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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. "
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.
DNA sharing is also used to show by some who misunderstand evolution that we came from monkeys.
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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.
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.