Posted on 06/05/2002 6:55:45 PM PDT by Gladwin
Two Republican congressmen are playing fast and loose with accepted definitions by suggesting that their home state should alter its science curriculum to include references to the so-called intelligent-design (ID) theory. Representatives John Boehner and Steve Chabot of Ohio want the curriculum amended to include the language, "Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist."
This might seem unobjectionable, except that most observers agree that the language is being used as a Trojan horse for a theory that is decidedly unscientific. ID argues that the complex nature of life and the universe provide evidence of an organizing intelligence. This is an old notion: The ancients marveled at "the harmony of the spheres," while the early-nineteenth century theologian William Paley likened God to a watchmaker (something as complex as a watch could never have occurred naturally, and so the same must be true of living things).
Intelligent design does have a thing or two going for it. Superficially, at least, it tries to address the concerns of science, being a more sophisticated and less airy attempt than the watchmaker theory at reconciling the human need for divinity with evidence.
ID is not, however, true science. According to the eminent modern philosopher Karl Popper, the defining characteristic of science is that its assertions are falsifiable. In other words, if we have no means to prove a theory wrong -- by experiment, observation, and the like -- then it is not scientific. And theories that cannot be falsified simply have no place in science books or classrooms. (Thankfully, most things to do with nature and the various physical laws can be tested, so our science curricula have plenty of material.)
Some elements of intelligent design can indeed be tested, such as the doctrine of irreducible complexity. This is the contention that complex biological entities cannot have arisen by chance because removing just one element in them often causes them to cease to function. Thus the Catholic biochemist Michael Behe, an ID theorist and author of Darwin's Black Box, has argued that certain biochemical systems within our cells are like a mousetrap: Take away any part of the trap -- the base, the spring -- and it stops catching mice. Therefore, Behe's argument goes, just as a mousetrap was consciously designed (by humans) to trap mice, so these molecular systems must have been designed for the role they play.
This is a false conclusion, however. Most traits of living things that arise by natural selection are advantageous but not essential -- or at least not at first. However, successive traits can then develop that are especially advantageous in combination with a previous trait, in the end making one or both of them essential. An example might be the air-breathing advantage of lungs. At first, this would have benefited an amphibious creature whose habitat was extended by the ability to stray from water onto dry land. But when paired with the extra mobility gained from legs evolved for walking, lungs might have become essential in order to allow the evolving organism to fully thrive in a land habitat. (Another quintessential example, of course, is the eye, an immensely complex organ that nevertheless obviously evolved in stages.)
Intelligent Design theorists such as Behe have attempted to include empirical examples in order to bolster their case. In the end, however, the underlying basis of the theory -- the proposition that a designing intelligence deliberately assembles complex living things -- remains unfalsifiable. We can certainly demonstrate how it is that natural selection can produce very complex organs such as the eye, and thereby falsify one tenet of the theory. But the overarching proposition, of a pre-existing intelligence, cannot be put to any scientific test.
That's why the National Academy of Sciences stated quite categorically that "intelligent design … [is] not science because [it is] not testable by the methods of science" in its definitive 1999 investigation, Science and Creationism: A view from the National Academy of Sciences. No amount of dressing the issue up in scientific terms can circumvent this problem. Until the "scientific creationists" come up with a theory that can be submitted, in its entirety, to scientific tests, they must recognize that what they are proposing to teach in schools is religious faith, not science.
And ID fails the test even using an alternative, non-Popperian view of the way the scientific method operates. In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that science is ruled by paradigms, worldviews that fit the available knowledge and according to which scientists operate. But intelligent design is not part of any current scientific paradigm, and besides a few fringe elements, no serious evolutionary biologists accept it. Moreover, it is hard to call ID an emerging scientific paradigm when its leading proponent is a University of California, Berkeley law professor, Phillip E. Johnson, who is not a scientist at all.
The only scientific theory of life's origins thus far is the theory of evolution. ID may have a genuine role to play in the classrooms of philosophers or comparative theologians, but it certainly does not belong in the science lab. If creationists want to have their views taught, they must first meet the biggest challenge in history: proving the existence of God.
That could be considered a sin in itself. (juuuust kidding)
The mind reels. What color is the sky on your planet?
He's been spamming that "God Hates Idiots, Too" thing on every thread for the past year. Here's my version 3.0 reply.
Thanks for your clear-headed thinking! If only the IDIOTS would read your reply!! This needs to be published!Notice who pops up immediately, almost as if he heard the word "idiots" and figured somebody was talking about him behind his back?
The mind reels. What color is the sky on your planet?
He's been spamming that "God Hates Idiots, Too" thing on every thread for the past year.
In other words, the evos, lacking any sort of a rational response to the post, have been accusing me of "spamming", as if I were actually being paid or otherwise profiting from posting the Eastwood-quote thing (Please, Lord, let it be so some day), and trying to have me booted from FR. Were they to succeed, people such as yourself would not be able to read that article on FR.
Here's my version 3.0 reply.
[Sample of Reeplogic(TM) from Reep's "version 3.0 reply"]:
You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
All of which probably co-evolve. If there's any co-dependency, then they're going to evolve together.
Really? I mean, do you know of some rational REASON why, say, flight feathers and the flow-through heart which flying birds require would co-evolve in a creature which wasn't a flying bird?? That's really brilliant, there, Reep; link up a few of your talk.origins artist conceptions of primitive birds and produce ten or twelve incoherent paragraphs worth of wishful thinking and then claim to have totally debunked a well-thought-out argument which annihilates your little brain-dead ideological doctrine masquarading as science while at the same time repeating your little crybaby mantra about me "spamming".
