I have no problem with a science teacher drawing a contrast between astrology and astronomy, for instance. 'This is why one is valid, this is why the other is not.'
Why do you have a problem with evolution being questioned?
Both Evolution and Creation have not and cannot be observed.
(even according to evolutionists it takes many generations for 'evolution' to occur. You yourself have drawn the distinction between 'evolution of a population' and 'change' in an individual, therefore you have dug your own hole on this.) ; and therefore are not scientific in the strict sense of the word. They are theories or ideas of what may have happened in the past and are unobserved and unobservable in the present.
Fortunately, Frederick Crews has made a much more thorough study of Freud, distilling and interpreting not only his whole corpus but also the past three decades of Freud scholarship. His conclusion is that Freud was indeed making it up as he went along. In Follies of the Wise, Crews takes on not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb to irrational ideas: recovered-memory therapy, alien abduction, theosophy, Rorschach inkblot analysis, intelligent design creationism, and even poststructuralist literary theory. All of these, asserts Crews, violate "the ethic of respecting that which is known, acknowledging what is still unknown, and acting as if one cared about the difference".
This, then, is a collection about epistemology, and one that should be read by anyone still harbouring the delusion that Freud was an important thinker, that psychoanalysis is an important cure, that intelligent design is a credible alternative to Darwinism, or that religion and science can coexist happily. It is perhaps strange that a retired professor of literature should become our preeminent critic of Freudianism and other intellectual follies on empirical grounds. But Crews has a keen mind, whetted by decades of arguing about the meaning of American literature, a scientific temperament, and is a fine prose stylist. And his credentials, at least for criticizing Freud, are authenticated by the fact that he was once an ardent Freudian, having written a psychoanalytic analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Sins of the Fathers, 1966), and then later disowned much of that book after developing misgivings about Freud's system.
Why do you have a problem with evolution being questioned?
I preface this with a very important note... Lola must not be informed that I've posted it. Any violator will be turned over to The American Inquisition.
real life wrote:I have no problem with a science teacher drawing a contrast between astrology and astronomy, for instance. 'This is why one is valid, this is why the other is not.'
And I have no problem with a science teacher saying "creationism is not science, and *that* dear students, is whey we don't study it in science class". And that is also why we don't use it as a comparison to scientific theories.
real life wrote:Why do you have a problem with evolution being questioned?
Because you have to understand something before you can question it. Right? And the students are in class to learn.
Why would we let the students start out by challenging something they don't yet understand. How can they even mount a valid challenge. Without first understanding it, all they would be doing is repeating someone else's words. We put up with that exact scenario here on A2K (as you so wonderfully demonstrate), but this isn't a science class for kids.
real life wrote:Both Evolution and Creation have not and cannot be observed.
And as we've told you MANY MANY times before, direct observation is not a requirement for scientific proof. Nobody was around to watch the biggest redwood tree grow from a seed either, but we know it didn't just pop up in the ground yesterday. Evolution is just as obvious.
real life wrote:(even according to evolutionists it takes many generations for 'evolution' to occur. You yourself have drawn the distinction between 'evolution of a population' and 'change' in an individual, therefore you have dug your own hole on this.) ; and therefore are not scientific in the strict sense of the word. They are theories or ideas of what may have happened in the past and are unobserved and unobservable in the present.
Ugh, what a bore. See above.
ACLU Condemns House Panel's Passage of "Public Expression of Religion Act"
(ACLU Press Release, September 8, 2006)
The American Civil Liberties Union today expressed its dismay as the House Judiciary Committee approved H.R. 2679, the "Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005" (PERA). The bill would bar the recovery of attorneys' fees to those who win lawsuits asserting their fundamental constitutional and civil rights in cases brought under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
"If PERA were to pass, Congress would isolate and discourage enforcement of a specific piece of our Bill of Rights," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "PERA advocates are seriously misguided in their claim of defending religious freedom. This legislation would in fact weaken the very freedom they claim to be protecting. We are deeply disappointed in the committee's decision to allow PERA to come to a vote."
The ACLU said the ability to recover attorneys' fees in civil rights and constitutional cases, including Establishment Clause cases, is necessary to help protect the religious freedom of all Americans and to keep religion government-free. People who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees -- often totaling tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Few citizens can afford to do so. But more importantly, citizens should not be required to do so where the court finds that the government has violated their rights and engaged in unconstitutional behavior.
The elimination of attorneys' fees would also deter attorneys from taking cases in which the government has acted unconstitutionally. In many cases, religious minorities would be unable to obtain legal representation to defend them in instances when their religious freedom has been violated by the government. The bill would apply even to cases involving illegal religious coercion of public school children or blatant discrimination against particular religions.
The ACLU noted that proponents of the bill have been spreading myths that religious symbols on gravestones at military cemeteries will be threatened without passage of PERA. In fact, religious symbols on grave markers in military cemeteries, including Arlington National Cemetery, are entirely constitutional. Religious symbols on personal gravestones are vastly different from government-sponsored religious symbols or religious symbols on government-owned property.
"In order to enforce and protect every American's right to religious freedom, ordinary Americans must be able to recover attorneys' fees in successful cases," said Terri Ann Schroeder, an ACLU Senior Lobbyist. "PERA would undermine the fundamental protections of the First Amendment. We urge the full House to reject this attack on religious liberty, and stand for religion free from government entanglement."
