Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

@Lightwizard,

Lightwizard wrote:

You mean "Kung Fu Panda?" It's about as comical -- pandas are smarter than most people. Michael Behe daft as a hen, laying his eggs all over the country?

Not the Panda book (Behe was only a cowriter). Spencer, Iowa wants to use "Darwin's Black Box" where Behe explained "irreducible complexity." All the examples used by Behe have been shown by others to be not irreducible. His hypothesis has been refuted.

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@wandeljw,

I'm surprised he didn't entitle it "Darwin's Pandora's Box," but that's a double possessive. However, Behe is, after all, possessed. His hypothesis haven't just been refuted, they have been made to look silly and childish.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
- Joseph Conrad

1 Reply

@wandeljw,

wandeljw wrote:

BACKGROUND ON SPENCER, IOWA'S NEW SCHOOL POLICY

Quote:
Spencer school district shapes policy on religion
(By STACI HUPP • Des Moines Register • July 8, 2009)

Two Spencer school board members - one is a pastor - put the finishing touches on the policy, which they will take to the board today.

Van Wyk, an Assemblies of God pastor who co-wrote the religious liberties policy...

What a shock, a pastor wrote the policy. But they don't have an agenda, noooooo (yah, right).

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SPENCER IOWA UPDATE

Quote:

Spencer's religious liberty policy timeline presented
(By Kris Todd, Spencer Daily Reporter, July 23, 2009)

Having already heard they're in "uncharted territory" with the task at hand, Spencer school board members still appear up for the challenge of developing a religious liberty policy for staff and students. A timeline delivered to them this week -- which includes addressing any local concerns with feedback sessions scheduled in -- has put the dream of two board members who crafted the district's initial draft policy in motion.

Superintendent Greg Ebeling supplied the timeline,below during the monthly board meeting held Tuesday night.

"We're going to get the legal requirements and so on to create a new draft. So, we'll work through that," he said of the public process outlined. "Once we have that new draft in place, we'll have those community, teacher and student focus groups to get some more feedback about the (newly-drafted) policy and see if it's making sense. But again, it has to meet legal muster, so we're not going to be challenged on anything that we're potentially doing that wouldn't stand up (in a court of law)."

District Attorney Steve Avery offered his professional opinion on the matter during a July 8 meeting. Besides stating the public school district cannot promote one school of thought or one secular belief, he also said it cannot prevent an individual from expressing his or her religious beliefs. As Avery informed the Spencer school board that it could adopt a policy on a religious program, course or materials, he did warn, "But it needs to be very broad brush," further suggesting that it cover many religions, multiple versions of the Bible and possibly throw in a chapter on evolution to balance it out.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Religious Liberty Policy Development Timeline

August Board members and administrators to work on new draft policy with legal guidance -- Free guidance has been offered by the Iowa Family Policy, the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Sept. 1 at 7 p.m. Community focus group to review new draft policy and offer feedback

Sept. 2 at 4 p.m. Teacher focus group to review new draft policy and offer feedback during lunch

Sept. 3 High school student focus group to review new draft policy and offer feedback

Sept. 8 Present draft at School Improvement Advisory Committee for feedback

Sept. 7-15 Review feedback from focus groups and make revisions to policy

Sept. 24 Focus groups subcommittee to review policy for final draft

Oct. 27 First reading of new policy

Nov. 24 Final reading of new policy

1 Reply

@wandeljw,

With over 80% christians, they are not really operating in good faith, but to win for their cause. If the cards were turned-around and we had 80% Muslims, they wouldn't even entertain such an idea.

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@Lightwizard,

Quote:

Don't bother, they're here" in the form of The Discovery Institute and other less ambitious follies. Give it up (or continue consuming plate fulls of crow).

But they are not eating crow. Far from it. They are dining in the nearly best style. Our Queen is best.

So your point is as blunt as a buttock. They drink European wine with their meals. Those at the top. And they run the show.

There's a demand you see. Like there is for bottled mineral spring water.

The anti-IDer's assumption that they create the demand, as the medical profession have been accused of doing, is a debateable point. The demand might exist like the demand for water exists and they cater for it just like every good American company caters for a public demand. A2K caters for a demand, possibly a deep felt need, for us to get things off our chests. We are each other's psychoanalysts.

