Posted on 03/07/2006 2:34:37 PM PST by SirLinksalot
Darwin smacked in new U.S. poll
Whopping 69 percent of Americans want alternate theories in classroom
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Posted: March 7, 2006 5:00 p.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
A new poll shows 69 percent of Americans believe public school teachers should present both the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution.
The Zogby International survey indicated only 21 percent think biology teachers should teach only Darwin's theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it.
A majority of Americans from every sub-group were at least twice as likely to prefer this approach to science education, the Zogby study showed.
About 88 percent of Americans 18-29 years old were in support, along with 73 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of independent voters.
Others who strongly support teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory include African-Americans (69 percent), 35-54 year-olds (70 percent) and Democrats (60 percent).
Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture said while his group does not favor mandating the teaching of intelligent design, "we do think it is constitutional for teachers to discuss it precisely because the theory is based upon scientific evidence not religious premises."
The Seattle-based Discovery Institute is the leading promoter of the theory of Intelligent Design, which has been at the center of challenges in federal court over the teaching of evolution in public school classes. Advocates say it draws on recent discoveries in physics, biochemistry and related disciplines that indicate some features of the natural world are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.
"The public strongly agrees that students should be permitted to learn about such evidence," Luskin said.
The Discovery Institute noted Americans also support students learning about evidence for intelligent design alongside evolution in biology class – 77 percent.
Just over half – 51 percent – agree strongly with that. Only 19 percent disagree.
As WorldNetDaily reported, more than 500 scientists with doctoral degrees have signed a statement expressing skepticism about Darwin's theory of evolution.
The statement, which includes endorsement by members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, was first published by the Discovery Institute in 2001 to challenge statements about Darwinian evolution made in promoting PBS's "Evolution" series.
The PBS promotion claimed "virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true."
I may be incorrect in my assessment regarding the general trend of mutations. However, to counter the theory of evolution it must be demonstrated that mutations can never be beneficial.
If we just had this one piece of data to deal with, then it would make the most sense to say that the great apes are closely related and that humans diverged at some point before the viral insert appearing in the apes. However, the conclusion reached needs to supported by all of the data. The solution these authors propose succeeds in explaining all of the genetic data available.
I would be more willing to accept that life came from outer space than from evolution.
There are simply to many ideas to consider. And what is science? Considering and discussing ideas and looking at all of them with scrutiny.
America's kids might be better off and smarter than I previously thought.
He started out as a somewhat cute black kid, and ended up as an ugly old white woman.
And he paid for it.
Thats your belief and desire not science Science deals with fact, philosophy deals with theology Faith and belief) It is religion that request faith not science. You simply believe man is made by God. You wish to prove it but faith and belief have no method except argument.
However I wish that we could observe the origin of man as a fact whether by a God or by nature. The fact of the origin of man would be explained by science. All of faith and belief would be exposed. Philosophy as a method might cease to exist. Science would explain the fact and would become the religion. Be careful what you wish for.
Before I answer some of your questions I will mention that evolution does not state that something comes from nothing.
As far back as the earliest single celled organism DNA has been the recipe organisms have been using to reproduce themselves. The recipe is a simple set of steps of what to do with availible raw material and energy. The language used by DNA is the language of chemistry and the tendency that molecules have for being attracted to some molecules but not to others. In many cases these molecules can combine in only one way dependent on the energy available.
Every change wrought by evolution is based on the existing state of the organism's DNA and the features and functions that result from that DNA. No new feature suddenly appears but is either a previously existing feature that has developed new functions or is the result of a duplication of an existing feature followed by a change in function. Both gene duplication, and mutations in control genes such as the HOX genes, can result in additional instances of an existing feature being expressed. This has been shown in the lab where additional wings, additional segments such as body segments in insects or additional segments such as vertebrae have been triggered in a number of organisms through HOX gene mutations and/or gene additions.
Once an additional feature is added it may change its function over a number of generations during which time its appearance may also change in step with the changing function. This is observed in simple adaptation.
"1. Natural selection is not a strong enough force to have changed us from bacteria to humans even over a zillion years. How come other animals/beings (like other bacteria) havent changed? What was wrong with their natural selection?
First off, there are very few if any organisms that have not changed. Even those extant organisms that we have records extending back millions of years for are not the same as they were at a given time in their history.
The very basis of selection is change - if the environment changes the organism will change as long as its current adaptive personality does not work well in the new environment.
