Posted on 03/24/2002 7:03:09 PM PST by scripter
Scientists urge 'academic freedom' to teach both sides of issue
Posted: March 24, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Julie Foster © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
In an effort to influence high-school science curriculum standards, more than 50 Ohio scientists issued a statement this week supporting academic freedom to teach arguments for and against Darwin's theory of evolution.
Released Wednesday, the statement was signed by 52 experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including entomology, toxicology, nuclear chemistry, engineering biochemistry and medicine. Some are employed in business, industry and research, but most teach at state and private universities. A third of the signatories are employed by Ohio State University.
The statement reads, in its entirety:
To enhance the effectiveness of Ohio science education, as scientists we affirm:
That biological evolution is an important scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom;
That a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science;
That a science curriculum should help students understand why the subject of biological evolution generates controversy;
That where alternative scientific theories exist in any area of inquiry (such as wave vs. particle theories of light, biological evolution vs. intelligent design, etc.), students should be permitted to learn the evidence for and against them;
That a science curriculum should encourage critical thinking and informed participation in public discussions about biological origins.
We oppose:
Religious or anti-religious indoctrination in a class specifically dedicated to teaching within the discipline of science;
The censorship of scientific views that may challenge current theories of origins.
Signatories released the statement as the Ohio State Board of Education works to update its curriculum standards, including those for high-school science classes, in accordance with a demand from the state legislature issued last year. Advocates of inclusion of evolution criticisms believe the Ohio scientists' statement echoes similar language in the recently passed federal education law, the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001." Report language interpreting the act explains that on controversial issues such as biological evolution, "the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist."
As part of its efforts to update the science standards, the Board of Education held a moderated panel discussion on the question, "Should intelligent design be included in Ohio's science academic content standards?" The debate was conducted during the March 11 regular board meeting and included two panelists from each side of the issue, who were given 15 minutes each to present their arguments. One of the panelists in favor of including "intelligent design" arguments (the idea that biological origin was at least initiated by an intelligent force) was Dr. Stephen Meyer, a professor at Whitworth College in Washington state and fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.
Meyer has written extensively on the subject, including a column for WorldNetDaily in which he criticizes the PBS series "Evolution." The series, he wrote, "rejects – even ridicules – traditional theistic religion because [religion] holds that God played an active (even discernible) role in the origin of life on earth."
Additionally, Meyer co-wrote a February 2001 Utah Law Review article defending the legality of presenting evolution criticism in schools. The article states in its conclusion that school boards or biology teachers should "take the initiative to teach, rather than suppress, the controversy as it exists in the scientific world," which is a "more open and more dialectical approach." The article also encourages school boards to defend "efforts to expand student access to evidence and information about this timely and compelling controversy."
Dr. Robert DiSilvestro, a professor at Ohio State and statement signatory, believes many pro-evolution scientists have not given Darwin's theory enough critical thought.
"As a scientist who has been following this debate closely, I think that a valid scientific challenge has been mounted to Darwinian orthodoxy on evolution. There are good scientific reasons to question many currently accepted ideas in this area," he said.
"The more this controversy rages, the more our colleagues start to investigate the scientific issues," commented DiSilvestro. "This has caused more scientists to publicly support our statement." He noted that several of the 52 scientists on the list had signed after last week's Board of Education panel discussion.
However, panelist Dr. Lawrence Krauss, chairman of Case Western Reserve University's physics department, said intelligent design is not science. ID proponents, he explained, are trying to redefine "science" and do not publish their work in peer-reviewed literature. In a January editorial published in The Plain Dealer, Krauss wrote that "the concept of 'intelligent design' is not introduced into science classes because it is not a scientific concept."
Promoters of ID bemoan "the fact that scientists confine their investigation to phenomena and ideas that can be experimentally investigated, and that science assumes that natural phenomena have natural causes," his editorial continues. "This is indeed how science operates, and if we are going to teach science, this is what we should teach." By its very nature, Krauss explains, science has limitations on what it can study, and to prove or disprove the existence of God does not fall into that sphere of study.
