In order to be genuinely "irriducibly complex" in a testable way, I would argue you need to be thermodynamically impossible, since no way to calculate the probability of a given configuration exists (we can really only at this stage observe favourable or disfavourable changes in a species and compute the obvious). No violation of the laws of thermodynamics are observed in the above systems, so I'd say you need to go back to the drawing board. Perhaps you would like to in some way quantify irriducibly complex for us so we can see irriducible complexity at work? Otherwise you are simply stating that a system could not have come into being without external asistance simply because you cant think of a good explanation.
The whole point here is that everyone doesn't have the 'same amount of bias'. You cant fake a line on a chart, you cant fake a regression, and you cant fake fossil records (at least not without getting caught eventually). Scientists go out of thier way to ensure that Creationists are not considered scientists because they are not scientists. You say most of what creationists say is junk, I would go a step further, I would say almost all of it is junk. You claim creationists explanation is feasible, and self-consistent. Of course it is, it is untestable. You say it is supported by evidence. There is no such evidence. At least no evidence that could distinguish creationism from a real scientific theory. You mention it is decently supported. I'm afraid that is simply a work of fiction. Almost every trained biologist supports the theory of evolution. For the most part it is engineers, computer scientists, and the like (people who make little contact the emperical biological science at a research level) who are creationists. These people are not qualified on the subject, and even if they were, an overwhelming majority still support evolution as the best theory we have to explain the origin of the species. I'm afraid your position, though moderate, is still wrong. The overwhelming evidence is that evolution is the correct theory to explain the origin of life back to the first replicator. It is incomplete, but any explanation which replaces it will contain most of the current theory of evolution as a subset of itself. In fact it will probably contain so much of the current theory it will be called evolution on account of it being based on identicle or near identicle premises. I appreciate that you are trying hard to be a moderator, a go between between scientists and the antiscientists, but the bottom line is that science cannot negotiate, because it is a method not a people. And the cold hard facts are that the method supports evolution, not creationism, and unless creationists come up with some real evidence supporting creationism, instead of simply pointing out the gaps that are not yet filled in in evolution, evolution will remain one of the key theories underpinning the biological sciences. It is not a choice to be more diplomatic, there is nothing to be more diplomatic about.
If you are acting as an agent of the government... then the Establishment Clause of the first Amendment? If you want to go on government property and pray that is fine, but if you are acting as an agent of the government then you cannot promote one religion over another.
You fail to understand the purpose of the first amendment, and have confused secularism with atheism. The founding fathers had no problem with privately practiced religion, in fact as you say, they (and I for that matter) consider it a basic and fundamental right. The first amendment balances several things against eachother. It protects free speech, it protects freedom of religion, and it protects it's citizens from theocracy.
You call preventing a science teacher talking about ID censorship. It may well be, but we censor all the time at work. We don't call stopping someone talking at length about their favourite cat a breach of free speech if they are prevented from doing it in the middle of a business propsal. Why? Because they are supposed to be doing a job. One of the fundamental principles of the United States is that it's government shall promote no one religion above another. Not world view, not methodology, just religion. That binds teachers in science class rooms in public schools, and requires that they not teach religion in a class with no call for it.
Morality arises from the study of ethics not religion, incidentally.
You state that you reject the idea that government should favor my view over yours. That is fine, amend the constitution replacing the establishment clause with a clause stating any ideological viewpoint, instead of religion. The greatest strength of the constitution is that it can be changed, and if you think that is a change for the better, you campaign to get that change to happen.
You then talk about the government censoring your views. You are in no way censored. If you want to you can go stand on a street corner and spout your opinions on ID till the sun explodes. I not only have no problem with that, but consider such essential liberty vital to the future of the United States. What you want is for religions to get privledge access to children using the abilities of the state. You want a theocracy.
Secularism is not atheism. Atheism is a world view held by those who, depending on your definition, either do not believe in a god or gods, or outright reject that a god or gods exist. Secularism is the requirement that the state be independent of religion. Secularism protects freedom of religious, that is the whole point of it being in the first amendment.
It is not because ID is false that it should be censored as you put it. It is because it is a religious doctrine, which has no place in a science class room. Teaching it violates the first amendment. The fact (I use fact deliberately, because when talking about science truth is basically a scientific colloquim for fact, there are no truths in science per se) that ID has no evidence for it (as you put it, 'is false') is irrelevant, it's factual nature is something that the people decide when they elect school boards. That it violates the first amendment is what requires it's 'censorship'.
"The main impact of introducing Intelligent Design into the classroom would be that there would arise a much larger group of people with an interest in developing falsifiable experiments that would allow people to decide between the two theories."
To disprove ID would be to show a negative. ID is unfalsifiable. There exists no experiment that can falsify it. Right, now that the challenge of finding all falsifiable predictions of ID has been met, and no falsification scheme devised, can we agree that teaching unfalsifiable tautologies in science class rooms is a waste of time?
Your arguement is ridiculous because by your definition selecting a curriculum is sensorship because you will always 'exclude ideas'. When selecting a curriculum we always include real science, at the cost of fiction, from our science class room. And local school board members apointed by the public decide what that should entail.
Intelligent Designs exclusion from science class rooms has nothing to do with the fact that from a scientific view point it is a load of ballony, and everything to do with not establishing a theocracy in the united states (or any other country).
