It to each individual person to believe how much of which they believe in.
This is a nice sentiment, that is, until your child comes home from science class in public school with twisted ideas about a magical watchmaker. Or worse yet, twisted ideas about the way science works. I don't care what people teach their kids at home or sunday school, but when it enters the secular public sphere, then it's my problem. That's the basis for the huge debate that gets launched here on slashdot everytime someone mentions the E word.
You wouldn't want your child coming home claiming that the world sits on the back of a turtle, so why should our children be indoctrinated into any particulary creation myth? So yeah, that's why we don't have an "agree to disagree" mentality. It's unfortunate, but that's the situation.
You're right that no one should discount a theory because it's bizarre. People do, and it's a shame. But still - the Cold Fusion in a Can guy didn't get his theory accepted because (I'm assuming a lot in your hypothetical example) he couldn't demonstrate it physically, mathematically, or theoretically. The quantum mechanics people, on the other hand, came by their conclusions by accident and with great astonishment. Usually in the form of equations, followed by "Damn.. that can't be right." Followed by no one being able to challenge the equations, and lastly followed by experiments that supported the equations... all the while everyone involved shaking their heads saying "well I'll be damned."
So you see there is a huge difference between the crazy theory of quantum mechanics (evolution's analog in this story, I'm assuming) and cold fusion in a can (ID's).
I'd like to add though, speaking to the religion-basher who's name I didn't care to glance at, that adherence to religion does not equal ignorance or non-inquiry. It was the Muslims (generally the Arabic and Spanish ones) who advanced science further than the Europe had ever done. The Renaissance was basically Christian Europe playing catch-up. Neither group was more or less fervent in their religious doctrine.. they were just coming at it from different theological/cultural world views.
Only problem is, monkeys can't give birth to humans.
HAHAHAHA I want you to know I printed this and taped it to my desk. It's the funnies thing I've read in ages. I hope, for your sake and that of your children, that you didn't mean that wierd stuff you typed & are actually a clever satirist.
You're right, the debate is also taking place in churches (even ones that are dressed up as institutions of education). I left that out though, I felt it was rather self-evident.
From your referenced thread:
Colleges such as Calvin and Messiah challenge students to think against the grain
That's cute. So I followed the links to the calander of events.
10 am Chapel.
Worship Service
Chaplain Cooper will introduce the series. His message, based on Song of Songs 1.15-2.7, will be about "The Ways of a Man with a Maiden."
7:30 pm Chapel
Lecture
Chaplain Dale Cooper will be speaking on: "The Top Ten Things I Wish I'd Known About Women Before Marrying One." Free ice cream at Johnny's after lecture.
(etc etc)
Then I checked out the page for the Biology major, and found this synopsis of study:
Studying biology at Calvin equips students to assume their roles and responsibilities as servants and stewards of God's creation.
And from Messiah's page...
Our motto "Christ Preeminent" reiterates this; we believe and teach that Jesus Christ--in his life and teachings, in his death and resurrection--is the incarnation of the way, the truth and the life of God. Members of the College community affirm that God in Christ is reconciling the world to renewed relationship with God, and has called us to be the agents or servants of this reconciling faith, hope, and love.
Messiah's mission, in turn, is to educate men and women who will serve their God through myriad vocations. To this end, the College is both rigorously academic and unapologetically Christian. As a community of Christian scholars, at Messiah we are committed to being transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we "may discern what is the will of God --what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Romans 12:2). To develop such a mature faith, the College pursues a unified Christian world view and lifestyle that joins revelation with rational inquiry and experience, and which integrates believing with being and doing.
Yeah, these are some serious outside-the-box radical thinkers. I might even go as far as to call them insane. One disturbing thing... the specialty of the Department of Biological Sciences in Messiah seems to be training K-12 teachers. That is frightening. On the bright side, I bet their textbooks are cheap - since they only use the one.
that fact that we are having the debate shows that we're not in one; but if either party were to win outright without the community showing it by evidence, then yes, we would enter a dark age.
