Most of the ranges around here ban steel-core bullets. Something about punching through the backstops...

Nicely put. Your professor's three rules apply pretty well to conversational topics, too.

I must admit that I'm struck by how many smart people seem so stubbornly averse to introducing ID in a science class. From my perspective, acknowledging the field of ID while teaching evolution provides the teacher with a number of object lessons: 1) distinguish the "theory" of ID from a scientific theory by addressing falsifiability, scientific method, etc. 2) distinguish the science of evolution (as not concerned with first causes) from the metaphysical concerns of ID (which necessarily is -- despite what it's current proponents claim), and 3) show how, in theory, the science of evolution is unperturbed by the philosophy of ID, and vice versa.

No "theory" requiring a god or invisible intelligence or burning sage or nineteen-teated mythical bear can be falsified – and is therefore not science.

Interestingly enough, this formulation ends up putting extremely large dents in science itself.

If a non-materialistic cause exists, it will not be falsifiable, and thus not science - and thus science's explanation for whatever-it-is will be automatically, inexorably, unavoidably wrong.

So to the extent that religion has any truth, science will hold some variable quantity of ineradicable wrongness. And that wrongness will be understood to exist by the religious majority.

Scary. The Rant, I mean. First time I ever read one, and agreed with every damn point.

I'll go now, and not read anything else: Why spoil the mood/buzz?

Gun Control: Right on. I would add one thing on concealed carry and that is a federal law that each state be required to honor the concealed carry permits of every other state.

Jeff G writes:

[[words to the effect that teaching ID is a great opportunity to show the difference between science and metaphysics]]

Unfortunately, that will not placate most of the people advocating teaching ID in the schools because what they really want is to get ID stamped with the imprimatur of science. You can't accomplish that if you make an explicit distinction between science and ID.

Robert writes:

> If a non-materialistic cause exists,
> it will not be falsifiable, and thus
> not science - and thus science's
> explanation for whatever-it-is will be
> automatically, inexorably, unavoidably
> wrong.

That's true only if you assume that science purports to explain everything. While this is a common view among religionists, whose own beliefs typically claim to do just that, it's not how science works. Unlike religion, it is ok in science to say, "We don't know, and we might never know." If a phenomenon truly has a nonmaterial explanation, then it will not be accessible to the scientific method, and it will get thrown into the "don't know" category. And, within the context of science, that will be the right explanation.

-rpl

Pertaining to ID, it is a theory which cannot be proven by science. Does this make it any less worthy of teaching in schools? I don't know.

One thing is certain though, each and every one of us will find out some day whether it is fact or not.

We are all people of faith. What happens when we die is unknowable. Whether Christian, Hindu, Jewish, etc... or atheist, what we believe happens after this life is an article of faith.

What a lot of people seem to forget is that it's okay for ANYONE to say "We don't know, and we might never know." It's pure social pressure that compels smart people to say stupid things rather than admit this natural and normal condition.

Both science *and* religion fail when they refuse to draw the line with that statement. It's trivial to scientifically demonstrate that the origin of the universe is impossible without one of two things happening:

1. Something outside of the natural laws of physics intervened.

2. The natural laws of physics were (and potentially still are) different than we understand them.

Which is right? We don't know, and we might never know. They're both wildly unlikely. But if you inject one simple precondition, you can choose one.

Is there anything outside the normal laws of physics? (Most people would call it God.)

If so, choice 1 is the most likely answer. If not, choice 2 is the most likely answer. But the *proper* answer to that question is "We don't know, and we might never know."

As a person of faith I would be content for authorities in the classroom indoctrinating my child to proceed after a simple caveat and concession of the form:

"We are sure there are things we do not know, and we are unsure that there may be things we CAN not know; but this is what we think we know and we want you to know it, too."

Gravity is a "fact" in that we can observe it happening, and even up until the 1930's there were U.S. highschool textbooks teaching that the sun glowed and provided us energy from "gravitational infall" of meteors and cosmic dust, falling by gravity into the mass of the sun. This was a good theory, consistant with most the data available thru most of the 19th century -- and to challenge the theory of gravity and to challenge the great Sir Issac Newton would have been unthinkable. And yet, God set the sun to shine by theories of his own, and the theory of gravitional infall was incorrect.

NOW, we think that the sun shines by a process of nuclear fusion. There is a minor matter of missing (undetectable? un-produced? shielded? ) neutrinos that still makes this a less-than-100% satisfactory theory. (God not only plays dice with the universe, He sometimes throws his dice where we have not yet learned to look.) But fusion's a better theory than the grav-theory we had last century and our children should know it -- and carry on researching the matter.

It's seems to me that Darwin's understanding of evolution is as well established as Newton's understanding of gravity - and should be taught as such. We can see mutations happening, we can see extinctions and survivals and the passage of expressed traits across the generations. Our children need to understand that this happens -- and that other dedicated researchers like Luther Burbank and the Russian, Lysenko, have looked hard for other explanations for changes in the forms of plants and animals and have not succeeded in developing a comparably good theory.

But they are children who should keep looking -- not simply accept the revealed "wisdom" of the textbook (30 years out of date by the time it gets thru the publication and approval process) and the teacher -- (with her degree in education, after all, not biology.)

I will NOT tolerate a teacher who stands before the classroom asking for a show of hands in response to the question of the form: "How many of you have parents who taught you 'God made all the plants and animals'? Okay, you lot are wrong, and your parents are stupid." (I have an example of this sort of pedagogery on videotape ...)

Unlike religion, it is ok in science to say, "We don't know, and we might never know."

Not exactly.

Firstly, it is completely ok for religions to make the same statement since almost all of them hold that God is infinite and, at some level, beyond the human capacity for understanding. Compare this to the subset of scientists who believe in Materialism and would say that that which is untestable doesn't exist.