I think you fail to understand what the Establishment clause is. It is not about ideology. It is about preventing theocracy. The founding fathers realised that theocracy was dangerous. Hence the establishment clause exists to create a secular state. The whole point of the Establishment clause is to promote secularism, it is incredibly biased against one view point, the view point that lead to the dark ages.
'Truths' are not something relevant to science, they are the domain of philosophy and religious study. Science is a method, there is no matter of opinion in so far as established fact. There is plenty of opinion when it comes to disputed facts, and how best to proceed, but every competant scientist trained in the field of physics knows Newtons Law of Gravitation works within the bounds of it's validity. Every biologist knows evolution happens. There is no disputed facts here, those ideas arrived at following from study of world religions are wrong about evolution, as far as scientific method goes.
Your consistent world view of reality does not exist. I accept that you cannot always seperate disciplines, but are far as those disciplines grounded in science go, religion has nothing to contribute. The interdisciplinary contradiction you talk of is simply a result of the incompatability of science and religion as methods of arriving at, respectively, facts and truth. Then trying to equate facts and truth and arriving at a contradiction. The problem is very simple. Religion makes predictions science can test. Science has shown those predictions to be wrong. If you reject the scientific method as a fundamental method of obtaining truth in your life, then you can reject facts obtained as a result of it and go on believing whatever you want. However, the Establishment clause makes it very clear that your religious outlook has no place in the government.
The reason I put up Chineese wall between religion and science is because as far as methods go, neither has anything to contribute to the other. They are totally philosophically distinct entities. Your belief in a 'consistent reality' is just a consequence of your inability to appreciate that there exist contradictory axiomatic structures which are internally consistent (although in the case of most religions the latter is true only because they do something equivilant to setting true equal to false).
At no point did I state that religion and science are mutually exclusive, I also happen to know many good scientists of religious faith. This isn't about the big bad religious people trying to get science.
Your individuals of faith who later discovered their faith can be disapointed with themselves for not having found their faith earlier if they want, that is their choice. But (using the US as an example since this is the major battle ground at the moment) the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is being flagrantly violated by individuals who do not teach science in the science class room as science fact. And this marks part of a wider and continuuing attack on scientific progress by fundamentalism.
I'm going to be rude and assume you are from the US (incidentally I'm not myself but most slashdotters are). Your example of the teacher who answered honestly, she might have answered honestly, but she also violated the first amendment. The two correct answers were "yes there is overwhelming scientific evidence in support of evolution" and "answering that would cause me to violate the estalishment clause of the first amendment".
This isn't about schools churning out mindless fundamentalists or otherwise, and it isn't just about the scientists who time is wasted. Our grant proposals are paid for by the people, who elect a government which decides where funding goes. Actions like the one you describe which in the US would violate the estalishment clause have the effect of discrediting science because "authority figure X doesn't believe it". This in turn makes them less willing to vote for politicians with pro-science stances.
Incidentally, when I say destroy, I mean in the same way you destroy a nation state or corporation, not kill. I'm not advocating dogmacide. I would have thought that was obvious. However if you cant see the culture war that exists at the moment, the relentless attacks by fundamentalist on science and western secular government, I rather suspect you should read the news more.
And when I say destroy, I say destroy because as far as they are concerned it is us or them. They will not rest until science is reduced to medicine and quasi-engineering. Make no mistake, fundamentalists of most of the major religions want to crush science, and they aren't going to go away quietly. Yes we have to rally thier pro-science religious bretheren. But we also have to utilise the machinery of the state to protect both it's secular nature, and the potential for scientific progress of future generations. I think it is somewhat nieve to believe that the fundamentalists will stop with just school curricula.
Funnily enough I know good scientists who are former Christians who were educated by people who dismissed evolution. These are very smart people, who are also now very bitter because thier time was wasted. I think you are the one selling what I consider our best and brightest short by implying that anyone who is duped by adults they trust by convincing subtle but ultimately false arguements into believing something false somehow cannot be our best and brightest.
I can understand why you aren't worried, but I've seen the damage of a much more pleasant scenario (that is, of educators bad mouthing evolution even when they are not allowed to talk about fictional alternatives) than the one you describe, and if it significantly unpleasant for scientists who have grown up in that environment imagine what it would be like if pseudo-philosophy is introduced as an alternative to science in the science class room. It is not fair on our children, and it's takes considerable effort to undo the damage.
IDist are fighting a culture war and it wont end with just changing school curriculums. The very survival of science in the US is at stake, and if we wish to protect science, then we must destroy these fundamentalist meddlers.
So you are saying that it is okay to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment? I think that in this case the rights conferred on all society by the Establishment Clause of First Amendment supercede those of a subset of educators right to express thier religious opinions inside a class room, also protected under the First Amendment. I think that the Supreme Court also agrees with me on this one. One reason, those educators are free to express those opinions off the job if they want to. They are being paid to educate, not spread religious doctrine, and thier right to freedom of expression is curtailed not by the application of undue duress or other illegal means but because they are being paid to teach children science, something they agreed to do in exchange for being paid. The establishment clause is binding on government, and the government can only ignore it if the constitution is suspended or amended. The right to free speach is something that is in the hands of individuals and can be surrendered (i.e. freedom of speach is not an inalieable right in that sense). On a personal not however I do feel that an organisations ablility to curtail freedom of expression should have limits, and that certain aspects of our capacity to curtail our own free speech amount to selling ourselves into bondage. Since I consider this freedom to be inalieable I do feel certain aspects of modern contract law to be in violation of the emancipation proclamation of the thriteenth amendment of the constitution of the United States. However that is just my opinion.