Respectfully, this debate only takes place on internet forums and PTA meetings in backward states (I'm looking at you, Kansas).
It's as if an entire town religiously believed that the British won the Revolutionary War, and they put so much pressure on the local school district that they had to put a disclaimer on the history books to the effect of
The "We Won" theory is only one possible explanation for the formation of the United States following colonization.
As a 'case in point' Jesus did not say that I as a heterosexual must not insert my penis into a woman's vagina to commit sexual sin. (This assumes that the woman in question is not my wife. It's no sin for me to have sex with my wife! It's a great thing!)
Jesus said "I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." This is a much higher bar than where I put my body parts.
That actually explains a lot (for me as a nontheist). Although it doesn't explain why people rail against homosexuality, and turn a blind eye to adultery (or premarital sex).
The homosexual lifestyle carries serious health risks. Health risks cited in the study include HIV and AIDS, substance abuse, depression and anxiety, cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Do you understand why this is? Can you imagine? It's not an act of God. This is the case because people who aren't afraid of getting pregnant don't use condoms (like the anon said, it's a matter of education).
You'll see identical statistics on heterosexual couples who rely only on chemical (pills) birth control. So this says absolutely nothing about homosexuality.
As a side note... penguin thread leads to homosexuality discussion??? Too funny!!!
Goooood morning:) Well now, are we talking about different versions of systems that exist within a divergent evolutionary tree or a convergent evolutionary tree?
I don't see that it matters (?). If a genetic change in population occurs once in one condition, it can occur again and again in the same conditions. It is randomness, at the chemical level, but actual morphological change is bound by those conditions. So if you have an environmental niche that can be filled (such as eating flying insects) then eventually you can have convergent evolution fill those niches. (such as birds and bats independently evolving methods to fly).
if nature itself has laws configured in such a way to bring about such extreme complexity, then what does that say about the laws of nature? It means the laws of nature are even more complicated than the machines that it produces
Well.. think about the computer you're using. Ever been play Quake and just had to stop and think... this whole game, the graphics, the sound, the network interface... it's all just 1s & 0s. This is a bad example, since of course someone programmed the game, so I'm probably asking for it. But this is just to illustrate that complexity arises out of simplicity.
as long as evolutionists cannot prove evolution
No one can "prove" the Law of Gravity, either. And it's a lot less understood than evolution:)
No offense or anything, but that's a terrible example of evolution. More shaking will destroy the castle walls
I smell the laws of thermodynamics entering the picture. (You can tell cause it smells like burning rubber). I'll get a jump on this now: the concept of entropy is only valid in a closed system. The earth is absolutely not one of those, we have a constant stream of energy from the sun. When that dries up, ya we'll all be reverting back to "simpler forms" LOL.
Zardo, if I thought that of David I would've filled out a different dance card by now.:P
At the end of it all, you apparently agree with him that the primordial soup self-replicator is hard to believe, which would lead me to believe you agree with ID in a sense
This is true, sort of. But I think people look for ID in too lineal a fashion. The primordial soup replicator isn't that hard to believe, it's just sort of disappointing. It's neither necessary nor warrented to explain evolution with a designer. However, I like to think that beyond it all (as opposed to behind it all), there is something bigger. That's where my faith sits.
Seems you could use a few more courses in ethics! ... well yeah, but not for the reasons you think ^_~
In other cases we find complicated systems with no possible reduced version conceivable or in the biological record.
I don't think I've ever seen such a system. The most grueling part of cultural anthropology is suffering through the mandatory physical anthropology courses... I still have species lineages and organ system progression of primates coming out of my (reducibly complex) ears. However.... To substantiate these claims, one needs to study them on a case by case basis.
You're right about that ^_^!! We'd be here all day! So lets put that on that burner.
Instead you added an entire factory of pre-designed molds and shafts with complicated machanisms that can assemble metal furnature.
