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A Revolution in Evolution Is Underway
Thomas More Lawcenter ^ | Tue, Jan 18, 2005

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 ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: crevolist; unknownorigin
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To: discostu
but the Bohr model isn't just the basics, the Bohr model is junk, it's how we used to think but learned better.

Sorry, it is NOT junk. It is a simple model. Just like our simple model of gravity. Works well every day for millions of us.

Just like our simplified model of light. Lot's of students get along fine with a simplified model of light. One does not have to understand the Schrodinger Wave Theory or be able to calculate mass defects to calculate laser excitation frequecies.

301 posted on 01/20/2005 8:15:56 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: WildTurkey

It's not a simple model, the Bohr model is a damned LIE, we KNOW that electrons DO NOT do that, we KNOW there is no nucleus to an atom. LIES aren't simple, LIES are LIES.

No they do not get by fine with a model of LIES. Then they believe lies, believing lies is never getting along fine. You're supporting fake but accurate science teaching. If it's not good enough for Dan Rather it's not good enough for our schools.


302 posted on 01/20/2005 8:18:46 PM PST by discostu (mime is money)
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To: e p1uribus unum
Can you show me where I said that?

#188

303 posted on 01/20/2005 8:20:07 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: discostu

Most software types are told that their programs are stored with binary logic on the disk. That is a lie. The data is analog. Does this invalidate the concept of digital information? No. It simplifies it for those that have no need to understand the complexities of data storage. Same with the Bohr model.


304 posted on 01/20/2005 8:33:13 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: WildTurkey

Not correct.

re-post of #188

to discostu

You've just reinforced all my own prejudices.
No science before college.
But, also, no graduating college without 4 years.
K-12 teach concrete stuff like anatomy, maybe some "isn't nature neat" but stay away from biology and chemistry as science. Maybe some simple mechanics from physics.
Don't get me started, I can spew forever on this.


It takes rather a stretch of the imagination to find "no mention of atoms until college"

I have, in another post, specifically stated that scientific _data_ may be taught, as opposed to science.

I do not like to be misrepresented and am done for the evening.


305 posted on 01/20/2005 8:35:09 PM PST by e p1uribus unum
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To: e p1uribus unum
It takes rather a stretch of the imagination to find "no mention of atoms until college" I have, in another post, specifically stated that scientific _data_ may be taught, as opposed to science. I do not like to be misrepresented and am done for the evening.

I think your "No science" would rule out the teaching of the atom. I see no qualifiers that would take exception to this. You NEW qualifier is not applicable. The "atom" is not scientific data but a scientific concept. You know, a model, science.

306 posted on 01/20/2005 8:40:11 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: WildTurkey
I don't see what's so hard about the concept of teaching science in at least high school. I learned about the scientific method in freshman (HS Freshman) Biology -- it was the first thing drilled into our skulls, and we were tested on it.

I think that some people fear high schoolers actually being taught real science, because it makes them less suceptable to the claim that non-falsifiable nonsense such as ID qualify as "science".
307 posted on 01/20/2005 8:49:20 PM PST by Dimensio (http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)
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To: dsc

Can you cite an example of a high school science teacher claiming that the fossil record proves that there is no God?


308 posted on 01/20/2005 8:52:00 PM PST by Dimensio (http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif <-- required reading before you use your next apostrophe!)
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To: js1138
You are aware that Dr. Meyer was an editor, and used his authority to publish the article without an actual review by people competent to judge it?

I believe you are mistaken. We've been over this a ton of times. The paper was reviewed by more than one person; all with Ph.D.'s. It followed the same process as the other papers. The only reason the Journal distanced itself was because the evo's went ape-**** and caused a firestorm. You better get your facts straight - I'm sure Dr. Meyer wouldn't appreciate you concocting a just-so story at his expense.

309 posted on 01/20/2005 9:09:12 PM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo (The best theory is not ipso facto a good theory. http://ww7.com/dna/)
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To: PatrickHenry; Ichneumon; betty boop; tortoise; Physicist; Doctor Stochastic; All
Thank y’all for your replies, PatrickHenry and Ichneumon! You guys are so much fun!

My question: Wouldn't every one of the examples of "transitional fossils" you provide in your exhaustive post actually be subject to the fallacy of quantizing the continuum?

