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Texas Science Director Forced To Resign Over ID Statements
jeffporcaro writes "Texas' Director of Science Curriculum was 'forced to step down' for favoring evolution over intelligent design (ID). She apparently circulated an e-mail that was critical of ID — although state regulations require her not to have any opinion 'on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.' 'The agency documents say that officials recommended firing Ms. Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination. The officials said forwarding the e-mail message conflicted with her job responsibilities and violated a directive that she not communicate with anyone outside the agency regarding a pending science curriculum review.'"
Since ID is not science, it is not an issue she should have remained neutral on, because it has nothing to do with the board.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
No, no. The curriculum review that they are talking about goes something like this: if science and the Scriptures differ, then it must be science that is in error.
and he is now my personal hero. When people make a sacrifice for what they believe in, that's real courage.
I think this is another huge signpost that even in our modern era, ultra-powerful empires fall prey to their own delusional spin and slowly disintegrate into a drooling heap of superstition. This is the dying of the US as a superpower..
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
I think it goes like this "Oh, I can't explain how life began. I think God must have done it".
Biggest cop-out excuse ever.
Evolution is proven as far as I'm concerned, we see how micro-organisms become resistant to anti-biotics. This can't be god stepping in and changing them just so someone's ageing relative dies.
If god is in control of everything then why is it the most religious countries get hit with major earthquakes, flooding and tsunamis?
Why exactly does it require less faith to believe in an entity that has not been proven to exist versus to believe that the basic rules by which all biological creatures live have not changed?
She was fired for having an opinion. Amazing. Correct me if I am wrong, but does it not require an opinion on a matter to better a system, to move forward so that we do not stagnate?
I mean, someone at some point had to assert an opinion to put (un)intelligent design at the top of the chain. Was that person fired?
This whole country is going right down the shitter because of policies like this. I also believe that draconian enforcement of this ilk is what causes people to be even louder and more obnoxious about their perspectives. This is a one-upmanship power struggle.
What was Leia's comment to Tarkin?
Most rational people wouldn't elect someone to public office who openly claims to psychically commune with an imaginary friend when he needs guidance on making a decision.
But by my definition, a majority of US citizens aren't rational people!
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Thanks for proving the OPs point: ID supporters don't understand what science is, and they don't understand why ID isn't one.
Cliff notes: you can't have a "science" that studies "the design" without first positing that there is a designer. That's where ID becomes a religion, and non-scientific. This should not be a complex subject for anyone who was awake during High School science.
It doesn't require any faith at all, nobody asks for faith that biology or the rules it follows is constant. That's why we run actual experiments and take actual measurements, to see if they are constant or not. For several thousand years biology has proven remarkably consistent, but if you were to come up with evidence tomorrow that showed biology was different at some point in the past, you'd win the Nobel Prize. No faith required.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Wrong. Established and proven science does NOT change. Newton's laws remained correct long after proven "wrong". The model you use to describe something depends on WHAT you want to show. Newton is sufficient for "every day physics", there's no need to use cannons (theory of relativity, quantum theory) when calculating movements e.g. of an airplane on earth.
Same with everything else incl. evolution. Evolution HAS been proven. Sure, it IS possible (and likely) that other ideas are found in areas where theory of evolution is weak right now, but that won't invalidate already existing experiments and data!
So yes, you always find something new, but if you successfully used a theory to predict something and it reliably works all the time those experiments continue to work even after new stuff is found. It's just that new theories may be better at explaining MORE, but once proven to work - and that means that predictions made using the theory reliably turn out right each time, whoever does the experiment - continue to do so. Even though Newton is "wrong" he's still right, it only depends on if you want to try to explain more stuff with it than originally intended, which is when it fails and relativity and quantum theories may be better suited. When the airplane was invented the arguments of the nay-sayers who said it's impossible were NOT proven wrong. They simply found another way AROUND the issues they had raised. That doesn't invalidate the physics of the scepticts, it merely extends it!
....Duh. I have never seen any evidence which indicates that the majority of Americans are rational at any level.
:)
9/11 is a perfect example.
Its in your bloody constitiution that ID is illegal in schools.
