The Texas-ization of American Public Education
Every 10 years, the Texas State Board of Education rewrites the textbook standards for all of the public school districts in Texas — and, as a practical matter, for the entire nation, because Texas is the textbook publishing industry’s biggest market. This year, the Board is effectively controlled by a group of fringe-right Christianists who are in the process of conforming the nation’s textbooks to fit their ideology (h/t Doug at Balloon Juice).
Mariah Blake has a fascinating albeit depressing and even alarming article in The Washington Monthly about the social reactionaries who have gained so much influence over public education in Texas:
Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. … With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”
Views like these are relatively common in East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.
Texas’s shrinking stock of educators and advocates who support reality-based teaching rather than right-wing agitprop are struggling to keep up morale, but it isn’t easy:
While the writing teams have so far made only modest concessions to the ideologue experts, the board has final say over the documents’ contents, and the ultraconservative bloc has made it clear that it wants its experts’ views to get prominent play—a situation the real experts find deeply unsettling. While in Texas, I paid a visit to James Kracht, a soft-spoken professor with a halo of fine white hair, who is a dean at Texas A&M University’s school of education. Kracht oversaw the writing of Texas’s social studies standards in the 1990s and is among the experts tapped by the board’s moderates this time around. I asked him how he thought the process was going. “I have to be careful what I say,” he replied, looking vaguely sheepish. “But when the door is closed and I’m by myself, I yell and scream and pound on the wall.”
Here are a few more examples of what they’re up against:
Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men.
… In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. …
A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.
As much as I’ve quoted, there is a lot more that I haven’t, and it deserves to be read in full. Read the whole thing, here.
94 Responses to “The Texas-ization of American Public Education”
I'm not an ID proponent, but while we're at it, I have a question. Why is science naturalistic instead of agnostic? Shouldn't it simply investigate all reasonable possibilities and let the chips fall where they may? There were some bad assumptions made with vestigial organs because naturalists assumed that evolution would have been inefficient, and they seem to be going down that same path with “junk” DNA, when there's still a lot about the production process that's not fully understood yet. Assumptions of any sort are not good for science either way.
Prof Elwood,
Great question! Science is, by definition, naturalistic. Science is the search for self-consistent rules that govern the universe. Once you've invoked the supernatural (astrology, mythology, religion, what-have-you), you are no longer in the realm of science.
If, for example, you want to believe the Earth was created 6000 years ago…ok. I'll disagree with you, but you have a right to *believe* whatever you like. However, that's not *science.* Science has shown that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. (This is an objective observation, and not based on any belief or faith system.)
If you want to believe that God (or any intelligent designer) somehow “directs” evolution, that's fine too. But again, it's not science. God is *outside* those self-consistent rules. Hence, this should not be taught in a science classroom.
PS In general, making an a priori assumption about how or why things work is bad science – to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, once you've assumed a theory, you tend to twist the facts to fit the theory, rather than creating a theory to fit the facts. This is how evolution works – it fits the facts. As new facts are (pardon the pun) unearthed, the theory of evolution is changed as needed to continue to fit the facts. And the model / framework is used to make predictions, which are then tested to provide rigor to the theory.
Science is, by definition, naturalistic. Once you've invoked the supernatural, you are no longer in the realm of science.
Science is not fundamentally naturalistic, it's fundamentally empirical. It will be happy to welcome the astrologers into the tent as soon as they can show astrology explains what we observe better than the reining models.
To the evolutionists on this site: Creation scientists are just as serious with our model as you are in believing that a tasteless, colorless gas (hydrogen) – given enough time – became people. Tell me where the science is in that. Please use only scientific language and concepts to make your compelling case for this hydrogen-to-people hypothesis.
Remember what fellow atheist Alan Guth said in a creation-bashing publication: “It is then tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing.” – Guth and Stienhardt (May ’84), Scientific American. More recently Guth was quoted as saying
“The universe burst into something from absolutely nothing – zero, nada. And as it got bigger, it became filled with even more stuff that came from absolutely nowhere” 4/02 cover of Discover magazine. Send me a description of how atheistic scientists can produce something from nothing in the laboratory. Scientific references only, please.
