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.
Notify the FAA immediately that their RADARs do not work!
Have you ever wondered how a RADAR is able to find the range to a target?
01: Site that debunks virtually all of creationism's fallacies. Excellent resource.
02: Creation "Science" Debunked.
03: Creationi sm and Pseudo Science. Familiar cartoon then lots of links.
04: The SKEPTIC annotated bibliography. Amazingly great meta-site!
05: The Evidence for Human Evolution. For the "no evidence" crowd.
06: Massive mega-site with thousands of links on evolution, creationism, young earth, etc..
07: Another amazing site full of links debunking creationism.
08: Creationism and Pseudo Science. Great cartoon!
09: Glenn R. Morton's site about creationism's fallacies. Another jennyp contribution.
11: Is Evolution Science?. Successful PREDICTIONS of evolution (Moonman62).
12: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution. On point and well-written.
13: Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions. A creationist nightmare!
14: DARWIN, FULL TEXT OF HIS WRITINGS. The original ee-voe-lou-shunist.
The foregoing was just a tiny sample. So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review:
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 16].
16 posted on 3/24/02 7:47 PM Hawaii-Aleutian by ZULU
Evolution alone is called atheism---secular humanism...spontaneous(big bang) matter/life---animal morphing(little bangs).
Evolution---matter development/life plus God is Creation.
You are both?
No problem?
And why not? If Intelligent Design can be proven wrong then it is falsifiable.
The sheer complexity, and the interrelatedness of all systems necessary for life should give you a hint that there is a lot more at work here than just random mutations.
One example is Mendellian genetics. Because any allele has only half a chance of being passed on to the next generation, the spread of even favorable mutations is pretty much impossible. In addition, a gene is so complicated that the creation of new ones, coding for new faculties, new phenotypes, is also practically impossible.
The difference between science and philosophy is that science gives proof of its assertions. Your statement that any hypothesis is science regardless of proof is utterly ridiculous. Just because evolution cannot give any proof of its assertions either in the fossil record or in any other way, does not mean that real science does not. Science proves its theories with repeatable experiments, calculations, predictions and practical applications. Evolution can do none of those, therefore it is not science.
Where did you get that from? "
From reading Darwin. It is just a huge mass of "just so stories", little more than a medieval bestiary. It is full of "proofs" which have been proven wrong such as the brachyocephalic index and the "melding" of traits from the parents which has been totally disproven by Mendellian genetics.
Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution
"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."
Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist
ID doesn't say a god, as defined by earth's religions, is responsible for the existence of life on this planet. It simply says that an intelligence was behind life being on this planet. That could be ET's uncles and cousins for all we know. The point is that the complexity of life on the earth and the amount of time allowed (roughly 5 billion) years contradict a theory of gradual change and development.
Perhaps there's another planet out there someplace where "life" originated and this life is the source of other life in the universe. Perhaps, if we were on that planet a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life would be much more obvious than it is here on earth.
The point is this. Intelligent design doesn't necessarily mean a god. Like in the second or third "Star Trek" movie, it could be some kind of "genesis project" carried on by extra-terrestrial, intelligent beings.
As I recall it from my college days, an idea "graduates" from a hypothesis, to a Theory, to a "Law", as more experimental and observational data is compiled.
You ignore the predictions its made? You ignore that no other scientific theory for how we got here has been able to displace it?
Now, I know we talked about this before.
Did the intelligent beings evolve naturally? If they did, why can't we have done so? If they didn't, who created them, and how did those folks come to be? Did they evolve naturally? And so on, ad infinitum.
Of course this postpones the question of the origin of life. But does that really matter? If the data says that the complexity of life is too great on this planet to explain except by outside intervention, then so be it. I'm a grown up. I can live with that.
The point is this. The intelligent race that "seeded" life on earth had to have come from someplace. Perhaps the place where they came from contains obvious data that explains how life originated there. Perhaps the conditions on that planet are different in such a way that we would look at it and say, "Oh, I didn't think of that. It's so obvious now."
Because your test doesn't prove ID wrong. It would only demonstrate that an alternative method was at work, but there is not requirement that if ID is true no other process could be as well. They aren't exclusionary. Later evolution could have been "designed" in.
Well, I would contend that theories do not become laws. Theories and laws are different kinds of things. Theories are explanatory, whereas laws are simply descriptive. A law says, "here is a model or mathematical formula that predicts the behavior of this system," whereas a theory says, "here is a mechanism that causes this behavior" You can, and do, for instance, have both laws and theories of gravity, and they are separate and not genetically related.
I do agree, however, that hypotheses can become theories through elaboration, extension and testing. (In that case one might distinquish between explanatory hypotheses, which may become theories, and descriptive or generalizing hypotheses, which may become laws.)
Alright then, please give me three examples of scientific theories that have been demonstrably proven. Should be easy, if scientific theories really are proven, as you insist. Why do you stall?
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