Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

wande wrote-



wande old boy-- we are all concerned to properly prepare students for 21st century life. Because the group of scientists are "concerned" to do that is not an argument that their method is the best one.

I am slightly concerned on behalf of our principle ally that you have a group of scientists who think that their assertion of their concern (unproved) is not only not an argument in favour of their method but that they should even announce such a crass, naive stupidity as that for public consumption and ,seemingly, to expect it to not cause guffaws of incredulity.

wande wrote-



Yes-I know that wande.

I asked about the demonstration that was intended to leave readers of your previous quote with the impression that the opposition to the anti-evolution minister was strong.

One never knows what one will be doing in ones career, nor the expectations of ones clientelle.
As a CEO of a minerals resources company , and having many colleagues who are CEO's of Environmental firms dealing with issues like Ground-water cleanup and soil contamination, I see the underpinnings of the planets Reality, namely succession of life, common ancestry, ages of the earth, and superposition are all key elements to these craft

Same goes for environmnetal law,intellectual property, copywright, contract law (with metes and bounds and environ claims sections) and engineering in mining, civil sanitary (where evolution of bugs is taken for granted in enucleation and assembly flora .)

Computer programmers , if I understand it, develop the scientific software we use to make our work proceed smoothly. They need to be told that the "ROCKWARE" AND "STRATA SCOUT" programs they develop are based upon an evolutionary assumption?

The rules of natural selection touch many important areas NOT only paleo, geo, bio, and genetics. How would enetertainment via science programs look if close minded Creationist or ID mentality would creep in the programmers scope
If one truly wishes to become merely a witless passerby and gawker at the workings of the world, one certainly has free will. One can go to work as a burger flipper, come home and watch wrasslin on the tube and otherwise personify what spendi stereotypes the world to be. I like Timbers moxie, we owethe kids the best we can deliver. We shouldnt have them be responsible for the reinvention of the logic behind the science, (except to stand as a historical reference)

Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution
Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: October 26, 2006

In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education.

The professors' favored candidate is Tom Sawyer, a former congressman and onetime mayor of Akron. They hope Mr. Sawyer, a Democrat, will oust Deborah Owens Fink, a leading advocate of curriculum standards that encourage students to challenge the theory of evolution.

Elsewhere in Ohio, scientists have also been campaigning for candidates who support the teaching of evolution and have recruited at least one biologist from out of state to help.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve who organized the circulation of the letter, said almost 90 percent of the science faculty on campus this semester had signed it. The signers are anthropologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, physicists and psychologists.

The letter says Dr. Owens Fink has "attempted to cast controversy on biological evolution in favor of an ill-defined notion called Intelligent Design that courts have ruled is religion, not science."

In an interview, Dr. Krauss said, "This is not some group of fringe scientists or however they are being portrayed by the creationist community," adding, "This is the entire scientific community, and I don't know of any other precedent for almost the entire faculty at an institution" making such a statement.

But Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron, said the curriculum standards she supported did not advocate teaching intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Rather, she said, they urge students to subject evolution to critical analysis, something she said scientists should endorse. She said the idea that there was a scientific consensus on evolution was "laughable."

Although researchers may argue about its details, the theory of evolution is the foundation for modern biology, and there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. In recent years, with creationist challenges to the teaching of evolution erupting in school districts around the country, groups like the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation's pre-eminent scientific organization, have repeatedly made this point.

But the academy's opinion does not matter to Dr. Owens Fink, who said the letter was probably right to say she had dismissed it as "a group of so-called scientists."

"I may have said that, yeah," she said.

She would not describe her views of Darwin and his theory, saying, "This isn't about my beliefs."

School board elections in Ohio are nonpartisan, but Dr. Owens Fink said she was a registered Republican. Her opponent, Mr. Sawyer, was urged to run for the Seventh District Board of Education seat by a new organization, Help Ohio Public Education, founded by Dr. Krauss and his colleague Patricia Princehouse, a biologist and historian of science, and Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University.

