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Tennessee Bill Helps Teachers Challenge Evolution
sciencehabit writes "In a 70-28 vote yesterday, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed HB 368 (PDF), a bill that encourages science teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal. Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom. If the bill passes, Tennessee would join Louisiana as the second state to have specific 'protection' for the teaching of evolution in the classroom."
I pray that the day after this law passes, a biology teacher somewhere in the state walks into his classroom and spends the entire day showing how the fossil record contradicts the silly Genesis story in the Bible--knowing he's now protected by a law that says his principal and angry parents can't do jackshit to stop him.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The knife cuts both ways: Science teachers are now free to say "Creationism is delusional nonsense" without fear of reprisal.
Trolling is a art,
I have the right to teach Evolution in Sunday School?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Now the students can write "God did it" on every question without the fear of getting a bad grade.
It is unfortunate that once again a group tried to legislate into "fact" what it cannot argue or demonstrate to be factual.
Shall we give equal rights to other religions? to be taught as facts about the formation of stars? Mohammedism? Buddhistology? shall we make the celestial teapot fact, by law?
The quote "explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal" sounds like the kindle for a flame war to me. It just means that teachers can make fun of or downplay topics that other teachers are teaching "without fear of reprisal".
Because apparently, we're devolving into a nation of idiots.
"Freedom of speech may be part of the Constitution, but I know of a place where the Constitution doesn't mean squat."
(The Supreme Court)
Requoting a sentence :
"...a bill that encourages science teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal."
So the article went straight from that wonderfully enlightened bill and went for creationism? Not partner preference, abortion, unsafe health conditions, or stem cells?
You could write 100 articles from that bill.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...and see how long it takes for this law gets amended.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
At first I thought 'Tennessee Bill' was some sort of Tea Party superhero.
If I wanted my kids to learn about creationism or intelligent design wouldn't I take them to a church? Or teach them myself? If my kids are learning about creationism in school and NOT evolution, I should be able to choose, and be funded by the state, to send my kids to a school that teaches observable science. Church/School/State should always be separated imo.
Personally I would take this opportunity to enlighten students in the way of Pastafarianism, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster...
When I made the mistake of moving to Tennessee from Florida, my children were way ahead of the others in both high school and middle school. They became bored. I was very surprised and disappointed to find the local high school was promoting religion instead of spending more time on the basics. When we moved back to Florida they had a lot of catching up to do -- initially it was tough but I'm lucky they're bright kids.
Tennessee is a state where you still have white people calling black people "boy", where the people I met were alarmingly uneducated, and where kids have no bright futures waiting for them. It is a backwoods stretch of stench, a blight to our nation.
not observable or repeatable
In that case, it's just like your religion.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've no idea if you are being serious or not. :(
Hey there are teachers at universities that teach that the 9/11 attacks where a plot by the US government and they get defended on the grounds of Academic freedom.
http://media.www.smithsophian.com/media/storage/paper587/news/2007/09/20/News/Umass.Professor.Supports.911.Conspiracy.Theory-2984244.shtml
Where do you draw the line? I agree that Creation science isn't but then I have heard teachers spout all sorts of tripe over the years. I know of one child that actually had a teacher that when she found out that she was a member of a certain religion start teaching a course about the history of the religion from a very negative view point and full of miss information. The school defended her teachers right to teach history how she saw fit and that was in high school.
So do you want the government to tell teachers what they can and can not teach?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Just say:
The bill also says that its "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."
And apparently it's all OK.
But yes, I look forward to a few teachers starting to teach the wackiest stuff they can think of. I'd pick old-school, myself. The four humors and all that.
But it *has* been observed. You've heard of antibiotic resistant bacteria, right?
It is both observable and has been repeated in many experiments.
Some of them are not even experiments per se: see antibiotics and bacteria.
In the interest of open dialog that truly allows learning and discovery, I pray the opposite of you. I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
Not observable or repeatable?!? Talk about showing your own damned ignorance.
Over 92% of Americans believe in God, but most Slashdotters don't, correct? I mean, not just saying they don't but degrading or belittling anyone's belief if they do.
Vescere bracis meis.
WHY, pray tell, does there have to be a conflict? And, by the way, evolution of simple organisms is observable and repeatable.
I am Spartacus
I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
Vaccine resistance.
Who is Tennessee Bill?
Which would put them on equal footing, wouldn't it?
In the interest of open dialog that truly allows learning and discovery, I pray the opposite of you. I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
Can't tell if trolling....
or just very stupid....
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
OK, let's suppose you're not trolling and you're not unwilling to challenge your own views. Not unreasonable assumptions, so watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI
And that's based on objective machines (DNA sequencers and computers comparing the sequences). The link is highly recommended for schools and teachers.
That means no Adam, no garden of eden, no eternal sin, no Jesus dying for our sins.
Bert
Not observable?
I guess that depends on your definition of "observable", since it was Darwin's observations that species that had left the mainland had evolved into new species that were better adapted to their new environment. We have observed hundreds of human and pre-human skeletons showing an evolution over a period of a million years from chimpanzees to modern humans. Countless other observations have been made. We have even recently observed that bacteria, when selective pressure (antibiotics) is applied, they tend to evolve (ie, "superbugs").
Not repeatable?
Again, lab experiments have shown this time and again. Take two bacterial colonies, start turning up the heat over a number of generations and you'll eventually have two separate colonies of thermophiles. In the wild, convergent evolution has been seen a number of times. The textbook example are birds and bats. They belong to different classes (mammalian vs avian) and from the fossil record, we know that the wings developed after the species split off, but both creatures have very similar wing structure.
Sure, it's entirely possible that our current understanding of Evolution is wrong. That's not now, and has never been, an issue. What is, however, is the presumption that an explanation cobbled together from ideas in a 2000 year old book, primal mythology, and uninformed fear mongering, is the correct one. If that's the case, how about the Norse, Hindu, Buddhist, or Zoroastrianism, all of which are older and better documented than the Christian slapshot. The fact that one theory might be right doesn't mean that another kooky one is correct and must be accepted without the same scientific rigor that prove the first one wrong (or right, we're not there, yet).
Most Christians are pretty ignorant as to what the bible actually says, so let me offer what might be a different view than has been presented here before:
It would be pretty stupid for any Christian to say that the Earth is a meager 6000 years old, yet they do it anyway. However, there is pretty clear text that says that to God, time is of no consequence. "A day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day" and all that. Now, consider that in the "seven days" that he created the world, day and night didn't even exist until the 4th day (correct me if I got the "day" wrong), which means that the way that we're measuring this time is wrong. So, the entirety of the creation process that is documented in the Bible is not something that Christians should be using to try and disprove Evolution, because it makes no mention whatsoever about how the inhabitants of the planet were created, and why would it be so wrong to believe that a creator would use the biological laws of the world he'd created to achieve said end?
Just consider it.
Oh no. Does this mean teaching of the FSM is legalized?
Can I teach that Thanksgiving was invented by the Turkey Voluntary Extinction movement?
I really want my child to learn about atheism. On Sunday we will sit and read Richard Dawkins books. Which is a bit hard going as I agree with him; but he is a bit too smug.
Not observed, but we know something occurs in natural systems that results in the change of species over time, usually to match their environments. That's what our current theory of evolution is based around.
Whereas the intelligent design idea is based around evidence that's either nonexistent, anecdotal, or disproven (from what I've read, anyway).
(Not trying to slam religion, here- I think that if God does exist, he could affect the universe to create life naturally. However, applying Occam's razor shows that the conditions for life forming randomly are much higher than some nebulous, as-yet unobserved entity doing same.)
Sent from my CR-48
Yep, it's been done with e.coli and fruit flies. Many, many, many times.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
This whole debate has everyone asking the wrong questions.
The problem is public education in the first place. Allow people to create schools however they want (without being crowded out by public education) and let the fittest survive.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
WHY, pray tell, does there have to be a conflict? And, by the way, evolution of simple organisms is observable and repeatable.
Please name one experiment where a simple organism gained information. The increase in genetic information is what is required to jump from microevolution to macroevolution
I just have one question. What is wrong with this bill as written? Go to the link and read the bill. It is amazingly clear for a law. I do not see anything in the bill that disagrees with positions taken on slashdot everyday by people from every ideological perspective. Just the other day we had a topic on here about how for most people science is something they take on faith. People were talking about how science is designed to be critiqued. This bill proposes that science teachers teach students how to do that "in an objective manner".
Forget what you think is wrong about the motivations of those who have written this bill. Evaluate this bill on the basis of what it actually says. I do not see any hidden phrases that allow it to enable some religious takeover of science education.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
so who needs it? that answer straightens out quite a bit of theatrical prop work? on to the tower of babel? convergences are pending.
using the genuine native american elders rising bird of prey leadership initiative (teepeeleaks etchings), there's more bad behavior than just real sex religious training, physical alterations & mutilations, depopulations, exterminations etc.. in our real history. our minds & spirits are also affected, but not dead yet, either. the planet will repair itself. will we? could probably breed out that hymen thing in a 1000 years or so, if nobody goes deity holycost on us again, ever. monkeys don't have one.
The difference still remains, small repeatable experimental pieces align with the larger evolutionary interpretation. When the religious right can repeatibly cause minor miracles to occur then the footing is equal.
Simple organisms like flowers, dogs, horses, etc. Mankind has been running evolution experiments at least for all of recorded history.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Who is Tennessee Bill, and why hasn't our FSM reached out to him?
That is all.
But... but.... RELIGION BAD!
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Idiot. An organism doesn't have to gain information to evolve. It just has to survive.
The anti-establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US constitution still trumps state law. Since the US Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that Creationism, "intelligent design", etc. are religious doctrine, they still cannot be taught in public school science classes, even in Tennessee. Just because this bill says they are not promoting religious doctrine doesn't make it so. If this passes, it will get tossed out as violating established constitutional law.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You can observe it. You just have to use some creature, with small life span, that produce many generation; something like a bacteria or a fungus. I my young time I made P. cubensis strain evolve to resist to a 2% h2o2 nutriment solution. Minus the now illegal part, this experiment should be easy to reproduce into a classroom.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are joking.
That means no Adam, no garden of eden, no eternal sin, no Jesus dying for our sins.
No it doesn't. You can be religious and think ID is a bunch of hooey. This isn't an either-or proposition.
When the religious right can repeatibly cause minor miracles to occur then the footing is equal.
Minor miracles are easy. They're required study at West Point in the future
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Why didn't soulkil opt for "Tennessee Bill Helps Teachers Challenge Genesis" or "Tennessee Bill Helps Teachers Present Evolution" To the implication was that teachers could NOT teach evolution...
I can start a debate on whether the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster is regular pasta, whole wheat grain variety or both? Or would this fall under the school's nutrition program? RAMEN!
This only means less competition in the work place for people who actually have a brain.
I was only thinking in terms of lab experiments, but yeah domestication can be seen as a sort of guided evolution. Chickens, among others, are so separated from their wild predecessors that they wouldn't do very well in the wild. Bananas, cows, etc. ... the list goes on.
I am Spartacus
Science is all about questioning what we know of science. Science classes should be completely open to discussion of scientific issues.
Creationism is not science and has no basis in science and is not even positioned even remotely as a testable scientific theory with even an ounce of evidence. Creationism is theology. Leave it in the theology classes and churches.
funny
Which would put them on equal footing, wouldn't it?
Well except for the volumes and volumes of data that show species changing over time from the fossil record. Religion just has 'a book that says so' for its evidence. So not exactly 'equal' footing.
Lets also take into account that the biblical scholars say the world is just a few thousand years old. Except that the volume of evidence for evolution clearly shows that the world is *billions* of years old.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I find it quite sad to see so many jurisdictions enshrining an ignorance of basic science into law, and defending the right of people to be both incredibly wrong, and to have their heads up their asses at the expense of verifiable scientific facts and discourse.
If your god intended you to be a drooling idiot, he wouldn't have given you the capacity to think.
I don't have a problem with religion, but when it decides that stupidity is the best course, and that it's best to ignore what we actually know about the world around us, it's quite pathetic.
I fail to see why religion needs to be compatible with basic science ... I realize there's a lot of different variations on Christianity, but even the Vatican has accepted basic science. It seems like the more you demand the right to deny evolution and the like, the more likely you are to be a wacky, radicalized person who insists that only your interpretation of the bible is correct -- and that anybody who disagrees with you is evil.
The friggin' Scopes Trial was in 1925 -- but it seems like some people are still convinced that there is a need to live in the dark ages and pretend we haven't learned anything ... though, TV and Wal Mart don't seem to be a problem.
This is like not marking children wrong on anything factual because everybody is entitled to their own opinion, and maybe little Billy really felt that 2+2=5, and we don't want to hurt his feelings.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Of course it isn't.
But it IS "an either-or proposition" if you insist on a LITERAL interpretation of The Bible.
You can be religious and understand/accept evolution and understand that "The Garden of Eden" was a parable.
You CANNOT believe that The Garden of Eden was a physical location on Earth and understand/accept evolution.
Not without some serious mental gymnastics about a trickster god.
There are a few things that you need to understand about why this is an issue. Christianity collapses entirely without the Creation story. While under Judaism, it was just a parable to explain the creation of the world, Christianity gives this story teeth for the following reason: The basis for Jesus's sacrifice was that Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden. From the Instant that happened, with the exception of a few Jews that followed the laws of Moses, 99.999% of all Humans all born on Earth before or since were damned to Hell. Thats the only reason the evolution issue is an issue at all. If this myth isn't true (and it isn't.) Christianity collapses and Jesus died for absolutely no reason than being a cult leader the Romans wanted to execute. (make no mistake, Christianity IS a doomsday cult.)
A few things about the Judeo-Christian God Yahweh:
- He started out as part of a War God along side two other gods, Ba'al, and Asherah. When their followers were eradicated Yahweh was given the title of 'Elohim'
- Jehovah is Yahweh in German
- He is a male God. Who advocates male supremacy and is VERY misogynistic
- He is very mean, cruel, and most Humans have a morality superior to Yahweh, in his original form. Yahweh has been watered down a whole bunch.
