State Legislators Seek Bills to Allow Questioning of Evolution Theory in Schools

Ken Miller is one of the good ones. I went to one of his workshops at a National Science Teachers Association convention a few years ago and I was impressed.

 

Funny you should mention that...

http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/irreducible-complexity-is-reducible-after-all/

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cach...ed&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=11&gl=au&client=firefox-a

There is still a fair bit of speculation about how the flagellum evolved but it is far far from irreducible.

 

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Funny you should mention that...

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I was unaware...thank you. That is a popular example, and obviously on it's way out. I don't normally debate evolution, so hopefully I won't have to find another haha.

But thanks

 

then you imagine bullshit.

For the 435,692nd time:

No one with enough sense to tie their shoes is arguing evolution does not exist///the discussion is whether evolution ccounts for all that is attributed to it.

Really don't give a fuck whether he's religious or not. Facts are facts regardless. If he has a good case he has a good case.

Seem to be? Since I wasn't saying anything at all about the use of the word "theory" maybe you are "imagining" again.

I'm not using the word theory at all, I'm pointing at the misuse of others.

Again, slower this time.

Some people say "evolution is only a theory"

some evolutionist rebut by saying

"garvity is 'only' a theory too but you believe in that, right?"

which is a bullshit answer BECAUSE the EXISTENCE of gravity is not a theory, it is an observed fact. Just as life is.

how you account for the observed fact is what you describe as a theory or a hypothesis.

So no, thank you just the same, I am NOT misusing the word theory and don't try to give me that "talk down to them like they are idiots" bullshit about the difference in a theory in science and a theory anywhere else. I been knowing that shit since middle school thankyouverymuch.

 

There really isn't much to be said at this point that hasn't already been said, Dark.

Just some people going back and forth on the same old debates.

But I do agree with you on the faith idea.

Everything is, in fact, a matter of faith. No matter what conclusive end you come to, on any topic, it can always be questioned.

And the fact that everything is questionable, and a matter of faith, is the only fact the human race can come to.

It is the only truly unquestionable truth.

Yeah, it's irritating, and can sometimes lead to answers that you would never imagine could be even a remote possibility. But there is always the remote possibility.

The interesting thing is watching everyone squirm because, somewhere, we all know this to be true.

Which makes it all the more frustrating when some nut comes up with a crackpot hypothesis that can't be disproved.

All we have is faith in evidence. Faith that all the scientific information we can gather is universal. That everything is the way it's "tangible" characteristics present themselves to be.

 

I should say that you both seem to be on either side of the actuality.

A gradual increase in the complexity and diversity of life over time is what we can observe in the fossil record. Obviously it isn't as directly observable as gravity but it is the equivalent in this case.

The theory of evolution is an attempt to explain why we see that. So in that way trying to poke at minor holes in the current theory of evolution does nothing more to disprove evolution that providing evidence against the existence of gravitons proves that gravity doesn't exist.

 

...and both the scientific and religious communities twitch, just a little bit.

 

Personally I believe in Evolution - but that's not the point.
IMO anything that gets kids thinking, debating, studying, or just giving a shit in general is okay by me! It doesn't matter if Evolution gets "proved" or not.....the process of examining theories is the most imortant thing.

 

All true...except no one worth taking seriously is trying to disprove that there is no evolution at all...they are trying to demonstrate that there is more claimed for evolution than it can support.

Poking holes in what is claimed for evolution - especially when those claims go beyond what the actually evolutionary scientist would claim - is not an attempt to say that no evolution has ever occurred any more than anyone wants to prove there is no such thing as gravity.

Bottom line, both sides of the debate are being made to look bad by the reactionaries who end up on camera and in print.


Listening to Miller now and he just said that he would love a sticker which said "EVERYTHING in science should be approached critically and with an open mind"

That's good. I hope it appears in big friendly letters on the introduction page of all his future textbooks.

 

And what debate do you want? Do you want the teacher to say "Well, we can't account for everything in evolution?"

Because that isn't exactly limited to just evolution. That applies to every single aspect of science, from botany to quantum physics.

You're basic argument is "evolution doesn't account for everything." Well, no, of course not. That's why why we keep examining.

You want to say, in not so many words, that we have reached the sum total of our understanding of the universe. That we can go NO further, and therefore must accept that a force greater than us, an intelligent force at that, is responsible for these things we do not understand.

But what happens in 30 years if and when we answer the gaps you claim are littering evolutionary theory? Or is that not going to be possible, since according to ID we have reached the pinnacle of human understanding?