Yet there is a review to see if they should ignore it or not.
If you feel your a rational person then my advice is to get the hell out of there asap.
Australia is a nice place.
> the scientific method is constantly changing, theism is a static world view.
That is actually not true. The church admitted few years ago that Sun is the center of our solar system, not Earth as it was bulieved. Also few years ago in my country, women could operate as priests, which had been long forbidden.
So the theism also evolves. Religion is changed when they notice that people won't tolerate or bulieve the old story any more. First the stories in Bible are literal. After sciense proves them wrong, they became metaphoras or just stories that try to teach us some lesson, or they are simply interpreted differently.
Most rational people would not want creationists at a government agency endorsing their position. So it makes sense to squelch any formal debate, even if it means offering up a sacrificial lamb, so to speak.
That assumes a false equivalence between religion and science. Those rational people should recognize that pushing a particular religious belief into policy is a violation of church-state separation in a way that simply promulgating a scientific curriculum never was. The fact that some religion has a doctrinal problem with a scientific finding is neither here nor there as far as science and education policy is concerned. A faith that cannot survive a collision with the truth is not worth many regrets. But when we start withholding information from students because of someone's goofy interpretation of his religion's mythology, then we have a problem. And "teaching the controversy" like Texas does, with a neutral presentation of both the truth and crap without saying which is which, is withholding information from students.
No one's talking about testing faith with science. The problem is that certain people -- including, apparently, the Texas Education Agency -- keep trying to test science by the standards of their faith.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The rest of the civilized world is laughing/wondering what the hell you are doing. Please stop this now.
Not according to TFA.
Now one might certainly deduce that she wasn't enamoured with ID, but she did not "apparently" criticise ID. She announced a talk by someone who probably does, though. Which is not the same thing as stating it was her opinion.How anyone can argue with a straight face that ID is anything but "Creationism in a new suit" is beyond me. Every single ID proponent was, and I'm sure still is, a Creationist. Their literature has been shown to be creationist tracts with a search-and-replace applied.
Can somebody please explain what the heck is going on? I do NOT mean to offend any Americans, far from it (and if I offend someone, I offer my sincere apologies), but something lite this could only happen in the US, or some other country where religious fundamentalism is prevalent . It would be nice if the human species could mature enough to finally cast away superstition and belief and embrace empirical proof and verifiable knowledge. We are not little children. We are grown-ups who have functional and rational brains. And we are naturally tolerant. At least most of us. "Intelligent Design" is a belief, or a rejection of the legitimacy of logical thought, not a science, and not verifiable in any way. In my opinion it should therefore NOT be sponsored by any government body or public institution or policy.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
There's a scientific method - you can apply it to religion - if it doesn't work you get to call religion 'bunk'
ID may be a hypothesis - it's allowed to be that - but the people who put it up need to come up with some experiments to prove their hypothesis if they want respect of other scientists and if they want their hypothesis to be taught as 'science' - otherwise it's just an idea that hasn't been proven
The problem of course is that approaching religion like this upsets a lot of religious people - largely I think because this sort of approach has tended to upset apple carts over the centuries - doesn't mean you should stop doing it though
Intolerance?
Any person not believing in the basic scientific principles which are the underpinnings of evolution is simply NOT QUALIFIED to hold any position which is in charge of establishing the curriculum to teach said principles.
In your example, the person in question most certainly should be fired as they are not qualified to hold the position -- just as you would fire a salesman for disparaging the product he's been hired to sell. If you believe science is a bunch of hooey, you shouldn't be in charge of how children are taught science. That's just common sense.
In the REAL situation, however,someone is being fired who is perfectly fired -- even suited -- to the job in question.
In short, your comparison is stupid.
"If god is in control of everything then why is it the most religious countries get hit with major earthquakes, flooding and tsunamis?"
Easy.. to test their faith.. see if they're truly worthy. Those that aren't religious are going to hell anyway.
That's the fun thing about most religions - you can easily explain everything away as a whim of a/the god(s). Something good happens? Praise God. Something bad happens? Maybe not praise God, but at least accept that it was 'His' will and he moves in mysterious ways for the greater good and all that.
