Posted on 12/03/2005 6:18:54 AM PST by Right Wing Professor
I’m afraid we live in loopy times. How else to account for the latest entries in America’s culture wars: science museum docents donning combat gloves against rival fundamentalist tour groups and evolution on trial in a Pennsylvania federal court. For those keeping score, so far this year it’s Monkeys: 0, Monkey Business: 82. That's 82 evolution versus creationism debates in school boards or towns nationwide—this year alone. [1]
This past summer, when most Americans were distracted by thoughts of beaches and vacations or the high price of gasoline (even before the twin hits of Katrina and Rita), 2 heavy-weight political figures joined the President of the United States to weigh in on a supposedly scientific issue. US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Arizona Senator John McCain, and President George W. Bush each endorsed the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in the science classroom. Can anyone reasonably convince me that these pronouncements were not just cynical political punditry but, rather, were expressions of sincere beliefs?
So you have to ask yourself in light of all of these events, are we headed back to the past with no escape in the future? Are we trapped in a new period of history when science, once again, is in for the fight of its life?
In times like these, as inundated as we are by technical wizardry, one might conclude that American technological supremacy and know-how would lead, inevitably, to a deeper understanding or trust of science. Well, it doesn’t. Perhaps just the opposite is true. Technology and gee whiz gadgetry has led to more suspicion rather than less. And a typical American’s understanding of science is limited at best. As far as evolution is concerned, if you’re a believer in facts, scientific methods, and empirical data, the picture is even more depressing. A recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Science found that 64 percent of respondents support teaching creationism side by side with evolution in the science curriculum of public schools. A near majority—48 percent—do not believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution is proven by fossil discoveries. Thirty-three percent believe that a general agreement does not exist among scientists that humans evolved over time [2].
What if we become a nation that can’t chew gum, walk down the street, and transplant embryonic stem cells all at the same time? Does it matter?
New York Times journalist Cornelia Dean, who balances her time between science reporting for the Times and lecturing at Harvard, told me that she believes that science stands in a perilous position. “Science, as an institution, has largely ceded the microphone to people who do not necessarily always embrace the scientific method,” she says. “Unless scientists participate in the public life of our country, our discourse on a number of issues of great importance becomes debased” [3].
Others, such as journalist Chris Mooney, point to the increasing politicization of science as a pollutant seeping into our nation’s psyche. In his recent book, The Republican War on Science, Mooney spells out the danger of ignorance in public life when ideology trumps science.
Science politicization threatens not just our public health and the environment but the very integrity of American democracy, which relies heavily on scientific and technical expertise to function. At a time when more political choices than ever before hinge upon the scientific and technical competence of our elected leaders, the disregard for consensus and expertise—and the substitution of ideological allegiance for careful assessment—can have disastrous consequences [4].
Jon D. Miller, PhD, a political scientist on faculty at Northwestern University’s School of Medicine, believes that the sophisticated questions of biology that will confront each and every American in the 21st Century will require that they know the difference between a cell and a cell phone and are able to differentiate DNA from MTV. For decades, Miller has been surveying Americans about their scientific knowledge. “We are now entering a period where our ability to unravel previously understood or not understood questions is going to grow extraordinarily,” says Miller. “As long as you are looking at the physics of nuclear power plants or the physics of transistors [all 20th Century questions]…it doesn’t affect your short-term belief systems. You can still turn on a radio and say it sounds good but you don’t have to know why it works. As we get into genetic medicine, infectious diseases…if you don’t understand immunity, genetics, the principles of DNA, you’re going to have a hard time making sense of these things” [5].
These ideological battles aren’t likely to vanish any time soon. If anything, an organized and emboldened fundamentalist religious movement buttressed by political power in Washington will continue to challenge accepted scientific theory that collides with religious beliefs. So one must ask, is it too farfetched to see these ideological battles spilling over into areas of medical research and even into funding at the National Institutes of Health?
Now I am not asking for a world that doesn’t respect religious belief. My education as a Roman Catholic balanced creed and science. In the classroom of my youth, one nun taught creationism in religion class while another taught evolution in science, and never the twain did meet.
So what does one do? How can a medical student, a resident, or a physician just beginning to build a career become active in these larger public battles? Burt Humburg, MD, a resident in internal medicine at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center, is one role model. He’s been manning the evolutionary ramparts since his medical school days in Kansas in the late 1990s when he became active in Kansas Citizens for Science. On a brief vacation from his residency volunteering as a citizen advocate for the federal trial in Pennsylvania, he said education is the key role for the physician. While he realizes that medical students, residents and physicians might not view themselves as scientists, per se, he sees himself and his colleagues as part of the larger scientific collective that can’t afford to shirk its duty. “The town scientist is the town doctor, so whether we want it or not, we have the mantle—the trappings—of a scientist” [7].
