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.
In fact, elsewhere I've already posted some (well-known and universally accepted) data on the important energetic interactions between DNA nearest neighbor pairs.Ah, that was you? I was going to ask you if anyone had done a statistical analysis of such patterns! I've read elsewhere that DNA can twist in several different conformations - in fact this page right here. David Ussery seems to be a specialist in this. But I don't see anything specific at his pages that deal with longer patterns on the letters imposed by the van der Waals forces - but he does seem to be saying that the vdW forces can push the DNA helix into one of 3 different shapes - A, B, or Z.Does anyone know if these interactions affect the base sequence? Not as far as I know. In fact, after posting on this subject previously, I've been tempted to run some calculations on the human genome to see if there's evidence that nearest neighbor interactions may indeed have affected the sequence. Anything for a paper, what? But to say that they categorically do not affect the sequence, and then infer from that a designer, is heaping an invalid deduction on a fabricated result.
I think the statistical sequence study would be a fascinating study!
Oops, I guess I should've just read a little further before posting... :-)
Clever? It rotates a flexible whip for propulsion! Why doesn't it rotate a proper 3-bladed propeller? That part of the flagellum has got to be very inefficient."More so than other motors, the flagellum resembles a machine designed by a human."
I can't think of a human designed motor that works by this mechanism. Would that we were so clever! We had the F1-ATPase mechanism staring us in the face for 20 years, and didn't see it.
Surprisingly, you forgot to answer my question in the 2nd part of my post:Of course not. There is no data for punk-eek. Just nice sounding hypothesis and lots of crayon work. Funny that every evolutionist with a set of crayons thinks him/herself a scientist! -me-
Who said I was a scientist?
Thanks for making my point - drawings are not scientific evidence. Anyone can draw anything, that does not make it a scientific fact.
Who said I was a scientist? I'm a computer programmer. What do you do for a living? I'm guessing widely published & respected historian of science...
Also, dismissing weaker bonds as less significant may be foolish for another reason. This from Trends Biochem Sci 1994;19:526-9
How much is a stabilizing bond worth?
Sharp KA, Englander SW.It is commonly supposed that the contribution of a bond to protein or nucleic acid stability is equal to the in situ stability of the bond itself. This is not true for the noncovalent bonds that stabilize molecular folding. In general, a bonding interaction contributes a free energy increment to protein or nucleic acid stability that is larger, an enthalpy increment that is smaller, and entropy and heat capacity increments that are more positive than the corresponding bond parameter.
More like some kind of uncontrolable spasm. Over the past year, we've all seen the condition become steadily worse. It's very sad. His keepers probably let him play on the internet as some kind of therapy. One has sympathy for him, naturally, yet I can't help wishing he'd find another website to plague with his involuntary outbursts.
Aaaa, but that was not my answer and you know that too. I find the question irrelevant and really impossible to answer because we do not know what other people believe. We know their work but we do not know their hearts. In addition to which most people keep such things to themselves. It is their work that is relevant to whether evolution is true, not what they believe. Some pretty smart people believe some pretty stupid things outside of their work.
That's why I posed the question which you do not want to answer but is directly connected to whether evolution is true or not:
Seems a very arrogant attitude to me and very uncivilized too. Seems to me also that it would be pretty easy for someone who would be as intelligent as you think yourself to be to in a civil manner refute a ridiculous statements. But then what the heck, I am not an evolutionist so what do I know eh?
Gee, guess Homer wasn't a 21st century scientist.
And you know what I meant - we know quite well that quantity does not equal quality. Take Thomas Edison, he discovered many things. Take Gregor Mendel, he discovered only one thing. Who has influenced science more??????????????
The current issue of WIRED magazine (December 2002) has an article called "The Pope's Astrophysicist."
It's quite an interesting article, and I'd post exerpts from it but it's not up on the WIRED website yet.
Anyway, the astrophysicist of the title is Father George Coyne, who conducts field work at the University of Arizona and the Kitt Peak facility with the Vatican Observatory Research Group. The group has "13 professional astronomers and cosmologists, all of them Jesuits. The group specializes in fields like galaxy formation, and, to quote from their latest report, 'the dynamics of inflationary universes with positive spatial curvature'."
Father Coyne is quoted in the article as saying, "Nothing we learn about the universe threatens our faith. It only enriches it."
All in all, the article presents a very positive depiction of the Catholic Church with regard to modern scientific research, and it makes a certain poster's observations about Junior's lapsed Catholicism seem way off base.
... you reply adding the part in bold
"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
First of all note that he ascribes totally material causes to evolution. Secondly one must ask is 'breathed' by whom. It seems to imply God, but note that he does not mention God which I think a Christian would have. He leaves the door open to a materialistic explanation later on which he is unwilling to talk about at this time because he wants to deceive his public regarding his religious beliefs as the following amply shows:
"P.S. Would you advise me to tell Murray [his publisher] that my book is not more un-orthodox than the subject makes inevitable. That I do not discuss the origin of man. That I do not bring in any discussion about Genesis, &c, &c., and only give facts, and such conclusions from them as seem to me fair.
Or had I better say nothing to Murray, and assume that he cannot object to this much unorthodoxy, which in fact is not more than any Geological Treatise which runs sharp counter to Genesis."
From: Daniel J. Boorstein, The Discoverers, page 475.
That he was deceptive about his religious views in the Origins is beyond doubt and that is why he waited until his views had gained ground that he went full front against Christianity in the 'Descent of Man' by finally saying what he meant all along - that man had descended from apes, that man was not specifically created by God. We also must add to his deception the quote below from Alamo-Girl's post:
"It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
So from all the above, the case is pretty solid that both evolution is wholly materialistic and that Darwin was willfully deceiving his public about his religious views in the Origins.
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