Assume we take evolution as fact - then after discarding the whole Adam&Eve bit, the religious can easily drop back to "but God -designed- evolution". There's your ID right there.
In the end, even if you can explain every single thing except the "why did the big bang happen?" (assuming the big bang theory is the correct one), then the religious can still say "God made it, and therefore everything, happen".
Sure, the Church of Filet Mignon is bogus - nobody's going to argue with that, I'd imagine.
That said, say I believe there are 3 gods, and to honor those gods I must sing melodic song in their praise every morning at sunrise. Not too far-fetched, I hope.. however, I can't identify with any of the major religions out there. So if I were to end up in such a prison, they'd go over the list of 'recognized' religions, say mine's not on it, and tell me to stfu when I do my singing.
Remember the 'Jedi' religion answer on census inquiries in the UK, Australia and other countries? There was fairly massive response from that, with Jedi ranking -above- Buddhism and Hindu in New Zealand in a census poll. As it was a census poll only, that didn't automatically make it a 'recognized' religion - but be darned if any of the reports from the time mention how one might actually do such a thing. I can't even find where one might apply for 'recognized' religion, what the minimum requirements are, or anything of the sort.
But even without having a 'recognized' religion - who is to say my religion is less valid than e.g. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.?
As a student in Texas, I'm appalled at this. The Director of Science curriculum shouldn't have to stay neutral on a subject when one side is science and the other is pseudoscience (if that). The Texas education system has been going in the shitter for years now, with the state lowering the bar every time students can't jump it rather than teaching the students to go higher. I guess now we can just forgo teaching evolutionary theory and replace the textbook chapters on it with the book of Genesis!
Christianity (and Islam, and Jewdaism, sortof) is special, it piles on one other restriction for got... he is infinitely good and infinitely wise. How that figures into, "God created the sunami and killed hundreds"... I don't know. The inevitable paradox of evil.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Gets even worse. They might even have worshipped the right God, but in the wrong way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Science does not work that way. Science begins with an observation, then the creation of a hypothesis, an experiment, and ends with an affirmation, denial, or refinement of the hypothesis.
Intelligent design begins with an affirmation: The universe is complex, therefore, it must have been designed by a sort of intelligent being. You just can't jump to assumptions like that. That is a debasement of all that science is. Just because we don't understand something doesn't mean it cannot be understood with more research. Just because we can't explain something through modern scientific theories does not mean that later theories cannot explain them. And most of all, just because we do not KNOW the answer to a question does not mean the answer defaults to "God."
We do not know for certain what created the universe. We theorize the Big Bang, but as to what lead to that, we don't know. This does NOT mean "God willed it to happen." It just means we don't know for now.
We can explain many properties of gravity, but we do not know WHAT it is, exactly. This is not a sign that God, excuse me, "The Designer" simply said "let's have mass attract each other at a rate proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them." All it means is... we don't know.
This is why ID is not a science. You cannot, under any circumstances, simply declare something "too complex" to occur naturally (which in and of itself is a bit of a joke. Anything that occurs in nature is, by definition, natural, regardless of means.). The only "evidence" we have that suggests God--pardon me, "designer" (and certainly not a thinly-veiled cover for the Judeo-Christian God), created all life is that we don't know for certain what did.
Intelligent Design by its very fundamental nature is not, cannot, and will not ever be a science. It's a debasement of all that is science. It's the lazy man's way out. "Oh, it's too complex for me to understand. It's much easier to just say God did it." If you want to believe that, fine. But keep that thinking, or lack thereof, out of our science classes and don't you dare expect those who actually KNOW what the Scientific Method is to just sit back and ignore the attempts to get rid of it.
The naivety of the faithful is truly astounding. God cares about the outcome of YOUR football game. God cares if you get that promotion at work or if your business is a success. And God certainly wants you to get that new car. But God didn't create that baby with birth defects (while God creates all people, the defects are somehow our fault). God doesn't heal amputees (though he does cure cancer and other ailments we don't fully understand).
I find that people pray for or about all of these things truly believing that God will listen. I think they are mixing their mythologies up... they have been praying to Goda Claus!
