Posted on 05/03/2005 2:12:35 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
"But students asking questions in class is always a good thing."
That's all most of us ask for anyway :)
Thanks for being one of the "Goodies"
I hope your students take advantage of this and recognize you later in life as a major influence on them.
-Mac
Thanks for the ping.
I think that's the problem with much of the public school text books and cirriculums. Nothing there to interest students. And then we have a situation where colleges are filled with liberla arts majors and few American kids want to go into any science or engineering program.
I think a lot of students are bored to tears in today's schools.
These questions look like those given in seminars on "How To Call Rush Limbaugh" or the like.
Mostly questions like this are used by students just to disrupt the class. Students will do almost anything to avoid learning. It happened in math classes regularly when I was teaching.
For some reason this can't be admitted. I guess it's a pride thing.
Must you accuse evolutionists of being prideful and lying by omission? This comes up in nearly every thread. Scientists freely admit that no one knows exactly how life began and that it is highly unlikely physical evidence will ever be found.
...evolutionary theory is an attempt to explain the origin and diversity of various forms of life.
That statement is incorrect. As I said, this comes up in nearly every thread. Please remember that evolutionary theory is only an attempt to explain the diversity of life, but not the origin of life.
The problems of the public school system reach far deeper than one life sciences class.
Surely you are not trying to posit that "evolution" is
more than a theory! Where is your proof?
from the website you recommended:
(Jonathan Wells research)
"...In every case, if any development occurred at all it followed the pattern of the egg, not the injected foreign DNA. While I was at Berkeley I performed experiments on frog embryos. My experiments focused on a reorganization of the egg cytoplasm after fertilization which causes the embryo to elongate into a tadpole; if I blocked the reorganization, the result was a ball of belly cells; if I induced a second reorganization after the first, I could produce a two-headed tadpole. Yet this reorganization had nothing to do with the egg's DNA, and proceeded quite well even in its absence (though the embryo eventually needed its DNA to supply it with additional proteins).
So DNA does not program the development of the embryo. As an analogy, consider a house: the builder needs materials (such as pieces of lumber cut to the right lengths, cement, nails, piping, wiring, etc.), but he also needs a floor plan (since any given pile of materials could be assembled into several different houses) and he needs a set of assembly instructions (since assembling the roof before the foundation and walls would pose a serious problem). In a developing organism, the DNA contains templates for producing proteins-the building materials.
To a very limited extent, it also contains information about the order in which those proteins should be produced-assembly instructions. But it does not contain the basic floor plan. The floor plan and many of the assembly instructions reside elsewhere (nobody yet knows where). Since development of the embryo is not programmed by the DNA, the Darwinian view of evolution as the differential survival of DNA mutations misses the point. ..."
This represents such poor interpretation of data that I suspect he was seeing with his preconceptions.
The biologist might see DNA as a program, and the cellular machinery as the reader that interprets the program. As with any metaphor, this one has limits.
Surely not.
It's new to this generation.
It's the same as students questioning homosexuality in class.
It's become a taboo. One that is finally being laid back to rest.
Having given it some thought, this one, too, is ID Ping worthy!
Are these the same scientists who argue against allowing criticism of evolutionary theory in government schools?
That statement is incorrect. As I said, this comes up in nearly every thread. Please remember that evolutionary theory is only an attempt to explain the diversity of life, but not the origin of life.
That's news to me. We learned about Miller's experiments and panspermia in gov't school biology in the late '70s. It was included in the unit on evolution. Evolutionary theory is also commonly understood as including explanations for the origin of life. And rightly so, since neither evolutionary theory nor origin of life theory will admit of the possibility of supernatural causality. They're logically related.
"The biologist might see DNA as a program, and the cellular machinery as the reader that interprets the program."
Then the question begs, who wrote the program? The program itself?
"As with any metaphor, this one has limits."
Then why do so many tout the "Computer program shows that evolution works" nonsense?
"...students think they're informed without having ever really read anything" on evolution or intelligent design, Mr. Wachholz says."
Those students have probably read the Bible, and have made their own decisions.
LOL. Why are teachers complaining about having engaged students?
I'm sorry, but you're incorrect. The modern synthesis theory (comprised of Darwin's theory of natural selection, Mendel's theory of inheritance, and advances in molecular biology since the description of the DNA molecule by Watson, Crick, and others) does not address origins. Evolution is defined as the change in the frequency of patterns of genes that occur over time in populations of organisms. It does not, it cannot encompass how life began. This may be the common understanding, but as with the common usage of the word theory, it is not technically correct.
...neither evolutionary theory nor origin of life theory will admit of the possibility of supernatural causality.
This is because the supernatural falls outside the realm of scientific investigation. Science is unequipped to address metaphysical questions. It is not a matter of admission. The purpose of science is only to describe the physical world in concrete terms, and to do so in such a way as to produce predicable results.
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