"Billion," not "million," was meant. Here's a timeline including Schopf's now-disputed data point:
Posted on 07/15/2003 12:23:23 AM PDT by Schnucki
(AgapePress) - It's being called "Jayson Blair-style reporting." CNN is being accused of fabricating a report about scientific critics of Darwinism who recently testified before the Texas State Board of Education.
At last week's hearing, two representatives from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute urged the board to correct factual errors in biology textbooks and require that books discuss flaws in evolutionary theory. Discovery Institute's Dr. John West says CNN reported the hearing as a battle between "nasty religious fundamentalists" who wanted to inject the Bible into science textbooks and "enlightened scientists" who wanted to keep that from happening.
But West says not one person who testified before the board advocated creationism, Intelligent Design theory, or including religion in biology textbooks.
"This doesn't even rise to the level of journalism. Really, it's sheer fantasy," West says. "They had a story that they wanted to tell, which was religion versus science, and when the facts didn't fit that, they just made it up. This is just atrocious."
West, who is associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, says the cable news network described critics of neo-Darwinism who testified at the hearing as people who believe that "the Bible takes precedence over science."
But West says the two Institute fellows who testified simply urged the board of education to use textbooks that cover both the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory.
"Apparently CNN thinks that when it comes to something that's debated, their viewers should only hear one point of view," he says. "This is blatant bias -- but bias is too meek a word for it. It was invention, it was fantasy -- and they were making up the news."
According to West, after CNN aired their taped report from Texas, it conducted a live one-on-one interview with a liberal law professor who attacked scientists who are raising questions about the biology textbooks.
West is encouraging people to call CNN and producers of the show Live from the Headlines to voice their dissatisfaction with correspondent Ed Lavendera's story.
No surprise here, evolutionists have been using lies to promote their theory since the first day of publication of "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life".
This, for instance, is a rebuttal to Tamzek's arguments from banded iron formations, pyrites, uraninites, etc. that the early atmosphere was anoxic.
Canil (2002) actually found that vanadium redox states in peridotite-bearing mantle xenoliths and Archean cratons imply that Earth's mantle was just as oxidized in the Archean as it is today109. The paper concluded that, "such reduced [atmospheric] components [CO and H2] are not supported by results of this and many other studies, which imply a scenario of Archean mantle redox not unlike that of today"109That's cafeteria "science" right there. Find one guy doing one study in one mineral, one data point, and announce it as the final resolution of the matter, thus rebutting who-knows-how-many studies in three minerals. And I don't see where a lack of carbon monoxide and free hydrogen necessarily implies free oxygen. Is it really "intuitively obvious" or is Luskin just hoping I'll assume so? Color me suspicious. Already, Luskin isn't looking good and I'm just passin' through here.
In the section on the Cambrian, Luskin echoes Wells in jumping in with the usual quote salad designed to make people think even evolutionists believe that everything appeared on Jan 1, 500 mya. I don't like that, either.
Luskin then says that Tamzek merely quotes Miller and Miller really doesn't do much. My reading of Miller is at odds. He has harsh words for Wells and for Well's depiction of the Cambrian.
The Late Precambrian and Early Cambrian fossil record of the metazoan phyla shows the same pattern as that of class- and order-level taxa in the Phanerozoic. Near the origin of these higher-level taxonomic categories, the boundaries between the taxa become blurred and fossils become difficult to classify. Moving back in time toward their presumed point of diversion from a common ancestor, organisms belonging to separate phyla converge in morphology. Several Early Cambrian organisms possess morphologies that bear similarities to more than one phylum, making their placement in existing phyla a matter of dispute. This classification problem is resolved either by erecting new phyla or by broadening definitions to include the new forms.What he's saying and nobody is answering is that bin-gaming creationists (I include ID-ers here, of course) ignore the classification difficulties and the tendency of the binned objects to resemble each other as you go back in time until you don't know what bin a thing belongs in. This means Wells is wrong. Miller is specifically saying that the late Precambrian and early Cambrian sediments show evolution. He or Tamzek might as well have mentioned that Morton explains the same point with more examples.
