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Federal Judge Rules Against Intelligent Design
evil agent writes "CNN is reporting that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III has ruled that Intelligent Design cannot be discussed in Dover, Pennsylvania biology classes. Dover Area School Board members had previously mandated that Intelligent Design be included in the biology curriculum. According to the judge, 'our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.'" Update: 12/20 23:40 GMT by J : eSkeptic has a look back at the trial and what led to it. And the Discovery Institute has issued a press release.
Lots of additional coverage on this decision is available at The National Center for Science Education and The Panda's Thumb, and the full text of the decision can be found here (PDF warning).
From the decision: Damn...what a smackdown.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Something that the CNN article doesn't mention is that one of the judge's findings is that ID does not meet the criteria to be considered science.
From a Bloomberg article: In his opinion, Jones said the key issue is ``whether Intelligent Design is science,'' and said, ``we have concluded that it is not.''
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom," he wrote in his 139-page opinion.
The link to the NY Times article
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
> Since this is a federal court ruling, does it affect the ID stuff going on in Kansas?
Not legally, since it's in a different federal district.
If Kansas goes to court the judge may or may not look to the Dover case for precedent. Fairly often we get conflicting rulings on an issue in different districts, and no one knows where things stand until the supreme court takes a side on it.
OTOH, I'm sure this will "affect" Kansas to the extent of having the creationists on the state board of education call a strategy meeting...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_0 11_01.html
Every change had to confer a survival advantage, no matter how slight. Eventually, the light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, the layer of cells and pigment at the back of the human eye. Over time a lens formed at the front of the eye. It could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue containing increasing amounts of liquid that gave it the convex curvature of the human eye.
In fact, eyes corresponding to every stage in this sequence have been found in existing living species.
The only thing a science teacher is forbidden from doing in the classroom is exactly what the decision says: presenting Intelligent Design as an alternative [explanatory framework] to evolution.
1. This particular "activist judge" was appointed by President G.W. Bush in 2002.
n .debate.ap/index.html).
2. It's unlikely that the current Dover school board will appeal the decision, making it unlikely that this particular case will ever get to the Supreme Court.
3. That leaves the "sticker" case in Georgia, with it's more narrowly expressed disapproval of evolution as the case most likely to get to the Supremes. At last report, it appeared the appeals court might be inclined to overturn the Federal court decision against the stickers (http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/12/16/evolutio
4. Some ID proponents advised against the former Dover school board pressing this case, as they felt it didn't have a good chance. Other school boards, however, will now simply become more careful about how they attempt to introduce ID into the classroom.
While Dover was a slam dunk for science, this particular fight is far from over.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
This has been observed, e.g. several new mosquito species have evolved in the London subway.
see here for more info.
A simple google search for "evidence evolution" yields numerous pages. From the very first one (I'm feeling lucky!)
m l has eight fruity fly speciation events. Most interesting to me is the Apple Maggot fly, which originally fed on hawthorn trees, but is speciating at this very moment; there are now two different races of the fly, one of which feeds on apples and other rosacea and one on thornapples. They mature at different rates and due to this do not interbreed even though they are still able to hybridize.
Link 1: Observed Evidence of Speciation http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.ht
Link 2: 29 evidences for macroevolution http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ This is the one I was looking for. If you read and understand this and fail to accept that evolution is occuring and can account for the diversity of species on earth then I've got a bridge to sell you.
Acy
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
> What it does not account for is macro-evolution, that is, the changing of one species into another at the chromosomal level by purely natural selection.
No modern biologist thinks evolution is purely a matter of natural selection. If you knew the subject matter at the freshman level you'd know that lots of other stuff, such as sexual selection, genetic drift, and the founder effect, also have influence on what evolution produces.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Evolution is provable/disprovable. ID is not.
ID doesn't meet the rigorous scientific standards to be called a "theory".
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
This is because any sensible religious person realises that there is no contradiction between evolution and ID. Evolution explains a mechanism, nothing more. It doesn't tell you why things happen, just how. Whether evolution is driven by random actions, or the FSM is the realm of philosophy, not science. Assuming the existence of an intelligent designer[1], science can tell us whether it's more likely that they said 'let there be stuff,' or if they created a simple system containing all of the necessary components to develop into a more complex one. Proponents of Intelligent-Design-as-an-alternative-to-evolution are worried that there is a God, and her final objective might not actually be them.
[1] A philosophical postulate, not a scientific one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You seem to have confused the Word Theory.
Evolution is a Theory in the Scientific Sense, "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."
This is why it counts as "Science"
Intelligent Design is a theory in the colloquial sense, which is what most of the definitions that include "Idle speculation" are referring to. There is no Scientific Backing for Intelligent Design, which is why, if it's taught in a classroom, it should be a theology class, not a Science Class.
