I think you're right about this being a free speech vs. censorship issue, tomzz. But how do you keep a high school biology classroom from being turned into a battleground? The issue has become so politicized (surprise, surprise), that reason goes right out the window.
All I know is that, in the long run at least, scientific truth comes out: You cannot stop it as long there are minds given to the free investigation of natural phenomena. And the history of science tells us that new scientific advances are built out of the achievements of the past, typically in a way that does not falsify the past achievements, but extends and refines them as our ability to observe the world grows with advances in technology.
Personally I doubt evolutionary theory has much to fear from the disciplines of ID, and perhaps has much to gain from them. For instance, the mathematical physicist Hubert Yockey, who's evidently a great admirer of Charles Darwin, taking a page from physics, wants to place the theory on a more rigorous, mathematical basis. I don't know why anyone would object to that.
Maybe this is some kind of turf war between the life scientists on the one side, and the physicists and mathematicians on the other, with the former regarding the latter as illegitimately poaching on their territory? The late, great Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, for instance, suggested that perhaps biology should be an independent discipline from the rest of science, to be regarded as sovereign in its own way as physics is in its. But to me this wouldn't be a very good idea, for without doubt living systems have a material basis in physics and chemistry, notwithstanding they are more than what that material basis can describe....
Well FWIW. Thanks for writing, tomzz!
Teach biology, not religion.
Now there, that was easy, wasn't it?
Maybe this is some kind of turf war between the life scientists on the one side, and the physicists and mathematicians on the other, with the former regarding the latter as illegitimately poaching on their territory? The late, great Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, for instance, suggested that perhaps biology should be an independent discipline from the rest of science, to be regarded as sovereign in its own way as physics is in its. But to me this wouldn't be a very good idea, for without doubt living systems have a material basis in physics and chemistry, notwithstanding they are more than what that material basis can describe....
Well FWIW. Thanks for writing, tomzz!
= = =
Great points.
Thanks.
I do think turf war and ego stuff are way up there in motivations on the part of the EVOS.
Everyone involved in biology is working toward better mathematical models. What relevance they have to a week or two of high school biology devoted to evolution, I have difficulty. Kind of like stuffing quantum mechanics into two weeks of high school physics.
But let's not kid ourselves. The issue under protest is not abstruse mathematical models; it is common descent.
In all the years I've been on these threads, I've only seen two evolution critics admit to accepting common descent.
Has he published his stuff in Math or Systems technical journals, or just in the popular press?