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Using Copyrights To Fight Intelligent Design
An anonymous reader writes "The National Academies' National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association are using the power of copyright to ensure that students in Kansas receive a robust education. They're backed by the AAS: The American Association for the Advancement of Science." From the release: "[they] have decided they cannot grant the Kansas State School Board permission to use substantial sections of text from two standards-related documents: the research council's 'National Science Education Standards' and 'Pathways to Science Standards', published by NSTA. The organizations sent letters to Kansas school authorities on Wednesday, Oct. 26 requesting that their copyrighted material not be used ... Leshner said AAAS backs the decision on copyright permission. 'We need to protect the integrity of science education if we expect the young people of Kansas to be fully productive members of an increasingly competitive world economy that is driven by science and technology ... We cannot allow young people to be denied an appropriate science education simply on ideological grounds.'"
In most standard treatments of arithmetic, 1+1=2 by definition of the symbol 2.
The scary part:
Evolution does have reproducable results via experimentation. Biologists, Geneticists, Medical Doctors, and many others have been documenting it for years.
"Intelligent Design", while not distastful to me in light of my religious background, is an idea with no support from reproducable study. It's just an idea that has been shoehorned into our gaps in knowledge, and thus when those gaps in knowledge change, it will have to change too.
So while bacteria are mutating to be antibiotic resistant, animals are changing both form and social function due to human impact on the environment, and scientists in laboratories are using evolution principles to alter DNA- psuedo-scientists take advantage of the fact that verifying first hand the effects of macroevolutionary process would require a study over a million years or more.
So while the scientific community withdraws it's wisdom from the school system, the luddite get to have their day in the sun.
Shame for the widthdrawal of copywrite. Shame on the Intelligent Design proponents for being so stuck on a belief that they have no problem being discriminatory.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Learn the truth about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, essentially intelligent design with the diety replaced by the flying spaghetti monster. No more provable/disprovable than ID, and lots more fun.
Remain calm! All is well!
That word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
How about these? http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html
...than people had feared.
... and you ignored them?" he asked.
According to this article that was posted to Fark yesterday... the school administration, aka the ones who voted to include ID in the curriculum, didn't even bother to research the concept at all.
A couple of choice quotes from one of the Einsteins on that board:
"They said it was a scientific thing," said Geesey, who added that "it wasn't my job" to learn more about intelligent design because she didn't serve on the curriculum committee."
and
"The only people in the school district with a scientific background were opposed to intelligent design
"Yes," Geesey said."
Grade-A fucking scary.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
One can always tell that it is an ID-er when he/she starts to use the words theory in bold, and say that it is "just a theory".
An ID thesis has the following components :
(a) A slipshod definition of what the word "Theory" actually means to them.
(b) A promotion of ID into a Theory by assertion.
(c) With this promotion, directly compare ID to Evolution, with the hope that the reader will think that ID actually has as much evidence behind it as evolutionary Theory.
(d) Finally, a series of anecdotal evidence, usually presented in bullet form and almost always wrong/falsified, of ID.
Boy, putting those Bold tags is hard work. How do they get through life?
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I find your argument a bit flawed. I would ask you to show me any "scientific advancement or medical break throughs" that has come from the study of macro-evolution. People who believe in Intelligent Design believe in micro-evolution. I hope you know the difference. Please understand that people who believe in ID support science, they just find that the science behind macro-evolution has been flawed and want to show that it is wrong, rather than limiting our children to the same material over and over and over, despite all of the problems that have shown up with Darwin's theory. Wouldn't you agree that it is good science to show the flaws in theories and suggest possible alternatives, as opposed to just printing what we've always had and disregard new evidence for the sake of tradition? Where else does this happen in the scientific community?
It's not "Misuse of Copyright". It's simply copyright. The National Academy of Sciences developed a science based curriculum as a means to improve the general level of scientific literacy in this country. Historically, it has granted copyright licenses to state boards as a means of propagating this standard. Instead of hiring a number of authors to write model lesson plans, classroom experiments and annotated bibliographies, the state board can spend it's time developing state specific addenda ("Agricultural products of Ohio: Soybean and Corn") and republish substantial portions of Pathways with this new material. It saves the board money, time, and effort-- and if things go swimmingly, the National Academy of Sciences will be assured that, at least in that one state, the science is rigorous, up-to-date, and prepares students for undergraduate study.