It is time for the medical community, through the initiative of individual physicians, to address not only how one can heal thy patient, but also how one can heal thy nation. There are many ways to get involved; from the most rudimentary—attending school board meetings, sending letters to the editor, and volunteering at the local science museum—to the more demanding—running for office, encouraging a spouse or partner to do so, or supporting candidates (especially financially) who are willing to speak out for science. As Tip O’Neill, the larger-than-life Speaker of the House of Representatives, famously declared, “All politics is local.” Speak out for science. Isn’t that a message that should be advanced in every physician’s office?
Northwestern’s Jon Miller concedes that speaking out may come with a price, “It won’t make…[physicians]...popular with many people but is important for any profession, particularly a profession based on science” to do so [5]. Consider this: shouldn’t civic leadership be embedded in the mind of every blooming physician? In the end, doesn’t combating this virulent campaign of anti-knowledge lead us back to that old adage of evolutionary leadership by example, “Monkey see, monkey do?” Seize the day, Doc.
Nope. There are no such critical flaws, and ID's biggest proponets have said that it is scientific only in the sense that Astrology is scientific. It claims design can be detected, but has been unable to say how, refuses to say by whom they were designed or by what mechanism the design was implemented, and every now and then assures the true believers, wink wink, the designer is God.
You think we haven't figured this stuff out?
Evolutionary theory is necessarily founded on the assumption that the universe has always existed (not in the Einsteinian sense, but the Newtonian sense). Evolutionary theory needs a forever universe in which to have sufficient time for random chance to do its magic.
Utter and complete rubbish. Evolution incorporates the known age of the earth - approximately 4.5 billion years.
It was the work of Einstein and modern physicists that destroyed the forever universe piffle and conceit of the evolutionists. The spectacular COBE results have since confirmed the existence of a cooling universe that was infinitely hot and dense less than 20 billion years ago. The forever universe is no more. That's a development that evolutionists desperately wish had never come along.
This appears to be a product of your fertile imagination. In general, estimates of the age of the earth have increased with time, not decreased.
You're a true cultist. No matter how often your arguments are proven to be completely speciioous, you won't question your belief system.
ID theory honestly and straightforwardly proffers by way of analogy that the best inference we can make about the existence of life is that an organizing intelligence set the initial conditions and devised the plans necessary for life to arise and evolve to the levels of present day complexity. It is the most logical and rational way, based on our observations, to explain how we got to where we are in less than 20 billion years.
Except that we have absolutely no evidence any such process ever happened. One might as well say, that because the Panama canal and Suez canals exist, and it's the only example of a channel between two bodies of water we've ever seen to form, that all channels on the earth must have been dug by humans. What piffle!
Evolutionists, on the other hand, quite clearly name and identify their organizing deity. It is none other than Chaos. Sadly for them, Chaos is only adequate to the task in a universe other than the universe that modern physics has disclosed to us.
Crap.
You obviously fail to understand JudgemAll's post
When teachers feel free to jeer at a student's religious beliefs...well, you're going to have trouble in your playground. Those students have organized to challenge and hector, and the teachers themselves are not behaving in a very attractive manner.
We've seen totalitarianism several times this century. It's not hard to recognize here.
Are you really suggesting that the theory of evolution matches one or more of these definitions?
Dogma: a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proofBelief: any cognitive content (perception) held as true; religious faith
Faith the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof
I've read your post five times now, and I still have no idea what you're saying (although I did pick up some bizarre ranting about scientists not deserving to live). Please rewrite it in English.
I was taught evo as a dogma. "The embryos have things that look like gills, therefore we are descended from fish." Poor teaching, sure, debunked--but the student is always at a disadvantage. At the time, I didn't really care except to get my grade, but I knew that I was being fed hokum as fact. If it had been taught as a model, which of course would have worked very well, there wouldn't be many out there who resent the kind of impositions of dogma where dogma does not belong.
Now, the evos are howling because the IDs want a listen. Many who aren't IDers, but simply doubt the overreaching claims of evos, enjoy the frightened dismay of those same evos.
What I'd suggest is developing a respectful case that evolution must be taught, but for the best reason--it is a vital paradigm for understanding the structure of life. You can do this without snarling at the religious.
And resist all temptation to ridicule a student who expresses doubt about "descendance"-- there is absolutely nothing unreasonable about a doubt--and no teacher should react with emotion when a doubt is expressed.
You'd better read up on exactly what Pasteur's famous experiment did, in fact, demonstrate. It had nothing to do with the origin of life.
Yep.
QUOTE: "...science is said to be religiously neutral, if only because science and religion are, by their very natures, epistemically distinct. However, the actual practice and content of science challenge this claim. In many areas, science is anything but religiously neutral; moreover, the standard arguments for methodological naturalism suffer from various grave shortcomings. .." Methodological Naturalism? ~ Alvin Plantinga
*
MORE: ".. Since science is not a system of thought deduced from first principles (as are traditional metaphysical systems), and that it deals precisely with objective experience, science is not, nor is any theory of science, a true metaphysical system. ...
