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Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law
H0D_G writes "The US state of Louisiana has passed the 'Science Education Act,' a piece of legislation that could allow Intelligent design to be taught in schools. From the article: 'The act is designed to slip ID in "through the back door"'"
First of all, this is a dupe.
Secondly, while nervous, the ACLU says this bill is not unconstitutional.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The submitter could have at least linked to the text of the bill that was actually passed instead of linking to a piece of alarmist journalism. I really don't think there is anything for us to be worried about here. The act allows teachers to "use supplementary textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner." Teachers cannot teach ID or creationism. In fact, the law "shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion." Additionally, Joe Cook, director of the ACLU for Louisiana has said that the act is constitutional as written. This bill is probably totally unnecessary, but simply promotes objective thinking about all scientific topics. Now that is scientific right?
Well, yes, they did. It was a small inland lake that people lived around, and a large storm caused the barrier between it and the sea to erode, and the sea came into the lake. It flooded everything for 20 miles from the shore of the lake. The survivors of this made the great flood origin story.
They found huts and such 20 miles out from shore, and the geological evidence backed this up, which is why they think its true.
Link for the interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(mythology)#Hypotheses_of_origin_of_Flood_myths/
neither is there any concrete scientific evidence of evolution, apart from the strong surviving over the week, which can hardly be used to back up macro-evolution.
Dude, you might want to get your facts right : http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html
Complexity is a measure of our ignorance...
Evolution is a fact. The theory element is the historical path, which makes sense (we obviously can't test the past 65M years). Ask any biologist, who work with evolutionary principles on a daily basis, whether evolution is a fact or not.
He will never veto it, because Jindal supports the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.
.. as it also opens the door for the teachings of our noodly saviour
Not to pick on the Christians, but they have a long tradition in the USA of trying to twist school curriculum & resources towards *only* their message.
Whenever athiests/pagans/wiccans/other use the same loophole, the Christians tend to get mighty upset.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Point of note :
Catholic Priests take a vow of celibacy.
A vow of celibacy is the act of abstaining from marriage.
The reason catholic priests are supposed to abstain from sex is because in the catholic church its a sin to have pre-marital sex.
Unless of course, they have taken a vow of chastity - which is a vow to abstain from sex.
Either way, I hope more people take both vows, gives me more room to work in.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
how do you know it's a lie? have you proven creationism to be a lie and not told anyone? while you're at it you might as well tell everyone how you proved evolution as fact while the rest of the world is still trying...
I don't need to because many people already have. Here's a few to get you started.
Honestly, not wanting your kid's science class to teach intelligent design to your kids is no different (to anyone remotely familiar with scientific evidence, anyway) than not wanting your kid's math class to teach them the "theory" that pi equals 3 (1 Kings 7:23).
There are plenty of well-documented examples of bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. That, in the context the bacteria are in, is beneficial and passed on.
There are a bazillion other examples, but this is the most obvious and trivial. Because not only can you do experiments like that in the lab, it tends to mess up your *other* experiments if you assume that a strain of bacteria will forever be antibiotic-sensitive.
Apparently you haven't seen this write up on Ars. It's about a study over a series of years, at the end of which a novel mutation developed that was beneficial to an E. coli population that started out from a single inoculum.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/06/04/tracking-adaptation-as-bacteria-evolve
Over the course of 44,000 generations, they evolved the ability to metabolize citrate. They'd been incubated with citrate since 1988 and recently started using it as a substrate for metabolism. This study satisfies all 3 of the criteria you just indicated
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Being from Louisiana, I can shed some light on this.
Let me give you some history.
Our last Governor was Blanco, who was never very strong. She only won because her competition was yet another corrupt old white guy no one liked, and Jindal, an Indian. The apathetic white male population basically didn't show up, and so women carried the vote. I'm all for a good female candidate, but Blanco was never it. My mother and Aunt were both organizers of NOW, my mother founded the Women Business Owners Association of Baton Rouge, and was a very politically active feminist. When Blanco was elected, both my mom and Aunt were PISSED. Because basically, the woman was a wishy-washy wimp. When Katrina and Rita hit, all she could ever manage to do was cry and whine.