Really LW- your metaphors ought to fit the facts. They dine very well I should think. No crow pie involved. They can stand on the prow of a ship sailing through a storm of vituperative invective without batting an eye. Your puny arguments will disturb them not at all.

So they won't give it up and you're imagining they will because you said so is just another example of how sold out you got to the Magic Wish Fairy.

I've been thinking about that Adams/Jefferson correspondence post. Mine I mean. It's more interesting than I thought.

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@wandeljw,

Quote:

That school district in Spencer, Iowa seems to be doing something very tricky, LW. I am going to be watching this. When I first heard about it I thought, "Dover Ain't Over."

I told you Dover wasn't over at the time wande. I didn't need the evidence. It's not over by a long shot.

If you meet any of the cast over in Spencer tell them from me that there's no need to worry because you are watching them much less to let it influence their deliberations.

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@wandeljw,

Quote:

All the examples used by Behe have been shown by others to be not irreducible. His hypothesis has been refuted.

That's sophistry designed to take in the unwary.

The hypothesis of irreducible complexity is not refuted because IC in his examples got refuted. Which I very much doubt it did anyway.

The impression given is that because his hypothesis has been refuted the hypothesis of the principle of irreducible complexity has also been refuted.

And it hasn't. And I'm surprised at you stooping to such a base trick when you know I'm watching you.

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@Lightwizard,

Quote:

I'm surprised he didn't entitle it "Darwin's Pandora's Box," but that's a double possessive. However, Behe is, after all, possessed. His hypothesis haven't just been refuted, they have been made to look silly and childish.

I think the double possessive is okay LW. "Elsie's knickers' drawer " seems okay. The "haven't" doesn't fit with the " hypothesis" though. Hypothesis is singular. A more obvious plural to go with "haven't" might be "arguments". And "His argument haven't just been refuted etc etc (more drivel) " doesn't harmonise for me. You wanted "hasn't" I feel.

I have read that Mr Behe is possessed of a wife and 8 children.

Your Conrad quote means to me that all the anti-IDer's laying the guilt of the bloodletting on the shoulders of religion is baloney. I might have quoted that if I had seen it.

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LOUISIANA UPDATE

Quote:

Guest column: Creationism balances the scales in state education
(Wayne DesLattes, Shreveport Times, July 24, 2009)

Who remembers the days of metal lunch boxes, homeroom teachers leading the morning, class recital of the pledge of allegiance, followed by unified singing of the national anthem? It seemed to be a simple and more innocent time. Parents knew what your kids were being taught, and it wasn't enlightenment nor evolution.

Since then, evolution's theory has found its way into the public school curriculum and is being passed on as truth today. You know what they say: if you say anything long enough and loud enough, people will begin to believe it.

Now, the offer of intelligent design, or creationism, is being given latitude in education as an origin of life. The National Center for Science Education, which promotes the teaching of evolution, feared that Senate Bill 733 would open the door for creationism. Gov. Jindal recently received flak again from opponents over his support of the bill. I applaud him for it. Some doubt his knowledge of science, but he has a science degree from an Ivy League university, showing he has some understanding about the matter of origins, not ignorance.

The Louisiana Science Education Act was viewed by some science educators as a sole attempt to allow creationism to only be taught. I support creationism and hope teachers take advantage of the opportunity. After all, if evolution and its nonbelief are allowed, why shouldn't intelligent design with its belief be allowed? At the risk of sounding Shakespearian, let's realize that to believe or to not believe, each is a manner of belief.

Simply because an expressed nonbelief doesn't have religious or spiritual tones doesn't mean it isn't religious underneath. Conversely, there are religious records which have scientific support. Did you know every middle to major-sized people group in the world has, in their earliest history, a record about a great deluge? Coincidental, huh? Because something has a religious or moral base doesn't mean it should be thrown out. Abstinence has a moral base and is taught as a birth control form.

I think it takes more faith to believe in evolution and the increasing order of things in the universe than creationism. Evolution directly opposes the repeated, scientifically-proven Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything moves from a beginning state of highly organized order (which supports intelligent design) to a latter state of random disorder. This is observed and proven each time something decomposes, ages, breaks down or rusts. I'm surprised science teachers and professors, knowing this fact, still promote this unproven theory. You don't have to be a genius. Einstein, though he never professed Christianity, believed in intelligent design! Go figure.