Secondly, a statement of "we don't know yet" is not the same as a statement of "we cannot know ever." In fact it implies that we should keep trying which is antithetical to the latter statement.

Thirdly, you will never get scientists to agree on "we cannot know ever" because (1) that would stop their grant money (2) a proof for that proposition is likely impossible because it would require knowing the nature of the unknown quanitity.

I don't know whether I like ID or if it is real science. Much like ID's critics, I haven't read anything actually written by the ID crowd. I do find criticisms of IDs unfalsifability laughable considering the shoddy record evolution has for passing falsifiers.

Mr. Green,

I think you're looking for the word "populace." Feel free to delete this comment.

-Michael

Dear Religionists,

Send your kids to private schools if you think their faith is so weak that knowing science will break their fragile little minds. Seriously.

Love,
Tim

That said: this wouldn't be an issue if we just went ahead and privitized/voucherized schools to give parents more choice.

Pouncer writes of 1930s textbooks with kooky theories of how the sun worked. The fact that textbooks are sometimes poorly written, out of date, or just plain wrong has nothing to do with what is or is not science, nor on the nature of science as contrasted with religion. I think we can all agree that textbooks on every subject, be it math, history, grammar, science, or whatever, should be reviewed for accuracy according to the current understanding of the subject. When this fails to happen, the fault is with the educators, not with the subject of the faulty textbook.

Actually, the discovery of nuclear fusion as the power source of the sun is a good object lesson in the difference between science and pseudoscience. Before fusion, the going theory was that the sun was powered by gravothermal contraction (which, by the way, has nothing to do with infalling meteorites). Then someone noticed that this mechanism could only power the sun for 50 thousand years or so, and geologists were starting to find rocks they believed to be older than that. In other words, the theory was falsified by the observations of geologists, and it was eventually discarded.

The replacement theory, nuclear fusion, has faced tests of its own, notably the missing neutrino problem mentioned above. This caused some scientists to theorize that neutrinos have mass and can therefore change types from electron neutrino to muon neutrino to tau neutrino and back. A pseudo-science would stop here, having saved the theory of fusion as a power source for stars, but of course science didn't stop there. An experiment was devised that could test the theory of massive neutrinos and neutrino oscillation. Had the experiment failed to come out the right way, the theory of neutrino oscillation would have to be scrapped. As it turns out, however, it looks as if neutrino oscillation can explain the missing solar neutrinos. In other words, an observation that something was incomplete in our current theories led us to speculate about what might be going on and to design an experiment to test whether those speculations were right or not.

Pseudo-sciences like Intelligent Design observe none of these processes. That's not to say that you shouldn't believe in a creator that set the universe in motion if that seems likely to you, but any such speculation is not a scientific theory, and my objection is specifically to attempts to characterize them as science.

Discussions like this one and similar ones on other forums show, if nothing else, that science is already poorly enough understood by many, if not most people. Muddying the waters by teaching as science theories that don't follow the scientific method (and in some cases explicitly reject the scientific method) can only further aggravate that situation.

-rpl

Stephen,

So you're pro-choice. And won't change your mind. That sucks. Why are libetarians so libertine?

I suspect the majority of the country would find libetarian politics acceptable, if there were libetarians who were religious, pro-life, etc. Hedonism is never a great political strategy for society, and whatever else you say, without religion or some other outword form of moral self-restraint like being pro-life, society will continue to think of libetarians as a bunch of morons.

...I haven't read anything actually written by the ID crowd.

I have. You can summarize volumes of ID stuff with a single statement: "I personally don't see how that could have happened without a guiding intelligence, therefore it didn't."

The rest is just fluff. Statistical "analysis" with numbers pulled out of the air, for example. Attacks on evolution that typically misunderstand the body of knowledge on which it is based. Attacks on science in general as being faith-based, attempting to establish some kind of equivalence between science and the their pseudo-science. "Thought experiments" that strongly resemble the stuff graduate theology students go through in their classes, and of course that's no accident.

After going through three or four sources that all said basically the same thing, I decided it was a waste of time to go any further. Recent ID entries seem to be the same as earlier stuff except that they are getting slicker in their presentation and rhetoric to hide the logical flaws.

RPL: "Pouncer writes of 1930s textbooks with kooky theories of how the sun worked."

It only looks kooky in retrospect. In 1880 or so this was state-of-the-art physics.

In-fall and contraction were both posited. "In-fall" was the superior theory, as it extended the apparent age of the sun past that 50,000 year limit RPL (historically correctly) cites - thereby bringing solar physics closer in line with terrestrial geology.

I make no defense of "Intelligent Design", which I agree appears to be un-falsifiable and therefore unscientific.

But I notice RPL makes no defense of classroom instructors who undercut parental authority. I appreciate that.

I agree that the unending process of iterative refinement of human understanding that we call "the scientific method" is deeply misunderstood by most of the public and, I suggest, most teachers. As I object to I.D. , I likewise object to compulsary indoctrination of children by public officials who couldn't, themselves, distinguish between mutation and mutilation -- Darwin or Lysynko.

Vouchers, please.

"We are sure there are things we do not know, and we are unsure that there may be things we CAN not know; but this is what we think we know and we want you to know it, too."

Pouncer: That sounds a lot like known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

Sydney Carlton -

What the Hell is a "libetarian?" I thought that it might be a typo, until you used it three times. Enlighten us?

Sydney,

I think there's a confusion in your terminology. A libertine would be someone with no moral principles, not a person with moral principles different from your own. A hedonist--as the term is used these days--is someone who pursues immediate, temporary pleasures, ignoring the long-term consequences of his actions. I saw nothing in Stephen's post to suggest that either of these terms apply to him.

Pouncer wrote: "Vouchers, please."

