Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Teaching so-called intelligent design violates the no establishment clause, while protecting the right of the Westboro shits resides in freedom of speech clause--i don't see why there should be any confusion.

ONE is a freedom of speech issue

The other is an establishment clause issue.
I dont see how you connect the two functionally. The fact that they are both clauses in the 1st amendment is immeterial.
What if one were Freedom of the press and another were the establishment clause issue.

No one is actually "Surpressing" Creationism in PUBLIC school, its just must not be taught as science because it would "establish" and suport a state religion. As far as freedom of speech and assemblyFreddy Phelps is required to stand 1000 ft away (surpressing and limiting his freedom of speech and assembly) but thats never been my point].His freedom of speech was the issue, not his right of "free exercise of his religion".
Or did I miss something? I hadnt heard anything re Phelps freedom of religion

Spendius is just a douche bag who stubbornly refuses to learn anything about the Constitution while at the same time he wants his lame opinions about same respected. Please dont associate me with him. My opinion is reasoned, based on EXISTING limitations on the freedom of speech clause.

what set said.

The distinction is further starkly drawn by the fact that you can teach whatever the hell you want in a private setting, it's when you're spending the public dime that no establishment becomes an issue--while the Westboro shits are behaving privately, and therefore not only is their (non-criminally inciting) speech protected, but their religious exercise is unmolested.

where does the constitution say that you must be 1000 feet away to exercise your rights pof free speech?

I disagree that their incitment was non violent and certainly non criminal, they had been making a living out of suing the berieved for "reckless endangerment".

If you read Robertsons summary for the majority, he states unequivocally that the reason the court was limited in its decision was because of the FACTS that were presented. I think he tried to walk a line but not to my satisfaction (or Judge ALito's)/
ALSO HS, I have yet to agree with Alito on just about anything hes positioned himself during his USSC tenure. Should I be consistent and disagree with him here too? Or should I, report out on my personal opinion about the issue.?

It's not immaterial unless there is some cafeteria interpretation of the 1A that I haven't heard about. And the 2 clauses are very much connected in proving that all "hate crime statutes" are unconstitutional based not only on 1A but also on 14 - but that's a meta-argument not relating to this thread.

Speaking of unrelated arguments, could you look into the Japan earthquake thread? I read the Sandia report but can't tell how imminent a containment vessel breach may be in any of the Fukushima reactors after their partial core meltdowns. Link: http://able2know.org/topic/169093-9#post-4538831

You realize that there are tons of case decisions handed down by the USSC on the 1st Amendment. I looked up AGuillard and theres only severl tens of references to the establishment clause and "Free exercise clause" . Nothing re: rights of assembly, petition, lobbying, press,or speech.
I think you are trying too hard a stretch here.

Limits on the right of free speech (such as designating places for demonstrations or separating potentially hostile groups) have been derived from decisions by the Supremes and predicated upon the concept of responsible behavior as opposed to criminally irresponsible behavior. No one's freedom of speech is suppressed, its expression is simply regulated.

I don't support teaching creationism in schools. I support it in those areas where voters can vote for it and do so. I support teaching atheism and evolution in the same circumstances.

If a constitutional provision of subsidiarity is granted, as the existence of school boards implies, then they should have the power to put into effect whatever they want when appointed.

It is totally ridiculous that people living in certain areas should seek to impose their viewpoints on people living in other areas. They should campaign for a national curriculum with education being run by a centralised bureaucracy and school boards abolished or their powers reduced to trivial matters.

The market will take care of creationism, evolution, atheism and voodoo through the mechanism of house prices. Anti-IDers are essentially levellers and totalitarian. And anti-evolution to boot.

The new coalition government here has recently made moves towards subsidiarity and the foothills of the voucher system and away from centralised control. It remains to be seen how far it will go.

I have close experience of the centralised control system and it is a racket, and corrupt from top to bottom which is, of course, inevitable given the facts of human nature. I see anti-IDers as having vested interests, material and personal, and they are obviously not very bright because they think, and often express the idea, that because a small number of them have gathered on this thread and outnumber me and can gang up on me they can do the same to a population in which they are outnumbered.

But for me, and possibly Io, this thread would resemble a revivalist meeting from a dynamic point of view. It even has its own versions of "Praise the Lord" and "Halleluja" and exclusion procedures. All of which make me laugh.

Our culturally determined reverence for the dead and the mourning process is so powerful that I would favour suspending other laws to protect it. Hiding behind pedantic interpretations of the Constitution is the hallmark of the trouble-maker. You won't hear me complain if the hooligans of the WBC are tarred and feathered and run out of town on a pole. That would really get them some attention.

And anti-IDers are often found hiding behind such pedantic interpretations in the service of abrogating the democratic process. If they are not Communists it is merely because they haven't the courage of their convictions.

Another thing which makes me think that anti-IDers are pretty stupid is that they obviously think that their insults directed at elected authority in places like Texas and Louisiana will have the slightest effect on those elected when all they are are versions of letting off steam at an internet terminal safe from being pelted with fruit past its sell by date.