If, on the other hand, the additional chapters turn out to be stuff on crystal healing, creationism, or integral values of pi, the authors have the right to deny that license.
Yes, the end result is educational, but think of this way: If schools and colleges could gleefully copy anything they wanted, in quantity, then no publisher would dare write materials for the educational market--one copy would be bought-- and hundreds of thousands of copies would be run off at state owned printing plants,..
This is very similar to Linus Torvalds denying a company the right to distribute a modified, binary only copy of the linux kernel.
If Kansas consults its lawyers, they may as well go right on ahead until ordered to desist by a federal judge, and maybe not even then. The extent to which the states and their agencies can be held liable for violation of copyright law is very limited, as the 11th amendment prevents 3rd parties from suing the states in federal court for money damages.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ideology
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." Mark Twain.
Slight nitpick, order of magnitude check. Estimates of the earth's age are around 4 billion years. Dinosaur bones are around 60 million years old.
Please tell me you're still going through the school system? Evolution is exactly the fucking opposite of the monkeys and typewriters "argument". Evolution is not at all random. In evolution, the most successful traits and habits of a creature remain and are pushed to the next generation and improved upon while those which are useless tend to fade out.
Monkeys and typewriters are random and have nothing to do with anything.
And it's silly that you use the argument of "we can't explain it yet, so it must be god!". Come on. Seriously. Read a book or something.
I agree that ID is a "weak" theory/conjecture, but it is as "scientific" as other speculative hard-to-test concepts considered scientific ideas such as String Theory, Multiple Universes (Anthropic Principle), time travel, etc. The latter are often considered "scientific ideas", and ID should be included in these.
No, it really isn't.
ID is as much a theory as:
I have an undectable nerf ball that floats above my head and follows me wherever I go.
THERE'S NO SCIENTIFIC CLAIM.
Time travel could be tested by sending a clock forwards or back wards through time and observing the result, ID is impossible to disprove as it doesn't actually say anything that could ever be tested or observed.
Life is too short to proofread.
This about.com article has a fairly good explanation of why evolution is considered falsifiable. As for a half-way mutated species, all species can be considered halfway mutated; evolution is continuous.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
>I have to form a worlview from the available evidence.
>Evolution has evidence.
>ID has not.
Einstien didn't work with scientific labs and big telescopes. He was really a theortical physicist. He proposed a theory that didn't have evidence for it until 8 years later. They are only finding direct evidence of some his work now. Yet his work was taken seriously, scientifically reviewed and is taught in science classes even though some of it has no direct evidence.
On the other hand, I'm with you. I think that Einstein's stuff is all wrong. And I don't really care because for the vast majority of my life, Newtonian physics will be good enough for me. Its easy to ignore things when we choose to.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
And for some more concrete examples, see here.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
How do you prove a given fossil is not half-way mutated?
More to the point, anyone who thinks that evolution predicts "half-way mutated species" doesn't understand the claims of the theory. There are no mutated species, just mutated genes. Once a gene persists in a population, it's no longer a mutation, but a variant. And, species do vary, yes? This is clear. The mechanism by which they have come to vary is evolution, according to science. Or, if it is "Intelligent Design," fine, but that is not science, it is magic by definition.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The Theory of Evolution predicts that there will be a mechanism (or set of mechanisms) for the two principle components of the theory - "survival of the fittest" and "inheritance of characteristics".
The Theory of Evolution predicted the existence of a mechanism like DNA about 60 years before DNA was discovered.
This was the primary falsifiable, and un-falsified (in fact entirely vindicated), prediction of the Theory of Evolution as it was first postulated by Darwin.
At the very least you could correctly CITE your sources.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy/murphy75.html
Yeah, I found the page you're copying from.
And since you're using that person's argument as your own, it is up to YOU to defend it.
First off, start by learning that "species" does not mean "individual".
And saving a redwood does not mean that the human race will suffer.
Hypotheses aren't scientific. "Science" is knowledge, and also the process you use to turn the hypothesis into knowledge. If something non-scientific (like scripture) is a part of that process (ie, you assume certain things to be true based upon it), then the process isn't science and neither is the result.
