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The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design
Mime Narrator writes "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board recently adopted a policy requiring that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory, a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again, is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative. The ACLU, along with the AUSCS (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State), and 11 parents, are suing the school board, accusing the board of violating the separation of church and state. "
One, if a literal interpretation of the Bible is correct
Very, very, very few Christians believe that the bible is literally correct. If the Bible says "and the mountains sang with joy", does that mean that they grew wind pipes and sand a song? No. The Bible deals in metaphor, and a huge percentage of Christains believe so.
Scientists have clear evidence of the evolutionary process throughout history via these fossils...where exactly did they come from if the planet is in fact only 6000-odd years old
Scientists have clear evidence, but you should be clear. It is not perfect. Anomolies that are currently unexplained do pop up from time to time.
Of course, this is the same god who told Abraham to sacrifice his only son to Him, and waited until the knife was actually descending to say "Psych!".
Depends on which faith you subscribe to. Many Christians follow a line of teaching that describes the Old Testament like you would a work of fine literature. Instructive. The Old Testament, especially the The Law or pentateuch, are considered to be of value only for historical reasons: they applied only to prepare the Chosen people for the coming of Christ. So the story, for example, of Abraham and creation were preperations for the coming of Christ. This is why, for example, even devout Christians do not keep kosher while devout Jews do: the period of preperation and sacrifice ended when Christ was recognized as the saviour.
This is important. For many Christians, the creation story is unimportant. It is part of the Old Testament, and to be regarded as a piece of historical - aka old - literature. It is useful in establishing tradition, and in learning how our ancestors lived, but otherwise, it is not The Word Of God.
Even for the gospels - the New Testament - we have four recognized versions.
For most Christians, this is not an issue. Evolution is a thoery that seems close enough to fact. Creationists will argue against the merits of Darwinian evolution all day, and will be right. The working theory of evolution is based on Darwinian thinking, but it didn't just stop there. It is highly refined, and able to empiraclly observed.
However, the real issue is, what do we teach? You teach the fact, with respect for dissenting viewpoints, just like any other topic. If you are discussing the birth place of a famous person, and there exists some doubt about the location, most decent textbooks discuss the question. Evolution and counter-evolutionists should work the same way. There are holes in the most complete theory of evolution. They should be addressed. You can point out it is a theory that is not able to entirely proven, like a mathematical equation might be.
You are right to say evolution doesn't disprove the existence of God.
There are more "minor" geological issues the creationists have to deal with. If you take a look at the mid-Atlantic ridge: Europe and America separate at the rate of 4 cm/year. Which would give a separation of 240 meters in 6000 years. I'ld say they are off by a factor of 10000 at least. (I'ld like to have a creationist explanation about the magnetic patterns in the ocean crust, other than God did it to make us think.)
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ID has no merits other than being non-Darwinist. There is no evidence supporting a designer being active to generate creatures (interestingly though we still call individual lifeforms 'creatures' even when we claim that they don't have been created by a creator ;) ), there is no conclusion we can draw out of ID that helps us deal with a problem we have with a single or a group of lifeforms.
We all know the problem with antibiotics: If you use them, and you are not reaching every single lifeform you want to wipe out with a deadly dose, some of the lifeforms might survive long enough to have offspring, which in turn might survive the antibiotics too. They even might be able to survive a low dose of antibiotics without any harm, so if you use the antibiotic again, they survive all competing lifeforms, which die due to the antibiotic, making the field free for a growing population of the slightly antibiotic resistant lifeforms.
In the end your antibiotic is not able anymore to harm the resistant lifeform, and all that happens if you use it: You increase the growing of the species, because the antibiotic helps battling all those other lifeforms once competing.
This is evolution at work, and there are enough antibiotics which are not effective anymore, because there are lifeforms resistant to them.
It does not only work for bacterias and other single cell organisms: Exactly those evolutative mechanisms were at work when coca plants grew resistant to RoundUp: The spraying of RoundUp on Columbian coca plantages had a strange effect: Because spraying from an airplane is quite incorrect, and you can't make sure that all plants you want to hit are hit with a full dose, and the one's you don't want to hit aren't, the coca growing pawns in Columbia faced a strange problem after a spraying attack: Most of their crops, coca and other crops, died. Most tomatos, most corn, most vegetables and fruit, and most coca plants.
But some survived, having only got a low dose and were able to survive.
Coca plants are mostly multiplied by the pawns by cutting small twigs and planting them into the earth rather than sowing the coca seeds. After a spraying attack almost the complete plantage of a pawn is destroyed, and only the coca plants which have survived can be used to plant anew, just cut some twigs and regrow your crops. Most cultural plants need to be grown again from seeds, and you have to wait until the RoundUp is washed out of the earth. In the end the whole coca plantages once attacked were replanted with twigs from coca plants that survived a RoundUp attack. And they were growing faster than before because the weed normally growing with the coca plants was suppressed by the RoundUp remains in the soil.
Within four years a coca plant was covering large areas which was completely immune against RoundUp. No genetic engineering (a.k.a. intelligent design) was necessary to outwith the DEA and Monsanto: Just having evolution go its way and taking the survivors of RoundUp attacks and replant the field with them.
You might love or hate Darwinism. But evolution is all around you every day.
. Evolution happens in other ways than mutations. Horizontal gene transfer from one species to another via viruses for instance.
