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Scientists Figure Out How Bees Fly
corbettw writes "Researchers at CalTech have discovered how bees fly, putting one more nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design. From the article: 'People in the ID community have said that we don't even know how bees fly ... We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.'"
Yeah it's like those black folks who keep badmouthing the Klan when they've NEVER been at one of their gathering or even just tried one of their comfortable hooded robes.
You know, one option to all of this is just to admit that science can't explain everything, and teach it for what it is: A religious philosophy equal to other religious philosophies (as opposed to teaching it as a religious philosophy while claiming that it isn't a religious philosophy and worse yet, preventing by law the teaching of other religious philosophies).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Let's get something straight, OK?
/= anti-science.
Intelligent design
There's an old single-frame cartoon where two scientists are looking at some equations on a blackboard and in the middle is the phrase, "a miracle happens" which prompts one scientist to question the other scientist's proof.
People who state the straw man that Intelligent Design is anti-science are guilty of the hypocrisy they say their opponents have.
If anything, belief in Intelligent Design should increase as the complexities and intricacies of the physical realm become more apparent. The more complex, the less the probability of something outside the ruleset happening. The more complex the ruleset, the lower the probability it came into existence spontaneously.
Denial of that is to deny math.
There are closed-minded irrational people on either "side" of "the debate." Both have their own instances of "a miracle happens." Statements like, "putting a nail in the coffin of ID" don't do anything other than show the speaker is an elitist snob from one "side" of "the debate" and has their own form of closed-minded, biggoted, boorish behavior and thoughts.
Think of string theory of...no, wait, this is even easier...think of Chemistry 101 and Physics 101. Both teach some very elementary ways to model the same physical phenomena. Does that mean one is right and the other wrong? No, it means they are 2 different ways of modeling. Perhaps another way to view it is those are views of the same phenomena from 2 different angles.
Plato has a very famous cave analogy from which we can take another illustration by examining just the starting premise, that the people live their lives seeing only shadows cast on the cave wall. One day, a person turns around and sees the light from the sun then understands the shadows from another point of view.
Intelligent Design, in its simplest form, really means order and complexity don't spontaneously happen. It doesn't mean science is invalid, just the opposite.
The bumblebee bit seems like it became a catchy phrase which had some truth at the beginning (couldn't explain with scientific tools we had) and was then turned into dogma, glommed onto by all sorts of people.
The idea that discovery of a way to model bumblee bee flight lessons the validity of the concept of Intelligent Design is emotional and irrational, not logical.
The excuse given for treating I.D. as a scientific theory is that science can't teach us all of the relatively basic things about our world, and thus, must be flawed in concept, so alternatives should be allowed.
Wrong again.
The argument for I.D. being a scientific theory is that, given a sufficiently complex structure, it is simpler to presume that there was something that made it than that the thing randomly occured. A great example of line of logic is the "watch on the sand" parable -- in short, if you found a watch on an alien world keeping time, you'd presume that it was constructed by an intelligence, rather than a random creation of the universe.
To put it another way: I.D. proponents claim first that there is a level of complexity that cannot occur without a designing intelligence (i.e., no randomly occuring telephones), and that human life is such a complexity.
I.D. should be taught alongside its alternative in public high school science classroms, because if nothing else, the teaching will get students thinking enough to realize that science is a method, not a body of knowledge.
Why do so many religious guys don't get it?
Maybe because thanks to standardized testing, the next statement:
Science never claimed to explain everything. Never.
Is completely incorrect as far as most people are concerned. Answers on the tests in high school science class are either right or wrong, never giving points for original thought.
Not only that, science also has said what it will never be able to explain or predict - so not only did science not claim to explain everything, science mentions several things which it will never be able to explain: For example what happens in a black hole or what was before the big bang.
But that's NOT the way it's presented when you go to court to exclude other explainations from the classroom.
Science does claim to explain and predict a lot of things - and without it we wouldn't post here on Slashdot, we would still sit in cold caves worshipping sungod and moongod.
Not quite true- because there was a competing scientific method that wasn't exclusive that would have probably come up with the same ideas.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
There has never been anything proven incorrect about the bible. If you took time to study it, then you would've found that out.
Also, don't you think that someone who devoted their life to following Christianity would know the facts of their own religion better than that of an interested bystander?