Well, it's just not logical. College-level philosophy and Star Trek's Mr. Spock edify the analysis of logic. To say there is no intelligent designer is illogical. One would have to span every inch of the globe and the universe to determine no intelligent Designer exists. This is the scientific, empirical method needed to refute, but cannot be performed. Attempting to prohibit the teaching of creationism but promoting evolution is not logical or scientific, but discriminatory. Hmm. Where is society's tolerance for this view? When evolution was introduced into education, science educators obviously didn't mind if its effect decreased the belief of creationism, or was that the point?

Evolution is not supported by science, and creation cannot be replicated in the lab. We are not animals, nor gods. In my opinion, attempts preventing the thought of God, and anything religious, from education has, for too long, degraded the moral compass of our students and society. Evolution's beginning is unscientific, its middle impossible and its end futile. Who wouldn't want their children to hear purpose of living and hope, to at least balance this long time, one-sided study?

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@wandeljw,

All these religious nuts trying to tell our children that science doesn't explain evolution has no concept of what science is. They also don't understand human history and religions where most of inhumanity to man has occurred.

Their ability to block out reality is the freightening part; a disease only by people with too much religion.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

I agree, C.I. The person who wrote that essay does not understand science. Evolution is not about the origin of life, only the origin of species. He also uses a "kindergarden" interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.

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@wandeljw,

wandeljw wrote:

LOUISIANA UPDATE

Quote:
Guest column: Creationism balances the scales in state education
(Wayne DesLattes, Shreveport Times, July 24, 2009)

I think it takes more faith to believe in evolution and the increasing order of things in the universe than creationism. Evolution directly opposes the repeated, scientifically-proven Second Law of Thermodynamics...

Oh brother. Here they go again...

How much you want to bet Wayne DesLattes is a product of the Louisiana school system which apparently wasn't teaching biology effectively when he was in school.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

Wayne, like many of his ilk, are begging for the books "Evolution for Dummies," "Biology for Dummies," or "Physics for Dummies."

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I have a challenge to the teaching of evolution which hasn't been aired yet.

I have found on my travels, which are only restricted to my locality now I'm fucked, that there is a general agreement, with which I concur, that a good sound Catholic education is the best thing for an exciting and long-lasting sex life. Just the expression "convent girls" is enough, even when just printed on a prosaic web page, most of which remain pretty prosaic for ever, to register a slight twitch response on one of those machines the modern sex researcher uses to try to discover what happens between a neural receptor receiving a signal and the dick to begin reacting to it. "Nunnery" is another example. Even those really well educated Catholic men who have progressed to "Mother Superior" still get an eye-blink rate speed-up on "convent girls" and "nunneries". It is ineradicable. Check Balzac out.

This is because, in my opinion, a good sound Catholic education condems sex as sinful and naughty and thus exciting. A bit of a risky business. For soldiers say. Or recidivist jay-walkers. Not for nuns in convents.

So in order to grant the faithful a long and exciting sex life the sex life has to be made naughty and risky first. So God has to be called in to declare sex naughty.
Risk soon gets forgotten about. One can always hire a priest to be waiting at the side door to reduce the risk to infinitessimal proportions.

Nobody would believe a human agent saying sex is naughty no matter how pompously he puffed himself up. He would get laughed at. It had to be "revealed".

And it put women in the driving seat. How do you go from Falstaff to Dick van Dyke with men in the driving seat.

And teaching evolution takes all the sin away. It's copulation. A biological response. One might get bored with it as one grows older like one grows bored with firing a pea-shooter at choir girls necks from two feet away. From an evolution theory point of view firing a pea-shooter at a female is no different from displaying peafeathers. It's not like scoring a 100 for the team in the Under 16s District Final played on the Dad's ground. Sex education is dead easy from an evolutionary point of view. A banana and a milk bottle and dad's your uncle.