Your cosy little coterie should open the window now and again.

That's the sort of sophistry one might expect to find on the back row of the D stream in a girl's class in a mill town. Nobody could manage such a contortion with an IQ above 80 whilst lacking the facilities of the aforementioned young ladies.

The biggest challenge to the teaching of evolution is the fact that evolution is a bunch of bullshit and in this new internet age, there is no real way to hide that from anybody. For the benefit of any who might have missed this one in the past...




The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

I love it when you come in with this "twice fried" beandip.
You are so ignorant of the rules of science evidence and testing hypotheses that were I you, Id get back to a HS level biology course.

Evolution has been deduced based upon evidence. Mathematical expressions have been develpped that track morphology fairly closely (As a seriws of solutions with several plausible options.

You keep sxtending your own bullshit by trying to make punctuated equilibrium sound like more than it was proposed as. Its a hypothesis that, since Gould has been found somewhat in disfavor. PE seems to be more a product of "missing strata" than actual saltation.

SO FAR GS noone of any scientific reputation and credibility has found anything that unsupports evolution.

IM asure youre going to post your "list" of quote mined scientists who you say are speaking against evolution, when all they are doing is making a "wish list" or they are quoted so far out of field that its a crime.


I watch Notre Dame fooball. Notre Dame has a very very good evolutionary biology and Geosciences program. Shall I call them up and tell them the bad news you are spreading?
When did you fall on your head?

Promoting it and attempting to shove it up everybody's arse using insults, straw men, innuendo, walled off hand-out production units and writing abilities which can't approach that of your post.

That our resident anti-IDers think they are qualified to influence the education of a superpower's children is even stupider. They think teaching equates with learning. And they think that what they say is teaching. It's a cosy circle of stupidity.

But if subsidarity exists, as school boards declare, then the voters can vote to teach free love and general promiscuity and evolution or anything they want and the market will take care of its usefulness.

What are these mathematical expressions. Are we required to have faith in them without knowing what they are. And what does "fairly closely" mean? Alpha Centauri is fairly closely proximate to where we are.

If the sentence was intended to leave the reader with the impression that evolution is proved mathematically it comes under the heading of "innuendo". It actually says nothing of the sort.

Did any of you see Melvyn Bragg's defence of the Bible the other night in a hour long programme on the BBC. He made a reasonable case that we would all be scampering around in the treetops without the Bible. Without the Bible Setanta would be unable to talk about such things at all.

fm's own lifestyle and his deepest private thoughts unsupport evolution.

What species in the Darwinian record ever had another species get a boat to give it the lookover and take some shots of it for the family album. Not one of Darwin's exhibits ever had a thought for its future generations. Was evolved not to have. Evolution through sexual reproduction would have floundered if the Big Pig could have put its eldest male offspring in charge no matter that it was a runt.

We unsupport evolution. gunga's essay, well written as it was, is beside the point just as there being no-one of any scientific reputation and credibility having found anything that unsupports evolution is. The latter is an assertion anyway and it discounts those sciences which deal with human social organisation and human emotion. It also puts evolution in a box and asks us to look at it and at nothing else.

gunga's posts are great and I welcome them but they are playing on the other team's ball-park and I think they will lose the argument which is why I think fm encourages him and doesn't put him on Ignore as he does others whose arguments he thinks will, or might, win.

The precise problem with Dover. It was a lay down for the plaintiffs once the arguments they could win with were the only ones admissible in court on account of the fact that the other ones, equally scientific, (see Masters & Johnson, Kinsey, Wilhelm Reich, Pavlov, Armstrong, Skinner, at al.) being somewhat embarrassing to the judge's female relations.

Bernard Shaw, when taken to task about his mother's and sister's preoccupation with Ouija boards, planchettes, communing with the illustrious dead and communicating the information received to the Astronomer Royal, and bringing into the house gentlemen with trimmed facial hair, replied that "one cannot shatter a consolation and a hope as one could criticize a scientific experiment."

So he wasn't as devoid of blood in his veins as some think he was.

Evolution theory is a creation theory of intelligent design.

=
MJA

Wanna buy a bridge?

Readers note, I am not into pushing religion. I'll RECOMMEND Christianity if somebody WANTS a recommendation, but ANY religion (other than for I-slam which is basically a form of devil worship) is better than evolution, including Voodoo and Rastafari. Neither Voodoo nor Rastafari require belief in any sort of a trans-finite sequence of probabilistic miracles. Rastafari vs evolution in particular is an outright no-brainer, you have to go with Rasta.

Supposedly, as we age all of our cognitive abilities increase . . . with the exception of memory. Nouns go first! That's why you can't remember the hard things that make up cliffs or why I heard my grandmother say, "Get that. It's over there on the thing." Later, I heard my mother say and I have caught myself saying it.

Such an extreme level of originality and creativity is astounding.