However, the claim is sometimes, and more plausibly, made that evolutionary theory, along with some other scientific theories, functions as a kind of attitudinal metaphysical system." Ruse, M: 1989. The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications, Routledge.
Ruse also describes what he calls "metaphysical Darwinism" -- Ruse, M: 1992.Darwinism. In E F Keller and E A Lloyd eds Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Press. -- (as opposed to "scientific Darwinism") which is indeed a metaphysical system akin to a worldview, and which has expressed itself in numerous extra-scientific philosophies, including Spencer's, Teilhard's, and Haeckel's, or even the quasi-mystical views of Julian Huxley. .. ~ John S. Wilkins (talkorigins)
"Origin of man now proved. -- Metaphysics must flourish. - he who understands baboon would do more toward Metaphysics than Locke." - Darwin, Notebook M, August 16, 1838
This is Quine's and Kuhn's point. But some theories provide a better explanation of the observations than do others. Many scientific hypotheses are abandonded not because they are falsified, but because a better hypothesis shows up. Sometimes the fit between a theory and the observation is so poor that the theory is essentially falsified; those are the sorts of theory that are said to have been falsified and/or are falsifiable. But for others, the losing theory or theories are not falsified, just out-performed. And in some cases, there is no clear winner.
Think of the historical sciences for example. They often do not generate testable predictions that allow decisive falsification; they may generate only expectations based on hypothetical determinations of results (i.e. what we would expect to find) given known rules and the particular case posited by the theory. In that situation theories compete abductively, not by deductive falsification via modus tollens.
-A8
Looks like another moron is about to join your VI list.
I agree. But evolutionary theory is broader than Darwinism. In other words, a rejection of Darwinism would not ipso facto be a rejection of evolutionary theory.
ID, on the other hand, as it has no constraints whatsoever on it's causative agent (the alleged intelligent designer), would be able to handle any and every sequence of fossils imaginable. No matter what.
I agree.
-A8
"Origin of man now proved. -- Metaphysics must flourish. - he who understands baboon would do more toward Metaphysics than Locke." - Darwin, Notebook M, August 16, 1838
Why did Darwin mention Locke in connection with metaphysics? What does Locke have to do with metaphysics? :)
If you were right, all the slow learners in class, the ones who just couldn't absorb the material, would be up for Nobel Prizes. That's ID. Asking the same questions over and over for at least the last 10 years and ignoring the answers.
By the way, this is one of the worst articles ever in support of Darwinism.
Truman used to say he didn't give 'em hell; he gave 'em the truth and they thought it was hell.
Although I agree with you about our second amendment rights (see my home page, the top line is the same as your tagline), I have to say that in this case, however belated, the support of the AMA is both welcome and important.
The last thing I want is a creationist doctor as in the Baby Fay episode.
Of course the bottom line is the fact that we wouldn't even be having this "debate" if the people who have the God-given responsibility for their own children's education, were allowed to send their children to the school of their choice (religious, or otherwise).
Instead we have allowed powerful special interests in "the government" (which our Constitution was put into place to protect us from) to usurp the parent's responsibility and enforce their own agenda-driven ideas on the rest of us.
This has to stop. Parents must insist that they have the right to educate their own children in the schools of their choice.
As far as I'm concerned, Cyber Schools (on-line learning) are the only way to go because one has access to the best teachers in the world from which to choose.
Parasitic government unions need to go. They're destroying our government, just as they destroyed the steel, airline, and automobile industries, etc. Union-backed bureaucracies destroy incentive and attract lazy, incompetent, mediocrities who can't compete in the real world - yet they get paid as much or more than those who excell in their work.
As in, perhaps, like a theory? That is what evolution is, a model (or theory). That is what I learned it as, and the limited teaching I did, that is what I taught it as. One of my favorite fields in grad school was "modeling," that is, working with hypotheses and theories.
Now, the evos are howling because the IDs want a listen.
No, not because they "want a listen," but because they want to undermine the very foundations of science. This is very well expressed in the Wedge Document. The goal is clearly not to improve science, or to improve the theory of evolution, but, as the document states: "Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies." Just what do you think they mean by this?
What I'd suggest is developing a respectful case that evolution must be taught, but for the best reason--it is a vital paradigm for understanding the structure of life. You can do this without snarling at the religious.
What I would suggest is that the religious cease their attacks on science. But, since that does not appear likely, perhaps scientists should start fighting back even more than they already do.
No, no, no - don't you see? When they argue, it's legitimate discourse. When you disagree and try to rebut, it's snarling bigotry. See how that works? Notice how clever it is to rule your argument illegitimate on its face?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.