It is perfectly correct to teach the fact of evolution, for it is a fact. It is an observed phenomenon, or fact, if you like. The Theory of Evolution is the theoretical construct explaining how evolution operates, the mechanism involved and the consequences of these mechanisms. So far, it has survived every challenge thrown at it by the fossil record, genetics, comparative biology, chemistry, physics and even computer science. And it has grown more powerful for it. The current incarnation of the theory bears as much resemblance to Darwin's original proposal as modern quantum electrodynamics bears to Ben Franklin's work with electricity.
The phenomenon of evolution is well established and as solid a fact as gravity, electromagnetism or heat transfer. The theory describing it is, in some ways, better off than the theory of gravity or electromagnetism. We know those two are inconsistent and at least one is due for a revision. There are no such open questions on the theory of evolution.
Evolution does not require faith. That's the thing about science, it works even if you don't believe in it. Disbelieving in the quantum nature of electrons won't make a lick of difference in how your computer operates. Likewise, disbelieving in evolution does not mean that advanced antibiotics suddenly stop having any effect. (Now, current diary practices, that's another story.)
Given your statements, it is clear you have not bothered even the most cursory attempt at understanding science. You seem so enmeshed in your dogma, you refuse to understand anyone else's position, casting well reasoned positions as mere articles of faith. Science is not a religion, no matter how much you wish it to be so.
Really, just because you insist on wielding a hammer, do not treat us screws and bolts as nails.
You never hear real scientists saying "Evolution is fact!" because it isn't.
;-) He and others have made a distinction between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution.
...
Actually, you do - with important qualifications.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote several papers that said just this. Of course, he said a lot more. (He had a column to fill, after all.
What he pointed out in several articles was that by the early 1800's, when Darwin was sailing on the Bugle, it was already widely accepted that biological evolution was a historical fact, thoroughly documented in the fossil record. What was missing was a good explanation of this fact. People examining fossils could see the general outline of the evolutionary process; they just didn't understand how it worked.
Facts are what we observe, combined with the easy inferences from the observations. To be scientific, you need not just a lot if facts, you also need explanations of those facts. Such an explanation is first called a hypothesis before it has been tested, and then a theory after it has passed sufficiently many tests.
What Darwin did was to propose an explanation for the observed fact of biological evolution over geologic time. His explanation was unusual in that the mechanism didn't require any guiding intelligence. But it did have explanatory power, and also made testable predictions. So, while the religious folks derided Darwin's heresy, the scientists set about trying to poke holes in his explanation.
In the 1860's, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was really just a hypothesis, not a theory. But now, more than a century later, it's a true theory. We've had plenty of opportunities to test it, and it has passed the tests quite handily. So now it's a true scientific theory. Biological research these days is mostly concerned with working out the details of the mechanisms. Nobody seriously expects that the basic theory will be overturned.
Not that it hasn't been modified along the way. Darwin didn't know about DNA or genes, and could only write vaguely about the mechanism of intelligence. He observed that this mechanism was imperfect, something that any plant or animal breeder would agree with. He also proposed that some variations were "random", which need not have been true, but which we now know is essentially true. He also proposed that the inherited code was not modified by an organism's environment, contrary to others such as Lysenko, and it turns out he was right in this, too. True, environmental things may alter your DNA, but not in any "directed" fashion.
But most importanly (and ignored by most creationists and ID proponents), his theory invoked a very non-random directing force, natural selection. This was difficult for him to observe, but we've since watched and tested it innumerable times, and again it turns out he was quite correct.
OTOH, he didn't guess about viral transduction. And he didn't anticipate Barbara McClintock's idea of the way that eukaryotic cells arose via merger of independent single-cell organisms. So he did miss a few important things that have since modified his theory a bit. But none of these things have significantly weakened his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Of course, we are now on the verge of implementing designer genes
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"thought to be the precursor to the eye" and "could have arisen as a double-layered transparent tissue" are not very scientific statements. As stated before. THERE IS NO CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE THAT THE ORIGIN OF LIFE WAS A POOL OF GOO THAT EVOLVED INTO WHAT IT IS TODAY.
Well lets consider glaciers. It is "thought" that the sun evaporated water from the ocean. And it is "thought" that that water fell as snow at the poles. And that snow "could have" built up over thousands of years into very deep glaciers.
And there are layers of dust and pollen and volcanic ash that are "thought" to have settled out of the atmosphere and that the layered of such particles "could have" arisen from seasonal snowfall cycles over tens of thousands of years.