- Yahweh is often refered to as 'The Lord' due to Censorship in English copies of the Bible. It is considered a violation of the Ten commandments to call Yahweh, 'Yahweh'.
The issue is that for reasons of social control. US Christians do not believe their civilization will survive without Christianity. Yahweh is a tribal god that his followers keep extending and expanding his powers. Yahweh is not real, he is only as powerful as his followers say he is. As such, without an all powerful Yahweh to bind everyone, and keep the masses in line, A whole lot of people who make a whole lot of money, and have a whole lot of power stand to lose their power if belief in Yahweh fades.
Another thing is there are Humans in this world who believe the myth of Heaven and Hell. To those people, when the 'end' comes, they are supremely worried that Yahweh will let exactly zero Humans (or at least not them) into Heaven. The creation myth is a big part of the idea that Jesus died for the original sin of Man. The religion doesn't work if the Garden of Eden never happened.
Not to mention, simple fruit-fly experiments.
Or . . .simply observing the generations of one's own family.
It isn't proof. To be fair, there is very little that is absolutely provable. But at least it is testable and we have gathered evidence to support it. Simply saying "but the bible says" is not evidence, proof, testable, or in any way on earth even remotely addressable by the scientific method. Having religion in science class makes absolutely no sense. Do religious people attend church or theology classes to learn about physics?
I'll admit, it's been almost 20 years since I've been in high school. In Texas. Not only do I not recall any debate about the issue then, I don't even remember EITHER side being discussed in any great detail. What "science" class would discuss evolution anyway, except perhaps biology, where it's reasonably appropriate. Even so, it's a topic that would consume all of about 10 minutes. As far as religion goes, the most in-depth discussion about that would be in my senior English class when we were reading Dante.
I don't even understand why anyone's so excited about this. So an amino acid popped out of the primordial soup some 4 billion years ago. Was it random chance, or did some higher power guide that moment. Maybe some passing alien spacecraft dumped its garbage and it leaked out. The point is, from that moment on, all of history is exactly the same. All of the biological sciences are exactly the same. It doesn't freaking matter how it happened, we just know it happened. So if some teacher wants to say that some people believe that God created all life on Earth by manipulating the first amino acid into forming, then let them. All we're proving here is that people on both sides of the debate have WAY too much free time on their hands.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Lets be fair, AC's ilk believes in all children looking exactly like their parents, being the same size and just as dumb. It's called 'incest'.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
That doesn't count. Ask any creationist.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
There's no such thing as 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' there's evolution.
What, precisely do you mean by 'gained information'. We're talking random chance coupled to fitness here. If someone throws a die and it lands on 6 five times in a row, has 'information been gained'? When a population of copper-tolerant grasses evolves that manages to live on mine spoil tips, is information gained? Antibiotic resistance in bacteria? The ability for a flu virus to mutate and survive in humans?
It is, in fact, both observable and is currently observed. As far as "repeatable" goes, there are plenty of processes impossible for humans, with our technology, to repeat, but it does not mean they do not occur. If not being able to repeat a process meant it wasn't a real thing that actually occurred, then there would be no such thing as stars, quasars, black holes, weather, or continental drift, as well as most other things that occur within the confines of our universe. So, this part of your argument is rather stupid.
The evidence for evolution is profound and overwhelming, and it is clearly seen at work in any species we care to observe. Mutation, natural selection, allele shift over time, etc. Speciation events have been observed in the thousands in modern times, and the fossil records shows many thousands of clear transitional forms. Every piece of evidence we find supports evolution, and not one piece of data has ever been shown to contradict it. It's as well evidenced as gravity, orbital theory, relativity, continental drift, etc. The only way to not see evolution occurring, at this point, is to willfully ignore and deny the tremendous amounts of evidence that show it true.
You know what we can't find any evidence for, though? What we've been looking thousands of years for and have not found one bit, one shred of evidence, directly or indirectly of? God.
This is a fallacy that keeps getting spouted off by ID proponents.
Genetic information CAN be gained... but even if it couldn't, it wouldn't matter. The amoeba... one of the "simplest" forms of life, has one of the largest observed genomes to date.
Simply through mutation of existing genetic information, the passing of it through sexual and non-sexual reproduction we can observe (yes OBSERVE) changes in genotype and phenotype.
I think that if God does exist, he could affect the universe to create life naturally.
Agreed. Personally, I am waiting for the bible thumpers to claim that 'created in his own image' actually meant DNA based lifeforms. They're so good at changing what they say their book actually means to counter when science proves it completely false ;-)
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Fucking magnets... how do they work?
In his TV show Cosmos, Carl Sagan showed how Japanese fishermen would throw crabs that had bumps on their shells that looked a bit like Samori back into the sea. He that because of this many more of those crabs would survive to reproduce (since they were not eaten by the Japanese) and they passed the genes onto their offspring that produced the bumps on their shells. Eventually the crabs shells started looking more and more like the face of a Samori as the fishermen would throw back the crabs that looked the most like a Samori face. This selective breeding did not take very long either.
Evolution follows the same process as selective breeding, the only difference is that the former takes place over a longer period of time and is not directed by man. Consider the dog. Over thousands of years we have created hundreds of new breeds of dogs in a process not unlike evolution. The dog is also proof of evolution.
This allows teachers to present alternate theories to evolution, not "finally teach evolution" like many posters are indicating. I went to a public highschool in Tennessee. Contrary to popular belief, the "religious South" does not teach Creationism in public schools. Teachers are forced to teach evolution and nothing else. They can't even answer questions about alternate theories, which is ridiculous. Science should be no more immune to critique, question, and criticism than religion ought to be. Nothing is too sacred to question, be it faith, science, or personal beliefs.
Additionally, also contrary to popular belief, evolution and creationism can co-exist. Strict young-earth creationists won't agree, but those with a open mind can find plenty of ways to allow them to coexist just fine.
*equips anti-flame armor* Here come the responses lol
Oh... and I don't need to cite an experiment. I can point to a real world example.
Down's syndrome is caused by the presence of an extra chromosome. THAT is additional genetic information right there.
Just because YOU can't figure out how an organism can gain information (and likely this is because you don't know enough about biology) doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
That is the basis of intelligent design. "I can't figure out how it could happen, that means that it doesn't - And no... I refuse to learn more so that I might be able to figure it out". That's fundamentally the basis of irreducible complexity - I can't figure it out the evolutionary mechanism, therefore it must have been designed. It's sad because others DO... and every example of irreducible complexity offered up by the ID community has plausible processes by which they could have evolved.
We will use science to destroy wisdom and blind ourselves to what cannot be weighed or measured.
We will use use religion to become insane and become deaf to the truth..
If Science and Religion do not become one, the human species won't be around for a very long time I am afraid.
Each alone releases horrific consequences, but together they form a philosophy that can take us to the stars, or perhaps beyond our current Universe.
Religion will provide us the faith to try and get there
Science will provide the means.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
You can be religious and think ID is a bunch of hooey. This isn't an either-or proposition.
True.
But what happens when someone moves from absolutely believing that the Bible is an infallible document that is absolutely the correct un-tainted word of God, to discovering that it's full of errors, omissions, inconsistencies, and has been changed in thousands of places over time.
Changes that are both accidental and intentional. Changes made for reasons both innocent and manipulative.
It's a big deal to discover that something you thought was infallible has errors.
Then what? If it has one big error , how many more are there?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
And that is exactly why "Intelligent Design" or "Creationism" is NOT a science and should NEVER be taught in a science class.
Science requires that any hypothesis or theory be falsifiable. At least in theory. It may be impossible to perform the experiment to falsify it.
With non-science, there is no way to falsify it.
If the experiment shows A, then the creator wanted it to.
If the experiment shows B, then the creator wanted it to.
Since it is not science, it should not be taught (even as a "controversy") in a science class.
Leave it in the social sciences / philosophy classes.
Theories.. These are all theories. There may be archeological evidence that seems to support evolution. There may be archeological evidence that seems to support the stories taught in the Bible and many other ancient religious texts. Why is it that some theories are accepted so profoundly as truth by one group, and then another group is mocked and slandered for accepting a different theory? All the comments here that mock creationism and open ideology are sad and contradictory to the idea of open discussion of theories and possibilities. This isn't progress. This is conflict.
So is intelligence making stuff :-)
Table-ized A.I.
Well except for the volumes and volumes of data that show species changing over time from the fossil record. Religion just has 'a book that says so' for its evidence. So not exactly 'equal' footing.
Yeah, but for people who really and truly believe in that one book "that says so", the footing isn't anywhere close to equal...
You do know the difference between speciation and adaptation right? To wit: a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are both still dogs. Antibiotic resistant bacteria is still bacteria, and more to the point, still the same species of bacteria it was previously.
I wonder if other professors or teachers in the past had to defend themselves when they spoke about the number zero which at one time didn't make sense or was feasible to the masses or other teachers, or had to defend themselves when they tried to say the world was round when the general consensus in the scientific realm was that the world was flat, or that there really wasn't any ether, etc...
I consider myself religious, but to try to demand that one line of thinking is fact and all others are "silly", is just being plain close minded and ignorant. I'm sure back in the days "when ether existed" there were plenty of scientists that could "prove" that it existed, as well as "prove" that the world was flat or that "zero" didn't really exist as a number.
Maybe we should instead have our kids learn to make decisions and build their brains to come up with new ideas and thoughts instead of trying to ram other's ideas down their throats like it is the "absolute truth", whether it be creationism, intelligent design, evolution, or 2 + 2 = 4. I'd much rather my kids learn to learn and think for themselves than to walk through life with some basic knowledge that may be disproved either at some point of their lives or hundreds of years from now.
If you can teach evolution alternatives with legal impunity:
I don't even need a ??? step!
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
and you can't fire me for claiming so. Or give a presentation that yanking off keeps the prostrate healthy. That'll get the fundie school board's panties in a knot.
Table-ized A.I.
So the 47th and 36th ranked states in K-12 education are the two leading proponents for this. Say no more.
Controversy or well accepted should not be the grounds for teaching. Teachers should teach topics that have proof reguardless of how contraversial. Gravity is uncontraversial and has proof (Teach It!) Evolution is very contraversial and has proof (Teach It) Intellegent design is contraversial and does not have a shred of proof (Don't Teach it) The real litmus test should NOT be how contraversial something is, but rather is it based on fact or faith.
Want to teach creationism or intelligent design? Go ahead, but do so in a theology class. Those concepts have no business whatsoever being taught in a science class.
If this thing passes anyone who cares about their child's education should move out of that state.
What a travesty. Between this, the fixation on celebrity culture and a total lack of work ethic America is truly doomed.
Do religious people attend church or theology classes to learn about physics?
Sadly, considering that there are fundies who are opposed to Einstein's Theory of Relativity (apparently because it advocates something being 'relative' rather than 'absolute'), I think they just might.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
It is both observable and has been repeated in many experiments.
Some of them are not even experiments per se: see antibiotics and bacteria.
Creationists have trouble differentiating between evolution, speciation, abiogenesis, the big bang, and the complete reproductive history of every organism that ever existed. Their religion lumps it all together, so they aren't use to thinking of them as separate questions.
No part of a story about the world being created some 6 thousand years ago by a magical sky wizard adds up to dinosaurs that were around millions and billions of years ago.
According to creationists, the large reptile/bird creatures we call "dinosaurs" were called taninim (sing. tanin) by the ancient Hebrews. Some dinosaurs, those too big to fit in a 450 by 75 by 45 foot barge built under the direction of Noah Lamechson, died in the great flood of 1656 Anno Mundi. Smaller ones, such as the velociraptor Deinonychus famous from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, may have been hunted to death before the flood. Still other creatures were aquatic, such as the plesiosaur (one of the possibilities for Heb. leviathan), but could not adapt to the post-flood composition of seawater. As for fossil records and radioisotope dating, young-Earth creationists have their own theories on how the flood interferes with those.
Really that is what it all boils down to. No person or group has any right not to be mortally offended. That is what free speech is really all about. There is no real argument about evolution and the Bible. So what if God used evolution to create all things. Evolution is simply one tool that God might choose to use. And we have no clue about what Genesis means by seven days and seven nights either. For all we know God used Lucifer to create heaven and Earth just so we would have things like jock itch, athlete's foot and tooth ache in our world.
That's mutation which is only a small part of evolution. There are no experiments that make new species, sorry bud.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
I think Tennessee Bill's existence itself challenges evolution!
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
Yes, you have the right to find a church that will allow you to teach Evolution in Sunday School.
This is mutation, not evolution. Evolution results in new species, not mutation within a species.
Perhaps this is a large part of the problem, even evolutions supporters dont know what it is.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
"I deal only in facts, that's why I'm a cocky fuckin' bastard." -- Bill Hicks
The problem is that clamping your hands over your ears and screaming "Lalalalalala I can't hear you!" has become a viable strategy. There seems to be no selection process against it. If we're in the woods and I tell a conservative a mushroom is poisonous and they shouldn't eat it and they do, the problem resolves itself. In the modern day, I can tell them a fact that's every bit as true as the one about the mushroom such as deficits mattering but it doesn't just kill them, it kills both of us. What's wrong with this picture?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Pastafarianism predicts a decrease in global temperature as piracy increases, as evidenced by the fact that the Golden Age of Piracy occurred during a little ice age. But the lack of rapid global cooling after Napster and the P2P outbreak that followed it would appear to disprove this prophecy.
The bill's text, if passed into state law, would protect teachers from discipline if they "help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught," namely, "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
This presents no advancement of ID and only allows for -scientific- criticism and exploration of evolution (something which anyone worthy of calling themself a "scientist" is going to readily support).
Happy: Science teachers should most definitely explore controversial topics. All teachers should explore controversial topics. That is a fundamental part of teaching.
