Posted on 11/07/2002 7:07:47 PM PST by Nebullis
The AAAS Board recently passed a resolution urging policymakers to oppose teaching "Intelligent Design Theory" within science classrooms, but rather, to keep it separate, in the same way that creationism and other religious teachings are currently handled.
"The United States has promised that no child will be left behind in the classroom," said Alan I. Leshner, CEO and executive publisher for AAAS. "If intelligent design theory is presented within science courses as factually based, it is likely to confuse American schoolchildren and to undermine the integrity of U.S. science education."
American society supports and encourages a broad range of viewpoints, Leshner noted. While this diversity enriches the educational experience for students, he added, science-based information and conceptual belief systems should not be presented together.
Peter H. Raven, chairman of the AAAS Board of Directors, agreed:
"The ID movement argues that random mutation in nature and natural selection can't explain the diversity of life forms or their complexity and that these things may be explained only by an extra-natural intelligent agent," said Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden. "This is an interesting philosophical or theological concept, and some people have strong feelings about it. Unfortunately, it's being put forth as a scientifically based alternative to the theory of biological evolution. Intelligent design theory has so far not been supported by peer-reviewed, published evidence."
In contrast, the theory of biological evolution is well-supported, and not a "disputed view" within the scientific community, as some ID proponents have suggested, for example, through "disclaimer" stickers affixed to textbooks in Cobb County, Georgia.
"The contemporary theory of biological evolution is one of the most robust products of scientific inquiry," the AAAS Board of Directors wrote in a resolution released today. "AAAS urges citizens across the nation to oppose the establishment of policies that would permit the teaching of `intelligent design theory' as a part of the science curriculum of the public schools."
The AAAS Board resolved to oppose claims that intelligent design theory is scientifically based, in response to a number of recent ID-related threats to public science education.
In Georgia, for example, the Cobb County District School Board decided in March this year to affix stickers to science textbooks, telling students that "evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things." Following a lawsuit filed August 21 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, the school board on September 26 modified its policy statement, but again described evolution as a "disputed view" that must be "balanced" in the classroom, taking into account other family teachings. The exact impact of the amended school board policy in Cobb County classrooms remains unclear.
A similar challenge is underway in Ohio, where the state's education board on October 14 passed a unanimous, though preliminary vote to keep ID theory out of the state's science classrooms. But, their ruling left the door open for local school districts to present ID theory together with science, and suggested that scientists should "continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." In fact, even while the state-level debate continued, the Patrick Henry Local School District, based in Columbus, passed a motion this June to support "the idea of intelligent design being included as appropriate in classroom discussions in addition to other scientific theories."
The Ohio State Education Board is inviting further public comment through November. In December, board members will vote to conclusively determine whether alternatives to evolution should be included in new guidelines that spell out what students need to know about science at different grade levels. Meanwhile, ID theorists have reportedly been active in Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, New Jersey, and other states, as well Ohio and Georgia.
While asking policymakers to oppose the teaching of ID theory within science classes, the AAAS also called on its 272 affiliated societies, its members, and the public to promote fact-based, standards-based science education for American schoolchildren.
Probably not an original concept, but a tale well told is still marketable. Keep sending it out.
I would hope that by now you would know me better than that. I am not being disengenuous. I have read the original sources and I know exactly what they say.
He cites the actual fossil evidence, not a particular display he elsewhere condemns, as good evidence for evolution.
Here's the problem for your position. With Eldredge, the Sunderland and Chase interviews were both conducted at the American Museum of Natural History. In the Sunderland interview he mentions
"the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution"
This is the exhibit he calls lamentable, speculative and an imaginary story.
In the Chase interview, also at the American Musuem for Natural History, he's in the same room as the exhibit mentioned above, turns and says
"Ahh, the horse is a good example [of evolution]"
He is definitely not talking about "the actual fossil evidence" as you said. He is in fact talking about a particular display. In fact, the same display he discusses in the Sunderland interview, except in the Chase interview he's in the same room as the horse exhibit whereas in the Sunderland interview he was upstairs from the exhibit.
But you would know that if you read my posts.
I will not let this slide. If you come back and try to say otherwise, do it using the original sources.
I don't think in order to reverse engineer a biological process you need to understand what the designer intended. You already know what the function does, you want to know how and why it works. You can also make predictions based on how that design can be adapted to other situations That is why ID is appealing and useful.
With a biological function that forms as the result of random mutations, it is completely unclear how you can predict anything.
Maybe it is just me, but I also fail to understand the process of adding genetic information via a random mutation or, for that matter, any mutation. But, once again, I'm not a biologist so I have some basic questions:
As we create life forms in the laboratory during research, how do they compare with existing life forms? Can we induce mutations to these laboratory created life forms to, in a sense, accelerate the evolutionary process and observe the process of mutagenic change that results in increased complexity?
If we produce single celled life forms in the lab under controlled conditions and simulate the results of the evolutionary process so that we can directly observe the changes within the cellular structures and functions, does that prove evolution or not?