Vouchers will still allow the state to control the curriculum of the schools, and it will have the effect of bringing private schools under state control, since they will not be able to refuse vouchers and stay in business. The better answer is to privatize the entire system. Vouchers would only be acceptable as an intermediate step towards that.

Three words: Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?

Bill,

It was a typo. I'm trying to give up coffee and it's not working.

Ardsgaine,

Being pro-choice is necessarily the result of the liberalization of sexaul ethics, which of course is all about immediate gratification of sexual pleasure while ignoring, or preventing, the natural results of such pleasure (children and marital fidelity, among others). It also primarily benefits MEN, since it absolves them of responsibility in sexual choices (making it, in truth, not a "woman's choice" but a "woman's burden"). Anyway, I'm coming at this from a Catholic position, so I can see where the terminology might confuse us.

I'm always told by libertarians that merely because something might be ok under the law doesn't mean it should be morally approved (for example, the legalization of drugs would correspond with increased social disapproval of the use of drugs so that the change in the law would have little if any effect in its practice). But despite that, there seems to be little if any moral scruples that accompany the increase in legal freedom by the political advocates of that freedom. Do libertarians want a world where it is legal to have an abortion, but the morality of the people is such that no one does it? Don't bet on it.

Sydney wrote:
Being pro-choice is necessarily the result of the liberalization of sexaul ethics, which of course is all about immediate gratification of sexual pleasure while ignoring, or preventing, the natural results of such pleasure (children and marital fidelity, among others).

No, being pro-choice is the result of recognizing that a woman has the right to make medical decisions about her body, including the decision of whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

Also, I disagree with you that the liberalization of sexual ethics is all about "immediate gratification of sexual pleasure." It is about people making their own decisions about what will best constitute their happiness without reference to the puritanical notions of sex held by the Catholic Church, or other such religious organizations.

The ascetic and the hedonist are just two sides of the same coin. Both view sex as something dirty. One embraces it, while the other rejects it. There is another point of view, though. One that treats sex as an important human value that should be treated with respect rather than dragged through the mud.

I don't understand the whole "When does life begin?" arguement. Since we define clinical death as the absence of brain activity, why not just define the start of life with the start of brain activity, that way abortion would be legal until the fetus was around 21 to 24 years old or maybe 18 if they went into the Marines.

I took honors English at Mizzou in the fall of '76 from the biggest douchebag--bar none--that I have ever suffered through. We nearly came to blows and he flunked me, too, even though I had at least 3 A+ papers.

I guess when you threaten them they have the right, though. You can take the boy out of the Ozarks...

(I doubt it was this fellow Cantwell. My guy had dark hair and a beard, the douche.)

"Both view sex as something dirty."

If you think that Catholic theology teaches sex is something dirty, then you have NO idea what the hell you're talking about. Read Theology of the Body, in which Pope JP2 discusses EROTICISM in marriage, and you'll find that from a Catholic perspective sex is anything but dirty.

"No, being pro-choice is the result of recognizing that a woman has the right to make medical decisions about her body, including the decision of whether to carry a pregnancy to term."

WRONG. The entire abortion debate should in fact be about when you as a person view the fetus becoming human. If the fetus isn’t human yet then of course the mother has the right to choose – it’s just another animal (since it is living tissue). No one (I think) debates this. But once the fetus is human the fetus’ (or now a human) right to life (man’s inalienable right to life, liberty, etc…) trumps the mothers right to choose since her right would infringe on the rights of the human inside of her.

So in fact when Stephen Green says “I support a woman's right to choose, for whatever reason, right up until the natural viability of the fetus.” he is really saying that the fetus is not really a human until it’s viable (Which is an acceptable, defensible position I believe). Though one must understand that others (say a religious person) might believe that humanity starts at conception – therefore the woman’s right to choose is always overridden by the fetus’ right to life. Still others might define the transition from fetus to human when brain activity begins, say around week 4-6.

I suspect the majority of the country would find libetarian politics acceptable, if there were libetarians who were religious, pro-life,

Right here we see a fundamental confusion, as apparently Sydney is looking for libertarian "politics" that are "religious, pro-life" etc. There are plenty of religious, pro-life libertarians, after all.

Plenty of libertarians are as religious as the next guy, although there is a streak of anti-church anti-authoritarianism as well, but the idea that any politics should be "religious" is anathema to libertarians.

So Sydney is likely to find plenty of religious libertarians, but none who are fans of mixing religion and government.

On pro-life issues, there is a robust strain of libertarian thought that begins with the pro-life premise - that the fetus at some point (maybe conception) is a person who has the right to life, liberty, etc. Libertarians, like everyone else, differ on the point at which the fetus should be protected as a person, but there is nothing inherently incoherent about being a pro-life libertarian.

Ah, some day you unbelievers will be dancing in the fires of hell, lamenting the fact that you were so wrong while you slowly roast. Have fun.

Good thing I had my surgeon install that handy pop-up timer in my abdomen! When Satan says medium rare, he means medium rare!

Holy crap! I agree with every one of your points. Let's start a political party.

Abortion: The problem with the "but only if the mother's life or health is endangered" exception is that "health" is so poorly defined. Mother's life is endangered, sure. Can't argue with that. Pretty clear really.

But what does it mean that her health is endangered? Too often, the mother's health is considered to be endangered if she says that she doesn't want the baby--all that mental anguish, you know. The health of the mother can mean too many things and weakens the ability to find compromise.

Abortion, gun control, and evolution? Who cares about that crap?

What do you think about asparagus? And, you'd better be able to back that up!!!!!

Fentriss wrote:
Ah, some day you unbelievers will be dancing in the fires of hell, lamenting the fact that you were so wrong while you slowly roast. Have fun.
-----------

Well, you know you won't be lonely then, don't you?

Pride goeth, and all that.

