Posted on 06/07/2002 11:35:28 AM PDT by jennyp
To Seattle area residents the struggle over how evolution is taught in public high schools may seem a topic from the distant past or a distant place.
Don't bet on it. One nearby episode in the controversy has ended, but a far-reaching, Seattle-based agenda to overthrow Darwin is gaining momentum.
Roger DeHart, a high-school science teacher who was the center of an intense curriculum dispute a few years ago in Skagit County, is leaving the state. He plans to teach next year in a private Christian school in California.
The fuss over DeHart's use of "intelligent design" theory in his classes at Burlington-Edison High School was merely a tiny blip in a grand scheme by promoters of the theory.
The theory is essentially this: Life is so complex that it can only be the result of design by an intelligent being.
Who is this unnamed being? Well, God, I presume. Wouldn't you?
As unlikely as it may seem, Seattle is ground zero for the intelligent-design agenda, thanks to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and its Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).
Headed by one-time Seattle City councilman and former Reagan administration official Bruce Chapman, the Discovery Institute is best known locally for its savvy insights on topics ranging from regionalism, transportation, defense policy and the economy.
In the late '90s, the institute jumped into the nation's culture wars with the CRSC. It may be little known to local folks, but it has caught the attention of conservative religious organizations around the country.
It's bound to get more attention in the future. Just last month, a documentary, Icons of Evolution, premiered at Seattle Pacific University. The video is based on a book of the same name by CRSC fellow Jonathan Wells. It tells the story of DeHart, along with the standard critique of Darwinian evolution that fuels the argument for intelligent design.
The video is part of the anti-Darwin agenda. Cruise the Internet on this topic and you'll find something called the Wedge Strategy, which credits the CRSC with a five-year plan for methodically promoting intelligent design and a 20-year goal of seeing "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life."
Last week, Chapman tried to put a little distance between his institute and the "wedge" document. He said it was a fund-raising tool used four years ago. "I don't disagree with it," he told me, "but it's not our program." (I'll let the folks who gave money based on the proposed strategy ponder what that means.)
Program or not, it is clear that the CRSC is intent on bringing down what one Center fellow calls "scientific imperialism." Surely Stephen Jay Gould already is spinning in his grave. Gould, one of America's most widely respected scientists and a prolific essayist, died just two weeks ago. Among his many fine books is one I kept by my bedside for many weeks after it was published in 1999, "Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life."
In "Rock of Ages," Gould presents an elegant case for the necessary co-existence of science and religion. Rather than conflicting, as secular humanists insist, or blending, as intelligent-design proponents would have it, science and religion exist in distinct domains, what Gould called magisteria (domains of teaching authority).
The domain of science is the empirical universe; the domain of religion is the moral, ethical and spiritual meaning of life.
Gould was called America's most prominent evolutionist, yet he too, was a critic of Darwin's theory, and the object of some controversy within the scientific community. There's a lesson in that: In the domain of science there is plenty of room for disagreement and alternative theories without bringing God into the debate.
I have no quarrel with those who believe in intelligent design. It has appeal as a way to grasp the unknowable why of our existence. But it is only a belief. When advocates push intelligent design as a legitimate scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations of evolution, it is time to push back.
That's what they continue to do in Skagit County. Last week, the Burlington-Edison School Board rejected on a 4-1 vote a proposal to "encourage" the teaching of intelligent design. Bravo.
Despite proponents' claims of scientific validity, intelligent design is little more than religion-based creationism wrapped in critiques of Darwin and all dressed up in politically correct language. All for the ultimate goal — placing a Christian God in science classrooms of America's public high schools.
"Some future day may yet arrive when all reasonable chemical experiments run to discover a probable origin of life have failed unequivocally. Further, new geological evidence may yet indicate a sudden appearance of life on the earth. Finally, we may have explored the universe and found no trace of life, or processes leading to life, elsewhere. Some scientists might choose to turn to religion for an answer. Others, however, myself included, would attempt to sort out the surviving less probable scientific explanations in the hope of selecting one that was still more likely than the remainder."
--Robert Shapiro
All this pseudo-mathematical blather does nothing to prove that prokariotes are the spontaneous beginning of life. You have invented a theory no branch of science holds, and roundly refuted it. Congratulations.
Give me a break. One failed experiment regarding one possible way RNA might have self-reproduced without DNA is hardly a definitive indication. I still await your PROOF that RNA couldn't have gotten going without DNA. It quite obviously could have--there are substantial machines in our present reproductive makeup that are made of RNA exclusively.
So although we may never know the exact conditions under which abiogenesis occurred we can nonetheless come up with scenarios that show it is possible. But even if we find such a scenario it doesn't mean that it actually happend that way. Afterall it may have taken an other pathway but at least it would have been demonstrated that it is not chemically impossible. Of course it may require a chain of very unlikely events but this doesn't mean that it is impossible or that it needs a very long time to happen. An event with low probability may occur in the next five minutes or it may take ten gazillion years until it happens.