This made Jindal a shoo-in for the next election. While he looks fine on paper, he's anything but mainstream. He was a proponent of teaching ID in schools well before he was ever elected. To suggest Jindal would attempt to veto this would be akin to suggesting Bush would have tried to veto the Patriot Act.
If we would start passing legislation randomly to teach unproven theories that "can be a very powerful idea when taught..." there would soon be no time left to teach stuff that actually matters like reading and math.
Considering when my friend's son was in 8th grade the ciriculum called for the class to spend two-weeks learning about Welfare (being on it, specifically) I have little doubt they learn anything than what would be on standardized tests, anyway.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Actually, that is just the English translation of the original Hebrew. In Genesis, when it says that God did such-and-such on this day, the Hebrew is yom. Yom has many English translations, only one of which is day-24 hours. It can also mean day-length of time, as in "In the day of my father".
This being said, there is no paradox.
$> man woman $> Segmentation fault. (Core dumped)
Sigh. It really amazes me how little self-proclaimed Christians know their own so-called divine book. Even a cursory look at the New Testament sees the word 'priest' used hundreds of times. For example- Hebrews 6:20 where Jesus, who went before us, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Watch this be shot down in court like the last one in....
ID is such a piece of bullshit.
Actually, this law is more about academic freedom than ID. The ACLU has even said that the law is not unconstitutional. However, if it is USED for something that it deems to be unconstitutional, then expect lawsuits.
From TFA:
Ultimately, if a number of suits are successfully tried, a group like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) could take the law itself to court, citing various cases in which it was used to bring religious material into the classroom. Representatives from the ACLU and from Americans United for Separation of Church and State have already told Louisiana state officials that lawsuits will follow if the law is used for religious ends.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Was it an "entirely different species" or was it just an adaptation?
One of the defining characteristics of E.coli is the inability to metabolize citrate. If it metabolizes citrate, it's not E.coli anymore.
Could you cross breed this "new" version of citrate metabolizing E. Coli with the original strain?
Erm, you need to consult a biology textbook about how bacteria reproduce. Hint: They don't need partners to do so. That makes cross-breeding a bit difficult. Especially since a strain of E.coli was used that doesn't do the conjugation thing, either.
Correct.
The practice of celibacy itself is more of the problem than the Catholic church or priesthood, per se.
Interesting tidbits:
1) The Apostle Peter (erroneously deemed the first pope) definitely was married.
2) The Apostle Paul declared his situation as somewhat of a unique gift, not a requirement of ministry.
3) The Bible clearly teaches celibacy is not something you should attempt to maintain if you retain desire. Instead you should get married. This is why one of the first things priests who started studying the Bible anew in the days of the Reformation was to renounce their vow of celibacy and get married.
4) The Bible more or less predicts the heresy of enforced celibacy would arise in later years.
5) In the Catholic church, this is NOT an issue of doctrine. It is simply an issue of Church Law. As such, any pope could wave their hands and dispense with the practice altogether. The structure is fairly rigidly in place at this point. Such a pope would likely be killed or at the very least "managed" so as not to do this. But the point is the Catholic church could do away with this by the mere flick of a pen.
6) Since it is not an issue of doctrine, there actually ARE married priests in the Catholic church. There is an established procedure for such. However, these are rather rare at the moment.
Your failure is one of scale. You fail to take into account that this is one experiment. Nature doesn't work that way. Nature experiments with THOUSANDS of different "petri dishes" every moment of every day. It doesn't care about reproducibility or the scientific method. Another experiment might have made this switch in 20 generations instead of 44,000. And even if it took 44,000 generations, that's only 44,000 years for platypus's.
Parallel evolution, immense timescales. You don't go from a door-mouse to a platypus in one step. It'll take you 10 million years, the right conditions and a shit-load of serendipity. If you had to do it all over again, you could never guarantee it would happen because you have no idea of the selective pressures applied, when and in what situations they were beneficial.
