Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Well, Im sure your recipe for cooking your supper will reccomend a high enough heat. SO I wouldnt worry too much, in your case,since it all goes to the same spot.

wande--why are you quoting glop about this stuff shortly after quoting someone else saying that it is absurd?



Are the defenders of church-state separation and good science education evolving as well and if so what into and if not they are stuck fast.

Church and State separation is an absolute thing. It cannot evolve. Links between Church and State can be tuned and thus superior from an evolutionary point of view to a fossil which is also stuck fast.

The use of "good science education" instead of "science education Mr Boston approves of" is the sort of uneducated, ignorant solecism one would not expect to see in an essay intended to be taken seriously.

Indeed it is. It's about time we got these "supplemmental materials" out for inspection. They have been used as a bogeyman for a lot longer than is polite in intellectual circles.

This is how our churches handled Evolution in the US!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssqRsOgyEKY&feature=related

Would this video about evolution be considered to be based on facts by all of you who view it or is there something that you disagree with?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElyqKDRU4gg&feature=channel_video_title

"Evolution by natural selection is the non-random survival of randomly varying individuals...."

That's circular.

It's also a non sequitur because the premiss is an assertion and does not prove that there is no intelligent design because both random and non-random effects are simply assumed which is necessary once design is denied. Thus, that there is no intelligent design is assumed if the premiss on which such a conclusion is based is an assumption.

Simply because the process looks to have randomness and non-randomness to dude science does not prove that there is actually randomness and non-randomness.

Suppose the government was secretly putting something in the water which altered behaviour as they are rumoured to do in miltary training establishments. Someone studying the behaviour of the population who didn't know that there was something in the water designedly placed there would come to incorrect scientific conclusions about human behaviour. To present such conclusions as facts about human behaviour would thus be false.

The speaker is making such an error once he rules out design.

It's as circular as a kid's roundabout at a vicarage garden party and, as such, has no place on either a science thread or in a discussion involving intelligent people.

The only conclusion one might draw from that is that rl doesn't do science and that he is not expecting to find intelligent people on A2K or, at least, not expecting to find anybody less gormless than he is.

And he bruised three apples un-necessarily which shows a rather cavalier attitude to food when it is remembered that those three apples would feed some people in the world for a week.

The speaker has fallen for the temptation of thinking himself clever by imagining that locating and describing items in a series is the equivalent of explaining them. Which it isn't.

It almost goes without saying that the expansion of such an idea into the realm of food production ( a real chicken here being 400% dearer than a treated one) is not likely to be welcome to the ears of dude scientists with their searching and piercing gaze into truth and reality.

It would be nearly as impolite as telling children that there is no Father Christmas and, as I am nothing if not polite, I refrained from expanding the notion I raised. Had I been anticipating a scientific audience I would, of course, have raised the bar.

The point being that once the speaker in the video has subjectively ruled out the possibility of intelligent design, which he cannot logically do, the rest of his spiel is simple and as predictable as the sequence of night/day/night etc and is at the level of K4 or 5 classrooms.

No its not. It says that the process of natural selection is non random , but the variation that occurs in natural phenotypes IS randomly distributed.
Dont make judgements if you dont comprehend what is said



This doesnt make any sense though. Im gonna stick with my assertion until you explain this for people who really want to understand how your logic works


So this is related to natural selection how?

The speaker was only interested in that which has been EVIDENCED. ID has no evidence that has been sustained (unless youve heard of something lately from the boys at the pub)

Somehow I detect a bit of jealousy because you havent been able to dissect the relationship between facts and theories as well as the speaker.
Im not gonna be hard on you today because I assume that you are still recovering from your bacon butty , post prandials and overidulgence at her maj's various shivarees.

I eagerly await your report of the marriage of the millenium.

That is circular because the "non-random survival of randomly varying individuals" is "evolution by natural selection".



That's a dogma unless cosmological events which influence the process are also non-random which implies design.



That's a dogma as well and implies no design.

You're in the same position as the student of human behaviour who doesn't know that the diet has been interfered with designedly.

Dont make judgements if you dont comprehend what is said.



I know you are going to stick with your assertions because you have too much pride and self-esteem invested in them. So much so that you have to declare yourself unscientific. My explanation was simple enough.



