Posted on 12/21/2004 7:59:02 PM PST by postitnews.com
HARRISBURG, PA-The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and attorneys with Pepper Hamilton LLP filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of 11 parents who say that presenting "intelligent design" in public school science classrooms violates their religious liberty by promoting particular religious beliefs to their children under the guise of science education.
"Teaching students about religion's role in world history and culture is proper, but disguising a particular religious belief as science is not," said ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak. "Intelligent design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes."
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United Executive Director, added, "Public schools are not Sunday schools, and we must resist any efforts to make them so. There is an evolving attack under way on sound science...Read More
(Excerpt) Read more at postitnews.com ...
I think it must be someting in the water. On this thread alone there have been multiple claims that "evolutionists don't do probablity computations" and a false representation of the Scopes trial. Both can be refuted by just looking at the literature.
As no Creationist has criticized these falsehoods, it must be assumed that Creationists in general support lying for their cause. Just as Clinton's lies about one thing leads to distrust of all his statemets, so it is with Creationists. Their continual lying on the above matters (inter alia) discredits all their claims on any matters.
No. The Earth was known to be spherical since before Aristotle.
Dimensio wrote:
The logical fallacy of "appeal to authority" involves dropping a "famous" name whose opinion matches your own even when the person in question is not an expert in the field in question; an example would be citing Issac Newton -- a physicist -- in an argument about biology.
RussP replies:
You got me thinking, and a bell went off in my head. Suddenly it all became clear.
Most biologists have not a clue about information theory -- or anything mathematical, for that matter. That explains why they reject Spetner's arguments without understanding them. They know all the biological jargon, but they don't understand the information structure behind it.
That's why I still haven't got an answer to the basic question of what is the ratio of harmful to beneficial mutations. Apparently nobody on this thread has the slightest clue about what it is for any species at any time under any circumstances. Nor did Dawkins bother to discuss it in his "Watchmaker" book.
Yet we are supposed to take their word for it that natural selection of random mutations can produce complex life forms. The evolutionists don't understand the problem because they know nothing about information theory or the mathematical and probabilistic concepts behind it.
The emperor has no clothes.
RussP wrote:
Most biologists have not a clue about information theory -- or anything mathematical, for that matter. That explains why they reject Spetner's arguments without understanding them. They know all the biological jargon, but they don't understand the information structure behind it.
Dimensio replied:
And it Spetner doesn't know anything about biology, then how can we trust that his refutation -- which may be soundly based in a proper application of information theory -- is actually addressing something that biology claims to happen?
RussP replies:
Ah, yet, but mathematics is really the hardest of the hard sciences. It is pure logic. To be good at math, you must be logical. That is why math is the foundation of physics, for example. As you go down the line to the "softer" sciences -- chemistry, biochemestry, biology, you get farther and farther from hard logic and reason. By the time you get to sociology ... well you know what happens: bullshit is rampant.
I would venture to say that biology is perhaps about a third of the way from logical mathematics to bullshit sociology. As such, it has its share of baloney. And where does the baloney reign in biology? Not in the more empirical areas where, say, you develop a drug and test it by double-blind studies, or splice a gene and see the result relatively quickly. No, the bullshit really reigns in the untestable areas, notably evolution. Nobody has come anywhere near producing life from scratch in a lab, but they can simply declare that it can happen in nature because lots of time and space is available. Can't be disproven, so it must be true -- or so their faulty logic tells them.
That is precisely why biology desperately needs mathematical logic. But most biologists are apparently not logical enough to know it. And that's why they see Spetner as a threat.
It seems that you do not know what scientists mean when they use the word "theory". It is quite different from the general use of the word (wild-assed guess). What laymen call a theory, scientists call a hypothesis. The simplest hypothesis that survives attempts to disprove it and which makes succesful predictions becomes a theory. There is no greater scientific status for an idea than theory. The Intelligent Design hypothesis has not become a theory because it makes no predictions and has not passed falsification tests. It is also more complicated than the current theory that it wishes to replace.
Citation please. If what you say is true, then why won't ID proponents help school boards with a lesson plan for it?
Oh, it doesn't? So are you admitting that the beginning of life cannot be explained in purely naturalistic terms without resort to intelligent design? If so, what makes you evolutionists so cocksure that life *after* the first living cell can be so explained?
And you have the gall to accuse other people of distortion.... breathtaking. (Just to explain my comment, I don't see where the OP said that there was could be no natural explanation of abiogenesis.)
F-, flunked evolution 101.
Being called "arrogant" by someone who can type the above sentence after claiming to have read 6-7 books about evolution is starting to feel like a compliment. Go and read the books again Russ; but this time read the pro-mainstream ones with your eyes and mind open. Try to understand the basic principals before you get onto detailed probabilistic math, or you'll just find yourself disproving a creationist straw man.
Boy, this is really getting ridiculous. You've completely given up on reason and have fallen back to simple unsubstantiated and unreasoned declarations. I didn't think that even hard-core evolutionists would stoop to *that* level.
"No, the bullshit really reigns in the untestable areas, notably evolution. Nobody has come anywhere near producing life from scratch in a lab, but they can simply declare that it can happen in nature because lots of time and space is available. Can't be disproven, so it must be true -- or so their faulty logic tells them."
I'm going to correct myself here because I realize that some pedantic evolutionist pinhead will soon be all over my slight error in terminology. I should have wrote,
"No, the bullshit really reigns in the untestable areas, notably evolution and the origin of life." ...