I will second that, and can I add that I want them peer reviewed, in a respected journal? I'm familiar with one example that got utterly trashed after publication because it was utterly weak. Are there any decent examples or is all the "evidence" in pseudomystic pop 'sci' books?
"Why do God and Science have to be mutually exclusive?"
They aren't. Who said anything about mutually exclusive? Pastor with the greatest respect, your side is the one waging a culture war. If your side left the explanation of the mechanisms of the universe to those with the training to understand them, then there would be no articles like this.
If you really are bothered by this kind of thing my advice is this, make regular sermons attacking ID and it's advocates. Indicate to your flock why it is that ID is not science. Encourage them to leave scientists alone to do thier jobs. If you and everyone like you did the same, maybe there would be a hope that this culture war could be ended.
Incidentally leaving alone includes trying to set up a theocracy in the US or any other nation. Our funding comes from government's (mostly), so support a free secular state.
Like to admit it or not science and everything that was gained during the enlightenment is under threat, and it's under threat from the same people who gave us the dark ages.
If the IDist (and others who stand in the way of scientific reseach) want a culture war, then I say give them one. We in the scientific community have sat by the sidelines for too long assuming that engaging these barsteds will give them credibility. They already have credibility, they have grown to powerful to just ignore. Just because we have no respect for them doesn't mean Joe Six Pack doesn't. It's time to ridicule and lobby. There is nothing wrong with journalists touting every discovery science makes as new evidence against this new "God of the Gaps".
If people who care about human scientific progress don't fight back soon, then progress will slow or even retard, and we have too many problems which will need solutions over the next 100 years to waste our future scientists time teaching them how a concrete verified corner stone of the biological sciences is embroiled in a non-existant controversy and offer them a unscientific tautological steaming pile of monkey terd as an alternative.
Well of course it doesn't falsify ID, you can falsify ID. It's falsification would be demonstrating a negative, that is "There are no designed systems". This of course is one of the many reasons it isn't science. But since ID is creationism dressed in scientific robes, and is being used in an attempt to cripple scientific education in the US, it makes sense that scientists look to refute the most credible claims of the ID gang. Now since anyone advocating ID has no credibility (at least as a biologist) one crazy persons non-scientific rantings are as good as the nexts, and none of these claims are made in respected scientific journals (to my knowledge), so shooting down one claim of an advocate of an unscientific theory is just as good as shooting down another. ID is just the "God of the Gaps" in new clothes. Religious individuals should stop trying to impose that religion on science, and go do something not harmful to scientific progress.
"And by the way, is it one of/.'s top priorities to attack religion every chance it gets?"
Pretty simple really. The crowd on slashdot are pretty interested in science from what I gather, mostly more technical stuff, but they find it interesting, and they like scientific progress. Many religious groups have elements that spend a significant portion of thier time trying to slow scientific progress down. Religious institutions don't spend much time promoting science, and when they do it often comes with caveats or is just an olive branch from a minority sect. As such since religions don't contribute much to the advancement of society from a technical or scientific aspect they are rarely going to appear on slashdot in a positive light.
On the other hand their are plent of religious individuals who if they had always had thier way would have kept man in the stone age. Heck it wouldn't suprise me if the fist few guys to make metal tools were burned for deviant or unnatural behaviour (incidentally, thats a joke).
End result if religion appears on slashdot it is in a negative light. Something to be stopped so that science can advance.
The solution is really very simple, if you want religion to appear in a positive light, then get it to take all that cash it gets from donations and fund stem cell research, or fundamental physics or something, maybe use some of those buildings they waste every Friday/Saturday/Sunday in as labs.
That would be the case except the AMD chip doesn't overclock so well, they tend to throw up error even running a dash over their usual clock speed. The Intel one can (if you can supply the juice) be seriously overclocked on the other hand. However I don't believe the article when it says the Intel Chip is faster. I've read what I would consider a much more reliable review which had the AMD chip either infront, or way infront for most benchmarks (especially when it came to multithreaded tasks). Maybe there is some variation in the chip qualities, me no know. However, for the time being at least, I more willing to believe results which give AMD the nose ahead than Intel. Granted I'm bias.
You have failed to address the fundamental issue, which I will express in a simple question. What is the difference between mathematics expressed on paper and mathematics expressed on a hard disk that makes the later patentable?
