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To: Torie
I don't think a candiate making an issue against a politician who believes that God had a hand in designing evolution will gain much traction.

That's not what the intelligent design movement is about. It's asserting that certain lifeforms are just too complex to have evolved via natural selection. That's a much stronger statement, and it is scientifically wrong. The vast majority of people advocating this stuff are anti-science crackpots.

I don't think a politician suggesting that schools admit what we don't know, as well as what we know, per the scientific method, will bite the dust in most places either in America.

That's not what they're doing. They are trying to sneak scientifically innacuarte criticisms of the theory of evolution into biology classes, and trying to replace that theory with an unscientific alternative.

329 posted on 08/18/2005 8:25:53 PM PDT by curiosity (.)
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To: curiosity
Of course we don't know whether it is too complex for evolution to handle, because we don't fully understand the mechanisms of evolution. As I said, the emphasis should be on the mystery of it all, and be careful to elucidate what we know, from what we don't. If one believes in a divine force, to dismiss its intervention in this matter cannot be refuted yet by science, particularly given the apparent conundrums and gaps. As I get older, savoring the mysteries, interests me more than savoring what is already under the belt. I suspect tolerance and acceptance of that which is unknown, and likely to remain so, is part of the human life cycle as a generalization.
341 posted on 08/18/2005 8:39:05 PM PDT by Torie
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To: curiosity
As an addendum, teaching the scientific method should be job one. Teaching about the tools that one should use to separate wheat from chaff should be job one. Evolution might be a useful example of how the two intersect, but of course that requires very intelligent hands indeed to handle, and the issue in secondary schools is simply too hot button. Pity. But from my distant memory, the main failing I found in secondary school science classes was a failure to be candid about what we did not know. I was left with the impression that much more was known than it was, from evolution, to gravity, to electricity, you name it.

Awareness of ignorance is the first step to knowledge.

354 posted on 08/18/2005 8:56:49 PM PDT by Torie
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