That's right, I did:) The question ID folk ask is: how can you go from the four universal forces to Human Beings? A very valid question.. and the answer is you can't. Humans are indeed very complex, but this is not so strange when you consider that our systems are built on systems built on systems (etc etc) that are built on the forces. For example, a star can form much easier than a human being. They're very simple things. But after the gravity (that made our infamous table) builds energy into mass, we get the beginnings of complexity: matter. So anyway millenia-long story made short: ID seems to many people (myself included) to be an answer to a question that didn't need to be asked.
One last jab:) What 'irreducible complexity' does (outside the realm of religion and politics) is give evolution a burdon of proof
This would be great, except that it does nothing of the kind. It simply makes claims that it cannot support or disprove (that no one can support or disprove) and "challenges" non-ID evolutionists to do the impossible.
One last note to close my arguement before I leave work ^_~... when you go all the way back, past the amoebas and the previruses, what started it all? That's where my god lives, until we find out and he'll have to take a seat farther back on the bus. But here's the nice part... since the bus is infinatly long, he'll always be there. (of course, most likely it'll turn out that everyone was looking in the wrong direction, and he was driving the whole time... but science has to stop at the yellow line).
And the winner for most beat-to-death metaphor goes to..... *crosses fingers*
The miscommunication we have is that we don't know whether something is outside of the ability of science to explain it. To assume that there is an explanation waiting for us to find is 'faith' in science as I explained in more detail in the other thread with droptone. I see you have much faith in science.:)
Well said ^_^ And because science is a human institution it is flawed (because people are).. but hey you can't argue with results. However, you didn't address the most important part of his post:
...it's up to IDists to explain why their theory better explains natural diversity than Evolution. You don't just switch over to a entirely new explanation just because the current theory doesn't seem to cover all the bases. Especially when the new theory doesn't seem to cover any.
we literally observe information systems throughout nature which the laws of nature as we understand them to work cannot explain
-- no we really don't. People often bring up one complex human organ or another as an example of "irreducible complexity"... but of course they could find reduced versions of everything all over nature if they cared to look. Which, of course, they don't.
As a poor analogy, metal furniture layed out in the open will never assemble itself by the force of gravity.
I don't get it... what does gravity making furniture have to do with evolution? Now if gravity was pulling molten metal through various molds down a shaft that randomly connected, and whereby everything that didn't stand on four legs would fall over into a pool of molten metal, then yes.. eventually you'll end up with something resembling a metal table. That's a much better analogy.
s long as science cannot explain something it remains a theory and not a fact
A theory in science is a system that explains facts. What you're thinking of is a hypothesis. Don't feel bad, everyone gets those mixed up, since in regular speech thats how we use the word theory.
Until things are fully explained by science, there is a level of faith in science
I agree with this in part, especially in questions like "how did the universe begin" or "what is to become of human kind?"... but a gap in scientific knowledge is not a green light to insert whatever fantasy happens to appeal to you.. especially if the specific gap is itself a fanciful construction (eg irreducible complexity).
there are "facts" in textbooks that have since been shown to be incorrect
Fair enough... but this wouldn't be a problem if funding wasn't a problem. When kids are still using textbooks from 1987, the dates on Australopithecus might be off by a few tens of thousands of years. While I agree its absurd that in college you have to relearn everything that was obsolete when you were in HS, I don't think this says anything about the theory as a whole.
And think of this: what if our religious/political leaders decided that the flat-earthers were right. They'd be lobbying for flat-earth theory to be taught along side "round-earth theory" in geography class. Does it matter that every current geographer, astronomer, historian, geologist, and everyone else believes now that the earth is round? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean we should teach flat-earth theory in school just because someone might say something like this:
Proof by democracy then?
This analogy may seem ridiculous to you, but its how educators feel when dealing with ID proponants.
Well actually arguments arise all the time about "current" theory, just because that's the nature of science. If one school of thought has a theory, then everyone else tries to rip it apart.
I would also be encouraged if more of this went on in the classroom (not just for evolution, but science in general). That's why lab-time and experimentation is important... no one should just accept what they read in the book.