There is no question at all. It isn't science. It is religion.
Agreed- but the problem is, science as it's taught at the high school level is ALSO a religion.
Well, then you went to a very bizarre high school. At mine and that of everybody I know, the scientific method was taught and it was made explicitly clear that theories are the best current explanation of the available evidence but they are subject to change as more evidence comes to light. Heck, we started with that lecture in junior high and it was reinforced every year.
Reinforced how? Were alternative explainations ok on tests for instance? Were you encouraged to come up with your own theories even if they were different than the textbook? Or was it like my highschool biology class: A tacit admission that evolution is just a theory- but the whole class based on it and any attempt to question it's assumptions was penalized heavily in the grade book?
Just because you had shitty teachers doesn't mean the rest of us did.
I'd call any teacher who relies on the court system to censor ideas from the classroom a shitty teacher.
No, the trolling was where you took the statement that science has never claimed to have *all* the answers to *everything*, and then said yes it does since your high school science tests were like that.
Well, that's a correct statement. "science has NEVER claimed" is a statement easily falsifiable by a single instance of someone claiming to teach science claiming that.
No it doesn't. It's religious creationism and nothing besides.
Then you apparently don't know the different ID theories very well- ID covers everything from Young Earth Creationism to Theistic Evolution. I'd certainly agree with you that one side of that spectrum is more scientific than the other side- but to deny that ANY of it is scientific is stupid in the extreme.
Of course it's banned by law, we believe in freedom of religion in this country.
That's funny, because banning it by law is freedom FROM religion, not freedom of religion. In fact, it's the very definition of legislating against the free exercise of religion.
That means you don't get to shove your personal beliefs into a science class.
But scientists do that all the time- their personal belief that reality exists, for instance.
Believe what you will, but don't make feeble dishonest attempts to shove your religion into a science class.
If that's the rule, then occam's razor, objective evidence, and the scientific method (for example) should also be banned from science class, since these are all religious beliefs unsupported by evidence.
It hurts science and it makes your god no better than a plate of pasta.
Science hurts itself worse by claiming to be anything but just another religion.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Fortunately ID continues to fail on many other major points of science. First it does not actually solve the problem it merely adds another layer.
That complaint is in fact Occam's razor- the idea we shouldn't add additional layers of complexity. If Occam's razor is in fact logically unsupportable, then this point is lost.
That chains continues so long as there remains a creator and a createe.
For all science knows, there is always a creator and a createe- that is, there are no uncaused events, everything is causual. So therefore, that's an argument FOR ID. The extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence is that there is a break in the chain of cause and event; or that there can be a break in that chain.
Actually Occam's razor would lead one more directly to ID. Evolution requires many assumptions, ID requires only the assumption that some invisible unquestionable magical being in the sky did it all. Since Occam's razor uses the number of assumptions and not the probability of the assumptions then Evolution would be shaved by the razor if ID were a valid scientific theory in the first place.
Now that's an interesting idea- that evolution requires *more* assumptions. I've been going on the idea that evolution requires the same number of assumptions- that the assumption of an indeterministic, non-causual universe is just as outlandish, complex, and improbable as the assumption of a creator. Can you explain the idea that evolution requires more than that? And how does that differ from ID's theistic evolution theory (which I have a problem differing from atheistic evolution to begin with- their predictions and assumptions seem entirely equal to me)?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If that's the point, why is Evolution singled out on the sticker rather than containing a general warning against the dogma of all scientific theories?
Maybe because it's a biology textbook that is written specifically to the idea that Evolution is not a scientific theory, but a religious dogma not to be questioned on pain of failing the course?
Hmmmm. Also, have you read this particular book which the sticker was placed upon?
Actually I have- and that's the point. But you're right, there's a larger point that this should be on any textbook that does NOT discuss scientific philosophy.
Can you tell me definitively whether the philosophy of science is covered in the textbook and whether evolution is presented in a uniquely dogmatic manner?
Definitively yes- proveably you'll have to read it for yourself. But in the past 120 years, evolution has become such a basis for biology that *any* biology book MUST treat evolution dogmatically if it's going to be accepted as such in the United States. Scientific philosophy is considered to be teaching religion by many- and so that's cut out. I would agree that in cutting out scientific philosophy as a religion, you don't actually remove religion from the classroom, you just end up establishing a new religion.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.