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Evolution Coverage Missed Real Story
FoxNews. com ^ | September 30, 2002 | John G. West, Jr.

Posted on 10/01/2002 6:32:12 AM PDT by Phaedrus

Edited on 04/22/2004 12:34:48 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]

More than 40 years ago, the film "Inherit the Wind" presented the controversy over the teaching of evolution as a battle between stick-figure fundamentalists who defend a literal reading of Genesis and saintly scientists who simply want to teach the facts of biology. Ever since, journalists have tended to depict almost any battle over evolution in the schools as if it were a replay of "Inherit the Wind"--even if it's not.


(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: crevolist; evolution; media; science; textbooks
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To: Physicist
The Discovery Institute is a stealth creationist think-tank.

I don't know how much thinking they do, but they work hard at being a War Room style PR shop. In this press release, for instance, senior Discovery fellow Jonathan Wells gets out the ID-side spin on the same day as the announcement of an important study supporting the evolution of insects from more basal arthropods.

A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."
The only problem being that the subject of the study was fruit flies, not shrimp.

Wells later feebly spins the incident here.

21 posted on 10/01/2002 7:54:22 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: dark_lord
The scientific method, insofar as it comes short of the whole range of human experience, is in that way limited.

Science, however, in the proper sense of the term, includes all that comes under the compass of human knowledge. Scientia is the Latin term for knowledge. If you want to reserve true knowledge for only those things that are provable, you will back yourself up to give a philosophical justification for the criteria of of a legitimate proof.

22 posted on 10/01/2002 7:54:40 AM PDT by cornelis
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To: kpp_kpp
because they don't have to.

I'll lay a wager that not one American public school student has a textbook that mentions it.

evolution is a scientific theory with a massive non-scientific lobbying group behind. explain that without bringing religion/anti-religion into it?

Does it have such a lobby group? No matter, it still redounds to my point: the battle over creationism is the sole issue here.

23 posted on 10/01/2002 7:54:42 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
the battle over creationism is the sole issue here

I suppose you could look at it that way.

24 posted on 10/01/2002 7:57:35 AM PDT by cornelis
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To: Physicist
The story is about the Cobb County school board, not the Discovery Institute. FYI . . .
25 posted on 10/01/2002 8:00:46 AM PDT by Phaedrus
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To: cornelis
Science, however, in the proper sense of the term, includes all that comes under the compass of human knowledge. Scientia is the Latin term for knowledge. If you want to reserve true knowledge for only those things that are provable, you will back yourself up to give a philosophical justification for the criteria of of a legitimate proof.

Nope. Science avoids that trap. Science does not reserve "true knowledge" (your term) to things that are provable. Science avoids the philisophical traps by merely requiring that its theories be disprovable - a completely separate and much easier condition to meet. All that is required is that when a theory is specified, it must be done so in such a way that it can be disproved. Do you see the distinction?

This is also why theology is, in general not scientific. If I state "God exists" - that is not a theory as I have not made a statement that can be disproved.

Science really is limited in its domain. I think it is just that because it has become successful (by using the scientific method) that the unwashed masses (and especially the ignorant media, as unscientifically educated a group as can be found outside the NEA) want to call many things science that are not.

26 posted on 10/01/2002 8:04:03 AM PDT by dark_lord
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To: Physicist
Sunlight, the best disinfectant.
27 posted on 10/01/2002 8:04:20 AM PDT by Phaedrus
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To: Phaedrus
The Discovery Institute is cited as if it were interested in discovering something. Since that's not only false but absurd . . .
28 posted on 10/01/2002 8:04:42 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: Phaedrus
Does ID necessarily lead to God? It could just as easily lead to some other designer, like ET, which would keep thing in the natural realm and provide a counter argument to Darwinian evolution.
29 posted on 10/01/2002 8:05:45 AM PDT by Undivided Heart
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To: dark_lord
Disproving something is a kind of proof. And the election for the criteria of disproof will require justification.
30 posted on 10/01/2002 8:07:52 AM PDT by cornelis
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To: VadeRetro
The Discovery Institute is cited as if it were interested in discovering something.