At the group's invitation, Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, will be in Ohio today through the weekend campaigning for other school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution. Dr. Miller, an author of a widely used biology textbook, was a crucial witness in the recent lawsuit in Dover, Pa., over intelligent design. The judge in that case ruled that it was a religious doctrine that had no place in a public school curriculum.

After that decision, Dr. Owens Fink said, the Ohio board abandoned curriculum standards that mandated a critical look at evolution, a decision she said she regretted. "Some people would rather just fold," she said.

But Dr. Miller said it was a good call, adding, "We have to make sure these good choices get ratified at the ballot box."

As it was intended to loosely encapsulate your view and voice (as parody, lampoon, or homage -- your choice), I suppose it was successful.

p'dog. To make it complete, you need to include some obscure song lines from you-know-who.

It is interesting wandel that Ms Fink is one of the original group that extended her "call for a critical analysis of natural selection" to include ID as a 'possible coequal scientific hypothesis".

Not only are the IDers lousy at making up their minds as to what they endorse, they are also a bunch of bald-face-liars who use science only when its convenient to their worldview.

farmerman,

I found it interesting that Ohio scientists believe evolution education is important, while Ms. Fink, a marketing professor, is willing to compromise science education. Doesn't Ms. Fink represent the point of view that Thomas described earlier?

You are very perceptive, Thomas.

And , I would add that one need not believe evolution in order to understand it. Those are really two different things.

There were good doctors before evolution was ever heard of, and I have no doubt that one can still be a good doctor even if you don't believe evolution. What part of being a doctor requires belief in evolution?

One could even be a good biologist and not believe in evolution. You could participate in research that has evolution as a central focus, but still not believe it. Why not?

Don't scientists of all kinds participate in researching questions that they may or may not hold with the conclusion that their colleagues expect to find?

Does it require groupthink to be a good scientist, or does it require an inquiring (and sometimes skeptical) frame of mind?

It is certainly not necessary to believe in, or understand, evolution to be a productive member of society in many areas.

There are only a few specific professions where it is really necessary to believe and understand evolution.

However, I think that timberlandko is making a slightly different point here. The point is that the way that a person thinks can be trained, and while evolution itself may not be important, a person who is raised to believe in something else has been training their brain to think illogically, and therefore they will not be capable of making logical decisions that can be trusted because the whole network of their brain is not functioning on the same level as someone who has learned to think rationally and critically.

Additionally, a CEO that has no concept of evolution and related matters but is in control of making large scale decisions can have really negative effects on the environment.

The only "groupthink" involved here is on the part of the luddite ID-iots, rl ... and you're perfectly welcome to seek out for yourself a physician considered "good" by 18th Century standards, though for my own I'd prefer one who had 21st Century skills and knowledge.

Edit to add: You got it, stuh.

I have here a nice passage which occurs in a chapter concerning itself with the Nausikaa section of Ulysses and which has some relevance to the discussion on here at present.

It discusses the scene where Mr Bloom is described expending his spiritual essence when Gertie leans backwards to watch the Roman Candles from the firework display at the bazaar in aid of the Mercer's Hospital and flashes him, a leisurely look at " her other things, too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven. . . ."

Mr Budgen, for it is he, is saying that the easiest laughs for a film-maker to get in his times (1934) are from scenes of ladies in the sort of underwear Gertie is wearing but shows an understanding of Mr Bloom having spent his youth and early manhood in the midst of such pruderies which is thought to have energised him to a "tropical degree".


Take it away Budgen-

"Let anyone behold the ladies' underwear in artificial silk in all colours but the right one exhibited nowadays [1934] in shop windows everywhere and admit that they are woefully unerotic. They are a visible sign [to an alert scientist] that the tide is now setting in the direction of candour, co-education and companiate marriages with surgically clean, scientific instruction in erotic and contraceptive mysteries, classic treatise on which will, no doubt, soon be borne home with the latest vitamin cookery book as school prizes. But when the life force, if that most depressing divinity happens to be in fashion at the time, finds that tabulated knowledge, the good pal girl and the fifty-fifty boy lead only to tweeds for everybody and general indifference, then social and sexual taboos, ignorance, inhibition, white undies, black stockings, and furtiveness, will come in again with all their tensions, as in the days of Gertie MacDowell."