We have proven that life EVOLVES. We will probably never be able to prove that all life came from a SINGLE cellular parent (probably because it didn't).
Not at all. "God = Universe" is pantheism, which predates Christianity, yet the latter has considered pantheism to be a heresy from the very beginning. And indeed, the central tenet of Christianity is the idea of a God as a person, and Universe as his creation - and certainly a creator cannot be a part of what he himself has created entirely. It is the same in all Abrahamic religions.
Wrong again. Allah does have personhood. The restriction is in place so that people do not start to worship the image of Allah instead of Allah himself (and seeing how Christians worship images and symbols of Christ, and icons of saints, it makes some sense).
Have you ever considered how "yuck", heterosexual intercourse is? Sure it's fun, but I'm using a thing normally used to dispose of waste fluid, to insert it into the moist hole of a female to inject some gooey stuff into her.
I tell you that as a heterosexual. Tell a small kid the above and you will inevitable get a "yuck"... Or take even simply (french) kissing. Come on! That serious "yuck" in the eyes of small kids.
Just because you cannot prove something does not mean it didn't happen. It's just that the idea is not scientific, because science is about testing hypotheses. Evolution is highly tested. ID is not tested, as it makes very few specific predictions, none of which are confirmed. Evolution cannot be proven; it can only be disproven. Do you have any evidence that evolution did not happen or is not happening?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I just feel, and this is from my limited understand of evolution and Darwinism, that evolution isn't truly science either.
Based on your comments, I'd say that it's not so much your understanding of evolution that's lacking, as your understanding of the principles of science.
For a theory to qualify as "truly science" absolutely does not require it to be perfect or complete. A scientific theory is not a collection of facts that reveal an absolute truth flawlessly. How could it? What is important is not the answer, but how you get to it.
The scientific method, as used by evolutionary biology, chemistry, astrophysics, and every other branch of the sciences, requires that you take four steps:
On the other hand, Intelligent Design follows a much simpler process:
The beauty of evolutionary theory is that at any moment, someone could turn up some piece of evidence that absolutely, undeniably proves that it's not true. And if that happened, biologists would start working on a new theory that fits the facts better. That's how it's supposed to work!
Tell me: What would have to happen, tomorrow, to prove that the "theory" of Intelligent Design is false?
That's why it doesn't belong in Science classes.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
ID is not a scientific theory, but it is a theory. The word simply has multiple meanings, and I believe a great deal of confusion comes from this unfortunate fact.
In the vernacular, "theory" is a guess used to explain some event, usually on circumstantial or incomplete evidence - an idea based on speculation. Non-Slashdot nerds use the word all day long to explain things, so it's not a bastardization. A close scientific equivalent is hypothesis.
A scientific theory, is, of course, entirely different. Two meanings, one word, and one horrible coincidence that gives IDers ammunition against us evil Neo-Darwinists :)
First off, a mouse didn't evolve into an elephant, they both had common ancestors. Second, life evolves QUICKLY when exposed to environmental stress, contrary to Darwinian Evolutionary Theory (which has been modified to fit with current observations). If a mouse is well suited to its environment (it is), then you could go a trillion generations and see no change in phenotype (although the genetic structure would almost certainly have tons of random, but meaningless mutations).
More likely you would go very quickly from mouse-like to rat-like, and the larger rat-like mammals would speciate, perhaps by geographical isolation, into various other types of animals. Some would grow adept at climbing trees, other at burrowing, and others still at swimming. Some environments would encourage them to get larger (especially so since there are no big predators), and (rats being omnivores) some would specialize into meat eating or plant eating, etc, etc, until you have yourself something that looks like an elephant, or a giraffe, or a blue whale, or a human.
Of course, you can trace the common lineage of these creatures by looking at the genes that code for proteins, which generally can't change randomly (because it would kill the rat), but instead must remain functional until an advantageous change is made, at which point that lineage takes over that of the other rat-like creatures. We used to do it by looking at animal phenotypes (that means what they look like), but that is grossly inaccurate due to the phenomenon of convergent evolution, where animals from different sets of ancestors evolve the same adaptations and wind up looking very similar to each other. Other animals were classified as being further away from each other on the tree of life than they really were, for example, it turns out that bears are actually quite closely related to dolphins, even though they couldn't look more different from each other.
