Posted on 08/24/2005 6:51:49 AM PDT by Quick1
Topeka — From Darwin to intelligent design to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The debate over teaching evolution in Kansas public schools has caught the attention of a cross-country Internet community of satirists.
In the past few weeks, hundreds of followers of the supreme Flying Spaghetti Monster have swamped state education officials with urgent e-mails.
They argue that since the conservative majority of the State Board of Education has blessed classroom science standards at the behest of intelligent design supporters, which criticize evolution, they want the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster taught.
“I’m sure you realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory,” writes Bobby Henderson, a Corvallis, Ore., resident whose Web site, www.venganza.org, is part FSM tribute and part job search. Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration
Karl Gehring/Journal-World Illustration
“It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” he wrote to the education board.
Henderson did not return a telephone call for comment. He says in his letter that it is disrespectful to teach about the FSM without wearing “full pirate regalia.”
Board member Bill Wagnon, a Democrat, whose district includes Lawrence, said he has received more than 500 e-mails from supporters of FSM.
“Clearly, these are just supreme satirists. What they are doing is pointing out that there is no more sense to intelligent design than there is to a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” Wagnon said.
Intelligent design posits that some aspects of biology are so complex, they point toward an intelligent creator.
ID proponents helped shepherd a report and hearings that have resulted in science standards that criticize evolution and have put Kansas in the middle of international attention on the subject.
John Calvert, of Lake Quivira, the lawyer who was instrumental in writing the science standards that criticize evolution, said he had seen the FSM e-mails, and was not impressed.
“You can only use that misinformation so long,” Calvert said. Calvert said the science standards do not promote intelligent design, but show that evolution has its critics.
Wagnon and the three other board members who support evolution have written Henderson back, saying they appreciated the comic relief but that they were saddened that the science standards were being changed to criticize evolution.
Don't be a smart ass. We knew about Bernoulli's Principle 150 years before anyone built a working airplane. We understood orbital mechanics for three centuries before the first artificial satellite was launched.
On the plus side evolution is being used to combat disease today.
Evolutionary computation techniques utilising darwinian evolution have been used to search for solutions to real-life problems. There have been patented circuit designs produced, and a genetic algorithm has been used to design wing shape on aircraft. In many cases the evolutionary algorithm manages to find solutions human designers haven't even thought of.
Please. It's been observed for, oh, several millennia that children have characteristics inherited from their parents - the concept of inheritance was not exactly novel even in Darwin's day, even if the exact mechanism for transmission of inherited characteristics was not known.
The conmcept of children inheriting their parents traits was well known. Yet the concept of the children becoming a different species of organism from their parents over the course of generations was slightly novel.
even if the exact mechanism for transmission of inherited characteristics was not known
Well, that's precisely the point at issue.
That was a symposium of evolutionists talking about how evolutionism is used to combat disease.
No results mentioned.
We are currently mucking with genetic in a form that qualifies as intelligent design.
If I were a billionaire philanthropist wanted to get results, would I go with...current ID technology or asserted evolutionary theory.
RESULTS...just like Ghost Busters.
DK
Evolution is not the science of molecular genetics. The theories of genetics and evolution began and advanced before the molecular basis for them became known.
Re:I'm the primary source.
" No you're not."
I am.
"The problem with the so-called "proof" is that you asserted an alleged fact which is not in evidence - namely that ID advocates postulate a "hole" in physics.
Try again, what you call a fact was not held at the start. It is one of the choices to conclude. It is in fact a conclusion.
"I'll also point out again that your "proof" consists of several unsubstantiated assertions.
Try agian.
The question at issue is whether "natural" selection is random selection or not.
That's not the issue - the issue is when does human life begin.
The scientific answer is the moment of conception.
The political answer is "much later, in my opinion."
In the first place your argument is a philosphical argument about science, not a statement ofscience, so it is essentially self-refuting. If you say as you did in #175 that, "The laws of physics are not sufficient and you abandon science to inject a arbitrary force , else they are and you stick with science, admit ignorance and work more...Science does not deal with arbitrary forces, nor does it deal with any intangible, unresponsive unknowns..." you are making statements that are not themselves derived from the scientific method, and so are themselves arbitrary and self-contradictory.
In the second place, you distort Behe's conclusions in circular reasoning that simply presupposes that life is not designed, but which is the point at issue. Behe's model shows NOT that his model is insufficient to explain the observations, but that Darwinian mechanisms are insuffiencent to produce the phenomena. There's a big difference.
That you call his approach unscientific shows more about your presuppositions and your arbitrary defintion of science than it does anything about Behe's conclusions.
Cordially,
I was repsonding to a previous poster's claim that macroevolution was more than theory and therefore nothing to become arrogant about. Don't call me ignorant while you sit there and use hold to a fading argument of the left, dipshite.
Exactly.
If abortion (murder) was not considered a "privacy" issue, there would be no "gray" philosophical question over whether it was life or not.
It is ALWAYS a child. Cell division is life. A beating heart is life. But not to the courts.
More specific please.
If you are going to claim survival of the fittest and recombinant tech, to test more combos than humans can...
Junior showed me a symposium of Evolutionist in Medicine proclaiming how much Evolution is important in Medicine.
Results. A measure of utility.
His pasta was terribly offended when I pointed out HIV and Influenza are still scourges.
I'm not trying to be mean, but with so much hype of the importance of NS, it really doesn't put out much in the way of results.
In biology our current ID tech seems much more important.
Of course we could try to use our current ID technologies to simulate NS. ;)
DK
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