First off, I'd like to state that IANAB (I am not a biologist). What I'm about to recount is a half-remembered snippet of a Richard Dawkins book that I read a while ago (but I can't remember which one. they're all worth it though).
I think that in the mammalian eye the light-sensitive surface is at the back of the cells of the retina so the light has to pass through the whole cell and the nerve machinery that carries the signal to the optic nerve before it's detected. In other types of animal (squid are one. can't remember the others) the eye has a fundamentally different and far superior "design" where the light sensitive surface is on the front of the cells in the retina and the light doesn't have to pass through anything before it strikes the detector. The squid's eyesight is therefore far far better than a human's, particularly in low light. The fact that human eyesight is as good as it is is a triumph of development over design. Rather like the Porsche 911.
N.B. Any or all of the above might be wrong (except the bit about the Porsche).
Again, maybe people could take you seriously if you understood what the debate is about. It's evolution vs. intelligent design. It has nothing to do with the Biblical story of creation.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
This is a silly game - for every intermedite form produced you'll simply shoehorn it into one category of the other and say "but what is between those?". The world's supply of discoverable fossil's is very much finite, while you can keep splitting hairs indefinitely.
In practice Archeopteryx is between lizards and birds. Between lizards and Archeopteryx are therapod dinosaurs. Between early lizard like therapods and Archeopteryx are late more bird-like dromaeosaurids and between early dromaeosaurids like Troodons and Archeopteryx are various feathered dinosaurs, which includes fossils that simply had feathers, apparently for warmth, through to later fossils that actually had clearly flight adapted feathers.
Want to try something different? How about whale evolution? We can start with a land dwelling mammal that looked fairly dog like but had certain ear structures not found in other mammals that are more suitable for hearing underwater. Then there's ambulocetus which was similar, but in practice was rather akin to a mammalian crocodile, with back legs obviously adpated for swimming, the same ear structures as our first creature, and a nose structure, similar to a crocodile, that was ideal for breathing while immersed in shallow water. Next there are things like rodhocetus which is remarkably whale like, yet still posses back legs, and still has a nasal structure placng the nostrils toward the tip as in ambulocetus. There's aetiocetus which shows the transition from snout tip nostrils toward nostils at the top of the skulls as in modern whales. Then there's basilosaurus which is decidedly whale like, but lacking in a few modern whale features, and retaining distinct, but quite useless, hind limbs similar to those of rodhocetus.
You can find similar sets of forms for the development of horses, the development of snakes from lizards, and even for the ape to man path, among many others.
Oh, I'm sure you can parse those and say "but what's between that?", but I think for most people who are not being mindlessly dogmatic that represents fairly reasonable evidence of transitions from lizards to birds, or from land dwelling mammals to whales, an, if they bothered to do the extra research and reading, the development of horses, snakes and man.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Ah, but until the recent development of dentistry, bashing out the tooth with a rock would most likely lead to another infection and death. So the choice is between a painful, lingering death (tooth nerves intact), or a painless quick death (tooth nerves missing). So having pain nerves is not a bonus in either case, until recently.
Here is why scientists are trying to purge ID from science classes...
There is no scientific controversy about whether or not evolution took place, none, it is as thoroughly demonstrated as the theory of relativity. The only contraversy on the topic is in the United States from religious/political arenas. So to even teach in science class that there is some sort of debate going on would be to give a poorer science education, a better place to teach about the debate would be social studies, and the best place to study ID itself (disproven already) would be philosophy or religious studies.
It's not inappropriate to teach ID, but it's certainly inappropriate to teach it in science class.
Note that the lack of controversy refers to evolution, not abiogenesis, which many people seem to confuse, and there are plenty of technical details inside evolution which could be called controversial, but none at the level taught at high school.