And while I'm on the subject of double-standard beliefs and understandings, we have established that some people have genetic predispositions for violence or impulse controls. We have established that some drugs can even induce violent behavior as a side effect. Why are we always cutting the heads off of people when we're looking at their health? Are the mind and body really as separate as we want to believe? What roles do genetics and chemical balances play in determining the behavior of individuals? We routinely punish and judge others for their behavior, however. Gays, thieves, molesters, even killers might be victims themselves due to defects or the influence of something affecting their brains. We don't want to change our convenient pre-packaged ideas of "good and evil" any more than we have to, though, because changing our understanding of things is bad.
This is both funny and scary at the same time. If it happened anywhere except in the most powerful nation in the world it would only be funny.
I don't see how anyone who thinks it's a good idea to treat christianity as "science" and make policy based on it could complain about states that make policy from other religions, such as sharia law.
Take your imaginary friends and get off of Slashdot. If the Church of Filet Mignon isn't 'good enough' to be real, then I don't see why we shouldn't laugh at your crazy showtune-loving deities.
All hail Beef. In the beginning, now, and as it shall forever be, it is what is for dinner.
Consider this. NOW she gets to sue for Wrongful Termination, *and* a COURT gets to rule on whether ID is anything to be seriously considered by *any* educational organization.
IF the court rules that ID is NOT worthy of consideration in any Science Curriculum, then it's NOT something she would have to remain neutral on, as the Board shouldn't have ever been considering it.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
No it must not, the agency has a moral obligation to support what is true ie science. Science (hard science at least) is not opinion, it's proven fact. When you land a spacecraft on the Moon you prove that there are rocks in space, you don't just opine on their existence. Neutrality does not imply that one is expected to give equal status to unfalsifiable claims. ID and creationism should never reach the brains of students through taxpayer's money.
If governments start using the school bureaucratic apparatus to teach what I believe are byproducts of malfunctioning brains then this will mean that our societies will have entered a new dark age. The last dark age existed for more than 1500 years, so if you allow this to happen again then you will share responsibility for causing your children and future descendants to suffer in a mad society.
It's fine to take your assertion as a starting point, but then you need a number of positive falsifiable experiments to test your hypothesis. That is science. What you have now is a philosophical theory. It has not become a scientific hypothesis yet, and this is why it must not be taught in science classes as an equal to evolutionary theory, which does have many falsifiable experiments that have supported it. Even for evolution theory's so-called Achilles' Heel, the fossil records are at least an observational test of organisms of the past, for which people have a reasonable repeatable measure of their age(whether it is ultimately the right measure is not the issue). You cannot create such a falsifiable test for a theory that has an extra-systemic creator as its basis.
All you can do ever with ID theory is try to falsify evolution theory, and then propose ID as the alternative. You can never go further than that. It can never be "science", because you can't repeatably and reliably test a being that exists and acts outside the system of the universe. ID theory is only philosophy. I'm not saying ID is right or wrong. I actually believe in an old Earth ID theory, but that's part of my religious belief. What I'm just saying is that if you have a philosophical theory, then it should be taught in a philosophy class, along with string theory.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
Personally, I think the whole thing is a giant, millennia-long intelligence test. God purposely set us up with ZERO evidence of his existence, got some flunkies to write a few Good Books and seed them around the planet, and then waited to see who would take the bait. Anyone that falls for a religion (any religion) is immediately sent to Hell because obviously they are mental defectives who are too stupid to go by the facts. It's the Atheists, the ones who saw through the scam all along, and suffered horribly down the ages at the hands of the True Believers (remember, if you want to go to the Good Place you have to suffer while you're on Earth) who will (to their great and everlasting surprise) be admitted to Heaven. At which point, the Atheists will be believers because, well ... now they'll have some evidence, and they'll be able to believe in God without having to take it on "faith". Yeah, it'll suck that the zealots were right all along, but at least they'll have the satisfaction of having used their brains.
Besides, if were all supposed to be companions to God after we're dead, why the hell would he want to surround himself with stupid people?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion.
No contest. No contest. Religion.
Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it.
Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man....
an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do, every minute of every day.
