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 like vanilla.
Perhaps it'd be more accurate to say "overwhelming consensus" or "decent (skilled) scientists."
Please recall Pons & Fleischman. Dead wrong, but still scientists... ;-)
Full Disclosure: Yes, I'm yanking your chain. It'd be more instructive to either define science and the scientific method, and show how ID doens't fit the definition, or use some of the failed predictions of ID to demonstrate how one validates ideas--and then compare and contrast to successful predictions elsewhere.
If evolutionists act in a dogmatic fashion, then it is no wonder they elicit dogmatic resistance...
Don't inadvertently abaondon empiricism, even in the short term, due to a lack of patience.
Cheers!
The claim seems to be that positing a supernatural creator is by definition not scientific (it is, well, supernatural), as well as unnecessary to account for the diversity of species as currently observerd.
That was a PRICELESS line!
Assuming of course, she only had one car, and had no other possessions which needed gasoline.
"The evidence still says evolution. Your incredulity and Spetner's don't weigh enough to even go on the evidence pile."
Let me just ask you a straightforward question. Do you believe that we know with reasonable "certainty" that the first living cell came about with no intelligent design or guidance?
Note: the question is not, "Do you think a plausible general outline can be given for how the first living cell could come into being with no intelligent guidance or design?" That is an entirely different question than the one above.
If you answer yes to the first question, then I think you are deluded.
I am always amazed at how evolutionists can be so cocksure about the "fact of evolution" in the face of such massive uncertainty about the origin of life. They will claim that we just don't know the exact details of how it happened, but we know for fact that it happened with no intelligent design or guidance. Baloney. We know that it was very unlikely to have happened without intelligent design.
There is a chapter in Richard Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker" that epitomizes this self delusion. I read the book several years ago and returned it to the library, so I don't remember the exact chapter name or number, but I remember the gist of it.
In that chapter, Dawkins speculates wildly about natural selection at the "chemical" level to get around the fact that natural selection can't work until reproduction starts. OK, wild speculation is fine. But then at the end of the chapter he says, basically, that although we don't know the "exact" mechanism that brought the first living cell into existence, we know for certain that it happened purely naturally (i.e., with no intelligent design or guidance).
Ummm.... excuse me, but we *don't* know that. He is begging the question with an arrogance that only Dawkins can display. The reason Dawkins *thinks* he knows that is because that was his premise. Until his premise is disproven with 100% certainty, he will stick with it. That is not proper scientific method.
Leave Peter Singer out of this, please! ;-)
(Sorry, latecomer to this thread and picking through it.)
...
If you answer yes to the first question, then I think you are deluded.
I do have to say "No" to "reasonable certainty" of such a statement in negative form, although the word "reasonable" beckons siren-like. It's pretty close.
I'm an agnostic on whether there's a God although I don't see him poofing cells into existence out of dirt in one afternoon. I'm agnostic on whether there's been some kind of alien life seeding onto the Earth. It's not quite "reasonable certainty," but lack of ID is far likelier than ID.
The problem is not whether you can eliminate ID but whether you need to invoke it. Occam's Razor says you don't add conjectural elements (or for that matter any elements) that are utterly unneeded.
"And so your complaint is that GAs, as used in industry, are designed to optimize too few goals, in environments that are too simple or static, to be relevant to biological evolution?"
No, my point is that GAs, as used in industry, are supervised by an intelligent person. Hence, they are a poor model for actual evolution, which supposedly has no intelligent supervisor. That seems patently obvious to me.
I think the better model for evolution is the one I already gave: random bit flips in the Linux kernel (to simulate random mutations), combined with user feedback on its usefulness (analogous to natural selection). I contend that you cannot build up a better operating system by that method no matter how much time you have. With very high probability, it will "go extinct" before it ever improves significantly.
"Spetners a pretty smart guy."
"I like wise people better than clever people."
