Evolution - Who wants to KNOW?

JM, But their support of ID will remain constant and unchanging.

JM,

You may have children in school like I do. Wouldn't you want science to be taught as science and religion to be taught as religion?

At the elementary or secondary level, teaching creationism alongside evolution would be confusing and give young students a false impression of science (in my opinion).

Religion is based of faith, while science is based on systemized knowledge based on observation. Mixing the two is comparing apples and carrots. Other than they're both being crispy, the similarities end there.

This article is quite interesting - and related to this topic.
New Research Opens a Window on the Minds of Plants
PATRIK JONSSON, Correspondent - The Christian Science Monitor

[This article is a validation of two friends who challenged the paradigm, and were much reviled for doing so. Many SR readers may remember their book, The Secret Life of Plants. The principal researcher and co-author was the late Christopher Bird, and the other co-author was Peter Tompkins. I was living in Washington when Secret Life of Plants, which sprang from a very successful article in Harper's was being written, and read the MS as it was being produced. Both authors, particularly Chris, who was a Harvard trained biologist, understood just how revolutionary their premise was, indeed, both were rebels who were quite happy to challenge the paradigm. They were, however, stunned by the nastiness of the skeptics' attacks, the dishonesty of their arguments, and the shallowness of their thinking. Chris and Peter wrote a second book, Secrets of the Soil that takes the arguments developed in Secret Life of Plants on to their logical conclusions. Both books were well in advance of their time, and their histories make a classic study in what happens to those who get ahead of the paradigm, and how professional skeptics behave in the face of information they find distasteful.
Thanks to SR reader Rosmarie Pilkington for alerting me to this story.

]


RALEIGH, N.C. - Hardly articulate, the tiny strangleweed, a pale parasitic plant, can sense the presence of friends, foes, and food, and make adroit decisions on how to approach them.
Mustard weed, a common plant with a six-week life cycle, can't find its way in the world if its root-tip statolith - a starchy "brain" that communicates with the rest of the plant - is cut off.

The ground-hugging mayapple plans its growth two years into the future, based on computations of weather patterns. And many who visit the redwoods of the Northwest come away awed by the trees' survival for millenniums - a journey that, for some trees, precedes the Parthenon.

As trowel-wielding scientists dig up a trove of new findings, even those skeptical of the evolving paradigm of "plant intelligence" acknowledge that, down to the simplest magnolia or fern, flora have the smarts of the forest. Some scientists say they carefully consider their environment, speculate on the future, conquer territory and enemies, and are often capable of forethought - revelations that could affect everyone from gardeners to philosophers.

Indeed, extraordinary new findings on how plants investigate and respond to their environments are part of a sprouting debate over the nature of intelligence itself.

"The attitude of people is changing quite substantially," says Anthony Trewavas, a plant

biochemist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a prominent scholar of plant intelligence. "The idea of intelligence is going from the very narrow view that it's just human to something that's much more generally found in life."

To be sure, there are no signs of Socratic logic or Shakespearean thought, and the subject of plant "brains" has sparked heated exchanges at botany conferences. Plants, skeptics scoff, surely don't fall in love, bake soufflés, or ponder poetry. And can a simple reaction to one's environment truly qualify as active, intentional reasoning?

But the late Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist Barbara McClintock called plant cells "thoughtful." Darwin wrote about root-tip "brains." Not only can plants communicate with each other and with insects by coded gas exhalations, scientists say now, they can perform Euclidean geometry calculations through cellular computations and, like a peeved boss, remember the tiniest transgression for months.

To a growing number of biologists, the fact that plants are now known to challenge and exert power over other species is proof of a basic intellect.

"If intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, then, absolutely, plants are intelligent," agrees Leslie Sieburth, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

For philosophers, one of the key findings is that two cuttings, or clones, taken from the same "mother plant" behave differently even when planted in identical conditions.

"We now know there's an ability of self-recognition in plants, which is highly unusual and quite extraordinary that it's actually there," says Dr. Trewavas. "But why has no one come to grips with it? Because the prevailing view of a plant, even among plant biologists, is that it's a simple organism that grows reproducibly in a flower pot."

But here at the labs on the North Carolina State campus, where fluorescent grow-rooms hold genetic secrets and laser microscopes parse the inner workings of live plants, there is still skepticism about the ability of ordinary houseplants to intellectualize their environment.

Most plant biologists are still looking at the mysteries of "signal transduction," or how genetic, chemical, and hormonal orders are dispersed for complex plant behavior. But skeptics say it's less a product of intelligence than mechanical directives, more genetic than genius. Some see the attribution of intelligence to plants as relative - an oversimplification of a complex human trait.

And despite intensifying research, exactly how a plant's complex orders are formulated and carried out remains draped in leafy mystery.

"There is still much that we do not know about how plants work, but a big part of intelligence is self-consciousness, and plants do not have that," says Heike Winter Sederoff, a plant biologist at N.C. State.