This is to Edgren & other atheists: Keep in mind your secular idea of origins involves as much faith as creationists – if not much, much more:
“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory – is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation – both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof” – Introduction to The Origin of Species (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1971).
To the darwinists on this site: In my field of biology I’d like any of you to head up a team of biologists intent on destroying creation science (“creationism”) to procure a corner of a biology graduate lab at some secular university. Once the administration gets wind of your project they’d bend over backwards to help any way they could. Funding would be no problem – contact E. Scott at NCSE (she said, ‘I would describe myself as a humanist or a nontheist.’) With that established, take a population of E. coli whose genome is free of any flagella genes. Have your volunteers plate out the bacteria and then stress them to favor locomotion (i.e. flagella evolution). Granted, it will take many thousands of generations but remember: E. coli has 1 of the shortest generation times, it’s small, and you’ll have literally hundreds of grad students who would only be too happy to help nail the coffin lid on creation science. After X generations of E. coli you can begin to analyze the cell wall for subtle signs of an emerging flagella.
Why hasn’t this been done already you ask? It’s because darwinists already know what the results would be. But you and your team go ahead and give it a shot – think of the notoriety you’d achieve if you’re successful.
*sigh* That's my point.
Windarr,
If you're truly interested in quantum fluctuations (Alan Guth's “something from nothing”), I recommend Stephen Hawking's book “The Universe in a Nutshell.” I don't recall the page numbers off the top of my head, but he gives a good layman's explanation of the concept.
Hey Prof — Yes, I'm familiar with that theory. I don't have any problem with it “kicking the can” — the issue is to figure out how life came about, and if it really came to this planet from somewhere else, the fact that such a thing would make it much more difficult to figure out how life first began wouldn't make it any less true. There are lots of other theories as well (more geocentric). I'm not pretending to know which, if any, is correct. I'm saying that the Magic Bearded Dude in the Sky is probably not going to further the understanding on it.
As for your links — you know they're all full of bunk, right? Answers in Genesis is so far off from anything remotely resembling science I don't even want to refute anything they say because of the poorly wasted time. The first thing one sees on EvolutionFacts (hello misnomer!) is about panda thumbs. Sorry — that whole panda thumb thing has been so thoroughly debunked it's unfathomable that it's still being used as the basis for a movement.
A quick google brought up a couple things about Denton, but it's hard to say what his motive is. For example, he's quick to say that there's no problem with microevolution and speciation (two main components of evolutionary theory), but he doesn't like macroevolution. It's like being ok with bricks and mortar but not with buildings. Plus, the man is very stuck on a few common mistruths that are painfully easy to explain. On the other hand, you just said that he was “agnostic”, not that there was any scientific value to his work (there isn't), so on the agnositic count, I can't actually find any evidence to the contrary in my 5 minutes of research.
One of the things that pisses me off about ID is the bewilderment and arrogance of it. It's like human beings can't contemplate that there are processes that we haven't figured out, so it must have been magic. It rather reminds me of how priests used to use chemistry and medicine to fool people into believing in miracles. Note to ID proponents: There's stuff the human race hasn't figured out. It's ok.
“Creation scientists are just as serious with our model as you are”
Er…Creation scientists don't *have* a model. (note: “God did it” is not a scientific model, as has been pointed out many, many times here already.)
“*sigh* That's my point.”
But ProfElwood, macroevolution is specifically not a priori. It's…whatever the opposite of that is — it is supported by huge, gigantic piles of evidence from all over the world.
