Posted on 09/27/2005 9:10:31 AM PDT by Crackingham
Dover Area School District's federal trial began yesterday in Harrisburg with talk ranging from divine intervention and the Boston Red Sox to aliens and bacterial flagellum. After about 10 months of waiting, the court case against the district and its board opened in Middle District Judge John E. Jones III's courtroom with statements from lawyers and several hours of expert testimony from biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth Miller.
On one side of the aisle, several plaintiffs packed themselves in wooden benches behind a row of attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, Pepper Hamilton LLC and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. On the other side of the aisle, nine school board members, only three of whom were on the board when it voted 6-3 to include a statement on intelligent design in biology classes, piled in behind lawyers from the Thomas More Law Center. Assistant superintendent Michael Baksa and superintendent Richard Nilsen shared a bench with Michael Behe, a Lehigh University professor expected to take the stand in defense of intelligent design.
SNIP
Miller, whose resume is several pages long and includes a stint as a professor at Harvard University, was the first witness called for the parents. Miller co-wrote the Prentice Hall textbook "Biology" with professor Joe Levine. The book is used by 35 percent of the high school students in the United States, Miller said. His were some of the thousands of biology books in which school officials in Cobb County, Ga., ordered stickers to be placed, warning that evolution is only a theory, "not a fact." Miller also testified in a lawsuit filed by Cobb County parents, and a judge later ordered that the stickers be removed.
Yesterday, the scientist's testimony was at times dominated by scientific terminology, though he jokingly told ACLU attorney Witold Walczak he would do his best to explain things in the layman's terms he uses with his mother.
Miller said intelligent design supporters think an intelligent designer must have been involved in the creation of life because science can't yet prove how everything evolved. He said the intelligent design idea that birds were created with beaks, feathers and wings and fish were born with fins is a creationist argument.
Intelligent design supporters often cite "irreducible complexity" in their research, he said. "Irreducible complexity" means that a living thing can't be reduced by any part or it won't work at all. So those living things could not have evolved in the way Darwin suggested; they had to be created with all of their existing parts, Miller said.
Intelligent design proponents often cite the bacterial flagellum, a bacterium with a tail that propels it, Miller said. Behe and his colleagues claim bacterial flagellum had to be created with all of its parts because it couldn't function if any of them were taken away, Miller testified. But scientists have proved that the bacterial flagellum can be reduced to a smaller being, a little organism that operates in a manner similar to a syringe, Miller said.
One of the biggest problems with the scientific viability of intelligent design is there is no way to experiment with the presence of a supernatural being because science only deals with the natural world and theories that are testable, Miller said.
Some people might suspect divine intervention last year when the Boston Red Sox came back to win the World Series after losing three games in a row to the New York Yankees in the playoffs. It may have been, but that's not science, he said. And intelligent design proponents haven't named the "intelligent being" behind their supposition, Miller said. They have suggested, among other things, that it could be aliens, he said. He said there is no evidence to prove intelligent design, so its proponents just try to poke holes in the theory of evolution.
Yes he did, because at least later in life he preferred Lysenko and Lamarkism. But both are evolutionary theories. They just differ in mechanism.
Try, E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1940, p. 8 (quoted in Davidheiser). Glurdjidze was the boyhood friend of Stalin who is quoted.
Cordially,
I was so amazed that I did my own search for this book on google. I can find about 50 references to it, every one of which appears to be to that particular quote, and every one of which appears as part of a creationist debating-point. (I didn't check them all, I can only wade through so much offal)
LOL. You can have a theory without the means to test it -- as with string theory --, but you can't have a theory without predicting or expecting specific kinds of data from specific kinds of observations. A theory that predicts everything predicts nothing.
the question, given the premise of a designer, what would we expect to find in the fossil record or in DNA that is different that what natural selection predicts? No fair waiting until something is found. If you have a theory you have an expectation. So what is it
Yes he did, because at least later in life he preferred Lysenko and Lamarkism. But both are evolutionary theories. They just differ in mechanism.
So why did Christians attack the World Trade Center?
Oh, wait, no, that was Muslims. They're both monotheistic, Abrahamic religions. They just differ in their theology.
Anyone can add a keyword, so it could just as well have been a creo who did it.
No. You obviously haven't explored all the options. For instance, the universe could have popped into existence (via one of the currently proposed theories) and God could have stumbled across it later.
I have to agree, there is no way to directly test for evolution over millions of years. Isn't it nice that humans are so good at problem solving and pattern recognition? With those abilities we've developed ways to observe indirectly and extrapolate from those observations. We see the patterns in those observations and can predict where they lead and can 'post'dict where they've been. We are remarkable animals.
"You can check fossil records and find some evidence of evolution. However, it's a huge jump of faith to extrapolate that and say that the world evolved from some form of primordial sludge at the beginning of time. Even then evolution cannot explain where that primordial sludge came from.
Why should evolution explain the primordial sludge? The ToE is an explanation for what comes after that sludge has produced life. As far as abiogenesis is concerned, it is far too young to have many answers yet.
