Posted on 08/23/2006 11:09:23 PM PDT by balch3
Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.
The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”
Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.
If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless they declare another major, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Mr. Nassirian said students seeking the grants went first to their college registrar, who determined whether they were full-time students majoring in an eligible field.
“If a field is missing, that student would not even get into the process,” he said.
That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.
One of them, Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned about it from someone at the Department of Education, who got in touch with him after his essay on the necessity of teaching evolution appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 15. Dr. Krauss would not name his source, who he said was concerned about being publicly identified as having drawn attention to the matter.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Is there such a field of study? If there is it would seem very specialized and unlikely to be an undergrad major.
"TToE is science. We know about it than we do about Gravity. This is a paperwork snafu, not a "subsidy" -- or do you think they should cut funding on studies of theology, which is TRUE mythology by any definition of the word?"
Gravity is observable and therefore empiriacally verifiable. Evolution is not.
Evolution is based on faith, not science.
A) Since science requires observation and verification and no one can or has ever observed or verified evolution, evolution is not scientific.
B) Evolutionists themselves state that evolution is a religion.
C) Evolutionists start with the presupposition that evolution is “scientific fact”.
Evolutionist and senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, Dr. Colin Patterson:
“We must first ask whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is scientific or pseudoscientific (metaphysical) … Taking the first part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the history of life is a single process of species-splitting and progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England. This part of the theory is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and so not subject to test.”
[Colin Patterson, Evolution (London: British Museum of Natural History, 1978), pp. 145-146
Evolutionist Harrison Matthews:
“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory – is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation – both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.”
[L. Harrison Matthews in the Introduction to Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1971), p. X-XI (emphasis added). As cited in Luther D. Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition (Santee, California: Master Books, 1988), pp. 30-31.]
As far as the twentieth century is concerned, the leading evolutionist is generally considered to be Sir Julian Huxley, primary architect of modern neo-Darwinism. Huxley called evolution a "Religion Without Revelation" and wrote a book with that title (2nd edition, 1957). In a later book, he said:
“Evolution . . . is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth.” [Huxley, Julian, Essays of a Humanist (New York: Harper and `Row, 1964) pp. 125, 222.] http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-332.htm
Later in the book he argued passionately that we must change "our pattern of religious thought from a God-centered to an evolution-centered pattern.” [Ibid., p 222.] Then he went on to say that: "the God hypothesis . . . is becoming an intellectual and moral burden on our thought." Therefore, he concluded that "we must construct something to take its place."
"TToE is silent on God. It merely attempts to explain how the physical world works. This silly little epithet is a standard CR/IDer insult. It is not surprising to see it tossed in."
The theory of evolution is an attmept to explain how the world could could exist without God. The theory of Evolution is not silent on God. It is loudly trying to throw out any notion of God altogether even if irrational.
Since the last one liner was a insulting "silly little epithet from a standard CR/IDer", perhaps you will find some mathematical probabities of proteins and bacteria arriving solely by chance and natural process more interesting.....
a) Calculations of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe for random generation of a simple enzyme and calculations for a single celled bacterium.
Although he is an evolutionist, and an atheist, Hoyle sees the mathematical statistical difficulty in producing a single bacterium like E. coli. In his calculations of the probability of life emerging from chance interactions with chemicals, Hoyle assumed that the first living cell was much simpler than today’s bacteria. However, his calculation for the likelihood of even one very simple enzyme arising at the right time in the right place was only chance in 1020. Because there are thousands of different enzymes with different functions, to produce the simplest living cell, Hoyle calculated that about 2,000 enzymes were needed with each one performing a specific task to form a single bacterium lie E coli.
No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have a random beginning….there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (1020)2000 = 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court….the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems….cannot in out view be generated by what are often called “natural” processes, …For life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instruction should have been provided for its assembly…There is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup, as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago.
-Hoyle & Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981).
Chandra Wickramasinghe adds:
“The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747.”
b) Calculations of Hubert Yockey for random generation of a single molecule of iso-1-cytochrome c protein.
He assigned the responsibility of amino acid selection and their polymerizing to form proteins to three Fates, acting as dei ex machina in a Greek drama. Lachesis was the caster of 110 icosahedral dice; Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life, polymerized them; and Atropos cut the thread when Lachesis assigned an amino acid to a non functionality equivalent site. Yockey asked the question: what is the probability that Lachesis and Clotho will build a chain of 110 amino acids of the iso-1-cytochrome c without Atropos cutting it?
Yockey calculated the probability was 2 x 10-44. Yockey then noted that the realistic odds are much worse what would have to form in the prebiotic soup…..
“In so far as chance plays a central role, the probability that even a very short protein, not withstanding a genome, could emerge from the primeval soup, if it ever existed, even with the help of a deus ex machina for 109 years is so small that the faith of Job is required to believe it….”
Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, p 279
“Let us remind ourselves that we have calculated the probability if the generation of only a single molecule of iso-1 cytochrome c. Of course, very many copies of each molecule must be generated to form the protobiont…I am using probability as a measure of degree of belief. It is clear that the belief that a molecule of iso-1-cytochrome c or any other protein could appear by chance is based on faith. And so we see that even if we believe that the “building blocks” are available, they do not spontaneously make proteins, at least not by chance. The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual motion machine is impossible in probability.”
Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, p 257
c) Calculations of Bradley and Thaxton for random production of a single protein.
Walter L. Bradley and Charles B. Thaxton calculated the probability of a random formation of amino acids into a protein to be 4.9 x 10-191. They began with the assumption that the probability of starting with an L-amino acid was .5, and the probability of starting with an L-amino acid was .5, and the probability of two L-amino acids joining with a peptide bond was also .5. They assumed that the twenty necessary amino acids existed in equal concentration in the prebiotic soup so that the probability of the right amino acid in the required position was .05.
Bradley and Thaxton were also generous towards the proponents of random processes when they also assumed that all of the chemical reactions would be with amino acids, ignoring the high probability of reactions with non-amino acid chemicals. They calculated the probability of the necessary placement of one amino acid to be .5 x .5 x .05 or .125. This, of coarse, meant that the probability of assembling N such amino acids would be .0125 x .0125 for N terms. Assuming a protein with 100 amino acids (.0125 x .0125 for 100 terms ), the mathematically impossible probability would be 4.9 x 10-191.
Bradley and Thaxton noted their agreement with Hubert P. Yockey and concluded that even assuming that all the carbon on earth existed in the form of amino acids and reacted at the greatest possible rate of 1012/s for one billion years (when actually only 130 million years were available), the mathematically impossible probability for the formation of one functional protein would be 10-65.
Walter L. Bradley and Charles B. Thaxton, “Information and the Origin of Life” in The Creation Hypothesis, ed. J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, Il : InterVarsity Press, 1994), p. 190
d) Calculations of Harold Morowitz for single celled bacterium developing from accidental or chance processes.
The difficulties in producing a protein from the mythical prebiotic soup are very large, but more difficult still is the probability of random processes producing the simplest living cell which represents an overwhelming in crease in complexity. Harold Morowitz calculated the probability of broken chemical bonds in a single celled bacterium reassembling under ideal chemical conditions. He assumed that only constructive chemical processes were acting ( under natural conditions 50 percent of chemical processes are destructive ) and that all of the amino acids were bioactive ( in the natural environment 75 percent of amino acids are not bioactive ). Morowitz computed the odds against the cell reassembling eot be one in 10100,000,000,000. He summarized his computation:
“…no amount of ordinary manipulation or arguing about the age of the universe or the size of the system can suffice to make it plausible that such a fluctuation would have occurred in an equilibrium system. It is always possible to argue that any unique event would have occurred. This is outside the range of probabilistic considerations, and really, outside of science. We may sum up stating that on energy considerations alone, the possibility of a living cell occurring in an equilibrium ensemble is vanishingly small. It is important to reiterate this point as a number of authors on the origin of life have missed the significance of vanishingly small probabilities. They have assumed that the final possibility will be reasonably large by virtue of the size and age of the system. The previous paragragh shows that is not so: calculate clause of the probability of spontaneous origin are so low that the final probabilities are still vanishingly small.”
-Harold J. Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology (Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1979), p. 12.
Morowitz also calculated the increase in chemical bonding energy required in forming an E coli bacterium and the probability of such a bacterium forming spontaneously anywhere in the entire universe over a period of five billion years under equilibrium conditions. In computing the odds to be one in 1010(110), Morowitz wrote:
“What is very clear … is that if equilibrium processes alone were at work, the largest possible fluctuation in the history of the universe id likely to have been no larger than a small peptide. Again, we stress in a very firm quantitative way, the impossibility of life originating as a fluctuation in an equilibrium ensemble.”
-Morowitz, Energy Flow in Biology, p. 68.
e) Calculations of Bernd-Olaf Kuppers for the random generation of the sequence of a bacterium.
Proceeding from the realistic assumption that all sequence alternatives of a nucleic-acid molecule are physically equivalent, Bernd-Olaf Kuppers concluded that the unguided, random formation of a predefined sequence ( such as the specific sequence of the nucleotides in the DNA molecule ) is reciprocally proportional to the number of all possible combinations of possible sequences. Kuppers noted that Michael Polanyi correctly emphasized that if the reverse assumption were true and the sequence of a nucleic-acid acid molecule would not have the capability to store information necessary to replicate living matter.
In calculating the expectation probability for the nucleotide sequence of a bacterium, Kuppers demonstrated the reason mathematicians have severe problems in accepting the assumptions of random origins:
“The human genome consists of about 109 nucleotides, and the number of combinatorially possible sequences attains the unimaginable size of 41000 million = 10 600 million. Even in the simple case of a bacterium, the genome consists of some 4.106 nucleotides, and the number of combinatorially possible sequences is 4 4million = 10 2.4 million. The expectation probability for the nucleotide sequence of a bacterium is thus so slight that not even the entire space of the universe would be enough to make the random synthesis of a bacterial genome probable. For example, the entire mass of the universe, expressed as a multiple of the mass of the hydrogen atom, amounts to about 1080 units. Even if all the matter in space consisted of DNA molecules of the structural complexity of the bacterial genome, with random sequence, then the chances of finding among them a bacterial genome or something resembling one would still be completely negligible.”
