School Board Panel: Ohio Students Should Be Taught Evolution, Controversies That Surround It

Associated Press / ABC ^

[RCW2001]

The Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio Oct. 14 — A state school board panel Monday recommended that Ohio science classes emphasize both evolution and the debate over its validity.

The committee left it up to individual school districts to decide whether to include in the debate the concept of "intelligent design," which holds that the universe is guided by a higher intelligence.

The guidelines for the science curriculum simply put into writing what many school districts already do. The current guidelines do not even mention evolution.

"What we're essentially saying here is evolution is a very strong theory, and students can learn from it by analyzing evidence as it is accumulated over time," said Tom McClain, a board member and co-chairman of the Ohio Board of Education's academic standards committee.

Conservative groups, some of which had tried and failed to get biblical creation taught in the public schools, had argued that students should learn about intelligent design. But critics of intelligent design said it is creationism in disguise.

On Monday, the committee unanimously forwarded a final draft without the concept in it to the full 19-member board.

Board member Michael Cochran, who had pushed for intelligent design in the standards, said, "The amendment allows teachers and students in Ohio to understand that evolution really is a theory and that there are competing views and different interpretations. This allows them to be discussed."

The Ohio school board will decide Tuesday whether to adopt the new standards or order that they be revised.

On the Net:

Ohio Department of Education: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/

[Bonaparte]

old = told

(I despise the new keyboards. Even IBM no longer makes a decent one and my old steel IBM won't work with the computer I have now. I'm convinced that this is what kills us. Over the years, these small aggravations take their toll and around 80 we just give up.)

[AndrewC]

But we can take solace in the sure knowledge that the mystery of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum has finally been put to rest. Right Wing Professor just old me so.

Ahh! Then I suppose I better book a flight to New York to see the twin towers rise up from the dust into their former glory. Just add heat.

[Bonaparte]

"Peer review means that a manuscript is reviewed by peers in the field. A publishing committee, not matter how prestigious, is not a peer. The Cambridge Series are not peer reviewed."

Actually, that would depend on who sits on the editorial board. Do you know who is on that board with the Cambridge series? I doubt it.

I meant to include you (but forgot) in my post 134. In that post, I linked to the Cambridge University Press website and demonstrated that they do, in fact, conduct peer review of submissions. Outside, anonymous peer review.

[PatrickHenry]

Like Patrick Henry, who at least admits his bias and lack of interest in learning what ID actually says, you are not qualified to render an opinion on what you have no knowledge of.

Let's clarify things again. I have no bias (prejudice) against ID or Dembski. My "bias" as you call it is in favor of reason, as it is used in the great endeavour we call science. I absolutely reject any allegedly scientific "teachings" that are not based on verifiable observations and logical reasoning. That's my "bias" as you call it. I'm proud of my bias. I brag about it. I glory in it. You do not insult me by mentioning it.

Now, my bias (i.e., my preference for rationality) having been fully exposed, I declare that I spend no time on Dembski's work because:

(1) he hasn't demonstrated that biological structures cannot evolve naturally, which is essential to his "theory"; and
(2) he hasn't produced any evidence for his [wink wink] non biblical designer.

[f.Christian]

Review by Richard Milton

When, a dozen years ago, I first published my view that Darwinism is scientifically flawed, I immediately encountered a kind of opponent who was to become very familiar to me over the next decade. I mean the kind who (quite sincerely) believes that anyone who challenges the conventional Darwinist view must be someone who is simply ignorant of the scientific facts. Such an opponent thus sets out to cure the ignorance he meets by the simple expedient of rehashing over and over again the tenets of the received wisdom, as found in the pages of Nature and Scientific American.

These guardians of Darwinian truth find it literally impossible to believe that anyone could actually have conducted some research and analysis that has led them to conclude rationally that Darwinism is scientifically flawed and think that -- like an Englishman abroad -- if only they shout a little louder, the dimwit foreigner might finally get the Darwinist message.

Michael Brass is such an upholder of the received wisdom on Darwinism, and his book, The Antiquity of Man, is just such a rehashing of that received wisdom. There is nothing new here. No new facts, no new scientific discoveries, not even a new interpretation or new analysis, merely the repetition of all the same old stuff that anyone who has ever spent time in a dentist's waiting room, leafing through old copies of National Geographic, is already thoroughly familiar with.

But in his book, Brass is not merely sounding off about anti-Darwinists in general -- he has some specific targets in his sights. From the outset he attacks scientific creationists for their views and he singles out the book 'Forbidden Archaeology' by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson.

As I'm not a creationist, and I don't have any religious beliefs, I don't intend to try to speak for Cremo, Thompson or anyone else, and I'm sure they are well able to look after themselves. But I am concerned, as a secular critic of the scientific content of Darwinism, that writers like Brass are getting away with obscuring the real scientific issues under the guise of 'debunking' what they pretend is merely 'creationist propaganda', a pretext that enables them to continue to dodge engaging in real scientific debate.