Two things. First by your logic General Relativity should have been patentable, simply by writing "An computer based implementation of an algorithm to find the behaviour of objects under gravity". You then go on to say that I'm on the losing side. I know I am, but the above example makes it pretty clear I'm not on the wrong side. The law does not define morallity. Your condition for obviousness does not work, because if an idea is obvious, there wont be a publication on it for that very reason. No self respecting scientist is going to publish in a journal a paper whose sole result is to extole the virtues of one click shopping. Now for my second thing. Since the only physical object you describe is a general purpose computer, we are agreed that a general purpose computer should be patentable. Bit late for that but I accept that. So should (to a certain extent) a unique hardware implementation of an algorithm be patentable. But by definition a general purpose computer is just a means of writing down mathematical algorithms. As such, by the agreement that mathematics is not patentable, mathematics written on a computer is not patentable. Your example is a misleading one because what is actually patentable in the device you describe is the computer, not the program on it. What you are saying amounts to saying "paper is patentable, hence so is stuff written on paper". As for our laws being bought and paid for, the Supreme Court is appointed by the president. The president is elected by a democratic process. To win that process requires campaign donations. Campaign donations are for buying laws. The software industry has made campaign donations, ergo they have bought laws. I'm not going into greater detail here because I would prefer the first two points by stressed, that is that mathematics should not be patentable.
Obvious or not, it is not an specification for an actual physical device. There used to be an understanding when it came to pure mathematics and sciences, mathematicians and scientists develop science and mathematics through grants given to them from the government, and in return, science and mathematics was not patentable, because to make that kind of knowledge patentable inhibited the free market (because it stopped inventors of actual devices from making progress using these results). Today, we can patent mathematics in the form of software, and surprise surprise this is inhibiting the free market. If it isn't a design for something I can hold my hand out and touch, it shouldn't be patentable. Now as for who should win here, well as much as I hate them, Apple should. But legally, I don't think they stand much of a chance. The laws that the software industry cartel bought from politicians in the US seems to me to support Burst and I don't think Apple have a case.
I consider the fact that the prison system costs money to be it's primary failing. We should make prisons into labour camps, and operate on a no work, no food, lodging, heat basis. An inmate earns his food, lodgings etc. Inmates would need to work longer hours than most people inorder to pay for additional security etc, and rations would have to be very basic to keep costs down, but I'm certain operating at capacity prisons could turn a profit. This profit could then be used to provide educational programs for inmates, who would not be released into society until they had adquired both the skills to do an in demand job and secured employment, in addition to requirements from sentencing. Keeping inmates all in solitary when not working, and enforcing a no talking rule while working would help to prevent inmates developing criminal contacts or developing new skills that would make them more effective burgalars, rapists, etc. In addition the forced education would ensure that the inmates who have no hope because they could not find work would have a second chance they could leap at. Those who on the other hand are serial parasites would starve to death without causing society any more problems.
A major failing of your assumption is that we have a government chosen by the people. Our government is not chosen by the people any more, and voting does not ensure that the peoples will is enacted.
In part this is a good thing, because it would infringe on citizens (inalieable or otherwise) rights (probably starting with the rights pertaining to religion). This is built into most modern pseudo-democracies and forces the government to defend those rights inspite of the fact that members of the government would like to take them away because it would be popular with their constituents.
However modern democracy has another problem, the press, mass media and the ignorance of the general public. The latter alows the two former to manipulate the public into electing individuals who do not act in the best interests of their citizens.
Modern pseudo-democracies suffer from two failings in relation to this matter as a result. Firstly the idea that government should be representative superseeds all else, and secondly the rights of the public can be bought and sold by those with influence, with the consequence of generating more influence for themselves, leading to a vicious cycle.
The latter is to some extent caused by the former. Goverment should be representative, this is true, but it should be more than that. Politicians have a responsibility to the people they represent to do what is best for them, even when that means going against popular support. They should do this in particular when the people are unable to understand the complexity of the problem. Terrorism is the modern classic example. The risks from terrorism are minor, and if we truely respected inalieable rights, then our response to terrorism would be give me liberty or give me death.
However most of the population have no understanding of the foundation of the society they live in. They see rights are something that can be traded for security without thinking of the consequences. So those few who do understand and who are forced to fight for liberty join with those who wish to be destructive in a pact with the devil. In order to defend liberty sometimes on has to fight against the will of the very people whose rights you are defending. To believe otherwise is to place the representative in representative democracy above the inalieable in inalieable rights. I believe in the latter, the former is just a means to an end.
No, no, it's psuedoscience. Thier explanation of the behaviour of comets shape simply does not match reality. Nor does thier explanation of the solar wind (which they claim is positively charged if I recall, it is infact electrically neutral). Thier predictions about Deep Impact were so vaguo they would make a astrology cringe, so to claim they got that right is absurd. These people don't open themselves up to peer review. We aren't talking about a bunch of little Einstiens the world wont accept. These are genuine crackpots.
Evolution is just a theory in the same way that general relativity and quantum mechanics are 'just' theories. Darwin had doubts for the same reason Einstien had doubts about his explanation of the photoelectric effect, he didn't have a bucket load of evidence. We have that now. Besides, that things evolve is not a theory, it is a fact. That evolution proceeds according to the theory of evolution is the best established theory in modern biology. The stickers are wrong. A much more suitable sticker would be one on the Bible reading "This book is a myth or fable and has limited historical evidense to back up it's claims". Now I don't think many of us would approve of that sticker and it is at least justifiable. This isn't about doubt or questioning, this is about religions war on scince. One that it is failing at and therefore getting increasingly desperate at. You do not understand the issue, you will not without study comprehend it and you will leave what is taught in the science class room up to scientists, let us do our job.
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And you have a degree in Biology..?
