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.
Thank you, but most of the credit belongs to Junior, whose massive resource is really an astounding work.
We've achieved some sort of symmetry. I'm thinking the same thing about you.
You must go to your search engine, pop in a word and then cut and paste whatever appears. You have no idea of the context of what you've grabbed, but its got the word you want in it, so it means what you think it means.
Now I thought we were talking about television, but you want to talk about gas discharge tubes. While its apparently true that Faraday coined the term "cathode", he did so in his work on electrolytic cells. He's not a good citation for cathode ray tubes because his work was done with gas discharge tubes and he thought he was pushing positively charged atoms. Not an easy thing to accomplish in a CRT.
But if you think Faraday's theory explains the workings of CRT's or gas discharge tubes, then explain how his theory allowed for the creation of gas discharge tubes more than 100 years before he was born. My own cut and paste:
"The concept behind neon signs was first conceived in 1675, when the French astronomer Jean Picard observed a faint glow in a mercury barometer tube. When the tube was shaken a glow called barometric light occurred, but the cause of the light (static electricity) was not then understood. "
And just so we're clear, this is not the starship captain.
LOL! You're a mean one.
Water is consumed by photosynthesis, yes. (You make it sound as if plants were electrolyzing water to release their oxygen. Sheesh!) It is released when the sugars resulting from the photosynthesis are metabolized by the plant (or whatever eats the plant). The net loss of water from photosynthesis is probably not important, no bigger than the total amount of sugar in the world at a given time. We have a lot more water than sugar.
Truth of the matter is that the earth is a very well balanced eco-system and has been so for as far back as we can tell.
We have direct evidence that the balance has swung many times. All kinds of things have changed drastically: temperatures, ice cover, the oxygen content of the atmosphere, sea levels, the nature of the animals and plants . . .
The creationist Biblical "Kind" Bin Game. So now T-rex and the sparrow in your backyard are in the same biblical kind? How useful is this construct? If you believe T-rex and the sparrow evolved from a common ancestor, what's all this silliness about not believing in macroevolution?
Now, I do happen to believe that T-rex and that sparrow share an ancestor somewhere back there, but you've been acting as if you don't. Feel free to clarify.
Because I don't trust you will ever actually run the numbers to back up your assertion, I've decided to give it a go, myself.
First off, we need to determine the volume of the atmosphere. The simplest way to do this is to determine the volume of the Earth and atmosphere together and then subtract the volume of the Earth.
The Volume of a Sphere is:
4 * Pi * (radius)^3
-------------------
3
We'll round Pi to 3.1416 for ease of calculation.
As mentioned earlier, the diameter of the Earth is 12,756 kilometers. Half of this is 6,378. To this we'll add the 150 kilometers of the atmosphere for 6528 kilometers. The volume of the who kit and kaboodle comes to 1,165,279,381,527 cubic kilometers (~1.17 trillion cubic kilometers).
Now, we'll work out the volume of the Earth, itself. Using a radius of 6,378 kilometers we come up with 1,086,783,833,910 cubic kilometers.
This means the atmosphere is 78,495,547,617 cubic kilometers.
Now, earlier we said one cubic meter of sea water supplies the oxygen for 3088.6 cubic meters of atmosphere. There are 1 million cubic meters in a cubic kilometer, so one cubic meter of sea water supplies the oxygen for 0.0030886 cubic kilometers of atmosphere. Therefore, it takes only 25,414,605 cubic kilometers of seawater to generate the atmosphere we have around Earth.
"Wait!" you say. "25 and a half million cubic kilometers of seawater is a lot of seawater." Let's see just how much that really is.
According to this Woods Hole site, the average depth of the ocean is 3.5 to 4 kilometers. We'll split the difference and say 3.75 kilometers. BTW, the above site is for grade schoolers, so it should be fairly simple to follow.
The surface area of a sphere is Surface Area of a Sphere = 4*Pi*r^2. Using this formula, we determine the surface area of the Earth to be 511,187,128 square kilometers. Water covers about 70 percent of this area, or 357,830,990 square kilometers. At an average depth of 3.75 kilometers, this gives us 1,341,866,211 cubic kilometers of water. It turns out you'd need to covert only about 2 percent of the Earth's water to hydrogen and oxygen to get the atmosphere we have. In 4.5 billion years, this has only lowered the oceans by 75 meters -- not a pittance, but certainly not anywhere near drying them up.