 

[QUOTE='[theDarkest_noir]Evolution can explain how species gradually "evolve" from one to another along the way. However, it can not account for how life goes from NOTHING to a single celled organism.[/quote]
You're right. Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. If you're curious about that I suggest you look into the very interesting work being done on abiogenesis.

There's a lot of ongoing research. That particular idea is called phyletic gradualism. There's also punctuated equilibrium.

There are a number of hypothesis out there. But even if none of them were correct it wouldn't be evidence for creation.

One hundred years ago we knew combustion could not account for the power of the sun. Imagine if scientists had resigned themselves to the fact that it must be the work of god. One of the fundamental pillars of physics would have never been discovered.

 

How many scientists that have written off intelligent design as religion have actually searched for evidence of creationism?

Because if any one of them haven't, then they aren't scientists.

It is the scientist's responsibility as a scientist to search for evidence of any truth, not just the one that lends itself to their theories.

When someone finds what may be the Ark, the "respected" scientific community goes out to find any evidence to the contrary of it actually being the Ark.

Any scientist that says, "Hey, they might have the Ark here" gets dismissed from the "respected" scientific community.

Now they're another one of those "religious scientists."

People get stuck on the word "religion." If there is a creator, it doesn't mean that science is up a shit creek, or that anything they've discovered is false. All it means is that something created the universe.

And you're an idiot if you let a word dictate how valid something can be, without proper study.

I think it's sad that events from this world's past can still have such a childish feud running this strong, in a time when we pride ourselves on the tolerance we can have for all peoples and ideas.

Sometimes I swear that the "respected" scientific community is no better than those African-Americans who are screaming for compensation for their ancestors being enslaved.

It's no better, because there's a clear and present bitterness in the hearts of so many scientists regarding the religious persecuting earlier scientists for supposedly questioning the validity of religious ideas.

Most of them weren't even trying to disprove religion, they were just out to understand how things work.

You've got so many scientists giving science a shitty ass name among religious folk, and so many religious icons giving God a shitty ass name among scientists.

Dismiss it if you wish, but if you haven't tried to gather any evidence for BOTH sides of this ridiculous debate, then you aren't a scientist, you're just an evolutionist.

And as an evolutionist, you're just fighting for your cause, rather than researching for the education of the race.

 

So by that logic if any scientist writes off the flying spaghetti monster as an imaginary concoction without actually looking for scientific evidence of it they are no longer a scientist?

As has been repeatedly said, ID isn't science simply because it doesn't do things in a scientific manner.

 

There's a massive difference.

We KNOW the Flying Spaghetti Monster was created.

 

A belief structure that was invented just a few years ago in response to the fight around creationisms place in the classroom?

Sounds an awful lot like ID to me...

 

*sigh* These round and round debates are tiring me. I don't usually even read these threads anymore, but I got sucked into this one...

Now, somebody tell me why EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE (gravity, electricity, planet & star formation) seem to go on just fine without the need for help from invisible beings like gods and farries pulling the strings (or is this that Discworld?) but *Life* is the single one that that some people just won't give up the need for a magical power to be behind!?

('course I know the answer: we wanna feel special)

And and referring back to something someone - I forgot, and am to tired to go back and look whom - Even Jacob Brownowski, scientists, biologist, author of the excellent book and tv-series "The Ascent of Man", and obvious proponent of rationalism and evolution, said that school shouldn't be a place where were just drill into kids heads to slavishly and unquestioningly accept the current dogma - but teach then to ask questions and think - critically - for themselves.

But somehow me thinks that if we taught kids critical thinking and the scientific method, this Creationism nonsense would go away.

But the proponents on ID (or whatever Creationism is calling itself these days) don't want honest debate. Written into theses legislations are often clauses that claim that too much questioning on ID is disparaging it, criticizing it, and not giving it "equal time".

And why science teachers in places like Dover have threatened to walk off the job or take being fired if required to teach ID, is that ID "textbooks" contain blatant and disproven falsehoods (hell the whole delusion that there is a real "debate" is a falsehood) and that that they don't want to be forced to tech them as "true" when they KNOW they are not, with their hands tied. Be forced teach to kids what the see as obvious lies. That's not teaching, and it disingenious and unfair to students.

Teachers owe it to teach kids the truth, as best we know it. (Anything else is less than honest.) Not politically and religiously motivated dogma.

 

To be fair, life, more specifically sentient life is pretty damn mind boggling.

 

A few random thoughts on the subject:

• Arguments that boil down to "I don't see how this could have happened naturally so there must be an intelligence that created it" are extremely weak. They are arguments from ignorance, which are even less sound than arguments from silence.