Sad: Does this mean that prior to this law, a teacher could not discuss a controversial topic? That is frightening!
I don't understand the criticism though:
Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom.
How so? It seems like it would do the opposite by allowing good science without fear of political reprisal.
...protect teachers from discipline if they help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught..."biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." The bill also says that its "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."
So you have stupid friends. All that tells me is that your friendships are unintelligently designed.
As for your inability to realize what a "theory is", please test your god by jumping off a goddam cliff. That'll show that theory of gravity (or, more exactly, *theories* of gravity. Be sure to deny all of them on your way down.) Oh, and be sure to take your Bible, so it can go thump one last time.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Watching Cosmos is like comfort food to me. However, I was saddened a bit while reading Dawkins' "The Greatest Show On Earth" when he debunks that example of evolution.
On the other hand, the whole purpose of the book is to provide examples and evidence for evolution and its mechanisms. It's actually quite a good book. It would be awesome to see a tv series made of it.
Two comments here:
(1) The constitution says something along the lines of "...Separation of Church and State." Let me be VERY clear on this. That does not mean "NO RELIGION IN SCHOOLS OR GOVERNMENT". That simply means, that the government has no right or authority to designate a certain religion, or discriminate against a certain religion.
(2) I perfectly understand that people have their owns beliefs of how the world got here. A song writer wrote "Can we agree to disagree?". In a country where we have the freedom to choose, I believe you have the right to choose what you want to believe. However, you DO NOT have the right to shove your belief down my throat. I encourage you to examine the two most popular beliefs of how the world came to be: Creation or Evolution. Ask yourself this question as you do this: "Why am I here, and what is my purpose?". I think you will find that is the question people want an answer too.
no loss
In his TV show Cosmos, Carl Sagan showed how Japanese fishermen would throw crabs that had bumps on their shells that looked a bit like Samori back into the sea. He that because of this many more of those crabs would survive to reproduce (since they were not eaten by the Japanese) and they passed the genes onto their offspring that produced the bumps on their shells. Eventually the crabs shells started looking more and more like the face of a Samori as the fishermen would throw back the crabs that looked the most like a Samori face. This selective breeding did not take very long either. Evolution follows the same process as selective breeding, the only difference is that the former takes place over a longer period of time and is not directed by man. Consider the dog. Over thousands of years we have created hundreds of new breeds of dogs in a process not unlike evolution. The dog is also proof of evolution.
But you aren't describing random mutations and random evolution. You're more closely describing something that can be compatible with intelligent design. Or in this case, inadvertent design. Crabs "evolving" into Samori face looking creatures and new breeds being created happened through intervention of ... in this case ... man. It wasn't some random, scientific thing that precludes there being any interaction.
By the way, back to evolution, shouldn't there be dozens... maybe hundreds... maybe thousands of fossils of creatures somewhere between monkeys and humans? Or did that evolution happen in one generation?
Who mod'ed that up?
It makes the same old mistake that we see every time this topic comes up.
A scientific theory is NOT the same as a "theory".
A scientific theory is NEVER "proven".
A scientific theory can only be shown to be flawed.
You are 100% wrong.
...though that could lead to a very interesting - if short - discussion in science classes in Tennessee about the evidence for the efficacy of prayer...
hmm... then how did anything increase into a more complex structure? Survival does not imply progression.
Survival with selection can imply a drive to complexity. Given a source of pattern-generation structures (organisms), those that are selected for by the environment survive.
Evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven.
Either you are thinking of a form of proof (like mathematical proof) that could never be applied to evolution, or you simply don't know of the many tests, models, experiments, etc. You can't re-run the tape of history to 'prove' that it happened that way, but you can check various obvious things
From a non-religious point-of-view, there is absolutely no reason that evolution should be granted any merit beyond intelligent design.
Really? Apart from it being actual science, and not just a thin screen for creation 'theory'?.
I have friends who believe in intelligent design who are atheists. Intelligent design does not predicate a deity.
And who do they suppose is the intelligent designer? Aliens? So who designed them?
A much better solution to the problem of "where is the designer?" is that organisms designed themselves. That is, the interactions between molecules, cells, organisms, and physical environments is a design process. That's evolution.
As far as I am concerned the practice of religion should be confined to adults only. The teaching of religion should be treated with the same disgust as grooming of children for child abuse.
A nice writeup here about one such experiment-- along with the backlash that accompanies proof that contradicts conservative beliefs.
God is imaginary
From Dictionary.com
Evolution: Biology . change in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation by such processes as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.
Honestly, what are you talking about? I think the bigger problem is that opponents don't know what it is. Case in point.
Species take time. There was a new plant species discovered to have evolved because of climate change (ie it cannot mate with its parent species). However, it's not really a good idea to use this method to try to make new species.
Another step back toward the Middle Ages.
If they want religion taught in public schools it should be offered as an alternative to Greek or Roman Mythology and not to science.
What's next, the Inquision?
Hmmm. Do not remember now, but i believe that some court decided that creationism is nor science, is a form of religion. Science is something you can proof, experiment, validate, test, repeat, modify.... Religion is dogma. The two are things totally separate. In the science field one can not operate only with beliefs. The models used in science can be inaccurate, or wrong, or stupid and you abandon them when they tested wrong and you construct another model better suited with reality. Religion is a conscience matter. And i believe that one of the fundamental liberties is the liberty of conscience. If somebody tries to force on me some religious beliefs, i get nervous... :| And which creationism theory is the "real" one, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist (incomplete list...)?
Yes, but speciation does have support. Speciation has been observed. (Obviously it takes millions of years, so it is not the same species going through all stages). We have, however, seen groups of organisms going through a species split.
The guy you're responding to is wrong, but nowhere near as wrong as you. If you're stupid enough to say things like "evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven", you're probably not worth wasting time on, but what the hell:
First of all, evolution and intelligent design aren't mutually exclusive. It's quite possible that some type of "creator" - whether it be a guy with a beard, or a black monolith - created life on earth. However, that in no way contradicts the fact that all life on earth is related, and that both the geological and genetic record prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all present-day species are descended from common ancestors. As long as your idea of "intelligent design" doesn't posit a magic-man who's constantly tweaking things, there's nothing contradictory between intelligent design and evolution.
Where intelligent design fails is a whole different issue. For starters, it posits no testable hypothesis. It offers no evidence. It attempts to put an end to further discussion and discovery, rather than opening new avenues of exploration. The phrase "god dun it" is not an answer - it's an appeal to ignorance. The same 'answer' has been used for tens of thousands of years to explain anything that we as a species couldn't understand. Why do we have lightning? God dun it. Why does the earth shake? God dun it. Why is there a flood? God dun it. In EVERY SINGLE PAST CASE, it was scientific scrutiny and the curiosity of man which eventually gave us a real answer, while the religious troglodytes continued to pound their holy books and point at their invisible dude in the sky. In every single case, the religious 'answer' was wrong. What possible combination of neural misfiring could convince you that, in this case, your answer happens to be right? And why would you EVER be satisfied with an answer that doesn't lead you to new questions?
In the interest of open dialog that truly allows learning and discovery, I pray the opposite of you. I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
It's a sad day on slashdot when bollocks like this is modded as insightful.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Nope. The existence of a _single_ antibiotic resistant bacteria is evidence for mutation. The fact that that single mutant bacteria's offspring are rather rapidly taking over the niche previously held by its non-resistant brethren is evidence for natural selection changing a species.
But you're right; the evolution debate would be greatly helped by more people - on both sides - actually understanding what evolution is. Perhaps they should teach it in schools or something?
You're confusing "theory" with "hypothesis". Biologists have agreed that evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis over a century ago.
What most intelligent design supporters seem to lack is the ability to imagine huge numbers. To be specific, huge numbers of individuals from one species which are born in every generation, huge numbers of individuals that die before they get a chance to reproduce and huge number of generations born over millions of years. If you realize how incredibly huge these numbers are, you also realize that those incredibly small odds for single individual are actually very close to 1 for the population as a whole.
I can see how it would break the establishment clause to teach "X is true", but not for "Catholics say X is true".
http://xkcd.com/556/
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Horseshit. Evolution has been observed as new species happen, and the fossil record is pretty clear on how it has worked from the past. We don't know every detail for every species, but to say evolution has yet to be proven is at best disingenuous, and at worst an outright lie.
Except, there is no evidence to support intelligent design in any meaningful way other than to say "we have an alternate theory which should be listened to", and it's all predicated on the fact that something seems so complex to you that it couldn't have possibly evolved. There is however physical evidence and observations of evolution.
Because only someone with a vested interest in there being a 'who' is proposing ID. Science starts with a point of view which is inherently atheist, and absent any evidence to suggest any basis for theism, keeps it that way. Without evidence to suggest some "supernatural" force, we assume only natural forces have been at play. So, until we see some physical proof to suggest that a deity or other outside actor was in mucking about with the life-forms, it's an extraordinary claim with absolutely no proof or evidence to support it.
Seriously, what evidence is there to suggest intelligent design? I would say there is no credible, factual, physical evidence other than supposition by people who engage in wishful thinking.
Again, horseshit. You don't seem to know what the scientific definition for theory, or if you do, you're intentionally ignoring it to try to muddle the conversation with your mumbo-jumbo.
If gravity hadn't been deemed a "law" several hundred years ago, it would still be considered a "theory". While something could come along to invalidate what we think about gravity, an awful lot of stuff has been shown which is consistent with the notion of gravity.
Anybody who says they're an atheist who believes in ID is either lying, an agnostic, or a crack-pot.
Because the only explanations become: deity, space aliens, or some "unknowable actor", which for all intents and purposes gets us back to deity.
Show me one falsifiable experiment you could do to learn anything about Intelligent Design. If you can't, your entire position is a fairy tale, and cannot be construed as science. Science has testable, verifiable and falsifiable hypothesis ... if you don't have the ability to offer those, don't call yourself science, and don't try to put yourself on equal footing with it.
All you're doing is saying "well, it's possible that the bogey man came in and did something, and since you can't disprove it, my theory is as good as yours".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ther needs to be a followup.
The option to make kids aware of the existence of alternatives to the mainstream thinking is great, however there now needs to be constant checking to make sure it stays balanced, otherwise this opportunity will get hijacked by radical teachers to only teach a wildly unbalanced personal agenda.
A) Mutation is part of evolution and
B) Speciation has been observed anyway
even evolutions supporters dont know what it is.
Neither do you.
Then your atheist friends aren't very sharp. Intelligent design requires an omnipotent, eternal entity - aka God. Intelligent design requires a deity in its thesis.
You're correct that survival does not imply progression. Neither does complexity. Progression in the sense of improving something requires a value judgment, which makes it an entirely arbitrary decision. Progression in the sense of merely something changing requires no value judgment, but also means much less than you imply.
As for your AI example, you're implying that something happens in a few decades that took billions of years to happen without outside influence. I'd look for an intelligent designer at that point as well - although you might be surprised to find out what was and what wasn't designed. Finally, your AI example also merely indicates that it is possible for something to be intelligently designed and become intelligent itseld (assuming strong AI will actually happen). It does not show that intelligence is not possible without an intelligent designer. Your basic logic class will show you that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So entities would no longer be able to choose to undergo arbitration under, say, either Sharia or Jewish Law, if they so choose--as they have innumerable times in the past. (One would think that people who claim to be as in love with the constitution as the Teabaggers would be aware of the Supremacy Clause anyway.) TN is a hopeless redneck state. I move that we question the legitimacy of having brought it back into the Union. TN seceded; it's not in my country.
There are no experiments that make new species, sorry bud
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html
Sorry Chuckles.
My head comes close to exploding every time I hear someone say we evolved from chimps or monkeys. We didn't. We are closely related but we are not descended from them. None of our closest ancestors are alive today, and haven't been for many hundreds of thousands of years. It's questions like "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?" that make it so hard for me to have an intelligent debate with creationists. I mean seriously, TRY to understand other viewpoints and theories besides your own.
I am reading the book Anarchy Evolution; Faith, Science, and Bad Religion and remember reading a passage that fits this perfectly:
"Sometimes creationists argue that educators should be forced to 'teach the controversy.' But there is no scientific controversy, just a social controversy."
It is completely absurd that intelligent design would be taught in a "science" curriculum since there is not one single piece of scientific evidence to support it thus meaning that intelligent design and creationism don't fit the definitions of science. However,I love the comments on here about how this can be used to an advantage in now being able to scientifically show how ridiculous the claims made by religion truly are and allow students to investigate it for themselves and make up their own minds.
Do you have any clue where the boundaries for "new species" are for bacterium? Quit yapping until you've cracked open a biology book. This stuff ain't that hard. You just have to pay attention in class.
Just say:
The bill also says that its "shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine."
And apparently it's all OK.
But yes, I look forward to a few teachers starting to teach the wackiest stuff they can think of. I'd pick old-school, myself. The four humors and all that.
I suspect that the problem there is that the school board can find other reasons to fire you, move you to the special ed class, or find some other way to make sure you won't be teaching the potential leaders of tomorrow, if you piss them off.
Evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven
Congratulations on not knowing anything at all about science. Theories are never proven, only disproven.
Intelligent design does not predicate a deity.
Wait, what? What is the designer then, if not a deity?
In my high school there was a push going on from the religious right which amounted to about a dozen "holier than thou" troublemakers - my Biology teacher was itching for a fight but all the nuts were next door. The position was then as it should always be-- it is a SCIENCE education and it is up to the teacher to spend as much time as they choose explaining the science; they can address stupid creationist questioning or they can simply shut up the student; who has no right to speak to the point of being disruptive. If they fail to learn the SCIENCE in a SCIENCE class then they get an F. They can believe what they will but they can't be exempt from doing what the course requires. This is what some of them next door complained about and their lower grades didn't result in any legal battles; however, I suspect they were still given leniency from the retiring teacher next door. This group did fight for recognition of their prayer group and schools are truly terrorized by lawsuits; they didn't get formal recognition but they informally got more than some legit activities.