Despite naturalist’s supposed allegiance to empirical research, their premise of macroevolution fails to meet even the most basic elements of rational inquiry. By being able to account for everything by Darwinian edict, macroevolution explains nothing. Using natural selection and random effects such as genetic drift, Darwinian naturalists maintain any biological phenomena are possible. As a student of biology, I was routinely taught the party line of macroevolution, but was never told how it actually occurred. Editor Michael Allaby stated, “there is no agreement as to whether macroevolution results from the accumulation of small changes due to microevolution, or whether macroevolution is uncoupled from microevolution” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Zoology, 1992). We used the 1974 edition of Integrated Principles of Zoology by Hickman, Hickman & Hickman in college. Not a single fact of macroevolution was listed in those pages. Interestingly, the 1997 edition of Integrated Principles of Zoology by Hickman, Roberts & Larson seems to have even less to say in regard to macroevolution.
All I can say roro80, is that the less that you know about any subject, the more confidently you can know it. Like many people, you have obviously confused micro-evolution with macro-evolution, something that even talk-origins says they're fighting. Macro-evolution (creating brand new genes for useful features and organs) is a more exciting, wide open field because it really isn't that well understood. I'm not convinced of either side because I spent a couple of weeks digging into the questions and answers, as best I could find them on the internet, and realized that both sides are overstating their cases, and hiding their weaknesses.
windarr,
We've seen evolution in action on a small scale, and we have evidence of its action on a large scale.
Now, before you go demanding science to perform more experiments to overcome your resistance, please provide ONE example of observed design. Not even macro design – I won't demand you show macro-design in progress. That's the sort of unreasonable demand made by creationists.
All you have to provide is one tiny example of observed micro-design. Just one.
And here's the best part! I'm SURE if you can document your example of divine design, that the James Randi Educational Foundation will pay you 1 MILLION dollars for demonstrating an actual example of something supernatural.
So there it is. It's so easy. You don't have to provide an example of divine speciation – just a tiny, simple example of a single irreducibly complex feature coming into existence through design.
Just one example of micro-design will completely refute ALL those observed examples of micro-evolution.
The power is yours, and the million dollars is waiting!
” If by the “law of biogenesis” you mean the theory that life must come from other life rather than from lifeless matter, that's no law at all. That's the principle of intelligent design again,”
No, no, no, Dr. J……
Louis Pasteur came up with that little law, not a bunch of neo-religous nuts. It went directly against the Darwinian theory that life sprang up from inorganic matter.
I do not say that I believe in Intelligent Design. I don't know that much about it (yet).
ProfElwood said: ” I spent a couple of weeks digging into the questions and answers, as best I could find them on the internet, and realized that both sides are overstating their cases, and hiding their weaknesses.”
Really? After a couple weeks you've found that the solid information on evolution and the solid information on intelligent design are about equal – on the internet? Well, that settles it, doesn't it?
A question – do the differences between chimps and humans count as “macro-evolution”? The genetic differences are very well understood. The chromosomal fusion is well understood. We even know that our common ancestors caught nasty viruses that left unique fingerprints in our DNA and in that of the other great apes.
http://www.evolutionarymodel.com/ervs.htm
If macroevolution doesn't happen, how do we explain such irrefutable proof that we share ancestors with the great apes?
Finally – ID is clearly a PR campaign. Stephen Meyer has clearly indicated his ambition to overturn naturalistic science to open public policy up to the Christian God. The Discovery Institute is largely funded by Young Earth creationists. ID's goal is to refute evolution.
Tell me, Prof. Do you think genetic researchers, biologists, paleontologists, and such are primarily motivated in their careers by a desire to overturn creationism?
Do you think the authors of the 50,000 papers dealing with evolution listed on PubMed were motivated by ideology, by a desire to refute divine creationism?
Do you think the ideology of an information source influences the reliability of its information?
JD,
It is taking Disqus more than a day to get replies to my email. Though late, let me offer my appreciation for the effort and research that your sincere discussions bring with them. It is one of the reasons I enjoy our interchanges here at TMV.
Others have attacked the non-science of intelligent design belief. I will not go that far. As I said before, it is an attractive proposition. My response though is that it contains a bit of circular reasoning when it attempts to present itself as “science”. Here we go: I know living organisms are complex. Therefore I will hypothesize that if living organisms are complex, there must be intelligence behind them. Thus, I will study organisms to see (what I already know) their complexity, from which I will conclude there is intelligent design behind them. Yeah, I know that's a little smart-alecky and not comprehensive, but it makes a point…one less important than what comes next.