Thanks for your clear-headed thinking! If only the IDIOTS would read your reply!! This needs to be published!Notice who pops up immediately, almost as if he heard the word "idiots" and figured somebody was talking about him behind his back?
The mind reels. What color is the sky on your planet?
He's been spamming that "God Hates Idiots, Too" thing on every thread for the past year.
In other words, the evos, lacking any sort of a rational response to the post, have been accusing me of "spamming", as if I were actually being paid or otherwise profiting from posting the Eastwood-quote thing (Please, Lord, let it be so some day), and trying to have me booted from FR. Were they to succeed, people such as yourself would not be able to read that article on FR.
Here's my version 3.0 reply.
[Sample of Reeplogic(TM) from Reep's "version 3.0 reply"]:
You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
All of which probably co-evolve. If there's any co-dependency, then they're going to evolve together.
Really? I mean, do you know of some rational REASON why, say, flight feathers and the flow-through heart which flying birds require would co-evolve in a creature which wasn't a flying bird?? That's really brilliant, there, Reep; link up a few of your talk.origins artist conceptions of primitive birds and produce ten or twelve incoherent paragraphs worth of wishful thinking and then claim to have totally debunked a well-thought-out argument which annihilates your little brain-dead ideological doctrine masquarading as science while at the same time repeating your little crybaby mantra about me "spamming".
Are horses and donkeys the same or different species?
It did. Darwinian natural selection won, big time. When the anti-evolution crowd comes up with some evidence, and **quits lying**, perhaps the debate will be re-opened.
I'm afraid the credit for it must go to Richard Dawkins, rather than to me. :)
Ann, read a book, for goodness sakes. What an uneducated dope. Obviously no one can see before their eyes a lizard turn into a snake or something because noticable evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years. The fossil records prove it happened beyond any doubt.
Points for honesty. I'd never heard it before.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
Wrong. All that is necessary for flight to get started is that creatures with a slightly increased surface area around the sides survive better than those that do not. A bird that fell from a high place might be saved by such a surface area because it slowed its descent ever so slightly. The birds which survived in this way will have some offspring with a larger still surface area, and so on. Slowly wings evolve. For examples of where a creature cannot fly, but can glide through the air because of this principle, look at a frog. Maybe one day frogs will be able to fly too. It is also not true that this must happen more than once. One time is enough, and from them on, slowly semi-winged birds can predominate.
Frat members don't exactly spend their time thinking about the origins of the world.
What I find amusing is this Creationist idea that if life evolved by Natural Selection then there is no such thing as right and wrong. "Oh well I used to think it was a bad idea to kill people, but since I read some Darwin he really proved that wrong." o_O
Like I say, that kind of logic works a lot better in fantasies than in the real world. In the real world, there is zero evidence, in all of recorded history, of any gliding animal, including "flying" squirrels, lizards, and fish, ever taking the first step towards being able to flap those folds of skin, or develop wings from them. If there were anything to evolutionism, we'd have seen it.
As for an example of a creature that uses wing-like greater surface area to glide; the frog.
Everybody has a "flow-through" heart. I believe you mean "flow-through lungs." The bird has a number of adaptations that give it a high oxygen uptake. That's not necessarily a flying adaptation, though. A pronghorn antelope has an oxygen uptake any human marathoner would envy, but it isn't a bird, nor can it fly.
You keep coming back with the same BS no matter no matter, but for Ann and any other might-as-well-be-Newbies out there: The evolution of birds happened. There's practically every kind of intermediate you could ask for somewhere in the fossil record. You don't make that go away with strawman thought experiments. If a theory doesn't explain how that happened, such a theory isn't worth the time it takes to throw it in the trash.
Washington, if it were not for some very vocal people, evolution would be unquestioned fact. Just because one particular scientific theory faces ill-judged religious objections does not mean it can retract its claim to objective truth.
The trouble with most Creationists is two-fold. They are ignorant, and they don't want to learn. It is lunacy to describe evolution as a pseudo-science, or say that an evolutionist is anyone who believes in evolution, or that evolution is a theory of blind chance.* You can argue with someone who is willing to debate what you actually say. But if they refuse even to understand the argument you are making, then there is nothing much that can be said. The reason Creationists refuse to deal with the real theory of evolution is, of course, that if you actually understand it, then you realise that it absolutely had to happen, by definition. It is almost impossible to refute once you understand it, so you must pretend not to, or shut your ears to the truth about it. Informed Creationists are very welcome in any debate. The trouble is that if you are informed you will almost certainly see that evolution took place, which is why Creationists are all scientific ignoramuses led by liars.
* Evolution uses the scientific method, so it is a science. Evolutionists are scientists who study evolution. Evolution is a theory of selection based on nature, not chance.
ID is not, however, true science. According to the eminent modern philosopher Karl Popper, the defining characteristic of science is that its assertions are falsifiable. In other words, if we have no means to prove a theory wrong -- by experiment, observation, and the like -- then it is not scientific. And theories that cannot be falsified simply have no place in science books or classrooms.
That's it in a nutshell, folks. Create a definition of science that eliminates the possibility of God, then point to the definition to show that any theory supposing the existence of God is "unscientific". The whole philosophy of evolution and its constant circular reasoning to justify itself, absent any evidence in nature or the fossil record whatsoever.
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