Posted on 11/06/2005 6:26:17 AM PST by Non-Sequitur
One hears the loud scrape of the creationist moving the goalposts. You started with the claim that the ToE's position within science is being eroded over time as new evidence comes in. When this was pointed out as absolutely flat-out false, you "defended" it by citing what it would supposedly take to overcome your personal incredulity. This in itself is shifty behavior.
Worse, your new defense trench is a risible strawman of evolutionary mechanisms in an arena (abiogenesis) in which they do not apply.
You're stinking up the joint.
Darwinism cannot explain scientifically the origins of life.
Drammach's Post #7:
Darwins TOE does not even attempt to explain the origins of life..I am sure you know that full well, but continue to misrepresent TOE at every opportunity..
Your Post #11:
When advocates of pure TOE can demonstrate repeatedly, under identical conditions, in a variety of locations and times, the competition among complex organic and inorganic compounds leading to viable primitive life, then I will say that TOE absent everthing else is science. Until then, begging to introduce immense spans of time as the deus ex machina of a materialist theory is the same thing as saying "The gods did it!"The inadequacies of TOE as an explanation of origins of life, which seem to be forgotten when it is taught, must be mentioned even as the truths of TOE are explained. Otherwise, education is incomplete and limited by secularist and materialist prejudices and opinion.
Why do you keep harping on the origins of life when evolution talks about change in life? A definition from the web provides a good example: "In the life sciences, evolution is a change in the traits of living organisms over generations, including the emergence of new species."
Can you say strawman, boys and girls? I knew you could!
laughing.
Why is this restricted to bacteria and eucaryotic protists?
I think she's worried about the political damage to her posterior.
You are not real clear on your definitions I see. The theory of gravity will always remain "the theory of gravity" no matter how much evidence is accumulated. BTW, there is more evidence supporting evolution than there is gravity. This may help:
Let me post my own example of gravity:
A little history here:
Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation
“Every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directed along the line of centers for the two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the separation between the two objects.”
F=Gm1m2/r2
Where:
F equals the gravitational force between two objects
m1 equals the mass of the first object
m2 equals the mass of the second object
R equals the distance between the objects
G equals the universal constant of gravitation = (6.6726 )* 10-11 N*m2/kg2 (which is still being refined and tested today)
(BTW this is a simple form of the equation and is only applied to point sources. Usually it is expressed as a vector equation)
Even though it works well for most practical purposes, this formulation has problems.
A few of the problems are:
It shows the change is gravitational force is transmitted instantaneously (Violates C), assumes an absolute space and time (this contradicts Special Relativity), etc.
Enter Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity
In 1915 Einstein developed a new theory of gravity called General Relativity.
A number of experiments showed this theory explained some of the problems with the classical Newtonian model. However, this theory like all others is still being explored and tested.
From an NSF abstract:
“As with all scientific knowledge, a theory can be refined or even replaced by an alternative theory in light of new and compelling evidence. The geocentric theory that the sun revolves around the earth was replaced by the heliocentric theory of the earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun. However, ideas are not referred to as "theories" in science unless they are supported by bodies of evidence that make their subsequent abandonment very unlikely. When a theory is supported by as much evidence as evolution, it is held with a very high degree of confidence.
In science, the word "hypothesis" conveys the tentativeness inherent in the common use of the word "theory.' A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world. Through experiment and observation, hypotheses can be supported or rejected. At the earliest level of understanding, hypotheses can be used to construct more complex inferences and explanations. Like "theory," the word "fact" has a different meaning in science than it does in common usage. A scientific fact is an observation that has been confirmed over and over. However, observations are gathered by our senses, which can never be trusted entirely. Observations also can change with better technologies or with better ways of looking at data. For example, it was held as a scientific fact for many years that human cells have 24 pairs of chromosomes, until improved techniques of microscopy revealed that they actually have 23. Ironically, facts in science often are more susceptible to change than theories, which is one reason why the word "fact" is not much used in science.
Finally, "laws" in science are typically descriptions of how the physical world behaves under certain circumstances. For example, the laws of motion describe how objects move when subjected to certain forces. These laws can be very useful in supporting hypotheses and theories, but like all elements of science they can be altered with new information and observations.
Those who oppose the teaching of evolution often say that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact." This statement confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.
