Encore! Encore!
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.
Plato should sue: he's clearly a victim of "Platypus envy."
Who cares? It still does not tell you if the organism from which it came from had the features of the platypus or not. Therefore does not tell you if it was a platypus or not. Therefore it does not tell you if it was the ancestor of the platypus.
In addition, as I said many posts back, even if these fossils were to be said to be ancestors of the platypus, you still cannot show where the peculiar combination of features of the platypus came from. Even those fossils had to have had ancestors according to evolution and those ancestors had to show that those features were present in them also or were in the process of being developed.
In addition to all the above there is the point I made which you continue to ignore. There are many species alive now and many others of which we have fossils. None of them, I repeat none of them, show even a close affinity to the peculiar combination of features found in the platypus. Therefore I repeat the claim which you have not been able to disprove: the platypus is strong proof that evolution is true.
BTW - Let me remind all here that the charlatan Darwin, even though the platypus had been known since the 1820's and had made a tremendous sensation when it was found, did not mention the platypus in either of his works. He knew that it was a big disproof of his theory and he knew no amount of sophistry could get around it.
From your post #517.
You are contradicting yourself in the same paragraph. Something that is identical cannot have any differences, not one. Also let me note Vade, that you just keep repeating the same statement without addressing my response.
From your post #568.
Here we go gore darling. sorry it took a while to reply, i forgot about this.
Bacterial flagellum: http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~e21092/flagella.htm
Prokaryote to Eukaryote: http://drnelson.utmem.edu/evolution.html
Echolocation ("sonar"): http://www.life.umd.edu/classroom/zool360/L10/echo.html
And if you'd like, these papers have more information (have fun :P ):
Nice generally informative link on echolocation, but severely lacking on how this feature evolved. It does however present one of those puzzles to "randomness".
Echolocation has evolved independently several times
1. oilbirds in South America
2. swiftlets in south-east Asia
3. toothed whales, e.g. dolphins, sperm whales
4. micro-chiropteran bats
Notice birds and mammals in this picture. Why again does T-Rex not have mammaries.(Yes, I know I'm not thinking like a Darwinian, they are not exactly the same mechanism so you can't use the common ancestor thingy). I still think it shows how you can pick and choose your "evidence" for Darwinism. It is notable that complex things, involving the nervous system like eyes and sonar evolve multiple times, but rather simpler things like a modified gland that produces "milk" don't.
Yes indeed. In fact the article, by detailing how many other features of the bat were needed in order to have echolocation, makes the evolutionary descent of this even harder to fathom. Also it should be noted, that if echolocation was not as accurate as it is, they would not be able to feed themselves. Gradual evolution of this near perfect system could never have happened.
Hence, the "Blind as a bat" tease. :^)
i thought it answered questions well...will nothing be sufficient?
Since man and chimp are from two different genealogical families, the above statements are clearly contradictory. In addition, since man and chimp branched apart over 5 million years ago, it is highly unlikely that if cytochrome c was a molecular clock for evolution (as evolutionists claim) that there would be absolutely no differences in the cytochrome c of man and chimp. Therefore this example is a disproof of evolution.
Indentical proteins in humans and chimps is a disproof of evolution!?! M-kay...
Note to lurkers: many proteins are identical or very similar in humans and chimps, but by no means all. Generally those that are most variable among species overall are also most variable between humans and chimps. Cytochrome c is among the least variable proteins, and one must compare organisms separated by hundreds of millions of years to find sequence divergences over 50 percent.
Lurkers should read some of the other articles among the 29 evidences concerning molecular data, the point being that there are multiple interlocking patterns that are explained by common descent, but are gratuitous, unaccountable or improbable otherwise. I won't go into the details here, but there are, for instance, families of proteins that evolved from gene duplications. In this case the assumption of common descent requires that certain general patterns must obtain when the same proteins are compared between different species AND when different proteins within the family are compared in a given species AND when the different proteins within a protein family are compared among different species. IOW the sequences must simultaneously betray evidence both of the evolution of one or more protein(s) from another protein AND of the sequential divergences of each protein as the result of subsequent speciation events.
Wrong. Identical proteins can be produced by non-identical genes. Note VadeRetro said the difference was in the NUCLEOTIDE sequence, i.e. a "silent mutation".
Dr Nelson does not answer, so I cannot comment on him.
The flagella response is rather crippled. Statements such as --- "The Filament (propellor) is composed of the proteins FlaA and FlaB, deletion of FlaB doesn't seem to do much, and deletion of FlaA results in trucated flagella, and have some motility, so it would appear that the actual propellor is not IC (2,11)." show that he has a skewed understanding of IC. You need a propelling object for a complex propelling system and the lack of IC for one part of IC structure has no bearing on the IC of the structure itself unless that particular part is IC which would then make the entire structure IC. The statement appears superfluous in the context of the flagella. The following statements also are harmful to the argument.
I'll ignore the L and P rings (FlgH, FlgI), as these can be absent or present without any effects on flagella function, so can't be part of the IC core :-)
The rod (driveshaft) is comprosed of a complex of the proteins FlgG, FlgB, FlgC, FlgF and FliJ, P, Q, R, I don't have any information about muations of these.
The M ring is formed from FliF, again, I don't have any info on mutations of this.
The flagellum certainly is complex, even irreducibly complex in this canonical form, but can it evolve? Well, there is still a lot unknown about eubacterial flagella, but we can get some ideas, and a plausible pathway from the literature.
There is no aparent homolog of the motor (MotAB) in type III secretory systems.
As an argument for the "accidental" formation of a complex object, I consider it bilge. As a "Just So" story it is nice.
IIRC, his colleagues called him "Barnacle Chuck". (IIRC.)
Working my way down the thread, shaking my head in awestruck sadness at the slow, oblivious train wreck...
It's a highly conserved gene to have had only one mutation since humans and chimps diverged.
Your usual garbage.
First of all the article says the cytochrome c's of chimps and humans are identical. ARE YOU NOW SAYING THAT THE ARTICLE THAT YOU AND OTHERS CONSTANTLY GIVE AS PROOF OF EVOLUTION WAS A LIE?????????
Gore, the article says this: "Humans and chimpanzees have the exact same cytochrome c protein sequence."
Vade said "It's a highly conserved gene to have had only one mutation since humans and chimps diverged."
Now do you see a contradiction between those two statements?
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