Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

The entire line of cross examination was your entire line of cross examination and whatever it did for the entertainment industry it proved nothing about IDers despite your assertions to the contrary. I can't imagine what the science of astrology has to do with ID anyway.

I can't imagine what the science of astrology has to do with ID anyway.

Tell me why you think there is no scientific credibility to astrology

1--opaque thinking.
2--I wouldn't have lasted half as long as Mr Behe.
3-- You think, at the time of writing, that I would have been laughed at.
4--I'm awestruck at my brilliance.
5--I'm drunk again.

Like me being a misogynist just because I'm honest about women whereas you think they are fluffy toys.

ros did say, and I think he chose his words carefully, that astrology "can be considered a science".

If I remember correctly, Behe's line of reasoning led to him claiming that astrology could be considered science

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a
muleteer drives on his mule, -- straight
forward ; ---- for instance, from Rome all
the way to Loretto, without ever once
turning his head aside either to the right
hand or to the left, -- he might venture
to foretell you to an hour when he should
get to his journey's end ; ---- but the
thing is, morally speaking, impossible :
For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he
will have fifty deviations from a straight
line to make with this or that party as he
goes along, which he can no ways avoid.
He will have views and prospects to
himself perpetually solliciting his eye,
which he can no more help standing still
to look at than he can fly ; he will more-
over have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up :
Inscriptions to make out :
Stories to weave in :
Traditions to sift :
Personages to call upon :
Panygericks to paste up at this door :
Pasquinades at that : ---- All which
both the man and his mule are quite ex-
empt from. To sum up all ; there are
archives at every stage to be look'd in-
to, and rolls, records, documents, and
endless genealogies, which justice ever
and anon calls him back to stay the
reading of : ---- In short, there is no end
of it ; ---- for my own part, I declare I
have been at it these six weeks, making
all the speed I possibly could, -- and am
not yet born : -- I have just been able,
and that's all, to tell you when it happen'd,
but not how ; -- so that you see the thing
is yet far from being accomplished.
These unforeseen stoppages, which I
own I had no conception of when I first
set out ; -- but which, I am convinced
now, will rather increase than diminish as
I advance, -- have struck out a hint which
I am resolved to follow ; -- and that is, --
not to be in a hurry ; -- but to go on lei-
surely, writing and publishing two vo-
lumes of my life every year ; ---- which,
if I am suffered to go on quietly, and can
make a tolerable bargain with my book-
seller, I shall continue to do as long as I
live.

This clown has been caught lying so many times that completely freezing out his interminable garrulity seems to be the only option if this thread is to proceed at all.

Fortunately more posters seem to have reached the same conclusion.

I've no idea what he's trying to accomplish by continuing, do you?

IN A SINGLE CELL PREDATOR, CLUES TO THE ANIMAL KINGDOM's BIRTH

Sean Carroll

The Environmental Protection Agency is worried about a lot of things in our water — polychlorinated biphenyls, dibromochloropropane, Cryptosporidium parvum — to name just a few of the dozens of chemicals or organisms they monitor. However, in nearly every creek and lake, and throughout the oceans, there is one important group of multisyllabic microbes that the E.P.A. does not track, and until recently, most biologists heard and knew very little about — the choanoflagellates.

Before you spit out that glass of water or dunk your swimsuit in Clorox, relax. These tiny organisms are harmless. They are important for other reasons. They are part of the so-called nanoplankton and play critical roles in the ocean food chain. Choanoflagellates are voracious single-cell predators.

The beating of their long flagellum both propels them through the water and creates a current that helps them to collect bacteria and food particles in the collar of 30 to 40 tentaclelike filaments at one end of the cell.

There can be thousands to millions of choanoflagellates in a gallon of sea water, which may filter 10 to 25 percent of coastal surface water per day. Choanoflagellates in turn serve as food for planktonic animals like crustacean larvae, which are consumed by larger animals, and so on up the food chain.

Theirs is a humble existence compared with the larger, more charismatic residents of the oceans like lobsters, fish, squids and whales.

But recent studies suggest that these obscure organisms are among the closest living single-celled relatives of animals. In other words, choanoflagellates are cousins to all animals in the same way that chimpanzees are cousins to humans. Just as the study of great apes has been vital to understanding human evolution, biologists are now scrutinizing choanoflagellates for clues about one of the great transitions in history — the origin of the animal kingdom.

