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 ...
Saturation may also be a contributory factor. There are only so many useful shapes. Were most already used, not many more would be developed. (I don't know if there are any results along this line. It's just speculation.) This is saturation of the "creature" space.
Another type of saturation would be if some creature(s) filled a niche and thus didn't allow other forms to enter. This is saturation of the environment. There is evidence of this happening with female bears. They have turf-wars. Again it's speculation with respect to microbes (or anyone eles'e crobes.)
Possibly. I don't have a better suggestion.
That's it. Not "challenging" so much as simply asking - state it. The Theory of Evolution. People talk about it like it means something. State is succinctly, clearly, scientifically.
The problem is, I don't think it can be done. The question remains - is evolution science? There are a lot of scientists who are surely asking this. Science, and particularly technology, is a bottom-line test. When you get the gizmo set up, you find out whether it works. There's a lot of BS, particularly in the published papers, no doubt. But unlike econ, or philosophy, or dare I say, evolution, there's that testing, that backboard, that hard wall that tells you if you threw the ball high or low. I'd say it to economists, and sociologists, and evolutionists. How did the ball bounce? Did you bother? Did you try? Can the 'science' get in the way of even throwing it hard enough to hit?
I remember asking one time about the key formulas of evolution. If you get an evolutionist text, what algebra and calculus is presented to the academic? I got a lot of blank stares as it were.
I have read some very interesting arguments both for and against evolution. If any high school has the time to go into either a history of science or current science questions I am sure that some of this information would be included.
To get back to this particular article, can any of the ID people on this list tell me what the scientific benefit of teaching ID in high school would be other than saying evolution is either wrong or incomplete.
because your statement was made in the context of "shouldn't you expect this from evolution". You replied "Not if the the evidence doesn't present the case". Which implies that you will adjust your expectation of evolution to match the evidence regardless of what the evidence shows. Do you not see the bias you have built into your interpretation? You aren't looking to see if the evidence matches evolution. You are looking to see what evolution did. No matter how inconsistent the evidence is with evolution, you will never notice. Because you have already assumed evolution must account for any set of evidence.
Charnia might have given you 30 million more years according to the evol timeframe, but it does mess up the sequence. Unless of course you find more fossils in that timeframe, you now have vertebrates coming before a lot of other phyla.
The oil scenario doesn't surprise me. That they find oil in similar situations doesn't mean that their interpretation of what they are looking at is correct. Only that there is a correlation between oil and whatever identifiers they've focused on.
By the way, I grew up in Louisiana near Alexandria. I've been down your way to the Festival Acadienes a few times.
Sure! Start here: Teach the Controversy
Dr. Meyer cites 5 reasons.
placemarker
It is not difficult to summarize the parts that people object to. The thing most object to is the assertion of common descent, followed by Darwin's mechanism, natural selection.
Again, I jump into an ongoing conversation with an extraneous question. But I have to ask while you are posting and it's on my mind.
It seems to me that ID would immediately be accepted as mainstream science if it would address one of its underlying assumptions, that the outcome of cnange can be predicted.
It seems to me that when you say something is designed, you imply that the designer knows how something will work before it is actually built. So it would seem that the central mission of ID would be to find the underlying predictive model that allows one to creat new things with knowledge of how their structure will be expressed.
In the case of a living system (an ecology) you would also need a model that predicts the reproductive success of anything new. Otherwise, no matter how clever your design, natural selection would still be the shaper of things.
This has been in the back of my mind since I started reading these threads, but this is the first time I've seen the question clearly as something that could be researched.
Well, true. But the assertion of common descent may be considered the observed "fact" of evolution, and natural selection is really only one piece of the theoretical puzzle underlying this factual observation. Perhaps they are relatively easy to summarize because they are relatively easy initial concepts to comprehend. Once you step past this threshold -- well, for me it can get kinda' hard.
But then, I'm not the best person against whom to gauge ease of scientific comprehension, suffering as I do from what my wife calls "acute hebetude".
Natural selection is an observed fact. It happens whether mutations and variations are random or whether God designs each and every one of them.
For ID to have any scientific standing, it would have to demonstrate that design is possible. It would have to have a model for predicting the outcome of change. Engineers have models that all them to predict how much material is required to keep a structure from falling down. ID proponents are obligated to demonstrate a way of predicting how an alleel change will affect reproductive success. If you can't predict the effect of a change, it makes no difference whether the change is random or deliberate.
