Posted on 02/18/2002 4:59:53 AM PST by cracker
The Dispatch tries to verify the identity of those who submit letters to the editor, but this message presented some problems. It arrived on a postcard with no return address:
Dear Representative Linda Reidelbach: Evolution is one of my creations with which I am most pleased.
It was signed, God.
The Dispatch cannot confirm that this is a divine communication, but the newspaper does endorse the sentiment it expresses: that there is room in the world for science and religion, and the two need not be at war.
The newspaper also agrees that Reidelbach, a Republican state representative from Columbus, is among the lawmakers most in need of this revelation. She is the sponsor of House Bill 481, which says that when public schools teach evolution, they also must teach competing "theories'' about the origin of life.
Reidelbach says the bill would "encourage the presentation of scientific evidence regarding the origins of life and its diversity objectively and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption.''
What this appears to mean is that any idea about the origin of life would be designated, incorrectly, a scientific theory and would get equal time with the genuine scientific theory known as evolution.
Those who correctly object that the creation stories of various religions are not scientific would be guilty, in the language of this bill, "of religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption.''
Never mind that science is not a bias or an assumption but simply a rigorous and logical method for describing and explaining what is observed in nature.
What Reidelbach and her co-sponsors are attempting to do is to require that science classes also teach creationism, intelligent design and related unscientific notions about the origin of life that are derived from Christian belief.
So bent are they on getting Christianity's foot in the door of science classrooms that they apparently don't mind that this bill also appears to give the green light to the creation stories of competing religions, cults and any other manifestation of belief or unbelief. Apparently, even Satanists would have their say.
But the real problem is that Reidelbach's bill would undermine science education at the very moment when Ohio should be developing a scientifically literate generation of students who can help the state succeed in 21st-century technologies and compete economically around the globe.
The fact is that religious ideas, no matter how much they are dressed up in the language of science, are not science. And subjecting students to religious ideas in a science class simply would muddle their understanding of the scientific method and waste valuable time that ought to be used to learn genuine science.
The scientific method consists of observing the natural world and drawing conclusions about the causes of what is observed. These conclusions, or theories, are subject to testing and revision as additional facts are discovered that either bolster or undermine the conclusions and theories. Scientific truth, such as it is, is constantly evolving as new theories replace or modify old ones in the light of new facts.
Religious notions of creation work in the opposite fashion. They begin with a preconceived belief -- for example, that God created all the creatures on the Earth -- and then pick and choose among the observable facts in the natural world to find those that fit. Those that don't are ignored.
The scientific approach expands knowledge about the natural world; the religious approach impedes it.
The classic example of this occurred 369 years ago when the Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. That theory contradicted the religiously based idea that man and the Earth formed the center of God's creation. Had the church's creationist view of the solar system prevailed, Ohioan Neil Armstrong never would have set foot on the moon.
Today, Copernican theory is established and acknowledged fact.
When it comes to evolution, much confusion grows out of the understanding -- or misunderstanding -- of the words theory and fact. Evolution is a theory, but one that has become so thoroughly buttressed by physical evidence that, for all intents and purposes, it is a fact. No one outside of the willfully obstinate questions the idea that new life forms evolved from older ones, a process conclusively illustrated in biology and the fossil record.
Where disagreement still exists is over how the process of evolution occurs. Scientists argue about the mechanism by which change occurs and whether the process is gradual and constant or proceeds in fits in starts. But while they debate over how evolution occurs, they do not doubt that it does occur.
Another way to understand this is to consider gravity. Everyone accepts the existence of this force, but many questions remain about just what gravity is and how it works. That scientists argue about how gravity works doesn't change the fact that gravity exists. Or, as author Stephen Jay Gould has put it, "Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome.''
Just as with gravity, evolution is a fact.
Those who persist on questioning this fact are a tiny minority, even among people of faith. But they are a loud minority and, to those not well-grounded in science, their arguments can sound reasonable, even "scientific.'' But their arguments are little more than unfounded assertions dressed up in the language of science.
This minority also insists on creating conflict between religion and science where none needs to exist. Major faiths long since have reconciled themselves to a division of labor with science. Religion looks to humankind's spiritual and moral needs, while science attends to the material ones.
The Catholic Church, which once tried to hold back the progress of science, now admits that it was wrong to suppress Galileo. More than a billion Catholics draw sustenance from their faith untroubled by the knowledge that the planet is racing around the sun.
Religion, in turn, provides spiritual and moral guideposts to decide how best to use the awesome powers that science has unlocked and placed at humankind's disposal.
Nor are scientists themselves antagonistic to religion. Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific geniuses in history, was deeply reverent: "My comprehension of God comes from the deeply felt conviction of a superior intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable world,'' he once said.
Others have made similar observations. The more the scientific method reveals about the intricacies of the universe, the more awestruck many scientists become.
The simplest way to reconcile religion and evolution is to accept the view propounded early last century by prominent Congregationalist minister and editor Lyman Abbott, who regarded evolution as the means God uses to create and shape life.
This view eliminates conflict between evolution and religion. It allows scientists to investigate evolution as a natural process and lets people of faith give God the credit for setting that process in motion.
As for what to do about creationism and evolution in schools, the answer is easy. Evolution should be taught in science classes. Creationism and related religiously based ideas should be taught in comparative-religion, civics and history classes.
Religion was and remains central to the American identity. It has profoundly shaped American ideals and provided the basis for its highest aspirations, from the Declaration of Independence to the civil-rights movement. There is no question that religion is a vital force and a vital area of knowledge that must be included in any complete education.