"Ahh, the horse is a good example. Here's an effectively modern horse which is a million years old, but we can all recognize it as a horse. And as we go deeper in lower layers of rock, back further in time, we excavate successively i more primitive horses. Here's one that is two million years old. They are becoming less and less obviously horselike till we get back 60 million years ago, and here is the ancestor of the horse which doesn't really look much like a horse. And the really interesting thing about this is that it is also the ancestor of the rhinoceros or very close to the ancestor of the rhinoceros. So when the creationists tell us that we have no intermediates between major groups, we point to a creature like the dawn horse and say, 'Here we have 60 million years ago an exact intermediate between horses and the rhinos.'"I agree. The thing is, even if as you claim he's standing in the middle of that misleading AMNH display, pointing item by item, I still agree with what he's saying in his text.
What do you mean, please show it!? I've said from the beginning: in the Chase interview Eldredge sites the horse exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History as "a good example" of evolution. Do you see the contradiction Eldredge makes?
Your quote does not show this. He cites "the horse." "The horse" is a good example. If you have him praising the exhibit he condemned earlier, please show this.
I do not believe that you can't tell the difference between a particular display and the subject thereof.
Then you start looking around and see that's exactly what I've done, and at the same time you realize this I'm responding to you. Then, realizing I'm going to respond you post the following:
The thing is, even if as you claim he's standing in the middle of that misleading AMNH display, pointing item by item, I still agree with what he's saying in his text.
So now with Eldredge pointing at each item in the display and talking about each one, it's no longer lamentable, speculative and imaginary? C'mon, VR, that's lamentable, if I may.
Yes, I'm trying to change the subject. Your arguments have been interesting at times and I don't want to you to switch over to a mode of gore3k-ism (who can't change the subject, can't change his message, and won't respond intelligently to criticism). If this matter is a real, hard decision point for you about your arguments in these threads, why not ask for some advice from your offline colleagues who might share your views? Is this point worth turning into (for example) an AndrewC over?
And, just curious, why would you want to constrain yourself to such a limited set of source material?
I tend to think that, in general, while it's not particularly necessary here, you have to place the quotes within the context of the scientific zeitgeist of the time they were made.
For one reason: context. I've met so many people who either do not or cannot understand the concept of context. Context allows us to better understand exactly what was said. When someone comes along and says, but that's not what he said here, or here, that has no bearing on the context of what has been said elsewhere.
What he's saying is true. You're trying to imply that what he's saying isn't true, unless your sole goal on these threads is to impugn Niles Eldredge, which I doubt although you'd take it at this point.
As curator, he might have updated that old 1905 display sooner than he did. (I can guess that it takes time and money and a certain bubbling up to high-enough priority.) You're getting the implied contradiction from where he's standing when he talks, not what he's saying.
Well put. Like many things, we can come up with incredibly complex scenarios for producing a situation that can alternatively be produced by a much simpler scenario. In my years of solving geologic problems, I usually find that when faced with multiple possible solutions, the simplest one is nearly always the correct one.
It appears to me that evolutionists work very hard at coming up with complex, difficult to defend theories for something that is much more easily explained by intelligent design.
Man, I'm famous today. My power must be beyond pale. I am invoked like some Djinni in order to save the invoker's argument. Here is something for you blatherog666
You changed your acceptable criteria once you realized crow was your next meal.
Did you miss post 290? Did you realize that in Jenny's post Eldredge admits to using the horse exhibit when he was on TV? The same exhibit he called deplorable, speculative and imaginary?
Are you finally going to admit Eldredge contradicts himself? I mean, c'mon, VR, the post you referenced supports the contradiction.
They are not theories. They are just-so stories.
Quoting someone---
I've had my fun, so now this is a more serious answer to your comment. It is no interest in science that drives the just-so stories, it is more like a failing attempt to shore up a failed philosophy.
If Only Darwinists Scrutinized Their Own Work as Closely: A Response to "Erik" By William A. Dembski
Evolutionary biology isn't a theory -- it's a pile of promissory notes for future theories, none of which has been redeemed since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species almost 150 years ago.
Let me make the same point more kindly and gently. Material mechanisms known to date offer no insight into biological complexity. Cell biologist Franklin Harold in The Way of the Cell (Oxford, 2001) remarks that in trying to account for biological complexity, biologists thus far have merely proposed "a variety of wishful speculations." If biologists really understood the emergence of biological complexity in purely material terms, intelligent design couldn't even get off the ground. The fact that they don't accounts for intelligent design's quick rise in public consciousness. Show us detailed, testable, mechanistic models for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous biomacromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick death.
The mechanisms of evolutionary biology fail to specify detailed testable mechanistic pathways capable of bringing about tightly integrated multi-part complex functional biological systems. In other words, evolutionary biology trades in unspecified mechanistic causes -- indeed, that's the only currency evolutionary biology seems to know. The irony here is lost on Erik. Though Erik has no problem with unspecified mechanistic causes that gesture at (to say "account for" is far too generous) biological complexity, he objects to intelligent design introducing an "unspecified designer."
Two comments are in order here: First, scientific explanations need to be causally adequate; in other words, they need causes with sufficient power to account for the things we are trying to explain. We know that designing intelligences have the causal power to produce tightly integrated multi-part functional systems (like machines). We have no experience of undirected material processes doing the same. Thus, in introducing an "unspecified designer," intelligent design is at least identifying a cause sufficient to produce the effect in question. To be sure, intelligent design must not stop here. But it certainly must not be prevented from getting here.
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