And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.
And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, and suffering, and burning, and torture, and pain, and burning, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!.........
But He loves you.
He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, but somehow, He just can't handle money!
Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit! ID my ass
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
The best thing is not to try to win THEIR argument. The simplest way to do it is this: In a faith-based creationist/ID scenario, God spake his holy word (or waved his magic wand or whatever) and there was light - everything appeared more or less as it we now see it. In a science based scenario, we are looking for an explanation that does not include supernatural intervention - How could it have happened if God DIDN'T wave a magic wand i.e. without resorting to a supernatural cause?
There really isn't any reason science must preclude God or religion. One may simply state that science is a process of understanding God's creation through reason. You also have to admit that science can describe the "How" but not the "Why". You can describe how the universe was created through the Big Bang, but you can never say WHY it was created because that is an article of faith.
CONVINCING religious people of all this is another story...
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
If it was a muslim country doing this the people'd be all, like, "Glass parking lot, it's the only way".
No sig today...
Probably because the differentiation between "macro-evolution" ("speciation") and "micro-evolution" is an ID foil. *ALL* evolution is microevolution. There's nowhere in evolutionary theory that says a frog must give birth to a mouse for evolution to occur. Micro-evolutionary changes are sufficient to explain speciation over a long enough time frame.
One of the recurring problems in these kinds of discussion is the definition of speciation. If you nail down an ID'er with evidence of speciation, they change the definition ("Oh, well, it's still a bacterium, isn't it?" ) and start talking about an amorphous concept called "kinds". Then you show the feathered dinosaur fossils, and they yell "hoax" (in spite of the fact that there have been many more species of feathered dinos than archeopteryx discovered), and when that doesn't pan out, they say it's not really a transitional species, it's a distinct, god-created animal that is now extinct. This is clearly the avoidance behavior we all sometimes engage in, designed to protect a comfortable delusion.
You can't 'win' this kind of argument. The BEST we can hope for is that it will fall 'out of fashion' over time.
Thinking outside my Head
That's a bit of an exaggeration. The common people have always been both willfully ignorant and quite stupid.
It is no arrogance to mention it. They require religion to manipulate them, and they become enraged at anything different. Their betters understand this.
The ruling classes don't hold to that superstitious nonsense, and realists like Karl Rove understand how to use it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Believing in micro-evolution but not believing in macro-evolution makes about as much sense as believing in centimetres but not believing in kilometres.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Erroneus....you were giving such a good point..and then you went and said "Gays, Thieves, molesters and even killers." Why are homosexual people bundled in there with what could be considered the scum of our society? It's truly sad that our society has not accepted a behavior that is present in almost all animal species. I have friends of mine that are gay and are extremely productive members of society. Besides if your "God", whoever he is, really didn't like them...I mean REALLY didn't like them...why aren't they all dropping like flies? And please don't give me the "The Devil made them do it!" bit...I'm pagan, to me everyone has good and evil inside.
So Jesus, Mohammed and Abraham walk into a Bar....
There is no essential difference between micro and macro evolution. They both use the same basic mechanism.
"Micro-evolution" refers to changes within a single population.
Macro-evolution is the just the micro-evolution of two isolated populations to the point that, if the two populations were to merge back together and try to interbreed, they would be unable to produce fertile, viable offspring. The two populations have diverged too much, and will continue to diverge from then on.
What happened is she walked off the job to attend a presentation not directly related to her job duties.
Of course it wasn't for opposing ID, just like Wal-Mart has never fired anyone who's tried to organize a union. When a company wants to fire someone but their reason is illegal, unpopular, or actionable, they can be very creative in finding other reasons to terminate you.
This, incidentally, makes the idea of 'species' almost total nonsense. If you had all of history to kidnap animals from, there is something you could breed with that could breed with something that could breed with something...that could breed with something that could breed with an gorilla. Or a cat, or a goldfish, or a spider. Or a potted plant.
It's just all those things are dead.
