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Evolution Battle Brews In Texas
oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."
that we have to spend time and effort keeping creationism from being taught as "science" in the
21st century.
Do people in this country really understand that the right wing religious nut-cases are out to make this
country a theocracy ? American taliban indeed.
Absolute statements are never true
Democracy can only work with good education. The people voting are supposed to be able to make intelligent decisions.
This kind of thing is going to undermine our ability to govern ourselves and I cannot imagine something more insidious than corrupting children toward that end.
This must be stopped.
That would imply that all theories, regardless of any evidence or factual basis, should be taught.
Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
If it's truly necessary to discuss every unsubstantiated creation theory, all sides of the story should be taught. Not just all 190 versions from the "bible", but all creation legends according to all religions and cultures.
Or we could stick with teaching substantiated facts. Nah, that would make way too much sense.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
In a theology class, a respected Reverend said "Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Over the next several sessions, he covered various cultural and religious beliefs by groups from around the world.
I had known him for years, but it wasn't until that day that I realized, he wasn't a leading member of the church to preach the word of god. He was a leading member of the church to help people who couldn't grasp the fact that there are things we don't fully understand yet. He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who take these fairy tales that were intended to help them not be scared, and demand everyone understand it as the truth.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
A null hypothesis must be falsifiable, and therefor "it must be a wizard that did it" cannot be the null hypothesis.
Q.E.D.
More like the Samuel L Jackson version of Dawkins (although, I'll admit I'm not nearly as cool as either.) And yes, I'm just letting of some steam here.
What?!
What the fuck?!
Those sections say the "null hypothesis" is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.
Since motherfucking when? I'll tell you, motherfucking never. How much more fucking evidence must scientists throw before your motherfucking ugly fucking face before you fucking get it?
Sample says the "null hypothesis" is such because the old experiments that attempted to produce "building blocks" of amino acids failed to do so. In addition later experiments that produced other precursor chemicals, such as DNA and RNA, required very specific conditions in a lab, and aren't he said. Necessarily reflective of what the early Earth was like. Therefore, he said, the odds of making life from non-life seem too small for a naturalistic hypothesis to work.
Well, what the fuck do you call this? And very specific lab conditions? Well, guess what motherfucker, the early Earth have very specific conditions that resemble nothing like what we have today, so yes, those conditions have to be specific in the laboratory. This doesn't even touch the fact that the early Earth was a much bigger fucking laboratory than some fucking room at a university.
Sample says it isn't stealth creationism - he says the intelligent agency might just as well be aliens. But he emphasizes that he wants students to learn to think critically, and that unlike the physical sciences, there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Firstly, observational evidence that can be repeatably confirmed is just as valid as repeatable experiments with observation in a laboratory. And this is yet another case of "What the fuck do you call this?":
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Do you see what year is in there? 1905! Speciation was observed in nineteen o'fucking five. That's 23 fucking years after Darwin's death. Can't fucking demonstrate evolution in the lab my ass.
To paraphrase:
Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you frighten you?
Does the idea that there might not be a supernatural so blow your Christian noodle that you'd rather stand there in the fog of your inability to Google?
Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
(Watch the rest, you won't regret it, promise.)
I get the idea that it's scary to think that this is all we have, but that's not an excuse to just start making things up to make yourself feel comfortable. If we truly want immortality, the only thing that can possibly deliver on that is science. And we can't continue to be held back by people whose only goal is to advance their favorite fairy tales in spite of the consequences. And yes, science can answer question
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
BABEL FISH :
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy recieved not from its own carrier but from those around it, It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. the practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes like this : "I refuse to prove that I exist", says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But", says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear", says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh that was easy" says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
>UNKNOWN REASON,
It's not unknown. It's errors. DNA does not copy exactly every time. And sex is merely a way of being able to get more variation in DNA. More variation = more chances to survive (up to a point).
And if you want to get down to the actual reason why DNA copies are not always true, it's because of physics. Physics and probability. Nothing more and nothing less. We've been testing the probability part of the physics for nearly 100 years.
And since your argument fails on its premise - that we don't know where the randomness comes from, all that shit you typed was for naught. The attempt to pull science down to "we just don't know" failed. Indeed, your entire argument is "Argument from incredulity" which isn't an argument at all, but simply a lack of imagination on your part.
Your argument is typical of creationst screeds. It tries to paint scientific arguments as "we just don't know either" when in fact that's not true. Science has done a pretty good job of explaining how the universe operates and we've created some nifty technology based on those rules, which in itself is a test of those rules.
Creationist arguments are not testable. They are not science. Evolution is testable. In fact, we run experiments on evolution all the time with antibiotics. Such experimentation by society nearly killed me with MRSA.
Keep religion out of the classroom unless you want to teach it as a cultural studies course. But then you have to teach other cultures to put things in perspective, and I don't think that the christian taliban behind this bullshit are quite prepared to have the Quran, Mahabharata, Tibetan book of the dead, the writings of Zoroaster, et alia to young minds. They might find their kids might learn something.
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BMO