Here is another nice page of what a theory is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory
"In common usage a theory is often viewed as little more than a guess or a hypothesis. But in science and generally in academic usage, a theory is much more than that. A theory is an established paradigm that explains all or many of the data we have and offers valid predictions that can be tested. In science, a theory can never be proven true, because we can never assume we know all there is to know. Instead, theories remain standing until they are disproven, at which point they are thrown out altogether or modified slightly.
Theories start out with empirical observations such as “sometimes water turns into ice.” At some point, there is a need or curiosity to find out why this is, which leads to a theoretical/scientific phase. In scientific theories, this then leads to research, in combination with auxiliary and other hypotheses (see scientific method), which may then eventually lead to a theory. Some scientific theories (such as the theory of gravity) are so widely accepted that they are often seen as laws. This, however, rests on a mistaken assumption of what theories and laws are. Theories and laws are not rungs in a ladder of truth, but different sets of data. A law is a general statement based on observations."
For Laws:
"A well-known example is that of Newton's law of gravity: while it describes the world accurately for most pertinent observations, such as of the movements of astronomical objects in the solar system, it was found to be inaccurate when applied to extremely large masses or velocities. Einstein's theory of general relativity, however, accurately handles gravitational interactions at those extreme conditions, in addition to the range covered by Newton's law. Newton's formula for gravity is still used in most circumstances, as an easier-to-calculate approximation of gravitational law. A similar relationship exists between Maxwell's equations and the theory of quantum electrodynamics; there are several such cases. This suggests the (unanswered) question of whether there are any ultimately true physical laws, or whether they are all just cases where our sensory and rational apparatus have generated mathematically simple approximations, valid within the range of normal human experience, to unobtainable true formulas."
And Intelligent Design does explain scientifically the origins of life?
There is one Democrat on the School Board, but she's hardly a liberal. The board is made up primarily of candidates of the other two political parties in the state, socially conservative Republicans and socially moderate Republicans.
The problem with this debate is that adherents of TOE as the only acceptable curriculum argue that TOE does not teach anything about life's origins, but when someone suggests that something about life's origins should be mentioned in curricula, even if to say that TOE does not explain origins of life, TOE adherents say precisely what you have responded to me: that is not the point of this debate (and they usually do it insultingly, as you have. But I forgive you since I know you must feel threatened).
I have actually plainly stated that TOE does not pretend to explain the origins of life. I do not understand why, on one hand, TOE advocates demand as an imperative the implication of accidental creation of life when teaching TOE, but object so strongly to mere mention of that implication's inadequacy at the same time? Why do you respond so condescendingly to a valid objection to that approach to teaching TOE?
TOE is not without other problems, of course. For example, returning to my objection to pure TOE advocate use of the deus ex machina of vast expanses of time, while one may observe the shift in population numbers of subspecies of moths in London suburbs as an accident of use of high- versus low-emission coal in manufacturies at the turn of the century, and use that as proof of an advantage of one coloring over another vis-a-vis predation, but it does not prove at all the emergence of a new species from an old one or even the survival of one species versus another. In other words, it is just a thoery.
Oh well, I know well that academic egos do not want to be questioned? "Get away from me, boy! Ya bother me!" (with apologies to W.C. Fields)
Regards.
I doubt that it will come to that...yet. Screwing with the biology curriculum doesn't discount the other hard sciences or math. But give the board time and there is no telling how much damage they can do.
Thank you. And you have a lovely Eloi screename.
It's never a good thing when science becomes political.
Do the Catholics just rip Genesis out of their Bibles?
"Next the ID nuts"
The name-calling begins...once again.
How many times over the past few months on these threads have you used the term "strawman"? LOL It's getting old.
What are the statistics of science revenue generated via public education funds vs. research grants, royalties from academic patents, commercial applications (including pharmaceuticals), etc? I am sure you have these figures, since your post claims that education dollars are the biggest source of money for science.
My primary theme was the scope of the theory of evolution. It does not deal with the origins of life, rather the changes which have occurred since those origins. However, you continue to bring up origins as a part of the theory of evolution. For example, you write the following (my responses in blue):
I do not understand why, on one hand, TOE advocates demand as an imperative the implication of accidental creation of life when teaching TOEI hope this helps to clarify things.Evolution does not mention the creation of life
but object so strongly to mere mention of that implication's inadequacy at the same time?
Evolution does not mention the creation of life
Why do you respond so condescendingly to a valid objection to that approach to teaching TOE?
Because evolution does not mention the creation of life
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