Krauss was disappointed in the Board of Education's decision to hold a panel discussion on the subject, saying the debate was not warranted since there is no evolution controversy in scientific circles.
"The debate, itself, was a victory for those promoting intelligent design," he said. "By pretending there's a controversy when there isn't, you're distorting reality."
But Meyer counters that a controversy does exist over the validity of Darwinian evolution, as evidenced by the growing number of scientists publicly acknowledging the theory's flaws. For example, 100 scientists, including professors from institutions such as M.I.T, Yale and Rice, issued a statement in September "questioning the creative power of natural selection," wrote Meyer in his WND column. But such criticism is rarely, if ever, reported by mainstream media outlets and establishment scientific publications, he maintains.
At the Board of Education's panel discussion, he proposed a compromise to mandating ID inclusion in science curriculum: Teach the controversy about Darwinism, including evidence for and against the theory of evolution. Also, he asked the board to make it clear that teachers are permitted to discuss other theories of biological origin, which Meyer believes is already legally established.
But such an agreement would only serve to compromise scientific research, according to Krauss. "It's not that it's inappropriate to discuss these ideas, just not in a science class," he concluded.
If these are true, it is not possible under certain circumstances to formulate mathematical equations which will definitely establish parameters.
Evolution is a fact. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection is a possible explanation for the process of evolution.
Regards
J.R.
Thanks! Those who would take that statement seriously would already have made up their mind since it was an assertion with no "evidence". :^)
Ask yourself why it is that creationists are so few and far between among the new intellectuals in this country. I'm not talking about lit or philosophy professors, I am talking about scientists, engineers, software developers, etc.
Most of the creationsts I've met end up in fuzzy intellectual areas like political science. They don't know how to do scientific research, write software, build complex machinery and things of that nature. They end up arguing what should the government be allowing or disallowing. They end up making a layman's ruling about a specialist's field. From banning cloning to telling software developers what we can do with our skills (when they cannot even discern between the syntaxes of different programming languages).
Here's a thought, following the scientific method if you want your bull$hit young earth theory to be accepted as a scientific theory.
If evolution has no compassion and we have compassion, then how did we get it? If compassion is not the result of the evolutionary process, then it came from somewhere else.
I would suggest to you that an equivalent event happened two thousand years ago in a place called Jerusalem when a crucified man in a tomb rose from the dead. That event will be celebrated worldwide in just a few days.
Last time I heard, Darwin is still dead. Couldn't he just spontaneously regenerate and settle this once and for all?
I accept that which can be shown by experimentation to confirm a hypothesis. At this point in time, the experimental data points towards life, the universe and everything having evolved by randomness reinforced by success. This is true in spite of your misunderstanding of or misrepresentations about statistical probabilities.
Since you are so big on statistical probabilities:
What is the probability that God exists?
Upon what data do you base your response?
What experiments has been done to verify your data?
Because of the nature of the laws of probability, the likelihood of any new kind of animal arising, with new kinds of organs, a new basic plan for existence etc. is a high-order infinitessimal, i.e. you are talking about a zero-probability event.
Now, it might be one thing to believe that one or two such events had ever occurred in the history of the world, but evolution posits an endless series of such events, i.e. it stands everything we know about probability on its head and requires a believer to pretend that such laws do not exist.
Moreover, natural selection could not plausibly select on the basis of hoped-for or future functionality; all you'd get would be a random walk around some norm for the old function. I.e. you'd have to come up with rationales for why an arm 10% of the way to becoming a wing offered an advantage, and then why an arm 20% offered an advantage over the 10% creatures, and then why an arm 30% of the way to being a wing....
Moreover, in real life, in trying to get to a new kind of a creature such as a flying bird, assuming you somehow miraculously evolved the first necessary new feature, then by the time the second evolved, the first would have de-evolved and either become vestigial or disappeared outright since it would have been useless - disfunctinal the entire while the second was evolving.
