The evolving Darwin debate

In an effort to influence high-school science curriculum standards, more than 50 Ohio scientists issued a statement this week supporting academic freedom to teach arguments for and against Darwin's theory of evolution.

Released Wednesday, the statement was signed by 52 experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including entomology, toxicology, nuclear chemistry, engineering biochemistry and medicine. Some are employed in business, industry and research, but most teach at state and private universities. A third of the signatories are employed by Ohio State University.

To enhance the effectiveness of Ohio science education, as scientists we affirm:

That biological evolution is an important scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom;

That a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science;

That a science curriculum should help students understand why the subject of biological evolution generates controversy;

That where alternative scientific theories exist in any area of inquiry (such as wave vs. particle theories of light, biological evolution vs. intelligent design, etc.), students should be permitted to learn the evidence for and against them;

That a science curriculum should encourage critical thinking and informed participation in public discussions about biological origins.

Religious or anti-religious indoctrination in a class specifically dedicated to teaching within the discipline of science;

The censorship of scientific views that may challenge current theories of origins.

Signatories released the statement as the Ohio State Board of Education works to update its curriculum standards, including those for high-school science classes, in accordance with a demand from the state legislature issued last year. Advocates of inclusion of evolution criticisms believe the Ohio scientists' statement echoes similar language in the recently passed federal education law, the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001." Report language interpreting the act explains that on controversial issues such as biological evolution, "the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist."

As part of its efforts to update the science standards, the Board of Education held a moderated panel discussion on the question, "Should intelligent design be included in Ohio's science academic content standards?" The debate was conducted during the March 11 regular board meeting and included two panelists from each side of the issue, who were given 15 minutes each to present their arguments. One of the panelists in favor of including "intelligent design" arguments (the idea that biological origin was at least initiated by an intelligent force) was Dr. Stephen Meyer, a professor at Whitworth College in Washington state and fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.

Meyer has written extensively on the subject, including a column for WorldNetDaily in which he criticizes the PBS series "Evolution." The series, he wrote, "rejects – even ridicules – traditional theistic religion because [religion] holds that God played an active (even discernible) role in the origin of life on earth."

Additionally, Meyer co-wrote a February 2001 Utah Law Review article defending the legality of presenting evolution criticism in schools. The article states in its conclusion that school boards or biology teachers should "take the initiative to teach, rather than suppress, the controversy as it exists in the scientific world," which is a "more open and more dialectical approach." The article also encourages school boards to defend "efforts to expand student access to evidence and information about this timely and compelling controversy."

Dr. Robert DiSilvestro, a professor at Ohio State and statement signatory, believes many pro-evolution scientists have not given Darwin's theory enough critical thought.

"As a scientist who has been following this debate closely, I think that a valid scientific challenge has been mounted to Darwinian orthodoxy on evolution. There are good scientific reasons to question many currently accepted ideas in this area," he said.

"The more this controversy rages, the more our colleagues start to investigate the scientific issues," commented DiSilvestro. "This has caused more scientists to publicly support our statement." He noted that several of the 52 scientists on the list had signed after last week's Board of Education panel discussion.

However, panelist Dr. Lawrence Krauss, chairman of Case Western Reserve University's physics department, said intelligent design is not science. ID proponents, he explained, are trying to redefine "science" and do not publish their work in peer-reviewed literature. In a January editorial published in The Plain Dealer, Krauss wrote that "the concept of 'intelligent design' is not introduced into science classes because it is not a scientific concept."

Promoters of ID bemoan "the fact that scientists confine their investigation to phenomena and ideas that can be experimentally investigated, and that science assumes that natural phenomena have natural causes," his editorial continues. "This is indeed how science operates, and if we are going to teach science, this is what we should teach." By its very nature, Krauss explains, science has limitations on what it can study, and to prove or disprove the existence of God does not fall into that sphere of study.

Krauss was disappointed in the Board of Education's decision to hold a panel discussion on the subject, saying the debate was not warranted since there is no evolution controversy in scientific circles.

"The debate, itself, was a victory for those promoting intelligent design," he said. "By pretending there's a controversy when there isn't, you're distorting reality."

