Posted on 01/20/2005 12:54:58 PM PST by Jay777
ANN ARBOR, MI — The small town of Dover, Pennsylvania today became the first school district in the nation to officially inform students of the theory of Intelligent Design, as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. In what has been called a “measured step”, ninth grade biology students in the Dover Area School District were read a four-paragraph statement Tuesday morning explaining that Darwin’s theory is not a fact and continues to be tested. The statement continued, “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.” Since the late 1950s advances in biochemistry and microbiology, information that Darwin did not have in the 1850s, have revealed that the machine like complexity of living cells - the fundamental unit of life- possessing the ability to store, edit, and transmit and use information to regulate biological systems, suggests the theory of intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of life and living cells.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm representing the school district against an ACLU lawsuit, commented, “Biology students in this small town received perhaps the most balanced science education regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution than any other public school student in the nation. This is not a case of science versus religion, but science versus science, with credible scientists now determining that based upon scientific data, the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living cells.”
“It is ironic that the ACLU after having worked so hard to prevent the suppression of Darwin’s theory in the Scopes trial, is now doing everything it can to suppress any effort to challenge it,” continued Thompson.
(Excerpt) Read more at thomasmore.org ...
So...it's okay to teach non-science in science classrooms? It's okay to distort what is and what is not science?
"Antibodies fit themselves to known germs but if the germ mutates into an unknown structure from having some of it's structure removed the antibody can't connect and destroy the germ."
Well, that's absolutely false from the immunology classes I took long ago at Stanford. While any given T-cell may have a fixed structure it connects to, the antibodies mutate to many forms and eventually one "connects" and that lineage is multiplied. Evolution on the quick at the cellular and molecular level. That's why, despite there being a new swine flue variant every year, we all eventually develop antibodies.
Sorry to not be more specific, it's a bit hazy, but the geneeral mechanism has been known for quite a while. Antibodies are not static.
very well done. thank you.
"That was a very concise overview of the difficulty.
"
Thanks, I think. Having faced being reviled for stating the truth of the matter in the past, I'm fearful for the next reply.
It's all so silly. The TOE is just that, a theory. It's being tested daily by scientists. IE is not a theory, at least not scientifically, because it CANNOT be tested. It's a thought experiment.
It all doesn't matter all that much. Evolution does not, in any way, deny the existence of a creative deity. That's what the rabid anti-evolution folks don't understand.
They're talking about biogenesis, and that has nothing to do with evolutionary theory. If they could possibly get that right, they could probably get a statement in there with no objection. Evolution is a fact. How life began is only speculation.
excellent post.
Exactly the opposite. If you'd read the rest of the post you'd see that my problem with low level science classes is that functionally they do worse than keep the masses uninformed, they downright MISinform the masses. 90% (maybe even more) of what you learned in your jr high and high school science classes is complete rubbish, it doesn't match up with either known or theorized science. This thread is a classic example, most high school bio classes that teach evolution teach a highly oversimplified version of Darwinian evolutionary theory even though Darmwin's theories have been largely disgarded as a nice start but wrong, and they also do nothing to distinguish between evolutionary theory and abiogenesis, and don't cover the later at all thus allowing students to make a false assumtion that evolutionary theory goes all the way back to the first appearance of life. This doesn't do the students any good, and if they don't go into a field where they need to learn biology and get the opportunity to unlearn the lies their teacher taught them they go on to be ignorant adults. If there isn't the time to teach students the truth it's much better to ignore the subject than to oversimplify it to the point of fiction.
Right, but what I meant was that I really doubt he's all alone in that opinion ;)
That is absolutely false. Earlier, another poster made claims about the curriculum and I posted to him a link of approved curriculum modules that proved he was out to lunch. Please post examples of your claim that these science classes are rubbish and I will post you modules that show your claims are hogwash.