JD, I really do not disparage the belief. But, be satisfied that it is a belief. You cannot scientifically prove the existence of God., which is necessary to ID's hypothesis. The existence of God (an intelligent creator) is not a matter of science, it is a matter of faith. For myself, I respect your faith. Don't try to prove it as science.
As someone earlier pointed out, evolution does not define the beginning of life, but rather how it has evolved over the millenia.
As to the ACLU, it does not surprise me that they would pull such a legal stunt, in Texas or anywhere else. As a member of the organization for more than 20 years, I am deeply disappointed that they have chosen to move from a constitutional rights organization to a radical liberal advocacy group. There was a time when they defended the rights of the American Nazi Party, as well as civil rights advocates, to be heard. Now they seem to show up only when it benefits the far left. I maintain my membership in the vague hope that the organization will one day rediscover its roots and its true purpose and meaning. Perhaps I wait in vain, but my Christian friends tell me that patience is a virtue.
Best,
gc
How can the Christmas present appear under the tree if there weren't a Santa Claus? I never said that there was proof that macro-evolution couldn't happen. I said that I never found the driver for it. You haven't changed that.
Nope, only that they both overstate their cases and hide their weaknesses. Please deal with what I wrote, not what you wanted me to write.
Yep. That's why science should be agnostic (or empirical).
No, no, no, Dr. J……Louis Pasteur came up with that little law
I didn't mean to imply the IDers invented it, just that that is the essence of their position: life can't come from lifelessness. It must come from other life, and so on.
Not to be pedantic, but it's not a law. It doesn't even qualify as an explanation, in that it doesn't replace a big mystery with a smaller one.
The primordial soup theory, that inanimate molecules banged together long enough to form something self-replicating which eventually evolved into iguanas, fungus, and Rush Limbaugh is admittedly speculative. No one has ever recreated such an event. But it at least does break the mystery of complex creatures down to a smaller mystery about molecules and statistical mechanics.
No, dear. I am not, in fact, mixing up the two. I've studied this stuff longer than a few weeks, and it wasn't on the internet.
There is a great deal of work going on as far as *how* macro-evolution occurs, and as with any ongoing scientific study, there are certainly big questions the answers to which nobody knows for sure (um…if they did, there wouldn't be any more study on it, would there?). There's not any controversy that it *does* occur. The argument why it must occur does assume that God or the “designer” or whatever hasn't been injecting new genes into living things every now and again since the dawn of life on Earth. In that way, it may be a circular argument. Of course, it also assumes that God didn't actually create the entire world 10 minutes ago and pre-program everyone with their current memories. These are similar propositions from a scientific point of view, and are therefore discounted out of hand.
” I said that I never found the driver for it. You haven't changed that.”
You didn't address the differences between humans and chimps.
Does that difference constitute macro evolution by your definition?
Are those differences impossible through known, natural genetic mechanisms?
As background, you might read this: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/8/195
Gene duplication and divergence does not require intervention by an intelligent designer.
” they both overstate their cases and hide their weaknesses”
The case for evolution: big giant pile of every bit of biology and genetic work ever done
The weakness of evolution: there are a lot of unanswered questions, 'cause biological mechanisms are complicated.
The case for ID: I can't fathom such awesomeness as humans could possibly arise from bacteria. Also, it squicks me out to think of myself as just another animal. I read on the internet that they found people and dinosaur footprints together. And the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!!!11!! Also, the Bible is supercool. So people must have been made by magic.
The weakness of ID: zero evidence of any sort, zero explanatory power, zero ability to create testable hypothyses.
And ProfElwood, may I point out that from my point of view, concluding that evolution “overstates its case” after “a couple of weeks of digging” seems just a tad presumptuous.