Any ID supporter or anyone fighting the inanity who tries to hang too much on 'species' is a fool. It's like trying to hang things on the names of colors, and arguing that while shades can change, blue can never turn into green, or that a ranch style house and a cap cod house are different. There's no such thing as those things! A species is just a term we hang on a bunch of animals that are close enough to interbreed, it's not a 'scientific concept' in any real sense.
All evolution says is that populations of interbreeding animals will, over time, suffer genetic drift towards a 'fitter' state, and sometimes this will result in them being unable to interbreed with other animals that, had they not drifted, they would have been able to interbreed with. It doesn't require a concept of species, the only reason a non-interbreeding change is interesting is because, from that point on, it changes the possible 'population of interbreeding animals'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I don't know if it deserves to be modded down. I'm from Utah and have spent considerable time (living, mostly) in NYC, Chicago, Portland, San Fran, Los Angeles, Austin, Nashville, and a whole smattering of places in between.
Basically, outside of the major coastal and midwestern urban areas the whole damn nation is uneducated white trash, eating, drinking, sleeping, and living the Bible, the small print on Wal-Mart labels, and little else. They're about as different from a New Yorker or a San Franciscan as a microscope lens is from the bottom of a beer bottle.
They probably shouldn't be allowed to vote, much less raise their own children.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The answer is that populations drift as a group. See Ring Species. Let's do a thought experiment:
There are two colonies of large farting rodents: One lives in the northern brush where predators largely ignore them because of the smell of their flatulence, and the other group lives on a warm little island in the Mediterranean where their farts, combined with the warmth and humidity, attract bacterial infections on their eggs and genetalia. In the first group, rodents born with a slight 'deformity' that causes smellier farts, or longer or thicker hair to combat the cold, or even oilier skin and hair to keep them warm when it rains, are more able to survive. In the second group, however, rodents born with a 'deformity' that causes them to fart less, or not at all, or with decreased smell, are more fit. Furthermore, finer, sparser hair allows them to stay cool when they run from the occasional predator, and the question of dry vs. oily skin and hair seems not to matter at all.
There are hundreds of traits like this that can come up in different environments. Sinus size, leg length, bone shape, sweat glands, skin pore size, ability to digest certain toxins, ability to respond to certain plants as immune stimulants -- the list could go on forever. The 'deformities' that work propagate through the population until the individuals without them are the odd ones out. They become the 'low hanging fruit' for predators, or are simply shunned by potential mates who want the genes more suited to the environment. Speciation "has occurred" when most or all of the members of one population have become different enough from the other population that offspring don't (or very rarely) survive, and/or are infertile.
It may not even be the selected traits that are causing the speciation. It could be genes that have no selective pressure at all, that simply 'piggyback' on the same chromosomes as the enhanced genes, that cause an incompatibility. Even in identical environments, since mutations are random, two other phenomena occur: Different traits have survival advantages for different reasons, and the same feature develops independently multiple times. If a source of food goes extinct in the area (a particular family of nuts, we'll say), the rodents can go in several directions -- and probably would, if they were on opposite sides of a river or mountain, or on two nearby but well-separated islands. A rat with stronger teeth or a shorter jaw will be healthier because he can eat tougher nuts instead. A rat with longer legs, or a better tail for balance, or a longer snout can catch insects more easily. But the same physical trait can come about in several ways. Perhaps some of the rats have longer legs because of hormonal changes, whereas other rats grow an elongated spongiform pattern in their bones, while still others grow denser, thicker, longer bones because they can digest more calcium from the same food.
The rats could even have been in the population for hundreds of years, through the good times, but now that something bad has happened, they're pretty much the only ones who will survive. Survival in the island climate may have been completely neutral to hair and skin oil, or the direction of hair growth, but if the rodents had to start swimming for some reason, perhaps to avoid a new predator, those traits would start to matter very quickly. It could even be a one-time event. A pack of predators gets lost, and wanders into a rat camp; Those that are best able to climb trees, or dig a hole deep into the ground, or swim out to a rock for safety, are the only ones that survive. And, therefore, only the chromosomes containing those genes still exist for that population.
Whenever the 'standard' set of genes for one population changes, you increase the chances that they won't mix well with another set to create a viable organism. In the end, after several hundred generations, provided that the relevant traits occ
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Wait, how was he nonplussed if he had a ready answer?