Darwininian gradualism has basically been abandoned at this point due to the lack of intermediates in the fossil record and also due to the Haldane dilemma and other problems of population genetics, basically the impossible time spans needed to spread genetic changes through sizeable populations of animals. The new semi-official replacement theory is the Gould/Eldredge notion of Punctuated Equilibria or "punc/eek". Unfortunately it turns out that punc/eek has even worse conceptual problems than the theory it is meant to replace:
It amounts to a pure pseudoscience since it involves a claim that the lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. In other words, it amounts to a claim that a theory can be valided by a lack of evidence rather than evidence.
It amounts to a claim that inbreeding is a good thing and the source of all genetic advancement.
It ignores the familiar "gambler's problem" and in fact requires yet another kind of a reversal of overwhelming probabilistic laws in requiring tiny groups of animals to repeatedly spread out and overwhelm vastly larger groups, countless billions of times.
It ignores the fact that in real life, globally adapted animals invariably prevail over parochially adapted ones.
Gould and Eldredge do not even talk about a mechanism for the rapid change which must occur amongst the tiny groups of peripheral isolates which they try to claim are the salvation of evolutionism. They leave that up to the reader. That amounts to a claim of magic.
just a quick-question to my spam-happy friend: you are anti-evolution because you sense that it is a conspiracy on the part of scientists, athetists, christians, and agnostics alike, to disprove the existence of the Lord your God?
I am antievolution because I don't like seeing idiotic things being funded with public money. I don't like idiots, I don't like yuppies trying to pretend they know something about science, and I don't like people with an overdeveloped sheep instinct generally, all of which comprises the basis of support for evolutionism at this point in time.
Religion has nothing to do with it. I'm not into voodoo or rastifari and normal religion does not really compete with evolutionism. That would be like Shakespeare having to compete with the Laurel and Hardy or Fatty Arbuckle and his rubber fish.
And it uses it incorrectly. Do you believe that other intelligent life exists in the universe?
Yes. And as Calvin said, the best evidence for them being intelligent is that they haven't contacted us yet.
As for the "2001" hypothesis, it's possible, and I'd have absolutely no problem with it , but there's no evidence for it that I've seen.
'twas a joke
We're going off on a tangent. The point was that while we have huge bodies of knowledge backed by observation and experiment, things such as Quantum theory still remain theory and will never be "proven." Certain laws may crop up in Quantum theory to explain absolute relationships between one quantum phenomenon and another, but the whole will always remain an "unproven" theory.
This was a response to those who state that evolutional theory is false unless someone can "prove" it.
Sure, and I think that makes my point that theories do not become laws, but instead that theories explain laws. The Kinetic Theory of Gases explains Boyle's Law. (The Kinetic Theory of Gases suggested that gases may be conceived as composed of molecules that act like little billiard balls, and Boyles Law quantified the relation between the volume and pressure of a gas assuming constant temperature. The Kinetic Theory provides a mechanism to account for why pressure increases as volume decreases, e.g. because a halving of volume doubles the number of molecules striking the interior walls of the gas' container.)
Note also Boyle' Law (1662) historically preceeded The Kinetic Theory of Gases (1738) by a considerable margin.
How does a theory graduate to the alledgely higher status of a law when the law came before the theory? Indeed this particular instance conforms to the general case. Descriptive laws usually do preceed corresponding explanatory laws. The same is true, for instance, in the case of gravity. In fact, hundreds of years after Newton provided us with the laws describing and predicting it's behavior, we still do not have a complete and satisfactory theory of gravity.
Many higher animals within a social group will demonstrate compassion. It works to help better a cohesive, mutually supportive group and make it more powerful and likely to survive than if it were just a loose group of individuals.
Certain standards of compassion and accepted behavior that are in general better for the group eventually become social norms, often interpreted as morals.
If you like you can start by giving me ONE example of a proven scientific theory. I'm waiting, and thanks in advance...
(I haven't been reading the full thread, btw. If you have answered this in a message not directed to me, please give the message number.)
You hate religious creationists? Think:
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