> Presenting Intelligent Design [...] as an alternative alongside teaching evolution is perfectly OK. Teach the kids the conflicting theories, let them use thier own intellect to sort it out.
Do you think schoolkiddies are adept at sorting out pseudoscience from the real science? Should we also teach them cold nuclear fusion, Alien Invasion Theory, Raelism, Scientology, Hindu cosmology, etc.?
> The point is, teaching this theory is not advocating or prostheletizing any particular religions
Intelligent Design 'theory' exists for the sole purpose of smuggling biblical creationism past the courts.
Look at what the people on the Dover school board have actually said about it.
> but at the same time, it is allowing for rational intellectual discussion.
Since when is teaching logically flawed propaganda to schoolkiddies a rational intellectual discussion?
> The type of "macro evolution" taught in the public classroom cannot be tested wholly. Due simply to the time spans involved you cannot replicate it in an experiment. You must look at evidence from long ago and infer.
Ah, but then you can go out and look at the world, to see if your inferences conform to reality.
The classic example is the paleontologist who inferred when an intermediate in the whale ancestry should have lived and what it should look like, and then went out and found it.
> Therefore, the best way to present it to young students is *as a theory*.
If our teachers are doing a good job, they're teaching all science as a theory. Theories are the currency science deals in.
> Intelligent Design is also theory.
FYI, nitpicking a real theory doesn't mean the nitpickers have a theory.
> Either teach both theories, or teach only fact and don't teach theory.
It appears that your science education was remiss in telling you what theories are.
> personally think the theories are important, so teach them both and let young students have open minds as they seek to better understand life and origins.
Do you think we should teach them all the competing claims, or just the ones you think support your own religious beliefs?
> The "religious right" are always accused of having closed minds... but often the left can't see the spec in the rights eye for the plank in their own.
So... is science some kind of leftist propaganda in your universe?
> There *IS* a science component of Intelligent Design.
That's a surprising claim. I don't see anything any more scientific than the $TECHNOBABBLE in a Star Trek script.
> As such, I think it's very appropriate to teach parts of Intelligent Design in the science classroom, insofar as to illustrate the probing nature of the Scientific Method.
I think it would be better to deconstruct it in a rhetorics class, since all it is is an obfuscated way of saying "I don't see how that X have evolved, therefore goddidit".
> If you find randomly scattered leaves in a forrest you call it chance. If you find neatly stacked leaves in a forrest you know someone or something created it. Then how can people look at the world and not see it?
FYI, no one denies that the universe isn't a completely random place.
What scientists do, when they observe something that doesn't look like it's purely random, is try to find an explanation for it. Hence theories... such as the ToE.
> I must say i do have trouble with the evolution theory
Could you enumerate the problems with it?
> but it really is a theory
Indeed. And 'theory' is as good as it gets in the empirical sciences.
> And when there is proof that contradicts that theory you all just joke over it.
Why do you consider the discovery of soft tissues in a fossil 'proof' that contradicts the theory of evolution? Are you aware that the tissues haven't even been identified yet?
> sad part is i know a lot about evolution. a lot they don't teach in schools. i have read books on it, listened to speakers on it, had my questions answered on it, studdied it. I do know a lot. I know a lot that is not common knowledge.
So, could you name the three most glaring occult flaws in evolution for us?
> Why do you question ID but not allow for evolution to be questioned?
Evolution has been under constant scrutiny for a century and a half.
> Why does a discussion of ID never bring up the merits or science
Because there are no merits or science. It's a pseudoscience ploy to give creationism respectability.
It has been examined and found wanting. And like other forms of creationism, its proponents keep pushing it anyway.
> Seriously - you want me to believe that the simplest explanation is that sex, butterflies, and Picasso "just happened"????
Is it really any simpler to think there just happens to be a god that created sex, butterflies, and Picasso? All you've done is add a middle man... your 'explanation' leaves more to be explained than when you started.