And it is "thought" that the pattern and composition of volcanic dust in the glacier happens to exactly match up with the historical and prehistorical records of major volcanic eruptions becuase that dust *did* come from those volcanoes and laid down over tens of thousands of years. And it is "thought" that the patterns of pollen match up with other global records over tens of thousands of years because that pollen *did* accumulate during the steady buildup of that glacier over tends of thousands of years.
And it is thought that the presence and levels of LEAD and other trace minerals in the upper layers of glacial dust "could have" been caused by the historical and prehistorical development of human mining releasing such contaminants into the the air.
And as you say, THERE IS NO CONCLUSIVE PROOF THAT THIS IS HOW GLACIERS ACTUALLY FORMED.
If anyone is a real thinking person then prove that you cant throw a pile of sticks and some glue up in the air and it will come down as a glued together, perfect box.
If anyone is a real thinking person then prove that you cant throw a bunch of water vapor up in the air and it will come down as a glued together, complex perfect snowflake.
The argument you were attempting to make (badly) is the stupid old argument that "the second law of thermodynamics says disorder must increase and therefore proves evolution impossible".
Of course the second law of thermodynamics only apples to average disorder increasing, and it does not apply at all when there is an energy flow through a system.
As I pointed with with snowflakes, it is actually quite normal and common for nature to spontaneously greate complex order and structure out of total chaos when there is an energy flow - in particular the sun provides an energy flow through the earth to drive both snowflake formation and biology and biological evolution.
The nature of life, the structure of life, and the existance of life can only be explained as an engineering miracle that was created. PERIOD.
Statint your ignorance and your lack of understanding is not a disproof of anything.
It is quite well understood how the evolution process creates structure and complexity and information. In fact I have personally witnessed exactly how this process operates and exactly how powerful it is at creating order and complexity and information.
The information is created/added during the secotion step of the evolution process.
If you have a replication (with mutation) and then selection in a repeating cycle, the mutation step creates a bit of random noise, and the selection step converts that noise into ordered/directed information by filtering out any portion that is contrary to the selection direction.
Roll a hundred dice. Do a slection step to "kill" the half with the lowest number showing, replicate the remaining 50 back to a hudred... you will have a hundred dice showing 4's, 5's, and 6's. "Kill" the half with the lowest number showing again, replicate the remaining 50 back to a hudred again... and you have a hundred dice showing 5's, and 6's. Repeat a third time and now you "magically" have 100 dices all showing perfect sixes.
We started with perfect chaos rolled dice, and
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
But evolution doesn't work the same way - show me one repeatable experiment where an animal actually independantly mutates to a genetic advantage. I understand that evolution supposedly takes thousands if not millions of years for this to happen, and so this experiment may not be possible. However, without repeatable experiments (instead of just circumstantial evidence), we can only make educated guesses as to what happened (whether that result is ID, evolution, FSM, or whatever).
:-P When can we actually get rid of this nonsense? Darwin was supposed to have more or less debunked Lamarck's nonesense.
;-)
Welcome to the 18th Century and the theories of Lamarck
Also note that current evolutionary theory is missing one or two critical questions that we may not have an answer to in the near future, but your objections have largely been overruled by modern research.
Part of the problem is that any life-form larger than a bacterium is not in a position to mutate spontaneously for genetic advantage. Yes, this behavior has been experimentally studied in bacteria, but it doesn't show up in anything larger. So for larger organisms you have a different process.
Spontaneous mutations occur and affect the general viability of offspring. Many of these are disasterous and probably result in very early miscarriages, or stillborns, etc. (though spontaneous mutations aren't very common). But the rest goes into a sort of community gene pool. This genetic diversity inherent to the community is extremely important.
Now suppose we have an environmental change. Say there is a drought, you poison a population of insects with an insecticide, there is a sudden abundance or shortage of foot or water, a population explosion of predators, etc. Now, the genetic variances between the individuals in the community start to become valuable. For example, birds with a smaller beak might die first in a drought because the seeds that are available to eat might be too big. A shortage of food might favor some members more than others, poisoning might be more likely to kill those who are genetically susceptible to the poison first, etc. So these environmental changes don't cause an individual to spontaneously mutate. They cause the composition of the community gene pool to change. This is basically a summary of puntuated equalibrum theory regarding evolution.
Now, if you have a sudden and long-term increase in food, you will see animals specialize according to their talents. So within a given population of a species of finches, those with bigger beaks might decide to eat different seeds than those with smaller beaks. This specialization is generally temporary because the resource availability is cyclic, but after a mass extinction this may be different. This leads to the communities partially separating and becoming subspecies. Now the missing piece is the question of what causes species to separate to the point of becomming genetically incompatible under these circumstances? Is migration and physical separation required? Or are other factors more likely to cause this? This is a big unknown and we don't have enough data to answer it. However, at the current rate of extinctions, maybe in a few hundred years, we can start watching
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