I was interested in your link to flaws in evolution, because everybody says "evolution has holes" but I've never been able to find any of these holes which are supposedly common knowledge in America (I have been looking, I honestly do want to know the holes the in theory). The site you link to is kooky, it's not that they demonstrate complete scientific ignorance on the topics they discuss, for example entropy, it's that they must honestly think that every scientist overlooked such a glaring inconsistency - they must be pretty special. (So if anybody reading this can point me to a scientific account of holes in evolution, drop a reply)
As to why can't scientists yet perform abiogenesis with all of our scientific knowledge? I imagine the same reason we can't make a fusion reactor yet with all our scientific knowledge, or why we can't cure cancer or AIDS yet, or why we can't make carbon nanotubes in the lengths we want - we just don't know enough to do it yet.
You point about the Alien spacecraft at Area51 makes me wonder if I'm replying to a troll.
Organisms decompose very quickly.Regardless, there are literally hundreds of thousands of transitional species and fossils. Study the damn science before you assert dumb ass claims that were made by your local lunatic religious person.
For some examples of living transitional species, look at dogs and wolves (which can be interbred), modern agriculture, and a few species of squirrels( On different sides of the Grand Canyon you'll find nearly identical squirrels, the difference being that on the side of the canyon that is higher, it is colder and you see that over time they've developed traits suited more for the climate and eventually became an individual species. Also if you take certain species of squirrels from say Pennsylvania and mate them with that same species from Ohio, they can mate fine, but try to mate it with a squirrel of the same species from California and it will most likely fail or be extremely hard to get to work because this species is on the verge of speciation where they form into two separate species that can no longer breed together.)
Anyone who claims that there is no evidence of transistional fossils or species is just plain and simple repeating non-sense, but no matter how much you say, it isn't true. Here is the known cladogram for just dinosauria, look at all transitions, and these are just the ones that have been found and proven, there are still large parts of the earth left to search, not to mention under the thousands of miles of ice at the poles which are currently unreachable but in the age of the dinosaurs were most liklely prolific with life. You kind find similar diagrams for *every* single species. When combined, it is huge, one of the biggest and best documented diagrams in all of man's history.
is a very truncated version of the cladogram for modern killer whales, the full cladogram contains significantly more detail. Please everyone stop spreading misinformation, this I.D. stuff is getting out of hand. The things I present here are just the beginning, actually look at the science in depth and realize what a well founded and proven theory evolution is.
Regards,
Steve
There are two layers of nerves and a layer of capilaries in front of the cones and rods. Not only that, but the capilaries are between the two layers of nerves, so a burst capillary can separate the two, resulting in blindness. Bad design all the way around.
For what it is worth, this applies to all vertebrate eyes, not just mammals.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Horse evolution for the family tree, or
Fossil horse photosfor the evidence.
It took me a few seconds to google "horse evolution" and find this. Assuming you're not just being difficult (and your use of the phrase 'halfway mutated' is tendentious -- like something 'knows' what it's mutating towards?) this is about as complete as you'd need. There are enough 'intermediate forms' here to prove the point, unless you're just being silly and want all the begats for a process spanning millions of years.
Biological evolution is just a special case of general evolution. If you DON'T want to accept biological evolution, you need to make a special argument about why general evolution should not be applied in this special area. I've never heard a good, or even a less than laughably poor, argument for this. This doesn't prove such arguments don't exist, or can't be made, but it certainly shows that they aren't common.
You won't find many people bothering to argue that apples are different than oranges, either.
There really is no theory of "general evolution" -- it is nothing more than a vague observation: lots of things change over time. The biological theory of evolution differs by including a mechanism that depends upon two crucial elements--hereditable variation and differential reproductive success. These are the core of the biological theory, and generally do not apply in realms other than biology.
For someone w/ "endoplasmic" as part of their username you sound like you don't know fuck about evolution.
u m
Punctuated Equilibrium -- read about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibri
This argument has been debunked so many time it ain't funny.
First if you think we find many fossile , think again : There was billion and billion of creature dying over the course of million of year. But fossilisation is a so lucky process that we do not find even 0.0000001% of the specimen which dyed during that time period. So what the hell make you think we would find every specy neatly fossilised ? Why some specy due to their living environnement would not simply never be found ?
Second each time a "gap" between fossile 1 and 2 with fossile 1.5 is filled, the creationist* just say "but what is the gap between fossile 1 and 1.5 , and between 1.5 and 2 ? Creationist will NEVER be statisfied as the only satisfying things would be a CONTINUOUS record of specy but this won't happen due to argument 1 (rate of fossilisation).