> an Intelligent Design theorist (and the only one I take particularly seriously is Behe)
If Behe is the best of the lot, then they're in trouble: Behe is easily refuted. His argument relies on a non sequitur ("not evolution --> intelligent design") applied to a strawman version of evolution (evolution isn't the reverse of the process that breaks irreducibly complex stuff).
> The frontier is much like the American West after the Civil War. The Alliance is powerful but remote authority. Some of the main characters were rebels and wore brown (thus brown coats) much like some western characters (ie, the Outlaw Josey Wales) were former confederates.
What percentage of games on the shelf at your local computer megamart have any original ideas? Aren't most of them just competing implementations of some trendsetter?
> More and more developers go under, and it gets harder and harder for programmers to get a job doing anything creative, because these idiots are copying other peoples' ideas and giving it away.
Do you have any actual evidence that FOSS games are killing game companies?
And if you do, doesn't that imply that FOSS games have more gameplay appeal than you're giving them credit for?
Is OSS about breakthroughs, or about continual refinement?
> Considering when Civ2 was released, I could have only used money I found on the street and under my couch and still had the real game in my hands 5 years ago. What is so important about freeciv?
It would be interesting to know how many people are playing Freeciv vs how many are still playing Civ2.
> Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital, being able to play an old favourite without compatibility issues, with customisations, bugfixes, with features that the game "should have had" in the first place, that's what it is all about.
In principle FOSS games, whether clones or not, should eventually offer a superior play experience because they don't have to be discarded every couple of years in order to sell new titles. I don't know whether any FOSS games have actually fulfilled that potential yet, but IMO Freeciv 1.x was on the verge. I'll certainly be checking out 2.0, with hopes that they follow through with it.
> Somehow, I don't feel it rewards "right" gameplay, if you ask me. I had to slow down where I could (the clock is running in each scenario, but no carry), kill units, gain experience instead of concentrating on the mission objectives.
Almost every release involves some playbalance adjustments (at least according to the announcements). You may be able to have some influence on things between now and v. 1.0 by participating in the forums at wesnoth.org.
However, I find that FOSS games like Freeciv and Wesnoth push my "I would have done it differently" button with even more annoying vigor than commercial games do, since I could fork the source and hack it to do things differently, if only I were willing to invest all my free time in it.
> I hope one of the new gospels has something that will really get the Bible-thumpers in a rage. Something like "Thou shalt not discriminate against gays"
The (purported) Secret Gospel of Mark would fill the bill, though as others have already pointed out, Christians have spent the last 16-17 centuries ignoring the ones that the early Church decided were off-message.
However, the fact that all we have of the SGoM are quotes of the sexual shockers purportedly in it is makes me suspect that it is a modern hoax. The existence of layers of secrets to be progressively revealed only as an initiate advances would be no surprize, given that lots of contemporary religions operated that way, but the secrets were usually dull symbolic stuff, not scandals or fourth rate sci-fi yarns.
> > It is well established that the universe was once inhospitable to life
> How can you say this with certainty? [...] Maybe it's a well established belief that a universe once inhospitable to life is the most likely scenario, but without some way of transcending time, you can't prove it a fact.
Do you recommend that people apply that kind of nihilism to everything, or just to discoveries that conflict with their religious beliefs?
> Whether you're Christian or not, how do you know some higher power didn't just set things up to lead you to think that's how it started?
That's cold comfort to creationists. Why would they suppose their sacred writings are true, if inspired by someone who misrepresented the very nature of reality itself?
Indeed, to holders of that sort of belief, what's the basis for thinking the letters on the page even say what you think they say? Perhaps the Bible really says that worshipping Darwin is a prerequisite for salvation, but the great Trickster in the Sky warps the light between the page and your eyes to make it look like it says something else, because he/she/it takes pleasure in misleading people?
> What if our universe is just someone's gigantic billiards table, and the dog jumped on it sending the balls all willy-nilly? Or what if our planet is just the world's greatest supercomputer, and the fjords were lovingly created and dinosaur bones were carefully placed in layers of dirt and rock by some handsomely paid planet crafters?
