Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

you're not really one to be commenting on what is and is not drivel. i barely understood half of that last rant. and i assure you, it isn't for lack of trying or education.

you're not really one to be commenting on what is and is not drivel.

A story like this illustrates the difference between scientific endeavor and religious dogma. Science is ready to change with new information; the religious change nothing, except rhetoric

Competitiveness bill signed into law by President
(The Daily News Journal, Aug 9, 2007)

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush today signed into law Rep. Bart Gordon's legislation to improve math and science education and foster energy research to help secure U.S. competitiveness.

The America COMPETES Act is designed to ensure that U.S. students, teachers, businesses and workers are prepared to continue leading the world in innovation, research and technology.

"This will help us keep American jobs on our shores by making sure we have the most skilled workforce in the world," said Gordon, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology.

"Other countries will always have lower wages, so in an effort to remain competitive our workforce must have the technical skills to make it advantageous for companies to keep their businesses here in the U.S. instead of moving overseas. We start by making sure our children are receiving the best math and science preparation in grades K-12."

Gordon's bill is based on recommendations from the National Academies' 2005 report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The report was produced at the request of a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Gordon and Sen. Lamar Alexander.

"This is the prime model of bipartisan cooperation on a massively important issue to every citizen of our country," added Sen. Alexander. "The America COMPETES Act is a direct response to the challenge our country faces in keeping our brainpower advantage so our good jobs don't go overseas to places like India and China. The President, the Senate Republican and Democratic Leadership, and Tennessee Congressmen Bart Gordon and Zach Wamp have played critical roles in bringing this legislation to the final step."

The "Gathering Storm" report concluded the United States could stand to lose its competitive edge without immediate action.

Specifically, the report found that in 1999, 68 percent of U.S. 8th grade students received math instruction from a teacher who lacked a degree or certification in the field. In 2000, 93 percent of students in grades 5-9 received physical science instruction from teachers without a certification in the subject matter.

"Many of our teachers are put in a difficult position of filling a school's need for a teacher in a particular subject area, but they may not have extensive knowledge of the content," said Gordon. "Our efforts today will help them gain the content knowledge and skills they need to teach our students."

The bill will help to prepare thousands of new teachers by offering scholarships to students who major in math, science or engineering and commit to become teachers upon graduation. The bill will also provide current teachers with content and teaching skills through summer training institutes.

The bill also takes steps to help reducing the nation's dependence on foreign sources of energy by establishing an Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Department of Energy to focus on high-risk, high-reward energy research to produce new energy technologies.

Gordon's legislation is supported by a wide variety of groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable and the National Education Association.

"This is an example of how the process should work," said Gordon. "A bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers requested the report from the National Academies, and we have acted on those recommendations to produce good legislation. I am proud that today the President has also shown his support by signing this bill. It's the right thing to do for our future and especially, our children's future."

USAF wrote-

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you're not really one to be commenting on what is and is not drivel.

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A story like this illustrates the difference between scientific endeavor and religious dogma. Science is ready to change with new information; the religious change nothing, except rhetoric

That's drivel USAF my boy. Take my word for it. Absolutely meaningless drivel of the type that would create guffaws in any company with hairs on its balls. Unless, of course, it sprang from a frock container. In which case one might pay close attention and compliment the purity of the intellectual processes involved.

And the reason you can't see it is precisely because of your lack of trying or education. You do demonstrate a want of both which an educated person can only gaze in mystified wonder at assuming you have reached puberty.

We gave up on assertions a long time ago.

I'm the King of Siam. If you don't believe that why should we believe how hard you claim to have worked and how educated you say you are?

The only story I could see was about Mr Leakey's bank balance and that was given scant prominence for obvious reasons.

A previous Department of Education was created in 1867 but soon was demoted to an Office in 1868. Its creation a century later in 1979 was controversial and opposed by many in the Republican Party, who saw the department as an unconstitutional, unnecessary federal bureaucratic intrusion into local affairs.

Unlike the systems of most other countries, education in the United States is highly decentralized, and the federal government and Department of Education are not heavily involved in determining curricula or educational standards (with the large exception of the No Child Left Behind Act). This has been left to state and local school districts. The quality of educational institutions and their degrees is maintained through an informal private process known as accreditation, over which the Department of Education has no direct public jurisdictional control.

Not that Spendius would notice in the snowfall of his postings.

i barely understood half of that last rant

A previous Department of Education was created in 1867 but soon was demoted to an Office in 1868. Its creation a century later in 1979 was controversial and opposed by many in the Republican Party, who saw the department as an unconstitutional, unnecessary federal bureaucratic intrusion into local affairs.

Orbiting the classroom

According to Hofstadter America has always undervalued its teachers and has a tradition of denigrating them.

It is the sheer numbers that are needed that is the problem coupled with the fact that the population has only a small number of people capable of mastering maths and physics and those can get better money in other jobs.

No words can cover that up.

The clarity of which he was so proud threatened at every moment to reveal itself as triviality. While retaining enough of formula to produce an atmosphere of profundity and exclusiveness.

His system is anticipated Darwinism

It is the view that Darwin (via Malthus) brought to bear with irresistable sucess in the field of zoology. The economic origin of Darwinism is shown by the fact that the system deduced from the similarities between men and the higher animals ceases to fit even at the level of the plant-world and becomes positively absurd as soon as it is seriously attempted to apply it with its will-tendency (natural selection, mimicry) to primitive organic forms. Proof, to the Darwinian, means the ordering and pictorial presentation of a selection of facts so that they confirm to his historico-dynamic basic feeling of "Evolution". Darwinism---that is to say, that totality of very varied and discrepant ideas, in which the common factor is merely the application of the causality factor to living things, which therefore is a method and not a result---was known in all details to the 18th Century. Rousseau was championing the ape-man theory as early as 1754. What Darwin originated is only the "Manchester School" system and it is this latent political element in it that accounts for its popularity.

spendi: In my view evolutionists posturing as scientists and getting everybody's back up are a bigger threat to scientific progress than religious believers.


Evolutionists do not "posture" as scientists. Anybody can study evolution, and report their findings. It either holds up to scrutiny or it doesn't. That's what science does; test the validity of any findings claimed to be proof of evolution. Many evolutionary theories are supported by more than one "science."