Some environments have changed very little, such as oceanic vents and sulfur pools near volcanic vents. Animals well adapted to those ecologies are affected less by environmental based selection but are still open to genetic drift and other forms of selection such as sexual selection (only if a sexually reproducing organism). If the organism is not prone to those other types of selection then a stable environment will not select out any but deleterious changes. In this case selection is actually acting to keep the organism the same.
As far as changing from single celled to multi-celled organisms such as humans, natural selection is not alone. Such things as drift and a number of other selection forces are also at work.
Mutations occur in all replications, this is shown in virii and bacteria as well as in humans and other animals. The vast majority of mutations are neutral either because they affect a non-coding section of the genome or the change expressed by the mutated gene is invisible to selection. This means that selection does not select for or against the change.
A small minority of mutations are deleterious, most of these are selected out by preventing the owner from replicating. An even smaller minority of mutations are beneficial where they give the owner a minor advantage in the current environment, but enough of an advantage to increase the percentage that genetic line occupies in the population.
Some of those mutations include addition of DNA material, both non-coding and coding. As long as this increase in size of genome and coding DNA occurs, the number of features will increase. Remember that DNA is a set of recipe instructions not the actual material needed to construct a body so even a small increase in DNA can result in large morphological changes. Because of this observed increase in genomic material natural selection does not encourage radical changes in morphology but actually attenuates it. Without selection the variation in organisms would be higher than it is currently .
My wife is waving at me to put the computer down so if you want I will attempt to answer your other points tomorrow.
First, because he said that they remain the same, in several places.
Not really. They only think that they are using evolutionary theory. They also only think that they think.
From the article: We identified a human endogenous retrovirus K (HERV-K) provirus that is present at the orthologous position in the gorilla and chimpanzee genomes, but not in the human genome. Humans contain an intact preintegration site at this locus.
This paper is a study of one ERV site. We have found something like 2000 such sites. When finding an insertion in gorilla, chimp, but not human genomes, that says that the human ancestor split off from the common ancestor of gorilla and chimp before the insertion occurred. Unless you're making a claim that this contradicts the species split sequence assumptions, then what's the problem here? Even if you are saying there is a species split sequence problem, then science will re-evaluate this with other information and correct the false sequence.
From the article: These observations provide very strong evidence that, for some fraction of the genome, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are more closely related to each other than they are to humans.
Ok. What's wrong with that?
From the article: They also show that HERV-K replicated as a virus and reinfected the germline of the common ancestor of the four modern species during the period of time when the lineages were separating and demonstrate the utility of using HERV-K to trace human evolution.
The authors are saying that ERV insertions help trace when species separation took place. Well, yeah. That's what I've been saying, although I can't always detail everything in every post.
In short, studying ERV insertions supports the earlier morhpological separation points. The more recent the species separation, the more common ERV insertions we find, which is a cross correlation of the earlier morhpological studies done decades ago.
Darwin was a pretty smart dude, eh? He gave us a scientific theory that says that if we find a specific piece of information (and genome sequences are most definitely information copied through the ages like copying an analog tape of Star Wars over and over, each time with slight errors), then it should tend to confirm other studies based on morphology and fossil finds. And guess what, it does!
ERV insertions are the smoking gun of common descent, and the smoking gun that demonstrates that the various species came into existence via evolution.
If you want to believe that God directed it, like He directs thunderstorms, fine. But just like evaporation and condensation explains how He makes thunderstorms, evolution explains how He made species, including humans.
Why would you be willing to dissmiss the idea that evolution may have been God's way of going about the act of Creation and attach yourself to extra-terrestrial as the source of life?
Where did THEY come from then?
How did they evolve from creations to creators?
We all have a purpose in life.
[The shortest distance between two puns is a good straight line.]
You are confusing facts, which are just data points used to construct a theory, with the theory. Theories never graduate to facts because theories explain facts.
Why do they sort at all? Why aren't they all jumbled up? They appear in discrete layers. And while you're answering that, can you explain to me the layer of fern spores laid down just above the K/T boundary, which apparently was deposited and then covered by many layers of other strata during the Flood? Why would so many fern spores decide to layer just so?
You seem to have some idea of what an evolutionist's lifestyle must be like, or else you wouldn't have brought it up. Please, I'm curious.
Science will soon be so utterly irrelevant that people will forget the word. I enjoy the toys that our technology has produced as much as anybody, and my work has been made immeasurably easier by it's use, but when it's done it'll be forgotten in the wink of an eye.
Can you give us some examples of scientific ideas that were later rejected in favor of a biblical solution?
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