Finally there is ALREADY many example of transitional form : lizard->byrd, fish->lizard, lizard->whale , preman->man, prehorse->horse and many other Iforgot, those have fossile a plenty, have been studied, and accepted as transitional form. Sigh.
(*) yeah I call ID'er creationism, to see why see argument about recursive designer in wiki
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I assume you got that quote from a creationist website rather than from Darwin himself, because if you got it from Darwin you would have known the context - Chapter 6 in Origin of the Species is "Difficulties on Theory" and is dedicated to addressing any preliminary difficulties the reader may have thought up while reading chapers 1 to 5.
It starts out
"Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to the reader"
At which point he lists difficulties the reader may have thought of - one being that bit you quoted out of context, and he then proceeds to directly address those perceived difficulties.
Transitional forms are everywhere, not only in the fossile record, but in your backyard garden.
From chapter 2
"That varieties of this doubtful nature are far from uncommon cannot be disputed. Compare the several floras of Great Britain, of France, or of the United States, drawn up by different botanists, and see what a surprising number of forms have been ranked by one botanist as good species, and by another as mere variety"
Basically, because of all the transitional forms out there, there is no objective way to determine what is a species and what is a variety (for example that stuff you were taught in high school about viable offspring isn't always applicable, and even when it is applicable it doesn't always work). Of course, if life were a continual flow of often divergent change as suggested by evolution, it suddenly makes sense that attempts to box it up into artificial pigeonholes labelled "species" just don't work.
But back to bones:
The missing link is a popular and not a scientific concept
The number of transitional forms dug out of the ground is pretty much as expected, there's nothing suspicious about it.
But lets say you have two fossils, lets call them Betty-sue and Jim-bob, and you claim the skeletal evidence suggests Betty-sue decended from Jim-bob, but critics claim you have a missing link. So you go out and find the missing link, lets call it Mary-kate, now you're in a pickle because now your critics claim you have 2 missing links - one between Betty-sue and Mary-kate, and one between Mary-kate and Jim-bob. It's a trick you can't beat no matter how many intermediate forms you find.
The discussion about wheather ID is or not scientific has been done a lot of times and it is clear that it is NOT at all and it is NOT provable NOR testable...
Would there be any value in trying to find out why the heck people believe it? I my opinion it simply ignorance.
Most of the people that believe in ID surely think that dinosaurs existed 4000 years ago (yeah right, and there's even a book on that somewhere...). On the other hand they take The Genesis as a historical fact book whereas it was really the last book written by the hebrews aroung 500 B.C. as a compendium of stories made to teach people what God's intent was, and all of its content has been traced back, from Noha's ark (actually a mesopotamian merchant with a big floating house who drifted to the sea for 7 days), to Abraham.
These people are simply ignorant. That is the real and only fact, and like they say, "God made them, and they gather", only an ignorant can follow another ignorant.
Wake up!
UgaBuga!
Well, since you apparently know quite a bit on the subject, or would like to think you do, maybe next time you'll actually bother to offer up some of your evidence, instead of calling those who disagree with you "weak minded".
Now, as much as I dislike feeding trolls, your error is common enough that it demands being addressed.
The presence of "evidence" for something does not, by any means, make it scientific. Also, you are confusing "evidence" with "empirical evidence", and that is not a semantic quibble, there is a world of difference between the two. Empirical evidence means observational evidence from the real world. That can be sometimes esoteric, as in quantum theory, but even quantum theory makes testable and falsifiable predictions.
If the intelligent design folks want to disprove evolution, it already can be done, and they don't even need to advance a competing theory. Evolution makes several falsifiable predictions, such as speciation, natural selection, and increased complexity of organisms as the fossil record timeline marches on. These have been borne out by observation. All you have to do to disprove evolution is to prove any one of those predictions false.