That was simple enough too. The metaphor of the dosing of recruits in military training camps with bromides applies to the intelligent designer dosing the universe with stuff those dosed are unaware of. The innocence is not a scientific condition in itself and is bound to lead to false conclusions.



Yes--quite-- but his innocence, genuine or assumed, of being dosed is a necessity for his subjective position which I would bet money derives from objecting to Christian sexual morality which seeks to restrict his promiscuity and, indeed, seeks that objective for scientific and evolutionary reasons. His being innocent of those scientific and evolutionary reasons is probably a matter of the selective use of the Ignore principle either by personal choice or having been guided. Critical analysis doesn't stop at his door. Or your's.



Try not to be so silly fm. When you understand progress theory you will see just how silly.

You are free to be as hard on me as suits your purposes. You needn't use me as an excuse.



I have already offered my thoughts on the matter. I'll see if I can find where for you. It was on the big day.

Here you go fm--

http://able2know.org/topic/47327-788#post-4590699

well, if you are unable to understand what "NON RANDOM PROCESSING and DISTRIBUTION OF RANDOM INFORMATION" means, I guess that ends it.

marbles are packed into bags of 100 by a counting conveyor belt (non random distribution), whereas the marbles may be of several sizes and colors(random distribution of marble sizes and colors). Does that analogy help?


"A search for design is dreaming. Its not up to the speaker to propose something that cannot be evidenced. Thats hardly science,

I presume you mean that evolution consists of mechanical processes and that sperm and eggs are like marbles.



But we are dreamers. Science derives from dreaming. Einstein's waking dreams were such that he often went abroad wearing odd shoes and with only one sock on.



So he's neither poet nor scientist. He's an ordinary Joe of the type which tradition says is born at the rate of one every minute. In my opinion it is a virtual certainty that he is objecting to Christian sexual morality and dressing it up in dude science in order to persuade others of his own sort. That he is successful in your case is a matter for regret.

Published in Salon.com:

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry officially declared three days last week to be "days of prayer" in response to the wildfires and droughts that have been plaguing the state, many progressives reacted with a mixture of disbelief and ridicule.

Calling for prayer while refusing to recognize the EPA's regulations on greenhouse gases seemed like an act of willful ignorance, as if Texas were sticking its fingers in its ears and humming as loud as it could to drown out what amounts to a warning of a future climate-change-induced catastrophe.

For my part, I'll cop to having sent a disparaging tweet or two. But I shouldn't have. Ridiculing Texas for attempting to pray away drought is a bad idea -- and not just because it makes progressives seem like Al Gore when he sighed with exasperation at George Bush in the 2000 presidential debate. The bigger issue is that, as the effects of climate change become more tangible, weather more unpredictable, and ordinary conditions more disastrous, progressives will have to offer more than sniggers to those who feel threatened by changes they don't understand.

Of course, as those of us who are pro-science argue, the changes are in fact perfectly understandable if you just look at the evidence on climate change. But we know there are lots of reasons why people don’t trust science, from the psychological (we tend to valorize information that confirms our existing beliefs and rationalize away information that doesn’t) to the political (oil companies have a vested interest in marginalizing real climate science and disseminating misinformation). Of course, better science education wouldn’t hurt -- and by "better," I mean education that doesn’t openly flout scientific consensus on evolution and climate change, as Texas education policy now does.

But progressives have to do more than explain why science is right. Too often, we pose a dichotomy between understanding things as "acts of God" that we can't control at all or as the results of scientific processes that we can understand and control completely. And while understanding the various factors -- both natural and social -- that contribute to disasters can help us anticipate them and minimize their worst impacts, we have to be more forthcoming about the limitations of technocratic approaches. We have to do a better job of talking about what science-based policy actually means and, more fundamentally, about how science actually works -- which means acknowledging that we don’t know everything and can’t control everything.

This approach is politically risky. Talking about the role of uncertainty in the scientific process can make scientific explanations vulnerable to people who would prefer to ignore inconvenient truths as long as possible. There are plenty of climate-deniers out there ready to pounce on the slightest hint of uncertainty to declare climate change a fraud. But claiming absolute knowledge may be just as dangerous, as the backlash of distrust spurred by "Climategate" demonstrated; when people got a glimpse of the disagreement and debate that is an essential part of the scientific process, they assumed they'd been hoodwinked all along.

