The evolving Darwin debate

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.

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.

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.

that gene is already doing an essential job for the organism and changing it will destroy the function it is performing and result in serious problems to the organism

Maybe sometimes true, but not relevant. Most of the DNA strand is non-functional -- left over from previous uses, but stored in the genetic attic. It is available for modification and re-use.

The second one is pretty cool because it's the one where Darwin said about the absence of certain fossils, "

So Darwin was the ancestor of Ms Cleo? He went around making thousands of predictions and when one or two were proven correct he called his theory proven? A few posts back I showed how many things Darwin was incorrect about. Important things at the heart of his theory and his "predictions". The above was a lucky guess and part of the chutzpah of the charlatan that he was. He also predicted that the fossil record would prove evolution and it has not done so after 150 years and 100 times more fossils. Furthermore, the Cambrian explosion with some 20-30 new genera appearing which had never been seen before is a very strong disproof of evolution.

You are absolutely wrong. Social Darwinism was not the misuse of Darwinian theory, it was putting Darwinian theory into action:

How is that different from building and using a bomb?

A bomb can be used or misused. A theory that promotes the killing of innocents, the lame and the weak cannot be used for good.

Evolution says to kill the weak, the lame, the useless. In other words, he and his theory were the originators of the evil proposition of eugenics. That is where the Nazis got the excuse. The theory itself is evil and you can do all the double-talk you like, it does not change it. Let me post Darwin's words again which you are trying to make people forget about with your rhetoric:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Darwin, "The Descent of Man", Chapter V.

We'll go over the other stuff in the other thread, but we agree here: Malthus (an Anglican pastor no less, hehehe), was an idiot.

Thanks for your honesty. It was Malthus and his chicken-little theory that formed the basis for natural selection.

There's no way we'll ever find all of the fossils necessary to close up every little hole to make people like you happy.

We are not talking about little holes, we are talking about humongous holes. Like the holes between mammals and reptiles, the wholes between birds and dinosaurs, the wholes between every major species on earth. There are no intermediaries either in the distant record or in the near record for any species.

This was in another thread. But in Mein Kampf, his speeches, private conversations and writings, he always insists that he is doing the right Christian thing, and continually proclaims himself a Christian.

Makes it pretty tough to be a designer, also.

You have it backwards, DNA makes it quite hard for a mindless force to design anything. However for whoever designed the whole thing, it was not that hard because He had created the design and all the parts.

Change in allele frequency over time.

Thanks for confirming my statement that you talk to ten evolutionists and get twelve different theories! That is the second one for you! What you have said cannot be even be considered a theory. For example you need to tell us by what means these frequencies change.

We can add another quotation from another evolutionist atheist:

Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.
From: Ernst Mayr - What Evolution Is - Edge Magazine 10/31/01

Since most DNA is dead code, that would mean most mutations have no effect at all.

You are absolutely wrong - and so is evolution. When the genome was finally deciphered, numerous parts of it did not contain genes. The evolutionists quickly jumped in with their explanation - this is junk DNA they said and the source for our evolution. Like the rest of the nonsense evolutionists have been saying for 150 years this "prediction" of evolution, has been proven wrong:

Conclusion

The idea that a major part of our DNA is "garbage" ignored the fact that a key feature of biological organisms is optimal energy expenditure. To carry enormous amounts of unnecessary molecules is contrary to this fundamental energy saving feature of biological organisms. Increasing evidence are now indicating many important functions of this DNA, including various regulatory roles. This means that this so-called non-coding DNA influences the behavior of the genes, the "coding DNA", in important ways. Still there is very little knowledge about the relationship between non-coding DNA and the DNA of genes. This adds to other factors making it impossible to foresee and control the effect of artificial insertion of foreign genes.
From: Junk DNA

That is the second one for you!

What was my first one?

For example you need to tell us by what means these frequencies change.

Actually there are multiple contributing factors, but how it happens doesn't matter -- what matters is that it happens, that is evolution.

It's kind of like inertia; an object will maintain constant motion unless influenced by an outside force, but the nature of that outside force isn't relevant to the fundamentals of inertia.

Only because there's not universal agreement on what constitutes a species. We make organisms at work all the time that can no longer interbreed with their original species, only among themselves.

The reason there is no agreement for what speciation is, is because the changes are hardly discernible either genetically or in any other way. A small change can be entirely due to a selection of different paths to react to the environment. We know that the body reacts to the environment in many ways - attacking intruding bodies for example, regulating body temperature and many other ways. So making small changes to adapt to the environment need not involve any change in the genes at all but just the turning of different genes on to act to adapt to the environment. Indeed, this is the most likely cause because many of the examples of speciation claimed by evolutionists are way too fast to allow for a mutation to have achieved such changes.

Liars say whatever they want, that is not an indictment upon the Christian church and has nothing to do with Christian teaching. His actions had nothing to do with Christian teaching but they had everything to do with Darwinian teaching - eugenics in particular, cleansing the race of undesirable characteristics by murder.

Eugenicis is hardly "Darwinistic". At best it's a perversion of evolution, attempting to force-fit biological events to a social structure.

Anyone who claims that evolution or Darwin's theories logically leads to eugenics is either lying or has a terrible understanding of biology and sociology.

I can see why you believe that chance always begins at ground zero. It is the way you think. The questions I have raised regarding the ratchet mechanism of variation and selection have been ignored and sidestepped, but not discussed.

Well, I am doing so now and discuss it in a couple of posts. Basically there is no Junk DNA which is what you are hanging your hat on. All DNA has a purpose. That is why mutations hurt the organism - they make a necessary part of it unusable. This is contrary to survival of the fittest and all that. Read the article one or two posts above this one and come back to me.

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