What does not disprove anything is "negative evidence"-that is, "No one can explain how such a complex structure appeared naturally, so it MUST have been a god or gods." The fact that something is currently unexplained does not mean that a "god" had a hand in it-500 years ago, all manner of phenomena, from supernova stars to lightning storms were attributed to God/gods. And yet, now that we have advanced, we can explain those as natural phenomena, and are quite aware of the mechanisms by which they work (stellar decay and static electricity, respectively). The fact that a theory does not yet explain everything does show a need for further study, but it does not in itself disprove the theory. Experimental falsification of that theory's predictions will do that, if they produce a result not explained or predicted by the theory. Can you please point me to that experiment? If it exists, the Nobel Prize committee has made a significant oversight.
Until then, try to refrain from calling your opposition "weak minded"-it is an indication of a weak mind to need to resort to such tactics.
As to intelligent design being scientific, please refer to the post you responded to. ID fails to complete several steps required by the scientific method, including the making of falsifiable predictions which can be tested through experimentation. That does not make it bad or its believers idiots, as they have every right to believe as they choose. It does, however, factually, make the theory unscientific. Until such time as it can be shown that Intelligent Design -has- been formulated according to the scientific method, it isn't science.
Oh, and I don't know what science class you attended, but any decent science teacher will make very clear to the students that it is, by definition, possible to prove any scientific theory false. That's part of the method-the theory must make falsifiable predictions. Many theories, such as phlogiston, were proven false after centuries of use, and sometimes they seemed to explain things very well. But to allow anyone to come along, insert "God" at whatever point they like, and call it science, is a disservice to the students and the scientific community in general.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
With evolution, biology makes no sense. Let's see you make the necessary amino acids, put them together in the necessary order to make DNA, create an environment that keeps them from degrading and then somehow they become more complex molecules.
If you have not noticed, entropy takes more complex items and turns them into simplier, lower energy state things. There are no local variations without someone doing work to reverse entropy, but in the end, entropy increases.
Science has yet to see a single-cell organism suddenly become a multicell organism and evolve. You can take a bacteria and turn it into many bacteria, but no one has taken bacteria and turned it into a form of life where both cells require each other support themselves.
My pamphlet, a PhD in Chemical Engineering.
Let's talk about your computer. Did it evolve by itself? Or did someone have to create it? DNA by it's nature requires the amino acid chains to be in a certain order. You can't simply put it together. The odds of evolving the right order are astronomical. In one book I have read written by 50 biologists, scientists, mathmaticians, it's improbable.
Get your Kicks on Route 66
the standard whale evolutionary path has been discredited, by evolutionists.
Really? Care to provide some references to that? Care to even describe how it was discredited? What exactly is the issue? Wikipedia isn't the best of sources, but it is usually up to date on the latest points, but they make no reference to criticism. There are plenty of other pages about whale origins, and their bibiolgraphies are reasonably up to date. Any searches on Google for "whale evolution discredited" or "cetacean evolution flawed" turns up nothing but creationist sites, and a wikipedia article about recapitulation theory (which is quite unrelated).
Just like the evolution of horses.
Couldn't find any details on that either - care to provide some decent references?
And how do you suppose the intermediate forms of things like dino/birds work? Things like the lungs are too different to have viable intermediaries.
And how, exactly, would you know a lot about the structures of the lungs of dinosaurs? Soft tissue doesn't get preserved. The best we've got is the strcuture of the rib cage and chest cavity which, even for dromaeosaurids was remarkably similar to birds? The best you could claim is that the lungs of modern reptiles and birds are too different - but then the general morphology of a crocodile and a chicken are very different yet we have many intermediate forms of various dinosaurs showing how that can work. It seems easy enough to believe that the lungs, and everything else, changed and adapted as well. What exactly is your firm foundation for believeing that dinosaurs didn't develop birdlike lungs?
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I almost hate to do this, but I'll try. After reading through many of the posts, I see the same idea running through many of them. The basic idea is that Christians are against science because (somehow) science invalidates God/the Bible/everything we believe in. I could point to my technical background in computer science, 20 years or industry experience, blah blah blah, to point out that I believe in scientific principles. That is, I do not pray that a bug will fix itself, I used my mind to try to figure out what it wrong (however, I often pray for strength not to hurt the manager who says, "So, can we shrink that 3 month project to 1 week?") But, I digress...
