A real elephant ear for you, Elsie the troll!
Posted on 08/18/2005 5:17:34 PM PDT by curiosity
The appeal of "intelligent design" to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God's fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there's little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that's shared by millions.
In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.
And intelligent design will run out of steam--a victim of its own grand ambitions. What began as a critique of Darwinian theory, pointing out aspects of biological life that modification-through-natural-selection has difficulty explaining, is now foolishly proposed as an alternative to Darwinism. On this front, intelligent design fails conspicuously--as even defenders like Rick Santorum are beginning to realize--because it can't offer a consistent, coherent, and testable story of how life developed. The "design inference" is a philosophical point, not a scientific theory: Even if the existence of a designer is a reasonable inference to draw from the complexity of, say, a bacterial flagellum, one would still need to explain how the flagellum moved from design to actuality.
And unless George W. Bush imposes intelligent design on American schools by fiat and orders the scientific establishment to recant its support for Darwin, intelligent design will eventually collapse--like other assaults on evolution that failed to offer an alternative--under the weight of its own overreaching.
If liberals play their cards right, this collapse could provide them with a powerful rhetorical bludgeon. Take the stem-cell debate, where the great questions are moral, not scientific--whether embryonic human life should be created and destroyed to prolong adult human life. Liberals might win that argument on the merits, but it's by no means a sure thing. The conservative embrace of intelligent design, however, reshapes the ideological battlefield. It helps liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.
This would be the liberal line of argument anyway, even without the controversy surrounding intelligent design. "The president is trapped between religion and science over stem cells," declared a Newsweek cover story last year; "Religion shouldn't undercut new science," the San Francisco Chronicle insisted; "Leadership in 'therapeutic cloning' has shifted abroad," the New York Times warned, because American scientists have been "hamstrung" by "religious opposition"--and so on and so forth. But liberalism's science-versus-religion rhetoric is only likely to grow more effective if conservatives continue to play into the stereotype by lining up to take potshots at Darwin.
Already, savvy liberal pundits are linking bioethics to the intelligent design debate. "In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs," Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote last week, "can the U.S. afford--ethically or economically--to raise our children on fraudulent biology?" (Message: If you're for Darwin, you're automatically for unfettered cloning research.) Or again, this week's TNR makes the pretty-much-airtight "case against intelligent design"; last week, the magazine called opponents of embryo-destroying stem cell research "flat-earthers." The suggested parallel is obvious: "Science" is on the side of evolution and on the side of embryo-killing.
Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable way, summed up the liberal argument earlier this year:
Exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education . . . a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a "culture of life" than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Terri Schiavo, sex education, stem cell research--on any issue that remotely touches on science, a GOP that's obsessed with downing Darwin will be easily tagged as medieval, reactionary, theocratic. And this formula can be applied to every new bioethical dilemma that comes down the pike. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued ethical guidelines for research cloning, which blessed the creation of human-animal "chimeras"--animals seeded with human cells. New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade, writing on the guidelines, declared that popular repugnance at the idea of such creatures is based on "the pre-Darwinian notion that species are fixed and penalties [for cross-breeding] are severe." In other words, if you're opposed to creating pig-men--carefully, of course, with safeguards in place (the NAS guidelines suggested that chimeric animals be forbidden from mating)--you're probably stuck back in the pre-Darwinian ooze with Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
There's an odd reversal-of-roles at work here. In the past, it was often the right that tried to draw societal implications from Darwinism, and the left that stood against them. And for understandable reasons: When people draw political conclusions from Darwin's theory, they're nearly always inegalitarian conclusions. Hence social Darwinism, hence scientific racism, hence eugenics.
Which is why however useful intelligent design may be as a rhetorical ploy, liberals eager to claim the mantle of science in the bioethics battle should beware. The left often thinks of modern science as a child of liberalism, but if anything, the reverse is true. And what scientific thought helped to forge--the belief that all human beings are equal--scientific thought can undermine as well. Conservatives may be wrong about evolution, but they aren't necessarily wrong about the dangers of using Darwin, or the National Academy of Sciences, as a guide to political and moral order.
I know. You are still trying to prove that the sun revolves around the earth.
Time would not exist unless there were a sequence to events. It could be that the past, present, and future are pre-cast, and that a time sequence law is in-place that glues the sequence in a rigorously, orderly fashion. That would contradict quantum physics, and would require some formidable substantiation to support.
Curiously, Quantum, and Einstein physics also allow that logical sequence can be violated, such that event A can be a (or apparent) consequence of event B, rather than a cause of event A. Perhaps it is a temporary state (or perceptual state) that Event A causes Event B, and sometime in the future Event B will (be seen to) cause Event A.
If the universe were closed, the collapsing universe would be a time reversed replica of the expanding universe.
Not really. No more than your return flight home takes you back to the time of your original departure.
You've wasted enough of my time. If you can't help but misrepresent my position perhaps a ping to the admin moderator will help keep your posting style in check.
I am one conservative that says, look God created it. That's what I believe and who I worship. You want me to believe ANYTHING else, you better prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt and even then, no promises.
The cat says ""I have always imagined that Hell will be a kind of scientific lab!."
So why do we lose the immune system too? Doesn't seem fair.
And I was only extremely indirectly reffering to procreation. I was think more in engineering terms. For any system the failure pattern follows a bathtub curve 
There is no point in trying to extend the useful life if it requires overengineering the system to beyound optinum cost. At the same time it is a bad idea to go for the cheapest production cost it makes the normal life failure life incidence high.
Translating back into biological terms (and for humans - coverting the time line from hours to days), it comes to Owen Lovejoy's theories on the balance berween r (reproduction) and K (parental care of the offspring).
Oysters have high r (millions of eggs) and zero K. All the energy is devoted to producing eggs but it's not very efficient for the oyster as most of them become food for other species. You (or Lewis Carroll) could say providing meals for others is the oysters' purpose.
On the other hand the Great Apes have low r (one offspring every few years) and high K. This is an extreme strategy too as extending the useful life does not address the limiting problem of low replacement production that all bar one of the Great Apes species have.
It was sarcasm. Get a life.
Then perhaps it would have been best if you kept your comment to yourself.
I was responding to your comment about my train being on the wrong track. Apparently you feel you can jest and the AM will protect you from any responses.
Hon, I just wanta live! The rest is static. And I wanta move without needing medicine. And I would rather not have any other deteriorating diseases. And I would like to see my grandchildren have children to see how much my genes have been diluted. I would like to see the greats do the same thing.
I've missed you too.
I don't know why he went to the AM. One would think he would bypass the AM and go straight to God.
True. Time to leave. Have fun.
Knock of the personal attacks
There is some significance to the Creation of Scripture leading to an understanding of what man is in relationship to God. Some of that significance is obscured when one attempts to avoid some literal statements in Scripture to condone an evolutionary worldview.
This doesn't insist some arguments and proofs observed by 'evolutionists' aren't worthy of consideration, rather, IMHO science that fails to humble itself to Scripture isn't worthy science in the first place.
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