It's an extra copy of chromosome 21, not a new and unique chromosome.
No. Having two copies of the same book on your shelf doesn't give you additional information-- it just crowds the other books.
WHY, pray tell, does there have to be a conflict? And, by the way, evolution of simple organisms is observable and repeatable.
Please name one experiment where a simple organism gained information. The increase in genetic information is what is required to jump from microevolution to macroevolution
There is no such things as micro or macro- evolution, it's just evolution. The two terms only exist in the minds of creationists.
Read the actual bill, the Science Mag reporter is a moron.
Intelligent design does not predicate a deity
Not so, the idea of intelligent design predicates there being some being or beings with some form of sentience which did the designing. Obviously any being with the capability of "intelligently designing" the universe would be a deity regardless whether you would like to call it that or not.
If you stated that intelligent design does not predicate belief in a specific religion or the belief of a single deity over many, etc. you are correct. But in order for there to be "intelligent design" instead of evolution then there must have been a designer or designers. Without a sentience behind the design, then you are claiming that everything "came into being" spontaneously, only intelligently.
In the interest of open dialog that truly allows learning and discovery, I pray the opposite of you. I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
Look, just because "observable", to you, solely means "able to see it demonstrated on Fox News before I get bored because this is so slow and stupid and boring and dull and nerdy and dorky and hey isn't American Idol on you're boring and nerdy, NERD", doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's just that those of us with longer attention spans can study things that happened further back than your last shopping trip to restock your beer supply.
There is nothing you can do to "question" the "so-called" science of evolution. Evolution is an observed, verified fact. The explanation of the observed fact is the Descent with Modification constrained by Natural Selection.
Evolution has been observed numerous times, in many ways. "Not observable or repeatable": That is simply false. There are a number of experimental demonstrations of evolution and its mechanisms, and vast amounts of observations in the wild. And contrary to the assertions of the fabulists, we've even observed speciation directly. Many times.
Stop looking at "Answers in Genesis", and open a good science book. If you are actually open to evidence, you'll see that those who told you evolution has not been observed are simply bs'ing you.
You do realize that *most* religious people easily accept that the earth is more than ~6000 years old.
Honestly, I have faith in a God and I have accepted science as truth as well. To those of us who are not hiding under a rock, we do not find a conflict between religion and science.
I believe that understanding science & the laws of the universe is akin to understanding God. It doesn't have to be one or the other...it doesn't have to be evolution or the literal translation of Genesis. "Let there be light" isn't God flipping a fucking lightswitch...but it sure as hell makes me think of the Big Bang.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
If it reaches any higher court, it will be killed. Just like it was last time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_v._Aguillard
A law that allows teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal also works the other way - someone wanting to explain creationism might have been afraid to do so before but is free to do so now. It will be interesting to see what happens in practice as a result.
Basically though the law is a very good one as a real scientists should be able to explore all sides and explain potential flaws for every theory from different angles.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No?
Nothing that can be done in a day... Maybe 40 years.
A Russian experiment to produce a new species of fox.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/807641/posts
Nathan
Wait, what? What's evolution got to do with Jesus? You just went off the reservation with that one.
The J and E thread reverse which comes first, animals or man. That's my favorite part about creationists - their own book gets it wrong almost immediately.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I'm 30 years old and from the South. When I was a child evolution was the only acceptable subject that could be taught in science class. We discussed the religions of the world, including Christianity, in social studies. They were discussed and evaluated through an academic lens. In freshman Biology a girl raised her hand and asked the teacher: "Do you really believe in evolution?" with an astonished look on her face. The rest of the class snickered and the teacher said that of course she did. It was truly funny to the rest of us that she would be that sheltered. Fundies where a lot less common back then. There were one or two in each class but most people were only passively religious if at all. We weren't exactly in the boonies but we were in a small city bordered on all sides by about fifty miles of rural farmland. It frightens me how much and how fast things have changed. On Slashdot the European readers love to scoff at the backwards Americans but just ten years ago this sort of thing would be laughable. My great-grandmother was devoutly religious, my grandmother is religious, my mother was barely religious, and I am not religious at all. This is the trend that I grew up with and what I saw in most of my friends' lives. Somewhere along the line things shifted and that trend reversed.
I'll comment anyway (it will at least be valide about the abstract).
"a bill that encourages science teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal." Science teachers teach science thats a specific job description. Creationism is not science so science teachers can't teach it, thats religion studies or philosophy down the hall.
If the title of this post had been: "TN Bill Helps Science Teachers Avoid interference" then 90% of you would not have even reacted. Just because you respond like a mob with pitchforks, does not magically make this bill an attack on all that is your holy shrine of science...The bill does expressly prohibit a teacher to push a religion of any kind. As many of you have aptly pointed out, this bill protects the teaching of evolution just as much as it does the teaching of creationism. If a teacher addresses creationism, they are required to do so only in terms of its scientific strengths and weaknesses. The bill expressly only protects the relaying of scientific information.
hmm... then how did anything increase into a more complex structure? Survival does not imply progression.
Neither does the theory of evolution.
Evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven.
You really have no idea how science works. FFS go read a book on the subject. Firstly, evolution has been observed both in the laboratory and in nature. Look up Lenski's work on Cit+ E. Coli, polyploidy in Spartina Anglica (and look at what that does to the size of the genome) and the Red Vizcacha Rat. Secondly, the theory of evolution attempts to describe how this works. Note that it is a theory, which means that it has been critically tested, has not been falsified and has a high degree of evidential backing. Note also that theories are both contingent and corrigible.
From a non-religious point-of-view, there is absolutely no reason that evolution should be granted any merit beyond intelligent design.
Unfortunately it seems that all the proponents of "Intelligent Design" in the States just happen to be fundamentalist Christians and their "designer" seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to the god of the bible. If, one day, a computer program gains self-awareness, would it be correct in arguing that it simply 'came to be', and it did not have an intelligent designer? And this ridiculous argument was debunked before it was made by one of the great British philosophers, David Hume. Here's may take on it using your example. A computer program runs on a computer, the program will have at least one designer who will probably be different to the person who writes the code. The computer itself will have multiple designers and multiple manufacturers, so your supposed "intelligent designer" looks like a large team already. You will note the team live in the same universe as the software and the computer is made out of material in that universe. Given the number of bugs in virtually all software it would look like these designers and implementers are neither omnipotent or omniscient. Further you will not that the likes of Grace Hopper, Edsgar Djikstra and Alan Turing are all dead, so it doesn't look as though your designers are immortal either. If you are going to use an argument from analogy then you might find it useful to choose an example that has more similarities than dissimilarities to thing you are going to compare it with.
The Bible says that the world is flat and that the Sun orbits the Earth. Any intellectually honest proponent of the Talking Snake Theory of Creation would also be defending geocentrism and platygaeanism alongside creationism (moreso, since there are direct claims about platygaeanism and geocentrism in the Holy Bible), but we all know that they are not interested in intellectual honesty.
They've been playing the "God of the gaps" game for some time now, and they've noticed that the gaps keep shrinking and becoming fewer in number, so they're switching strategies from "God of the gaps" to "deny reality". It doesn't matter that their arguments have gone from questionable to openly laughable as long as their followers are gullible enough to swallow whatever they are fed.
Yeah I always wondered that. Like what kind of education and careers to these people have?
Kind of hard to be a Geologist if you think the world is 5000 years old. Astrophysics would be right out the door also... etc...
Anyway there will always be idiots, I think the bigger concern should be teaching better teachers, as apparently that is one job that you can do and having wacko ideas like the world being 5000 years old isn't going to be an impediment...
The issue is that evolution isn't controversial. Hell, even the Catholic Church recognizes it.
Not quite, the Catholic church promotes "theistic evolution" or "evolution with added god". This isn't compatible with the TofE in that it isn't naturalistic and it is teleological. Catholics are forbidden to believe in "atheistic evolution".
In any community of organisms, there are small genetic differences between each organism, that may be shown through different traits. (That guy has brown eyes, that guy has green eyes...) In any environment the organism is going to die, eventually. There are traits the organism can have that make it badly suited or well suited to it's current environment. If it is badly suited to it's environment, it will more than likely die before it is able to reproduce. If it is well suited to it's environment, the opposite could happen, and it may reproduce multiple times before it expires.
What we have now, is a new generation that is slightly better suited to the environment, and the new generation still has small genetic differences between each member, which may help or hinder it's ability to reproduce, and on, and on, and on.
The bacteria might slowly gain more and more genetic information by insertions, deletions, multiplication of sections in it's genetic code over millions of generations, which is why there is genetic diversity in the population of organisms.
Mistakes (anything except a perfect genetic copy) are made when cells divide. That's why people get cancer.
What should give it any further merit over any other not-disproven theory?
But intelligent design is not a theory, a theory is disprovable. Also, it is impossible to PROVE a theory, only to disprove it.
If you can find an organism that thrives in an environment that it is ill suited for, that would be proof against evolution.
BUT THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN NOW DOES IT.
Back in the 80s, my biology teacher in Oklahoma said she was required by the state to discuss creationism; and she did so. Also telling us that she was required by the state to do so. She spent all of about 5 minutes doing so, including shooting down the DNA is code argument.
But the teachers in TN, should also mention the Flying Spaghetti Monster, now that they're required to discuss alternative theories.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
But you're right; the evolution debate would be greatly helped by more people - on both sides - actually understanding what evolution is. Perhaps they should teach it in schools or something?
Perhaps they should teach it accurately in schools. I have always called it Darwin's theory of adaptation since that seems more accurate to his work. Our bodies are wondrous and have the ability to adapt to countless adverse conditions. People with no arms can adapt to use their feet like hands. The blind develop an acute sense of hearing. In Darwin's observations of the Galapagos Finches the birds had developed in such a way as to cope with the harsher environment Galapagos presented them. They were still Finches just "hard core biker" Finches.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You do realize that *most* religious people easily accept that the earth is more than ~6000 years old.
I do realize that most 'religious' people are hypocritical in their beliefs yes. The 'Church' explicitly argued the earth was only a few thousand years old for centuries until science proved them wrong. The sheer volume of religious beliefs disproved by science is staggering. The Church simply changes what they say the bible means when confronted with such evidence..
You can be religious, but if you are just taking the parts you don't find objectionable, then you aren't being true to your religion. For instance, Catholics who believe that same sex marriage is acceptable aren't true Catholics by the Church's own definition. They condemned Galileo for saying the earth revolved around the sun even though Galileo claimed it didn't violate the bible's writings.
In short, religion is not science and never will be unless God himself come down and starts providing actual evidence for his existence. Faith is admirable, even noble, but when you cherry pick what you want out of it you diminish yourself.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If your post wasn't modded troll I am going to take the Karma gamble here and see if mine gets modded that way.
If evolution is just a theory which has yet to be proven, and is equally valid to intelligent design. Then God has the hand of intelligent design is just a theory, which also have yet to be proven. However there has been a heck of a lot more time to prove the existence of God than to prove Evolution? By that logic it seems much less likely, given the time invested, that God will be validated before Evolution. So by that measure lets just teach Evolution on the basis that they haven't proved God over all these years, so its going to be even more difficult to prove intelligent design.
I am a religious person.... but seriously Intelligent Design has no place in school
I think you do not understand what "literal" means in this context.
Believing that The Garden of Eden was a place on Earth inhabited by Adam and Eve who were tempted blah blah blah is a literal interpretation of The Bible.
Then you do NOT subscribe to a literal interpretation. It's that easy.
Go buy a dictionary. Or use one of the on-line versions. You don't know what "literal" means nor do you grasp "straw man".
Who cares? This isn't about your personal interpretation (being non-literal) of anything.
Which is why your beliefs should NOT be taught in a science class.
Most people that believe the Bible and think ID is stupid don't think that Genesis is an error, they think it's a metaphor or parable, which there are plenty more of in the Bible. The GP is correct in saying that the evolution being fact doesn't change anything.
if the world weren't about to end.
I believe that the Bible WAS the "Inspired Word of God"
I believe that since its authorship, the multitudes of oral passdown, translation, and outright manipulation by some parties have left it a shell of what it was and what it could be. It has been effectively spoiled by the corruption of man, seeking power for himself over God.
I do not believe it is infallable, because people are fallable, and people have been responsible for its maintenance. But I believe it still contains spiritual truths...one just has to be willing to look for it.
I do believe in a literal Adam & Eve & The Garden, but not in the sense of "God took a rib...", but that these two people were effectively God's chosen & the origin of the Jewish people.
I believe in the Big Bang Theory, and in Evolution, because science has shown these things to be "true" - while we cannot go back in time & observe it directly, they are the best explanations for the origin of the universe.
I believe the creation story in the Bible is a primitive mind attempting to comprehend & explain being shown the Big Bang and evolution bringing about the world we live in.
I do believe that there is truth in religion still out there...and the strongest truth comes from a people that are willing and open and able to reconcile that religion and science are not mutually exclusive...that scientific truth can help you find religious truth; that understanding the laws of the universe is another path to understanding God.
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...shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine.
Logically:
...shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine.
=...shall not be construed to promote any doctrine.
=...shall be construed to promote no doctrine.
---> Nothing gets taught at school!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
" not observable or repeatable."
false and false.
We warehouse full of evidence, I can observe the human evolution through it's fossil record.
Like the Theory of Gravity, or Germ theory, or any other theory it even makes prediction. predictions that have been used to find data.
I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and actually read up before making statement some unqualified yokel taught you in you weekly mind rape session i.e. Church.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If it was true, yes. But there is evidences, observation, prediction, testing. All the things that make it a good science, unlike myth belief.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape
Fine, instead of saying that we "evolved from chimpanzees", I should have said that "we and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor". Is that better?