In order to be genuinely "irriducibly complex" in a testable way, I would argue you need to be thermodynamically impossible, since no way to calculate the probability of a given configuration exists (we can really only at this stage observe favourable or disfavourable changes in a species and compute the obvious). No violation of the laws of thermodynamics are observed in the above systems, so I'd say you need to go back to the drawing board.
Perhaps you would like to in some way quantify irriducibly complex for us so we can see irriducible complexity at work? Otherwise you are simply stating that a system could not have come into being without external asistance simply because you cant think of a good explanation.
The whole point here is that everyone doesn't have the 'same amount of bias'. You cant fake a line on a chart, you cant fake a regression, and you cant fake fossil records (at least not without getting caught eventually).
Scientists go out of thier way to ensure that Creationists are not considered scientists because they are not scientists. You say most of what creationists say is junk, I would go a step further, I would say almost all of it is junk. You claim creationists explanation is feasible, and self-consistent. Of course it is, it is untestable. You say it is supported by evidence. There is no such evidence. At least no evidence that could distinguish creationism from a real scientific theory.
You mention it is decently supported. I'm afraid that is simply a work of fiction. Almost every trained biologist supports the theory of evolution. For the most part it is engineers, computer scientists, and the like (people who make little contact the emperical biological science at a research level) who are creationists. These people are not qualified on the subject, and even if they were, an overwhelming majority still support evolution as the best theory we have to explain the origin of the species.
I'm afraid your position, though moderate, is still wrong. The overwhelming evidence is that evolution is the correct theory to explain the origin of life back to the first replicator. It is incomplete, but any explanation which replaces it will contain most of the current theory of evolution as a subset of itself. In fact it will probably contain so much of the current theory it will be called evolution on account of it being based on identicle or near identicle premises.
I appreciate that you are trying hard to be a moderator, a go between between scientists and the antiscientists, but the bottom line is that science cannot negotiate, because it is a method not a people. And the cold hard facts are that the method supports evolution, not creationism, and unless creationists come up with some real evidence supporting creationism, instead of simply pointing out the gaps that are not yet filled in in evolution, evolution will remain one of the key theories underpinning the biological sciences. It is not a choice to be more diplomatic, there is nothing to be more diplomatic about.
If you are acting as an agent of the government... then the Establishment Clause of the first Amendment? If you want to go on government property and pray that is fine, but if you are acting as an agent of the government then you cannot promote one religion over another.
You fail to understand the purpose of the first amendment, and have confused secularism with atheism. The founding fathers had no problem with privately practiced religion, in fact as you say, they (and I for that matter) consider it a basic and fundamental right. The first amendment balances several things against eachother. It protects free speech, it protects freedom of religion, and it protects it's citizens from theocracy.
You call preventing a science teacher talking about ID censorship. It may well be, but we censor all the time at work. We don't call stopping someone talking at length about their favourite cat a breach of free speech if they are prevented from doing it in the middle of a business propsal. Why? Because they are supposed to be doing a job. One of the fundamental principles of the United States is that it's government shall promote no one religion above another. Not world view, not methodology, just religion. That binds teachers in science class rooms in public schools, and requires that they not teach religion in a class with no call for it.
Morality arises from the study of ethics not religion, incidentally.
You state that you reject the idea that government should favor my view over yours. That is fine, amend the constitution replacing the establishment clause with a clause stating any ideological viewpoint, instead of religion. The greatest strength of the constitution is that it can be changed, and if you think that is a change for the better, you campaign to get that change to happen.
You then talk about the government censoring your views. You are in no way censored. If you want to you can go stand on a street corner and spout your opinions on ID till the sun explodes. I not only have no problem with that, but consider such essential liberty vital to the future of the United States. What you want is for religions to get privledge access to children using the abilities of the state. You want a theocracy.
Secularism is not atheism. Atheism is a world view held by those who, depending on your definition, either do not believe in a god or gods, or outright reject that a god or gods exist. Secularism is the requirement that the state be independent of religion. Secularism protects freedom of religious, that is the whole point of it being in the first amendment.
It is not because ID is false that it should be censored as you put it. It is because it is a religious doctrine, which has no place in a science class room. Teaching it violates the first amendment. The fact (I use fact deliberately, because when talking about science truth is basically a scientific colloquim for fact, there are no truths in science per se) that ID has no evidence for it (as you put it, 'is false') is irrelevant, it's factual nature is something that the people decide when they elect school boards. That it violates the first amendment is what requires it's 'censorship'.
"The main impact of introducing Intelligent Design into the classroom would be that there would arise a much larger group of people with an interest in developing falsifiable experiments that would allow people to decide between the two theories."
To disprove ID would be to show a negative. ID is unfalsifiable. There exists no experiment that can falsify it. Right, now that the challenge of finding all falsifiable predictions of ID has been met, and no falsification scheme devised, can we agree that teaching unfalsifiable tautologies in science class rooms is a waste of time?
Your arguement is ridiculous because by your definition selecting a curriculum is sensorship because you will always 'exclude ideas'. When selecting a curriculum we always include real science, at the cost of fiction, from our science class room. And local school board members apointed by the public decide what that should entail.
Intelligent Designs exclusion from science class rooms has nothing to do with the fact that from a scientific view point it is a load of ballony, and everything to do with not establishing a theocracy in the united states (or any other country).