And just as important, we'll make better policy if we admit we don't know and can't control everything while continuing to stand by the things we do know. To admit uncertainty isn’t to undermine science -- rather, it’s essential for making policy that’s science-based. It will help us better assess what we can feasibly do and prepare for the things we can’t. It will make us more flexible, more ready to adapt to new information and perspectives, and ultimately more resilient. Those qualities are particularly important in the age of climate change -- we don’t know what a planet that's 2, or 3, or 6 degrees warmer will be like because we haven’t lived on it yet.

After Katrina, for example, despite the Bush administration's protestations that Katrina had "exceeded … anybody’s foresight," it soon became clear that the risk of a disastrous hurricane had been predicted for years, but because the government neglected its duties to mitigate and to prepare for a disaster to the best of its abilities, deep-rooted social problems turned a moderately sized hurricane into a catastrophe. But overestimating our ability to control nature is also dangerous: The levees protecting New Orleans from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain were built to resist most storms, but in such a way that a breach would result in catastrophic failure. Acknowledging the inevitability of the unexpected and the potential fallibility of all human systems is essential to building systems that can fail less disastrously.

The problem is that admitting we’re not totally in control is scary. Writing about disaster and injustice, political philosopher Judith Shklar noted that "we often blame ourselves wholly without grounds, simply because an arbitrary and wholly impersonal world seems harder to endure than an unjust one in which some force, at the very least, is in charge of events." But the question of how to accept our inability to completely control the world around us without simply reverting to theological explanations is an important one. And even more important is the question of how can we relinquish the illusion of control without granting a pass to real acts of injustice -- that is, without calling things "acts of God" to excuse our own failures.

More difficult may be accepting a world of uncertainty and seeming randomness, and understanding that what seems random may simply be the effect of living in a universe that doesn’t revolve around us. Doing that without losing sight of the role we do play in creating, exacerbating and perpetuating injustice is perhaps most difficult of all. But it’s worth asking how we might change our approach to living in the world if we learned to accept that bad things sometimes happen to good people neither because God is punishing us nor because we failed to do everything right, but because we live on a planet full of living things and dynamic processes, from honeybees to earthquakes to threshold effects. Might we be humble, more conscious of the other people, creatures and things on which our lives depend?

These are hard questions to answer, but progressives need to start asking them. As Alex de Waal wrote shortly after Katrina, "the public leaders best able to craft a meaningful narrative will be those who shape America’s social and environmental policies and even its leadership over the next few years." Progressives need to craft a narrative that acknowledges our simultaneous responsibility to do what we can to anticipate and mitigate environmental threats and to be humble about what we can’t do, or risk losing the chance for a truly science-based conversation about our relationship to the natural world at the time when it’s needed most.

Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.

But climate change "progressives" use their care and compassion for the future when they wish to sound off as superior persons and the rest of the time they continue their polluting daily doings at a rate which outdistances most of the world's population by appreciably more than the proverbial country mile. In Al Gore's case a lot more than that. Factors of 10,000 + being involved in some cases.

And they don't address the important point that to take them seriously might involve economic disasters with effects far more potent than localised bush fires.

What do you think about this type of logical thinking Spendius?
Do you think that it speaks truth or false dichotomy?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9MdYU0S7CQ

It's the type of thinking you anti-IDers are permanently stuck with.

Logic does suck for people who have reasons other than logical reasons!

That's meaningless unless you provide some examples.

Logic doesn't suck for me. I just never see any from anti-IDers. The only logical reason I can see for attacking Christianity is the personal one I have given on many occasions. I'm aware that no anti-IDer can be honest enough to admit to it.

The logical defect in evolutionist modes of thought is that to place things, life forms, social order, career and such like, in a list, a series, is not to explain them.

A serial explanation which includes explanations of the causal connections between the stages is pointless because we only need the explanation of the causal connections between the stages in the series and if we have those the series then becomes merely a list of the successive conditions. Which explains nothing that has not been explained before. We know how a bank of sieves work from the mechanics of each successive sieve. We are not astounded that the quarried rock comes out of the last sieve as a fine powder suitable for use in toothpaste or make-up. I suppose young kids might think the bank of sieves ground up the rock.

