Posted on 10/14/2006 11:16:50 AM PDT by lizol
Keep Darwin's 'lies' out of Polish schools: education official 2 hours.
WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's deputy education minister called for the influential evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin not to be taught in the country's schools, branding them "lies."
"The theory of evolution is a lie, an error that we have legalised as a common truth," Miroslaw Orzechowski, the deputy minister in the country's right-wing coalition government, was quoted as saying by the Gazeta Wyborcza daily Saturday.
Orzechowski said the theory was "a feeble idea of an aged non-believer," who had come up with it "perhaps because he was a vegetarian and lacked fire inside him."
The evolution theory of the 19th-century British naturalist holds that existing animals and plants are the result of natural selection which eliminated inferior species gradually over time. This conflicts with the "creationist" theory that God created all life on the planet in a finite number.
Orzechowski called for a debate on whether Darwin's theory should be taught in schools.
"We should not teach lies, just as we should not teach bad instead of good, or ugliness instead of beauty," he said. "We are not going to withdraw (Darwin's theory) from the school books, but we should start to discuss it."
The deputy minister is a member of a Catholic far-right political group, the League of Polish Families. The league's head, Roman Giertych, is education minister in the conservative coalition government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Giertych's father Maciej, who represents the league in the European Parliament, organised a discussion there last week on Darwinism. He described the theory as "not supported by proof" and called for it be removed from school books.
The far-right joined the government in May when Kaczynski's ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, after months of ineffective minority government, formed a coalition including LPR and the populist Sambroon party.
Roman Giertych has not spoken out on Darwinism, but the far-right politician's stance on other issues has stirred protest in Poland since he joined the government.
A school pupils' association was expected to demonstrate in front of the education ministry on Saturday to call for his resignation.
In a word, yes. Intellectual laziness on the part of its disciples and hearers has resulted in the wrong label being applied and accepted. Evolution in the wide sense is merely a philosophy of history, a tautological one at that, which allows any piece of evidence to be interpreted in any way one wishes, all without the possibility of being verified on a repeated basis.
Even if dinosaurs were to be found living among humans this very day, such a find would in no way militate against the notion that, since certain creatures have common forms, they necessarily have a common ancestor. The only process that has allowed evolution in the wide sense to be accepted as science is like-minded intellectual laziness on a grand scale. As you put it, "some creature trying to make itself grander."
Meanwhile, one does not have to bypass any kind of process to recognize that intelligent design takes place on a regular basis, results in organized matter performing specific functions, and potentially governs either directly or indirectly every particle of matter as we know it. It's the way science has been undertaken since the beginning: intelligence exploring an intelligible universe by seeking order.
The "bypassing" and usurpation have be perpetrated by people like you who do not know the difference between pure science and philosophy. But that's okay. Science will progress in spite of you, though public school science classes suffer in being deprived by law of the scientific paradigm that is most reasonable and most helpful.
Sorry to say, the ToE is stronger today than it was when Johnson invented his evangelical tool.
You've been dreaming all along. Don't stop now.
Yes. How do you intend to teach ID as though it were a theory?
Bear with me: What's this stricter application of the word chaos regarding design theory?
And this "intelligent design theory" of particle matter and beyond: Could you provide some links?
The application that allows what appears to be chaos to be investigated, assessed, and known as something other than chaos. Hence, one might be allowed to call the final play of the recent Colts/Jets game "chaos" and be within proper use of the word, but when using the word to assess patterns in the physical world that appear to be random, it ought not be applied in a positive sense, but with some qualification.
And this "intelligent design theory" of particle matter and beyond: Could you provide some links?
It is ubiquitous enough to be apprehended through anything that is intelligible, and you are asking for "links?" Intelligent design theory is an axiomatic paradigm whereby intelligent beings explore an intelligible universe. It assumes that where there is not chaos (in the strict sense), there intelligent design may be in play, either directly or indirectly. I suppose if one Googled the phrase he may find links to attempts at presenting it in formal terms, but I have not sought it out.
FesterWorld Translation: that's what it looks like to me, therefore it's a fact that needs no support.
