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Ohio's Board of Education has been reviewing the teaching of Intelligent Design, partly in response to two bills introduced in the House and Senatethat would ban "naturalist bias" and require "alternatives" to evolution in biology classes.

The Dispatch has long been a forum for cr-evo debates, with numerous guest columnists and letters local OSU faculty (split), ministers, local Federal judges (anti-evo) and others, as well as weekly science columns on biology and geology (pro-evo).

1 posted on 02/18/2002 4:59:53 AM PST by cracker
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To: crevo_list
FYI, Ohio's capital city paper weighs in on the recent Crevo dust-up in the state science curriculum.
2 posted on 02/18/2002 5:01:44 AM PST by cracker
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To: cracker
"The scientific method consists of observing the natural world OK and drawing conclusions about the causes of what is observed. OK again These conclusions, or theories, are subject to testing No, they are not, evolution from one species to another - Macro Evolution, has never been tested and revision Yes, the only observable changes in the Theory of Evolution, are the constant changes in the theory itself as additional facts are discovered that either bolster These supposed supports get front page coverage or undermine No coverage for these, or else a Clintonesque escuse is used, ie: "those previous statements are no longer operative" the conclusions and theories. Scientific truth, such as it is, is constantly evolving You can say that again! as new theories replace or modify old ones in the light of new facts Or what passes for facts .
3 posted on 02/18/2002 6:11:33 AM PST by keithtoo
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To: cracker
No one outside of the willfully obstinate questions the idea that new life forms evolved from older ones, a process conclusively illustrated in biology and the fossil record.

We've got a whole lot of these folks on this forum...

4 posted on 02/18/2002 6:31:20 AM PST by Junior
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To: cracker
No one outside of the willfully obstinate questions the idea that new life forms evolved from older ones, a process conclusively illustrated in biology and the fossil record.,

Micro-evolution is what is being refered to here, adaptation to change WITHIN a species. There is no fossil record of a species evolving into a different species, known a macro-evolution. The mixing of these two ideas is what seems to cause the fevered debates concerning evolution.
6 posted on 02/18/2002 7:04:02 AM PST by ThinkLikeWaterAndReeds
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To: cracker
Yay! Another crevo thread!
7 posted on 02/18/2002 7:26:33 AM PST by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: cracker;**Ohio;*Education News
Bump List
13 posted on 02/18/2002 9:47:06 AM PST by Free the USA
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To: cracker
Part of the famous "list-o-links" (so the creationists don't get to start each new thread from ground zero).

01: Site that debunks virtually all of creationism's fallacies. Excellent resource.
02: Creation "Science" Debunked.
03: Creationi sm and Pseudo Science. Familiar cartoon then lots of links.
04: The SKEPTIC annotated bibliography. Amazingly great meta-site!
05: The Evidence for Human Evolution. For the "no evidence" crowd.
06: Massi ve mega-site with thousands of links on evolution, creationism, young earth, etc..
07: Another amazing site full of links debunking creationism.
08: Creationism and Pseudo Science. Great cartoon!
09: Glenn R. Morton's site about creationism's fallacies. Another jennyp contribution.
11: Is Evolution Science?. Successful PREDICTIONS of evolution (Moonman62).
12: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution. On point and well-written.
13: Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions. A creationist nightmare!
14: DARWIN, FULL TEXT OF HIS WRITINGS. The original ee-voe-lou-shunist.

The foregoing was just a tiny sample. So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review: The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 15].

18 posted on 02/18/2002 11:57:03 AM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: cracker
Just as with gravity, evolution is a fact.

Just as with gravity(santa claus), evolution(Easter bunny) is a fact(real)...tooth fairy(nea) too!

26 posted on 02/20/2002 2:57:20 AM PST by f.Christian
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To: cracker
reject evolution as pseudoscience
32 posted on 02/20/2002 12:46:57 PM PST by Khepera
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To: cracker
This article adds no evidence to the crevo debate. It is simply an attempt to shout down creationists. When actual evidence is presented, I'll take a look at it.
48 posted on 02/20/2002 1:17:52 PM PST by Ahban
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To: cracker
The scientific approach expands knowledge about the natural world; the religious approach impedes it.

This is true, but it doesn't mean that a scientist has to be irreligious. It means that a scientist has to keep his religion out of his science.

80 posted on 02/20/2002 5:12:56 PM PST by VadeRetro
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To: cracker
In a few months, when the State Board of Education lays out the standards for science education in Ohio's public schools, it should strongly endorse the teaching of evolution and ignore the demands of those who purvey pseudoscience....

Evolution IS pseudoscience.

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

83 posted on 02/20/2002 6:05:06 PM PST by medved
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To: cracker
Typical liberal tripe. These people don't have a clue about the real evolution-design debate. They simply parrot the "experts" in their smug arrogance. Fools.
97 posted on 02/20/2002 7:31:54 PM PST by Timmy
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To: cracker
The state is not able to discern when science becomes religion. When the state allows evolution to be taught and not creation or visa versa, they prove that. It has to either be both or neither.
154 posted on 02/21/2002 9:52:36 AM PST by biblewonk
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To: cracker
Just as with gravity, evolution is a fact.

Ooh ooh.  This is a no-no.  Gravity is a law.  Evolution is a theory.  Neither are facts.  Both have facts to support them.  Additionally, evolution has facts against it.
155 posted on 02/21/2002 9:58:59 AM PST by Frumious Bandersnatch
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To: all
there is room in the world for science and religion, and the two need not be at war

But, in this case, it's religion and religion. Or, if you prefer, science and science. Both require ample amounts of faith. It's just that those who believe in evolution either don't realize or refuse to admit the amount of faith required to accept even what they believe to be "givens."

159 posted on 02/21/2002 10:30:35 AM PST by newgeezer
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To: cracker
It really bugs me when conservatives waste time and political capital trying to teach our kids pseudoscience, when they could be spending that time reversing moral decay (wellfare) and limiting the power of government.
300 posted on 02/22/2002 6:16:25 AM PST by Godel
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To: cracker
"Never mind that science is not a bias or an assumption but simply a rigorous and logical method for describing and explaining what is observed in nature."

Yeah right. I got a good laugh out of that. Science is unbiased, for example:

global warming "science"
gun control "science"
environmental doom "science"
population study "science"
The EPA
The CDC
Al Gore and Earth in the Balance

No biased science here.

JWinNC

484 posted on 02/22/2002 6:34:31 PM PST by JWinNC
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To: cracker
Evolution debate: State board should reject pseudoscience

Christians should reject State funded education. I have.

752 posted on 02/25/2002 8:44:39 AM PST by Galatians513
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To: cracker
Even Darwin reneged on his thesis before he died.
763 posted on 02/25/2002 10:16:21 AM PST by Salvation
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