If we don't know the mechanics of each successive stage in a series and how they generate each other then the series becomes an A to Z type of explanation. There was "this" and then there was "that" and then there was "the other" is scientific fatuity.

Hence the explanation of evolutionary processes is either pointless or inefficient.

Alleged patterns of development or doctrines concerning the mechanics of the transitions in the series, or of stable states between transitions if such can be said to exist in any dynamic process, are worthless except for propaganda purposes which, of course, rely on an uncritical audience and on an unscientific motive.

In view of those considerations an evolutionary approach hardly qualifies as the central focus of the explanation and validation of the general scheme of things and that is precisely what an evolutionist does.

It is worth asking why this was not obvious to proponents of evolutionist theories. One supposes it was put on Ignore for various reasons. Distractions were allowed to loom larger than they deserved to do. The list of the series, the what, the when and the where, was combined with the allegations and the doctrines which allowed the whence, the why, the how and the wherefore to become obscured enough to be lost sight of.

The result is what you see from anti-IDers. The list of items in the series, the allegations and the doctrines then masquerade as explanations, with brilliantine word interpolations to add spicy chutzpah for those awed by such things, and such illogicality is not a suitable justification for a dramatic change in the educational system or in wider society.

Your post is an example of where you end up. Using words like logic and logical in a form which is meant to suggest that you are logical and admire logic and your opponents are not. Like a T-shirt saying GO LOGIC.

And you have no idea what logic involves, or science, and imo you are so illogical as to have me suspect that you are female or have lived in close proximity to mothers, sisters, aunties and neices for longer than is good for you.

Marxism falls afoul of the logic of the above because the stages society goes through under industrialism, a list, is explained by such things as the class struggle, a doctrine, in terms of the mechanics of the transitions and an account of them and the stable states, so called, between them. Which is not to say Marxism is not "heap big medicine" but only that it is illogical. There are other explanations for the billions of stages. Technological developments and the gradual synergistic improvement of them for example holding out hopes for affluence and freedom. The Holy Grail. One might expect the class struggle to be a very short lived affair bearing in mind that the toffs are so overwhelmingly outnumbered and so stupid.

Darwinism also falls foul of logic. It has a theory, that there is no independent origin and that species are mutable, a list, which is basically what Origins consists of, there's a bit of foot shuffling here and there, and these items are fused with a doctrine to explain the transitions: natural selection. Or sexual selection as I prefer.

These two constituents of the bowl of cabbage soup, the world growth story, the list, and the doctrinal explanation of the mechanics of the transitions, when fused, obscure the illogicality of the world growth story itself. If the doctrinal explanations are presented in a suitably persuasive manner, borrowing from religious precendent, the audience can easily forget that logic and logicality exists.

Which is where you lot have arrived at. Saying the words is enough for you. You are your own suckers. You want it too much you see. Or you did at some point and the argument itself has now taken over and you're in denial of the original want. Which is ridiculous for an evolutionist who wants to know the whence, the why, the how and the wherefore of anti-ID in the transition from short pants to long pants. After that rote learning explains it all.

After all, it would be more than astounding if each and every anti-IDer had arrived independently at the brilliant flash of insight that the Christian project was a giant pile of bullshit and its achievements are not to be reckoned in the same league as the genius of such an insight. Which is what would be required if there was no, long forgotten, common and predictable, starting point. No acorns. A standing cock has no conscience it is said.

If we are consumed in a nuclear conflagration then will be the time to declare the Christian project to be a giant pile of bullshit. As it stands, our lifestyles, when compared to any others I have read about, justifies the opposite view.

spendi wrote,

spendi can't see his own contradiction in the two sentences he composes next to each other.

CLUE: There is no such thing as "anti-IDers." It doesn't exist, and he's trying to claim he understands logic. Completely self-defeating by his own words.

I use it as a taxonomist does expressions such as "rattus norvegicus" to designate a classification of a species which has some observable features in common.

It's just a collective word for you lot and everybody knows what it means by now so it communicates efficiently and that's logical if communication is attempted rather than confusing everybody by arranging you all separately in glass cases and labelling you more accurately on the basis of the type of acorn you were before you sprouted your anti-intelligent design carapace.