As for your statement "their god is only the Old Testament God when dealing with homosexuals", I don't completely understand where you got this from considering the main part of the bible that discusses homosexuals is the New Testament.
Actually, most Biblical arguments against homosexuality all come from the old Testament (most often cited are Genesis 1, Genesis 19, various other Genesis passages, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and various passages from Deuteronomy, Judges, and Kings). And the hypocrisy is that books like Leviticus are also the ones that admonish, for example, wearing wool and cotton at the same time. If a Christian is not going to keep a completely kosher house and lifestyle, it is pretty hypocritical to attack homosexuality from that same reference.
Some references in the New Testament include Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1. Jesus, however, was notably silent on the issue, despite having a great deal to say about all sorts of other practices in his day. (In fact, Jesus doesn't really have much to say about any of the major "Christian right" hot topics, from homosexuality to abortion, whereas he has a great deal to say about welfare, health care, and the evils of money.)
E pluribus unum
Tough. Sometimes we have to read things that we find distasteful: if we can't handle that we shouldn't frequent public forums like Slashdot. I might also point out that some of us also consider science to be something that you don't take lightly, and truly find the anti-intellectual offensive promulgated by Creationists to be just as disturbing as they find Darwinism. Anyone that wants civilization to continue shouldn't take science lightly either. That should be obvious to anyone with even a partially-functioning cerebral cortex, yet there's a significant and growing sector of our society that feels perfectly free to ridicule science, and those who practice it, with even less reason and with much darker purpose.
I'm not a religious person myself, and I've been ridiculed for that on numerous occasions by those same touchy, sensitive people you speak of. You'll pardon me if I'm not terribly concerned about the feelings of people that have no sense of humor about their belief systems: I find them to be the most intolerant, generally unpleasant people to be around. If the hypersensitive religious component of our culture truly wants people like me to spare them any empathy, I have only two words for them: lighten up! It works both ways: their hurt feelings aren't somehow special or more important just because they believe in God.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Although I agree in practice with your answer on falling trees, I prefer to take the Schoedinger approach in principle: "If a tree falls in the woods and noone is there to observe it, does it fall?"
Science is the study of things that are real, that should be all the "review" of religion anyone should need. Let's stop calling this "faith" and call it what it is: make believe.
The Farewell Tour II
I'm not sure if you're making stuff up or if you're simply repeating something you pulled off the Internet, but mutations are significantly more common than you seem to think they are. Mendel's work definitely does not prove what you think it does.
Well, mutations are a pretty good source of new information.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The problem is that ID closes down scientific inquiry, it doesn't expand upon it. It is a proposition unto itself with no scientific proof and even no way to research it. The Theory of Evolution came about by looking at the natural world and noticing something peculiar, then trying to reason why this occurred. ID simply says "We don't understand how this occurred, so a supernatural force must have done it." If ID were really trying to be a scientific theory, it would try to explain what the designer is, why it did what it did, when this occurred, and how the designer implemented his designs.
1 - What designed us? What scientific methods would you use to research this? The only theories I know of are religious and come from books written thousands of years ago with no evidence to support them. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
2 - Why did the designer make us? Well, without any evidence that there is a designer or knowledge of it existing, how do we learn anything about its motivations? This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
3 - When did this occur? They don't attempt to explain the fossil record or use the scientific methods of radioactive dating (or come up with their own) to show when this happened. They don't explain why there are fossils in the record that are so much different than our own. Did the designer make some mistakes and kill off those creatures? The only thing proponents of intelligent design say here are religious quotes from the Bible. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
4 - How did the designer implement his designs? ID proponents don't even attempt to explain the scientific origin of the designer's designs. The designer couldn't have just "designed" them, they had to actually be created some how. Oh wait, we can't say that word because that exposes intelligent design as being the same thing as creationism. Any scientific inquiry into ID would try to explain the forces at play that made the first molecules come together into the first human being though. Did the designer use magnetic forces to draw atoms together? Did it it use a laser? Here again we have nothing from ID proponents on the issue except for quoting from the Bible. This exposes ID as a religious theory and not science.