What have I just been saying? There are plenty of hypotheses presently extant just now regarding how prokariotic life might of had substantial precursors, even pre-cellular precursors. No one has offered anything even remotely resembling a proof that any of them might not, in fact, be the actual case.
What's essential is self-reproduction with constrained modification & self maintainance in some kind of energy capturing chemical cycle. One could say that, at base, you are just a citric acid cycle with mostly useless energy-consuming doo-dads attached. Nobody writ on a stone tablet somewhere that you had to have protein, DNA, or even RNA, or even a specific location with a phosphorus-based hydrophobic/philic skin around it to get the ball rolling.
And, certainly, nobody as demonstrated that there must be a huge miracle somewhere along the way to get from that to Mozart--and without said demonstration, unmasterable complexity arguments are not going to be any more persuasive for scientists than the fossil gap argument, which is the same sort of fundamental refusal to understand that reasoning by induction on samplings is how science operates, and that merely pointing out that science isn't all knowing is not an adequate way to refute a scientific hypothesis.
As I have been pointing out, this future day cannot arrive, since there are an infinite number of chemical experiments one could try, whose reasonableness cannot be determined sight unseen, and therefore no possibility of "reasonable" closure in a finite universe.
You are playing games with words here
No. I am making the same point here that I just made above. Unmasterable complexity arguments without a state-space & a selection criteria most of the science community buys into, is so much brain-drizzle--not a scientific proof of anything.
massive computational attempts to look back in history, as proof, has little to do with science
So why did Sagan and Muncaster do it?
and the obvious failure of such attempts, should they be made, would have no impact whatsoever on science.
It seems they have an impact. Abiogenesis has fallen as a science. Getting life to sponateously arise from chemicals is akin to transmuting lead into gold. Except success is exponentially less likely.
Perhaps you didn't see this, which I posted to you in another thread three hours ago?
You:
I've pointed out the extreme unlikelihood of the accidental occurance of life. Arguably, it is an event which is mathematically impossible -- based on the age of the universe and the amount of events possible during that time. Frankly, it is more rational to believe in miracles.Me:
This notion is like the Terminator. It just won't die, no matter how many times you shoot it, blow it up, crush it, burn it, etc., it just keeps on coming ...You seem to have this notion of a strand of complicated DNA just popping into existence out of random atoms scattered around the universe, but chemistry doesn't work like that. You start with an ocean full of organic compounds which form naturally (and which can be demonstrated to do so in the lab). Make that several oceans, because earth has lots of ocean. Carbon forms organic compounds very easily. You can't really prevent it. Carbon atoms are very promiscuous. They can naturally form long, complicated chains of organic molecules. Most of those chains are worthless, but you've got oceans full of this stuff, trillions of organic molecules drifting around, and you've got hundreds of millions of years to play with. That's billions and billions of potential combinations and re-combinations going on all the time, for millions and millions of years. Some compounds may have drifted in from comets, as they form so readily that we find them off the earth as well as here at home. It just takes one time that one of those already complicated strands combines with another and blunders into the configuration required to be a self-replicator. It doesn't pop into existence from scratch; it's assembled from pre-existing components (this is the point so often missing in the "life from non-life is impossible" math models). Then, before long, you've got oceans of self-replicating molecules. They bubble and boil and combine and re-combine for millions of years. It's not really inevitable that you'll get living material out of this organic brew. But it's certainly not impossible. And here we are. Ta-da!
957 posted on 6/13/02 4:43 PM Eastern by PatrickHenry
Originally liberals were social conservatives who advocated growth and progess mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality...the nature of man/govt. does not change.
Atheist secular materialists through evolution removed the foundations...made the absolutes relative and call all technology evolution(science) to substantiate their efforts--claims...social engineering--PC!
Liberals/Evolution BELIEVE they are the conservatives too!
What's left?
Evolutionistas are liberal moles---cancer!
Originally liberals were social conservatives who advocated growth and progess
For an enlightening experience look up the word "liberalism" on Merriam Webster Online. I did and was shocked when I learned that I was a liberal.
Evolutionistas are liberal moles---cancer!
Once upon a time I believed in evolution, and I'm still willing to consider the scientific arguments. What caused me to drift away more than anything was that it's advocates appeared to be defending it as a religion rather than a scientific theory.
I've said before that I'm willing to go back to it and accept Genesis as an allegory. My faith in Jesus and God won't be affected in the least.
What bothers me more than anything in this debate is that evolution proponents don't seem willing to consider the possibility that macro-evolution may not have occurred and that there is strong evidence for this.
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Like what?
One more thing I want to know is whether all species that ever lived (animal or plant) were created at one point in the past or whether they were created consecutively.
My inclination would be to say consecutively.
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