I wish the pundits and newsies would shut it on the abortion deal everytime a judge is appointed or a person runs for office.

Half of us out there aren't women. There are more important things to discuss.

Michael,

I think you're looking for the word "populace." Feel free to delete this comment.

Forget deleting the comment; Stephen better hurry up and fix the original before Don't-Call-Me-Dave reads it! I'd hate to see our kind host receive that kind of drubbing that would certainly ensue...

Texican --

"One thing is certain though, each and every one of us will find out some day whether it is fact or not."

No, we won't. ID believers will believe it to the moment of their death, and then will become corpses. Corpses can't know anything, accordingly they'll never know they were wrong. Death renders "finding out" impossible.

By the way, if I were a theist, I'd be insulted by the arguments of the Intelligent Design folk. God couldn't design a system to have life arise from inorganic compnents, but instead had to stick his thumb in somewhere between the cooling of the Earth and the formation of the first living cell? What kind of omnipotent and omniscent Creator would be so incompetent that he couldn't set things up to evolve from the Big Bang to mankind without assistance?

Heresy alert:

Whether one embraces the theory of evolution as dictated by modern science, or religiously based creationist models hardly matters. Most people can safely enjoy their lives holding utterly ridiculous views on the topic without injury to themselves or others.

In the grand scheme of things, we laypersons take the word of physicists, geneticists and biologists as an article of faith as pure as that which has true believers immersed in their bibles - in that the vast majority of us have no ability to "peer review" the pronouncements of men of science any more than we do those of career theologians.

Having followed the advances in the science of genetics over the past 10 years very closely, and witnessed too many accepted "fundamental facts" (some of which underpin evolutionary theory) overturned to count, I suspect that it may be premature to enter into this particular debate with the aim of proving anybody "wrong".

One for Fentriss from the Old Jokes Department:
Well, if you're not there - how could hell be so bad?

I pretty much agree with everything you said, except I'm confused on one point:

My position, naturally, extends to issues like must-issue laws for concealed weapons permits.

I don't exactly understand what you're saying here. You agree with must-issue laws, etc., or you don't agree? Because, even though I believe our Constitution allows us the freedom to be armed, I think in the interests of crime-control that licensing is a good thing.

If a non-materialistic cause exists, it will not be falsifiable, and thus not science - and thus science's explanation for whatever-it-is will be automatically, inexorably, unavoidably wrong.

This is of course correct.

Science is based on the principle of Naturalism: That all things have natural causes. Natural causes are those that act in all ways as material causes, that is, there is no intervention from beyond the material Universe.

If there were any such intervention, Science, as you say, would give us the wrong answer.

It's an interesting point that Science is no enormously successful. If there is a non-materialistic cause to anything, we haven't seen it.

To put it another way: The Theory of Evolution appears to be correct, based on immense amounts of evidence. If there is an Intelligent Designer, then ID is working in exactly the same way we would expect evolution to proceed naturally.

Which doesn't falsify ID, because you can't falsify ID.

"I support a woman's right to choose, for whatever reason, right up until the natural viability of the fetus. That's a variable, but generally around the start of the third trimester. After that point, I am still pro-choice, but only if the mother's life or health is endangered. End of rant, end of debate. You will not change my mind, so don't even try."

Stephen,

I am not about to try to change your mind on this one, so I hope I can tickle a response out of you anyway.

The idea of a mother's health or life being endangered is the key part here. When you say that, what do you mean by "health" and to what degree do you mean "endangered"?

It is important, not for anything other than your own determination of if you want Roe as it is now applied overturned. Right now, health can mean anything, and endangered means anything, since pregnancy itself is risky to an extent.

Further, given that Roe is even being used to invalidate parental notification laws, what is your stance on them?

It sounds, to me, that you support some 'reasonable' restrictions on abortion. I suspect my definition of reasonable is more restrictive than yours, which is fine. However, I also suspect (but may be wrong) that you would prefer to not have Roe overturned. I think this means that you are for keeping the very ruling that prevents the reasonable restrictions you think should occur.

Am I wrong?

i asked my 15 year old neice (who attends public school, and comes from a secular nuclear family) if ID should be taught in her science curriculum. she said, "no way! that is religion not science!" and she pointed out that if ID was taught in her science class, all other manner of religious theories of creation would have to be taught also.

her best gf was also there (home-schooled, and from a fundamentalist christian nuclear family) so i polled her too. She said, "of course ID should be taught in science class!" (even tho she is homeschooled) and proceeded to elaborate that Darwin had actually accepted Jesus as his savior on his deathbed.

wow.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Aaargh!

It's an interesting point that Science is so enormously successful.

What a strange typo to make.

So what's this about a "burning sage"? I haven't heard that angle before. Sounds a bit contrived.

So what's this about a "burning sage"? I haven't heard that angle before. Sounds a bit contrived.

She said, "of course ID should be taught in science class!" (even tho she is homeschooled) and proceeded to elaborate that Darwin had actually accepted Jesus as his savior on his deathbed.

Didn't happen.

And what's with the double post? %^&*$ software.

lol pixy, of course it isn't true. i can't believe anyone could swallow that wad.
;-)
i'm just polling the youth.

Sydney is correct in pointing out abortion is a 'woman's burden' not a choice. For some unknown reason we women have convinced ourselves that abortion empowers us, when in reality all it has done is allow men the opportunity to avoid responsibilty. That said, the main pro-abortion argument heard today is not about women's health but is about women having to face the burden of poverty because she bears children. Today, women have all the resources available to allow for the opportunity to become financially independent yet we still complain that having babies will impoverish us.