However, evolution has been picked-apart to death; probably the most attacked scientific theory to date. The fact that it is still the exclusively accepted theory in the scientific community after all of this would make teachers poking at it seem like... well... zealotism.
Creationism is a "theory" in the colloquial sense... which is what science calls a hypothesis (and not a very good one). Evolution, on the other hand, is a theory in the scientific sense... which is better described as a system (a story really) that is used adaptably to fit the known facts. Other examples: The Theory of Gravity & the Theory of Relativity.
ID could be a scientific theory if there were any facts to support it, but there aren't. (Doesn't mean its not True with a capital 'T', just means it's not science and shouldnt be in biology class).
And as to the folks who said that this is an old arguement and not newsworthy, this is why it is:
Bush said "Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about,"
Problem is, in science class this debate doesn't exist. It only exists in philosophy & religion classes (and now, thanks to dubya, political science).
"covers eyes to avoid reading that the nurse was fat, hairy, covered in sentient boils, and a tranny"
No trust me, it's worse if the nurse is smokin hot... & then she gives you that *look*. Its not as bad as the look you get from the drug-store clerk who happens to be your girlfriend's brother, but it ranks right up there.
Awareness of and exposure to sex is the best cure for teen pregancy there is.
I went to highschool up north in a suburb of chicago, where controls on sexual material were VERY lax. You could get even condoms from the nurses office (which, by the way, kills the mood). In my four years there, there was only one pregnancy... which was quite the scandal.
Then I moved to the uptight bible belt, where even mentioning sex earns you the title of "deviant devil worshipper". This is the important part---> the High School had to have a DAY CARE added on to it!!!
(and this town is a LOT more wealthy and influential than my old neighborhood, god knows, so its not an economic thing.. its a repression/curiosity/forced-self-discovery thing)... so yes I think people who are upset about their kids accidently seeing sexual material either are VERY stupid or they want grandchildren NOW.
I don't think people removing everyday objects "before the test could be considered real world, do you?"
I don't think they much care. When they do stun-gun demonstrations they ask that the volunteer remove keys and lighters and stuff from their pockets. Same idiotic policy.
" first of all do some real world testing on volunteers"
This was already done.. they asked the volunteers to remove glasses & contacts first (wouldn't want that beam refocused).
This will undoubtably face the same legal problems as other weapons labeled "non-lethal". They are loose on regulations and easy to approve for (and abused in) domestic use.
Iraq is another matter... no use crying about the bed we've made and are already stuck sleeping in. If we choose to stay for the sake of order at this point (as opposed to letting the inevitable civil war happen "naturally"), the more non-lethal weapons available the better.
MHO
So basically if they want peaceful assemblies to stay peaceful, they don't need rayguns. They just need a cannabis gun. Or maybe a "smoke out grenade":)
Result?
"I'm still pissed off about the WTO, but do I really want to turn over a car? Only if I think there's Doritos under there."
Slashdot Mirror
This is a nice sentiment, that is, until your child comes home from science class in public school with twisted ideas about a magical watchmaker. Or worse yet, twisted ideas about the way science works. I don't care what people teach their kids at home or sunday school, but when it enters the secular public sphere, then it's my problem. That's the basis for the huge debate that gets launched here on slashdot everytime someone mentions the E word.
You wouldn't want your child coming home claiming that the world sits on the back of a turtle, so why should our children be indoctrinated into any particulary creation myth? So yeah, that's why we don't have an "agree to disagree" mentality. It's unfortunate, but that's the situation.
Well.. yeah... ok.
You're right that no one should discount a theory because it's bizarre. People do, and it's a shame. But still - the Cold Fusion in a Can guy didn't get his theory accepted because (I'm assuming a lot in your hypothetical example) he couldn't demonstrate it physically, mathematically, or theoretically. The quantum mechanics people, on the other hand, came by their conclusions by accident and with great astonishment. Usually in the form of equations, followed by "Damn.. that can't be right." Followed by no one being able to challenge the equations, and lastly followed by experiments that supported the equations... all the while everyone involved shaking their heads saying "well I'll be damned."
