You guys who freak out about "Creationists" crack me up..
Posted on 02/06/2002 6:26:41 AM PST by aculeus
The Ohio Board of Education met yesterday to decide who will be given the opportunity argue for and against a new theory of the origin of life next month, when a panel meets to debate whether it should be included in the state's science curriculum.
One representative of ID will be a trained molecular and cell biologist named Jonathan Wells, who holds a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley. Wells is a fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a main promulgator of ID, whose proponents feel that "Darwinism has problems with it," according to its spokesperson Mark Edwards. "At the basic level, what's being taught is simply not accurate," he went on, "so we just feel like students should be able to know this. That's fundamental to getting an education."
To many scientists in Ohio, this sounds like Kansas - and creationism - all over again. (In that state, the Board of Education voted last year to reinstate teaching evolution, after dropping it two years earlier.) But proponents of ID maintain that this time is different.
"What they're trying to do is get [creationism] in through the backdoor of a science curriculum," charges Ohio State University paleoanthropologist Jeffrey McKee in a BioMedNet News report [LINK here] out today. "They came up with a new name, and say silly things like 'Well we don't know who the designer is.' But it's just a thinly veiled attempt to get creationism taught in a science classroom."
The semantics are important, because US federal courts have ruled it unconstitutional to teach creationism in science classes, as a violation of the separation of church and state. The chairman of the Ohio Senate Education Committee, state Senator Robert Gardner, maintains ID is still a constitutional issue, even though it does not specify the possessor of the creative intelligence.
"There's probably a place for [discussing] higher intelligence," he said. "But that's probably a history of religion class as opposed to a science curriculum, which is based on fact."
Two years ago, an independent report found Ohio one of 12 states that won the grade of F in its effort to teach evolution. Its current curriculum does not mention the word evolution at all, says Lynn Elfner, who directs the Ohio Academy of Science. Instead, it makes references to "change over time," which is "nonsense," Elfner told BioMedNet News. "The wallpaper on the wall changes over time. My shoes change over time," he said. "Change over time says nothing about evolution."
A 45-member panel of volunteers, including scientists, educators, and non-scientist members of the public, began revising standards for the teaching of evolution, prompted by the unfavorable rating, under orders from the Ohio state legislature. Oddly, the effort provoked some members of the 19-member Board of Education to propose including intelligent design rather than upgrading the teaching of Darwinism.
This is not the first time Ohio has tried to introduce ID into its classrooms, says Elfner. Two years ago, Board member Deborah Owens-Fink tried and failed to include intelligent design as one of the state's 12th grade competencies.
The Board is schecduled to vote on the new standards in December.
"I think we'll win this one," McKee said, "mainly because we have the truth on our side. We all saw what happened in Kansas."
Which is another lie repeated again by the leftist press. The state of Kansas never banned teaching evolution, but rather allowed schools to teach creationism and evolution as they pleased. In other words, it left the decision up to the local school boards.
Do you mean evolution?
FYI, Darwin had as much to do with evolution as Benjamin Franklin had to with electric lights.
They both noted *something* interesting.
Franklin discovered that lightning was electricity and Darwin discovered that isolated families of plants and animals change to fill nitches in their environments.
That is all.
Nonsense. You omit the key concept of variation and selection. And numerous books detailing the evidence.
It's a bit like talking about Newton without mentioning the inverse square law.
Too bad more of them haven't bothered to read up on the human genome project. They would learn something new, like Creationism is impossible.
Is this person saying that higher intelligence is not a fact? It sure reads that way to me!
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nods of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record." (Gould, Stephen J. "The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 181) So, because there is no evidence, Gould accepts the theory and comes up with the absurd idea of punctuated equilibria (evolution happened so fast there is no evidence)
It violates history in regard to mutations. Evolution is based on the idea that mutations are massive and beneficial, but human history shows mutations are overwhelming detrimential.
Dr. Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box) shows complex organism are have too many interdepental or organs and functions to have evolved from lower organisms. Creatures in the duckbilled platypus could not have evolved. The idea that complexity of the human eye could have evolved is "absurd in the highest degree."
Evoluton violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states ALL physical systems,including biological processes, go from order to disorder, use up available energy, decay and die. The sun doesn't change that fact. Raw energy from the sun increase etropy and causes disorder. The built in mechanisms that allow organisms to store and convert energy could not have evolved from lower life forms since the Second Law would have nipped evolution in the earliest stages.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.