• Arguments that boil down to "Anything that involves the supernatural is necessarily false" are just as weak, since they are based on ruling out a priori a conclusion that must be ruled out, if indeed it is ruled out, as a result of the argument, not as a premise for the argument.

• I am in favor of schools being allowed to question just about anything. Why not question evolution? Why not question whether Euclidian geometry is correct? Why not question the way history is taught? If any discipline does not have the grounds to back up its claims, it deserves to be questioned. If it has the grounds, it will be strengthened, not weakened, by the questioning.

• I am opposed to any and all laws that even smell like "officially approved truth." That is the biggest problem I have with the sacred status that has been accorded to evolution in the last couple of decades. If it is scientifically sound and provable, it should be able to stand up to the heat. I do not think it is the role of government to say, "This is truth, and can be taught in schools, while this is not, and cannot be taught in schools." This way lies dictatorship and mind control of the masses. Europe suffered under the Catholic Church doing that for centuries; it is no better to use the same appoach just because it is a different agency, with a different philosophy, employing it. There should not be any "officially approved truth."

• For all those reasons, I am in favor of teachers and/or students being allowed to question evolution. By the same token, I am soundly opposed to them being required to question it. The content of teaching should be decided by teachers and parents, not by legislatures.

 

Actually, there are three points at which there is a qualitative, and not just a quantitative, change in "what exists," which require scientific explanations that do not exist at present. They are the appearance of anything (mass/energy/space/time when there was nothing before), the appearance of life (the "simplest" possible life is many orders of magnitude more complicated than the most complex non-organic chemical structures), and the appearance of sentience. There are, at best, tenuous theories concerning those three points, none of which comes close to being scientific proof.

It is also worth noting that evolution, as a scientific theory (as opposed to a popular theory that has more to do with people's preconceptions than with genuine scientific thought), has nothing to say about any of the three. It is a theory about how life changes, producing new variations from previously existing variations, by means of mutation and natural selection. The common belief (among both the defenders and detractors of evolution) that it explains the appearance of life simply shows how few people understand the scientific theory.

 

However, even if one accepts a Supreme Being behind creation, the problems of existence (of Him), life (His), and sentience (His) would still remain unanswered.

 

In school (at least the one I was at) the origins of life itself was barely touched since there are only a few loose theories at the moment for how it happened, and there was never any pretense that evolution covered that.

What I was responding to was Bryces question of why life is treated differently to other natural processes and I was just responding to point out that while I do believe our sentience came about naturally, it is different to all the other things we have observed in the universe to date so it is understandable why people feel it should be treated differently.

 

So what exactly are you arguing then Shep? The fact that you're inverting the terminology certainly isn't helping any here. I took it to mean that evolution has not been observed (which is false) while gravity has.

What does that mean? Are we talking "God of the Gaps" here?

You were using the term incorrectly and you're still using it incorrectly when you say things like "gravity is not a theory, it is an observed fact."

 

Do you have a good falsifiable experiment in mind?

 

Scientists don't pursue the supernatural not only because it's never been observed but because by definition it can never be understood.

 

True. That merely puts the questions into a different realm. And where I disagree with many creationists is that questions about the existence of life and sentience are not, to me, any kind of "proof" that God exists. A large part of the reason is that, if God does exist, that simply changes the nature of the questions, as you have pointed out, rather than answering them.

 

Oh, I am not disagreeing with you at all. I was merely amplifying what you said. Your answer was succint, but totally correct as far as it went. I just extended your answer into a few other realms as well.

 

I would like to know what kind of definition of the supernatural can be rationally demonstrated to be correct and yet at the same time be a conclusive demonstration that the supernatural can never be understood.

It seems to me that you, as well, are making as a premise for your argument something that should be the conclusion of a previous argument, but which has never (as far as I know) been so demonstrated.

 

The very definition of supernatural is "phenomena that cannot be explained by natural laws" so I'm not sure what you're digging for here.

 

From Wikipedia:

A "law" is simply a rule that is part of a theory.

And the concept of absolute "proof" does not exist in science.

No, the case would not have been proven, and to say that it was is a misuse of the term. Doubt always exists to some extent in criminal cases, and the same applies to scientific theories.

I don't have faith. My position is supported by testable evidence, and were it someday not, it would cease to be my position. There is no equivalence between our views, but of course you don't understand this because you're still rattling on about things like "proof" and pretending that I'm asserting absolute epistimological certainty, despite being told otherwise.
If you're going to debate this with grown-ups, I suggest you think of something a little better than Pascals Wager.