I suppose he means something like Spengler's Second Religiousness.

Maybe IDers are fighting to put a bit of excitement back into life and after reading through fm's piece of not so subtle self flattery one feels, or one hopes, they succeed.

It seems to me that because the "general indifference" is glossed over with a blitz of sanitised erotica and asserted virility it is lost sight of thus leaving the partner to take the blame.

It is noticeable that all fm's occupations are those lower-middle class ones similar to his own.

It is also noticeable that the anti-ID case is often accompanied with calls for sex education sometimes for 10 year olds using carrots and milk bottles for models.

fm wrote-



Just like you include some obscure style free lines from who knows where. Your stuff had to be picked up. You were empty once. You can't even get a thing like that right such is your rush for the premature ejaculation!

. Belief isnt the issue, understanding is. If you didnt understand the mechanisms , you couldnt be a good biologist. If you understood and still didnt believe, then youd be a vast minority of biological scientists ( I know, your gonna quote statistics, but the truth is that less than .05% of bio and geo scientists ACCEPT anything other than natural selection (and that even includes Punctuated Equilibrium and Neo Darwinism)

Back dead in the water again. Same old rigmarole. Do you really want to go around that fairground ride again fm holding on to the little handles on the hobby-horses carved heads.

Are you trying to divert the thread from examining social consequences. No serious person doesn't accept evolution.

You just like using unserious persons to plow the furrow of your technical expertise and all round wonderfulness. The field is ploughed all to f***.
It's planting time.

Science= Impotence. Obviously.

. You mustnt be so hard on yourself spendi. Im sure youre trying your best but , riding the "little bus" can do things for your self esteem.

Just another bray from the back row fm. Doesn't mean a thing outside of your box.

Ohhhh ... a fit of spendipique rendered in spendispeak! That's so cute.

No pique timber. Just a scientific fact.

Volume 2, 1990
Baby Fae: The Unlearned Lesson

Kenneth P. Stoller, MD.