So you see there is a huge difference between the crazy theory of quantum mechanics (evolution's analog in this story, I'm assuming) and cold fusion in a can (ID's).
I'd like to add though, speaking to the religion-basher who's name I didn't care to glance at, that adherence to religion does not equal ignorance or non-inquiry. It was the Muslims (generally the Arabic and Spanish ones) who advanced science further than the Europe had ever done. The Renaissance was basically Christian Europe playing catch-up. Neither group was more or less fervent in their religious doctrine.. they were just coming at it from different theological/cultural world views.
From your referenced thread:
That's cute. So I followed the links to the calander of events.
Then I checked out the page for the Biology major, and found this synopsis of study:
And from Messiah's page...
Yeah, these are some serious outside-the-box radical thinkers. I might even go as far as to call them insane.
One disturbing thing... the specialty of the Department of Biological Sciences in Messiah seems to be training K-12 teachers. That is frightening. On the bright side, I bet their textbooks are cheap - since they only use the one.
Respectfully, this debate only takes place on internet forums and PTA meetings in backward states (I'm looking at you, Kansas).
It's as if an entire town religiously believed that the British won the Revolutionary War, and they put so much pressure on the local school district that they had to put a disclaimer on the history books to the effect of
The "We Won" theory is only one possible explanation for the formation of the United States following colonization.
As a 'case in point' Jesus did not say that I as a heterosexual must not insert my penis into a woman's vagina to commit sexual sin. (This assumes that the woman in question is not my wife. It's no sin for me to have sex with my wife! It's a great thing!) Jesus said "I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." This is a much higher bar than where I put my body parts.
That actually explains a lot (for me as a nontheist). Although it doesn't explain why people rail against homosexuality, and turn a blind eye to adultery (or premarital sex).
The homosexual lifestyle carries serious health risks. Health risks cited in the study include HIV and AIDS, substance abuse, depression and anxiety, cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Do you understand why this is? Can you imagine? It's not an act of God. This is the case because people who aren't afraid of getting pregnant don't use condoms (like the anon said, it's a matter of education).
You'll see identical statistics on heterosexual couples who rely only on chemical (pills) birth control. So this says absolutely nothing about homosexuality.
As a side note... penguin thread leads to homosexuality discussion??? Too funny!!!
Goooood morning :)
:)
Well now, are we talking about different versions of systems that exist within a divergent evolutionary tree or a convergent evolutionary tree?
I don't see that it matters (?). If a genetic change in population occurs once in one condition, it can occur again and again in the same conditions. It is randomness, at the chemical level, but actual morphological change is bound by those conditions.
So if you have an environmental niche that can be filled (such as eating flying insects) then eventually you can have convergent evolution fill those niches. (such as birds and bats independently evolving methods to fly).
if nature itself has laws configured in such a way to bring about such extreme complexity, then what does that say about the laws of nature? It means the laws of nature are even more complicated than the machines that it produces
Well.. think about the computer you're using. Ever been play Quake and just had to stop and think... this whole game, the graphics, the sound, the network interface... it's all just 1s & 0s. This is a bad example, since of course someone programmed the game, so I'm probably asking for it. But this is just to illustrate that complexity arises out of simplicity.
as long as evolutionists cannot prove evolution
No one can "prove" the Law of Gravity, either. And it's a lot less understood than evolution
No offense or anything, but that's a terrible example of evolution. More shaking will destroy the castle walls
I smell the laws of thermodynamics entering the picture. (You can tell cause it smells like burning rubber). I'll get a jump on this now: the concept of entropy is only valid in a closed system. The earth is absolutely not one of those, we have a constant stream of energy from the sun. When that dries up, ya we'll all be reverting back to "simpler forms" LOL.
