Why Can't Scientists Be Fair to Huckabee, the Mentally Challenged, the Insane, and Hardcore Christians?
NANCY ZUCKERBROD of the Associated Press must have written this before Iowan Republicans caucused for the Neanderthal of their choice:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientific advisers to the government emphasize in a report the importance of teaching evolution in public schools.
The report by the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine follows up on similar past publications, the last of which came out in 1999. The new document includes recently discovered evidence supporting evolution, including an important fossil find.
The report released Thursday also takes swipes at creationism and other anti-evolution views.
"Despite the lack of scientific evidence for creationist positions, some advocates continue to demand that various forms of creationism be taught together with or in place of evolution in science classes," the report says.
Evolution is a continuing topic of debate in some states. Florida officials are considering revisions in state science standards that would add the word "evolution" to the standards. The state Board of Education plans to vote on the guidelines next month.
In Texas, the state's director of science curriculum, Chris Comer, maintains she was forced to resign recently due to evolution politics. Comer said she came under pressure after forwarding an e-mail that her superiors felt made the agency appear to be biased against the instruction of intelligent design, an alternative to evolution favored by some religious conservatives.
Intelligent design holds that the universe's order and complexity are so great that evolution cannot explain it.
The Texas State Board of Education is expected to begin a review of the state science curriculum soon.
Josh Rosenau, a spokesman for the California-based National Center for Science Education, which supports the teaching of evolution, said the new report is important because the debate over evolution in school is not going away.
Casey Luskin, program officer for the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that supports teaching students about the criticism of evolution, was critical of the document.
"Students should learn about the evidence for and against evolution," he said.
The Institute of Medicine is part of the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters.
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Evidence?
Is there actually any real (provable) evidence against evolution? I am honestly curious about this.
Evolution
Haruka,
Consider asking the question the other way around:
If Evolution allows one to coordinate millions of facts ALREADY, thousands in the pipeline, and struggles with a few anomalies how does it compare to "Theories" which "explain" the few anomalies but fail to do so for the aforementioned millions of pieces of data?
ANYONE can explain a few facts. ANYONE. Rocks fall because they like the earth. Perfectly reasonable. However, start adding additional facts like the trajectories of those rocks and suddenly one is reduced to an extremely narrow subset of theories which predict their motions. Most notably Newtons Laws. (And with refinement, General Relativity).
And for those of a philosophical bent, Evolutionary Theory does not attempt to prove or disprove that God created us 5 seconds ago and implanted memories in us to make us believe things are far older. It simply provides the simplest mental construct which allows one to coordinate the most comprehensive set of data to date.
Jim
GOD and EVOLUTION
I would like to clear up something that is constantly misunderstood, even by Ph.D.s in various disciplines.
I want folks to peak behind the curtain they have created when they make assumptions about what it is scientists do.
Nobody would be denying God (or confirming God) by this. One would simply find that the planet's complex motions could all be predicted by a single set of far simpler principles.
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Now here is where folks really go awry:
Dance
Think of it this way:
If God tells dancers to move left one step when someone is on their right side. Forward 2 steps when someone is behind them. ... Jump, when someone is in front of them. (In other words God enacts the laws and then lets the dance proceed).
Then when a Scientist, or our High School Student, sees a star burst dance OR a vibrating line dance explosion OR etc. and realizes they ALL occur due to the simple aforementioned laws he is ONLY correct and NOT adding assumptions about GOD or NO GOD.
However, if you claim the star burst dance could NOT have come about from some simple laws and must come from "GOD-IN- THE-MOMENT" then you are incorrect even though God exists and enacted those simple laws as per our initial assumption.
Get it? Please tell me you get it? I'm beggin here!
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One final note before I'm shot: The above is not me saying that God enacted laws and walked away. That is not a way out from the thinking errors I've outlined above. In the above scenario God exists and enacts laws. God might also break those laws at any time. No problem. In the above scenario we are only following folks thinking while God allows the laws to be unbroken. And none of the above relies on whether God exists or does not.
Welcome back Haruka...been a long time...
Evolution is the one argument that will be continued long after the debaters are long gone.
For arguments, pro and con, see the Tennessee attempts to make religion part of their school curriculums and prevent evolution from being taught. This one state has been in court almost constantly since the Scopes Trial. All the efforts by the state of Tennessee have been tossed out of court.
The Theory Of Evolution has been, to date, the only way in which the processes and changes of living things can be fully explained. Most top scientists are fully convinced that DNA stops the arguments and shows that there is a continuous record that confirms evolutionary studies.
The arguments posed by creationists/intelligent designers, show very little because they do not question what little evidence is in a much-rewritten book that dates back to when we had more superstitions than we had knowledge.
Either we acknowledge that over the past 2000 years we have learned something, or we have to admit that we have learned nothing in 2000 years.
I do notice that the anti-science crowd rank number one when it comes to knocking the methodology of science...and yet are also number one in availing themselves of it's[science]benefits. Difficult in this modern world to have one's cake and yet eat it too is it not?
Scientist and knowledge-seeking individuals tend to follow the evolutionary trail since it can be seen, handled, observed scientifically, and experimented with. It can be tracked.
Those who follow the tenets of a book, tend to ignore that which is right in front of their eyes, that which they can touch, that which fully explains who and what we are and...even a glimpse of where we came from. And, more importantly, where all living things came from. The book does not do that.
Neverending story--that is evolution. Mythology is rooted in the past and has never progressed.
Hence, we waste our talents and energy on debating the two avenues that attempt to explain where we live and how we got here, as well as where we are going.
One explains, the other demands that you accept an unproven and untested story.
Please note that the most obnoxious deniers of evolution are those individuals who livlihood is fully-engaged in the promotion of myths.
A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.
Anne Hathaway: 1556-1623
The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.
More than one Book grinch.
This one is written into the scoffers themselves ;)
LOL Jim...lots of chapters maybe...
That bit of yours is pretty powerful all by itself. I maybe should have heard of that by now, one of my lifelong friends is a retired(prof at University of Illinois, Urbana)molecular biologist.
His wife is a Shoemaker, the sister of the cosmologist Gene Shoemaker of Flagstaff fame. She is a 'bug' expert(Ph.d--national expert on cicadas). As you can tell, a senior moment so I substituted 'bugs.' Entomology? Sheesh. Age has it's moments. LOL.
With these two, we have some pretty interesting conversations from time to time.
A mind once expanded can never return to its original dimensions.
Anne Hathaway: 1556-1623
The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.
As one whose family swam in
As one whose family swam in the original gene pool, and who has read the family history as recorded by my Auntie Protozoa and Uncle Algae, I can say with some degree of certainty that our family invented sex. The original inspiration for that invention was to put an end to the boredom of just swimming around and dividing ourselves for eons on end.
That single invention caught on so rapidly, that soon all of the other pond scum were engaging in sex, which led to a literal population explosion. Well, you know the rest – someone spotted a shiny thing on land, and then everyone wanted to try sex-on-the-beach. Incidentally, that one variation brought about the need for lubricants, among many other progressive ideas.
As time passed, the free-sex thing led to many different, and variant, families, some of which looked very peculiar indeed. For a while there, horns and long tails were all the rage, but that fad wore off after the shorter-tailed (and less horny) families invented weaponry and war, which was in turn brought about by other new inventions: jealousy and greed.
Anyway, Darwin was finally allowed to attend a family reunion in the tropics, and the rest (as some might say) is history.