PatrickHenry: The increasingly evident fact that there are no clear-cut quanta (isolated species), but everything, past and present, forms a continuum, is what common descent is all about.

Ichneumon: No, because they're samples along the continuum of morphological change, and not being presented as discrete entities. In fact, it's the anti-evolutionists who commit the fallacy of quantizing the continuum, by trying to assert that these transitionals are all "separate" creatures, and that there exist no further links between them.

PatrickHenry wins the prize for consistency with tortoise’s definition of the “continuum” and Physicist's and Doctor Stochastic's explanation thereof. However you both lose for applying the fallacy when it helps you and ignoring it when it doesn’t.

The fallacy was first raised to refute our attempt to define life v non-life (or death) in a project to investigate the theory of abiogenesis. IOW, the fallacy would say that it is impossible to define a point in the continuum at which life exists and thus abiogenesis is idle speculation. The same concept was used elsewhere in arguing when/if a fetus is alive in the womb.

To the contrary of your assertion, Ichneumon, a “sample” is in fact a discrete fossil, a quantization of the continuum, like a lizard or a snake, for instance. But there is no quantizable beginning for snakiness, as Physicist explains here.

The key presumption of the theory of evolution, as PatrickHenry has said, is that a continuum exists. Everything in the theory depends on it being a continuum and yet the evidence for the theory is quantization of that presumed continuum.

IOW, if the evidence for a continuum is the quantization of it and the quantization of a continuum is a fallacy per se then ipso facto evolution is false.

Anyone interested can read more about how the fallacy was defined and explained (and protested) here:

On Plato, the Early Church, and Modern Science: An Eclectic Meditation (post 633 and forward).

Personally – and I believe I can speak for betty boop here – the fallacy of quantizing the continuum is a smoke screen. To borrow my own phrasing from another thread:

There are so many ways to avoid facing Truth. The old-fashioned way of closing one's eyes, covering one's ears and whistling has been replaced with more fashionable equivalencies, e.g. - rabbits and rocks are both made of subatomic particles thus there is no difference between life and non-life/death, quantum superposition exists therefore observations at the classical levels must also be uncertain, computers can be envisioned to mimic man’s intelligence and therefore consciousness in the natural world is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain, the dead albatross and the live albatross are both made of the same DNA and chemicals therefore there is no distinction between life and death.

One must choose. Either you accept the fallacy of quantizing the continuum or not.

If you agree with betty boop and with me and do not accept it, then the theories of evolution and abiogenesis survive.

However, if you do accept it, well, then …

It is my duty to inform you that the theory of evolution passed away at 11:12:03 PM CST 01/20/2005. He had lingered in a coma since 1:18:10 PM CST 01/13/2005.

Though he was a combat veteran of many skirmishes with intelligent design and young earth creationism, his death was by natural cause. There was no evidence of fatal wounds on the body.

He was both loved and hated – but I ask those who hated him to please not celebrate or gloat but allow the family time to grieve.

I realize you are all interested in knowing the circumstances of his death and so I’ll devote the rest of this press conference to tell you what I know about it. I was there, so I can speak as an eyewitness to the events.

As you know, evolution was an old man – over 100 years old, as a matter of fact. And this was one of the few times in his life that he wasn’t involved in a fight. Actually there wasn’t even a fight going on, but the way he rushed in to the defense of his son, abiogenesis, I suspect he misinterpreted the scene and that may have led to his death.

Abiogenesis was just a baby and it was time for his first thorough examination here on the forum. I was one of those running tests on him. It is true that the tests were rigorous and there was some concern whether or not he could survive. But we were all being very careful not to kill him. The investigators reached a few conclusions about his health.

We determined that in order for there to be a theory of life from non-life, there had to be a clear definition of what life is. The panel agreed that that which is living can be discerned from that which is not living by the presence or absence of information, which is based on the Shannon-Weaver model, roughly “successful communications”. The comparison of a live skin cell to a dead skin cell (from the same person) was a base thought experiment although the same definition would find humans, cats, bacteria, viruses, spores, pollen all alive and rocks, stars, water, DNA and chemicals all not alive. We had not yet begun tests on autonomy, semiosis or complexity – we had only gotten the definition of life v non-life and death “nailed” and determined that there is currently no known source for information in space/time though we hadn’t yet looked at geometry and string theory.