The problem is not the lack of links, but their abundance - as you said: it's an ubiquitous concept. I hoped, that you could provide some further information as you seem to be interested in that matter.
In many words, you dismiss the decades of work that led to the eventual acceptance of the ToE, and decades more work in the refinement of the theory given new discoveries and technologies. It underwent the same regimen of acceptance and refinement that was undergone by the Theory of Relativity, Quantum Theory and the Theory of Heat, yet you don't dismiss those (or do you?). Despite any philosophical disagreements you may have with it, the ToE has withstood the test of time in science, gone from unaccepted to accepted, and has survived attacks by actual scientists.
As usual, when creationists who try to bash the ToE fail on the merits of their pseudo-scientific attacks, they revert to attacking science in general.
Sorry, we do not need the luddites dictating what goes into a science class unless we want our public education to slip even further behind the other industrialized countries.
You've been dreaming all along. Don't stop now.
It's simple fact, recorded, proven.
Placemarker
OK. You have stated a number of times that it is not possible but you have yet to give me a reason why.
How many mutations are necessary to go from the first bipedal hominid to H. sapiens? I don't mean just single point mutations but mutations of all kinds including transposons, gene duplication, all other copy errors, and ERVs.
How many alleles can fix simultaneous in a population? Alleles do not fix one at a time. In any given population there will be many alleles on their way to fixation at the same time. Populations do not wait for one allele to fix before another mutation is allowed to move toward fixation. (No this is not a suggestion that the population has conscious control over the frequency of alleles, they don't. It is just a handy way of describing the process)
What was the mutation rate at the time of those first hominids and what is the mutation rate of H. sapiens?
What were the population sizes 4 million years ago, 3 million years ago, 2 million years ago, etc....?
It is well known that alleles fix in a small population faster that in large populations. (Its just a matter of math)
How many subpopulations were there throughout those 3,805,000 million years?
"According to science how old is the hominid species?
The bipedal hominid line starts with the australopithecines somewhere in between Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus afarensis about 4 million years ago. Homo sapiens originated about 195,000 years ago. That makes about 195,000 generations.
Actually the number of generations should be much higher. I used ~19 years between generations. A more realistic difference between generations would be 12 or 13 years.
I did a Google on it myself and found positions pro and con. I do not have a specific link to assist or promote, but I am confident you are most capable of thinking things through in your own way and on your own time.
It wasn't that many words, and who cares how many decades of work are dismissed if they are undertaken as a philosophy dressed in scientific garb? Evolution in the wide sense does not have the support of pure science. It is 90% conjecture based upon various scientific disciplines that support it on a limited scale. It hardly enjoys the certitude of other scientific theories, like the theory of gravity, quantum theory, and such.
On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of certitude the theory of evolution is right up there with Grimm's Fairy Tales, with every evolutionist having a different tale to tell, and every one of them operating under the intellectually lazy assumption that common forms mean common ancestry. It may appeal to the masses, but it it is not science. It certainly does not deserve an exclusive hearing by law in the public school science classroom.
So LC, which one of those doctrines was false?
I will hit your other points later, but this is the salient one. 195,000 is not enough time. If it take millions of years for slight changes to happen then there just was not the amount of time neccessary for the full changes to happen to bring to our current evolutionary state.
In "this" scheme science has backed itself into a corner. You can't theorize that something has evolved over MILLIONS of years and then try to change the argument into something that directly contradicts the original premise. Since life began, if it happened by "chance" then how in tarnation did all the sudden it just happen to get it structually right? There's more than one series of overwhelming, statisical impossible obstacles life had to go thru to "Happen By Chance" DNA tells us, there is NO WAY life happens by chance because SOMEONE is drawing those blueprints.
My confusion is some scientist say that we evolved from the premortal(sp)soup and others say no, we evoled from another species that just happen to all of the sudden show up...Which is it?
No, I'm not.
But there is NO place in the bible that says "10" (as far as I know)
AARRGH!!
"Men in Tights"!
Saying things that pique my interest.
(Lots of things do, so you are probably in for a loooong ride. ;^)
Our tax laws???
99 more to go!
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