In the interests of accuracty--ie, before I get pounced upon--DI isn't cited here. Wells is, and West was allowed to write the article for Fox as though West were were a neutral reporter.

31 posted on 10/01/2002 8:08:20 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: cornelis
Is it possible to give a date when this shift in the meaning occurred?

Theology has never been a science.

32 posted on 10/01/2002 8:09:10 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: Doctor Stochastic
I am not one to argue with history.
33 posted on 10/01/2002 8:10:46 AM PDT by cornelis
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To: The Man
Theology as it has been understood in the Christian sense for centuries is and always has been a science. One can prove or disprove ones theological statements or constructs by examining them according to the data of Scriptural statements. You can reject the validity of the underlying data, but that doesn't change the methodology used to interpret it.

What was considered "science" at the time of Aquinas is not considered "science" today. The meaning of words changes over the centuries. Theology is considered a branch of metaphysics or philosophy. Your definition really refers to a branch of philosophy known as "symbolic logic", which is related to mathematics.

(1) All winged animals can fly.
(2) Horses have wings.
Therefore, horses can fly.

True, if the assumptions are true. But not science.

Your philosphy might be stated:
(1) Scripture is true.
(2) I can use logic to validate my theology using scripture.
Therefore, my theology is true.

But you cannot prove your 1st assumption. Symbolic logic is a useful tool. But it is not the scientific method, and it is philosophy, not science.

34 posted on 10/01/2002 8:11:16 AM PDT by dark_lord
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To: Phaedrus
What the national newsmedia have failed to report is that a group of 28 scientists from the very same educational institutions (places like the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech) wrote the Cobb County board expressing their skepticism of Darwinism and urging "careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory."

One of those professors is Dr. Henry Schaefer, here at UGA. Here is his guest editorial from Sunday's AJC.

[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 9/28/02 ] GUEST COLUMNISTS

Standard evolutionary theory has shortcomings

By Henry Schaefer
Professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia

As a theorist who uses quantum mechanics to solve problems ranging from biochemistry to astrophysics, the subject of this essay is of great interest to me. It is a question that is discussed in depth in my University of Georgia freshman seminar entitled "Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?"

This autumn 18 gifted UGA students and I are spending six weeks examining Stephen Hawking's best-selling book "A Brief History of Time." Therein Hawking states, "A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements. And it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations."

I consider Hawking's statement to be an excellent definition of a good theory. How does evolution stack up to the two demands of a good theory? By the term "evolution," I mean the claim that random mutations and natural selection can fully account for the complexity of life, and particularly macroscopic living things.

I think that the standard evolutionary model does a good job of categorizing and systematizing the fossil record. It serves as an effective umbrella or big tent under which to collect a large number of observations. If evolution has a weakness in this regard, it is that the tent is too big. Thus the 20th century witnessed a series of hoaxes, beginning in 1908 with Piltdown Man and continuing to recent fabricated fossil "discoveries" in China, that have been embraced as missing links by distinguished paleontologists.

Nevertheless, I give evolution a B grade with respect to Hawking's first category.

The second requirement for a good theory is far more problematical for the standard evolutionary model, sometimes called the modern synthesis. Over the past 150 years evolutionary theorists have made countless predictions about fossil specimens to be observed in the future.

Unfortunately for these seers, many new fossils have been discovered, and the interesting ones almost always seem to be contrary to the "best" predictions. This is sometimes true even when the predictions are rather vague, as seen by the continuing controversies associated with the purported relationships between dinosaurs and birds.

Is the expectation that a good theory be predictive unrealistic? Let us consider two theories to which evolution is often favorably compared. The theory of gravity precisely predicted the appearances of Halley's comet in 1910 and 1986. On the latter occasion I was on sabbatical from Berkeley at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The newspaper (informed by classical mechanics and the law of gravity) told me exactly when I had to wake up in the middle of the night to enjoy the wonder of Halley's Comet. And in fact, the theory of gravity never fails for the macroscopic objects to which it is applicable.