Still, a new NASA grant awarded to the university to study gravitational effects on crop plants came in part due to new findings that plants have neurotransmitters very similar to humans' - capable, perhaps, of offering clues on how gravity affects more sentient beings. The National Science Foundation has awarded a $5 million research grant to pinpoint the molecular clockwork by which plants know when to grow and when to flower.

The new field of plant neurobiology holds its first conference - The First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology - in May in Florence, Italy.

The debate is rapidly moving past the theoretical. In space, "smart plants" can provide not only food, oxygen, and clean air, but also valuable companionship for lonely space travelers, say some - a boon for astronauts if America is to go to Mars. Research on the workings of the mustard weed's statolith, for example, may one day yield a corn crop with 1-3/8 the gravitational force of Earth.

Some Earth-bound farmers, meanwhile, see the possibility of communicating with plants to time waterings for ultimate growth. A new gene, Bypass-1, found by University of Utah researchers, may make that possible.

Still, it can be hard for the common houseplant to command respect - even among those who study it most closely.

"When I was a postdoc, I had a neighbor who watched me buy plants, forget to water them, and throw them out, buy them and throw them out," says Dr. Sieburth. "When she found out I had a PhD in botany, I thought she was going to die."

Whoa smart plants? That's actually really cool.

I thought so too! LOL

Just like the brain wasnt the determenative organ that ascribed our "humanness". (The brain was consequent to "uprightedness"), so too, plants with neural pathways will give way to some dumb plant whose entire relationship to its environment will be a predeterminative factor. I dont know what thatll be but I submit, just for grins, that the lowly skunk cabbage could be where plant /ecosystem control will develop. The skunk cabbage, as we know is mildly endothermic. Sort of like a tuna is semi-warm blooded.

JM-The US SC has had its say n Creationism taught in schools. They voted 7-2, with Justice Scalia and Rehnquist in the minority. Strict Creationism in science is not even an issue. The issue is whether Intelligent Design is going to make it to USSC rule, by posing as science. Since ID has pretty much stipulated that evolution is in play, and the earth is real old, were not arguing this point anymore.
However, think about it. Natural Selection is SILENT on the origins of Life and Intelligent Design seems mostly to be about the origins of life. Its possible that, in the morass of everyone thinking only about science, this whole case may be won by the IDers in summary judgement. Then Im not sure where that leaves us. The arguments will pass by like two ships in opposite directions.
The classical Creationism is pretty much Dead in the WAter. The Creationists in Edwards v Aguillard had their chance in 1986-7. They lost.
Only where Intelligent Design actually tries to transplant laws of science with bogus "truths" (like irreducable complexity, or the 747 "pile of parts " ) will the argument be drawn into the close order sparring between Dr Behes crew and the rest of science.

There was an all-day and panel on Intelligent Design last week in Elizabethtown Pa. It included familiar academicians , lawyers, clergy, etc. As a member of the discussion, I felt that either Im missing the point or everyone else is.

PS , the reason Bib used a capital E was taken from an essay by the late Stephen Gould. Gould brought it to the attention as a point of William Jennings Bryants last hoorah, (which Killed him) but started the duality of Creationist thought for the next 75 years or so.
His support materialized through Kelly Seagraves and Henry Morris who founded the Creation Sciences resaerch Institute and the , more recognizable, Institute of Creation Science.
Their arguments are quite complementary is that

1 Creation SCience has as much data in support of its position as (E)volution

2 Just in case it isnt (E) volution is also a religion subject to the same basis of "Faith" as is Creation
Hence the use of a capitol E.

The bifurcate argument for their existence has always been a fun game to play with Creation "scientists" . Like , whenever theyre in a discussion, take bets on how long it takes them to switch from argument 1 to argument 2.

The sad truth is that the old "fun" days, when the Creation argument was loaded with yeast and popping all over, it induced more written controversy than it deserved, thus keeping the subject fresh in peoples minds. Ever since 1987, the arguments have been mostly preparing for the coming discussions on the place of Intelligent Design, since almost all religions embrace evolution by natural selection .
In my posts on many of these web sites, Ive been mostly hounding on the use of fraud and deception, the trumped-up issues such as "the lack of time necessary to accomplish natural selection", or the dubious origins of clades as fundamentally disproving evolution.Thats why this thread has been fun , mostly because its author (and a few others) are living a discourse thats almost 20 years debated and settled in the US

As I said, classic Creationism is as dead as can be , since the highest court in the land has disapproved its coequal teaching in science. BUT the "alternative theories of origins' and the need to "teach the controversy" are still quite alive and smokin.

farmerman,

Don't you think "teach the controversy" is also a dishonest approach? It seems that the theory of evolution is being unfairly singled out.

you damn right. Just to add to your point, how many science classes require "teaching the controversy to Atomic Theory?"
can we say disengenuous?

I have misspoken and you all here are right in correcting me, thanks. My equating ID with Creationism stems from the obvious fact, to me and, I am sure, most people on this thread, that ID is just another attempt, not only to "keep the Dream Alive" but, for those believing in a "Guiding Hand", cloak their arguments in the guise of "Scientific Argument". For those of true faith this is unnecessary.