What if it's safer to stand in front of trains than to stand out of their way? Again I must ask, do you suggest nihilism as an actual approach to life, or just as something to keep in the apologetics toolkit for emergency deployment when all attempts to deny the evidence have failed?
> To overcome his next stage of disbelief you'll need to show formation of a species. Then that of a higher species. The last stage is that of showing that a human being can evolve.
Actually you'll have to show them God not creating the universe 6009 years ago.
> I often wondered if there were some type of feedback loop in evolution.
"Feedback loop" is, IMO, precisely the concept needed for understanding evolution. Genes, and a bit of noise, get fed back into a breeding population, with a filter in the loop.
> And yes, in school I was taught natural selection--but that loop seems awefully slow and tedious.
On a human time scale, yes. But AFAIK evolution isn't in a hurry to get something done.
> Maybe a way environmental changes are "written" back into the genome somehow.
Perhaps so. Arguably that's what the filtered feedback loop does, but perhaps there's a more direct mechanism we haven't discovered yet.
Also arguably, for species that are capable of learning, at no matter how rudimentary a level, their memory (or whatever you want to call what they use to store their learning) serves as a "register" that information about what works in the environment can be written to. The subtlety is that the environmental changes are written into phenotype space (memory) rather than genotype space (DNA).
> There is only one way to prove that evolution is possible: run an experiment in which speciation occurs.
Science doesn't deal in proofs. It deals in understanding phenomena.
> Lets hold off on judging people having faith in creation until the theory of evolution no longer requires a similar faith.
It's not like creationists would automagically be right if evolution disappeared. We find that creationists adhere to one interpretation of one of many competing mythological texts, and offer nothing to support it other than incorrect claims of fact and fallacies of logic. They can be dismissed as either ignorant (excusable) or crackpots (not excusable), with nary an appeal to evolution in the analysis.
> I know i'm splitting hairs here, but it would be nice to have undeniable evidence, non?
We have rock-solid (ehr, no pun intended) evidence that the collection of species on earth has changed over time, and we have a theory that explains it. And we have new observations all the time - daily in the age of automated gene sequencing - that continue to turn out the way the theory predicts.[*] What more is science supposed to provide?
[*] E.g., we don't find fossil centaurs or harpies, and we don't discover that a dog's DNA is more similar to a rooster's than to a bear's.
> There is no reason or sound evidence for abiogenesis yet
Sure there is. It is well established that the universe was once inhospitable to life, and that now at least one tiny corner of it teams with life. Ergo, life had to start sometime between then and now. The only open questions about abiogenesis are the when, where, and how; the 'if' is a closed question.
> which is necessarily a part of evolution (whether or not we want to admit it)
No, evolution is what happens to a system of imperfect replicators. It doesn't matter in the least where they came from. In particular, it doesn't matter to biology whether life on earth arose from natural chemical processes or was put here by a magic pixie; that fact that life replicates itself, imperfectly, is sufficient for evolution to occur.
> Show me one documented example of information increasing evolution in action.
What definition of 'information' are you using? If I have a string of n bits and one of them changes from 0 to 1 or vice versa, is that an increase of information or a decrease? Or no change? If the string grows to length n+1, is that an increase, decrease, or no change?
It's pointless to demand something you haven't designed.
Slashdot Mirror
> Presenting Intelligent Design [...] as an alternative alongside teaching evolution is perfectly OK. Teach the kids the conflicting theories, let them use thier own intellect to sort it out.
Do you think schoolkiddies are adept at sorting out pseudoscience from the real science? Should we also teach them cold nuclear fusion, Alien Invasion Theory, Raelism, Scientology, Hindu cosmology, etc.?
> The point is, teaching this theory is not advocating or prostheletizing any particular religions
Intelligent Design 'theory' exists for the sole purpose of smuggling biblical creationism past the courts.