>>and they also do nothing to distinguish between evolutionary theory and abiogenesis, and don't cover the later at all thus allowing students to make a false assumtion that evolutionary theory goes all the way back to the first appearance of life. <<
Absolutely false. Apparently you did not read the earlier posts on this thread:
It's not absolutely false. Ever compared what your high school chemistry class taught you about electron orbits and what college biochem class taught? What was the first they taught in biochem about those orbits? That your high school chemistry teach lied to you, what they taught you in high school was grossly over simplified to the point of fiction, but it was considered "good enough" for high school kids learning "water chemistry" who aren't going to have to get into complex chemical reactions. Those simple orbits are something every high school chem student learned, memorized and were tested on and they're damned lies, why do we make students memorize and regurgitate something we know is BS?!
Your link doesn't match any high school bio text book I've ever seen, for one thing that discussion on evolution is about 10 times as long as what's in real in use high school bio text books. It's really nice that ENSI wants that to be taught, but it's not what's getting taught. Real world high school evolutionary curriculum is 2 days long, one hour per day, here's Darwin, here's his boat, his natural selection, time to move on. It's worthless.
Hopefully not.
No ID.
No wafty elementary teachers having the class vote on science results.
No HS gym teachers teaching physics.
I have no objection to teaching the facts uncovered by science...but before college the teachers themselves all too often are so unqualified as to turn off good students from the basic concepts of scientific thinking.
A lot of the creationists on this thread and others I've posted on are perfect examples. Very intelligent and quick thinking, but not able to get their heads around why scientists think as they do about evolution.
I'm sympathetic to your view and also have seen many fine modules.
I've also seen what happens in the pre-college classroom.
Science is a discipline not a collection of data points, and mis-learning is far more damaging than waiting.
It's not a lie. It's called a simplified model that is correct within certain limitations and is useful for classical chemistry studies and careers. Please cite something that is FALSE that is taught.
It forms the basis for continued education. Learning the structure of the atom (classical) and the periodic table made future studies easier, not harder.
By your reasoning, we should not teach a person how to bake a cake without knowing differential equations.
Please cite an example of mis-learning.
I was taught the scientific method in Jr. High and that foundation has stayed with me. The reason that the creationists are not able to "get their heads around" is that they are fanatics, not because they were mis-taught in high school. More likely, they were never taught, rather than mis-taught.
"IE is not a theory, at least not scientifically, because it CANNOT be tested."
Actually, I beg to differ. I'm a mechanical engineer with a background in thermodynamics and information theory. Entropy, in the lingo, is sometimes called information energy. Intelligent design simply implies a universe with entities that might be considered negative entropy wells, or information sources, they could be of multiple shapes and sizes. In terms of thermodynamics I can't preclude the presence of universe spanning systems with free energy gradients that could be construed as sentient.
For example, the universe has a memory of itself (that's what Hubble is showing us), it has a sense of self preservation (gravity constrains it), it has a nervous system of light rays, it's beginning and end may not be deterministic (i.e. free will), and it is rational (conservative laws of physics).
One can there fore conjecture the universe is sentient, it is evolving, it has a memory and sense of self. All this can be discussed in terms of thermodynamics and physics. So the idea that intelligent design is not amenable to scientific discussion is unscientific.
It IS a lie, when simplification goes to the point that it no longer bears any real resemblance it's not simplification, it's BS. I already did, electron orbits in high school chem as taught are a damned lie and we do our country as a whole a disservice by teaching them. It means everyone who doesn't go beyond high school chem believs BS, and everybody who does has to waste time unlearning the lies they were told.
Lying to people doesn't form a basis for continued education, lying to people forms a basis for the majority of the population to not know what they're talking about.
No, there's nothing wrong with teaching them how to bake a cake if what you teach them will actually result in an actually edible cake. What we do in high school chem class is teach them how to cook a pot roast and tell them it's a cake. The goal of science class is to teach the student how thing work in theory or practice (depending on the science being discussed), when we make stuff up that isn't how things work we aren't teaching them science. If we're going to teach them fiction we might as well hand them a novel.
Since you don't want anything other than a couple of basic principles of physics taught, seems HS gym teachers would be ideal.
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