I think you fail to understand what the Establishment clause is. It is not about ideology. It is about preventing theocracy. The founding fathers realised that theocracy was dangerous. Hence the establishment clause exists to create a secular state. The whole point of the Establishment clause is to promote secularism, it is incredibly biased against one view point, the view point that lead to the dark ages.
'Truths' are not something relevant to science, they are the domain of philosophy and religious study. Science is a method, there is no matter of opinion in so far as established fact. There is plenty of opinion when it comes to disputed facts, and how best to proceed, but every competant scientist trained in the field of physics knows Newtons Law of Gravitation works within the bounds of it's validity. Every biologist knows evolution happens. There is no disputed facts here, those ideas arrived at following from study of world religions are wrong about evolution, as far as scientific method goes.
Your consistent world view of reality does not exist. I accept that you cannot always seperate disciplines, but are far as those disciplines grounded in science go, religion has nothing to contribute. The interdisciplinary contradiction you talk of is simply a result of the incompatability of science and religion as methods of arriving at, respectively, facts and truth. Then trying to equate facts and truth and arriving at a contradiction. The problem is very simple. Religion makes predictions science can test. Science has shown those predictions to be wrong. If you reject the scientific method as a fundamental method of obtaining truth in your life, then you can reject facts obtained as a result of it and go on believing whatever you want. However, the Establishment clause makes it very clear that your religious outlook has no place in the government.
The reason I put up Chineese wall between religion and science is because as far as methods go, neither has anything to contribute to the other. They are totally philosophically distinct entities. Your belief in a 'consistent reality' is just a consequence of your inability to appreciate that there exist contradictory axiomatic structures which are internally consistent (although in the case of most religions the latter is true only because they do something equivilant to setting true equal to false).
At no point did I state that religion and science are mutually exclusive, I also happen to know many good scientists of religious faith. This isn't about the big bad religious people trying to get science.
Your individuals of faith who later discovered their faith can be disapointed with themselves for not having found their faith earlier if they want, that is their choice. But (using the US as an example since this is the major battle ground at the moment) the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is being flagrantly violated by individuals who do not teach science in the science class room as science fact. And this marks part of a wider and continuuing attack on scientific progress by fundamentalism.
I'm going to be rude and assume you are from the US (incidentally I'm not myself but most slashdotters are). Your example of the teacher who answered honestly, she might have answered honestly, but she also violated the first amendment. The two correct answers were "yes there is overwhelming scientific evidence in support of evolution" and "answering that would cause me to violate the estalishment clause of the first amendment".
This isn't about schools churning out mindless fundamentalists or otherwise, and it isn't just about the scientists who time is wasted. Our grant proposals are paid for by the people, who elect a government which decides where funding goes. Actions like the one you describe which in the US would violate the estalishment clause have the effect of discrediting science because "authority figure X doesn't believe it". This in turn makes them less willing to vote for politicians with pro-science stances.
Incidentally, when I say destroy, I mean in the same way you destroy a nation state or corporation, not kill. I'm not advocating dogmacide. I would have thought that was obvious. However if you cant see the culture war that exists at the moment, the relentless attacks by fundamentalist on science and western secular government, I rather suspect you should read the news more.
And when I say destroy, I say destroy because as far as they are concerned it is us or them. They will not rest until science is reduced to medicine and quasi-engineering. Make no mistake, fundamentalists of most of the major religions want to crush science, and they aren't going to go away quietly. Yes we have to rally thier pro-science religious bretheren. But we also have to utilise the machinery of the state to protect both it's secular nature, and the potential for scientific progress of future generations. I think it is somewhat nieve to believe that the fundamentalists will stop with just school curricula.
Funnily enough I know good scientists who are former Christians who were educated by people who dismissed evolution. These are very smart people, who are also now very bitter because thier time was wasted. I think you are the one selling what I consider our best and brightest short by implying that anyone who is duped by adults they trust by convincing subtle but ultimately false arguements into believing something false somehow cannot be our best and brightest.
I can understand why you aren't worried, but I've seen the damage of a much more pleasant scenario (that is, of educators bad mouthing evolution even when they are not allowed to talk about fictional alternatives) than the one you describe, and if it significantly unpleasant for scientists who have grown up in that environment imagine what it would be like if pseudo-philosophy is introduced as an alternative to science in the science class room. It is not fair on our children, and it's takes considerable effort to undo the damage.
IDist are fighting a culture war and it wont end with just changing school curriculums. The very survival of science in the US is at stake, and if we wish to protect science, then we must destroy these fundamentalist meddlers.
So you are saying that it is okay to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment? I think that in this case the rights conferred on all society by the Establishment Clause of First Amendment supercede those of a subset of educators right to express thier religious opinions inside a class room, also protected under the First Amendment. I think that the Supreme Court also agrees with me on this one.
One reason, those educators are free to express those opinions off the job if they want to. They are being paid to educate, not spread religious doctrine, and thier right to freedom of expression is curtailed not by the application of undue duress or other illegal means but because they are being paid to teach children science, something they agreed to do in exchange for being paid.
The establishment clause is binding on government, and the government can only ignore it if the constitution is suspended or amended. The right to free speach is something that is in the hands of individuals and can be surrendered (i.e. freedom of speach is not an inalieable right in that sense).