That is when evolution had his heart attack. He grabbed his chest and keeled over in the examining room, muttering “quantizing the continuum fallacy”.

As you know he always is surrounded by body guards and his personal physicians. As they were working on him, his body guards explained what he meant by those, which turned out to be his final, words.

The term basically means that it is a fallacy to pick a single point out of a continuum. They gave an example of a person thought wealthy if he made $100,000 a year and not if he made $99,999.99 a year. They applied this to the distinction we made between life and death – saying that it means there is no distinction between life and non-life in the continuum.

Whereupon hearing that, abiogenesis immediately vanished into thin air. It was shocking at the time, but looking back on it now it makes sense – because if there is no definition of life, there can be no theory of life from non-life. Abiogenesis could not exist. Perhaps that is why nobody seemed to mourn him – it’s like he never existed at all, even to the bodyguards.

The bodyguards continued in their explanation of evolution’s last words.

They said the same fallacy of quantizing a continuum would apply to species – that there is no clear point in time in the geological record when a lizard begins and a snake begins.

Upon hearing that, evolution went into the coma from which he never recovered. Best I can tell he went into shock because his skeleton is the “tree of life” and the beginning side of each of the limbs disappeared into this fallacy and his skeleton simply, came apart and fell away. IOW, if there is no beginning to a limb then there can be no connection – and evolution himself existed not because limbs existed, but because he is the connection between the limbs, the theory of the origin of species, i.e. common ancestry He wasn’t the bones, he was the structure of the bones- but, alas, now the bones were lying on the floor without a beginning in physical reality, at least that anyone could see.

Outside the window, the evolution haters were celebrating, they had made big signs declaring that evolution can’t be a science if it based on a fallacy, the fallacy of quantizing the continuum.

His own physicians tried valiantly to revive him. We who had been examining his now no longer existing son tried to help by pointing to evolution’s vital organs – the connections themselves.

One of his own physicians came up with a procedure to try to save him – he made a gummy substance and proceeded to slap it on the bones lying on the floor in order to form some kind of a beginning for the bones in physical reality.

The physician called this substance a statistical distribution within the continuum and used the example of a bell curve wherein there may be a range of points in which a more obscure difference (such as between a snake and lizard) might be observed in a continuum.

But it was in a word, the bodyguard’s own word, fuzzy – there were no boundaries to the substance. It was loose in his hand – not as firm as bread dough and not as flimsy as water, something in between. They were all hoping it would be enough to give a beginning to the limbs so evolution could be reconnected.

So they tried to lift him up but the connections did not hold because the beginning of the limbs were still arbitrary. IOW, the distribution itself was derived from data points each of which is a fallacy of quantizing the continuum. It was better than limbs lying on the floor without a beginning at all in physical reality, but the beginnings of the limbs were nevertheless obscure, fuzzy, lacking boundaries – or as the evolution-haters were exclaiming outside the window, capricious.

He could not stand. His connections were not strong enough to hold the weight of his bones. He just keeled over again.

Attempts to revive him ceased and the bodyguards and personal physicians left the scene.

Whereupon I had a duty to declare him dead and have called this press conference to inform the forum because he was, after all, much loved and also much hated.

I realize there will be many recriminations over his death. Fortunately for those of us who were working on his son, everything was recorded.

Also, I’m sure there will be attempts to revive him. Or because under the fallacy of quantizing the continuum there is no distinction between life and death, there will be denials that he is dead at all. But for those of us who still see a distinction between life and death, he is most assuredly dead.


310 posted on 01/20/2005 9:12:18 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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Review of Meyer Paper
311 posted on 01/20/2005 9:14:23 PM PST by Michael_Michaelangelo (The best theory is not ipso facto a good theory. http://ww7.com/dna/)
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To: Dimensio
I don't see what's so hard about the concept of teaching science in at least high school. I learned about the scientific method in freshman (HS Freshman) Biology -- it was the first thing drilled into our skulls, and we were tested on it.

I posted a similar post earlier. Unfortunately, many students never really learn it and never apply it after the test is over. Later, their learning becomes what their buddies tell them at work.

312 posted on 01/20/2005 9:28:22 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: discostu
So you spent most of your career working with fiction, good for you, so does Stephen King.

My "fiction" helped design, build, startup and operate a number of nuclear power plants.