I assume Spetner is a smart guy, but I think he is also wise.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me state what I think is perhaps the most important point in his book. Dawkins and the evolutionists subscribe to a theory of evolution based on probabilities, yet they never did any probability calculations to check their theory. They talk and talk about the amazing potential for natural selection of random mutations to produce life forms with the "appearance" of intelligent design, but they never bothered to actually test their hypothesis. The simply asserted its truth and proclaimed that if you don't buy it you are an irrational "creationist" without enough imagination to envision how it works.
That's not science. That's just secular dogma.
"One of the most surprising discoveries which has arisen from DNA sequencing has been the remarkable finding that the genomes of all organisms are clustered very close together in a tiny region of DNA sequence space forming a tree of related sequences that can all be interconverted via a series of tiny incremental natural steps".
...
"So the sharp discontinuities, referred to above, between different organs and adaptations and different types of organisms, which have been the bedrock of antievolutionary arguments for the past century (3), have now greatly diminished at the DNA level. Organisms which seem very different at a morphological level can be very close together at the DNA level."
from the link above
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine.
Tropisms ma-ake the i-ivy twine.
Ray-ayleigh scattering makes skies so blue.
Testicular hormones are why I love youuu!
Two questions:
Did the next verse mention Airy functions and the beauty of the rainbows?
Is there a female singing a verse about ovarian hormones?
Cheers!
Darwin never breathed a sigh about probabilities. I'm not addressing Dawkins because he is not a historically important theorist, just a popularizer.
You are wrong about the history, wrong about the theory. Funny, all the other creationists can be counted on for the same level of accuracy.
... yet they never did any probability calculations to check their theory.
Not a contradiction. Nothing was about a priori probabilities. Very few complex phenomena can be analyzed meaningfully in such terms.
It's always been about seeing and interpreting the evidence, a thing which cannot be done well with blinders of religious horror in place.
I doubt a next verse was ever written. I saw the thing in some Asimov anthology decades ago, but he wasn't claiming it as his.
Three questions:
What language is the program written in?
Is it publically available, and at what cost?
Is there supporting literature?
It sounds a lot like what was being shopped around as "simulated evolutionary methods" for optimization problems about 10 years ago...
Full Disclosure: Some of the methods are more suitable than others to a particular problem, e.g. if the time cost of functional evaluation is too expensive, and the space of possible solutions too large, they are not practicable; and other methods such as Lagrange methods are better...
I write technical papers (in the aerospace engineering field), and I try to write them in a natural style that is understandable by laypersons. Perhaps biological research is just too complicated for that style of writing. If so, that's a shame.
Don't feel guilty.
Feynman once said (paraphrasing) that "if you can't explain a scientific concept to laypeople, you don't understand it yourself."(*)
Interestingly enough, C.S. Lewis once said much the same thing in regard to theology and/or apologetics.
So I guess it isn't just molecular biologists who have trouble--although it is much easier to type in E=mc**2 than it is to paginate the Krebs cycle in ASCII... (*) IIRC, the quote was in a foreword or introduction to Six Easy Pieces. I've since returned the book to the library and don't have it available to double check.
Cheers!
1) What is the size of the mutation on the trial function, as compared to the scale on which the "fitness surface" varies? It is in principle possible to jump right over a very deep, narrow minimum.
2) Or, you may still end up with a wide, shallow minimum selected, because the trial mutations are too small to climb out of the hole. 3) On another front, you may not locate all of the true extrema, since your randomization process does not sample a large enough proportion of the solution space. 4) If the functional evaluation is too computationally expensive, you can't use these methods and have to try other methods, like steepest descents, or Lagrange multipliers... What would be an interesting discussion, if one could get away from the flamers on both sides, would be how to use these methods to model evolutionary processes and fine tune the requirements for rate of mutation vs. rate of change of environment... (e.g. Dodo birds went extinct before they could adapt to the presence of new predators. At what rate of predation would allow a self-sustaining population to survive, and then (possibly) adapt to overcome said predation?) Cheers!
Off-topic joke:
Q. What do you call someone who got all C's in Medical School?
A. Doctor.
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