The main idea for (some/most/many) Chrisitians is that science is a process by which we study God's world. We study it to understand it and to be amazed/awed/inspired by the wonders of it. And this is the historical rational behind why many people of science also happened to be Christians. If you look at the biographies of people like Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Keppler (there may be more, but I have personally read the ones just mentioned), you would see that their faith (i.e., Christianity) led them to pursue science.
And, I do not think that I am incorrect in stating that their faith actually helped improve their science. Permit me to mention a few stories:
Pasteur: as I understand it, one of the prevailing theories at the time was spontaneous generation. That is, the idea that life just "appeared." This was not an evolution issue, but was related to the question of why bacteria/maggots/other small animals "magically" appeared in certain uncovered substances (e.g., rotting flesh). According to the biography I read, Pasteur believed, because of his religious background, that God was the sole creator of all life and that these small animals could not just appear out of nowhere. So, he created a series of interesting experiments (involving curved neck beakers, etc.) to demonstrate that this was the case. And his work led to the whole notion of germ theory or at least provided the evidence(I think that last sentence is correct, but I would have to reread the biography).
Keppler: According to the biography, Kepler was dissatisfied with Ptolemy's model of the solar system and planetary orbits. Kepler was convinced that God would not have designed such an overcomplicated (and inaccurate) model as Ptolemy had (I think that Ptolemy used a complex combination of circles to predict planetary orbits). In one of his first steps, he decided to use Copernicus' model which posited that the sun was the center of the universe instead of the earth.
At this point, let the flaming begin about how those Christians (more specifically, the Roman Catholic Church at this time) made it dogma that the Earth wa the center of universe, not the sun. But this just points out a basic belief of Christians: men are fallible, but God is not. There are many sordid examples of Christians using the Bible to support their own preferences, but that is the nature of sin. Not to excuse, but similar things have happened in the name of science (e.g., Hitler's use of the prinicple of positive eugenics). As we see with Kepler (and with Christian-backed slavery), some Chrisitans will adhere to God's word and the truth will win out. Anyway...
Kepler pursued his theory and eventually created a mathetical model which he published in a book, The Comsic Mystery. In the book, he wrote the following song of praise:
Thus God himself
Was too kind to remain idle.
And began to play the game of signatures,
Signing his likeness into the world.
To make a long story short, he had a difficult time getting it publish because of the Copernicus issue (as you would expect, but God never said life was easy), but eventually did. It was still an inaccurate model because it was based on faulty observational data (which Keppler knew). Later, he was given much more accurate data by Tyco Brahe and later went on to write The New Astronony, and Harm
Typical unsourced creationist claims.
p art1a.htm if anyone wants the detail on this.
You say there is only one fossil linking fish and amphibians. Absolute poppycock. Over a dozen "transitional" *species* between fish and amphibians have been identified from many hundreds of fossils. There are many other well understood transitions. There is an excellent introduction of this at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/
Your argument is also self-refuting. You claim that if evolution were correct then the fossil record would be a continuum. But you presumably accept "microevolution" even though there is no continuum of "micro-evolved" fossils. The answer is of course that the chance of an organism being fossilised, and then surviving millions of years of erosion and geological activity is is pretty damn small.
And as for a scientific revolution coming, it's a funny kind of scientific revolution that's driven by religious fundamentalists?
Ah yes, a random site that simply makes the claim that the fossil is a forgery. It should be noted, of course, that there are in fact 7 different specimens of Archaeopteryx, discovered at various different times in various places and in various degrees of intactness. We aren't talking about a single forged specimen but instead about 7 different independent forgeries that all happen to coincide almost exactly. That's a remarkable conspiracy you're claiming, and you have, let's be frank, absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back that up - the best you seem to be able to point to is a creationist who says "well it looks suspicious to me".
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Look up Satanism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica if you don't believe me..."Satanism" as you describe it doesn't exist outside of fiction. I'm not terribly surprised that you have no idea what I'm talking about, but before continuing this conversation, why don't you look it up for yourself?
From the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "also called Devil Worship - worship of Satan, or the devil, the personality or principle regarded by the Judeo-Christian tradition as embodying absolute evil in complete antithesis to God...Satanic cults have been documented in Europe and America as far back as the 17th century"
Take your own advise and look it up yourself, or of course no-one will have any idea what your talking about.