Look at what the people on the Dover school board have actually said about it.
> but at the same time, it is allowing for rational intellectual discussion.
Since when is teaching logically flawed propaganda to schoolkiddies a rational intellectual discussion?
> The type of "macro evolution" taught in the public classroom cannot be tested wholly. Due simply to the time spans involved you cannot replicate it in an experiment. You must look at evidence from long ago and infer.
Ah, but then you can go out and look at the world, to see if your inferences conform to reality.
The classic example is the paleontologist who inferred when an intermediate in the whale ancestry should have lived and what it should look like, and then went out and found it.
> Therefore, the best way to present it to young students is *as a theory*.
If our teachers are doing a good job, they're teaching all science as a theory. Theories are the currency science deals in.
> Intelligent Design is also theory.
FYI, nitpicking a real theory doesn't mean the nitpickers have a theory.
> Either teach both theories, or teach only fact and don't teach theory.
It appears that your science education was remiss in telling you what theories are.
> personally think the theories are important, so teach them both and let young students have open minds as they seek to better understand life and origins.
Do you think we should teach them all the competing claims, or just the ones you think support your own religious beliefs?
> The "religious right" are always accused of having closed minds... but often the left can't see the spec in the rights eye for the plank in their own.
So... is science some kind of leftist propaganda in your universe?
> There *IS* a science component of Intelligent Design.
That's a surprising claim. I don't see anything any more scientific than the $TECHNOBABBLE in a Star Trek script.
> As such, I think it's very appropriate to teach parts of Intelligent Design in the science classroom, insofar as to illustrate the probing nature of the Scientific Method.
I think it would be better to deconstruct it in a rhetorics class, since all it is is an obfuscated way of saying "I don't see how that X have evolved, therefore goddidit".
> If you find randomly scattered leaves in a forrest you call it chance. If you find neatly stacked leaves in a forrest you know someone or something created it. Then how can people look at the world and not see it?
FYI, no one denies that the universe isn't a completely random place.
What scientists do, when they observe something that doesn't look like it's purely random, is try to find an explanation for it. Hence theories... such as the ToE.
> I must say i do have trouble with the evolution theory
Could you enumerate the problems with it?
> but it really is a theory
Indeed. And 'theory' is as good as it gets in the empirical sciences.
> And when there is proof that contradicts that theory you all just joke over it.
Why do you consider the discovery of soft tissues in a fossil 'proof' that contradicts the theory of evolution? Are you aware that the tissues haven't even been identified yet?
> sad part is i know a lot about evolution. a lot they don't teach in schools. i have read books on it, listened to speakers on it, had my questions answered on it, studdied it. I do know a lot. I know a lot that is not common knowledge.
So, could you name the three most glaring occult flaws in evolution for us?
> Why do you question ID but not allow for evolution to be questioned?
Evolution has been under constant scrutiny for a century and a half.
> Why does a discussion of ID never bring up the merits or science
Because there are no merits or science. It's a pseudoscience ploy to give creationism respectability.
It has been examined and found wanting. And like other forms of creationism, its proponents keep pushing it anyway.
> Seriously - you want me to believe that the simplest explanation is that sex, butterflies, and Picasso "just happened"????
Is it really any simpler to think there just happens to be a god that created sex, butterflies, and Picasso? All you've done is add a middle man... your 'explanation' leaves more to be explained than when you started.
> an Intelligent Design theorist (and the only one I take particularly seriously is Behe)
If Behe is the best of the lot, then they're in trouble: Behe is easily refuted. His argument relies on a non sequitur ("not evolution --> intelligent design") applied to a strawman version of evolution (evolution isn't the reverse of the process that breaks irreducibly complex stuff).
> Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it.
So, where do you think the Intelligent Designer came from? Evolved or something?
> This is a viable theory.
No, it's utter bullshit masquerading as a theory.
> In the same way evolution, based on the science, has many holes and flaws.
Are you disputing the fact or the explanatory theory?