Examples of evolution in bacteria are common, but they are more difficult to see in large animals, but they do happen, and quickly. One example is related to a certain species of snakes in Australia (I forget which one), which was a high level predator. When Cane Toads were introduced more than 50 years ago, many of the snakes died trying to eat them, as they put out a potent poison. It has recently been found that the same species of snake has evolved a smaller head, so it can no longer eat the poisonous toads. This is an example of an environmental stress producing a rapid change in a species. Had the original snake survived elsewhere in geographical isolation, as time went on, they would accumulate enough changes to their DNA that they would no longer be able to breed, and thus would constitute a new species.
So if you can prove something wrong then that IS science? That makes no sense
You misunderstand. Science is about trying to disprove ideas and seeing which ones hold up to scrutiny. If there is no way possible to prove an idea incorrect, then that idea is not science.
For example, I hypothesize that the Earth is round. A consequence of that idea is that if I travel around it long enough, I'll come back to where I started. If I tried that experiment and it failed, then the Earth could not be round.
Now, take the idea that the Earth was formed last Tuesday by a smartass god who likes to screw with our heads, and he made the world look exactly as though it were 5 billion years old and created all of us with memories extending back before last Tuesday. Maybe it's an interesting thought experiment, but it is not science because there wouldn't be any test you could run that could disprove the idea.
There's more to science than disprovability, but it's a key component and one whose absence is enough to relegate an idea to philosophy instead of genuine scientific inquiry.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It has been demonstrated that fundamental building blocks of live are available in some of the remotest parts of our solar system and on this planet as well.
They have discovered the presence of water in samples brought back from the moon. They have found the elements on Mars - and now are trying to confirm that liquid water once existed long enough for life to take hold.
Scientists have created amino acids and proteins in the lab by creating a primordial soup and hitting it with electricity. While this isn't life, per se, it is the fundamentals of life - and it was created by man. Amazingly, those amino acids also started combining to form proteins - more building blocks of life.
Supposed organisms created out of thin air? Not likely (unless the aliens leave them here when they visit). New organisms and species are created by the sharing of genetic material and evolutionary processes. The combinations of genetic material from two disparate but somehow compatible DNA results in new "species" aka life-forms - we see this all the time with bacteria as they absorb material from other antibiotic resistant bacteria and acquire that resistance as well. Doesn't happen all the time - but, at the rate they (bacteria) reproduce (much faster than humans), we can see how this process functions.
Genetic algorithms and programs (human creations) emulate standard genetic processes. They solve problems by randomly selecting elements of a solution (genes) into a container called a "chromosome". They exchange "genetic" material with other until a solution emerges that is a best fit solution. Weak solutions are discarded or may be subject to more genetic mutations. Those mutations might make them stronger and more likely to survive into the next generation.
In the case of new species, the best fit solution is that which still enables life. Nothing magical there - we only know that to be the case because we are alive and can see it for ourselves.
What is amazing is that the necessary conditions for this happen exist here on Earth. Our planet has a climate that allows liquid water to exist. It has an abundance of the amino building blocks. It has protection from excessive solar radiation through by way of the ozone layer - radiation that would break up the molecules.
Whether this is by chance or by design? That's for you to decide. But, please don't try to impart that logic or belief system on my children as "science" or on the rest of the population via gov't policy. It isn't science and, what science it does pro port to use is distorted and perverted to meet the needs of the ID belief system.
If you recognize that there is no such magical line--just differential selective mating and hybrid infertility that eventually reaches approximately zero--then there are plenty of speciation events that have been caught in the middle. Again, talkorigins.org lists a pile of these. Macroevolution has been caught at pretty much every stage between no speciation and complete segregation, and though the 100 or 200 years (when people have been paying enough attention to collect sufficiently accurate data--not 2000 (what are you thinking?!)) are a very short time to observe much change in reproductive isolation, changes have been observed (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html).