Dang! The spelling force is not with me today.
Off hand, I see several approaches to the challenge based on the disciplines touched, e.g. biology, physics, math, cosmology. So I’m sure others will be interested in it. And I don't want to shut the door on any of my own thoughts, because your challenge entails considerable meditation, thought experiments, research, etc.
My first reaction, though, concerns the nature of space/time itself - whether the future is knowable anywhere within or outside space/time.
The later is an obvious yes, because our four dimensions (3 of space and 1 of time) is a hypercube. Thus any perspective which allows one to see the entire hypercube is, definitionally speaking, apart from it, i.e. outside of space/time. The future is as clear as the present or past to anyone outside the hypercube. God sees all. Past, present, future only has meaning inside the hypercube to those in corporeal perspective, moving along a worldline.
Not quite so obvious is that the perception of time and space is relative within the hypercube between two observers on different worldlines, that is called simultaneity. Even less obvious is that gravity, which if positive is an indentation of space/time and if negative is an outdent of space/time has the same effect as velocity with regard to worldlines. space/time wheel.
In sum, from within the hypercube, foreknowledge could be no more than an illusion with regard to another’s worldline. However, add only one temporal dimension to the hypercube and what we who dwell in the hypercube perceive as a timeline becomes a plane and then foreknowledge, past knowledge, non-locality/superluminal events are all possible. The existence of another temporal dimension is proposed but not (yet) evidenced. We cannot exclude the possibility.
The next question moves to whether a future event has ever been known – prophesied – with sufficient specificity to conclude that the future is known. To answer that, I would turn to ancient manuscripts and recorded history.
The prophesies of Psalms 22 for example are quite specific and were fulfilled in Christ’s crucifixion. Daniel’s prophesies concerning Alexander the Great were also quite specific and fulfilled and recorded much later by Josephus. And one which always make me chuckle: the scientists who had dated the book of Enoch (before it was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls) – used a date after Herod the Great because their presumption was that prophesy is impossible (scientific materialism). Carbon dating of the Enoch scroll at Qumran set the date of that particular copy at 200 B.C. The date of the original is unknown but of course must be older than that.
So, standing back and looking at the geometry of space/time and the evidence of fulfilled prophesy, my first response is that the Designer in Intelligent Design theory – if outside of space/time, i.e. God – would indeed have the foreknowledge to circumvent the forces of natural selection – indeed to circumvent everything in the hypercube. If the designer were inside the hypercube (e.g. cosmic ancestry) – then natural selection could only be averted by the existence of an additional temporal dimension available to the designer’s vision and mind. (Our human vision and mind are constrained to a selection of 4 coordinates).
If the Designer is God, outside the hypercube, then experimentation with the hypercube would not be necessary nor precluded. When a change is made to the design, or a deviation permitted within the hypercube - the results are already known over all of time to the Designer outside of space/time. This is how predestination and free will are not mutually exclusive. (For Christians lurking, this is also how Christ’s being enfleshed from outside the hypercube into the hypercube and His crucifixion from within the hypercube and release of the Spirit would reach to every where and every when.)
Anyway, those are my first blush reactions to your challenge, js1138. I will be meditating further on the subject though and probably posting again!
DI would have a better chance if it could even demonstrate a single falsifying prediction. ID proponents need to describe an experiment (actually several) that would allow ID to be distinguished from other proposals. So far, nothing has been proposed and ID is still only an attack on science rather than part of it.
The future is obviously knowable to some extent. Astronomy has a pretty good record. Meteorology less so. But my question cuts to the central issue of whether ID can be a science.
It seems that the assertion that life forms are designed implies that their properties are known in advance of "manufacture". Not a big job for God, perhaps, but a tall order for anyone else.
A lesser issue, and perhaps more ameneable to research, is whether allele changes have predictable consequenses. There are, of course at least levels of consequense. The first would be structural. Can the resulting organism survive. The second consequence would be ecological. How does the change affect the organism's reproductive success in a world teeming with competitors and preditors. Can this be predicted, even in principle?
This is the problem addressed by natural selection. Darwin's answer was variation, overproduction and selection: rinse, repeat.
JS, I did not quite grasp what you saw as the researchable portion.
Is it possible for you to restate it?
Concisely you would say, "I'm researching "X"." Please include any thoughts you have on "how" to research "X."
This is intended to be a serious question, and I am interested in what you think.
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