Well, rl, if ..........
Your redwood analogy is a very poor one, and I am surprised that you keep bringing it up.
A redwood CAN be observed. You can test the DNA in a redwood at any stage of growth and see that it is redwood DNA, so concluding that a giant tree grew from a seedling is not an unwarranted conclusion.
Evolution from non-mammal to mammal, for instance, or from reptile to bird has NOT been observed, nor will it be.
Evolution is untestable. You can repeat the mantra 'lots of little changes equals big changes' all that you like; but that doesn't make your statement true, nor does it make evolution scientific in the strict sense of the word.
What you have is circumstantial evidence and broad inference. Hardly conclusive.
Absent direct observation you need some other pretty conclusive proof that what you are claiming both CAN and DID occur. You haven't either.
Your objection about 'repeating someone else's words' is absurd since this is exactly what you want them to do after completing an evolution class, isn't it? You want them to follow the party line and defend evolution using the arguments that they were taught, correct?
So, you don't want students to question evolution because they don't understand it? That seems to put them in pretty good company, because according to many evolutionists 'we don't know HOW evolution occurred, we just KNOW that it DID.' Since these don't seem to have the wherewithal to question evolution, it may be up to the kids to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
it is ignorance, it is superstition, it is idiotic.
timberlandko wrote:Well, rl, if ..........
g'morning timber,
Yes, that's the hinge, isn't it?
IF you had that level of evidence, yes, circumstantial evidence can be very compelling.
But you do not.
To assert that nothing but a theory of evolution will explain the evidence is fallacious.
In fact, Darwin was well acquainted with the idea of evolution LONG BEFORE he went aboard the Beagle.
Evidence wasn't necessary for him or his grandpappy to consider evolution because it isn't evidence based in a strict sense.
It is a (quite old) philosophical position, predating Darwin by many years, that is used in modern times to interpret the data to arrive at a preordained conclusion.
Now, not being an IDer , I cannot speak for them, though you seem to mistake me for one; but as a creationist I can tell you that I am not waiting for any 'missing evidence.'
Also, when several folks start with the same assumptions ('evolution is a fact') and (surprise!) reach the same conclusion ('the evidence only supports the evolutionary hypothesis' ), then we can hardly refer to their conclusions as 'independently derived', can we?
But of course they are mutually cross corroborative, and that sounds so impressive that it should be used as often as possible for maximum psychological effect. Good propaganda works that way and you are convinced by some of the best.
If you need to link ID to Creationism in order to have an argument with ID, and provide opportunities in which you can strut the stuff of your specialisms, you are free to do so but it's just getting a barrel to shoot fish in. And those gentle readers who are prepared to follow this thread know it.
Evolution's 'odd man out' may be modern humans, and not Neanderthals
Washington, Sep 9: Researchers have said that modern human beings and not the brow ridged, large-nosed Neanderthals may be odd men out in the history of human evolution.
Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in his study in the journal of Current Anthropology said that study based on fossils have revealed that the straight line from chimps to the common ancestor should go down to the Neanderthals, and modern humans should be the off branch.
For his study, Prof. Trinkaus examined fossil records identifying traits, which seemed to be genetic markers - those not greatly influenced by environment, life ways and wear and tear.
He was careful to examine traits that appear to be largely independent of each other to avoid redundancy.
His findings revealed that modern humans and not Neanderthals belonged to the unusual group.
"I wanted to see to what extent Neanderthals are derived, that is distinct, from the ancestral form. I also wanted to see the extent to which modern humans are derived relative to the ancestral form. What I came up with is that modern humans have about twice as many uniquely derived traits than do the Neanderthals," said Prof. Trinkaus.
"In the broader sweep of human evolution, the more unusual group is not Neanderthals, whom we tend to look at as strange, weird and unusual, but it's us - Modern Humans. The more academic implication of this research is that we should not be trying to explain the Neanderthals, which is what most people have tried to do, including myself, in the past. We wonder why Neanderthals look unusual and we want to explain that. What I'm saying is that we've been asking the wrong questions," he added.
He said researchers have for so long looked the wrong way at our ancient ancestors.
"The most unusual characteristics throughout human anatomy occur in Modern Humans. If we want to better understand human evolution, we should be asking why Modern Humans are so unusual, not why the Neanderthals are divergent. Modern Humans, for example, are the only people who lack brow ridges. We are the only ones who have seriously shortened faces. We are the only ones with very reduced internal nasal cavities. We also have a number of detailed features of the limb skeleton that are unique," he said.
"Every palaeontologist will define the traits a little differently. If you really wanted to, you could make the case that Neanderthals look stranger than we do. But if you are reasonably honest about it, I think it would be extraordinarily difficult to make Neanderthals more derived than Modern Humans," he added.
Interesting article
ID borrows numerous concepts directly from Creationism(The textbook Of Pandas and People, merely crossed out all refernces to Creationism and merely substituted ID at each point--Theres a nice bit of intellonesty)
Of course the interesting thing is that no matter if you as an evolutionist agree with Trinkhaus or not, the underlying assumption of evolution is never questioned and can be interpreted by either group to reach greatly different conclusions.
