. Interested readers should consult APPENDIX E for a print out of the "Basic" program that will perform this test of empirical probability ten successive times. When running the program through a home computer 1000 times, it developed that an average of 335.2 trials were required in order to produce the sequence of letters "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Small computers do not have perfect random number generators, but the outcome gives reasonable support to the theoretical expectancy of 338. Clearly 338 is a number of vastly different magnitude than the number of seconds that have elapsed in the history of the solar system. Extending this computer program so that it would construct the entire play would be a task of Herculean proportions, but if this were done, the actual writing of the play would require only about four and one half days for the relatively slow home computers of today." THE COMPUTER PROGRAM IN APPENDIX E IN "UPON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" BY RICHARD HARDISON 10 REM 1984 R. HARDISON 11 PRINT "RANDOMIZING ALPHABET" 12 PRINT "WRITE HAMLET, KEEPING" 13 PRINT "SUCCESSES." 14 PRINT :; REM N-COUNTER: # OF TRIALS 15 REM T=COUNTER:REUSE "TO BE" 16 PRINT "SUBROUTINE TO 17 PRINT "RANDOMIZE AND SELECT" 18 PRINT "LETTER" 30 N = 0 40 FOR G = 1 TO 10 50 T = 0 60 GOTO 80 70 X = INT (26 * RND (1)) + 1: RETURN 80 GOSUB 70 90 N = N + 1
ETC.
That seems to be the point of the article is it not? That scientific theories are subject to the vote of the 'elite' in this board (made up of people with phd's in science that never accomplished anything).
Oh really? And how can one use design to discover things when those things are supposedly random? How can randomness have order? How can science discover order in biology and every other scientific field if nature is the result of random events?
Point well taken, but, in this case, "always" comes pretty darn close to the truth from my observations!
Just read faster...and selectively :-)
Totally wrong. It is evolution that brings nothing to the table. It is evolution that gets thoroughly discredited with every single biological discovery. Let's see, in 1859 Pasteur showed that spontaneous generation does not occur, so much for abiogenesis which it took evolutionists some 10 years to take out of their philosophy. Then in the beginning of the 1900's Mendel's work was rediscovered, it discredited Darwin's UNSCIENTIFIC 'melding' theory and it took evolutionists decades to make up a story to reconcile it. Then in the 1950's DNA was discovered and evolutionists had to run for the hills again but this time it was not so convincing, the creation of new genes is well nigh impossible at random and many scientists said so. Then came the genome project which got rid of the self-serving but totally unscientific claim by evolutionists that all DNA not in genes was junk and just the remnants of mutations and previous species. It showed that genes were nothing, and that the junk was what made organisms tick and furthermore that the mechanisms were so intricate that they could never have arisen at random. Now the evos are trying to say that evolution is the result of some kind of an algorithm which makes everything fit. Well when someone shows me a thinking rock, or a thinking cloud, I will believe that nonsense. Personally I am a million times more likely to believe that a million monkeys with typewriters wrote Shakespeare's plays.
More seriously I don't have a high opinion of intrinsic human nature. I believe strongly that man without God will find himself opressing someone whom he finds an advantage over whether temporary or inherent. And justifying it to himself and others on moral grounds.
And you think a theist monarch wouldn't???
You are arguing against ad-hoc, self serving interpretations of a moral code. And I agree completely with that. You can come up with a self-serving interpretation of just about any body of moral teachings.
But the important thing is that we both agree we have these inalienable rights.
We agree. But, there are those who don't and they truely want you to be their slave. And you have to be able to answer them when they come up with justifications to prevent you from expressing an opinion or having a gun in the house.
Of course, presenting a well-formed rational justification for why the jack-booted thug should stop pulling my books out of the bookcase (and by the way let me get dressed too 'cuz it's cold now that you've broken in the window) is always a difficult project. :-)
"Intrinsic human nature" will not work because it is not true. They will answer that "intrinsic human nature" is unreliable hence humans must be controlled forgetting all the while they are not a bit better than you.
And this is why we have secure bodies of law. And why secure bodies of law are better than bodies of law that can be interpreted away on a whim, etc. etc.
I think that in the long run societies do evolve, especially when the people are exposed to other ways of structuring society (exposure to history, other cultures, other legal & economic systems, etc.) I must admit that the truths are not really "self-evident"; they must be learned. But western-style capitalism & open societies with secure legal systems that recognize individual rights, are slowly but surely spreading around the world and the alternatives are slowly being driven to extinction; and there's a good reason for that.
The foundation flows from the facts of our basic human nature as thinking beings. If this is not so, then we should expect to see some of these things happen in the future: Radical Islamic states will prosper & grow (not just in isolated, walled-off countries like Taliban Afghanistan), Communism will likewise stage a comeback & thrive in many places, and so will any number of fundamentally different systems. I doubt that will happen. (I guess there's a falsifiable prediction for you!)
I watched my first child in the process of "discovering" herself in the first few weeks after she was born. I will just say it was amazing to see her find her hands and arms and figure out their uses.
Also, I did some volunteer teaching at my daughters' grade school from 3rd to 5th grades (brought in my telescope and we looked at sunspots and discussed the solar cycle, etc.). I was very impressed not only with their curiosity, but the insight involved in their questions.
Yes children have great perspicacity. That is why aside from the question of whether ID or evolution is correct or not, the attitude of the board is absolutely wrong. Thinking should always be encouraged, it should never be put down.
It appears that not all here would agree - ha ha. But that is the essence of a good debate - is it not?
While I'm not a biologist, molecular or otherwise, the more I learn, the more compelling I find ID to be. I guess you may need to take more of an engineering approach rather than a traditional research biologist approach, but I haven't heard anything here that tells me that this doesn't work. Even those with clearly vested interests in an evolutionary approach make disparaging remarks, but haven't said why it doesn't work.
Easily. Start here and iterate the bibliography operator. William Feller's books may be of assistance.
With regard to the speculation about the age of the pyramids and which came first, I hasten to note that several Geologists have dated the Sphinx prior to the date given by Egyptologists. I'm not suggesting they were built by aliens, but that there may have been an earlier civilization or some event that caused the appearance of great age.
Mainstream Egyptologists reacted with total disbelief when it was proposed that the famous Sphinx was much older than the 4th Dynasty [2500 BC]
This tentative estimate [7000 to 5000 BC] is probably a minimum date; given that weathering rates may proceed non-linearly (the deeper the weathering is, the slower it may progress due to the fact that it is "protected' by the overlying material), the possibility remains open that the initial carving of the Great Sphinx may be even earlier than 9,000 years ago
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