I'm no biologist, but here are some of the books I can recommend for understanding the Evolution/ID debate:
“Signature in the Cell” – Stephen Meyer
“Greatest Show on Earth” – Richard Dawkins
“Why Evolution is True” – Jerry Coyne
“Evolution” – Carl Zimmer
“Origin of the Species” (abridged) – Charles Darwin
“The Selfish Gene” – Dawkins
“The Blind Watchmaker” – Dawkins
“Climbing Mount Improbable” – Dawkins
“The Third Chimpanzee” – Jared Diamond
“The First Humans” – Ann Gibbons
“Finding Darwin's God” – Ken Miller
“One Long Argument” – Ernst Mayr
“Your Inner Fish” – Neil Shubin
and many essays by Stephen Jay Gould
This doesn't include the various research papers and articles, some of which are cited in my earlier posts.
Having read all this, and having read a bit of history about how effective the supernatural has been at explaining natural events, natural evolution has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The only remaining doubt that species evolve naturally is either unreasonable, or uninformed.
The weakness of ID: zero evidence of any sort
Well, there's the negative evidence that our design is manifestly not very intelligent. We're ruled by our animal brains, we're bad at probabilities, we're prone to overeat. And what sort of designer would make the optic nerve go through the back of the eye to join on the front of our retina, leaving a hole our brains have to paper over?
OMGosh JD, Darwin's Origin of Species is not about biogenesis. Again, for emphasis: Darwin's Origin of Species is not about biogenesis.
Darwin did say, later, in a letter, that perhaps a “pond somewhere” had the right combination of stuff to form a protien, which then underwent other changes. That Louis Pasteur (or any of the others who've tried) couldn't produce life from non-life in a lab setting over the course of days or years does NOT in any way preclude the very real possibility that biogenesis occured once in the roughly 4.5 billion years our planet has been around. Please stop using the sterilization dude as an argument against evolution, because it DOES NOT FOLLOW. You know what has been done in the lab over the course of years? Evolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_…
Plus, my head might explode if I have to explain this exact same concept one more time on this thread… (perhaps that would be a feature and not a bug…:-))
Agree completely.
I like this list courtesy of Neil deGrasse Tyson regarding the “intelligent design” evident in our universe:
Intelligent design of the universe:
- The portion of the universe that is instantly lethal to life:
99.99999999999999999999999999%
- Most planet orbits are unstable
- Star formation is inefficient – most matter never makes a star or planet
- Our galaxy will collide with Andromeda
- Our universe will wind down to cold oblivion
Intelligent design of the Earth:
- Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes
- Only 1/3 of surface is habitable by man, and only a tiny fraction habitable without technology
- Mass extinctions – disease / climate shift / killer asteroids
- 99% of all species of life are now extinct
- It took 3.5 BILLION years to make multi-cellular life – not very efficient
Intelligent design of humans:
- Horrible birth defects
- Aggressive childhood diseases: lukemia, hemophilia, sickle cell, MS, epilepsy, Parkinsons, ALS.
- Absurdly narrow vision spectrum – can't detect dangerous things like magnetic fields, radiation, radon, carbon monoxide, etc.
- Age leads to vision loss, loss of teeth, dementia, cancer
- We exhale most of the oxygen we inhale
- Warm-blooded animals must eat constantly (as opposed to reptiles who can eat oncea week or less
- Practically comatose for 1/3 of our lives
- Breathe and eat through same pipe – so we choke (dolphins don't, for example)
- Eliminate waste and breed through same pipe, leading to infection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1cKD93W3yg&feat…
So if someone thinks for one moment that the universe was designed as some sort of grand plan to create humans, that person has WAAAAY too big an ego.
tidbits said to JD: “The existence of God (an intelligent creator) is not a matter of science, it is a matter of faith. For myself, I respect your faith. Don't try to prove it as science.”
I recommend reading the “God” and “Reason” chapters of “The Case for God” by Karen Armstrong. She outlines an interesting picture of how Western religion went astray when many followers tried to take the work of Newton, Paley and others as “explaining God's laws” and tried to scientifically or mechanistically prove God's influence on the world. In so doing, they forced God into the current understanding of science at that time. So when Darwin came along and showed that perhaps God wasn't actively tinkering with something as fundamental as much as these “mechanistic believers” thought, suddenly they had nowhere to turn. And that's when some Western faiths started to dig in their heels and fight with tooth and nail each new scientific discovery, trying to maintain a gap wide enough to fit their concept of an interventionist God.
