Supreme Court Won't Hear Case on Teaching Evolution

Fox News & Associated Press ^ | 07 January 2002 | AP Staff

[PatrickHenry]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court declined Monday to be drawn into a debate over the teaching of evolution in America's public schools.

The refusal is a victory for schools that require teachers to instruct on the subject even if the teacher disagrees with the scientific theory.

[ThinkPlease]

Your attitude is most unscientific. "Peer reviewed" journals publish that which repeats academic dogma or fashion; they will rarely publish views challenging academic dogma. In 1995, for example, tenured professors of sociology would ingratiate themselves to their peers, by standing up at faculty meetings, and bragging of not having read Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.

Welcome to the physical sciences, you'll find that we're a little more picky than most. Here's a short list of new ideas that either made it or didn't into scientific journals. According to you, they shouldn't have made it there: Quantized redshifts(Tifft et al), non-cosmological redshifts(Arp, Burbidge et al), localization of Gamma Ray Bursts(many), Punctuated Equilibrium (Gould et al), and many, many more. If science were as you say it is, we'd still be waiting for lightning to strike a tree so that we could get fire.

[ThinkPlease]

The claim I make is this: design is always inferred, it is never a direct intuition. We don’t get into the mind of designers and thereby attribute design. Rather we look at effects in the physical world that seem to have been designed and from those features infer to a designing intelligence."

A pretty quote, but so far they've done a poor job of trying to show us how they plan on going about it.

[PatrickHenry]

... and many, many more ...

Continental drift, black holes, the big bang ...

[tortoise]

Go read Dembski's work, then come back and tell me why he's wrong! You can find lots of his work here.

I actually went and read a couple of Dembski's papers and articles on intelligent design at the link you posted. The problem with Dembski is that he doesn't actually prove anything. His primary tool is "proof" by analogy or anecdote, which is absolutely worthless with respect to supporting his position. There are also a number of subtle non-sequiturs in his arguments. I did not find a single real information theoretic argument; I only found vaguely related assertions that appear to be made from an invalid premise (though I clearly get the impression that he doesn't actually understand information theory).

Overall, I was underwhelmed. Is there anyone else who does a better job of constructing an intelligent design argument than Dembski? Dembski talks an okay story, but his papers are full of obvious holes to my keen eyes, too numerous to itemize really. It reads like it was written by a salesman rather than a scientist, a distinction that would be lost on people not used to critically evaluating these things. If my clients asked me to evaluate that paper as a proposal of a new concept, I would give it a "no go". (I used to work as a consultant for VCs evaluating new technology proposals that were too steeped in scientific or pseudo-scientific banter for them to get a good feel for the legitimacy of it, a fun job since I got to put people through the intellectual wringer to separate the charlatans and kooks from the bright guys with original ideas.)

[ThinkPlease]

Off to go watch the Vikings get their butts whooped by the Ravens, be back at halftime, when the score gets out of control.

[VadeRetro]

Crickets chirping in time with the temperature seem to me a purely natural creation of information.

Actually, the running down of the universe has created all kinds of information. The early universe we see from the Cosmic Microwave Background is a diffuse, almost perfectly even gas of a few very simple elements, mostly hydrogen. Not much information there, just tremendous potential energy waiting for gravity and nuclear chemistry to create galaxies, stars, and planets.

[RadioAstronomer]

I work on the bleeding edges of information theory in the real world

I'm truly impressed! I have been reading a book called "SPIKES Exploring the neural code" on exactly that, information theory related to how the nervous system encode sensory signals. Cool stuff!

[Non-Sequitur]

bump

[gore3000]

It would have been more interesting if he'd been trying to teach Intelligent Design theory along side Evolution. That's a court case I'm still waiting on.. it's only a matter of time..

It ain't gonna happen.

The SC is full of atheists with no morals. It is time for conservatives to realize that those 9 old fools are our enemy and the enemy of the Constitution we hold dear.

[HiTech RedNeck]

The way the SCOTUS addressed it, it looks like they wouldn't care if the school required teachers to teach that rabbits all hopped out of hollow logs, if there was no law to the contrary. The only thing verboten to be propounded is "religion."

[gore3000]

"I have absolutly no problem with the Intelligent Design theory being taught in school, as long as they teach the details of how it works."

Quite funny! It is the evolutionists which cannot tell how their theory works at all. They cannot tell how life arose from dead matter, how tens of thousands of new genes can arise by mere random chance, why they cannot find fossils of intermediate species and a hundred other questions which their phony theory cannot explain.

[gore3000]

"I've been seeing the creationist's idea of what "honest look" means

...and I have been seeing on these pages what evolutionists call freedom of speech and thought. Like the Communists, it only applies to them and it is okay to fire, kill or silence anyone who disagrees with them.

[mrustow]

Here's a short list of new ideas that either made it or didn't into scientific journals.

Well, did they or didn't they?

The one item on your list that sounded familiar was "punctuated equilibrium (Gould et al)." That's not Stephen Jay Gould and his theory that killed evolution, in order to save it, is it?

[Nebullis]

The AP story doesn't go into the details, but I did find some on Time.com . Apparently, "in a six-page "Position Paper on the Teaching of Evolution," LeVake pledges to teach evolution while also taking "an honest look at the difficulties and inconsistencies of the theory.""

This, at face value, seems reasonable and not sufficient for demotion. However, upon closer inspection, it's clear that the difficulties and inconsistencies are not scientific but run-of-the-mill creationist arguments.

"LeVake lists examples of irreducible complexity in nature for which, he says, Darwin has no explanation, such as the eggshell and the woodpecker's tongue. LeVake cites "the amazing lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. There has never been a creature discovered that could be considered a logical intermediate of any two major classes of animals or plants." "

[tortoise]

I have been reading a book called "SPIKES Exploring the neural code" on exactly that, information theory related to how the nervous system encode sensory signals. Cool stuff!

By coincidence, I put out a short paper today on the encoding of audio sensory data for use in induction networks, a behavior that is closely analagous to the way sensory data is encoded for the CNS. This was some tangential work to my normal area, though.

A lot of people don't realize that the mathematical descriptions of learning and intelligence are also found in information theory, with many important developments in the last couple years in that regard, and is among the many things that make that field interesting. Most people aren't aware to the extent a great many very interesting things can be proven in information that most people assume aren't provable. The mathematical toolset given by information theory is immensely powerful and it really starts to make you see the world in a different way after you've been immersed in it for a while. Definitely good stuff.

[mrustow]

To tell a teacher that he must dogmatically teach the theory of evolution, and remain silent about the theory's scientific problems, sounds authoritarian, superstitious, and irrational (cowardly, too). Such an attitude is the opposite of the scientific temper.

[gore3000]

" Leave those schools to the atheists."

You are right, we do not have "neutral" schools, we have atheist schools. This is nowhere in the Constitution. In fact atheism is itself a religion and should not be allowed in schools at all. If the schools are not "preventing the free exercise thereof" (the part which all the commies, atheists and the SC forget about the First Amendment) then we need a new dictionary definition of the word "free".

[PatrickHenry]

It may be that some new scientific theory will one day supersede evolution. We are all open-minded when it comes to evidence and logical argument. But so far there are no contenders; and evolution stands alone. Creationism -- and it's little sister, Intelligent Design -- are non-starters.

[VadeRetro]

...and I have been seeing on these pages what evolutionists call freedom of speech and thought.

In science, there are right and wrong answers.

[gore3000]

So far, we've received no information from the future.

The point of science is indeed to predict what will happen under a certain set of circumstances. If evolution were a science it would be able to predict how species would develop, but of course it cannot do that because it is not science, it is bull duty.