On October 26, 1984, Dr. Leonard L Bailey placed the heart of a baboon into the chest of Baby Fae, an infant born with a severe heart defect known as left hypoplastic heart. Baby Fae seemed to do well for a few days; then her body mounted a massive immunological attack on the foreign tissue and rejected the graft. Baby Fae's death came as no surprise to scientists and physicians familiar with the human immune system and with the scientific realities that preclude successful cross-species transplants.
Before the Baby Fae incident, Bailey, a surgeon at Loma Linda University Medical Center, spent almost a decade vainly pursuing research grants. His work in xenografts, largely unknown and unrcviewed by other professionals, had not appeared in journals and was funded by Bailey himself and his colleagues.1,2 During the seven years preceding the Baby Fae baboon transplant, he performed some 160 cross-species transplants, mostly on sheep and goats, none of whom survived more than 6 months. Although warned by a colleague at a medical conference that his research was too incomplete to risk using human subjects,3 Bailey went ahead.
Baby Fae was not the first human to receive a primate xenograft. In a review of xenografts,4 the Council of Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association noted a rapid rejection of all baboon transplants to humans. Nevertheless, Bailey claimed that the problems of rejection could be overcome by the "immature" state of an infant's immune system. After the operation, immunologists from around the world pointed out that the part of the immune system that rejects unmatched transplants is fully mature at birth, Furthermore, there is no way to match baboon hearts to human recipients, because baboons have no antigens in common with human tissue.5 Bailey has always maintained that Baby Fae's death was unrelated to the species of the organ "donor." An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association called Bailey's claim "wishful thinking."5
Bailey's use of baboons was somewhat surprising, given their relatively distant evolutionary relationship to humans compared to other primates. The reason came to light when the Times of London published an interview between Bailey and an Australian radio crew. The reporters had been forbidden to ask direct questions about the operation, so they queried Bailey on the issue of why he had chosen a baboon in view of the baboon's evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey replied, "Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don't believe in evolution."6 It is shocking that Bailey ignored basic biological concepts in formulating a life-threatening human experiment.Often, ambitious surgeons wish to perform new, perhaps dangerous, experimental operations. In an effort to safeguard patients, institutional review boards must first give permission for any human experiment. In an unconscionable lapse of ethics, the review board of Loma Linda Medical Center failed to live up to its obligations -- they gave Bailey permission for five baboon-to-human transplant experiments, having no reports documenting that even heart allotransplantation in infancy is successful.5 Furthermore, highly experimental procedures on children, such as a xenograft, require special permission from the Secretary of Health and Human Services.7
In addition to these institutional and federal safeguards that should have protected Baby Fae, California's Protection of Human Subjects in Medical Experimentation Act (PHSMEA) requires that if informed consent is given in behalf of another person, the experimental procedure must meet certain criteria. California's Health and Safety Code ~24175, subsection (e) states, "Informed consent given by a person other than the human subject shall only be for medical experiments related to maintaining or improving the health of the human subject or related to obtaining information about a pathological condition of the human subject."
Because Bailey did not look for a human heart donor and did not refer Baby Fae elsewhere for attempted surgical repair, the highly experimental transplant was both unethical and unlawful. Dr. William Norwood at the Children's Hospital in Boston has been repairing left hypoplastic hearts since 1979. The survival rate of the Norwood procedure is now as high as 75 percent Nevertheless, Baby Fae's consent form read, "Temporizing operation to extend the lives of babies like yours by a few months have generally been unsuccessful. We believe heart transplantation may offer hope of life for your baby. Laboratory research at Loma Linda University over the past seven years, including over 150 heart transplants in newborn animals, suggest that long term survival with appropriate growth and development may be possible following heart transplantation during the first week of life."
Following considerable controversy over the Baby Fae transplant, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appointed a special committee charged with reviewing the procedures used by the university to assure that Baby Fae's relatives gave proper informed consent. The committee did not deal with the scientific basis for transplanting a baboon heart into a human. The committee found several weaknesses in the consent procedure. Specifically, the committee concluded that possibility of "long term survival" had been overstated and the protocol did not include searching for or transplanting a human heart. The committee's report did not address why Loma Linda had not sought permission for this unprecedented experiment from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Furthermore, it did not address the California law that should have prevented the experiment. (Perhaps the NIH committee was unaware of PHSMEA.)
Why hasn't Bailey been prosecuted? The San Bernandino District Attorney's office has officially stated that there are insufficient facts to support a felony prosecution. Unofficially, I was told that the highly technical nature of the case would likely overwhelm the court with conflicting medical opinions and therefore make a conviction unlikely. Furthermore, Bailey is considered a local hero. The office of the California State Attorney General, John K. Van de Kamp, has also maintained that Sufficient facts are available to establish that a crime occurred.
The facts, however, suggest that Baby Fae was sacrificed to Leonard Bailey's career. Given the state of current medical knowledge, there was no doubt that Baby Fae would reject the baboon heart. Rules and laws designed to protect her were violated by those entrusted to uphold them. Professional ethics were considered to be of less importance than widespread publicity. The institutional review boards and law enforcement agencies responsible for protecting human subjects have virtually no accountability to the public, much less to the experimental subjects themselves.
http://www.curedisease.com/Perspectives/vol_2_1990/BabyFae.html

This is another of a growing list of potentiall falsifiabilities that Creationists state cannot be because evolution is "not science". Thanks pauligirl, Ive added it to my list of forgotten milestones in Creationist based scientific "advances"
If evolution "was not relevant" then the xenograft could have taken (serology problems were apparent also cause Baby Fae died of rejection and critical liver failure). Potentially falsifiable---check.


:wink:

Nice of you to drag that one up from the past, Pauligirl. Education itself is no remedy for ID-iocy, and here we have an educated ID-iot who's arrogance, contempt for ethics and standard protocols, and self-admitted rejection of common scientific knowledge was the proximate cause of the death of an infant. Doesn't get much sicker than that; at least a scientist who merely disregards ethics and standard protocol while not disregarding common scientific knowledge knows what he's doing. This clown's ignorance cost a life.