But Meyer counters that a controversy does exist over the validity of Darwinian evolution, as evidenced by the growing number of scientists publicly acknowledging the theory's flaws. For example, 100 scientists, including professors from institutions such as M.I.T, Yale and Rice, issued a statement in September "questioning the creative power of natural selection," wrote Meyer in his WND column. But such criticism is rarely, if ever, reported by mainstream media outlets and establishment scientific publications, he maintains.

At the Board of Education's panel discussion, he proposed a compromise to mandating ID inclusion in science curriculum: Teach the controversy about Darwinism, including evidence for and against the theory of evolution. Also, he asked the board to make it clear that teachers are permitted to discuss other theories of biological origin, which Meyer believes is already legally established.

But such an agreement would only serve to compromise scientific research, according to Krauss. "It's not that it's inappropriate to discuss these ideas, just not in a science class," he concluded.

scientific propositions can never be proven.

So it hasn't yet been proven that the earth revolves around the sun?

No, this has not been proven. That is to say, there are no arguments or observations that entail with logical necessity that the Heliocentric Theory is true.

Don't get me wrong, the evidence for the heliocentric theory is very, very, very strong, such that it is perverse to deny it confident, if formally tentative, assent. But a very, very, very strong case is not the same as a "proof". A proof is a demonstration that a proposition is not merely irrefutable as a practical matter, or on the basis of present knowledge, but rather that it must be true, regardless of any possible future discoveries.

NO scientific claim has this characteristic. ALL scientific claims are subject to revision, replacement or abandonment as may be required by future discoveries, or the creation of stronger theories. In this light, btw, it should be noted that the heliocentric theory when intially proposed was, in fact, much weaker both in evidentiary support and predictive power than the prevailing geocentric views, and that it was significantly modified subsequently (most notably in Kepler's substitution of elliptical orbits for circular ones).

I should note, just for the record, that there are still creationists who insist on Geocentrism. A quick search turned up the following web pages:

The Heliocentric Hoax

GALILEO'S HERESY (same site as the preceeding)

What is Geocentricity?

Association for Biblical Astronomy

The Scriptural Basis for a Geocentric Cosmology

The non-moving earth & anti-evolution web page...

So it hasn't yet been proven that the earth revolves around the sun?

That is a fact. Facts can be proven.

I have to disagree with both of these sentences.

1) A fact is a confirmed observation. No one has observed heliocentrism as a singular (or even a complex) fact. What we observe is that a light in the sky (a planet) traces such and such a path of polar co-ordinates across the night sky. Granted that this condition has been considerably augmented in recent decades by observations from space craft, but these observations still comprise a large collection of individual facts/observations. It is because these facts are uniquely consistent, among available coherent views, with the heliocentric view that we conclude that heliocentrism is true, but it is still an inference rather than a fact itself.

2) Facts are not proven. If a fact is a "confirmed observation" then we must always be open to the possibility that disconfirming observations may come to light in the future. As a specific example, it was "a fact" (a confirmed observation) until 1956 that there where 48 human chromosomes. After that time improvements in staining techniques corrected earlier observations, and the number of human chromosomes "changed" to the currently accepted number of 46. See History of human cytogenetics.

Do you believe that other intelligent life exists in the universe? Yes.

That's the only part I need to know. It opens untold possibilities that fit the hypothesis.

These are a considerable number of trained mathematicians, statisticians, and scientists. They say they have correctly applied their model. Their opponents say they haven't.

If I can find an alternate explanation for the opponent's (evolutionist's) refutation of their work, then it is admissible by the rules of evidence. That alternate explanation is: religio/philosophical differences. Historically, that is a strong incentive to demean emerging theories. The evolutionists have, then, a philosophical and financial reason for opposition that requires the grant of some leeway to the IntelDesign folks.

Evolution: Over the last hundred+ years, this is how science has and is figuring out how we came about. Read any of several thousand books (not all agreeing on all points), go on digs yourself, do your own experiments and come to your own conclusions. You are free to publish scientific attacks on evolution, and if you happen to be the one who takes down the theory with a scientific argument, you'll be more famous than Darwin.