A second successful theory, the atomic theory, is grounded in Schroedinger's Equation and the Dirac Equation. Atomic theory is able to make many predictions of the spectra of the hydrogen molecule and the helium atom to more significant figures that may be currently measured in the laboratory. We are utterly confident that these predictions will be confirmed by future experiments.

By any reasonable standard the theory of gravity and the atomic theory are good theories, well deserving of A grades. In comparison with these quantitative theories of the physical sciences, when it comes to Hawking's second requirement for a good theory, the standard evolutionary model fails, and should be given a D grade at best.

Might I be more detailed in stating my reservations concerning the standard evolutionary model? Sure. Let me preface these brief remarks by noting that I think the scientific evidence that God created the universe 13-15 billion years ago is good.

My first concern is that, with the collapse of the Miller-Urey model, there is no plausible scientific mechanism for the origin of life, i.e., the appearance of the first self-replicating biochemical system. The staggeringly high information content of the simplest living thing is not readily explained by evolutionists.

Second, the time frame for speciation events seems all wrong to me. The major feature of the fossil record is stasis, long periods in which new species do not appear. When new developments occur, they come rapidly, not gradually.

My third area of reservation is that I find no satisfactory mechanism for macroevolutionary changes. Analogies between a few inches of change in the beaks of a Galapagos finch species and a purported transition from dinosaur to bird (or vice versa) appear to me inappropriate.

35 posted on 10/01/2002 8:11:19 AM PDT by CFW
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To: Phaedrus
The story is about the Cobb County school board, not the Discovery Institute. FYI . . .

The story is about the Cobb County school board. The spin on the story comes from the Discovery Institute. It's like reading an editorial on Toricelli written by the DNC.

36 posted on 10/01/2002 8:13:19 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: cornelis
Disproving something is a kind of proof. And the election for the criteria of disproof will require justification.

Yes, disproving something is a kind of self evident proof. But you must see the difference between stating something so that it can be disproved, and not doing so.

37 posted on 10/01/2002 8:13:22 AM PDT by dark_lord
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To: cornelis
Give it up. You're headed into an epistemological black hole. You will not get non-empirical data admitted into the data set. We like our data set the way it is, thank you very much. We have trimmed off everything without a biological etiology and we do not need it. If we can find a biological etiology for it we will resuscitate it and dub it "data". We will copy you on the memo if that should happen.

We decided centuries ago there was no way to think about thinking or qualities or values or cultural characteristics without letting the metaphysical camel's nose under the tent. (Except to find a biological etiology. We will copy you on the memo should that happen.)

And we do not believe the camel should be allowed to exist. He is not domesticated.
38 posted on 10/01/2002 8:16:38 AM PDT by Taliesan
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To: Taliesan
I just saw the ghost of Descartes.
39 posted on 10/01/2002 8:18:41 AM PDT by cornelis
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To: cornelis
The view that only science is science is redundant. The view that areas of human experience cannot come under the scrutiny of human knowledge is the very monopoly of a dogmatism that you warn against.

I can understand why you mention my statement is dogmatic in nature. Actually, I'm basing it on a strict definition of science which is: a branch of study in which facts are observed and classified, and, usually, quantitative laws are formulated and verified; involves the application of mathematical reasoning and data analysis to natural phenomena (from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms). In other words, scientific understanding is a subset of understanding.

Your statement that "areas of human experience cannot come under the scrutiny of human knowledge" does not fit into the classical definition of science. Theology is one such example. Can the mind God (let alone the mind of a human) be reduced to a series of mathematical equations? Could the thoughts of a poet be expressed as a formula? Can the Bible be deconstructed in a lab, a theory developed and new Bible verses predicted?

My point is that thee are many areas of human understanding that fall outside the realm of science. Science is only one way of building understanding. It is systematic and cold in its ways. I do not demean theological study when I say it is not science, because the nature of theology is not scientific, nor is science theological. But that does not mean that either are diminished in the realm of human understanding. They are different tools that let us understand different things.

40 posted on 10/01/2002 8:21:50 AM PDT by doc30
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