The right to abort has weakened, not empowered women. One reason why Susan B. Anthony fought for women's rights was so that women were not forced to abort their children out of financial desperation. On the other hand, Margaret Sanger(founder of Planned Parenthood) believed abortion was a means for women to avoid poverty (poverty breeds poor people) in order to create a perfect society. Sanger was also a noted racist and wanted to rid her ideal society of those 'black people'.

In any case Stephen, it doesn't matter what your stance is regarding abortion since all your rights to your sperm and potential off-spring were effectively castriated in 1973. Today, women literally have men 'by the balls' so to speak. In effect, Roe vs Wade represents a quagmire for libertarian males who are not free from this court decreed government restriction.

I posted this elsewhere in an ID commentary:
Gee, we kinda went into the whole 'first moments' possibilities... in third grade. Devine intervention in the Big Bang and pathways of evolution was brought up as a considered philisophical position, along with a disclaimer that no one had ever gotten scientific proof, or even a good note from The Management in 8 foot tall flaming letters, that such a thing existed.
This was in a private, not public school, though. And it was, I think, at least fairly helpful to have a teacher point out the difference between faith and science, which was something along the lines of what pouncer and Caliban were wanting, right?

Let's start at the beginning, the Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve, now I'm Roman Catholic, and I don't believe that it is a factual story. Have you ever played phone booth, you stand in a line and whisper something to the person next to you, when it gets to the end of the line, the story that you told is usually completely different from what you told the person next to you. Now it wasn't until 1611 that the first King James Version of the Bible was written, that's one thousand six hundred and eleven years plus since the events in the Bible occurred, until then the Bible was passed down verbally from generation to generation, in other words the stories can change.

I tend to believe that Adam and Eve were the last of the early humans, the missing link if you will, the "scientists" of the day probably studied them to find out what they were, they probably could learn and speak to others, and they probably had normal children, that's why there is a verbal and now a written history of them.

Now all that said (and an overuse of the word probably), evolution may have been described in the Bible. Of course this is all speculation, say a hypothesis, on my part.

Evolution is a fact – species change over time.

If this were all there were to the evolution debate, there would be no debate. What you mean to say is,

That species change over time is a fact - The theory of Evolution offers an apparently convincing explanation for this.

As to this:

The fossil record demonstrates this beyond debate.

The fossil record is sparse and open to many interpretations. If it were not, there would, indeed, be no debate.

No "theory" requiring a god or invisible intelligence or burning sage or nineteen-teated mythical bear can be falsified – and is therefore not science.

ID is certainly falsifiable - demonstrate (conjecture alone is not sufficient) a mechanism by which those organic systems which have been deemed "irreducibly complex" could have evolved by random mutation. It is every bit as falsifiable as standard Evolution.

New discoveries in microbiology are also challenging the Neo-Darwinian paradigm. It is not settled "science" by any stretch of the imagination. I recommend keeping an open mind, in the true spirit of scientific inquiry.

Reid -

ID is certainly falsifiable - demonstrate (conjecture alone is not sufficient) a mechanism by which those organic systems which have been deemed "irreducibly complex" could have evolved by random mutation. It is every bit as falsifiable as standard Evolution.

I agree that conjecture alone is not sufficient, however "irreducible complexity" itself is nothing but conjecture, an argument from incredulity, stating "I can't believe this happened, so it must be a designer."

Uh, yeah, ok.

Abortion. I support the woman's right to choose - up untill the fetus becomes a human being. I do not care if it is "viable". If it is a human being - we can not dispose of her simply because she can not survive on her own. If it is not a human being, then it does not matter if it is viable - tapeworms are viable, that does not give them any rights to stay alive in one's body.

How to decide when it is a human being? Well, hard to tell. I'd rather err on the side orf caution. Details here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/philyopain/#item7331

You want to talk high-school scientific, or real scientific? Ok, then. Evolution - is not a "fact". Neither is "gravity". No scientific theory is. Any scientific theory (except math) is a *model* that with certain precision explains and helps predict things we observe. Evolution theory as it is now - is one of the less precise models. That, however, has no bearing on teaching it in schools.

I can not accept the idea that we can separate everything into two categories: things that governmnet can forcefully teach and things that government can not teach. By any criteria - be it "science is good, Creationism is bad", or "Catholicism is good, Baptism is bad", ot "stem cell research is good, research of the mating habits of the Berkley class of 1940 is bad" - I do not care. I do not think that you have the right to forcefully take my money to pay for your studies. Especially, if they are offensive to me. For whatever reason - you have no right to disregard my views even if they are the most ridiculously non-scientific ones.

The thing that gets me about the Darwinian argument is that Darwin was mute on the subject of the origin of life. His theory contemplated the origin of species, not the ultimate origin (or origins) of life itself. To argue that more complex life forms demonstrably evolved from less complex ones is quite different from positing the actual beginning of life.

Now, how you get from speciation in the form of wing morphology in birds to the original molecular interactions which produced the first DNA transcription is beyond me.

The Evolutionists are fooling themselves if they believe that Darwin has the answer to this. It simply isn't there.

The argument goes like this:

Apes evolved to form Man, therefore molecules self-organized to form a single celled organism using DNA to encode the chemicals necessary to become self-replicating.

I don't see it. The leap is one of religion, just as surely as ID is.

I sigh often over this issue and, in honor of our host, won't try.

Is anyone conversant with the gap between micro and macro evolution, in terms of the evidence?

syn: For some unknown reason we women have convinced ourselves that abortion empowers us, when in reality all it has done is allow men the opportunity to avoid responsibilty.

Avoid responsibility for what? For supporting children they father? Or, as Sydney C. might put it, avoiding taking responsibility for 'the natural results of [sexual] pleasure?' I hate to break it to you, but men have always had that opportunity. The only medical procedure that interferes with it is DNA testing, and the only legal one is paternity laws. And, given the number of 'deadbeat dads' running around, neither of those is doing much in that regard. What abortion does is empower women to avoid that responsibility as well (if they choose to do so). The notion that it's weakened women is utter nonsense.