+1 insightful. Religion is bad, in fact it's so bad I'm glad you used caps.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Y'all niggahs are livin' in a TROLL STATE.
..seriously, is someone going to reign in the poop-eaters at some point? This is getting rediculous. The U.S. is full of rather dumb people right now, and the U.S. in general is just getting dumber and dumber with each passing year.
You definition of adaptation regard evolution is wrong. The rest of you argument was relative 50 years ago.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's a big deal to discover that something you thought was infallible has errors.
Then what? If it has one big error , how many more are there?
Hmmm...sounds very much like the IPCC's AR4. But that was written by the hand of man, not god. Oh, wait...
Every document on earth has an agenda, which is built into it by the people who write it. Really, is there any other reason to write, other than to share your worldview with others in hopes of convincing them to adjust their perspectives to match yours? Even entertainment writing tries to convince people to adjust their consciousness based on (sometimes) hidden themes and allegories. Writing for the purposes of advertising is a bit more blatant, in that it directly tries to tell you exactly what you should believe (Brand X is teh BESTEST!!! ZOMG, buy it NOWEZ!!!).
Scientific writings are no different, other than in one crucial point: they do (or should, if they're reputable) invite others to present evidence that refutes their conclusions. If their conclusions are disproved, they then (again, if they're reputable) seek to find out why, and adjust their conclusions accordingly rather than attacking the person who presented the evidence and calling them names. Like 'heretic' or 'witch' or 'denier'.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
My head comes close to exploding every time I hear someone say we evolved from chimps or monkeys. We didn't. We are closely related but we are not descended from them. None of our closest ancestors are alive today, and haven't been for many hundreds of thousands of years.
It's questions like "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?" that make it so hard for me to have an intelligent debate with creationists. I mean seriously, TRY to understand other viewpoints and theories besides your own.
I hate that argument too - but my greatest curiousity really when it comes to Evolution...WHY did ALL the more-common ancestors die out? I mean...I always looked at the "Why are there still monkeys around?" argument as stupid and in many ways PROOF of evolution. I mean, Evolution isn't a statement of Poof! Today there are (human ancestor species) and tomorrow there are just humans. Natural Selection suggests that mutations occour over time & those that are beneficial to the species get carried forward. But not every monkey would suddenly mutate....some wouldn't mutate at all & would carry on as fucking monkeys, while another group moved up the evolutionary ladder.
See though...turning that around...where the fuck are these "closest ancestors" and why did they go extinct? You would almost assume that there would be SOME around...perhaps a very small population, but that there would still be an population of effectively "caveman" out there we would have discovered on some island in the middle of assfuck, nowhere. And I don't mean some half-monkey half-man either, because that's just a fucking stupid anti-evolution argument too...but why aren't there those that can be almost directly tied to Homo Erectus instead of Homo Sapien? That's the piece I don't understand...but I'm not a scientist either, just a lowly computer tech.
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Because God told me it's true.
I can't wait to see this lawsuit turn up somewhere in the bible belt, where a student sues for getting an "F" on a test, and submits that because God told him that 2+2=5 the teacher has no right to dispute that knowledge as false.
Only after we get some incredibly stupid shit will people see the error of their ways. However, I've *already* seen some incredibly stupid shit, and frankly, it seems to be getting stupider with no sign of abating. Perhaps some time in the suture 2+2=5 will be accepted as fact, and no one will even bother trying to correct anyone.
We are truly headed for 'Idiocracy" where "ass" wins the academy award for best script.
Where is the FSM in all this? Can *that* theory also be taught in Tennessee Schools?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There is no clear-cut definition of "microevolution" and "macroevolution". And note that gaining genetic information is not necessarily analogous to "complexity" or "useful".
Table-ized A.I.
As long as they teach that all religions, past and present, are credible alternatives, I'm fine with it. Teaching ID won't seem nearly as as appealing if they have to discuss Zeuss and Quetzalcoatl as equally likely as the Christian god. Pastafarianism deserves mention too. Don't let them single out Christianity as the best alternative.
To be fair to the ID-ists, this is not a valid excuse for not having any direct observations. It's like "time ate my homework".
(Is this playing "devil's advocate", or is that offensive to fundamentalists?)
Table-ized A.I.
Oh GOD, not another one. Please don't breed and jump in front of a bus as soon as you can.
Does this mean in these two states it would be legal for a bio-teach to profess that we are actually the descendants of aliens?!!
Um... see... this is where your lack of knowledge keeps you from seeing the possibilities...
A duplicate of the same information allows you to have additional information through mutation IN ADDITION to the current existing genotype.
So you have one copy of a book... the original book remains the same, but then mutations occur in the copy... which lead to favorable or unfavorable traits IN ADDITION to the traits of the original book. This is the very essence of evolution.
Maybe God's a bad copy-and-paste coder? If I was omnipotent, say running a "human universe" simulation on my 4D linux box in my 4D universe as a hobby, I may get sloppy with the code also. I'd be omnipotent to the simulants' perspective, yet could still be lazy and sloppy with my code. Anyone who needs hymns of praise sung to him every Sunday is an egomaniac anyhow. (Ohshit, he might delete me if he reads /.)
Table-ized A.I.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but .. I don't think it's useful to use the Catholic Church as the baseline for intellectual standards anymore. I'm an American, and we do everything better. The Vatican? Oh please. I bet our own natives were molesting children long before someone first came up with the word "Pope" as a business plan.
You're crossing "The Church" with "Religion" (and I'm sorry, but I believe it is a VERY important distinction).
"The Church" is after one thing, and one thing only. Power over their followers. The Church uses the Bible (or whatever document if not christian) as the stick to force their followers to tow the line (or GO TO HELL!). As a religious person, I honestly believe....fuck the Church. Galileo didn't say ANYTHING contridicting biblical religion when he said the Earth orbits the sun...but he spoke against the Church, and the CHurch beat his ass for it.
Religion is entirely different...and even Christian religion. The Bible doesn't have to be infallable for me to find Truth in it. In this particular argument, the bible NOT ONCE EVER says that the Earth was formed out of nothing 6000 years ago. "Day" when you look at the ceation story doesn't even fucking mean Day - the closest possible translation is "period of time" - and in my opinion is an exceptionally primitive description of the Big Bang & Evolution.
I don't ignore shit I find objectionable and carry on. I use science to further my understanding of God. Where science and the bible clash...quite frankly, I figure it is because some asshole a thousand years ago, when translating, picked a version that suited his own purposes, or that of his church. Scientific Truth shows where these assholes failed, and brings me closer to the actual spiritual Truth.
I get that this shit is hard to comprehend for the athiests out there...no worries. Feel free to have your beliefs, and criticize me for mine. Your choice to make, as being spiritual is my choice to make.
The only place you're right...my spirituality is un-provable. I accept it on faith, and faith alone. I don't expect you to accept it on faith, and I won't condem you or bitch you out for not being able to accept God on faith alone.
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To the extent that teachers use this new law to actually teach, I'm all for it. Critical thinking and exploring all sides of an issue are important for students. But... what is to be feared is if this law is used to allow teachers to ignore/misrepresent facts in order to create a false controversy. From the examples the Bill gives, it's almost certain that the drafters of it don't want Pastafarianism or Hinduism or pink unicorns discussed in classrooms. They want teachers to be able to confidently ignore mountains of evidence supporting evolution in order to claim that there is a HUGE controversy and it's entirely valid to dismiss said evidence and believe a 2000 year old book instead.
if you looking for the dog evolving into a monkey you are right. but about the one species evolving into another, this has been observed and recorded.
it comes down to how you define a species, if like in biology it is a member of the same genus who are not able to interbreed
it's almost 12am and i'm too tired to explain it well watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnu-O5x_pRU&feature=related
**facepalm**
Darwin simply stated that it was survival of the fit (not fittest). So it is not about each generation being superior to the previous, it is a matter of each generation reflecting the traits of the most prolific of the previous set. In harsher times this meant that those who hunted the best were more likely to have offspring that made it to mating age. In modern times groups with morals against condoms, and for large families will represent a growing share of the population, while the well educated with access to birth control, forethought about the tradeoffs of procreation, etc will have fewer kids and be a smaller slice of the population.
Since the education of your parents is a good indicator of your education level (vastly fewer college grads have dropout parents than the other way around) it is likely that lower procreation rates among the well educated will cause this to be a shrinking lice of the population.
So yes, from a simplified Darwinian perspective we are presently evolving towards a society of less educated horny Morman's and Catholics. Other countries (i.e. Euroland) have taken roughly the same breeding stock and pointed it the other way.
Evolution has been proven time and again. And again, and again. See the grey moth for example. Evolution is a theory in the same way that gravity is a theory, not a proven fact. What gives it merit is that it has EVIDENCE to back it up. You should know this, but I suspect you're trolling.
Bullshit anyone believes in intelligent design and is an atheist. Intelligent design REQUIRES an intelligence to do the designing - ie a deity. Of course, you used the 'it's just a theory' argument, so clearly you aren't so hot on the logical thinking anyway, but the reason they become deism vs atheism debates is because there are no non-deists on the intelligent design side, and that side has zero scientific merit, merely a hoard of theistic rhetoric.
Full disclosure: I'm a christian and I believe that evolution happens, because I open my eyes and look at the world.
Mutation is part of evolution, evolution itself is a much larger process.
Just like tires are part of a car, but a tire isnt a car. Clear yet?
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
I have found an error in the bible. The error specifically has to due with timelines. The accepted answer "These people weren't historians so messed up the date."
I am also a child of the scientific movement and enjoy doing scientific studies and experiments. I'll give you another glaring inconsistency:
One of the accepted teachings is the end of the world. In fact, Revelations is dedicated to it. Yet Genesis 8 says:
8:21 And the LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. 8:22 "While the earth remains, Seedtime and harvest, And cold and heat, And summer and winter, And day and night Shall not cease."
Infallible God, Honest God, yet 2 Peter 3 says:
10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
So it's easier for someone to find inconsistencies if they look.
*DISCLAIMER
I am a bible following christian. I however believe that the bible teaches moral lessons and those are more important than the actual factual information. I also believe in something like a mixture of creationism and evolution. I believe that there is an intelligent design to our world, but also believe that evolution has caused many things to adapt. The biggest question that I haven't heard evolution answer is "How did we go from a single cell organism to speaking and thinking homosapiens?"
Christianity and Evolution are very compatible. Christians should not challenge evolution, they should challenge their own theology. Just as God spoke to me one time to let me know he is real, he also let me know my first book was approved by him. In the book I wrote about God, I have an article entitled,"The Long Day Theory", Read it here
God spoke to me.
He didn't claim it was proof of "mutation", he claimed it was proof of "evolution".
They are not synonyms. One is a small piece of the other.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
I also want to point out a major reason why it's difficult for people who don't actually study evolution to understand it and I think it might "head off at the pass" your argument against my previous post.
Evolution does NOT happen within a single organism during its lifetime. A fish isn't born a fish and then some time while it's alive, become another species. It happens progressively through generations. So while (in my Down's Syndrome example) the first person may have an exact copy of chromosome 21, that trait will likely be inherited by any offspring that person may have. Due to the way gametes are produced (via crossing and whatnot) in diploid organism, and how gametes combine to form a single organism, there will be SIGNIFICANT differences not only in the original parent with Down's Syndrome and the child. Thus creating "new information" that is not an exact copy.
I believe the original challenge was to point to how an organism can gain new genetic information. I think I have done that handily.
Also, this example only deals with Down's syndrome and only humans and only across one generation... there are countless other ways that genetic information can erroneously replicate to give a "canvas" to create new information.
If I am understanding you correctly...English is not your native language.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Cancer is a mutation, having cancer does not change your species.
The original person i replied too was implying that experiments that prove mutation are experiments proving evolution. They aren't.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Unfortunately those proofs were not evolutionary but crossbreeding chuckles.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
The Right doesn't want an educated populace, but an ingnorant, compliant, god-fearing one. On this facet, every fundamentalist religion is in complete agreement.
If it weren't for the invention of the con game known as Religion, we'd be travelling amongst the effing stars by now.
A science class should be about science. Creationism and its synonym 'intelligent design' are not science (ruled by an American court), so it has no place in a science class. Furthermore, there is no controversy about evolution in science. The vast majority of scientists accept evolution as a scientific fact.
The controversy of this topic only exists among the general public. Many people know nothing of science, nor its ways to explore and describe the universe. They should have no say in what happens in a science class, because if they would, the only thing students would learn is unchallenged general 'knowledge'.
Also, please explain how not wanting to be associated with the Church is any different than being in the Church and only choosing what you wish to 'believe' from the scriptures.
the bible NOT ONCE EVER says that the Earth was formed out of nothing 6000 years ago.
You'll note I never said this. I said 'biblical scholars' said this based on study of the bible. If you're going to argue semantics, I suggest you follow them yourself.
The only place you're right...my spirituality is un-provable. I accept it on faith, and faith alone.
Except we're talking here, about allowing teachers to teach that science is flawed and 'faith' is the true path. That should scare the crap out of anyone who thinks.
I get that this shit is hard to comprehend for the athiests out there...no worries. Feel free to have your beliefs, and criticize me for mine. Your choice to make, as being spiritual is my choice to make.
The problem is that religious/spiritual beliefs are still firmly rooted in our government and laws. Until they are gone, your spiritual beliefs do impinge on my life. I fully respect your right to be spiritual and to believe on faith alone that God exists. But it's no different than a 5 yr old believing in Santa Claus.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
No scientific theory is ever really "proven." It is only upheld by the evidence. What happens is that as more and more evidence is presented, the theory is refined so our understand of the underlying processes becomes clearer and more accurate.
The discovery of genetics could have seriously undermined the theory of evolution since a TON of new hereditary and ancestral evidence arose. However, not only did it not refute evolution, it became the strongest evidence to support it.
You're obviously not Catholic. Why, when I was a child, my priest showed me God's love all the time.
ALL generalizations are false. . . now enjoy the circular logic.
