Easy?! ...And all this time I was under the impression that some genetic traits were recessive. That whole "you'll be bald if your maternal uncle was bald" thing must be out of date...
Posted on 01/22/2005 7:38:12 AM PST by PatrickHenry
A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it's a handful of judges -- "activist judges" in the view of their critics -- who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America's public-school classrooms.
The ruling this month in Georgia by Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper ordering the Cobb County School Board to remove stickers it had inserted in biology textbooks questioning Darwin's theory of evolution is being appealed by the suburban Atlanta district. Similar legal battles pitting evolution against biblical creationism are erupting across the country. Judges are conscientiously observing the constitutionally required separation of church and state, and specifically a 1987 Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of creationism, a religious belief, in public schools. But seekers of scientific truth have to be unnerved by a November 2004 CBS News poll in which nearly two-thirds of Americans favored teaching creationism, the notion that God created heaven and earth in six days, alongside evolution in schools.
If this style of "science" ever took hold in U.S. schools, it is safe to say that as a nation we could well be headed for Third World status, along with everything that dire label implies. Much of the Arab world is stuck in a miasma of imam-enforced repression and non-thought. Could it happen here? Our Constitution protects creativity and dissent, but no civilization has lasted forever, and our current national leaders seem happy with the present trends.
It is the creationists, of course, who forecast doom if U.S. schools follow a secularist path. Science, however, by its nature, relies on evidence, and all the fossil and other evidence points toward an evolved human species over millions of years on a planet tens of millions of years old [ooops!] in a universe over two billion years in existence [ooops again!].
Some creationists are promoting an idea they call "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinism, eliminating the randomness and survival-of-the-fittest of Darwinian thought. But, again, no evidence exists to support any theory of evolution except Charles Darwin's. Science classes can only teach the scientific method or they become meaningless.
Many creationists say that teaching Darwin is tantamount to teaching atheism, but most science teachers, believers as well as non-believers, scoff at that. The Rev. Warren Eschbach, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa., believes that "science is figuring out what God has already done" and the book of Genesis was never "meant to be a science textbook for the 21st century." Rev. Eschbach is the father of Robert Eschbach, one of the science teachers in Dover, Pa., who refused to teach a school-board-mandated statement to biology students criticizing the theory of evolution and promoting intelligent design. Last week, the school district gathered students together and the statement was read to them by an assistant superintendent.
Similar pro-creationist initiatives are underway in Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. And a newly elected creationist majority on the state board of education in Kansas plans to rewrite the entire state's science curriculum this spring. This means the state's public-school science teachers will have to choose between being scientists or ayatollahs -- or perhaps abandoning their students and fleeing Kansas, like academic truth-seekers in China in the 1980s or Tehran today.
That's easy to answer. The original single individual does not have the trait. After many generations, some of the descendents do have the trait. It is easy to demonstrate that the colony starts with one individual. It is easy to demonstrate that the resulting colony has variation.
"...Yes, it is bizarre, and their "faith" is much more like science than it is faith...."
I agree. I had not thought about that extension of what I said, but it certainly does follow.
Proof -- if only you weren't so blind! -- that a miracle happened in your petri dish.
</creationism mode>
Locusts have six legs, dammit! This passage implies they have only four.
From the website:
"You may eat the following: locusts of every variety; all varieties of bald locust; crickets of every variety; and all varieties of grasshopper, but all other winged swarming things that have four legs shall be an abomination for you. Lev. 11: 22-23......"
Not to be picky, but grasshoppers, crickets and locusts, have six legs, making the word "other" possibly incorrect. An elaboration I found in my King James allows any hopping insect which would include leafhoppers and such.
Interpretation is absolutely required for this to make sense.
Same goes for ferns, mosses, mushrooms, slimemolds and bacteria. Not listed in Creation, even though the first three would have been obvious to people.
I am certain G-d's word is inerrant. I'm not at all sure the people who wrote it down were.
Umm..yes, you are correct that procedure would work.
Are you likely to volunteer? ;->
Sorry, I was busily typing when you had gotten there first and better.
Great minds go to Hell in the same handbasket, evidently...
Easy?! ...And all this time I was under the impression that some genetic traits were recessive. That whole "you'll be bald if your maternal uncle was bald" thing must be out of date...
Explain to us how recessive traits work in bacteria.
I think you are a little recessive when it comes to providing the results (probabilities) of your mathematical calculation.
Ah yes ... it's a high fly ball ... over center field ... easy out.
Don't patronize me, especially with respectable examples that are about 1000 intellectual miles from Darwinism.
Are Margaret Meade and Alfred Kinsey are in your pantheon of "scientists" too?
No doubt anguish is one smart Swede but he is wrong on the "Constitution being apllied to the states" as a general statement and wrong in this particular case as are you. All state constitutions enumerated speech and religion rights prior to 20th Century incorporation of certain of the BOR's to the states.
The 14A is a club used by federal courts to put their noses in where they don't belong and anti-thetical in that regard to the original intent of the founders.
The anti federalists feared an overly strong central government lording iver the states and they were exactly right. Nothing in the Constitution, the 14A, the 1A or Constitutional jurisprudence prohibits an acknowldgement of a Creator. Not that the CC BOEd even metnioned such.
What the judge accomplishes, and you seemingly support, is a further poisoning of the well and stoking the flames of the culture war. Culture wars persist because unelected judges make rulings such as these and use the power of the fedgov to enforce them. Issues such as this are best left to be debated in the public square of the localities and states. The remedies are simple; elections, recalls or voting with your feet.
You can have a Constitutional Republic or you can have oligarchy. One leads to freedom, the other to fascism.
And this judge will be overturned. His holding and justification for same is inept. jwalsh, you may not agree with the SCOTUS rulings but Anguish and Narby did provide you with the judicial realities of the situation.
Do like I do and no one will get hurt. Consider only the raw scientific data and spit out the bones of interpretation. We all have fully functioning brains.
Post a link to the original article. Once it goes through the filter of a creationist site, the result is the exact opposite of what was originally published. Like I said, I've seen what creationist sites do with quotes, why should I trust them with articles?
Recessive traits come to the fore in sexually-reproducing critters. Bacteria ain't them.
The dominant-recessive thing? That's for sexual species with specific X and Y sex chromosomes.
Bacteria typically have one ring-shaped chromosome, one strand of DNA, one copy of any gene at a given locus, and damn little "junk" to slow down reproduction. Hello? They reproduce asexually without any recombination of mama and papa genes.
People have been trying to tell you for years now that your dumb-butt strawman models are biologically misinformed. If you had any integrity, you would admit that now.
But if you had any integrity, you wouldn't be Southack.
Was I too subtle?
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