THESE are the four areas of research that ID "scientists" should be focusing on. If they could come up with a single published scientific paper showing actual research into any of these four questions, maybe ID could start to be seen as a scientific theory. Meanwhile there has been vast amounts of research over the last 150 years into evolution and natural selection. THAT is what scientists do. They come up with questions and research them, they don't just posit logical theories and rest on their laurels.
ID isn't science or religion, it's politics. Just ask Galileo.
"You also have to admit that science can describe the "How" but not the "Why"."
I fucking hate this goddamn ignorant argument like poison, as if science is somehow deficient and in need of some faith-based concept like religion to fill in the blanks. Here's a 'why' for you: why is it that people are so fucking childish that they need to cling the idea that things are the way they for some Higher Purpose? If I roll a die and it comes up 5, I don't ask why that happened: I recognize that given certain physical realities and a finite number of possible outcomes, 5 was one possibility that just happened to come up. The question 'why are we here' is no different, except replace 5 with 'everything happens in such a way that it produces the world we live in now' and add about a zillion other possible outcomes to your die. We're here because things happened the way they happened--they could just have easily happened a different way, in which case we might not be here to see it. But some people obviously need the security blanket of believing that existence has some kind of magic meaning.
" It's would be a valid philosophy, I suppose,"
I read an interesting article a while back that would take exception to your statement; the concept is often refered to as 'God in the gaps'.
Put it this way: we don't understand natural process X, so the philosophers says "well, science cannot explain X, so X must be the work of God." Then, a year or two later, scientists figure X out. God has been shoved back by science, and the more we know, the further back he retreats. Theologically speaking, a philosophy that relegates God to more and more marginal roles in the universe is hardly desirable. It's good to think about these things, though. Cheers!
Evolution is based on a concept of common ancestry, and that speciation occurs in the branches, where organisms can no longer interbreed. This means that you can build a tree of life that is untangled between major branches, with minor tangling of the twigs within a branch. (theres quite a bit more to evolution, but these are the parts I'm using).. So a reptile can mutate to get hair, passing the trait to its progeny. Eventually those progeny have a vast array of variation in their hair. The hair becomes more advanced (hollow hairs in the case of the Pronghorn). Now this bit of evolution is a pretty advanced piece of work.
Now to disprove Evolution we need to show that this trait shows up in another major branch of life IE find a tangle. So if we can find a plant with these kinds of hairs, or a bird that has the same kind of hair, were golden. Now since we classify all things with hair as mammals we might never find a bird with hair. So we could look for something more useful from birds in mammals.
Birds have a four cycle lung which is more efficient than the mammalian 2 cycle lung, because it vents nearly all the waste gases in each breath. If we found a mammal with a four cycle lung, that could also be evidence that something is wrong with our theory of evolution.
So then there is the platypus, a mammal that lays eggs, is that evidence? Since we're pretty sure that reptiles were the forbearer's of mammals, then mammals can still have the egg laying apparatus from the reptilian side. So the branches haven't been crossed.
So to disprove evolution you need to find highly evolved traits which don't appear to exist in a common ancestor, but are copied nearly exactly. (so birds and bats flying doesn't count, because the wings aren't even close to being similar)
Storm
p.s. for you ID advocates, happy hunting. Find where the designer is cutting and pasting at the top levels, and you have a way better case...
One problem with ID is the assumption that if evolution is wrong then ID must be right. Evolution may very well be wrong. In fact, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that our current understanding of evolution will most definitely be found to be flawed at some point in the future. Such is the nature of science. That does not in any way, shape, nor form provide any validation for ID. I have read a fair bit of ID literature. Nothing that I have read ever gives reasons to believe in ID. Their literature consists solely of showing the flaws in evolution. They then imply that the only reasonable solution is to believe in ID. Hey, Discover Institute, provide us with some hypothesis and predictions with which we can test ID. Then, and only then, will I listen to you.
Easily done:
Step 1) Hypothesis: Someone, somewhere, somewhen, created everything.
Step 2) Create an experiment to prove said hypothesis. Uhh, can't.
Verdict: It's unprovable crap.
DONE.