The theory of evolution by means of natural selection was presented to the world in 1859. It has been widely accepted among biologists for at least 100 years, and has gotten even stronger support with every new discovery since then (genetics, chromosomes, DNA and so on).
From a scientific point of view, there is no controversy. Evolution is right and creationism is wrong, simple as that. Teaching creationism isn't presenting both sides of a controversial issue - it's lying to the students. This bill explicitely says "This section only protects the teaching of scientific information", so creationism should be exempt from its protection since it is, legally speaking, "not a scientific theory" (see McLean v. Arkansas 1981, Edwards v. Aguillard 1987 and Kitzmiller v. Dover 2005).
If the bill is intended to protect teachers who want to teach creationism or intelligent design, I highly doubt it will achieve its purpose.
Why can't public schools just focus on teaching students about the scientific method to the degree that they could apply the process to "controversial" topics and arrive at their own conclusions? Why do they need to be told what to think rather than taught how to think and explore intellectual topics?
This isn't just about science either. Christian parents routinely create all kinds of melodrama in English literature courses because they simply cannot tolerate their children being exposed to viewpoints that aren't vetted by their precious holy book. Would you people kindly take your superstitions back to the madrasas where they belong and fuck off? The rest of us are trying to learn something, not trying desperately to shutdown any kind of opposing perspectives.
And I completely agree with you, but your response leads me to believe that you think I am espousing religion; I did not do that. I did question the science of evolution, but never made a positive statement of religion as anything provable. I have to this point, never seen science prove evolution; we look at effects and think we know the cause, but we never recreate the cause and prove the effect. Until I see that, it is just another theory in footing with any other that has the same weakness.
no comment
What, people are not allowed to study or know or comment about *two* things now? We have to all stay in a box with one subject?
no comment
Having read the PDF of the law I see no problem in it. They are merely stating that any teacher can teach the scientific strengths and weaknesses of any scientific theory "in an objective manner". To do this they will of course need to teach HOW science works, a process I think most people who've had years of science still do not understand. Maybe with a better understanding of the scientific method people will realize exactly how weak a scientific theory ID is when actually stated as a theory (it usually is stated as a catch all therefore not a true scientific theory since it can not be disproven). Should a teacher not teach HOW the scientific method works and praise ID as a viable theory I see nothing in the law to prevent disciplinary action or even dismissal on the basis they are a bad science teacher. It does after all state they must teach the relative strengths and weaknesses in an objective manner should they champion highly improbable theories over much more probable ones with no rational reasoning behind it they are displaying a considerably unscientific method. In particular challenge them to do the following with ID:
1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.
2. Form a conjecture: When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook. 3. Deduce a prediction from that explanation: If you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?
4. Test: Look for the opposite of each consequence in order to disprove 2. It is a logical error to seek 3 directly as proof of 2. This error is called affirming the consequent.
Step 3 becomes terrible hard with ID since it really states some "invisible unknown intelligence" is responsible for everything we can not explain (basically mysticism). When this is pointed out it can be almost summarily dismissed as a viable scientific theory.
I have a friend that taught science for many years to high schoolers and it baffled me that he actually did not understand how the scientific process works and that verifiable predictions MUST be a result for any serious theory (even mutli-dimension string theory has some predicted results). Should they specify where, how, when, what form this supposed intelligence takes then reasonable experimentation would be able to look for signs of these results. IMO students should also be taught is that science never totally proves or disproves anything. It merely points out how likely or unlikely the current theories describe the world as we see it and predict future behavior. Theories that have not made predictions and been tested at all are generally considered little stronger than the theory "Godzilla did it".
The fact that this conversation about ID has gone on so long shows how bad our science education is on the most fundamental level. We learn chemistry, biology and physics but most don't understand what even makes them science. Who knows maybe ID will actually help science in this respect. I definitely do not fear it degrading science. Those who want to believe in mysticism will believe in mysticism and those who want to believe in science will believe in science.
That would make treating something in science as a religion bad too right? But is it caps worthy bad?
That's right, Because even with the volumes of fossils records out there, most people will never be able to examine them and if they could, they would never be able to put the dots together claiming evolution without someone telling them first.
Did we just have an entire thread discussing this yesterday? The majority of people who believe in this stuff, don't have the capacity to do much more then trust the authority figure telling them it is true.
Chris Stassen's example #1 is from crossbreeding, as is James Merrit's example #1, Anneliese Lilje's example #1, L. Drew Davis' example #9 and #12, and in "A talk.origins participant" example #3. Even though we know that hybridization can be a natural process (as some of those examples are) and can naturally lead to the rise of new species (as in some of those examples), let's throw them out for shits and giggles. That leaves you...35 examples from just that one web page assembled 14 years ago largely by nonspecialists who also state that their list is incomplete. Speciation happens. Deal with it.
Now, scientific marxism-leninism! Nuff' said!
If this goes through, they should be forced to put stickers on the science books that mention such things reading: "This textbook contains material on intelligent design and creationism. Intelligent design and creationism are not only theories, there has never been any evidence discovered to support them at all. This material should be approached with an open mind, laughed at, and tossed in the trash."
By the way, back to evolution, shouldn't there be dozens... maybe hundreds... maybe thousands of fossils of creatures somewhere between monkeys and humans? Or did that evolution happen in one generation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Homo
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Natural Selection suggests that mutations occour over time & those that are beneficial to the species get carried forward. But not every monkey would suddenly mutate....some wouldn't mutate at all & would carry on as fucking monkeys, while another group moved up the evolutionary ladder.
They get out-competed (food, breeding, not dying as often, etc) by the mutants who are better adapted to their environment and eventually die out. See Neanderthals.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
...teaching that alternate viewpoints of the origin of the universe and life exist? "Teaching religion" has nothing to do with it. It's simply stating that alternate viewpoints do exist.
then in the extreme limit you would have publicly funded, private, religious education.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
shouldn't there be dozens... maybe hundreds...
There are. Even counting only the variations so sturdy they've lasted tens or hundreds of thousands of generations, there are hundreds of primate species. If you're going to demand fossil evidence of transients, please produce the fossil evidence for Eve.
But you aren't describing random mutations and random evolution
Doesn't matter what's being selected for, the process works the same. A particular shell pattern, quicker reflexes, tolerance for chemicals, all the same. Even among sexual creatures there isn't a hard test for species boundary -- is a female chihuahua more likely to interbreed with a wolf or a mastiff? -- but the one thing sure is that traits that don't affect survival, such as ability to interbreed with absent populations, change much, much more slowly than the ones that do.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
So that means that a teacher who wants to analyze the case that homosexuals are the planet's savior from humans destroying it with overpopulation are protected...
"There has been a widespread pattern of discrimination against educators who would challenge evolution in the classroom," Casey Luskin, a policy analyst for the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, in Seattle, Washington, told ScienceInsider. "Schools censor from students the evidence against evolution."
Yes. And there has also been a widespread pattern of discrimination against educators who would challenge the fact that the holocaust happened, and schools censor from students the evidence for holocaust denial. Thankfully.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There are hundreds of fossils of extinct primates, including dozens (or more) of hominans, that is humans and our extinct relatives. Take a look at the Smithsonian's page, The Institute of Human Origins, archaeologyinfo.com, The New Scientist, or good old talk.origins for some examples. Also humans and chimpanzees split off from each other about 6 million years ago, and the apes (or superfamily hominoidea which includes humans, chimps, orangutans, gorillas, and gibbons) split off from old-world monkeys about 25 million years ago. The split between old- and new-world monkeys occurred about 35 million years ago. We didn't evolve from monkeys any more than monkeys evolved from us. We share a common ancestor, just like on a much smaller scale my cousin and I share a common ancestor.
He said:
" antibiotic resistant bacteria"
You said:
"This is mutation, not evolution."
I pointed out how the change in bacteria becoming antibiotic resistant _as a species, rather than an individual organism_ IS an example of evolution, not mutation. So you're correct: he claimed evolution, not mutation - he was right to do so. YOU claimed mutation, not evolution, and there you were wrong.
"Perhaps they should teach it accurately in schools."
I agree wholeheartedly. And to that end:
"People with no arms can adapt to use their feet like hands. The blind develop an acute sense of hearing."
Neither of these is an example of _species_ adaptation, which is what Darwin wrote about. This, however, is:
"the birds had developed in such a way as to cope with the harsher environment Galapagos presented them. They were still Finches just "hard core biker" Finches."
Also, please explain how not wanting to be associated with the Church is any different than being in the Church and only choosing what you wish to 'believe' from the scriptures.
Let me put it this way...I have found science to prove in emperical ways things which made me re-think and reflect on my interpetation of scripture. Remember...unlike the Church, I see the Bible as being potentially fallable, where corrupted by the hand of man (most normally to increase the power of the Church). Because I accept the Bible as being potentially fallable, my overall belief is that I will follow the Bible to my understanding, using science as a corrective tool when scientific proof contradicts my understanding.
You'll note I never said this. I said 'biblical scholars' said this based on study of the bible. If you're going to argue semantics, I suggest you follow them yourself.
If "biblical scholar" = Biblical Literalist, then yes, I agree. They believe that God created everything in 6 24-hour days. Ancient Hebrew begs to differ - overall, its a shitty translation at fault for these morons thinking Let There Be Light = God turning on a lightswitch. They are a small proportion of Christianity.
Except we're talking here, about allowing teachers to teach that science is flawed and 'faith' is the true path. That should scare the crap out of anyone who thinks.
I would like to point out that I haven't made a comment regarding the article, only regarding your comments that seem to think that any religious person believes the earth is 6000 years old. I wrote to refute that. If you want my thoughts on the overall topic...I agree it fucking retarded that TN has passed a law allowing a teacher to pretend evolution isn't real because they are a biblical literalist. I believe in evolution - you will not find me arguing against it, or its inclusion in school cirruclium. I'm a man of faith, but outside a religious school religion has NO place but in a theology class.
The problem is that religious/spiritual beliefs are still firmly rooted in our government and laws. Until they are gone, your spiritual beliefs do impinge on my life. I fully respect your right to be spiritual and to believe on faith alone that God exists.
I also agree...so-called "morality laws" should be stricken from the books. If you are not doing harm to another person, the Government has no fucking place to tell you what is morally right or wrong.
But it's no different than a 5 yr old believing in Santa Claus.
And this is what makes you a sanctimonious asshole, and why the religious have such a problem with you fuckers. YOu feel the need to insult and be a jackass because you do not share the same beliefs and faith as the religious.
That doesn't make you some wonderful and caring person, spreading the truth to all the believers. I respect the fact you have no religious beliefs, and I won't call you out and tell you that you had better repent or Jeebus will crush you or any of that shit. Faith, or lack thereof, is your choice (as it is my choice) and I won't ridicule you for it, nor will I try to convert you to my beliefs. But yet you have to ridicule me for my beliefs.
Go fuck yourself :)
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I still don't understand why religion and science are always at each other's throats. Personally I see it as 2 halves of the same coin. If you actually read genesis with an objective mind it actually supports the theory of macro-evolution. God created man "from the dust of the earth," and the order of creation follows the believed evolutionary order. Also, everyone assumes a 100% accurate translation from the original old Hebrew. Language doesn't work that way. "Day" in the original language of genesis is actually a much more loose term and the actual translation depends heavily on context. It could very well mean just a period of time. A more accurate translation would be age or era. Zealots on both sides tend to discount all evidence that contradicts their personal belief system. This goes against all scientific principles along with the biblical admonition to "be humble." The conflicts between religion and science are imagined and played up by the radicals on both sides, and do more to harm humanity's search for our origins than help it.
I have to this point, never seen science prove evolution; we look at effects and think we know the cause, but we never recreate the cause and prove the effect. Until I see that, it is just another theory in footing with any other that has the same weakness.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria? The beauty of science is that not one single model or theory is absolute. Science is evolving! In my opinion one can be a religious scientist. It is a little schizoid but it is possible to be a very good scientist. Please goggle Guy J. Consolmagno. "Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god."
You do understand that there isn't just one church, there are many and they often do not agree with each other.
I would hope that you also understand that no where in the religious documents does it say the earth is X years old. What you have is man attempting to understand and interpreting the documents and information available making a claim that the earth is X years old. The "church" as you put it, has had no problem in the past with recognizing the man has been wrong. In fact, what you call science is largely the same process used to make that determination in the first place.
You still didn't explain why its different than a 5 yr old believing in Santa Claus. Both are about belief in something with nothing but the word and outright lies of other people. But the nerve I struck seems to prove my point :)
:)
You can say you respect my beliefs and I do respect your 'right' to have yours if not the beliefs themselves. But your kind has routinely called my kind heathens, pagans and made us bow to *your* beliefs. Whether you do or not, you have to be responsible for those who do so in the same name that you worship.
Go fuck your God...he/she certainly enjoys fucking with other people
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
So Tennessee is tossing aside the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment in favor of teaching religious doctrine in public schools. What's next?...Abstinence-only Sex Ed? Witch trials? Burning at the stake? a Christian theocracy?
The problem with the ""but the bible says"" issue is that the bible is both religious and historical in nature. What you end up with is a lot of things in the bible that science supports that has meaning attached to that is more philosophical then anything. So in the end, you have a lot of the same in spirit and complexity.
I don't think anyone can speak for everyone, but I do not see any reason why not. Furthermore, there is no technical reason why a creationist cannot be a evolutionary biologist studying anthropology. I'm not entirely sure why some people do not understand that we have the mental capacity which is shown quite often by children playing simple game, to compartmentalize things into proper categories and bring that information to the front when needed. For instance, I can play games on both the Xbox, and my computer and have little difficulty knowing what controls do the same things on either. Similarly, there is no reason why someone can't say in their faith, Its X, and in their job its Y when they are completely opposite of each other. In fact, I primarily use Linux at home and windows at work with little difficulty. You cannot really get much different and opposite then that.
I would hope that you also understand that no where in the religious documents does it say the earth is X years old.