Zardo, if I thought that of David I would've filled out a different dance card by now. :P
At the end of it all, you apparently agree with him that the primordial soup self-replicator is hard to believe, which would lead me to believe you agree with ID in a sense
... well yeah, but not for the reasons you think ^_~
This is true, sort of. But I think people look for ID in too lineal a fashion. The primordial soup replicator isn't that hard to believe, it's just sort of disappointing. It's neither necessary nor warrented to explain evolution with a designer. However, I like to think that beyond it all (as opposed to behind it all), there is something bigger. That's where my faith sits.
Seems you could use a few more courses in ethics!
In other cases we find complicated systems with no possible reduced version conceivable or in the biological record.
:) The question ID folk ask is: how can you go from the four universal forces to Human Beings? A very valid question.. and the answer is you can't. Humans are indeed very complex, but this is not so strange when you consider that our systems are built on systems built on systems (etc etc) that are built on the forces. For example, a star can form much easier than a human being. They're very simple things. But after the gravity (that made our infamous table) builds energy into mass, we get the beginnings of complexity: matter.
:)
I don't think I've ever seen such a system. The most grueling part of cultural anthropology is suffering through the mandatory physical anthropology courses... I still have species lineages and organ system progression of primates coming out of my (reducibly complex) ears. However....
To substantiate these claims, one needs to study them on a case by case basis.
You're right about that ^_^!! We'd be here all day! So lets put that on that burner.
Instead you added an entire factory of pre-designed molds and shafts with complicated machanisms that can assemble metal furnature.
That's right, I did
So anyway millenia-long story made short: ID seems to many people (myself included) to be an answer to a question that didn't need to be asked.
One last jab
What 'irreducible complexity' does (outside the realm of religion and politics) is give evolution a burdon of proof
This would be great, except that it does nothing of the kind. It simply makes claims that it cannot support or disprove (that no one can support or disprove) and "challenges" non-ID evolutionists to do the impossible.
One last note to close my arguement before I leave work ^_~... when you go all the way back, past the amoebas and the previruses, what started it all? That's where my god lives, until we find out and he'll have to take a seat farther back on the bus. But here's the nice part... since the bus is infinatly long, he'll always be there. (of course, most likely it'll turn out that everyone was looking in the wrong direction, and he was driving the whole time... but science has to stop at the yellow line).
And the winner for most beat-to-death metaphor goes to..... *crosses fingers*
The miscommunication we have is that we don't know whether something is outside of the ability of science to explain it. To assume that there is an explanation waiting for us to find is 'faith' in science as I explained in more detail in the other thread with droptone. I see you have much faith in science. :)
...it's up to IDists to explain why their theory better explains natural diversity than Evolution. You don't just switch over to a entirely new explanation just because the current theory doesn't seem to cover all the bases. Especially when the new theory doesn't seem to cover any.
Well said ^_^ And because science is a human institution it is flawed (because people are).. but hey you can't argue with results.
However, you didn't address the most important part of his post:
oh wow.. ok.. *deep breath*
... but a gap in scientific knowledge is not a green light to insert whatever fantasy happens to appeal to you.. especially if the specific gap is itself a fanciful construction (eg irreducible complexity).
we literally observe information systems throughout nature which the laws of nature as we understand them to work cannot explain
-- no we really don't. People often bring up one complex human organ or another as an example of "irreducible complexity"... but of course they could find reduced versions of everything all over nature if they cared to look. Which, of course, they don't.
As a poor analogy, metal furniture layed out in the open will never assemble itself by the force of gravity.
I don't get it... what does gravity making furniture have to do with evolution? Now if gravity was pulling molten metal through various molds down a shaft that randomly connected, and whereby everything that didn't stand on four legs would fall over into a pool of molten metal, then yes.. eventually you'll end up with something resembling a metal table. That's a much better analogy.
s long as science cannot explain something it remains a theory and not a fact
A theory in science is a system that explains facts. What you're thinking of is a hypothesis. Don't feel bad, everyone gets those mixed up, since in regular speech thats how we use the word theory.