I've read Cremo and Thomson's book. I didn't find any religious propaganda or creationist messages, but I did find a mountain of carefully compiled scientific observations and reports that uniformly tend to undermine the conventional view that people like Brass hold so tightly and are unwilling even to debate openly and honestly. Certainly there are a few geological and palaeontological observations in Forbidden Archaeology that I found weak or questionable. That is hardly surprising since the book is 1000 pages long and contains thousands of references.

What a book like Forbidden Archaeology shows, in my view, is that if even a half (or even a tenth) of the objections raised by its authors are valid scientific objections, then Darwinism is a theory that is in deep, irremediable trouble. And the best that Brass can do in the way of rebuttal is to question a handful of their cases as unproven or badly chosen. His preferred method of rebuttal in almost all cases is that described earlier: he simply recites again, more loudly, the accepted Darwinist view.

We get an early glimpse of Brass's fundamentalist stance on the evidence claimed to support Darwinism such as dating of fossils. On page 38 he presents a table of two kinds of fossil dating. He labels the first as 'relative dating' and the second, radiometric dating by the potassium-argon method, he calls 'absolute dating'. Now, as his degrees are in history and archaeology, it is perfectly possible that Brass is completely unaware of the important scientific error he is making in describing radiometric dating of fossils as 'absolute' dating, and is merely taking it on trust from his physicist colleagues that his belief is correct -- as most scientists do. But the fact remains that the words 'absolute dating' can never be used in connection with the radiometric dating of fossils of any kind. (For background to dating fossils, see 'Shattering the myths of Darwinism' chapters 3, 4, and 5.)

To be fair, I should add that Brass is far from being the only professional scientist who is confused about this question. Most Darwinists are. Even Gavin de Beer, director of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote in the museum's Guide to Evolution, first published in 1970, that the rocks forming the geological column and the fossils in them had been directly dated by radiometric methods -- a claim which is scientific nonsense and based solely on ignorance of the real facts.

In the same passage, Brass tries to make his claims for the potassium-argon method seem credible by pointing out that '0.01% of all natural potassium is radiopotassium.' To the uninitiated, this rarity must make the method seem special. But Brass forgets to mention that the substance this radioactive potassium turns into, the end product that is measured, is argon-40. Argon is the twelfth most abundant element on earth, and more than 99 per cent of it is argon-40. And there is no physical or chemical way to tell whether a given sample of argon-40 is the residue of radioactive potassium or was present in the rocks when they formed.

There are many other places where Brass shows he has swallowed Darwinist urban scientific myths hook, line and sinker. On the very first page of his introduction he repeats the commonly-made claim that Darwinian evolution is supported by observed speciation, when the true scientific facts are that there is not a single real case of observed Darwinian speciation (the cases listed in the talk-origin "FAQ" being entirely bogus [more information available here]).

Whenever he encounters scientific evidence that he is unable to rebut, Brass appeals to authorities who, in his mind, are so grand as to be unimpeachable. Yet these 'authorities' and their words often turn out on closer inspection to have no more substance than Brass himself.

For example, the work of zoologist Solly Zuckermann, has long been a thorn in the side of Darwinists because Zuckermann conducted a study which concluded that Australopithecines (like 'Lucy') were predominantly ape-like and not human-like creatures and thus not ancestral to humans. Brass dismisses the work of Zuckermann, one of Britain's most distinguished zoologists, by reference to a quote from Jim Foley. Who is Jim Foley? He is the author of the talk-origins "FAQ" on human origins, which is as badly-researched and bogus as the rest of the talk-origins "FAQs" [more information available here].

In writing this book, Michael Brass has put on his arms and armour, chosen a cause about which he feels passionately, selected a battleground and engaged those he perceives as the enemies of science. Unfortunately, his armour doesn't fit him, his weapons are blunt, his passionate cause is already lost and, worst of all, he has chosen the wrong battle. For instead of attacking the real enemies of science -- the brain-dead pedlars of urban scientific myths -- he is attacking the few people who are making an honest attempt to question a theory that is long past its sell-by date.

This book is designed to bring aid and comfort to the excrement-hurling howler monkeys that infest Internet groups such as talk-origins, by reaffirming once more the oft-told Darwinist tale of human origins. It does not advance the cause of scientific investigation nor, despite its title, does it shed any light on the antiquity of mankind.

Richard Milton is the author of Shattering the Myths of Darwinism and 'Alternative Science'.

[f.Christian]

The... book---review!

[f.Christian]

Granted, it's not the same as watching it happen. But given this vast accumulation of evidence, which is also consistent with geology, continental drift, climatology, astronomy, and molecular biology, what are we to make of it? The theory of evolution says that the newer species gradually developed, by mutation and natural selection, from earlier ones. I didn't see it happening. No one did. But we have a ton of clues and a theory which explains them. What is your explanation?