I specifically said that it was 'biblical scholars', those people who profess to know what the Bible actually means, who said this.
And yes, the Church I'm referring to is the generic Christian church and Catholics in particular.
The "church" as you put it, has had no problem in the past with recognizing the man has been wrong.
You mean like recognizing official 'regret' for the treatment of Galileo...in 1992? Yeah, that's downright admirable of them :) Religions used to be very similar to science. Even Islam was behind some great scientific research once upon a time. A time, when we didn't have explanations for much of the known world and science wasn't yet able to explain it - so religion happily coexisted.
Right up until science started disproving much of the religious foundations. Then they parted company and religion had to be against 'science' because it offers up a method by which things can be proven. And religion fails that method categorically.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You do understand that there isn't just one church
Generally speaking the people who fail to recognize there are multiple religions are the religious themselves...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Does that mean Tennessee teachers can teach the gospel of the flying spaghetti monster, as they can "explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal" ? If so, then I welcome this bill, and hope some of the teachers can teach the ways of his noodliness without getting into trouble.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
You didn't ask why it's different. You made a statement to be insulting.
Obviously, you find God to be a lie. I don't. Unfortunately for this discussion, that IS an argument of faith and not science. I can not *prove* God exists any more than you can *prove* that God does not exist. So, we're at an impasse, one where I respect that you have come to a different conclusion than I have, and yet you seem to not respect in me.
"My kind" - with all due respect sir, you're bordering on nothing but blind hate and discrimination because I happen to believe in a God similarly to the Christian and Catholic Church. *I* have never called an athiest a heathen, or pagan, or forced another person to conform to my beliefs. I do not have to be responsible for how others have perverted the Bible to their own interests, and would (and currently am in this discussion) publicly standing AGAINST such actions by the so-called Christian Church. As far as I'm concerned, we don't even remotely believe in the same thing, even if we allegedly worship the same entity. Hence the serious distinction *I* make between Church and Religion. Religion itself is "pure" - only when you organize it into masses of people ready to crucify others for their non-belief or different-belief does it become that which you seem to hate.
Obviously someone/some church has seriously fucked with you over the years, to leave you with so much blind hate towards them. We're not all the same.
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Technically you're right, because good scientists will not say that they prove anything. Evolution is, however, a scientific theory with immense evidence in support of it. It is just about as close to proven as we can get. If one called it proven, one would be so close to correct that it is barely worth pointing out that it's wrong.
Yes, there is.
Evolution is a scientific theory. That means it is falsifiable (disprovable), test- and re-testable, observable, and has predictive value. In evolution's case, it is also strongly supported by scientific evidence and observation over several hundred years. Intelligent design is a theory in the sense of somebody standing up and saying "I have a theory about that!" It means nothing more than a guess that may or may not be educated. That doesn't necessarily mean it is WRONG, but it is not scientific -- and it can never be proven to be wrong for that reason, even if it is. That is why evolution should be granted merit beyond intelligent design. Even if they both turned out to be right, one is science and one is not. If schools want to teach ID in schools, I would support that; but it should be done in a theology class, or perhaps a contemporary history class. It should not be held up as science because it is demonstrably not science, nor even scientific. The value of science is in the process, not the conclusions. ID dismisses that process entirely.
They don't have to be. There's nothing at all to say that somebody can't stand up and say "evolution is the natural means by which God has chosen to execute his plan," and indeed, many people do.
The reason there is so much conflict is because--and I don't mean to be insulting--of people like you who make statements like you did that they should be on equal footing, or that it is just a theory, and because people who push ID typically aren't doing so as an investigation into possible truth, but rather an attempt at a pseudo-scientific explanation of their faith. When you do that, you're going to get all sorts of people on edge and they're all going to jump on you and point out all the difference I just did, just like I just did. (Though I hope at least that you consider I am trying to be respectful!)
This is rather tangential, but I actually disagree. You could argue some sort of creator force or power without necessarily invoking a deity, but once you start talking about intelligent design--a plan, and a means of enacting that plan through natural forces--how is that not a deity? It may not be the god of the Bible, or any god we even know on Earth -- but you've essentially personified it, and what is a deity other than a personification of ultimate power and knowledge?
But again, that has nothing to do with evolution and it's purely my philosophical bent on it.
If you want full disclosure from me, I'm somewhere between atheist and agnostic -- where tends to vary. I'm moving more toward agnostic as I get older, but I would never hold up ID or faith as scientific. They don't belong in the same discussions because they are simply not the same things.
Maybe a protest is in order. All can show up at their nearest church and demand the teaching of evolution. If these religious nut jobs want to use the educational system to spread their virus, than I suggest we spread the cure.
Right up until science started disproving much of the religious foundations. Then they parted company and religion had to be against 'science' because it offers up a method by which things can be proven. And religion fails that method categorically.
I'm not aware of science disproving the bible. Laugh all you want...it has disproven the people that believe that the earth is 6000 years old, but that's not against anything written in the bible. It has disproven the concept that the Earth is the absolute ceneter of the universe, which is not against anything written in the bible. It has shown evolution to likely* be true, which is not against anything said in the bible.
*"Likely" was used in the sense of: It is not yet a Law - we may find emperical evidence to further our understanding of evolution, which may change some general ideas and/or details. I am not arguing in any way that evolution is wrong, or just a hypothesis.
Not every religion or religious person thinks that science and religion are adversaries. They can, and do, co-exist perfectly, so long as the listener is open to hearing.
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I can not *prove* God exists any more than you can *prove* that God does not exist.
Actually, no, I don't have to prove he doesn't exist. He simply doesn't until you prove he does. There's no impasse here other than your (or anyone's) inability to prove what they believe.
If you don't see the connection between blind faith in something that can't be proven in any fashion, and Charles Manson's delusional followers, well I think we're done here. You can't have one without the other no matter how much you protest.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Lack of viable offspring from crossbreeding is exactly how we tell one species apart from another. Evolution doesn't happen like in Pokemon, mice don't give birth to squirrels so if that's what you're expecting by "evolution", I'd suggest going back to fourth grade.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Then you would still be completely wrong. There are plenty of christian churches and Christians for that matter that completely accept the earth is older then the dogma loudly expelled by the catholic church.
Stop looking for the boogerman because you fear or do not want to understand something. At the time Galileo was around, defying the authority usually ended with your death. The church in control at that time was about control more then anything else and saw attacks on what they said as attacks on their control and power. 90% or better of all Christians and churches had excepted the work of Galileo as being accurate or more accurate then a geocentric earth well before 1992.
Science has never disproved any religious foundations- not Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. What in the hell are you talking about. Science has disproved religious dogma spouted by man, but never has science disproved any religion. In fact, if you think it has, then you are probably confused and using science as your religion. This is because the foundations of religion are not testable and therefore not part of science.
You failed seriously there.
It is both observable and has been repeated in many experiments.
Some of them are not even experiments per se: see antibiotics and bacteria.
Creationists have trouble differentiating between evolution, speciation, abiogenesis, the big bang, and the complete reproductive history of every organism that ever existed. Their religion lumps it all together, so they aren't used to thinking (period)
Fixed that for you. ;-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Science has disproved religious dogma spouted by man, but never has science disproved any religion Religion *is* dogma spouted by man. The fail here is yours :)
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I don't have to prove God exists either. I just accept it. I feel it in my interaction in the world. I can't prove it, and honestly...if I'm wrong and have deluded myself into belief in a lie for my life, there's no consequence to my belief other than I've followed a lie. I am doing no harm to my fellow man.
And I'm not even trying to be one of those assholes who give the anti-athiest argument of "Well, if I'm wrong, nothing happens. If you're wrong, you go to hell" bullshit. When I say there is no consequence to my belief, I mean it. I follow my path, try to be the best person I can be & help in the world, and I don't try to force anyone to believe the same as I do. My impact, and my personal faith's inpact on the world, is pretty much zero.
Yes, it is entirely faith, pure and simple, because the existence or non-existence of God cannot be emperically proven. TO you it is the same as believing in Santa...to me it is a part of who I am.
I guess the difference...even though in both cases it is blind faith...I'm willing to revise my opinions based on evidence, and to date I have found no evidence that God does not exist. If Science were to somehow prove that God does not exist, I would be forced to revisit my entire belief structure. (And before you ask...of course there would be people/churches that would scream bloody murder, and start a downright religious war thinking Science made it all up if that happened. That would be wrong, and I would never be a part of it)
I see that the only way you would accept God is if Science lit him up and went "SEE!! THERE HE IS!!!" for all of humanity to witness, and I respect your decision. But I stand by the statement that, at least in our little discussion here, I'm the one being respectful of your beliefs, and you are not. And I stand by the concept that as a general rule, athiests seem to have a serious problem accepting that religious people have their beliefs, and feel the need to mock and belittle those with faith for their faith.
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Science has disproved religious dogma spouted by man, but never has science disproved any religion
once more with quote tags spelled right...grrr
:)
Religion *is* dogma spouted by man. The fail here is yours
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You can be religious and think ID is a bunch of hooey. This isn't an either-or proposition.
...
It's a big deal to discover that something you thought was infallible has errors. Then what? If it has one big error , how many more are there?
Woah! Gimme time! I'm still counting...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
One can compare fossils against genesis all they want, the common error here is they both give the possibility that some origin exists, yet neither prove it. The bill notes "chemical origins of life", so I think it is much more restrictive in that quote than open debate about origin vs origin. They actually have to use probable causes and not just possibilities from any imagination. Sometimes people got to stop at the leather bound cover of the bible and wonder about the origins of it's DNA rather than skip to the inner pages. "What species is that cover from?" "Does that species still exist?" "Is that leather bound bible made from human skin?" "If not human, can we still map the DNA of that species?" Real science!
Given that those old leather bound bibles have been handed down for centuries... why do people miss the obvious?
Yet another reason why my kid hasn't seen the inside of the propaganda house in his life, and won't see the inside of one until college.
I fail to see how he is any more wrong then you. Please point it out to me. And I agree that it isn't worth wasting much time on it, but alas, when I see idiots using religions or anti religious rants to support or deconstruct another, I feel compelled to call out the biggest idiot of the bunch.
There is no genetic record that include genetic evidence only that points to this. There is however, a record that included non-genetic evidence to lead people to believe this. But that evidence is far from proof as it could be as accurate at saying two skeletons found were siblings simply because of the location they were found in. You see, outside of looking alike and being skeletons of the same species, there is no genetic proof there of a sibling relationship. It's all inferred from a working theory that seems to be supported by other inferences. This does not prove anything, it leads people to believe with confidence but that's simple not proof.
This is a common mistake with people who want something to be wrong more then they want what they believe in to be right.
Short and simple, what if God or a god dun it? You have completely discounted that to push your own imagination with little evidence outside of, you don't want it to be God dun it.
You do not know at all if the religious answer was right or wrong. "God dun it" does not explain how he or it "dun it". But I can tell from your disdain of all things religious so far, that logic is only important if you can use it to bash your enemies right? Now if we just knew why anything religious frightens you so much that you have to position them as an enemy. You don't even understand your own position let alone the positions of others you are ranting about. I think the entire world is more dumb after reading your tripe.
I think you are completely confused. God doing something is not an answer to how it was done, it's an answer to why it was done. I
Can't wait to see all these religious nut jobs get all up in arms when a Science teacher starts trying to teach "Scientology" in the class room instead of the religious views they want to teach.
Same goes for Islam, Wicken, druidism, or any other host of non-christian religions. Oh the fun it will be watching them try and back track on this while still trying to enforce their slanted, non-scientific views in a science room.
But until then, if I owned my own business, I would have to start giving all my applicants science tests for any job I hired for that wasn't flipping burgers and anyone who tries to answer "What happens when you freeze water?" with "God makes ice" is going to be sent back to the 3rd grade as a requirement for working at my job.
I'll leave others to pick apart the rest of your post and just say this: please try applying the same level of skepticism to your Bible that you do to the theory of evolution. The latter has a mind-bogglingly thorough body of evidence in support of it, the former has no evidence of any kind, at all, ever in support of it and quite a lot of contradictory evidence to support dismissing it. If you were uniformly skeptical I think you'd turn out alright.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Since when was Creationism... science?
"Some people believe that the earth was created by God. However there is no scientific proof that a supreme being ever existed, thus there is no god. However, shall we go over the libraries of scientific studies related to the BBT?"
Can you see the church goers having a fit?
"I've got no problem with god... it's his fan club I'm not to happy with."
-Unknown
if I'm wrong and have deluded myself into belief in a lie for my life, there's no consequence to my belief other than I've followed a lie. I am doing no harm to my fellow man.
You may not be, but plenty of other 'religious' folk seem quite hell bent on imposing their views on the rest of the world. So yes I attribute that to anyone who supports that idea. You can't have one without the other.
TO you it is the same as believing in Santa...to me it is a part of who I am.
I assert that to a 5 yr old it is quite definitely part of who they are as well.
I'm willing to revise my opinions based on evidence, and to date I have found no evidence that God does not exist.
This is the very definition of 'science' that I am in favor of. Having 'evidence' drive things, not fantastical belief systems with no supporting evidence. You seem to agree with me on this point.
And I stand by the concept that as a general rule, athiests seem to have a serious problem accepting that religious people have their beliefs, and feel the need to mock and belittle those with faith for their faith.
I heartily disagree with you. The whole point of the article was about the religious pushing their views onto others. Religious history is literally rife with them pushing their beliefs onto others. Atheists and my ilk object heartily to being forced to accommodate in our lives the beliefs of others that are clearly not based on factual evidence. Again something you say you agree with.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I'm actually starting to see the biggest issue in this discussion....we keep interchanging words around. I'm doing it too, so I'm failing there just as bad.
