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.
You obviously have nothing intelligent to say. You're just here to spew idiotic inane babble because you lack rationality and honesty. I have nothing more to say to you.
Now, that goes on the list of classic quotes!
"Do you understand what a theory is? Just because I don't know how to prove or disprove something does not mean it's not a scientific theory.
Er, actually, that does mean that it's not a theory.
Theories cannot be proven. Scientific theories can never be proven. There is a requirement, however, that scientific theories can be disproven."
Ok, how do you disprove evolution? How do you disprove the theory of relativity?
How do you prove that is not possible to disprove the theory of intelligent design?
One of the rules of logic is that you cannot prove a negative.
It's not possible to prove that ID cannot be proven. Therefore even by your own definition you cannot prove that it is not a theory.
A definition of something isn't very useful if it's defined as not something.
Not knowing how to disprove something does not mean that it cannot be disproven. It means you don't know.
untrained: There's no way to test for evolution over millions of years either.
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.
You just admitted that the fossil record is evidence. That's one sort of test. There is also the manifest evidence -- and more of it every day -- from genetics. All this evidence points in exactly the same direction, and none of it contradicts the theory of evolution. Again, evolution is not a theory about origins, so your question about where the primordial sludge came from, fascinating as it is (really), doesn't apply.
Further, evolution is not a "leap of faith." It is the best explanation we have that takes in all the known facts. When a better explanation comes along, that new explanation will become the operative theory. There is no faith involved.
Evolution simply can't explain how the things got there that started evolving, or what set them on that path.
Again, evolution isn't about origins and it doesn't pretend to be.
If not being able to be proven makes it not be science, evolution is not science.
No scientific theory is ever proved. In this evolution is exactly the same as every other scientific theory.
There are still simply questions that are better answered by divine intervention than by evolution.
Not in science.
Excluding intelligent design as a possible theory isn't science. It's the suppression of science.
All scientific theories are subject to testing. What's the test for id? What does the theory predict (i.e., "If id is true, then facts a, b, and c will emerge").
G: "Right. You also have to have a means of attempting to prove or disprove it."
untrained: 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.
We don't ever prove theories, but we do look for evidence and for possible disproof. Theories don't "graduate" to laws.
G: "For the perhaps billionth time this month, no scientific theory is ever proven. Why should the theory of evolution be different?"
untrained: 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.
Intelligent design isn't a theory because we can't test for it. That's not the same as "prove" it. It also predicts nothing ... like I say in the next sentence you quoted.
G: " ID does not rise to the level of a scientific theory because it can't be tested by any known method, and it predicts nothing."
untrained: Absolute BS. How can you test that the world evolved from nothing at the beginning of time?
Please note that your question had nothing to do with mine, so it was non-responsive.
Your objection to the theory of evolution is based on a false premise (that evolution includes something other than speciation and what happens over long periods of time), and if it were stated correctly, so as to eliminate the matter of origins, it would still be wrong. When he proposed the theory of evolution, Darwin noted many possible tests for the theory, and they've been met both in ways he expected and in ways he never anticipated.
G: "That people who do not accept ID believe that God does not exist is contrary to fact. There are many right here on FR who believe in God, who understand that the theory of evolution is science, and that ID isn't."
untrained: 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.
We disagree on whether the people in question understand science, and we further disagree on whether the people who are touting id do. Your note about an honest scientist is completely true, by the way. I suspect that scientists have a much better grasp of what we don't understand than most of us do. What keeps science and religion in different realms, I would say, is the need for evidence in science and the need for faith in religion. While there may be room for evidence in religion, there is no room for faith in science. (Do not read this as an attempt to belittle religion; it's not. I merely point out that they're different).
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.
And injecting any given religion into science is injecting that religion's dogma.
ID is a valid scientific theory.
Evolution is a valid scientific theory.
ID is not a valid scientific theory for a number of reasons. There's no way to test for it. It rests on proving a negative and an argument from astonishment, which is a logical fallacy ("It is impossible for 'x' to have happened, therefore it must be id"). And it makes no predictions.
On the other hand, the theory of evolution has withstood many tests over roughly 150 years. Transitional fossils, lacking in Darwin's day, have been found all over the world. Genetic mapping has demonstrated that certain animals are related to each other in ways we hadn't suspected. But none of it has given any scientist reason to doubt the overall theory. It's unquestionably science.
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.
We clearly disagree.
Or what you said.
I do not rape and pillage.
I accept the fact of evolution.
I do not believe in creationism.
Therefore, I am a superior moral being, seeing as though I don't rape and pillage, even though I supposedly can.
I am better than you.
/creationist "logic."
But neither have anything to do with Darwin. Lamarck at least was a scientist who just happened to get a lot of things wrong, but can't really be blamed given the data he had access to. Lysenko, whom Stalin backed, was not a scientist by any definition of the word. Calling Stalin a believer in evolution is a huge stretch, as his conception bears zero relation to what scientists believe.
Try, E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1940, p. 8
Thanks, I will. I've ordered a copy of the book at my local university library. I might add my mild bemusement at the fact that Stalinist propaganda is being treated as an authoritative source, but I'll check it out regardless.
Cladistics is at least as good circumstantial evidence as finding a trout in the milk. All criteria lead to essentially the same tree; no lawns either.
Or it could be what you said.
How about, because we want to? It's not being done for reward or to avoid punishment, but to live amicably with one's neighbors. In other words, it's truly from the heart. Many so-called Christians, however, apparently only do it to achieve heaven or to avoid hell.
For thousands of years before Christ people were quite comfortably (how else would civilization have arisen?). And for a couple of thousand years after Christ a goodly portion of the planet has lived quite comfortably not knowing about Christ.
Now, you apparently seem incapable of doing the right thing without external supervision. However, do not assign your motives to others, especially when you lack evidence to support your claims.
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