Until things are fully explained by science, there is a level of faith in science
I agree with this in part, especially in questions like "how did the universe begin" or "what is to become of human kind?"
sorry for the long post~!
Fair enough... but this wouldn't be a problem if funding wasn't a problem. When kids are still using textbooks from 1987, the dates on Australopithecus might be off by a few tens of thousands of years. While I agree its absurd that in college you have to relearn everything that was obsolete when you were in HS, I don't think this says anything about the theory as a whole.
And think of this: what if our religious/political leaders decided that the flat-earthers were right. They'd be lobbying for flat-earth theory to be taught along side "round-earth theory" in geography class. Does it matter that every current geographer, astronomer, historian, geologist, and everyone else believes now that the earth is round? Maybe not, but that doesn't mean we should teach flat-earth theory in school just because someone might say something like this:
This analogy may seem ridiculous to you, but its how educators feel when dealing with ID proponants.
Well actually arguments arise all the time about "current" theory, just because that's the nature of science. If one school of thought has a theory, then everyone else tries to rip it apart.
I would also be encouraged if more of this went on in the classroom (not just for evolution, but science in general). That's why lab-time and experimentation is important... no one should just accept what they read in the book.
However, evolution has been picked-apart to death; probably the most attacked scientific theory to date. The fact that it is still the exclusively accepted theory in the scientific community after all of this would make teachers poking at it seem like... well... zealotism.
Creationism is a "theory" in the colloquial sense... which is what science calls a hypothesis (and not a very good one). Evolution, on the other hand, is a theory in the scientific sense... which is better described as a system (a story really) that is used adaptably to fit the known facts. Other examples: The Theory of Gravity & the Theory of Relativity.
ID could be a scientific theory if there were any facts to support it, but there aren't. (Doesn't mean its not True with a capital 'T', just means it's not science and shouldnt be in biology class).
And as to the folks who said that this is an old arguement and not newsworthy, this is why it is:
Bush said "Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about,"
Problem is, in science class this debate doesn't exist. It only exists in philosophy & religion classes (and now, thanks to dubya, political science).
No trust me, it's worse if the nurse is smokin hot... & then she gives you that *look*. Its not as bad as the look you get from the drug-store clerk who happens to be your girlfriend's brother, but it ranks right up there.
Awareness of and exposure to sex is the best cure for teen pregancy there is. I went to highschool up north in a suburb of chicago, where controls on sexual material were VERY lax. You could get even condoms from the nurses office (which, by the way, kills the mood). In my four years there, there was only one pregnancy... which was quite the scandal. Then I moved to the uptight bible belt, where even mentioning sex earns you the title of "deviant devil worshipper". This is the important part---> the High School had to have a DAY CARE added on to it!!! (and this town is a LOT more wealthy and influential than my old neighborhood, god knows, so its not an economic thing.. its a repression/curiosity/forced-self-discovery thing) ... so yes I think people who are upset about their kids accidently seeing sexual material either are VERY stupid or they want grandchildren NOW.
I don't think people removing everyday objects "before the test could be considered real world, do you?"
I don't think they much care. When they do stun-gun demonstrations they ask that the volunteer remove keys and lighters and stuff from their pockets. Same idiotic policy.
" first of all do some real world testing on volunteers" This was already done.. they asked the volunteers to remove glasses & contacts first (wouldn't want that beam refocused). This will undoubtably face the same legal problems as other weapons labeled "non-lethal". They are loose on regulations and easy to approve for (and abused in) domestic use. Iraq is another matter... no use crying about the bed we've made and are already stuck sleeping in. If we choose to stay for the sake of order at this point (as opposed to letting the inevitable civil war happen "naturally"), the more non-lethal weapons available the better. MHO
So basically if they want peaceful assemblies to stay peaceful, they don't need rayguns. They just need a cannabis gun. Or maybe a "smoke out grenade" :)
Result?
"I'm still pissed off about the WTO, but do I really want to turn over a car? Only if I think there's Doritos under there."