Either way, what are the three biggest holes/flaws in the science?
> That trailer makes the Star Wars III trailer look like a stupid cartoon.
Since when did Star Wars need any help looking like a stupid cartoon?
> The frontier is much like the American West after the Civil War. The Alliance is powerful but remote authority. Some of the main characters were rebels and wore brown (thus brown coats) much like some western characters (ie, the Outlaw Josey Wales) were former confederates.
Mal = Jesse James
> > Screw Star Wars Episode 3 With a big rubber dick. I'll wait until it comes out on DVD and I can rent it.
> Somehow, I don't think Lucas is too concerned with someone "screwing SW3" by "only" renting it on DVD
Yes, but he might be a bit concerned about the "big rubber dick" part.
> Free from original ideas.
What percentage of games on the shelf at your local computer megamart have any original ideas? Aren't most of them just competing implementations of some trendsetter?
> More and more developers go under, and it gets harder and harder for programmers to get a job doing anything creative, because these idiots are copying other peoples' ideas and giving it away.
Do you have any actual evidence that FOSS games are killing game companies?
And if you do, doesn't that imply that FOSS games have more gameplay appeal than you're giving them credit for?
> Are there any real breakthru's in OSS here?
Is OSS about breakthroughs, or about continual refinement?
> Considering when Civ2 was released, I could have only used money I found on the street and under my couch and still had the real game in my hands 5 years ago. What is so important about freeciv?
It would be interesting to know how many people are playing Freeciv vs how many are still playing Civ2.
> Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital, being able to play an old favourite without compatibility issues, with customisations, bugfixes, with features that the game "should have had" in the first place, that's what it is all about.
In principle FOSS games, whether clones or not, should eventually offer a superior play experience because they don't have to be discarded every couple of years in order to sell new titles. I don't know whether any FOSS games have actually fulfilled that potential yet, but IMO Freeciv 1.x was on the verge. I'll certainly be checking out 2.0, with hopes that they follow through with it.
> Somehow, I don't feel it rewards "right" gameplay, if you ask me. I had to slow down where I could (the clock is running in each scenario, but no carry), kill units, gain experience instead of concentrating on the mission objectives.
Almost every release involves some playbalance adjustments (at least according to the announcements). You may be able to have some influence on things between now and v. 1.0 by participating in the forums at wesnoth.org.
However, I find that FOSS games like Freeciv and Wesnoth push my "I would have done it differently" button with even more annoying vigor than commercial games do, since I could fork the source and hack it to do things differently, if only I were willing to invest all my free time in it.
> I hope one of the new gospels has something that will really get the Bible-thumpers in a rage. Something like "Thou shalt not discriminate against gays"
The (purported) Secret Gospel of Mark would fill the bill, though as others have already pointed out, Christians have spent the last 16-17 centuries ignoring the ones that the early Church decided were off-message.
However, the fact that all we have of the SGoM are quotes of the sexual shockers purportedly in it is makes me suspect that it is a modern hoax. The existence of layers of secrets to be progressively revealed only as an initiate advances would be no surprize, given that lots of contemporary religions operated that way, but the secrets were usually dull symbolic stuff, not scandals or fourth rate sci-fi yarns.
> > It is well established that the universe was once inhospitable to life
> How can you say this with certainty? [...] Maybe it's a well established belief that a universe once inhospitable to life is the most likely scenario, but without some way of transcending time, you can't prove it a fact.
Do you recommend that people apply that kind of nihilism to everything, or just to discoveries that conflict with their religious beliefs?
> Whether you're Christian or not, how do you know some higher power didn't just set things up to lead you to think that's how it started?
That's cold comfort to creationists. Why would they suppose their sacred writings are true, if inspired by someone who misrepresented the very nature of reality itself?
Indeed, to holders of that sort of belief, what's the basis for thinking the letters on the page even say what you think they say? Perhaps the Bible really says that worshipping Darwin is a prerequisite for salvation, but the great Trickster in the Sky warps the light between the page and your eyes to make it look like it says something else, because he/she/it takes pleasure in misleading people?