I can't imagine cricket without Christianity. The game is all about sinning and risk to get at girls. That's how it started. After sex had been made sinful.
The rules came in to reduce the carnage. Look at the fielding positions. Stumper, first slip, second slip, backward gully, silly mid-on, short leg, deep extra cover, mid-wicket, third man and long leg. Poetry. That's a field for a 90mph bowler who moves it both ways off the seam and can get one into the throat off just short of a length to a batsman who has just come in who can't resist driving so good and is a tough nut to crack once he gets his eye in. If you don't get him early you might have a few hours of painful and humiliating toil ahead.

You'll end up really lacking in style teaching evolution.

Exciting and long lasting sex and cricket is a fine recommendation for any religion. I won't go into science and art and wine making and gourmet diets and ladies underwear and fashion on this occasion as I am trying to make this post as concise as I can.

Won't teaching evolution ruin all our lives? Won't we end up like all those societies which used other methods of controlling sexuality. Compounds and such like. Allowing men and women to freely mingle in their daily lives might only be possible if they think sex is sinful. Really. What a mixture that alchemist thought up.

Is there any other creature on earth or in the record that moaned about unemployment?

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I thought that the article wande quoted by Wayne DesLattes is the best article he has so far brought to us. And it is very well written.

The responses to it are pitiful. Nothing but infantile assertions. All of them. No answer.

What's the grown up version of the second law of thermodymics wande.

Is it this-

Quote:

The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal principle of increasing entropy, stating that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

The origin of the second law can be traced to French physicist Sadi Carnot's 1824 paper Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which presented the view that motive power (work) is due to the flow of caloric (heat) from a hot to cold body (working substance). In simple terms, the second law is an expression of the fact that over time, ignoring the effects of self-gravity, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how much this evening-out process has progressed.

There are many versions of the second law, but they all have the same effect, which is to explain the phenomenon of irreversibility in nature.

A mathematical representation of the second law is: (* the equation hasn't printed but I don't suppose it matters. It's on Wiki.*) .

where δQ is the heat energy added to the system and T is the temperature.

I think Mr DesLattes gives a decent layman's version of it. Why did you say it was a "kindergarten" version wande. Just an asserted smear I fear to try to take in your faithful claque. And you admit it is a version.

Who on earth would want people like those teaching their kids anything? They have nothing to say other than ignorant heckles. They are incoherent.

wande agrees with ci? does he. As if ci. knows what science is and understands history and religion. In a few not very well chosen words from the 1,000 unit vocabulary. What were you agreeing with wande?

LW and ros were simply futile gestures of a declining energy. An entropic rundown. A last gasp.

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This writer is not just reiterating statements (to the point of outright plagiarism) made over and over ad nauseum by the IDiot, Goebbels-trained propagandists. Then he tries to rationalize his lie about the Second Law of Thermodynamics by pointing the finger at others who are suppose to be continually telling the same lie until it becomes fact. Hypocrisy by any other name. Foolish man.

The second law of thermodynamics states that inside a closed system, energy will tend toward disorder (entropy) until achieving equilibrium. The lie is that Earth is not a closed system and nearly all of its energy which has supported the beginning of life and the propensity of life to evolve and sustain itself comes from a gigantic nuclear hydrogen ball we all see rise and fall in the horizon every day.

1 Reply

@Lightwizard,

Come on LW. We can't go into the future just attacking existing institutions and ways of life. It's negative doing that.

Make your case for a society of atheists. We can't worry about how to get there unless we know something about where we are intended to get to. Describe the main features of your utopia. Teaching evolution is hardly that important.

I made a case up above for Christian ideas. Is it on Ignore? Are you a bloke with a bag over his head on a train which you don't know the destination of.

Mr DesLattes is a mere incident. Structures of society are a bit more serious than that.

1 Reply

@spendius,

spendi, There is no such thing as a society of atheists. We don't get together for anything; it's our belief about the non-existence of a higher power/god. The people we do socialize with are of all different kinds of religions and non-believers. We never ask what their religious beliefs are.

Those are the facts.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

You are promoting atheism. You thus have to envisage your being successful and converting us all. That's what I mean.

Once there were no Christians. If you want to go back to that, and if you don't you're lost, tell us what you think it will be like.

You must have thought it through. No responsible person would promote such a dramatic change without having thought it through--surely?

1 Reply

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