On a personal not however I do feel that an organisations ablility to curtail freedom of expression should have limits, and that certain aspects of our capacity to curtail our own free speech amount to selling ourselves into bondage. Since I consider this freedom to be inalieable I do feel certain aspects of modern contract law to be in violation of the emancipation proclamation of the thriteenth amendment of the constitution of the United States. However that is just my opinion.
I will second that, and can I add that I want them peer reviewed, in a respected journal? I'm familiar with one example that got utterly trashed after publication because it was utterly weak. Are there any decent examples or is all the "evidence" in pseudomystic pop 'sci' books?
"Why do God and Science have to be mutually exclusive?"
They aren't. Who said anything about mutually exclusive? Pastor with the greatest respect, your side is the one waging a culture war. If your side left the explanation of the mechanisms of the universe to those with the training to understand them, then there would be no articles like this.
If you really are bothered by this kind of thing my advice is this, make regular sermons attacking ID and it's advocates. Indicate to your flock why it is that ID is not science. Encourage them to leave scientists alone to do thier jobs. If you and everyone like you did the same, maybe there would be a hope that this culture war could be ended.
Incidentally leaving alone includes trying to set up a theocracy in the US or any other nation. Our funding comes from government's (mostly), so support a free secular state.
Like to admit it or not science and everything that was gained during the enlightenment is under threat, and it's under threat from the same people who gave us the dark ages. If the IDist (and others who stand in the way of scientific reseach) want a culture war, then I say give them one. We in the scientific community have sat by the sidelines for too long assuming that engaging these barsteds will give them credibility. They already have credibility, they have grown to powerful to just ignore. Just because we have no respect for them doesn't mean Joe Six Pack doesn't. It's time to ridicule and lobby. There is nothing wrong with journalists touting every discovery science makes as new evidence against this new "God of the Gaps". If people who care about human scientific progress don't fight back soon, then progress will slow or even retard, and we have too many problems which will need solutions over the next 100 years to waste our future scientists time teaching them how a concrete verified corner stone of the biological sciences is embroiled in a non-existant controversy and offer them a unscientific tautological steaming pile of monkey terd as an alternative.
Well of course it doesn't falsify ID, you can falsify ID. It's falsification would be demonstrating a negative, that is "There are no designed systems". This of course is one of the many reasons it isn't science. But since ID is creationism dressed in scientific robes, and is being used in an attempt to cripple scientific education in the US, it makes sense that scientists look to refute the most credible claims of the ID gang. Now since anyone advocating ID has no credibility (at least as a biologist) one crazy persons non-scientific rantings are as good as the nexts, and none of these claims are made in respected scientific journals (to my knowledge), so shooting down one claim of an advocate of an unscientific theory is just as good as shooting down another. ID is just the "God of the Gaps" in new clothes. Religious individuals should stop trying to impose that religion on science, and go do something not harmful to scientific progress.
Got anything peer reviewed in a respected scientific journal? I'm one of these olde scientists who doesn't trust pop sci.
"And by the way, is it one of /.'s top priorities to attack religion every chance it gets?"
Pretty simple really. The crowd on slashdot are pretty interested in science from what I gather, mostly more technical stuff, but they find it interesting, and they like scientific progress. Many religious groups have elements that spend a significant portion of thier time trying to slow scientific progress down. Religious institutions don't spend much time promoting science, and when they do it often comes with caveats or is just an olive branch from a minority sect. As such since religions don't contribute much to the advancement of society from a technical or scientific aspect they are rarely going to appear on slashdot in a positive light.
On the other hand their are plent of religious individuals who if they had always had thier way would have kept man in the stone age. Heck it wouldn't suprise me if the fist few guys to make metal tools were burned for deviant or unnatural behaviour (incidentally, thats a joke).
End result if religion appears on slashdot it is in a negative light. Something to be stopped so that science can advance.
The solution is really very simple, if you want religion to appear in a positive light, then get it to take all that cash it gets from donations and fund stem cell research, or fundamental physics or something, maybe use some of those buildings they waste every Friday/Saturday/Sunday in as labs.
That would be the case except the AMD chip doesn't overclock so well, they tend to throw up error even running a dash over their usual clock speed. The Intel one can (if you can supply the juice) be seriously overclocked on the other hand. However I don't believe the article when it says the Intel Chip is faster. I've read what I would consider a much more reliable review which had the AMD chip either infront, or way infront for most benchmarks (especially when it came to multithreaded tasks). Maybe there is some variation in the chip qualities, me no know. However, for the time being at least, I more willing to believe results which give AMD the nose ahead than Intel. Granted I'm bias.
You have failed to address the fundamental issue, which I will express in a simple question. What is the difference between mathematics expressed on paper and mathematics expressed on a hard disk that makes the later patentable?
Two things. First by your logic General Relativity should have been patentable, simply by writing "An computer based implementation of an algorithm to find the behaviour of objects under gravity". You then go on to say that I'm on the losing side. I know I am, but the above example makes it pretty clear I'm not on the wrong side. The law does not define morallity.
Your condition for obviousness does not work, because if an idea is obvious, there wont be a publication on it for that very reason. No self respecting scientist is going to publish in a journal a paper whose sole result is to extole the virtues of one click shopping.