My desire, of course, was not to teach religion but just the opposite and perhaps train young individuals in critical thinking. If the ID crowd wants to enjoy the implied validation of the scientific method they must endure the slings and arrows that account for its valued results. The course envisioned would really be that teaching argumentation (in the debate sense) utilizing premise, evidence, inference, and those warrants bolstering such constructs. The debates so contained could start with the ID/Evolution arguments as a warm up then move on to more challenging controversies such as capital punishment. Alas, the ID people would probably spot this for what I intend and avoid it like the plague.

Farmerman, I know there must be transcripts or such out there of just such debates involving those such as yourself and, say, Michael Shermer (Skeptic magazine). Do you have any favorites or recommendations?

RE:

Natural selection may be silent but evolution, at this point in the game, almost screams that ID is irrelevant when addressing origins of life. Just as the "irreducible complexity" of the human eye can be explained by evolutionary mechanisms, I submit that life here on earth can be so explained given only STP (I use "Standard Temperature and Pressure" here in a general sense as regarding that environment that the earth has experienced and not a specific temperature and sea level atmospheric pressure.) and the normal reactions of chemicals and the laws of physics as we presently understand them. As I have argued before, William Paley's clock on the beach and the 747 assembly can be explained by evolution. Any product of an evolutionary product is itself necessarily an evolutionary product by default and definition. Paley's inference that because clocks need human designers it follows that so do humans, is not only a "leap of faith" too far, it is unnecessary when explaining increasing complexity.


C.I. Thanks for the article on plant "intelligence" and "minds" I really must investigate this further. I put the two terms in quotes because the former is relative and the latter lacks a really good definition which may or may not allow its use relative to the plant kingdom.

JM

JM, Our idea about "minds" is limited to the long term exposure in the way it was defined for us. Shiftin gears is difficult, but I think it behooves us to rethink what we learned in the past.

C.I., RE:

Yes, and this doesn't even need a paradigm shift just an acceptance of "lesser" or "different" minds.
This, of course, should in no way encourage less respect for those minds so perhaps the latter term would be more appropriate. Less respect engenders or, at least, implies irrelevance and such an attitude might rob us of information from these situations that might be useful to our selves.

JM

JM. I will say this, thatin the neAR FUTURE ASERIES OF AMICUS BRIEFS AND POSITION PAPERS WILL BE FORTHCOMING FROM VARIOUS ORGANIZATIONS RE THE PRESENT id stand for recognition in Pa.
Ive been recentlt reviewing my own literature collection on both sides of the issue and I heartily reccomend the collections of Jay Gould from among his various essay collections. For example, out of Dinosaur in a Hatstack is a wonderful couple of selections

William Jennings Bryants last Stand
Where Justice Scalia Got It Wrong
A discourse at a Pig Roast (paraphrase but something like that)

FROM A WONDERFUL LIFE
chapt 6 Walcotts Vision and the History of the Earth

Also, go to the Talk Origins Archive http://www.talkorigins.org/faq/EdwardsvAguillard/htm
and look for the AMicus Curiae brief produced by 72 Nobel LAureates and several institutions , in support of the apellees in the Edwards v Aguillard USSC case.

Youve gotta read Behes book "Darwins Black Box" so that one can find and evaluate the arguments wherein "origins" by intelligent design are substituted for evolution by natural selection.

farmerman, Your link is out of service for the moment.

no, ci, its me and my lazy style of searching. I usually get in the neighborhood then I start trimming from the url till it links , then I go forward again.
Lemme try the entire link on my downloaded page of the amicus brief.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/edwards-v-aguillard/amicus1.html

If this doesnt work youl get a 404 prompt and then go to the bottom to search, then just type in edwards-v-aguillard amicus brief

farmerman, Got it! Long, but the first argument against id says it all. Will read more later. Thx

farmerman

Thanks for your efforts. I have both of these in my library and will revisit.

I read about 1/2 of Behes Black Box and found it frustrating reading. I Kept saying out loud "perhaps what you say is true, but can't we also look at it this way and lose the implied mysticism?".

I am now off to that web site!

JM

P.S. Sentence from the aforementioned site sums it all up in a nut shell:

DOVER, PENNSYLVANIA UPDATE

A school board member who resigned because of the "intelligent design" controversy was replaced this week by someone who told the board that he supports teaching "intelligent design" in high school biology. Another person, who was not selected, had refused to tell the board what his position on "intelligent design" was.

Still, seven out of the nine school board seats will be on a ballot this May in Dover.

Farmerman, are you eligible to run?

I dont live anywhere near Dover. You must live in the district to run. Anyway, Id have a conflict , what with the case and all.

farmerman, Read more of your link. It is definitely a push for creation-science which promotes their religion rather than science. They can't seem to understand the simple fact that scientific findings of evolution is a 'fact' and deny its existence. When it comes to promoting their own religion, it seems no matter how well educated the individual, their religion comes first.