> What if our universe is just someone's gigantic billiards table, and the dog jumped on it sending the balls all willy-nilly? Or what if our planet is just the world's greatest supercomputer, and the fjords were lovingly created and dinosaur bones were carefully placed in layers of dirt and rock by some handsomely paid planet crafters?
What if it's safer to stand in front of trains than to stand out of their way? Again I must ask, do you suggest nihilism as an actual approach to life, or just as something to keep in the apologetics toolkit for emergency deployment when all attempts to deny the evidence have failed?
> Those things must have been tasty if they went so extinct.
What I want to know is, who ate all the dinosaurs?
> I can accept life adapting to its environment, but adaptation does not prove or disprove evolution.
I can accept moving goalposts, but I don't feel obligated to chase after them.
> To overcome his next stage of disbelief you'll need to show formation of a species. Then that of a higher species. The last stage is that of showing that a human being can evolve.
Actually you'll have to show them God not creating the universe 6009 years ago.
> I often wondered if there were some type of feedback loop in evolution.
"Feedback loop" is, IMO, precisely the concept needed for understanding evolution. Genes, and a bit of noise, get fed back into a breeding population, with a filter in the loop.
> And yes, in school I was taught natural selection--but that loop seems awefully slow and tedious.
On a human time scale, yes. But AFAIK evolution isn't in a hurry to get something done.
> Maybe a way environmental changes are "written" back into the genome somehow.
Perhaps so. Arguably that's what the filtered feedback loop does, but perhaps there's a more direct mechanism we haven't discovered yet.
Also arguably, for species that are capable of learning, at no matter how rudimentary a level, their memory (or whatever you want to call what they use to store their learning) serves as a "register" that information about what works in the environment can be written to. The subtlety is that the environmental changes are written into phenotype space (memory) rather than genotype space (DNA).
> There is only one way to prove that evolution is possible: run an experiment in which speciation occurs.
Science doesn't deal in proofs. It deals in understanding phenomena.
> Lets hold off on judging people having faith in creation until the theory of evolution no longer requires a similar faith.
It's not like creationists would automagically be right if evolution disappeared. We find that creationists adhere to one interpretation of one of many competing mythological texts, and offer nothing to support it other than incorrect claims of fact and fallacies of logic. They can be dismissed as either ignorant (excusable) or crackpots (not excusable), with nary an appeal to evolution in the analysis.
> I know i'm splitting hairs here, but it would be nice to have undeniable evidence, non?
We have rock-solid (ehr, no pun intended) evidence that the collection of species on earth has changed over time, and we have a theory that explains it. And we have new observations all the time - daily in the age of automated gene sequencing - that continue to turn out the way the theory predicts.[*] What more is science supposed to provide?
[*] E.g., we don't find fossil centaurs or harpies, and we don't discover that a dog's DNA is more similar to a rooster's than to a bear's.
> There is no reason or sound evidence for abiogenesis yet
Sure there is. It is well established that the universe was once inhospitable to life, and that now at least one tiny corner of it teams with life. Ergo, life had to start sometime between then and now. The only open questions about abiogenesis are the when, where, and how; the 'if' is a closed question.
> which is necessarily a part of evolution (whether or not we want to admit it)
No, evolution is what happens to a system of imperfect replicators. It doesn't matter in the least where they came from. In particular, it doesn't matter to biology whether life on earth arose from natural chemical processes or was put here by a magic pixie; that fact that life replicates itself, imperfectly, is sufficient for evolution to occur.
> Show me one documented example of information increasing evolution in action.
What definition of 'information' are you using? If I have a string of n bits and one of them changes from 0 to 1 or vice versa, is that an increase of information or a decrease? Or no change? If the string grows to length n+1, is that an increase, decrease, or no change?
It's pointless to demand something you haven't designed.