For most of the first 2.5 billion years of life on Earth, most species were microscopic, rarely exceeding one millimeter in size, and unicellular. Many different kinds of larger life forms, including fungi, animals and plants, subsequently evolved independently from separate single-celled ancestors.

The evolution of multicellularity was a critical step in the origin of each of these groups because it opened the way to the emergence of much more complex organisms in which different cells could take on different tasks. And the emergence of larger organisms drove profound changes in ecology that changed the face of the planet.

Scientists are eager to understand how transitions from a unicellular to multicellular lifestyle were accomplished. Reconstructing events that happened more than 600 million years ago, in the case of animals, is a great challenge. Ideally, one would have specimens from just before and immediately after the event. But the unicellular ancestor of animals and those first animals are long extinct. So information has to be gleaned from living sources.

This is where comparisons between choanoflagellates and animals come into play. The close kinship between choanoflagellates and animals means that there once lived a single-celled ancestor that gave rise to two lines of evolution — one leading to the living choanoflagellates and the other to animals. Choanoflagellates can tell us a lot about that ancestor because any characteristics that they share with animals must have been present in that ancestor and then inherited by both groups. By similar logic, whatever animals have but choanoflagellates lack probably arose during animal evolution.

There are striking physical resemblances between choanoflagellates and certain animal cells, specifically the feeding cells of sponges, called choanocytes. Sponge choanocytes also have a flagellum and possess a collar of filaments for trapping food. Similar collars have been seen on several kinds of animals cells. These similarities indicate that the unicellular ancestor of animals probably had a flagellum and a collar, and may have been much like a choanoflagellate.

But even more surprising and informative resemblances between choanoflagellates and animals have been revealed at the level of DNA. Recently, the genome sequence of one choanoflagellate species was analyzed by a team led by Nicole King and Daniel Rokhsar at the University of California, Berkeley. They identified many genetic features that were shared exclusively between choanoflagellates and animals. These included 78 pieces of proteins, many of which in animals are involved in making cells adhere to one another.

The presence of so many cell adhesion molecules in choanoflagellates was very surprising. The scientists are trying to figure out what all of those molecules are doing in a unicellular creature. One possibility is that the molecules are used in capturing prey.

Whatever the explanation, the presence of those genes in a unicellular organism indicates that much of the machinery for making multicellular animals was in place long before the origin of animals. It may be that rather than evolving new genes, animal ancestors simply used what they had to become multicellular. There may be selective advantages to forming colonies, like avoiding being eaten by other small predators. And in fact, some choanoflagellates do form multicellular colonies at stages of their life cycle.

Dr. King and her colleagues Stephen Fairclough and Mark Doyel investigated one such species to determine whether colony formation occurred by dividing cells staying together, the way animal embryos form, or by individual cells aggregating together, as some protists like slime molds do.

The scientists found that colonies formed exclusively by dividing cells staying together. They suggested that the ancient common ancestor of choanoflagellates and animals was capable of forming simple colonies and that this property may well have been a first step on the road to animal evolution.

The world is full of microbes, and we spend a lot of worry and effort trying to keep them off and out of our bodies. It is humbling to ponder that still swimming within that microscopic soup are our distant cousins.

....The world is full of microbes... It is humbling to ponder that still swimming within that microscopic soup are our distant cousins.

there is one important group of multisyllabic microbes that the E.P.A. does not track,

Job candidate sues University of Kentucky, claiming religion cost him the post
(By Peter Smith • Louisville Courier-Journal • December 10, 2010)

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Gaskell had given lectures to campus religious groups around the country in which he said that while he has no problem reconciling the Bible with the theory of evolution, he believes the theory has major flaws. And he recommended students read theory critics in the intelligent-design movement.

That stance alarmed UK science professors and, the university acknowledges, played a role in the job going to another candidate.

Now a federal judge says Gaskell has a right to a jury trial over his allegation that he lost the job because he is a Christian and "potentially evangelical."

“The record contains substantial evidence that Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position until the issue of his religion or his scientific position became an issue,” U.S. Senior District Judge Karl S. Forester of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote late last month in rejecting the university's motion for summary judgment, which would have dismissed the case.