If they had just stuck with the idea that God transcends all, and doesn't actually actively meddle with the day-to-day activity of the universe, everyone could be happy.
Too bad we can't wind the clock back and make everyone listen to St. Augustine. But the battle lines are drawn and people have taken sides.
Now it is down to this: the only way to maintain a space for a physically active, interventionist God is to deny science education to each new generation of students.
Reading back over this thread I just noticed that JeffersonDavis used a citation from the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya.
For those who don't know, among his other amusingly moronic actions, Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya's real name):
- Offered a prize of 10 trillion Turkish lira (~7 trillion dollars) for an example of an intermediate fossil demonstrating evolution.
- Published a book called “Atlas of Creation” that had picture after picture of ancient fossils compared to modern species, demonstrating that they were the same and evolution never occurred. But of course, he often compared things that were not even remotely the same species.
But most amusing of all, when he couldn't find modern counterparts to his fossil pictures, he STOLE PICTURES OF LIFELIKE FISHING LURES from a fishing supply website and published them in his book.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/perma…
http://sciencereligionnews.blogspot.com/2009/02…
The whole incident became a viral joke on the internet, and the fellow who designed and sold the lifelike fishing lures was quite amused by his 15 minutes of fame courtesy of a crazy Turkish creationist. As you can see from the blog entry above, Oktar deleted SOME of his fishing lures from the online version of his book, but there were still one or two he missed.
JD – congrats! You've quoted a source that's had the distinction of making it into the Museum of Hoaxes!!
“That Louis Pasteur (or any of the others who've tried) couldn't produce life from non-life in a lab setting over the course of days or years does NOT in any way preclude the very real possibility that biogenesis occured once in the roughly 4.5 billion years our planet has been around”
Give me one example of live coming from non-life, and I'll shut up.
Because Pasteur (or others) could do it, does not preclude the very real possiblity that alien hamsters planted life here on earth either.
That's my point. Life has NEVER come from non-life. It's something that cannot be “scientifically” explained. Intelligent design explains it, but “normal” science cannot.
“primordial soup…..No one has ever recreated such an event. But it at least does break the mystery of complex creatures down to a smaller mystery about molecules and statistical mechanics.”
No one has ever REMOTELY succeeded in combining amino acids in such a manner as to make life – self replicating or otherwise. We have been able to simulate coal-to-diamond formation (replacing billions of years), but not been able to duplicate amino acid-to-bacterium-to-anything.
Oddly enough, Tidbits, I am also a member of the ACLU – although not a PAYING member – as I don't want my money to benefit their benefactors. I believe in their original purpose.
As far as science goes, I truly believe that the true goal of science should be to find God. However, even if the humanist scientists came face to face with Him, they'd explain it away.
“JD – congrats! You've quoted a source that's had the distinction of making it into the Museum of Hoaxes!!
“
First of all, Rick…. If you really want an answer to a charge like that, then you should hit the “reply to” button, instead of the hit-n-run.
Secondly, I didn't intentionally quote anyone. I've never heard of Muslim creationist Harun Yahya.
Finally, to which quote are you referring?
“Give me one example of live coming from non-life, and I'll shut up.”
As has been explained numerous times here already, it's still an open question. How in the world could I give you an example considering the likelyhood that it only happens once every billion years or so? I'm only 29; written history is only about 10,000 years old (slightly more if we count cave paintings). The fact that we don't know the answer does not mean it has to be magic — it just means there's more to study.