Now for my second thing. Since the only physical object you describe is a general purpose computer, we are agreed that a general purpose computer should be patentable. Bit late for that but I accept that. So should (to a certain extent) a unique hardware implementation of an algorithm be patentable. But by definition a general purpose computer is just a means of writing down mathematical algorithms. As such, by the agreement that mathematics is not patentable, mathematics written on a computer is not patentable. Your example is a misleading one because what is actually patentable in the device you describe is the computer, not the program on it. What you are saying amounts to saying "paper is patentable, hence so is stuff written on paper".
As for our laws being bought and paid for, the Supreme Court is appointed by the president. The president is elected by a democratic process. To win that process requires campaign donations. Campaign donations are for buying laws. The software industry has made campaign donations, ergo they have bought laws. I'm not going into greater detail here because I would prefer the first two points by stressed, that is that mathematics should not be patentable.
Obvious or not, it is not an specification for an actual physical device. There used to be an understanding when it came to pure mathematics and sciences, mathematicians and scientists develop science and mathematics through grants given to them from the government, and in return, science and mathematics was not patentable, because to make that kind of knowledge patentable inhibited the free market (because it stopped inventors of actual devices from making progress using these results). Today, we can patent mathematics in the form of software, and surprise surprise this is inhibiting the free market.
If it isn't a design for something I can hold my hand out and touch, it shouldn't be patentable. Now as for who should win here, well as much as I hate them, Apple should. But legally, I don't think they stand much of a chance. The laws that the software industry cartel bought from politicians in the US seems to me to support Burst and I don't think Apple have a case.
I consider the fact that the prison system costs money to be it's primary failing. We should make prisons into labour camps, and operate on a no work, no food, lodging, heat basis. An inmate earns his food, lodgings etc. Inmates would need to work longer hours than most people inorder to pay for additional security etc, and rations would have to be very basic to keep costs down, but I'm certain operating at capacity prisons could turn a profit. This profit could then be used to provide educational programs for inmates, who would not be released into society until they had adquired both the skills to do an in demand job and secured employment, in addition to requirements from sentencing.
Keeping inmates all in solitary when not working, and enforcing a no talking rule while working would help to prevent inmates developing criminal contacts or developing new skills that would make them more effective burgalars, rapists, etc.
In addition the forced education would ensure that the inmates who have no hope because they could not find work would have a second chance they could leap at. Those who on the other hand are serial parasites would starve to death without causing society any more problems.
A major failing of your assumption is that we have a government chosen by the people. Our government is not chosen by the people any more, and voting does not ensure that the peoples will is enacted. In part this is a good thing, because it would infringe on citizens (inalieable or otherwise) rights (probably starting with the rights pertaining to religion). This is built into most modern pseudo-democracies and forces the government to defend those rights inspite of the fact that members of the government would like to take them away because it would be popular with their constituents. However modern democracy has another problem, the press, mass media and the ignorance of the general public. The latter alows the two former to manipulate the public into electing individuals who do not act in the best interests of their citizens. Modern pseudo-democracies suffer from two failings in relation to this matter as a result. Firstly the idea that government should be representative superseeds all else, and secondly the rights of the public can be bought and sold by those with influence, with the consequence of generating more influence for themselves, leading to a vicious cycle. The latter is to some extent caused by the former. Goverment should be representative, this is true, but it should be more than that. Politicians have a responsibility to the people they represent to do what is best for them, even when that means going against popular support. They should do this in particular when the people are unable to understand the complexity of the problem. Terrorism is the modern classic example. The risks from terrorism are minor, and if we truely respected inalieable rights, then our response to terrorism would be give me liberty or give me death. However most of the population have no understanding of the foundation of the society they live in. They see rights are something that can be traded for security without thinking of the consequences. So those few who do understand and who are forced to fight for liberty join with those who wish to be destructive in a pact with the devil. In order to defend liberty sometimes on has to fight against the will of the very people whose rights you are defending. To believe otherwise is to place the representative in representative democracy above the inalieable in inalieable rights. I believe in the latter, the former is just a means to an end.
No, no, it's psuedoscience. Thier explanation of the behaviour of comets shape simply does not match reality. Nor does thier explanation of the solar wind (which they claim is positively charged if I recall, it is infact electrically neutral).
Thier predictions about Deep Impact were so vaguo they would make a astrology cringe, so to claim they got that right is absurd.
These people don't open themselves up to peer review. We aren't talking about a bunch of little Einstiens the world wont accept. These are genuine crackpots.
Evolution is just a theory in the same way that general relativity and quantum mechanics are 'just' theories.
Darwin had doubts for the same reason Einstien had doubts about his explanation of the photoelectric effect, he didn't have a bucket load of evidence. We have that now. Besides, that things evolve is not a theory, it is a fact. That evolution proceeds according to the theory of evolution is the best established theory in modern biology.
The stickers are wrong. A much more suitable sticker would be one on the Bible reading "This book is a myth or fable and has limited historical evidense to back up it's claims". Now I don't think many of us would approve of that sticker and it is at least justifiable.
This isn't about doubt or questioning, this is about religions war on scince. One that it is failing at and therefore getting increasingly desperate at. You do not understand the issue, you will not without study comprehend it and you will leave what is taught in the science class room up to scientists, let us do our job.