A few comments up, John wrote -

Now it wasn't until 1611 that the first King James Version of the Bible was written, that's one thousand six hundred and eleven years plus since the events in the Bible occurred, until then the Bible was passed down verbally from generation to generation, in other words the stories can change.

John is sadly misinformed about the origin of the King James Bible. It wasn't written down from oral tradition; it was translated from written sources in Greek, half of which (the Old Testament portions) were translations from earlier sources in Hebrew.

Some parts of the Bible, such as the stories of Adam and Eve, were indeed handed down orally for quite some time before being written down. But the vast majority of the Bible was not passed down orally, but was written down by the original authors (or, in some cases, dictated to their secretaries -- this was the case with most of Paul's letters, for instance).

Just wanted to correct a misapprehension here. :-)

I'm trying to believe in the theory of evolution. It's tough going. I have to squinch up my eyes and imagine real hard. But I'm determined to do it, because it's the Right Thing To Do, and keeps people from yelling at you.

Trouble is, I keep running into bumps and potholes.

For example, I worry about The Amoeba In The Soup. We're told that a jillion years ago all sorts of glop and gunch sloshed around in the primeval seas, and lo! a wee little amoeba-thingy accidentally assembled itself, the way a car does when you shake a bin of parts. It then evolved furiously into Bill Gates.

OK. Fine by me. I can believe that Bill has amoeboid ancestry. Except: How do we know that the amoeba happened? Other than by blind faith?

Be patient with me. Permit me a few rude questions about the Soup, such as might be asked by a garage mechanic. Maybe I'm being uncouth, but I don't know any better.

(1) Do we have any evidential reason for believing that the Soup ever existed? Do we, for example, have residual pools of the Soup? Dried deposits somewhere? No. Do we know enough about the formation of planets to know what the soup had to be? No. Then how do we know that the Soup, if any, was the right kind?

Ah. We know it, say evolutionists, because life appeared, which it couldn't have done without the Soup. Therefore the right Soup must have existed.

Good try. But this is reasoning from a previously accepted theory to nonexistent evidence, or, more bluntly, imagining evidence to support a theory that we are determined to believe. Scientifically, this is bad juju. One derives theories from evidence, not evidence from theories. (If memory serves, it is also precisely the Catholic proof of the existence of God: The world is here, something must have created it, therefore God. Or the Soup. Personally, I incline to a primal Salad.)

(2) Well, if we don't know that a workable Soup existed, then surely the formation of life has been demonstrated in the lab? No. You can put various forms of goop and degradation in a flask, and heat it, and run sparks through it. You get chemicals found in living things. You don't get life.

(3) OK. No doubt you can show mathematically that, given time, the amoeba (or Gates) would be likely to form? No, actually. Statistical chemistry isn't that good.

Evolutionists love time. It covers up fundamental implausibilities. All those gazillions of atoms and molecules, sloshing for billions of years. Surely an amoeba would have to clot out of it, if not a bull elephant. Billions of years, mind you. Virtually anything would have to form in so much time. No?

Not necessarily. Probabilities can be more daunting than one might expect. Things that seem intuitively likely sometimes just flat aren't. To illustrate the point:

We've all heard Sir James Jeans' assertion that a monkey, typing randomly, would eventually produce all the books in the British Museum. Sound reasonable? Sure, at first glance. But would the monkey in fact ever get even one book?

No. Not in any practical sense.

Consider a thickish book of, say, 200,000 words. By the newspaper estimate that there are on average five letters per word, that's a million letters. What's the likelihood that our monkey, typing randomly (ignoring upper case and punctuation) will get the book in a given string of a million letters?

He has a 1/26 chance of getting the first letter, times a 1/26 chance of the second, and so on. The chance of getting the book in a million characters is one in 26 to the millionth power. I don't have a calculator handy, but we can get an approximation. Since 26 = 10 exp(log 26), then 26 exp(1,000,000) = 10 exp(log 26 x 1,000,000) . Since log 10 = 1 and log 100 = 2, log 26 has to be between, somewhere on the low end. Call it 1.2.

The monkey thus has one chance in 12 followed by 1,000,000 zeros. (OK, 999,999 for the picky.) That's what mathematicians call a BLG (Brutishly Large Number). For practical purposes, one divided by that rascal is zero. If you had a billion billion monkeys (more monkeys than I want) typing a billion billion letters a second, for a billion billion times the estimated age of the universe (10 exp 18 seconds is commonly given), the chance of getting the book would still be essentially zero.

Now, does the problem of accidentally getting an amoeba involve similar improbabilities? We don't know. A conclusion: Appealing to billions of years of sloshing is not a substitute for knowing what you're talking about.

To sum up all of the foregoing: We don't know that a suitable soup existed. We can't reproduce the evolution of life in the lab, from any Soup. And we can't show it to be mathematically plausible.

Might this not be grounds for withholding judgement?

Naw.

Another point--tricky, crucial, and carefully overlooked--is that we don't really know what life is. Evolutionists assume that life is purely chemical: that if we could somehow assemble an artificial cat atom by atom, and then set it to reacting, we would have a genuine, living cat, that would eat mice and miss its litter box. But would we? All known life has come from previous life. Is life merely a complex of chemical reactions? Or is it something that inhabits certain complexes of reactions? Or something else entirely?

We don't know. But we have ample room to suspect that it is something else entirely. Or at least that more is involved than chemistry.

Such as consciousness. If anything exists at all, consciousness does. We are all conscious, with the possible exception of network anchormen. Consciousness affects matter: If you will your arm to move, it does. Matter also affects consciousness: If you drop an anvil on your foot, it will decidedly affect your consciousness.

