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 ...
Hello StJacques, and welcome back!
Forgive me, but I'm confused by your post. I do not conflate a "Nominalist" argument with an hypothesis or a conjecture. ID at this point in its development is following a conjecture, and it seems a quite reasonable one to me from an empirical standpoint: that there is a "designed quality" or a kind of "patterning" built into the world, which is a conclusion that can be reached simply by observing the world. ID simply wants to find out how to account for this. It has not produced any kind of a "final" theory. In fact, I think it may be still trying to refine its methods; it is clearly early in its developmental process. What it has done thus far is to open up the conceptual space in which science can proceed to do its work.
If it were at a stage in its research where it proposed a full-blown theory, absent experimental tests, then you might have a point. But it hasn't done that, and I don't expect it will any time soon.
It is still a fallacy, it does not matter where it is used. Abiogenesis is no different than anything else, and there is no clear distinction between complex chemical soup and living organism. Assuming that a distinction exists here is yet another example of the fallacy. Convenient and imprecise semantics are not a scientific model.
The underlying model is a continuum of chemical systems, from simple to extremely complex. The terminology and semantics surrounding "life" are imprecise communication tools that make it easier for people to understand interesting points, and that imprecise and arbitrarily quantized map should not be confused or conflated with the actual territory.
Aristotle (I think, I don't remember that far back very well), gave an example of the problem of defining sharp boundaries. He considered a new constructed ship which is then used for maritime purposes (fishing, transportaion, smuggling, piracy,....) After each voyage the ship is repaired: perhaps new sails, oars, a new keel, new planking, etc. At some point, there are no original parts left; so is it the same ship? All changes were no more than an iota's worth.
This can be expanded to consider a fleet of ships in different states of upgrading; new ships being launched and old ones scuttled. At no point again is anything but a minor change made; but there are a pair of points in time for which no two ships in the fleet are the same. We can say that a complete change has taken place, but we are unable to define a point at which a change occured.
Language evolution is another example. It wasn't until the time of Charlemagne that people realized that they weren't speaking Latin anymore; they were speaking (old) French. The change was gradual; not like leaving Kansas in a cyclone. We have a pretty good written record of English back to pre-Chaucer days, so we can trace the developments; but it's isn't easy to read Beowulf without study so Beowulf clearly isn't Modern English although Shakespeare is.
Please do not presume though that because I see an autonomous biological self-organizing complexity that I have accepted or rejected other types of complexity, e.g. irreducible complexity.
From the very beginning of the ID debates I have argued that it was an unfortunate decision on the part of the ID supporters to invent a new kind of complexity. It clouds the issue by raising a new definition. IOW, irreducible complexity looks backwards and calls "irreducible" what a forward looking model would call "punctuated equilibrium" or "functional complexity".
We had just gotten to the point on the Plato thread where the types of complexity were on the table. You left, the thread died - but the point is that there are two distinctly different types of complexity (least description and least time) and we were positioned to examine the various formulations - Kolmogorov, self-organizing, physical, functional, irreducible, specific and metatransition (punctuated equilibrium).
That, IMHO, is what needs to be investigated in our round-table before we can make any further progress. IOW, it is not accepting intelligent design based on a definition - but trying to find a definition so that we can understand what we are looking at.
Since y'all want to hang on to it as a fallacy rather than a property of evidence, then I re-assert that the fallacy must apply across the board which means to evolution as well. In my obituary post I summed it up as follows:
It is a property of evidence. The fallacy is to apply it wrongly.
Amen to that!! I just got the "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History...It sure is nice to read a history book that doesn't try to tell you all of our founding fathers just wanted to suppress the church as much as possible.
almost-afraid-to-PLACE-a-MARKER
The two phyla with durable skeletons that do not appear in Lower Cambrian time, the Chordata and Bryozoa, may have been represented then by soft-bodied lineages, for they have body plans that do not require durable skeletons. Indeed, the chordates appear in the Middle Cambrian, while durable chordate skeletons are not known until the Late Cambrian (Repetski, 1978).I really, really, really don't like old dates on assertions that there are no fossils for this or that. It's almost self-discrediting on the face of it, even before I bother to go check.
I don't really need to go back and look in this case, either. We've had FR threads on findings of "deep roots and tiny prototypes" for Cambrian body plans.
I'm feeling lazy, so I'll wait for the challenge before I go get it.
The paper I would guess was written NLT 1980. It's a quarter century old and just wrong.
We know what was going on 700-600 million years ago. There was a big adaptive radiation at the end of the Snowball Earth glaciation.
But we also know "deep roots and tiny prototypes."
That's actually a wonderful analogy for evolution. If you think (as I've been guilty of myself) that it's a simple progression from Anglo-Saxon to Chaucerian English to Shakespearean English to fully Modern English, the striking thing is how sweeping the early changes are. Beowulf to Chaucer seems like a huge jump, from a practically Old German language to something we can almost but not quite read without footnotes. If it were a linear progression, it would seem to have started with an amazing saltation.
It's more complicated than that because Pre-Chaucerian Britain was incredibly balkanized compared to the later editions more familiar to us. Never mind the large unassimilated Celtic populations and the Dane/Viking settlements. Even the Anglo-Saxon areas (Essex, Wessex, Suffolk... I forget) had peculiar dialects coexisting and evolving in separate directions. Much of the changes were "hidden," you might say "unfossilized," by not being written down while more conservative versions were being recorded as literary forms.
It's a tree, not a straight line progression, and the record is fragmentary. Still, you can piece together what happened if you've a mind to see it.
The radiation of languages that grew from the original Latin is also a good analogy to evolution. You can trace the roots of words back to their origins, somewhat like DNA. There's a field of linguistic archeology (or whatever it's called) that carries this back quite a ways, to Sanskrit and maybe earlier. I think it's been largely superseded by DNA tracing, but I believe the field still exists.
There's a controversy in linguistics over whether you can show families related in superfamiles and the latter related in super-superfamilies. I think most linguists accept that, historically speaking, a branching evolutionary pattern has occurred. However, far fewer believe that you can actually show this by analysis of the languages.
The problem is that languages change faster than even the fastest molecular clocks in organisms. You know the limitation involved in that. The faster the clock, the more accurate it is for recent events. Nevertheless, the fast clock's signal is lost in total turnover as you try to go back beyond a certain range limit.
Sure. A military conquest can virtually wipe out the indigenous language. Similarly, a migration can result in the immigrants' adopting the language of their new home. The traces of the old tongue can be so few as to be almost useless in reconstructing the history of what happened. DNA, however, is a more persistent marker. But before DNA, linguistics was at least a clue to the past.
A more reliable analogy to evolution is the gradual change in a lanaguage over centuries, where there's been no conquest. Say ... France or England for the past 1,000 years.
No, of course not, because as you noticed:
If so, it doesn’t really address the point I was raising.
It wasn't meant to.
I pinged you to it because 7MMmag challenged a point I had made to you, so in case you saw his post I wanted to ensure that you saw my rebuttal as well.
It is said that a falsehood can circle the world before the truth can put on its running shoes, but at least with pings the truth can be hand-delivered to the appropriate recipients once it gets up and running.
Almost 700 ...
I found a more recent article by the same scientist (with others contributing). This one was written 1999: Fossils, molecules and embryos: new perspectives on the Cambrian
On first blush, I cannot see a major shift in the view concerning durable skeletons and the Cambrian explosion - or a reduction of the interest in explaining the rise of so many body plans in so short a time.
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