313 posted on 01/20/2005 9:31:08 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: discostu
Conservation of Mass, well they need to learn a little about conservation of mass but not much.

Ah, the Law of Conservation of Mass. Another one of those LIES taught in school. Mass is NOT conserved during combustion. I bet that really flipped you when you learned that!

314 posted on 01/20/2005 9:35:05 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: discostu

Now I understand your problem. You fail to grasp the function of the Bohr model. It is not meant to be a "photographic" representation of the atom but a model to be used in classical physics to undertand the energy relationships of the principle parts of the atom.


315 posted on 01/20/2005 9:46:46 PM PST by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)
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To: Ichneumon
...National Geographic published an embarrassed retraction and post-mortem analysis of how they had managed to screw up.

I assume that National Geographic is not on Dan Rather's short list of places to apply.

316 posted on 01/20/2005 9:58:37 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Right Wing Professor
Darwin's theory says nothing about the origin of life.Are they uneducated, or mendacious?

Anyone who makes that claim on FR is mendacious. Corrections have been posted many times. There is no excuse but that they are liars.

317 posted on 01/20/2005 10:05:52 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Dimensio
"So...it's okay to teach non-science in science classrooms? It's okay to distort what is and what is not science?"

No it isn't okay. The blind-faith religion known as macro-evolution should definately NOT be taught in science classrooms.

318 posted on 01/20/2005 10:32:33 PM PST by Matchett-PI (Today's DemocRATS are either religious moral relativists, libertines or anarchists.)
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To: discostu
their sample set was only 12 squirrels

You're not referring to 'big science' so much as over-classification, which I understand is a common complaint. But consider with what evidence a new 'species' is often introduced by paleontologists.

"Simply a force of nature" is a phrased used by people that don't like science

That's a complaint made by someone who understands neither what is meant by an irreducible force or nature nor science, itself. I told you gravity was a bad example.

Returning to evolutionism, have you conceived a theory, yet? since I think we're both of the mind that it is NOT a a force of nature. There is a theory as to cause. What exactly - in your words - is that theory?

319 posted on 01/20/2005 11:54:19 PM PST by sevry
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To: discostu
Particle physics has simple formulas and simple concepts?!

Have to. It's science. That's the efficiency of it, and the math. It may be counter-intuitive and lacking comparison. And the math can become meaningless nonsense more easily because of it, while still remaining syntactically correct. But it can be defined, succinctly, precisely, because it is hard science. Evolutionism is barely a soft science, and as we see here, is much more a vague, superstitious and pre-scientific religious imperative to believe, but not to ask precisely in what. Getting answers about particle physics is not so difficult. The science is defined. The formulas are specific. Getting answers about evolution is like asking a thief caught red-handed with the cash why he stole it, when he thinks he can still escape by coming up with an excuse.

I've told you what evolution is

And I said that I understand that people speak of a fact of evolution, whatever they mean by it, themselves. I said, for the moment, I didn't care. What I cared about what how you went about explaining this fact. What theory might you present to explain it? Specifically, how is it worded, saying what - specifically? That's science.

The Church, God, Christianity quite simply CANNOT be explained by any 4 sentences.

The Faith can be explained in four principal Creeds, however. You refuse to confess something so obvious, even if I don't ask you to confess the Creeds themselves (though for the sake of your soul I do wish that you would). It can be stated, and succinctly. Volumes have been written on the work that went into to these formulations. But there they are, ultimately, in very few words.

you've been presented with well over a dozen rephrasing of the exact same definition

There are some differences in what the fact entails. But since the same use this phrase - the theory of evolution - I just thought they could as easily tell me how that thing reads, as well. You know - the thing. The thing that everybody knows, you say. The thing that's been explained to me, you say. This thing that is somehow beyond words, and yet claims to be the most rock-solid of sciences and demands its place in every classrom from grade school through Ph.D.

Evolution is one of the hottest sciences today

I understand that there are those who study global warming and how to make the US pay. I understand it's a 'hot' field, with lots of funding. Your point?

scientists don't have time to argue with people that simply don't believe

They seem to make time. That blind belief is not science. And no scientist is reluctant to put the theory to the test. A scientist welcomes a challenge, after a little thought. If the theory holds, then he or she is perhaps pleased, but more importantly knows very simply - the theory held.

320 posted on 01/21/2005 12:34:52 AM PST by sevry
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