But, though it clearly is an important aspect of life, and clearly influences the physical world, consciousness has no scientific existence, being instrumentally undetectable and having no operational definition. So scientists ignore it.

Ignoring things seems to me a funny way to understand them, but then I always did like my lunch box better than my book bag, and maybe I just don't think right. But I'm still working on believing in evolution. I'll get there. Any day now.

1. Abortion: You're wrong.

   Natural viability is arbitrary and not even well defined. What "unnatural" methods are allowed to keep the baby alive? An incubator? A slap on the butt to get it to breather? Breast milk? Climate control so it doesn't freeze to death?

   In addition, does this mean that any baby that is not naturally viable at birth due to easily correctable birth defects can be killed even then? Why not? It's not naturally viable, right?

   I don't have a good answer to this problem but I'm sure yours is worse than most - it isn't even morally and intellectually consistent.

2. Gun control: You're right.
   
3. Evolution:

   You're right but a lot of your reasoning is wrong.

   When people say that ID or anything requiring God, etc. is automtically not science they destroy their credibility.

   Simple thought experiment...

   Say that someone demonstrated that there were copyright notices written by space aliens encoded in our genome using an error correcting code.

   Would anyone deny that decoding these notices, looking for additional information, and attempting to understand what portion of our genome was designed and what portion was evolved would be high priority hard science?

   The reason why the current ID is religion, not science, is that it is faith based. Let them get some hard evidence beyond the scriptures to back up their theories and ID will become science. I don't think it will happen, but the blanket rejection of ID as ever being qualified to be a science just destroys the credibility of those who make it.

I agree that conjecture alone is not sufficient, however "irreducible complexity" itself is nothing but conjecture, an argument from incredulity, stating "I can't believe this happened, so it must be a designer."

Andy - Evolution itself fits this description. "I can't believe there are supernatural forces or even natural forces or processes beyond those I can readily sense or detect through state-of-the-art technical means and/or based upon current analytical methods therefore, it all happened spontaneously and randomly."

Personally, I abhor the appeal to deity promoted in the ID paradigm. But, I do think it is worthwhile pondering how these magnificent biological systems came to be, some following very different paths yet arriving at the same function. And, the tenuous, hand-waving speculation offered by the pro-Evolution crowd leave me just as cold as any other half-baked defense of religious dogma.

In any case, the question before us was whether ID was falsifiable, not it's epistemology. It appears to me that it is.

I wasn't going to hold forth any longer about evolution. No. I was going to live in peace, writing about race and sex, and watch the crowd that gathers on my front lawn with a rope. But the public is importunate. "Tell us more about point mutations and punctuated equilibrium," say thousands of correspondents from everywhere. A heart-wrenching letter from Papua-New Guinea, written on a piece of bark, talks of people so fascinated that they can't eat those big nasty grubs the tv crews give them when they're doing specials. I'm not going to cause international starvation. So here it is.

The biggest problem with evolution is You Can't Get There From Here. Lemme explain.

We're supposed to think, almost required to think, that critters evolve by high-energy sunburn. They walk around munching on things until they get smacked in the germ plasm by a cosmic ray. It puts puts a crimp in their DNA, so they have weird offspring (which a lot of us manage without cosmic rays). These tads are occasionally an improvement on their parents, or in human experience at least think they are, and so they have lots of kids. So the race improves.

To believe this, you have to believe that you can improve a car engine by firing a rifle at it. And that teenagers are an improvement. On anything.

Well, here's a question that occurred to me when I was about fifteen.

Suppose you have a giraffe or wombat or something that has black-and-white vision, and it decides to evolve color vision. Maybe it wants to watch movies.

Now, to watch color movies, it needs two things, aside from bad taste. First, it needs a whole potful (that's evolving into a word) of complicated retinal chemistry to respond differently to different colors of light. I don't know as how I can swallow the idea. A chemical engineer couldn't make it work on purpose, much less by accident. You might as well believe that earthquakes build houses.

But let's say it happened. So we've got a giraffe with color eyeballs.

Thing is, color eyeballs aren't worth a good idea's chance in Congress unless you have a bunch of complicated brain circuitry to interpret the retina's output. Nerve impulses don't come in colors. They're just self-propagating depolarizations, sodium in potassium out, along a damp sticky fiber, that squirts polysyllabic glop like acetylcholine across synapses, blurt.

Now, the complicated retinal chemistry is perfectly useless unless you've already got the complicated brain circuitry -- which is perfectly useless unless you've already got the complicated retinal chemistry. Which makes life difficult for the giraffe. For that tall spotted rascal to see color, he's got to accidentally evolve, simultaneously, two phenomenally tricky systems that are independently of no value at all.

Only a Democrat could believe that. (They can believe anything. Look who they elected.)

Some time back, I ran into a book (Darwin's Black Box, by Michael Behe. Amazon has it.) by one of these biochemist fellers who worry about things like phosphodiester bonds and replication forks and enzyme-catalyzed hooha. Biochemists probably have too much time on their hands.

He said the same thing I thought, so I knew he had to be on to something. What he called it was the Principle of Irreducible Complexity, which is a better phrase than I could come up with at fifteen. (If you'd seen the cheerleaders at King George High, you'd understand. I was trying to advance evolution by the only way I usually couldn't.) Anyway, irreducible complexity says that sometimes you can't get by gradual steps from A to B because the intermediate stages won't do anything useful. You either get there all at once, or you don't get there.

The example Behe uses is a mousetrap -- the ordinary kind that has the cheese and trigger and wire thingy to crush the internal organs of cute furry rodents. (In the appendices he uses real stuff, like blood-clotting cascades.) For that sucker to work, you have to have all of it. Take away any part, and it doesn't just work less well. It doesn't work at all. Without the board it's all stapled to, you have a handful of wire. Without the trigger plate, nothing will ever happen. Without the thumper thing, you've got a cheese tray. Every part is essential.

