What! Are you turning into ...
Posted on 10/14/2002 4:59:49 PM PDT by 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/ |
What! Are you turning into ...
What you wrote was this:
And what is considered "peer review," Doctor? The refusal to review by the very journals controlled by ID's adversaries and neo-Darwinism's allies?
Unfortunately, that is indeed what most of us consider peer review. Scholarly monographs are not subjected to the same kind of review as books.
And there is no way I would make such a sweeping statement, since I'm well aware of professional journals that have accepted articles by ID theorists, for example, The Journal of Theoretical Biology. Consult PubMed or SciSearch and you'll find others.
Well, I just did, and you'll have to help me here. I used SciFinder, a very comprehensive database that I happen to be able to access from my deskrop. I searched for intelligent design as a literal phrase. I got 50 hits, but most were nothing to do with ID as we're discussing it. Of those that were relevant, one was a book review of a compilation of arguments for and against ID, and one was a computer science paper in a preprint archive (by definition, this hasn't yet made it past peer review); that one didn't seem to take a position on evolution (it was an analysis of biological system complexity). And that was it.
I got 507 hits on the concept 'intelligent design'; a scan of the first 100 or so turned up the two previous hits and none others, so I concluded this wasn't the mother lode, either.
I have scanned under Behe's name too. I found his 'regular' scientific work, and one polemic on ID, but that was it.
So here I'm stuck. You say ID has a measurable peer reviewed impact in biology. I say as far as I can tell, it hasn't resulted in any significant number of peer reviewed publications in biology or biological chemistry at all. From my perspective, it's the fringest of fringe ideas; it's the product of small number of mathematicians who have notably failed to have any impact on the field they're supposedly interested in. Looked at from a non-theistic perspective, why would we even consider teaching this in high-school?
That is most likely due to your "gummy" leg. ;^)
Maybe that's the problem. It does seem at times that he's writing with his feet.
Patrick Henry up to his usual attempts to silence opposing opinions. Why don't you refute the darned thing instead of complaining about it? What's the matter the essay is true? You never contribute anything to these threads except insults, links you do not read and spam placemarkers with insults, pictures or other nonsense. Believe it or not we could care less when you get up, when you go to sleep or whatever personal nonsense your massive ego tells you to post.
William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design, pp.247-252, (quoted by Bonaparte in post 40 to this thread).
Very interesting claim, coming as it does, in a book titled, ""Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology."
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA! You idiot! How do you "refute" a book review?
Exactly. If you can't explain it, you really don't understand it.
The flagellum has long been known to have significant homologies to the protonmotive ATPase. It was recently discovered the proton motive ATPase works by mechanical coupling; protons are translocated across a cell membrane, and this motion causes the 'headpiece' of the protein to rotate. This mechanical motion then causes the chemical structure of the active site to change, and ATP is synthesized from ADP and Pi. The flagellar motor is likewise driven by a protonmotive mechanism.
If you decouple the enzyme from membrane proton transport, and treat it with ATP, it runs in reverse. The investigators, who will if there's any justice in the world will be making a trip to Stockholm in the near future, attached a fluorescent bead to the headpiece, and watched it rotate in response to added ATP. The resemblance to a flagellum is uncanny.
The authors made no claims about flagella. Why would they? - they'd just figured out the mechanisms of one of the most important enzymes in biology. Nonetheless, those of us who can think for ourselves can look at the homologies, look at the mechanism of the two systems, and put two and two together.
This is a paper that should be available to you online (I don't think PNAS requires subscriptions) It will provide all the references you need, in particular references 4 and 5; unfortunately, unless you have a subscription to Nature, all you'll be able to read online is the abstacts of the original papers.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/26/14291
BTW, I've spent 3 hours answering you. I'm really busy, and probably won't return to this thread for some days.
Fred Hoyle was so wrong about cosmology for so long, if he's anti-evolution, I must say that heartens me greatly.
fC...
Anarchy is a prelude to THE POLICE STATE...liberalism/EVOLUTION perpetuates it!
AP...
If Liberalism be evolution Then its a backwards track in time we take when freedom and liberty a spike in the eye of a king and a sting to aristocrats and monarchs once again we must beat back those red diaper doper babies who would bind us in chains and call it Evolution when its actually Tyranny
79 posted on 10/16/02 6:03 PM Pacific by ATOMIC_PUNK
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.
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]).
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'.
[In this thread:]
Posts 173, 174, and 175 (broken down into three sections) after the thing had already been posted, in its entirety, here:
School Board Panel: Ohio Students Should Be Taught Evolution, Controversies -- post 145 .
[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.
Thankyou for clarifying your original statement -- as well as what the true subject and conclusion of this study actually are. IOW, the investigators were not studying flagella and they made no claims about flagella. The claims about how the flagellum evolved are made by others and based on a resemblance between the appearance in an enzyme and the appearance of a flagellum. So once again, "looks like" = "comes from," and flagellar evolution along with its mechanism is now, in your mind, an established fact. Congratulations! What a coup! What could the authors of that paper have been thinking to not state such an obvious and momentous result? It's not everyday that a concept like irreducible complexity gets swept off the game board so decisively.
Thanks for your time and, once again, for your candor.
The subtitle does not conflate science with theology. The very wording ("bridge") underscores the distinction between the two. But that word also suggests that they don't have to be antagonists. The evidence for an intelligently designed universe conforms to scientific requirements. It also happens to support one aspect of some theological accounts. Must science, to be "legitimate," contradict theology in every last particular?
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