350 posted on 9/29/02 2:00 PM Pacific by PatrickHenry

[f.Christian]

The Mentality of Evolution

There seems to be a cart before the horse attitude i.e. evolution has occurred, that's a fact ( it is never stated who proved this fact ), therefore we just need to twist the evidence until it fits our pre-conceptions. Of course, science is supposed to look at the evidence, and then derive the theory, but as Karl Popper admitted, the theory of evolution has never been a scientific theory due to its lack of testability, so normal scientific standards do not and have never applied to the theory of evolution. It has always been an emotional issue and not a scientific one - on all sides it must be stated in fairness. The main difference is that the worshippers of mechanistic reductionist Newtonian materialism try to pretend they are objective, when in reality most of them are not. The following extract from Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial puts it quite nicely:-

It is likely that Darwinist gradualism is statistically just as unlikely as Goldschmidt's saltationism, once we give adequate attention to all the necessary elements. The advantageous micro mutations postulated by Neo-Darwinist genetics are tiny, usually too small to be noticed. This premise is important because, in the words of Richard Dawkins, "virtually all the mutations studied in genetics laboratories which are pretty macro because otherwise geneticists wouldn't notice them are deleterious to the animals possessing them." But if the necessary mutations are too small to be seen, there will have to be a great many of them (millions?) of the right type coming along when they are needed to carry on the long-term project of producing a complex organ.

The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micro mutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micro mutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened. Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.

Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that "Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.

---

[Nebullis]

I linked to the Cambridge University Press website and demonstrated that they do, in fact, conduct peer review of submissions.

It appears that the proposals for books are reviewed. Nobody fine-combs the material in the book and/or whether it passes scientific muster. This is very different from peer review for a journal.

[VadeRetro]

Your post – specified complexity or natural occurrence?

All of my designs are intelligent, whatever my ex-employers might tell you.

[PatrickHenry]

This spam essay has been posted several times before by this person. Please observe that the essay is called "spam" because it is always being gratuitously posted. It is not in response to a question, or to a request for information, or offered as refutation of a previously posted asertion. The poster just copies it into a thread at some random place, for no purpose. It consumes Jim Robinson's resources for no reason. Here are a few places where it can be found:

[In this thread:]
School Board Panel: Ohio Students Should Be Taught Evolution, Controversies That Surround It .

[In prior threads:]
Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec) -- post 58.
Living dinosaurs -- post 389.
Ga. school board OKs teaching creationism -- post 44.
Evolution Coverage Missed Real Story -- post 67.
Study: Humans, Chimps More Different -- post 30.
Earth's magnetic field 'boosts gravity' -- Post 99.

[Gumlegs]

What loony, refined virtuoso.

... is the best.

[Gumlegs]

But Patrick, it's not Dembski doing the winking, so we can at least credit him with honesty. The full title of his book, "Intelligent Design" is actually, "Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology". See here, for instance.

[Right Wing Professor]

If a brief description in "simple rigorous terms" were sufficiently explanatory, books on this subject would not have to be written, would they?

Many, many long monographs have been written on subjects such as thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, on so on; even more on specialized subfields of these fields. Yet this doesn't preclude us from writing a one page essay on the essence of these ideas. In fact, I'm inclided to think if one can't write a one-age essay of this sort, one doesn't really understand the subject.

With all due respect, I'm not here to tutor anybody on the basics.

I'm not asking to be tutored on the basics; I think you're being presumptuous. I'm asking you to state your position in your own words, rather than throw a book at me.

See, the principle of an intelligent discussion is to compare ideas, not citations. If you can't give me a synopsis of the ideas you profess to hold and understand, it's rather a pointless discussion, isn't it?

You're a highly educated, intelligent individual, fully capable of carrying out your own research.

Indeed I am. And you, likewise are obviously highly literate, and have thought some about this, though I have no idea what your scientific background is. My problem is, I have a lot of my own research to carry out, and very limited time. I asked you to give me a good reason why I would devote some of that time to Dembski. You've failed to do so, and so leave me with the previous opinion that his ideas are in conflict with elementary principles of the very successfully predictive field of statistical mechanics, and therefore don't need to be pursued further.

Everything you need is as close as your campus reference librarian.

The library is very very big, and my hours are short. I try, therefore, to focus my attention on what's worthwhile.

[AndrewC]

You are someone to speak. Your constant dropping of markers in all threads, many with insults, is as surely a waste of resources and time as you portray the opinion expressed in the "essay" you are attacking. The "essay" expresses an opinion relevant to the discussion ---The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micro mutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micro mutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened. Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.