Forester has set a trial date of Feb. 8 on Gaskell’s claims the university violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act's ban on job bias on the basis of religion.

UK, in a legal brief, acknowledged that concerns over Gaskell's views on evolution played a role in the decision to chose another candidate. But it argued that this was a valid scientific concern, and that there were other factors, including a poor review from a previous supervisor and UK faculty views that he was a poor listener.

In its brief, UK said professors worried about Gaskell's "casual blending of religion and science" and feared the then-planned MacAdam Student Observatory’s "true mission … would be thwarted by controversy that has nothing to do with astronomy."

Gaskell's lawsuit, however, argues UK officials repeatedly referred to his religion in their discussions and e-mails. And he argues that UK mistook him for a creationist — someone who believes the Bible disproves the theory of evolution.

Originally, Gaskell was rated the leading candidate by the UK search committee, which was looking for a founding director for the observatory, which opened in 2008.

Gaskell had a doctorate in his field, had published extensively on such subjects as black holes in space, and had developed an observatory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln atop a campus parking garage — an innovative approach UK eventually would use.

But search committee members also learned of lecture notes Gaskell posted on his University of Nebraska website for a talk, "Modern Astronomy, the Bible and Creation." Gaskell had given the talk to religious and other groups at campuses around the country, including one at UK in the 1990s.

Much of the lecture seeks to show the harmony between modern astronomy and the biblical book of Genesis. But on the topic of biology, Gaskell says there are “major scientific problems in evolutionary theory," even though he accepts it. The notes are now part of the court record.

One search committee member, Sally Shafer, called Gaskell “fascinating,” but “potentially evangelical” in an e-mail to the chairs of the search committee and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The court record also shows:

An astronomy professor, Moshe Elitzur, told department chair Michael Cavagnero that he feared embarrassing headlines about Kentucky's flagship university hiring a “creationist” in a state already home to the controversial Creation Museum.

And three UK biology professors consulted by Cavagnero vigorously objected to Gaskell's hiring.

One, Jim Krupa, said hiring Gaskell would be a "disaster," particularly because UK planned to use the observatory to promote science education among the general public. UK "might as well have folks from the Creation Museum get involved with UK's science outreach" if it hired him, he wrote to Cavagnero.

Another geology professor, Shelly Steiner, wrote that UK should no more hire an astronomer skeptical of evolution than “a biologist who believed that the sun revolved around the Earth."

Gaskell has said he rejects the brand of creationism taught at the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky, which presents a literal interpretation of the Bible. It says the Earth and all life were created a few thousand years ago in six 24-hour days and disputes the scientific consensus that both developed gradually over billions of years.

Gaskell, in his lecture notes, calls such creationism “very bad scientifically and theologically” and said it “actually hinders some scientists becoming Christians.”

But UK biologists said in their e-mails that evidence for evolution was so overwhelming that Gaskell had no scientific basis to raise questions about it.

And they disputed his positive words for the intelligent design movement — which says life is too complex to have been developed through evolutionary natural selection. The biologists said intelligent design is religion, not science, echoing a landmark Pennsylvania federal court ruling in 2005.

Gaskell bases the claims in his lawsuit in part on an October 2007 e-mail by professor Thomas Troland, the chair of the UK search committee for the observatory job, to Cavagnero.

Troland lamented that UK was rejecting a “superbly qualified” candidate for “religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy." Troland wrote that this "repudiated any claim to honoring the principles of diversity that are so piously proclaimed on this campus."

But in a March 2010 deposition, Troland said he no longer agrees with what he wrote. He now accepts that opposition was over Gaskell's scientific rather than religious views. He said he wrote the e-mail in frustration that others didn't share his high opinion of Gaskell.

Gaskell, a native of England, is now a research fellow at the University of Texas' McDonald Observatory. His suit is seeking financial damages for lost income and emotional distress.

One of Gaskell's attorneys, Francis J. Manion, said Gaskell “would have been the perfect foil to what those (UK) decision-makers view as the kind of scientific obscurantism represented by the Creation Museum: an openly Christian man of science who accepts evolution.”

Manion, of New Hope, Ky., who represents Gaskell on behalf of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said he advised Gaskell not to comment while the case is pending.

UK spokesman Jay Blanton declined to comment beyond the legal filings because the case involved pending litigation.