"Religion" is a cultural concept more than a spiritual one. It tends to go into organizations, which spout there particual breed of
"Dogma", which is effectively the forced "you must believe/do exactly THIS or bad shit will happen", which is what the Church tells its members to effectively control their membership. All the "There is only one path, and its the Catholic path" type bullshit (to pick on catholics for a moment) is there for no other purpose than to contol and intimidate their membership through FUD.
"Faith" though is simple. I believe in the biblical Christian God, but I also realize that the Bible itself is at minimum probably 50% dogma, created/translated/misread by the Church to use in their Church and control the masses through FUD. I also read other ancient religious documents which often directly contridict the bible. Sometimes those documents are crap, and sometimes I find what I believe to be truth in them. My faith, my religion, is a personal journey, one that I do not allow the Church to corrupt. I make up my own mind based on my own experiences and insight, using the fact that Science provides to also further my understanding of the universe.
I think (and I could be wrong) that we're not that different here, other than the fact that one of us believes in a god, and the other doesn't. We seem to hold similar opinions of organized religion, and religion's negative impact on government and law. We both believe, through observance, of the natural laws of our reality, and how science shows us how the universe functions.
So I believe in God and you don't. Big fucking deal. Its Friday afternoon, lets go hit the bar & have a fucking beer :)
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True...we agree there. I am 100% against poeple forcing their beliefs on another person.
I'm more than willing to discuss it (as we have been here), but I'd never try to make you believe what I believe. The Religious are WRONG to do that to people, period. And you are right...organized religion (or what I keep referring to as "The Church") have done it since the dawn of man, and they're bastards for doing so.
Fuckit, I grow tired of this discussion...we seem to agree on everything but the existance of God. I'm ok with that. Lets fucking get a beer :P
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Why are all evolution vs. intelligent design debates always really just deism vs. atheism debates?
Because "Intelligent Design" was a drop-in replacement for "Creation" used in the different editions of the book 'Of Pandas and People'.
Intelligent design does not predicate a deity.
Of course it doesn't. It predicts that an entity A was created by Intelligent Designer B. It then states that Intelligent Designer B was created by Intelligent Designer C, and so on.
The only exception is if you decide at some point that an entity was either created using natural processes (in which case, you're describing Evolution), or was created by a supernatural entity such as a god (in which case, you're describing Creationism). If you stick to the ID path, you have turtles all the way down.
The American school system seems to have the unique ability to make anything it teaches horribly uninteresting. None of us worry that they're the mathematics they're teaching are false, or basic geography or history; yet Americans who've been through those lessons generally demonstrate a lesser degree of knowledge of those subjects than people educated in other industrialized nations.
In theory, it's wrong to teach children bad science; but in practice - at least in America - it's probably the fastest way to sour them on religion for the rest of their natural lives. Personally, I think things would be much improved if in the future, Americans spent as much time on religion as they currently do on calculus or classical literature.
After all, evolution is simply a theory, not a proven fact. What should give it any further merit over any other not-disproven theory?
The reason that there isn't any merit in what you say is that you don't know what a scientific theory is. Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory and then realize why that statement doesn't make sense. A scientific theory is not the same thing as the English word "theory" in the context of which you use it. Might want to check out the "theory" of gravity and argue the same point, homeschool.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
teach marxism in the classroom and with a particular focus on a materialist analysis of the history of the Deep South and watch everyone squirm :D
No, there is a religion supported by records passed down from generation to generation then there is dogma that attempts to reconcile that with life. The failure is still yours because the transcribed history is very real. It's meaning however, when taken outside what is written the dogma separate from the religion.
The failure is still yours.
Please prove this by successfully breeding (without technological aid) a male Great Dane and a female Chihuahua and showing the adult hybrid offspring.
By the way, back to evolution, shouldn't there be dozens... maybe hundreds... maybe thousands of fossils of creatures somewhere between monkeys and humans?
Of course not, given that humans didn't evolve from monkeys. The split happened around the Haplorrhini, if you are thinking about New World Monkeys, or the Catarrhini, if you are thinking about Old World Monkeys. The resulting branch, Hominoidae, then split into the Hominidae and the branches that would end up being the gibbon, situation repeated with the Homininae and the orangutan branches, Hominini and the gorillas, Hominina and the chimpanzees, and after that it's continue producing different competing branches, eventually leading to the genus called Homo. Eventually, we have the Homo sapiens, which is the only species of the genus Homo that survived.
All of this, and a ton more that I skipped, is well documented in the fossil record. Sometimes I just can't decide if people spewing the "BUT WHERE ARE THE FOSSILS?!?!?!?!!!!!111" question are knowingly lying about their ignorance, or are just totally blind to anyone saying "RIGHT THERE".
But of course, we'll never find the fossils of creatures somewhere between monkeys and humans, which is what you asked for. So this time, I'll go with ignorance.
But you aren't describing random mutations and random evolution.
Absolutely is.
The bump pattern was the result of random mutation.
In their environment, the crabs with a certain mutation were more likely to survive. They were the ones that proliferated.
It's true that in this case the survival criteria were dictated by man. If you draw the (I think useful) distinction between the endeavors of man, and "nature", then this wasn't "natural selection". But the crabs and their genes don't know that! If somehow those same bumps had given the crabs a significant survival advantage in the wild, the same result would have occurred.
The enemies of Democracy are
The biggest question that I haven't heard evolution answer is "How did we go from a single cell organism to speaking and thinking homosapiens?"
Evolutionary biologists have done a ton of work on (a) testing the truth of the theory of common descent (meaning that all known life on earth appears to have evolved from common unicellular ancestors, based on genetic studies and other information), (b) figuring out exactly what the tree of descent looks like (and please take note, it's a tree, not a ladder: not all of those unicellular ancestors evolved into any form of multicellular organism, for evolution doesn't have end goals), and (c) investigating how the interesting gains in complexity happened.
Usually when someone brings up a question like this, it basically means that the questioner hasn't done any work looking for the answers, or has accepted creationist claims that science has no answers.
Oh good, you don't know what a species is either.
Evolution is a change in allele frequencies in a population over time.
If a mutation survives and spreads through the population, that's evolution by definition.
I don't know what you think evolution is. A chimpanzee giving birth to a human? Pikachu evolving into Raichu?
I am ashamed to serve on a boat named after this state.
And I agree that it isn't worth wasting much time on it, but alas, when I see idiots using religions or anti religious rants to support or deconstruct another, I feel compelled to call out the biggest idiot of the bunch.
I think you must have been reading a different set of comments then. Regardless, I can waste a couple minutes on you.
There is no genetic record that include genetic evidence only that points to this. There is however, a record that included non-genetic evidence to lead people to believe this.
Speak English, please.
Short and simple, what if God or a god dun it?
Then provide some evidence to support that hypothesis. What if Santa Claus dun it? What if Bigfoot dun it? What if Yo Mama dun it? The time to believe a claim is when it is sufficiently supported by evidence. Until that time it's all bullshit, and what-if scenarios don't make it any more credible. If your "explanation" is indistinguishable from something I just made up, then it's fucking useless.
You do not know at all if the religious answer was right or wrong.
Yes, I do. But if you want to keep believing that lightning happens because god is angry, and that lightning-rods are the tool of the devil, you go right ahead.
Terrorists no longer need to use violence: they just need to stir the pot by funding trade unions and Christian extremist groups. Hey wait a second...
Please explain what screwed up reasoning you have for thinking the commandments apply to the statement I made.
I'm sorry, that was English.. Do I need to draw you a picture or something?
So you are saying that no matter what the truth is, you are not going to accept it if it involved some supernatural being that did it. And no, it's not a hypothesis, I am not making a statement of fact, I asked you a short and simple question, what if God or a god actually did do it.
What if God appeared to you, said he "dun it" and left. There is not evidence you can show me.. But what if he dun it. The answer is, nothing. He could have dun it, he could have used the process that science will figure out to explain it, he could have created the process as a side effect of when he dun it. The problem here is that you do not know. The best you can say is you haven't been convinced or you have found no proof of it. Instead, you are rambling on about some genetic record that doesn't exist and claiming it's proof that God dun it is wrong when even if the genetic record was there, it still doesn't mean god didn't do it.
Strange, I have never heard religions claim that lightning is a god being angry. I have heard old wives tails used to trick kids into being extra good while stuck in doors instead of outside being occupied with chores say that. But if that's what you are talking about, then I bet you believe the boogerman is a religious doctrine too.
Please explain what screwed up reasoning you have for thinking the commandments apply to the statement I made.
Are you drunk, or just unable to read? Scroll back up, and read my comment carefully. Sound it out if you have to. It's ok if your lips move - nobody can tell, online.
I'm sorry, that was English..
It most certainly was not. It was a collection of English words strung together using a drunken version of Italian, or possibly French grammar. Either way, it was completely incomprehensible.
So you are saying that no matter what the truth is, you are not going to accept it if it involved some supernatural being that did it.
Wrong again!
And no, it's not a hypothesis, I am not making a statement of fact, I asked you a short and simple question, what if God or a god actually did do it.
Wow. Ok, you're either drunk or epically incompetent. Please, go over to the Miriam-Webster website and look up the word "hypothesis".
I won't bother with the rest of your nonsense. This feels too much like mocking handicapped children.
So ya got none and you are just trolling instead of trying to make any valid points.
I told you I could dumb it down for you if ya need it. Just ask.. There is nothing wrong with asking for help when you need it. Here, I will even paraphrase it for you. There is no genetic record you were speaking of. We can leave it at that because it appears you get lost easily.
Then please, by all means, what were you trying to say then? Because words have meanings and the ones you string together appears to mean that you will not believe God dun it, even if it is true.
I bet your parents would be absolutely fucking thrilled if you were one tenth as smart as you think you are. I think they probably have already gotten over the shame that must be required for raising you. here. read the damn definition yourself and tell me where me asking you a simple what if God did do it was me doing any of that.
You see, definition 1a is a : an assumption or concession made for the sake of argument. I did neither, I asked you to do it.
definition b is b : an interpretation of a practical situation or condition taken as the ground for action I did neither and did not ask you to.
definition 2 is : a tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences. We aren't testing anything, I just wanted to see what you would say.
Definition 3 is the antecedent clause of a conditional statement which is likely the closest stretch to anything close to it being a hypothesis, but it's still not applicable to this.
So either put up or go troll somewhere else. You are wrong and it's that simple.
Ok, I admit it, you had me going there. For the last few comments, I really thought you were serious. But now that I've noticed your username, I get it. Well done; yours is by far the best act I've ever seen on slashdot. Much more subtle than people like pizza-analogy-guy. I'm not sure what the point is, but the execution is fantastic! I'm just surprised I didn't get any serious responders to my first comment - I thought for sure some of the creationists would try to defend their idiotic beliefs.
No, he's not. The fact that the selection mechanism of natural selection happened to be personal preference of men rather than poor eyesight of their predators or some other "natural" source doesn't make any difference to the genes in the crabs. The mutations that produce the bumps on their shells appear at random, producing more or less random patterns that get passed on to their offspring and further mutated. The filtering mechanism of natural selection determines which of those patterns survives (is selected to be) to be passed on or not.
A more correct comparison to intelligent design would be if man had directly genetically manipulated the crab's genomes through DNA splicing and other genetic manipulation to produce samurai looking shells.
Sure. Exactly the same way you can find every single one of your ancestors' fossils going back to your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather. Well, except for the fact that fossilization is an uncommon occurrence and not every single organism that dies is fossilized. In fact most aren't. If you actually tried to learn something about how the world works instead of repeating stupid sound-bite arguments that your preacher pounds out from the pulpit, you would begin to understand how ignorant you are and how much of an idiot you sound like. How many gaps would have to be filled before you would accept humans as being descended from other primates? Every time a new intermediate species is discovered, would you then say "Yeah, but what came between THOSE?!"
Also, humans didn't evolve from monkeys. Except maybe your line.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
From the bill:
"(e) This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion."
I look forward to the day a Tennessee teacher uses the law as an excuse to lecture the kids about how the 9/11 WTC suicide attack was justified. (Note: Not that I believe that. But it's right up there with "Evolution is just another theory among many equally valid")
It may be that those courting alternative ideas have, themselves, failed to evolve. It leads one to believe there could be a genetic factor causing this phenomenon. I tend to think there is a nasty ulterior motive involved to satisfy the lust for control of the mind of the easily
lead. I guess there is a certain satisfaction in convincing others to believe total bulls%^t, as once achieved, anything is possible.
I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
Dude, are you on crack? We observe the influenza virus repeatedly evolving about two or three times every single year. Keep praying.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Really, so it is no longer influenza? I missed that headline! Or maybe it is mutating, and not evolving into another species...yep that's what it is doing. Call me when you see real evolution, or stop wastig my time.
no comment
evolution
n 1: a process in which something passes by degrees to a
different stage (especially a more advanced or mature
stage); "the development of his ideas took many years";
"the evolution of Greek civilization"; "the slow
development of her skill as a writer" [syn: {development}]
[ant: {degeneration}]
2: (biology) the sequence of events involved in the
evolutionary development of a species or taxonomic group
of organisms [syn: {phylogeny}, {phylogenesis}]
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Thanks for the dictionary, another time waster. Once again, call me when you see REAL evolution.
no comment
How is a flu virus not "passing by degrees to a different stage?" How is a domestic dog not going through "the sequence of events involved in evolutionary development?"
You don't get to redefine widely understood words just because they don't happen to fit your fairy tale worldview.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Crap, now you want to argue Tastes Great vs Less Filling?
;-)
talk about a holy war...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Once again, when a dog becomes a cat....oh never mind...
no comment
I explained to you what evolution is. I gave you a very concise definition. By all means, continue sticking your fingers in your ears and saying LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. The dictionary doesn't give a fuck about your ideology and neither do I.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Dude, no theory can ever be proven, outside of Mathematics. You can never know if there is an example which might disprove it. You need complete and infinte knowledge to be able to conclusively *prove* anything. The reason why evolution gains more credence is that no one has ever observed a being capable of inteligent design of the level required for our present universe.