Again: evolution does not rest upon any particular biogenesis theory (2nd definition theory). ID and the alien hampsters sound very, very much the same to someone who doesn't believe God had anything to do with the origin of life; generally, the alien hampsters/intelligent designers are named the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” or “Magic Sky Daddy”, but the idea is basically the same. Heck, if you take the word “hampsters” broadly enough, I don't have a scientific problem with the possibility that fuzzy alien thingies were the source of life on Earth. Hard to find evidence, yes, but also more probable than ID from a scientific standpoint.
And this brings us full circle to the original point: believe what you want on faith, but don't pretend it is science, and don't teach it in science class. Teach the controversy in philosophy class, if you'd like. Religious studies — of course! I love all the various genesis stories in all the different religions (wicca has a particularly interesting one), but let's be honest here: if we were to give equal time to all the mythologies in science class, there would be no time for science .
“We have been able to simulate coal-to-diamond formation”
Diamonds are extremely simple, chemically. It's just carbon, with a touch of intersticial “contaminants” for sparkle. All you need for diamonds is carbon and pressure. In nature, that takes a lot of time. In the lab, it takes very little. Life is a *bit* more complicated. Of course, for the umpteenth time, evolution does not rest upon a particular genesis story.
JD said: “First of all, Rick…. If you really want an answer to a charge like that, then you should hit the “reply to” button, instead of the hit-n-run.
Secondly, I didn't intentionally quote anyone. I've never heard of Muslim creationist Harun Yahya.
Finally, to which quote are you referring?”
*sigh*
I didn't “hit and run”. I'm still here, Mate. Look at how much I posted. Look at the citations and support I've given for the discussions above. Do not project your approach on me because I entered a comment without hitting the reply button. Don't try to deflect attention from the repeated takedowns of your earlier posts.
And you might try READING YOUR OWN POSTS, where you'll find YOUR quote starting “When Darwin wrote his book On the Origin of Species…”. You will find that YOU provide the link for that quote back to Harun Yahya's site.
I know you're not bothering to read everything I post, but I'd expect you to display enough intellectual integrity to at least read what YOU post.
Dawkins is right. Biological evolution is indeed the greatest show on Earth. It is the greatest, most subtle, vibrant, elegant story ever told. I feel sorry for you, JD, that you've decided to miss this wonderful show and to follow instead the misinterpretation of ancient mythological texts and the rantings of an egomaniacal Turkish madman.
Between the “you need to look at the basics” and the straw man attacks, you haven't spent one hour looking at the opposing point of view, much less tried to understand it. I've seen every argument you made, and quite a bit more that you haven't yet, looked into what I could find on all sides and then made up my mind. You call that anything that you want, and I still won't be insulted.
That's my point. Life has NEVER come from non-life. It's something that cannot be “scientifically” explained. Intelligent design explains it, but “normal” science cannot.
Whether life has come from non-life is very much in dispute. To claim it never has obviously goes beyond any knowledge any of us have.
You may consider science's explanation flimsy, and I don't disagree. But it's still a notch better than intelligent design's, which is no explanation at all. “Where did life come from? Other life.” That's not an explanation, any more than “because I said so” is a reason. It certainly doesn't belong in a science classroom.
The 1997 edition of Integrated Principles of Zoology by Hickman, Roberts and Larson has nada to say in regard to macroevolution –
“The origin of the ciliates [e.g. the Paramecium] is somewhat obscure.” – p. 235
“Unraveling the origin of the multicellular animals (metazoans) has presented many problems for zoologists.” – p. 240
“. . . one of the most intriguing questions is the place of mesozoans in the evolutionary picture.” – p. 242
“The origin of the cnidarians and ctenophores [comb jellies] is obscure.” – p. 275.