Moving on in Luskin:
The bottom line is that the gene duplication explanation still leaves the details to the dice, and this pathway definitely hasn't been experimentally verified. All Espiritu et al. have found are protein homologies, and then inferred a vague ancestral pathway of gene creation. This explanation for the origin of real evolutionary novelty lacks a reliable mechanism and is little better than hand waving.I would say Luskin is doing the hand-waving here if he still doesn't believe in gene duplication, or that it means anything. ID is lagging mainstream genetics by about 40 years on this point because of what it doesn't want to be true.
The section on Archaeopteryx is such a groaner that I hardly know where to begin. Archaeopteryx looks at least as much like a dromaeosaur as it does like a bird. In itself it's almost a perfect intermediate. Here's Tamzek on Wells.
Archaeopteryx has long been something that creationists have felt the need to deal with somehow, as it is a clear fossil intermediate between two vertebrate classes. However, creationist claims have been refuted so often and so thoroughly regarding Archaeopteryx that very little remains for Wells to do except raise a smoke screen over whether or not Archaeopteryx was the actual species through which the genes of the last common ancestor of modern birds passed, or whether it was a closely related side-branch. Either way, it is clear evidence that a transition between the classes occurred.Here's Luskin on Tamzek:
Tamzek claims that Wells' only gripe is that Archaeopteryx is not a true ancestor of birds, however Wells' criticisms go far beyond that. Wells notes that the geological layer which bore Caudipteryx and Protoarchaeopteryx radiometrically dates to about 120 Ma41, while Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, is said to be about 150 Ma42--and even more modern looking birds appear soon after. In fact, the ordering of the fossil record has led some to suggest that these Dromeosaurs are not dinosaurs, but flightless birds descended from previous birds, such as Archeaopteryx.43 Other alleged even more bird-like theropods, such as Velociraptor do not appear until some 70 m.y. after Archaeopteryx92. Later in the avian fossil record, the extremely rapid appearance of the major bird groups, about 70-80 Ma, preceded by a long period where bird fossils are few and far between36 has been termed "bird evolution's big bang"44 by some paleontologists who say that birds evolved "explosively"44.The actual arguments given here aren't very good. Fossils mostly appear in the order you'd expect, but they don't absolutely have to because the fossil record is too spotty. The main thing is, neither Wells nor Luskin has actually addressed why Archaeopteryx looks just as much like a dinosaur as it does a bird. If you don't do that, you might as well admit you have no answer for Archaeopteryx.The alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds thus appear about 30 million years after the birds themselves, and we have no fossils documenting the diversification of the major bird groups. When considering the hypothesis that birds descended from dinosaurs, how sure can we therefore be sure that there really were reptilian ancestors of birds? From what, exactly, if anything, did birds evolve? Perhaps the weak constraints of evolutionary theory allow a hypothetical tree to still be constructed, but Wells is correct to assert that, "immense stretches of time are left with no fossil evidence to support cladistic phylogenies" (Icons, pg. 120). It is this lack of fossils which provides the basis for the Wells' critique.
I now doubt I'll spend any more time on this turkey of an article. You don't have to eat the whole omelet to know it's got a bad egg. Out for the night.
No, have parents be fully responsible by paying for education too. Welfare is welfare!
I find it more thorough than Tamzek's work.
I'm going to zoom out of the details to recap for the confused lurker and the confused Heartlander at this point. The lead article cites the Discovery PR tank claiming CNN lied its butt off about a meeting in Texas over science textbooks. It was then pointed out that Knight-Ridder and AP are saying exactly the same things as CNN, casting further doubts upon what should already have been very dubious.
Somehow, Heartlander decided that a statement by President Bush on human origins trumps that embarrassment. Well, maybe it was just time to distract and evade. (I'd like to also note that Bush's statement, while inaccurate when applied to the big picture, hardly makes him a YEC. I hold out hope that a man of obvious intelligence with an Ivy-League education is not so incredibly deluded. Yes, I put some Bush-isms in my pseudo-quote, but that was just to make it look authentic. My bet remains that he's smarter than that.)