But not in the science classroom, because religion is not science. There is no such thing as Buddhist chemistry, Jewish physics or Christian mathematics.
The Earth revolves around the sun regardless of the faiths of the people whom gravity carries along for the ride. Two plus two equals four whether that sum is calculated by a Muslim or a Zoroastrian.
Reidelbach and her supporters genuinely worry that a crucial element -- moral education and appreciation of religion's role in America -- is missing in education. But they will not correct that lack by injecting pseudoscience into Ohio's science curriculum.
And Reidelbach is not the only one making this mistake. Senate Bill 222, sponsored by state Sen. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, is equally misguided. This bill would require that science standards adopted by the State Board of Education be approved by resolution in the General Assembly. This is a recipe for disaster, injecting not only religion, but also politics, into Ohio's science classes.
These two bills should be ignored by lawmakers.
In a few months, when the State Board of Education lays out the standards for science education in Ohio's public schools, it should strongly endorse the teaching of evolution and ignore the demands of those who purvey pseudoscience.
But when various museum-stored specimens were examined, the biologiclike compounds (including amino acids) found were dismissed as contaminants. This picture changed on September 28, 1969, when a meteorite seen falling to earth near Murchison, Australia, in the state of Victoria, was found to be a carbonaceous chondrite. Numerous pieces of the Murchison were picked up immediately and by high-powered techniques (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) shown to contain seven amino acids, including five found in Miller's earlier studies. [That's the famous aminos-in-a-glass-from-simple-gas experiment of the 1950s. --- VR] Further work identified eighteen amino acids in the meteorite and showed that these same amino acids, in almost identical relative amounts, are made in Miller-type experiments. This striking correspondence suggests that the early-Earth conditions simulated by Miller's experiments were present on the meteorite's asteroidal parent (a small, planet-like body between Mars and Jupiter) and gave rise to the same suite of biologiclike monomers.Fat-fingered in from My Copy of Schopf's Cradle of Life.
He goes on to describe that lots more inorganic "organics" have been detected in a variety of space environments.
There's another question nobody here is asking: does the "enrichment" from space amount to organic material coming in from dead space outside of our system or is it leftover stuff floating around from past catastrophes which might have destroyed living worlds (such as Mars) and blasted fragments of them throughout our system? There wouldn't seem to be any easy way to know on this one, nonetheless the fact that they go on finding martian meteorites on Earth is astonishing at first blush since only a tiny fraction of those actually here would figure to ever be found.
This mixing is also a plus. Pockets of concentrated biomolecules, exposed to fresh sources of new abiotic molecules...
I'm out of my depth. I see lots of very interesting possibilities but don't know enough about this area.
Once life has been established the scenario changes immensely. The thing about space is that the reactions will occur at low temperature(think low entropy). The dilution problem is still there, but I think the low temperature would greatly offset that problem. Anyway stars produce lots of protons, and photons for reaction paths.
If those prebiotic molecules are concentrated in areas where thermal currents pass new chemicals by at high rates, where temperatures are conducive to reactions, and where mineral surfaces provide substrates for biopolymers, I would think the dilution problem is smaller than you imagine.
You got post number 1234.
Easy enough to test. The chemistry involved is happening at this very moment unlike the Miller-Urey experiment. The prebiotics may be eaten by the living but they should be produced at exactly the same rates and types as the hypothetical abiotic ocean. The minerals available should not be very different now as the vents are fresh crustal material.
Iota gets to share the cabin on the Cruise from Hell with Medved, f.Christian, g3K, and a few others. At the expense of "Answers in Genesis."
Using software testing standards, ALL theories of origin of species seem to not be ready for even preliminary testing. The truth is, none of us know the origin of species. All of us are speculators.
Which of you has the courage to admit "I don't know"?
Hmm. This reference shows no biotic type chemistry occurring.
However, if the earth's atmosphere contained as much CO2 as Venus or Mars, the sea should contain substantially more dissolved CO2. This would change the chemistry, but I doubt would produce much in the form of biologic type organics. Methane is also outgassed, but again the chemistry is not clear at 400 degrees C.
That is what testing is all about. And the assumptions, to me are no more serious than the assumptions which produced the mesonychus/whale problem.
"The prebiotics may be eaten by the living but they should be produced at exactly the same rates and types as the hypothetical abiotic ocean.".
You make a wild assumption about precursor concentrations. Why aren't they eaten? Why are conditions the same now as they were in the prebiotic world?
Using your standard, virtually no software would ever leave the lab.
You of all people, as a "software tester," ought to know that only the most simplistic pieces of software can be fully tested using all possible data values through all possible combinations of execution paths. That being the case, software testing is typically limited to a tiny subset of all possible test cases, and thus the s/w is never "proved" to be correct.
The same is true of ALL scientific theories, including but not limited to Evolution. Just as it is impossible to test every data value and every combination of execution paths in complex software, it is analogously impossible to conduct every possible experiment or observation that could falsify a scientific theory. Thus, scientific theories are accepted based upon their consonance with existing data and their repeated resistance to falsification. They are no more "proven" than software.
What then makes the vents candidates for anything? Volcanoes are a source of energy and much of the same gases.
Hah! I see "Evolved seawater." Your own posts are proof against your own position. You're so easy to beat in a debate it's pathetic.
</G3K_mode>
OK, you had to have been there when he was lawyering on the "duck" in "duckbilled platypus."
[Plato the Platypus says: "I was there."]
Interesting. But I think that claim was already tried with the polywater theory. The explanations were very good, but very wrong.
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