“Any ancestral or other related groups that would shed a clue to the [evolutionary] relationships of the Acanthocephala is probably long since extinct.” – p. 317
“The primitive ancestral mollusk [snails, clams, squids] was probably a more or less wormlike organism . . .” – p. 346
“The phylogenetic position of placozoans is uncertain . . .” – p. 242 (this phylum is now supposedly ‘the closest living thing to the ancestor of all animals’ – New Scientist 1/09)
“No truly satisfactory explanation has yet been given for the origins of metamerism [segmentation] and the coelom [a fluid-filled cavity], although the subject has stimulated much speculation and debate over the years.” – p. 365
“What can we infer about the common ancestor of the annelids [clam worms, earthworms]? This has been the subject of a long and continuing debate.” – p. 365
“Controversy on [evolution] within the Chelicerata [arthropod] also exists . . .” – p. 379
“The relationship of the crustaceans to other arthropods has long been a puzzle.” – p. 399
“The [evolutionary] affinities of the Pentastomida are uncertain. – p. 439
“The [evolutionary] position of the lophophorates [invertebrates] has been the subject of much controversy and debate.” – p. 447
“Despite the excellent fossil record, the origin and early evolution of the echinoderms [sea stars] are still obscure.” – p. 450
“Despite the existence of an extensive fossil record, there have been numerous contesting hypotheses on echinoderm [evolution].” – p. 465
“Hemichordate [evolution] has long been puzzling.” – p. 476
“ . . zoologists have debated the question of vertebrate origins. It has been very difficult to reconstruct lines of descent because the earliest protochordates were in all probability soft-bodied creatures that stood little chance of being preserved as fossils even under the most ideal conditions.” – p. 485 [In other words, there is no evidence for their evolution]
“However, the exact [evolutionary] position of the chordates within the animal kingdom is unclear.” – p. 480
“The evolutionary origin of insect wings has long been a puzzle.” – p. 429 [“Nobody knows where caterpillars came from” – retired zoologist Donald Williamson, U of Liverpool, New Scientist Aug., 29, ’09 p. 12]
“The fishes are of ancient ancestry, having descended from an unknown free-swimming protochordate [a tunicate or lancelet] ancestor.” – p. 499
On the basis of this partial list – why is evolution taught as a *fact* ???
From what I can tell, no evolutionist on this site has quoted from Kathleen Hunt's long list of “transitional forms” found on snoreorigins.com.
This is good! In fact, I have written a 50-page rebuttal to her fanciful list, complete with liberal quotes from leading paleontology texts. Her long list of alleged transitionals shrinks dramatically to . . . nothing. So much for the *fact* of macroevolution.
The relationship of the crustaceans to other arthropods has long been a puzzle. … On the basis of this partial list – why is evolution taught as a *fact* ???
I went to a family reunion and met relatives I didn't know how I was related to. Clear disproof of the “fact”of family trees.
To: 'doctor' jay – Wow. Wut a devastating argument above. Meanwhile you & other darwinists must address the long list of in-context quotes I've listed from a major zoology text above (yes, I'm a zoologist & have never had a single hour in a seminary or Christian college – all of my biology/zoology training has been at the feet of darwinists like 'doctor' jay. And yes, I have published original research in a peer-reviewed science journal. How much more open minded do I have to be?).
C'mon 'doctor' jay – using good science convince the folk on this post that people came from a tasteless, colorless gas (hydrogen) through nothing more than time & chance. Talk about faith. Remember what England's #1 zoologist said, the late L. Harrison Matthews (F.R.S.) –
“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory – is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation – both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof” – Introduction to The Origin of Species (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1971)
Wow. Wut a devastating argument above. Meanwhile you & other darwinists must address the long list of in-context quotes I've listed from a major zoology text above
Thank you.
As your quotes make clear, biologists are working on filling in those gaps. There are a lot of them, and filling them is an incremental process, so it takes time.
Meanwhile, how's the gap-filling going in the creationist camp? Any new insights about where God came from?
windarr do you happen to be Frank Sherwin of the Institution of Creation Research (I’m 99% sure you are by the way)? If you are please answer honestly (the Christian thing to do) to this question.
” I feel sorry for you, JD, that you've decided to miss this wonderful show and to follow instead the misinterpretation of ancient mythological texts and the rantings of an egomaniacal Turkish madman”
Sadly, Rick…. I choose “ancient mythological texts” and you have chosen modern mythological texts. You accept as fact that which has no proof. Welcome to the wonderful world of faith. Mine is in God, yours is in humanism.