That fallacy pointed out, Heartlander "rebuts" by posting a Jonathan Wells article in which Wells grades textbooks on whether they omit things Wells doesn't like because they support evolution. This foolish quest of Wells wouldn't allow science textbooks to talk about much at all in biology, really, but that's not my point for now.
While this is the very kind of thing that people were presumably arguing in that textbook meeting, it and your previous argument ignore that Discovery's claims about CNN's reporting seem totally unfounded. The main subject and point of this thread thus appears to have been conceded for a lack of any support whatsoever.
As for rebuttals of the rebuttals to Wells (Luskin), let me do the same thing and point out how the discussion is going. Wells doesn't like evolution, so he doesn't like the evidence for evolution, so he doesn't like textbooks to cite that evidence.
So he writes rebuttals to experiments. He writes rebuttals to fossils. Everything he doesn't like, he finds something to say, says it, and wraps it all up in a book.
Well, he was desperate to find something to say about everything, so the book is a poorly thought-out, poorly written grab-bag and people find lots and lots and lots and lots of things wrong with it. They say so.
Enter Luskin. He doesn't like evolution either. He likes it that Wells's book seems to make evolution go away for him. He doesn't like all the bad things people say about Wells's book.
He takes the Tamzek article and goes through it icon by icon, finding something to say on every point. That's the important thing. At the end, you have to say, "All done! Nothing left there at all! Nothing!"
He cites minority evolutionist opinions like those of Alan Feduccia:
A similar thing happens with Schopf, whom Luskin cites as follows:
- Alan Feduccia who opposes the idea that birds are descended from dinosaurs and instead argues that birds are descended from non-dinosaur archosaurs (a taxon that includes dinosaurs) is often quoted by evolution deniers. Feduccia is a qualified scientist and should not be just dismissed, but his views are in an extreme minority within the scientific community. It is simply bad reasoning for the evolution deniers to use Feduccia's writing disagreeing with conventional ideas of bird evolution while ignoring the many experts that disagree with him.
This site1 quotes Feduccia on Archaeopteryx:
Was Archaeopteryx a feathered dinosaur? Dr. Alan Feduccia, a world authority on birds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an evolutionist himself, said: "Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that."Notice the author is citing Feduccia's conclusion, and not his evidence. There is no mention that that his opinion is a minority opinion. Feduccia's peers in the field of bird evolution are "authorities" too. In short this creationist is saying that Feduccia is an authority and that he says that birds are not descended from dinosaurs, therefore birds are not descended from dinosaurs. It is a classic "argument from authority." It is also very inconsistent. Feduccia also says that evolution occurs, so if this argument is to be followed to its logical conclusion, this creationist must accept the evolution of birds from non-birds! One could also cite many more authorities that say birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs. This is why one should not pick and choose authorities. If Feduccia does turn out to be correct and his views become established within the scientific community, then the evolution deniers will probably become fond of quoting what Kevin Padian and other proponents of birds being descended from dinosaurs had to say about Feduccia's views.
Schopf notes that the Swaziland Supergroup (~3.2 Ga) contains inorganic carbon, "indicating that carbon dioxide, and not methane, may have been the dominant form of atmospheric carbon at this point in time"16Schopf has become a somewhat controversial figure for his claim of having found 3.5 million-year old cyanobacteria fossils in Australian chert. Nevertheless, anyone who has read his book Cradle of Life knows that he utterly and totally disagrees with Luskin and Wells on early oxygen. Luskin's approach to Schopf mirrors his approach to science in general. He wades into a sea of contrary data, after three hours finds a shell that he likes, and adds it to his collection of what "real science" says.
The funny thing is that the Holy Warriors see no problem in arguing this way. They're sure that it's a Holy War against a Satanic foe and that both sides are doing the same thing. Actually, they've benefitted by flying under the radar of mainstream science, which has simply been too busy doing real science to pay attention to the wild claims of a collection of crackpots and yahoos. That's starting to change under press coverage like that provided by CNN. No wonder the Discovery Institute is yelling foul!"