You know, these calculations can also be used to determine the amount of water required by Noah's flood:
"Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered." Gen 7:20
A cubit was about 1½ feet, so the mountains were covered to a depth of 22.5 feet. The highest mountain in the world is Mt. Everest, of course, at a height of 29,001 feet. This means that the world had to be covered to a depth of 29,024 feet, or about 9 kilometers. We know the surface area of the Earth is 511,187,127, so we'd need an additional 4,600,684,143 cubic kilometers of seawater, or 3.5 times the total amount of water on Earth now.
See how absurd some claims are when one starts to run the numbers?
The construct was to illuminate what I believe is the phobia towards conclusions counter to a certain line. I don't believe I have ever used micro- or macro- evolution terms in my direct arguments, although the words are present in some of my citations(specifically micro in J Shapiro's presentation). And I do not understand the compelling need for me to admit or deny something I have not characterized or that the questioner does not admit accepting. Although this would be the opportunity for you to admit whether you agree to a difference between micro and macro evolution, whatever that difference would be. My problem with the Darwinian explanation is the "random" aspect. It seems as if the molecular evidence is bearing out my concern with that aspect. To answer the clarification issue, again I see no need since my views of the subject are not really an issue related to the veracity of the claims of others, however, I will by stating that birds and lizards seem to be related, as do whales and hippos.
But a given size biomass is at an equilibrium for water release/consumption. (Burning carbos releases the water again.) You have to increase the biomass to increase the amount of water converted to carbos at a given time, and the loss is proportional to the physical volume of the biomass. (Much of which is in the ocean anyway and not hurting sea levels.)
I long thought that the micro- macro- distinction was a creationist invention to evade the obvious evidence for evolution. (I still think you see it used mainly by creationists and people who argue with creationists and get sucked into using their terms, but I seem to recall there are exceptions out there in the real literature.) Certainly the bar for macro- as determined by creationists is always something that hasn't been seen yet.
Nebby will disagree but I see no reason micro- changes (individual muations) do not accumulate forever to drift populations isolated from each other arbitrarily far apart. No anchoring, limiting mechanism has ever been identified to me.
I didn't check your numbers, but did you account for the fact that the oxygen in the atmosphere is very reactive and will also be removed? You know the "rusty" rocks that someone else mentioned.(not in those words)
Whatever your post 729 is, it isn't an explanation of what you're saying here. Obviously, us Darwinians believe in common descent. But what are you saying?
The answer is not in isolation. This was a reply to the poster's observation that "feathers" were found in something "different" than birds.
This is total nonsense. If plants were converting oxygen from water at such a rate, the seas would be dropping constantly and would have almost dissappeared by now. Truth of the matter is that the earth is a very well balanced eco-system and has been so for as far back as we can tell.
-- gore300
This is such a staggeringly ridiculous strawman model of anything going on in the real world, I just wanted to blow it up a little bigger as a monument to Cretin Science.
When you do photosynthesis, sunlight in the presence of the catalyst chlorophyll energizes water and carbon dioxide to form glucose and free oxygen. (More complex carbos can form in other reactions with the glucose later but this is the step that consumes a little water.)
When you burn/metabolize the glucose (or any carbohydrate) with free oxygen you get the water and carbon dioxide back. You also get some of the solar energy that was stored chemically in the glucose.
The only water not returned to the system is the water and carbohydrate content of the biomass itself. Period. The only way for the ocean to dry up from bioactivity was for the ocean to turn completely into sugar, starch, cellulose, etc. There probably are a lot of limiting factors that put you in equilibrium before that happens. (Not enough carbon or other essential elements, etc.)
Feathers were once considered diagnostic of clade Aves, birds. Now they are known to occur on dinosaurs as well. That was news when we discovered it.
How do you keep rationalizing this stuff?
But as I have so often seen on here, mirco-evolution does not satisfy most posters need for "proof". Which part of the evolutionary theory do you have a problem with? It would be easier to prove my point (pun intended) if we got to specifics.
Oldcats
How do you keep mischaracterizing my statements?
You're too cutesy-vague?
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