If you're interested in fairytales I'd recommend Pushkin; the kind of thing you describe is a system of fairytales for grown people. Moreover, it's a system of fairytales based upon a patently idiotic theory which has known and unavoidable pathalogical social and political consequences, and that theory is being held at present, despite overwhelming disproofs having been presented, for essentially religious reasons by scientists who should know better. Moreover, the adherents of this theory are continuing to insist that it be taught as a fact in public schools at public expense and make all possible efforts to suppress scientific dissenting opinions using every agency of American government and jurisprudence available to them.

Like I say, that kind of fairytale has no particular appeal to me. The question will ultimately be settled in courtrooms and ballotboxes and that is proper, since it is basically a political issue.

" I ask, for the third time now, for three examples of scientific theories (from any field of natural science) that do meet this criteria."

Well, medved answered you in post#60, but I guess you want me to do it: 1. Mendellian genetics - he proved it himself with a bunch of peas, has been further verified by many breeding experiments. 2. Gravity - by the American landing on the moon. All the calculations were made using the theory of gravity.
3. Relativity - the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb.

Just about every single invention you see around you is proof of some scientific theory - from the bridges you ride over, to your tv, to the computer you are using. The natural sciences - unlike what evolutionists like to say - do provide proof, they provide experimental proof, predictive proof, practical proof. That is why one theory is able to build upon the discoveries of others and why science keep advancing our knowledge and our way of life. That evolutionists have to smear science in order to excuse the failures of their theory is abundant proof that evolution is not science.

You ignore the predictions its made?

What predictions did he make that were proven? I know quite a few statements that he made which have been proven wrong by real science:
1. that the brachyo-cephalic index means anything.
2. that fossils would prove evolution - after 150 years and 100 times more fossils than we had then it still does not.
3. that the genes of the parents "meld" in the progeny - refuted by Mendellian genetics.

"Because your test doesn't prove ID wrong. It would only demonstrate that an alternative method was at work, but there is not requirement that if ID is true no other process could be as well. They aren't exclusionary. Later evolution could have been "designed" in.

Your statement is self-contradictory and silly. If it can be proven that a set of characteristics which work together gradually evolved then ID is refuted, period. Evolution cannot "design" anything, it is a mindless force, it has no intelligence, no memory, no brain. Whatever it does, however it does it, cannot be called design.

"Intelligent design can be falsified. All you have to do is prove how different genes, how different organs, how different faculties coevolved at the same time. -me-

How would this falsify intelligent design?"

It would falsify intelligent design by demonstrating that different characteristics can coevolve to create a functioning system which requires different organs, genes, proteins, etc. to work together. Of course, to say such a thing is totally ridiculous and is the reason why Intelligent Design disproves evolution.

I love it! If people really bothered to read Darwin the debate over evolution would be quickly ended. The man was not only a mysoginist as you showed, but also a racist as his brachyocephalism showed, and a total immoral barbarism as the following passage shows:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Darwin, "The Descent of Man", Chapter V.

If you're interested in fairytales I'd recommend Pushkin; the kind of thing you describe is a system of fairytales for grown people.

As opposed to the fairy tales from the first bullet? At least the evolution tales weren't made by the same people who believed the Earth to be flat and the stars to be set in an Earth-covering dome with a heaven beyond.

Moreover, it's a system of fairytales based upon a patently idiotic theory which has known and unavoidable pathalogical social and political consequences

Political and social problems have nothing to do with the validity of a theory. The heliocentric theory begat serious political, religious, philosophical, and social problems, yet there aren't too many people challenging it anymore.

and that theory is being held at present, despite overwhelming disproofs having been presented,

If overwhelming scientific (not religious pseudoscience) disproofs existed, evolution theory would have fallen and the disprover would be a very famous and probably rich person. This is the way science works.

What predictions did he make that were proven? I know quite a few statements that he made which have been proven wrong by real science:

You're talking "he" rather than the theory, which is rather limiting, and many scientists throughout evolution theory and many other theories have made hypotheses that turned out not to be true -- this is the nature of science. These hypotheses are then not taken as part of the theory. However, PatrickHenry already gave you the link to many predictions come true.

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