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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.'"
I myself was educated by an order of Catholic Brothers"(a bit like monks) in Scotland. There were an impressive list of eccentrics, as one would expect, and some eccentric beliefs to match (anyone for a procession of angels?). These were people who had sacrificed a lot for their beliefs, you know vows of poverty and chastity and obedience.
However when it came to Science they were bang on. The closest they ever came to ID was Brother Francis (The Biology Teacher) when if pressed on evolution would say that he would like to think that perhaps there was room for a little Divine nudge, but that this was not in the curriculum, and not in the Science of Biology and would never be included in the classroom. In fact I remember in the morning religious knowledge period the Biblical creationist theorem being taken apart, and really discarded.
It is of course a great irony that Charles Darwin himself was a theology student, but he arrived at the theory of evolution via Scientific method. Religion and Science are not incompatible, they just dont deal with the same areas.
To sum up, the creationists are an embarrassment to both religion and Science and should get some education.
It's not as simple as you think when your own teachers don't believe in evolution. My high school biology teacher thought evolution was a bunch of bull-crap (he was careful not to say what his belief was). Sure, he taught the scientific method as outlined in his curriculum, but every time he got the chance he was bad-mouthing evolution. I don't think very many of his students came (come?) away with a good understanding of how to actually apply it. I think, mostly because he refused to apply it himself. The irony is that I was constantly sleeping through his class because I had finished reading the textbook in the first month of school. All the kids who were actually awake learned less than me because they listened to his propaganda.
Quick question (because I've been trying to think about this a bit myself lately) - what are the claims of the current theory of evolution that can be tested and disproven?
It seems like there's quite a few (progression from less to more complex organisms, commonality of microscopic biological features between species, observed changes of organisms) that seem to in general point at a mechanism, but there are enough oddball organisms and gaps in the fossil record that seem to throw small exceptions in the general theories I've heard, and cause the theory to change to adapt to them.
So, out of curiosity, at this point (given the evidence we have in favor of evolution) what would we have to find to disprove it? Since the ability to be proved false stands at the core of the criticism of ID.
I'm not trying to argue for ID - I think it's a load of bullocks and evolution has a whole lot of research going for it. I'm just curious for those of us who didn't have to take more than high school bio what would actually prove evolution false?
To say that "they change to become resistant" is misleading, because you are suggesting a single bacteria changes within the span of it's own life cycle to become resistant. To be more accurate, any given culture DOES contain multiple, slight variations that make some bacteria more resistant than others. However, it it the evolution opponents who write this off as "all possible variations already exist" - which is equally false. The variations within a single culture are the results of non-lethal mutations between generations.
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Here's a simple experiment anyone that is half-competent with science-y things can do.
Take a single bacteria and cultivate it.
Take a any two individual bacteria from that culture and cultivate them separately. Take a third bacteria from this original culture and sequence its DNA for future comparison.
Continue to re-sample each culture and start a new culture, keeping the descendants of the original "split" separate.
After some number of generations, sample and sequence the DNA from each descendant colony. Compare them against each other and the sequence from the original culture.
I predict they will all be different. The fact that both cultures are ultimately descended from a SINGLE bacteria eliminates the possibility that all of these unique DNA sequences existed simultaneously, and the fact that they are different proves that non-lethal mutations have been occurring over time.
As an extra bonus, I also predict that the cultures will have different reactions to the same antibiotic.
As an extra extra bonus, if we continue to develop these two lines of ancestry I predict they will eventually diverge enough in genetic makeup that they can be considered a new species of bacteria. Tada! Macroevolution is the cumulative effect of microevolution!
Science. It works, bitches.
=Smidge=
Of course, "neutrality" is a code word "supporting ID/creationism without admitting it," since Don McLeroy, Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, has made openly pro-ID statements. Yet merely informing people that a major player in the debate is giving a talk constitutes taking sides. So much for "teaching the controversy" (which is really code for teaching ID/creationism).
Of course, ID/creationists are terrified of Barbara Forrest, because she has meticulously documented how "intelligent design" is merely a rebranding of "creationism." She has become even more dangerous to them since the Dover trial, since discovery gave her access to early drafts of the key "intelligent design" textbook "Of Pandas and People," which revealed how it started life as a creationist textbook, and became an "intelligent design" book by a simple search & replace. Hilariously, at one point, they botched the replace, and "creationists" became "cdesign proponentists."
Every time a gene is sequenced, it is a test of natural selection. Natural selection makes numerous predictions in this area--the commonality of the genetic code, close relatedness of genes in higher organisms, even down to the degree of similarity. Failure of these predictions to hold up would force the abandonment of natural selection in its current form.
Of course, creationists have worked very hard to promote a nonsensical "two model" idea that the alternative to natural selection is creationism, but the notion that disproof of natural selection would force a return to creationism is nonsensical. When Newton's Laws of motion were shown to be incorrect, science did not return to Aristotle's ideas of motion--a new theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, supplanted it--one that included Newton's Laws as a special case approximation.
It is worth noting that natural selection is not even the only theory of evolution. Remember Lamarck? Darwin came along at a time when scientists were looking for an evolutionary theory, because the predictions of creationism were inconsistent with the data (unlike intelligent design, which is intentionally vague and more a religious notion than a scientific theory, the creationism of Darwin's time was genuinely scientific, in that it made actual predictions).
I tried to play the "infinity" card against an IDer recently, the "paradox of evil" as you put it (and they put it). For the uninitiated, the argument goes: God is infinite, which means by definition that he includes everything. Ergo, if evil exists then it too must be part of God. This requires one of three conclusions, (a) God is not all good, (b) God is not infinite, or (c) evil doesn't exist.
Completely nonplussed, my ID opponent had a ready answer. I have no trouble, he said, with understanding that God is infinite but separate, because God is an infinite presence. He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I tried to counter that this does not fit the definition of infinite, although it might meet the definition of pervasive. He would have none of it, and repeated that he had no trouble understanding infinite-but-separate, as if the failure of reasoning was on me.
Now the lesson of this story is that there is no limit to weaseling out of logic if one's precious mental schema is at stake.
As a post-script, here is one other anecdote. In college I was party to a similar debate. One girl, arguing the ID side, was at one point confronted by another student with the statement, "This is basic logic!" To which she replied, "Yeah, human logic, maybe."
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Well, let's look at what would have disproved it.
DNA. When DNA was discovered, well after Darwin's time, it could have easily rendered large swathes of evolution irrelevant. It didn't. It verified and strengthened the theory.
Chromosomes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs; the other great apes have 24. By evolutionary theory, we should find that somewhere along the line, human genes mutated and two of our chromosomes fused. A chromosome has two markers called telomeres, one on each end, and a single centromere in the middle. (T__C___T) What we would expect to find is a chromosome with telomeres on each end, telomeres in the middle (where the fusion happened) and two centromeres. If we don't, our current understanding of evolution is wrong.
But we did find a fused chromosome, exactly as predicted; our chromosome #2. (T__c___TT___C__T)
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