. Your blood clotting reference is the same as the evolution of the eye and many other things. You do not know if one and only one ancient protein could not do the job albeit poorly. This gene was then helped by others and did a better job. You do not know this and your ignorance (and ours) cannot justify a supreme being interference.
As a scientist, I do not need any God hypothesis.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
DNA sharing is also used to show by some who misunderstand evolution that we came from monkeys.
...
Your argument about "DNA sharing" is technically incorrect. It is possible to demonstrate that we "came from monkeys" using DNA evidence because it is possible to distinguish between convergent evolution and common ancestry at the DNA level. One of the reasons this is true is because there are many DNA sequences that can code for the same protein sequence, so if the DNA sequences are more related than would be expected by chance, that implies common ancestry (because functionally, only the protein sequence matters much). There are also other things, such as position of genes on the chromosomes, that can not be attributed to convergent evolution. Not only can it be shown that chimps and humans share a common ancestor, but there are algorithms that can predict the approximate time that the most recent common ancestor existed for humans, mice, flies, horseshoe crabs, flowering plants, etc.
Even if it were somehow proven that man evolved from lower primates,
It HAS been proven that man evolved from lower primates. The fact that many people in the US do not believe this is due to widespread ignorance of just how strong the data is.
You are misteaken, most Lutherans identify with a literal interpretation of the scripture and an anti-evolutionary stance. You must just know ELCA lutherans, who are known to be liberals.
Wisconsin Synod lutherans: WELS Evolution
Lutheran Church Missouri Synod:Evolution
ELCA however does not make a formal stance on the issue. They are the more liberal branch of the Lutheran church and are almost roman-catholic in their practices.
There are about 20 Lutheran branches but these are the big three. Lutheranism is most popular in the midwest, particularly Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota. Lutheranism is a conservative sect that follows a literal interpretation of the scripture. -philski-
Except that neo-conservatives aren't all that religious. Religion has never been and probably never will be a central tenet of neo-conservatism. Just because neo-conservatives hate Christians a little bit less than they hate socialist peaceniks doesn't mean that they are the same thing.
Maybe you should look up what a term means before you use it. From wikipedia:
"But domestic policy does not define neoconservatism; it is a movement founded on, and perpetuated by an aggressive approach to foreign policy, free trade, opposition to communism during the Cold War, support for beleaguered liberal democracies such as Israel and Taiwan and opposition to Middle Eastern and other states that are perceived to support terrorism. Thus, their foremost target was the conservative but pragmatic approach to foreign policy often associated with Richard Nixon, i.e., peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control, détente and containment (rather than rollback) of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the process that would lead to bilateral ties between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the U.S. Today, a rift still divides the neoconservatives from many members of the State Department, who favor established foreign policy conventions."
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
You're completely misunderstanding the second law of thermodynamics. It only applies to a closed system (meaning there is no external source of energy).
The Universe as a whole is probably a closed system, so on average for the whole universe at once, entropy is increasing. But that does not keep individual areas of the universe to have decreasing entropy, or increasing complexity. The earth is one such system, because we have a huge burning energy source beaming down on us, the sun. Someday yes the sun will burn out, and perhaps the whole universe will die a whimpering heat death. But in the meantime the sun still shines, and we still get a lot more energy than we need to increase complexity on this small planet.
Right now, it's mathmatically identical to quantum mechanics , or at least 99.999999% identical, and no one is sure where it's not.
The only reason string theory exists is we know quantum mechanics can't explain the universe, because it falls apart at macroscopic levels.
And we have no useful theory of what's actually going on in QM...or, rather, we have too many of them. Transactional and Many Worlds are the best two quantum theories.
We have the math, and nothing behind it, we have no idea what it means. Hence calling it quantum 'mechanics' instead of quantum 'theory'. Quantum mechanics is not hard, we had that like 60 years ago. Quantum theory is some crazy shit, and working on it makes no sense when we don't know why QM breaks at the macroscopic scale. (Aka, collapsing the wave function, which we don't understand at all.)
So we need a theory that works exactly, or almost exactly, like quantum mechanics. Except it needs to stop working like that at a certain scale for an explicably reason.
So someone realized that, hey, you can explain that if particles are actually strings...
String theory is a theory that needs to exist and be testable, but really isn't all the way there yet. They've got some math that matches QM, but that's it.
In fact, I think they've basically turned that into m-brane theory, where these 'strings' are actually two n-dimensional plains that intersect with each other...
And if they were teaching string theory in schools, scientists would probably have a problem with that, too. ;)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Some geologists support a theory by Thomas Gold which says that petroleum has a non-biological source. The gist is that non-biological methane is converted into longer-chain hydrocarbons by bacteria deep in the crust.
There's a bunch of evidence to support the theory. It may or may not be sufficient to explain all of the petroleum we see, but it could be; it's not a complete crackpot theory.
I'm not supporting ID or creationism here; I think that the intelligent design people are nut jobs and/or hypocrites. But you don't get to call yourself a scientist without taking all the facts into account. Abiogenic petroleum doesn't constitute a shred of evidence against evolution or for intelligent design. It just means that the irony you cite isn't quite as funny as it could be. Sorry.
Can't. War's over, sanity lost.
This is a lesson America will only learn the hard way, or not at all. But don't worry, rest of the world: It will directly lead to America no longer being the lone superpower, economically or otherwise. Another bush brand Republican or two, and our economy will no longer be anything to be feared, and the government will be so massively in debt it can no longer afford its military superiority, or waging pointless wars.
Meanwhile, I've moved to Canada, and don't really feel any need to go back.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice