Posted on 08/11/2005 8:28:30 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
All you have to do is Google "behe" and this link is the first one to come up. Now that wasn't hard was it? Have fun!
The correct stance on issues like an ancient Earth, the common ancestry of organisms, and natural selection can be worked out later, after we've convinced the public that they should be rejecting at least one of these.
Sounds like one of those fallacies of self-reference ("This statement is false") Douglas Hofstadter used like to explore. A song about itself. ("Say, have you seen the carioca? It's not a foxtrot or a polka!")
High standards. Do you insist that crimes be repeated before you believe they happened?
This is a step toward what I am seeking, but you phrase it in the third person. Do you accept the findings of mainstream biology, other than "blind natural selection"? Is this the seni-official stance of the ID movement?
From this website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): Biological and Ecological Sciences in the FY 2005 Budget:
"... funding for non-medical biology ... accounts for only 3 percent of all federally supported life science funding."The National Science Foundation (NSF) remains the principal federal supporter of the biological and ecological sciences, providing 65 percent of the academic funding for non-medical biology. The NSF proposed budget for FY 2005 includes a 2.2 percent ($13 million) increase in funding for the Biological Sciences Directorate (BIO) to bring it to a total of $600 million.
That $600 million is broken down into Molecular and Cellular Biosci, Integrative Biology & Neurosci, Environmental Biology , Biological Infrastructure, Emerging Frontiers, Plant Genome Research. Seems to be non-medical. Here's a table with a breakdown of those expenditures by category: R&D in the National Science Foundation.
If that $600 million is 65% of non-med funding, the total (including stuff from the Agriculture Dep't, forestry bureaucracies, oceanic research, etc.) is about $900 million. That's a nice number. But it's only from federal funding. There is a large amount of industrial funding, from biotech and pharmaceutical firms for example. There is, of course, no creationism/ID research program of any kind.
But let's stick with what the feds spend, because that's where the objection seems to lie. If there are, say, 100,000 scientists and technicians working in such research, that comes to ...$9K per person. Incredible riches!
Look outside and common sense says that the earth is flat.
You are also misstating what the theory of evolution actually says. So many anti-evos focus on the word "Random" in association with evolution that they fail to realize that randomness actually plays little to no role in evolution.
The actual theory of evolution can be summed up in the statement that new species of life can arise as the result of the variation over time of allele frequencies in organism populations, and that this variation over time of allele frequencies in organism populations is the result of mutations that are subject to natural selection. Now, most scientists will tell you that the mutations occur at random, but this isn't really an inherent part of the theory.
For example, if God himself came down and told all of humanity that the scientists had done a good job of figuring out evolution, except that He was the one who directly determined which mutations occurred, what would that do to the validity of the theory of evolution? Answer: absolutely nothing. Evolution doesn't inherently rely on the randomness of the mutations, only that the mutations produce variants of organisms that are not identical with respect to their ability to survive and reproduce.
Note that if God were actually directly manipulating the mutations to produce the creatures He wants, science has nothing and never will have anything to say about it. Such an idea is unfalsifiable, and hence outside the realm of science, which is why such an idea is not part of evolution, which is a SCIENTIFIC theory. Being outside the possible realm of science, such an idea has no ability to impact the validity of ANY scientific theory. (BTW, evolution has precisely NOTHING to say about the universe as a whole. Evolution only applies to those systems which are capable of reproducing imperfectly. Other scientific theories deal with the structure and history of the universe.)
The best thing about relying on common sense is that there's never any homework.
All this and daily directives from Darwin Central too!
Or that the majority of Americans don't believe that.
Most of that 9K gets siphoned off by Darwin Central.
So since we cannot test, observe, or repeat the craters on the moon, then you refuse to believe they were caused by meteor strikes?
We have evidence left of past meteor strikes on earth, and that is "scientific" enough for any reasonable person to conclude that such craters are caused by them. That, and Occam's razor makes the same explanation for moon craters the "best" explanation as well.
Likewise, we have massive amounts of evidence for evolution in the form of fossils, DNA, and observations about the strata they are found in. That information and occam's razor makes evolution the "best" explanation for how species developed.
None of that precludes God, or a "purpose" for the world. That's philosophy and faith, and need not conflict with science one bit.
Of course. But getting back to my earlier post, I'd like to be more precise. I'm assuming that the whole $900 million can be allocated to evolution, because nothing in biology would make sense otherwise. But if the figure should be changed, I'd like to make the adjustment. Also, I'd like to know many biology-trained people are employed in spending that $900 million. Then we'd know what the per-person figure really is.
My guess is that a street-person carrying a "Will Work for Food" sign makes more than the figure we'll eventually come up with.
They drilled down trying to find the meteor that struck, and never found anything. Apparently it was obliterated by the impact.
That's confirmed by the discovery of iron meteor chunks that were found primarily on one side of the crater for 10-20 miles down stream. In the late 1800's, there were lots of these pieces laying about, and someone sent an expedition of wagons from San Francisco to pick them up. Since they're high in nickel, they don't rust and are a very high quality iron. The guy who picked them up milled them into jewelry. Apparently they polish up nicely.
But of course, since we didn't have video cameras recording the impact 10,000 years ago, we can't say the crater is from a meteor. We must ignore the other evidence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.