:-)
Posted on 03/22/2006 6:22:07 PM PST by Central Scrutiniser
Huge crowds extend Darwin exhibit in New York
Wed Mar 22, 2:54 PM ET
NEW YORK (AFP) - A monumental Charles Darwin exhibition in New York has been extended by five months amid an overwhelming public response to what was touted as a scholarly rebuke to opponents of teaching evolution in US schools.
The American Museum of Natural History said Wednesday that nearly 200,000 people had visited "Darwin" since it opened three months ago.
Originally slated to close at the end of this month, the exhibition will now run through August 20, said museum spokesman Joshua Schnakenberg.
"Darwin" had opened amid furious debate in many school districts over the teaching of the 19th century naturalist's evolutionary theory and the first trial on the teaching of the God-centered alternative favoured by many religious groups, "intelligent design," or ID.
That trial, in Pennsylvania, ended in defeat for the evangelical right with the judge in the case decrying the "breathtaking inanity" of the school board in the town of Dover which backed the concept that nature is so complex it must be the work of a superior being.
"Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom," the judge said in his ruling in December.
An early section of the New York exhibit is devoted to the question, "What is a Theory?" and seeks to clarify the distinction between scientific theories and non-scientific explanations about the origins and diversity of life.
"This is really for the schoolchildren of America. This is the evidence of evolution," said the exhibit's curator, Niles Eldridge.
In a Gallup poll released last October, 53 percent of American adults agreed with the statement that God created humans in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it.
Thirty-one percent stood by the "intelligent design" stance, while only 12 percent said humans have evolved from other forms of life and "God has no part."
I mean, towards. Yikes!
Yes, he is.
Like churches and religious masses?
LOL, okay, so it's not a fully thought-out policy proposal. But, I don't have a problem if a parent says, "Here's what the science is, but we don't want to believe it because we find it religiously threatening grounds," and someone who just lies about what the science is ("science proves Noah's flood happened" and so forth) or who (like the Ham-ster, here) teach their children to be ignorant. I think that's the part that gets me. They are basically saying "don't learn this, make yourself ignorant." Anyone who does that has no business being a parent. Locking them up may be a bit extreme, but not by much, IMO.
I don't think Ham realizes it, but his views on reality and history is very close to what is taught in uber-left wing liberal arts departments around this country.
The popular view these days among liberal academics is that the only legitimate way to view history is through one's own experiences, and that the viewpoint of an illiterate laborer is just as valuable in the historic record as, say, Abraham Lincoln's.
Politics is a closed universe - go too far off the right end and you emerge on the far left.
(Nice treatise on gravity & science, R.A.)
grrrr..... you beat me to it...
No theory is ever proven. None. Ever.
With the exception of pure mathematics (without any real physical parameters).
Thank you for the correction. I should have said "no scientific theory is ever proven." Which is, of course, the subject at hand.
:-)
The Field Museum of Natural History here in my very own adopted city of Chicago has opened a new permanent exhibit called the Evolving Planet. I'm planning on going soon. They've got some great stuff online though too, here's the link:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/evolvingplanet/
Yep! Bringing Up Baby! Though I think it may have been a brontosaurus in the movie, not a T.Rex. Either way, I love that movie!
An observation is not the same thing as an explanation.
Suppose a plane crashes, and the FAA sends a team to find out why. The team comes back and says, "The plane crashed". That's an observation, not an explanation.
Your description of how the sun rises (the earth rotating away from the sun, etc.) is an observation. It doesn't explain where the earth or sun came from, where the laws came from that govern orbits and rotations, etc.
You're a chemist. I'm sure you can describe all the elements, their properties, the effects of combining them in different quantities (H2O = water), and so forth. But that's not an explanation for how those elements exist or why they behave the way they do. No one can objectively explain the "whys" of those things.
There are two popular subjective explanations around here for those things. One is that God created those elements and the laws which govern their behavior. The other is that those elements just happen to exist and just happen to behave that way. Neither can be proven, disproven, tested, falsified, and so on. It isn't scientific and tangible to believe that things just happen to exist and work in certain ways. It's simply a subjective belief system, a "gut feeling", not anything qualitatively different from faith in God.
How do all the apparently bizarre meanderings that we believe occur at the sub-atomic level somehow produce the observable universe that we all see? Who can know for sure? Did God design and program it? Or does it just happen to exist and work that way? Can you scientifically demonstrate either one?
In other threads I've suggested that the Dover case would had been better fought in state court, on fraud charges, and in the PA Legislature, on high crimes and misdemeanors.
Specifically, claiming that ID is science is a fraud upon the students. The taxpayers paid to get a science education, and instead they're getting pseudoscience.
I'm assuming that PA is like VA, in that the Legislature has passed laws mandating the formation of school boards, and mandating that these boards draw up curricula. By including pseudoscience in the science curriculum, these elected officials are violating the requirements of their office. That's the definition of high crimes.
The advantage of this approach is that applies to subjects that have no establishment clause entanglement, like Ebonics-as-Engllish, or Afrocentrism-as-History.
What makes you think I would disagree with you on this?
I do think that the FTC should more thoroughly prosecute people who are peddling products based on demonstrably false claims under the pretense of science and/or medicine. Products & services sold by Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, et.al. should be subject to the same legal scrutiny as the virulent fraud of that pharmaceutical conspiracy nut Kevin Trudeau.
These people are guilty of scientific fraud, plain and simple - they have the right to say what they want, but they cross a line when they begin charging people for their fraudulent "knowledge".
Remember that Behe said that his version of ID is compatible with a designer that's been dead for millions of years.
Yes, you're right in your description of the tenets of the specific ID concept proposed by men such as Behe.
All I was arguing was that Theistic Evolution is a form of intelligent design (not the specific ID concept of Behe, etc.). In order for evolution to be theistic, God would have to be involved with it in some way, but that would make it intelligent design, though not necessarily **THE** prevailing ID concept as proposed by Behe and others.
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