What tells us that we evolved from that far back is the evidence of common descent. We share much with other species who share the same recent ancestor and less with those species who share a more remote ancestor. The nice thing about science is that we get to make predictions based on the theory. If the prediction holds then we conclude that we are on the right track. If the prediction does not hold then we realize we've either done something wrong or the theory is incomplete or incorrect.
When testing the ToE, we predict that we will find a fossil that will share some features with an older fossil and share features of a newer fossil, putting the unfound fossil somewhere in between the two we have found. Interestingly enough, we have done just that. We have found many fossils that fit in between two other fossils that not only share a few common features but share diagnostic features. They fit in the chronology. They fit in morphology. They fit in ecology. If we want to show that common descent is true, all we have to find is one such fossil. We do not need to have fossils from every single lineage to show the validity of common descent.
"Evolution simply can't explain how the things got there that started evolving, or what set them on that path.
You are right. That does not invalidate common descent.
"If not being able to be proven makes it not be science, evolution is not science.
No science is ever proven. We can have confidence that it is correct, based on successful defense against falsification, but proofs are for math only, and even then the word proof does not mean the same as the common usage of the word. Since 'proof' as you mean it is not a requirement of science, then you have not shown evolution to not be science. There are, however, other criteria that do determine what constitutes a science.
"There are still simply questions that are better answered by divine intervention than by evolution.
That may be true, but that does not make those questions a part of science. Answering those questions is more a part of theology than of anything else.
"Excluding intelligent design as a possible theory isn't science. It's the suppression of science.
It's the suppression of science if and only if ID is science. So far it has not met all the requirements of science.
"Actually we don't have the means to prove or disprove scientific theories, or they're no longer theories. If we can prove it it is considered a law, not a theory. The scientific process is the search for a way to prove or disprove a theory.
You are partially right, the scientific process does try to falsify a hypothesis. However, a theory is never promoted to a law, they are different qualifiers. A theory is always an ongoing struggle to increase our knowledge.
"Exactly, you just contradicted your assertion that intelligent design isn't a scientific theory because it we haven't found a way to prove it.
No, that is not what is being said. What is being said, is that ID is not falsifiable; there is always the possibility that a designer was involved whether the object under study appears to be designed or it appears to be natural. Science requires that all wrong hypotheses that make up a theory be eliminated. Without the ability to falsify hypotheses, the theory loses all purpose and usefulness. This is the case with ID. There is no way to falsify it, therefore we never know if it is right or wrong when using it to diagnose some object.
"Absolute BS. How can you test that the world evolved from nothing at the beginning of time?
We don't. That is not the job of biologists, nor the purpose of the ToE.
"Then they apparently don't know what science is. There isn't an invisible wall between science and religion. A honest scientist will tell you that there's much more about this world that we don't understand than we do understand.
Then he will tell you, as a scientist he has no ability to deal with the supernatural. He may think about it, believe it, even desire it, but science by its very nature deals only with the natural. ID tries to deal with the supernatural and the natural. However, dealing with the supernatural makes ID inherently not science.
"This is why PHDs are Doctorates of Philosophy in a certain discipline. This is because the more you learn, the more you realize how little we really know. If you forget that and close yourself off from possible theories because of dogma, you're limited your ability to learn through the scientific method.
No one is closing science off from alternate theories unless those theories are not theories in the scientific sense, such as homeopathy, or do not meet the criteria for science, like ID.
"ID is a valid scientific theory.
Afraid not, not in its current incarnation. It may be at a later date, but not today.
"Evolution is a valid scientific theory.
Yup.
"People who say that one or the other is not are not doing so on the basis of science, but on the basis of blind faith. That may be faith in God, or faith in something else.
Once again, are you saying that atheists, pagans and heathens are incapable of choosing good, defering their wants and serving others? There are millions of examples around the world and throughout history that would put the lie to your claim.
Methinks it's pretty obvious that the only thing keeping you in check is faith in the Almighty. Regardless of your claims, however, others may not share your lack of self control sans external force.
f.christian, is that you?
I gave the link to my source. But what difference does the source make unless you deny the authenticity of the quotation?
Cordially,
You may think so. But does he agree? From his writing he seems to think that the only thing keeping his behaviour in check is his religious faith.
"Oh, wait, no, that was Muslims. They're both monotheistic, Abrahamic religions. They just differ in their theology."
Ouch. I felt that one over here, and I'm neither Muslim nor Christian.
I've come across stuff like this before where the "original" didn't actually exist, just all the "copies" on creationist websites.
FWIW this example appears to be genuine so apologies for the implied slur on my part.
However, I'm not particularly impressed by an anecdote from a childhood friend of Uncle Joe, presumably remembered from many years before and recounted from memory to a biographer. Stalin had a tendency to say and do whatever was convenient for Stalin at the time. And if we are to judge him by his deeds we can see that he clearly rejected Darwinist evolution. Lysenkoism was an anti-scientific disaster for soviet agriculture and evolutionary biologists had a tendency to get sent to the Gulags.
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