Brand-Olaf Kuppers, Information and the Origin of Life ( Cambridge, Mass:: The MIT Press, 1990 ), pp 59-60.
I do have to say I appreciate your walking into this one. Why you guys don't learn is beyond me.
I said the Theory of Gravity -- not the experience of Gravity. You need to learn what a scientific theory is before you can really participate in this discussion. (hint: seeing something fall down is a data point within the overall theory and "proves" nothing).
A) Since science requires observation and verification and no one can or has ever observed or verified evolution, evolution is not scientific.
Not true. Seen a graviton lately? Can you "prove" the make up of Jupiter based on our camera and telescopic analysis? How about sub-quantum threads?
No offense, you don't know what science is.
B) Evolutionists themselves state that evolution is a religion.
Not true. This is a canard that is played by icr and other political groups.
C) Evolutionists start with the presupposition that evolution is “scientific fact”.
Not true. Evolution is a Scientific Theory. Again, your lack of knowledge about the subject at hand is making you look a bit foolish.
Please see PH's links for more information about this subject.
I won't waste my or your time addressing your icr cut-and-paste. Until you understand what is being discussed, you aren't qualified to speak on it.
Please, friend. Educate yourself.
Is this the part where the monkey throws up on Dean Wormer? ;)
The creationists (flame suit on) are just making FR look silly. This is an honest mistake.It is not going to affect the applications, it will be deemed a mere typo.
Even the vatican admitted Galleleo was correct, will it take creationists 500 more years to get around to admiting the mechanics of god?
Yes there is and it is not that spectacular.
It was quite important for agricultural work. Remember that next time you eat non-Genetically modified corn.
Wouldn't know if the corn I eat is GM or not. Still doesn't answer if evolutionary biology is an undergrad major.
“Evolution is a fact, not a theory.” Carl Sagan
Carl was addressing a non-scientific community. It is as much fact as you can probably find for a theory.
Whether or not you decide to respond to the huge problem has evolution has with spontaneous generation or the huge problem evolution has with even the mathematical improbability of random generation of a single protein is your own perogative....but you should ask yourself: What are the consequences if I am wrong abou this and the world was actually created....???
There is no scientific way to answer your question.
Gravity is NOT a Theory...Gravity is a scientific law.
Again, you show you have no idea what I am talking about. You ape words well (no offense), but you don't understand the underlying foundation.
The Law of Gravity is a Scientific Law. The Theory of Gravity is Not.
You fall under the same incorrect assumption that there is a heirarchy that goes something like Guess->Hyposthesis->Theory->Law.
This is wrong. Again, I urge you to educate yourself before you make yourself look a bit silly. You have proven your ability to cut and paste.
Please learn the subject matter before responding further. You really are making yourself look ignorant and I have no desire to see you make yourself look more foolish.
I have your best interests at heart.
Instead of trying to insult someone I have never met, I will pray for you....
The logical conclusions of your presuppositions do not match what you observe: the complexity, beauty, and order of the created universe. You build up walls of protection, sometimes irrational, to shield yourself from this point of tension. I will pray, lovingly and with true tears, that the shelter you have built for yourself will crumble allowing the truth of the created world to shine on you.
You can't pray a guy into ignorance.
Thank you. I will pray for you, as well.
The logical conclusions of your presuppositions do not match what you observe: the complexity, beauty, and order of the created universe. You build up walls of protection, sometimes irrational, to shield yourself from this point of tension. I will pray, lovingly and with true tears, that the shelter you have built for yourself will crumble allowing the truth of the created world to shine on you.
The more science learns, the more awesome God appears. God sits outside of time and space. He created the Universe and all its laws, of which we are barely eeking out the smallest inkling.
We are ants on a tapestry trying to describe the whole.
God gave us the ability to think, to discover, to be rational.
The God of science is an awesome God that is beyond imagination.
Sadly, the God of most Creationists is a small God -- Gandalf writ large. Star Trek has characters that can create this small world in a monent's time.
But a God that can design and create Evolution, DNA, quantum strings, the reverse orbit of a local planet, binary star systems, the red Shift, etc. etc. etc.
Anyone who understands science, even a little bit, sees God's hand.
I will pray for you my friend. That you get knowledge. Wisdom will come later.
If you would prefer no money to by used for the research of Evolutionary Biology than you should also be opposed to using advancements in medical science derived from such research.
So, go ahead and throw away your antibiotics and tell your doctor that you do not believe in the junk science of modern medicine.
"The God of science is an awesome God that is beyond imagination. Sadly, the God of most Creationists is a small God -- Gandalf writ large. Star Trek has characters that can create this small world in a monent's time......"
"They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator."
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,
19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools
...
25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Romans 1:18-22,25
Arghh!
Thanks. Now I've got that tune stuck in my head.
Cudda fooled me!
But the converse, isn't.
Genesis 2
1. Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
2. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.
3. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
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