Not like the following

The attack on evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On News/Activism ^ Oct 16 8:35 PM #279 of 279 ^ Placemarker. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 278 | View Replies
Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec) ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On News/Activism ^ Oct 16 8:33 PM #1,227 of 1,234 ^ Placemarker. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1,226 | View Replies
Evidence Disproving Evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On General Interest ^ Oct 16 8:33 PM #645 of 650 ^ Placemarker. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 644 | View Replies
The attack on evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On News/Activism ^ Oct 15 8:59 PM #273 of 279 ^ Placemarker Post Reply | Private Reply | To 271 | View Replies
Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec) ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On News/Activism ^ Oct 15 8:56 PM #1,221 of 1,234 ^ Placemarker. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1,220 | View Replies
Evidence Disproving Evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On General Interest ^ Oct 15 8:45 PM #598 of 650 ^ End of session placemarker. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 595 | View Replies
Evidence Disproving Evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to All On General Interest ^ Oct 13 8:12 PM #403 of 650 ^ [We evolution types interrupt this thread to bring you the following important message:] George W. Bush is the greatest! Down with bolshevism! Defeat the socialistic dems! Win back the Senate! God bless America! [And now, let the thread continue ... ] Post Reply | Private Reply | To 402 | View Replies
Evidence Disproving Evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to PatrickHenry On General Interest ^ Oct 13 7:34 PM #400 of 650 ^ Even numbered post. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 399 | View Replies
The attack on evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to balrog666 On News/Activism ^ Oct 10 6:52 PM #184 of 279 ^ First, have a successful freepathon. Then lower the ax. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 183 | View Replies
Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec) ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to scripter On News/Activism ^ Oct 10 6:50 PM #822 of 1,234 ^ We anti-evos second the motion. Evos love Bush more than creos. Much more. Hee hee. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 821 | View Replies
Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to All On News/Activism ^ Oct 7 9:03 PM #142 of 189 ^ Blue-skipping placemarker.. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 141 | View Replies
Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to All On News/Activism ^ Oct 7 7:56 PM #117 of 189 ^ Blue-skipping placemarker.. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 115 | View Replies
The attack on evolution ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to All On News/Activism ^ Oct 7 7:56 PM #64 of 279 ^ Blue-skipping placemarker.. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies
Etc, Etc, Etc.

Finally, you've tried this before.

Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec) ^
			Posted by PatrickHenry to f.Christian; Admin Moderator On News/Activism ^ Oct 6 2:35 PM #91 of 1,234 ^ This same exact spam essay has been posted several times before by this person. Here are a few places where it can be found: [In this thread:] Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec) -- post 58. [In prior threads:] Living dinosaurs -- post 389. Ga. school board OKs teaching creationism -- post 44. Evolution Coverage Missed Real Story -- post 67. Study: Humans, Chimps More Different -- post 30. Earth's magnetic field 'boosts gravity' -- Post 99. Post Reply | Private Reply | To 58 | View Replies

You should stop your own continual spamming and learn how to save links on your own computer if you wish to pick up where you left off, and stop trying to silence someone trying to make a relevant contribution.

[Right Wing Professor]

Obviously then the occurence is not random. It is ordered. Why? It is pretty darn well difficult to make a crystal other than that arrangement. You can reproduce that sequence everyday for a year with your eyes closed. Try that with nucleic acids. And no cheating by using compounds derived from living organisms.

This begs one or two questions. You say it's not random. I say the human genome is not random. Dembski, I think, would do better; he'd say that it's highly ordered, we could write a very short full description of it, and therefore it's not complex. I would then reply that I can give you examples of very, very complex crystals that are formed spontaneously from far simpler systems, and that unless you can prove that the complexity of the human genome is different in kind and not merely in degree from those systems, you don't have much of a point.

The great difficulty in this field is the calculation of a priori probabilities, one of the most dangerous areas of mathematics. I've no doubt Dembski, as a mathematician, is aware of that. Perhaps, as a mathematician, he thinks he can avoid the pitfalls. Contrarily, I as a physical scientist, am highly skeptical that he can, and will not dismiss what I consider a strong and experimentally unchallenged theory on the basis of some very iffy mathematics.

And particularly dangerous, in all of this, is the constraint that we ourselves are the result of the processes whose probabilities we're calculating. The probability of mankind, and free republic, and this thread, is one. Therefore, of all the possibilities that we can hypothesize, we have to apply the filter that we can only count the ones that lead to our own existence. That's essentially impossible.

[Heartlander]

I
guess
a
picture
says
a
thousand
words…
LOL!

[AndrewC]

... is the best.

The results of some other words

X produces

Thy ripe crank

Y produces

Overrated

R....d(rhymes with leotard) evo

[AndrewC]

and that unless you can prove that the complexity of the human genome is different in kind and not merely in degree from those systems, you don't have much of a point

It "produces" the human mind.

[Gumlegs]

It's starting to sound like fChristian.