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 ...
Thank you for your reply!
Which is exactly what I was getting at. The Creeds can't stand on their own, they need support. A table of contents without the rest of the book might be interesting but isn't terribly useful.
Care to tell me why it matters whether or not the collection of concepts within the theoretical framework of evolution can be conveniently reduced to a single sentence? It is not particularly difficult to discover the actual concepts at issue, e.g., variation through random mutation, changes in allele frequencies in a population over time, genetic drift, and natural selection.
It is particularly difficult to put those concepts on a postcard.
But why is that exercise even necessary? What point is served?
Evolution used to include the concept of Abiogenesis. Only once hard scientific problems with abiogenesis started turning up did evolutionists start distancing themselves from it. And it's been fairly recent. 10 years ago, hardly anybody talked about abiogenesis and evolution being two different things.
"I can't figure out how there could be a God, so we must have happened by chance"
and they defend their position by accusing us of not being able to figure out evolution so there must be a God.
We often speak of the "will to live" which we observe in everything from bacteria to whales, the struggle to survive, the "want to". I hadn't meditated on it as waxing/waning force.
no, the antibodies I don't believe have a fixed number of prordained shapes they fit to, instead they have an A and B portion, one of which is not stably encoded and so might essentially be considered a quickly mutating protein, sort of like HIV quickly mutates.
But this is a long time ago to remember, so one of us needs to take the time to look it up. If I get time, I will.
What is that sharp dividing line? (It's not obvious to everybody.)
Part of the problem is the assumption that simple, single-cell life forms are simple. In actual fact, they are not so simple. They have moving parts, they have a control system that directs the operation of those parts, and a basic logic blueprint that directs how they are formed, how they operate, and how they fit themselves into their environment.
What distinguishes "life" from "non-life" seems to be a philosophical problem when we don't have a powerful enough microscope, and we can't see the moving parts. But our very basic lifeform has a built in logic that guides how it does what it does. When the signals that trigger its actions are no longer interpreted correctly, it starts to fail. When the signals are no longer generated at all, we would say that it is dead.
The signals, be they chemical or electrochemical in nature, and its response to those signals are the indicator that it is alive. As others have pointed out, the DNA (which is presumably where the logical blueprint exists) is still there even after it is dead, but the signals that keep the little mechanism working have stopped.
I realize that I am treading in way over my head. Cars are mysterious to me, but they are not magic. They have moving parts and a logic that controls their sequence of operation. There is a continuum I suppose between an engine and a raw block of iron ore, but the relationship between the two should not obfuscate the fact that an engine is not ore. But cut the cord from the ignition coil and it stops dead in its tracks.
And you have proof of this statement where?
Life does not "defy" the 2nd law. Life does involve a kind of heat pump, but so does the evaporation of water.
There is a very sharp dividing line, or difference, between the presence or absense of life. There is no in-between state. A thing is either alive, or it is not.
Right, betty boop, that's what you said earlier. My question is what is that sharp dividing line? What is it that demarcates something living from something non living?
Presence or absence. That is all. The DNA is the same regardless of whether the entity is alive or dead. But something is definitely "absent" in the latter case. We know this intuitively, we know this from direct observation. But that "something" may prove extraordinarily difficult to "isolate" experimentally.
It's something worth thinking about because that "something" seems obvious for straightforward examples like rocks and humans. But it is much less obvious for entities like viruses or viroids or even prions. Along those very murky lines, it is not obvious to anyone what constitutes life and what doesn't. Scientists draw up very precise definitions to include or exclude certain entities from life. And not all of them agree. There is no sharp dividing line and where a dividing line is drawn, it is done with definite measurable criteria. It's clear from your answers that even though you claim a sharp dividing line, you don't really know what that line is. You're in good company!
In thinking about abiogenesis, the same murky life-non life distinction exists. Afterall, nobody is suggesting that humans sprang from rocks (accepting some creationists). The gulf between life and non life is certainly not as clear-cut as you proclaim and it is possibly not a very big one.
Chiming in on a very difficult subject, I tend to agree with Nebullis. You state that the dividing line is "presence or absence," but that begs the question -- presence or absence of what? And if it is presence or absence of animation, this seems to apply only to the most rudimentary of examples -- biological life forms that have lost a preexisting animation.
The more difficult questions apply to the border line chemical structures, such as the (now proverbial) virus, which exhibits both dormant and active states. For that matter (to get really obtuse), we can measure both growth and cessation of growth in crystallization, and the chemical triggers in that process definitely have on and off switches. While these are certainly in a different category from biological life, they do render animation itself as less than a unique trait, or marker, of "life".
Perhaps the only (facetiously) known quality of life is its apparent weightlessness.
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