"outcome-based science," in which the data is culled for supporting evidence, and the refuting evidence is ignored, isn't science at all. It's a propoganda program, and as such should be studied in the context of Public Relations, not science.
The first thing anyone should discover about the Discovery Institute is that they're a PR "War Room" for stealth creationism.
"Billion," not "million," was meant. Here's a timeline including Schopf's now-disputed data point:
Oh, I agree with you. But the benefit to the nation of privatised schools would be so great that I would be willing to pay the 10K to make it happen.
· CNN asserted as fact that intelligent design theory, which is a scientific theory, is the same thing as creationism, which it isn’t.
Intelligent Design Creationism· CNN asserted as fact that supporters of intelligent design are trying to get the Texas Board to insert the theory into textbooks. This is completely false.
"The Institute’s goal is to inform policymakers and citizens about factual errors in how some textbooks cover evolutionary theory and to encourage textbooks to include information about both the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory. The 41-page preliminary textbook review Discovery Institute distributed to the Board of Education focused on factual errors and the need to include additional information about four issues—the Miller-Urey experiment, the Peppered Moth experiments, the Cambrian Explosion, and Haeckel’s embryos. The only places that the report broached the subject of intelligent design was in reference to two textbooks that already discuss intelligent design theory. The textbook review noted how these two textbooks discussed intelligent design in a biased and highly inaccurate manner. While the Institute is not advocating that textbooks must cover intelligent design theory, it does believe that textbooks that already mention intelligent design should cover the theory accurately and fairly. Again, the Institute’s chief concern is that evolutionary theory be treated fully and accurately in textbooks, NOT that intelligent design be included."
“On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth."What would happen? Be consistent…
Next you ridicule Wells. (I will let the gentleman defend himself seeing that he already has…):
Alan Gishlick and the NCSE: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing New on the Icons of Evolution
“Critics Rave Over Icons of Evolution: A Response to Published Reviews” (June 12, 2002)
“Inherit the Spin: Darwinists Answer ‘Ten Questions’ with Evasions and Falsehoods” (January 15, 2002)
“Desperately Defending the Peppered Myth: A Response to Bruce Grant” (October 2, 2002)
“Moth-eaten Statistics: A Reply to Kenneth R. Miller” (April 16, 2002)
“There You Go Again: A Response to Kenneth R. Miller” (April 9, 2002)
And textbooks are slowly correcting their errors:
Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine, has dropped the peppered moth icon.Molecular Biology of the Cell, has dumped at least two icons: Haeckel's embryos and Miller's origin-of-life experiment.
Did CNN fabricate and misrepresent? Yes
Are you consistent with your ridicule of others? No.
Has Wells addressed your issues? Maybe, read and see.
Are textbooks correcting errors that Wells pointed out? Yes.
Now I will close with a quote from Wells:
"It seems that I am guilty of the one unforgivable sin in modern biology: I am openly critical of Darwinian evolution. In Icons I pointed out that the best-known “evidences” for Darwin’s theory have been exaggerated, distorted or even faked. I argued that a theory that systematically distorts the evidence is not good empirical science--perhaps not even science at all. In fact, Darwinism has all the trappings of a secular religion. Its priests forgive a multitude of sins in their postulants--manipulating data, overstating results, presenting assumptions as though they were conclusions--but never the sin of disbelief."
Argue for constitutionally limited government all you want. That's what we're ALL doing here. But join in with the liberal/marxist/communist Democrats? Never! That's where I draw the line.
You agree with CNN - liberals !
Free Republic was never intended to be a liberal debating society. It has a purpose and goals. The long term goal is to promote the cause of conservatism and to work for a return to the constitutionally limited republican form of government as established by our founders. If these are not your goals then I don't want you here. I am defending my first amendment right to freedom of association. I only want to associate myself and FR with people who will work with me to achieve my goals.
Evolution is a comprehension - thinking - knowing liberal (( lies )) from conservative (( truth )) problem ... you have it big - total --- always time !
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