I just read a very interesting article about mousetraps. Read about how Michael Behe's mousetrap analogy has been misunderstood and distorted by the evolutionists:
http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_mousetrapdefended.htm
This is great stuff. Don't miss it.
In fairness, let me point out that I found the link to this article on an evolutionist's webpage.
I'll try again, and this time I'll go for spoon feeding you the answer.
The answer to the question you pose is contained in the question. How do you tell the difference between a "bad" or "beneficial" mutation? There is only one answer, which is that the "bad" ones are the ones that get selected out (less likely to result in reproductive success), and the "beneficial" ones are the ones that get selected in (more likely to result in reproductive success). This is true regardless of your or anyone else's opinion of what might constitute "bad" and "beneficial" mutations whereas your question implies that you believe there is some separate standard of "bad" versus "beneficial" beyond reproductive success (presumably you are looking for some absolute standard of faster/stronger/cleverer that you think evolution should be aiming for). Somehow you managed to read all those books about evolution without picking up on that central idea of ToE. That is why I suggested that you should read them again.
What part of the ToE do you think is untestable?
I missed the bit in Behe's article where he showed how his work had been misunderstood and distorted. In fact a link to Behe's article purporting to refute Macdonald's work is on Macdonald's own website. Macdonald himself says the following about Behe's rebuttal:
My original reduced-complexity mousetraps must have struck a nerve, since Behe's public lectures and his web page now include a lengthy "rebuttal" of them. I find his objections muddled and confusing, but he seems to be saying that showing how something would work after removing some parts is not enough to reject irreducible complexity; it is necessary to show how something could be built up, step by step, with each addition or modification of a part improving the function. This seems to go beyond the original definition ("necessarily composed of several parts"), but I have merely taken it as a challenge. Here I show how one could start with a single piece of spring wire, make an inefficient mousetrap, then through a series of modifications and additions of parts make better and better mousetraps, until the end result is the modern snap mousetrap. In addition to demonstrating that a mousetrap is not irreducibly complex, I also illustrate another important objection to "irreducible complexity" as evidence for "intelligent design": a part which may be optional at one stage of complexity may later become necessary due to modifications of some of the other parts. Completely different pathways by which a mousetrap may be built up by small steps have been described by Alex Fidelibus, and by Don Stoner. Another way to make a complex system is to use parts that have other functions; Ken Miller points out that parts of a mousetrap could be used as a tieclip, paper clip, toothpick, keychain or door knocker.
This has sunk to mere repetition. All right, one last time and I'll let you spiral on down without me.
What you ignore:Spetner's claims are an inappropriate basis for questioning the biology of the last 150 years.
- A vast body of evidence having no reasonable interpretation except the relationship by common descent of all life on Earth,
- The irrelevance of details of mutation to the concept of variation and natural selection.
It is clear that the variation exists everywhere and (as can be very rapidly observed in bacteria) reasserts itself even after genetic bottlenecking. You can't make bullet item 1 go away by using strawman models to "prove" the variation can't happen. It's like the creationist proofs that a bumblee can't fly the way an airplane does so its flight must be a miracle.
- Spetner is wrong in the details of the biology, ligand specificity is not directly governed by binding string length as required by Spetner's theory, and ligand binding is not and "all or nothing affair". This invalidates his analyses. Even then, Spetner's own examples do not support his claims. Furthermore, when using his metrics Spetner swaps metrics when one shows inconvenient changes.
- Then, there's Spetner's apalling disregard for what is known of the continuum of relationships among genes.
Wow. You broke my Iron-o-Meter (for irony detection).
But the blindfold is key. Imposing the blindfold amounts to the following significant edit to classical evolutionary theory: "Common descent diversifying via variation and natural selection."
Yes, another dishonest and/or ignorant creationist model of evolution. The kindest thing anyone can think is creationists are genuinenly ignorant. On the other hand, if the ignorance isn't genuine, they're not being honest about what they know or understand.
And it's not just that one thing. Every mantra of creation/ID is founded in either falsehood or fallacy. Not a one stands up to scrutiny.
"There are no transitional forms." Absolute balderdash.
"Evolution cannot account for complexity." A crock.
"The second law of thermodynamics forbids evolution." Complete BS.
"There is no evidence for anything suddenly turning into something else." Actually, metamorphosis happens here and there but it's not a prediction of evolution. Deliberate fallacy.
I could go on. I realized I've skipped a bunch. After five years of sifting through the creation/ID arguments, I don't know any good ones.
There have been one or two that had me semi-stumped for a while. One about a woodpecker's tongue comes to mind. None have held up. Note too that there's a difference between knowing you're temporarily stumped at "Spot the gimmick" and knowing you're wrong.
That's why I don't want to teach something called "ID" alongside of evolution. "ID" has no content except lies and deliberately bad reasoning.
Vade, have you debated evolution here for five years?
The key to that one -- the ever-popular "random atoms blindly flying together by accident" strawman -- is the creationoid's unstated premise that all atoms behave like a Teflontm-coated ball-bearings, so that none will naturally form a huge variety of sub-components that are abundant and readily available for combining into ever-more-complicated organic molecules.
I could go on. I realized I've skipped a bunch. After five years of sifting through the creation/ID arguments, I don't know any good ones.
They're mostly all here, and all refuted: An Index to Creationist Claims. From Talk.Origins.
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