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.
NOUN: 1. An idea that has been demonstrated as true or is assumed to be so demonstrable.
2. Mathematics A proposition that has been or is to be proved on the basis of explicit assumptions.
ETYMOLOGY: Late Latin therma, from Greek, from therein, to look at, from theros, spectator.
FB: "I'm not necessarily claiming ID to be a theory so much as a theorem. As a theorem it works much more nicely that random chance."
I'm still lost. According to the American Heritage Dictionary On-Line (Edition of 2000), if it's a theorem, you're assuming it to be true.
When are you going to give proof of macro-evolution, of the descent of the platypus, of the descent of euglena, of the descent of the bat, of the descent of eukaryotes, of the of the descent of mammals and birds, of the descent of man. When are you going to find the numerous missing links to prove evolution? When are you going to show the proof of abiogenesis? When are you going to give the proof that monkeys can paint Rembrandts or write Hamlet? When are you going to give proof that a single gene has indeed been created through gradual evolution? When are you going to prove that God does not exist? When are you going to give proof that the eye, the flagellum, the cilia, and fruits evolved gradually?
In other words, when are Darwinists are going to give proof of anything?
Well, that's different. Surely we cannot doubt Robin Williams, one of the greatest scientists of this or any other century!
Ah, I assume you've put a "hex" on what we were discussing.
Nice touch.
Been pinging you on this for a while. You tried to say that the whole reptile-jaws-to-mammal-ear-bones thing was just Cuffey's fakey drawing. (How did he get away with that?)
Why do mammalian embryos echo this process in their development? Coincindence?
Check out the pic in #859.
That's a genuine "fahrvfignewton" (VW "Beetle") in the TROLL's hand.
Ja!
Unter "Aurora" Brücke....
Funny you should mention the above. I really think of those as proof against evolution. Here's why: although these creatures are allegedly mutating a lot, they are still viruses, still bacteria, still the same insects. Now one would think that if evolution is true, we would see more change in these creatures than just a new resistance to a drug. That can happen with a small single mutation in a single gene or by other means. As I have pointed out on these threads, you need a lot more than that to get from bacteria to man. You really need the transformation of organisms and this is not happening in the above cases. This transformation has never been observed in any of these organisms even though they seem to quite easily adapt themselves to new circumstances. Since adaptation to the environment is supposedly the engine of evolution, one would think that for example some of these viruses would have become bacteria by now.
BTW the above also deals with the problems of abiogenesis. Some evolutionists have said that because viruses are made of RNA only that this is the way life started. However, viruses do not reproduce. They are parasites and can only replicate through infecting a host cell. The fact that in spite of the tremendous amount of research on viruses by the medical community, no evolution of these viruses into self-replicating organisms has been seen is strong proof against both the theory of evolution and theories of abiogenesis.
I am not sure that you can say that the response is due to the same protein. We know far less about biology than we think we know. We do know though that in some cases certain actions and reactions are controlled by more than one gene, by more than one protein. Man probably has another regulator that is affecting this response which the guinea pig does not have. And this you see is one of the problems with evolution. It claims to give an answer to questions when the answer may well lie elsewhere. It said the appendix was just a vestigial organ, it was not, it had a purpose. It said that non-coding DNA was junk, it was not, it had a purpose. We are far from knowing all the answers yet. We do not even know exactly what all the genes are in humans, let alone what the purpose of every one of them is. Our biggest lack though is in the knowledge of the complex interrelationships between cells. We are not even close to an answer on that.
It shows nothing of the sort. A favorable mutation is one that, by definition, confers a survival advantage to the organism. An organism with an advantage has a better chance of reproducing, thus of spreading the mutation. An unfavorable mutation tends to be bred out of a population, and a neutral mutation remains in the population at pretty much a stable frequency. The spread of mutations throughout a population is not random, nor does it take a long time. This is all basic biology, which is usually taught in freshman level biology courses."
Let's take this one step at a time. Darwin's view was that if an individual had a mutation it had a 100% chance of being passed on to the next generation because he thought the traits of the parents "melded" in the progeny. Mendellian genetics showed this is not the case. First of all, if a new gene is recessive, it will never spread through the species. Now, even on the 50/50 chance that it would be a dominant gene, the chances of its spreading are pretty thin indeed. Remember, this is a new gene, noone else in the species has it. When the individual mates with another the chance will be 50/50 the progenitor will get the gene. If the progenitor does not marry a sister which got the gene (on the 50/50 chance also), the chances are 50/50 again. If it does not marry a cousin (who through a 1 in 4 chance got the gene), or if he was an only child the chances will be 50/50 again. We are already down to a 1/8th chance in just 3 generations of this very good gene from spreading. Even in a small population, the chances of this gene spreading are slim. That is why Kirmura had to invent (out of whole cloth) the genetic drift concept - to try to solve the problem of genetics. It was also one of the reasons Gould said that evolution took place in small populations - because it was so hard to spread even a very good new gene through a large population. So yes, Mendellian genetics does make evolution very hard - and Mendellian genetics is taught in high school biology classes (but its consequences to the theory of evolution are not which is why we need real science taught in schools not evolution).
There is not one now either - just a bunch of rants from atheists like Dawkings and some on this forum whose names shall not be mentioned to protect the guilty.
Being a non-evolutionist, I have a very highly developed BS meter.
Definitions are proof of nothing. We had enough of this nonsense here already. Back up your theory with facts instead of rhetoric.
In evolutionary terms you would have something not predicted - devolution. Remember, evolution keeps creating more fitness not less, so poor Henry Adams characterized himself a disproof against evolution. BTW - he thought that Darwinism was just another passing fancy.
Ms Cleo also makes predictions which have been proven after the fact - does that make her a great scientist?
The answer is no. Predictions are scientific proof only when all the predictions are proven to be true. Any charlatan can make some predictions that turn out to be true - and Darwin was an excellent charlatan. I have shown some important predictions of Darwin, pretty central to his theory that have been proven false: brachyocephalism, melding of parental traits, proof of evolution from the fossil record, the malthusian basis of evolution, to name just some. So no, his predictions prove him a charlatan, not a scientist.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.