In short, some things need to have a certain level of complexity from the git-go. The point is crucial. It's not implausible to imagine our giraffe slowly evolving a longer neck, because each time it accidentally got a little longer he'd be able to eat leaves the other giraffes couldn't reach without ladders. Then he'd be tall and well-fed and good-looking and get all the girl giraffes and have lots of little tiny giraffe kids, who would grow up to have their daddy's neck. That works logically. But getting color vision doesn't. It appears that you either get it all at once, or you don't get it.

(The best argument for evolution, I concede, is that the only way anything could look like a giraffe is accidentally.)

Now, if you question the theology of evolution, which is what it is, you get letters accusing you of being a low-down, no-'count, shiftless, obscurantist varmint who probably thinks God created the world out of nothing, the way the Big Bang did. The implication is that since God didn't do it, evolution must have. In other words, if one theory is scientifically untenable, we must accept another, which is at best marginally better. Southern Baptists are the best thing that ever happened to the evolution lobby. They serve to divert attention from the wild inadequacies of Darwin, however amended. And from the curious truth that we don't know where we came from.

There you have it -- the last thing anyone will ever need to write on evolution. Papua-New Guineans can eat their grubs again. Doubtless the National Science Foundation will write me a letter of gratitude, and the Smithsonian will erect a statue of me on the Mall. I hope they'll include my cowboy hat. It's glorious

Oh help. The religious orthodoxy that impedes discussion of biological evolution continues with its accustomed dreadful tenacity. I’m going to hide in Tierra del Fuego.

One difference between faith and science is that science allows with reasonable grace the questioning of theory. A physicist who doubts, say, the theory of general relativity will be expected to show good cause for his doubt. He won’t be dismissed in chorus as delusional and an enemy of truth.

By contrast, he who doubts the divinity of Christ, the prophethood of Mohammed, or the sanctity of natural selection will be savaged. It is the classic emotional reaction of the True Believer to whom dissent is not just wrong but intolerable. Which is unfortunate. If the faithful of evolution spent as much time examining their theory as they do defending it, they might prove to be right, or partly right, or discover all manner of interesting things heretofore unsuspected.

Among the articles of faith: Life evolved from the primeval soup (sheer conjecture; the existence of the soup is inferred from the theory); evolution occurred, as distinct from change; accounting for all characteristics of life (mere assertion); natural selection being the driving force (unestablished). Many of these points are logically separable. Since evolution serves the purposes of a religion, namely to explain human origin and destiny, they are invariably bundled.

A few questions:

It is asserted, though not demonstrated, that point mutations caused by, say, cosmic rays sometimes give an animal a slight advantage over others of its species, and that these advantages accumulate over countless generations and lead to major changes. Demonstrable fact, or plausible conjecture? I note that metaphysical plausibility often substitutes for evidence in matters evolutionary. The approach ignores hard questions, such as whether tiny advantages, if engendered at all, rise above the noise level, or what that level might be.

At any rate, the idea is that slight selective pressure (operational definition, please? Units?) over enough time produces major changes. The idea is appealingly plausible. But, for example:

(1) A fair number of people are deathly allergic to bee stings, going into anaphylactic shock and dying. In any but a protected urban setting, children are virtually certain to be stung many times before reaching puberty. Assured death before reproduction would seem a robust variety of selective pressure.

Yet the allergic haven’t been eliminated from the population. Why is it that miniscule, unobserved mutations over vast stretches of time can produce major changes, while an extraordinarily powerful, observable selective pressure doesn’t? The same reasoning applies to a long list of genetic diseases that kill children before they reach adulthood. (Yes, I too can imagine plausible explanations. Plausibility isn’t evidence.)

(2) Homosexuality in males works strongly against reproduction. Why have the genetic traits predisposing to homosexuality not been eliminated long ago?

(3) Pain serves to warn an animal that it is being injured, or to make it favor, say, a wounded leg so that it can heal. Fair enough. But then why did we evolve the nerves that produce the agony of kidney stones—about which an animal can do absolutely nothing?

(4) There are at least two ways in which a species might change over time. One is the (postulated) accumulation over very long periods of mutations. Maybe.

The other is the concentration of existing traits by selective breeding, which is nothing but deliberate natural selection. The latter is demonstrable, and can happen within a few generations. If a breed of dog has weak hips, for example, the defect can be rectified by interbreeding those with better hips until good hips become the norm. About this there is no doubt. If natural selection occurs as advertised, this is where we would expect to see it.

Now, the genes exist for the brains of a Gauss or Newton, the phenomenal vision of Ted Williams, the physical prowess of Cassius Clay. Presumably (a tricky word) in a pre-civilized world, strong and intelligent people with superbly acute (for humans) senses would be more likely to survive and spread their genes, leading to a race of supermen. Is this what we observe?

Here we come to an interesting question: Do the superior pass along their genes more reliably than the inferior? In primitive tribal societies do we observe that the brighter have more children than the not so bright?

Do the most fit men breed with the most fit women, or with the most sexually attractive? As a matter of daily experience, a man will go every time for the sleek, pretty, and coquettish over the big, strong, bright, and ugly. I mention this to evolutionists and they make intellectual pretzels trying to prove that the attractive and the fit are one and the same. Well, they aren’t.

(5) If intelligence promotes survival, why did it appear so late? If it doesn’t promote survival, why did it appear at all?

(6) People have a wretched sense of smell and mediocre hearing. Why? The pat explanation is that people evolved in open territory, where sight is more important than the other senses. People walked erect, keeping their eyes well above the ground so that they could see farther. As noses became smaller, there was less room for the olfactory apparatus.

Is much of this not palpable nonsense? Horses have eves at about the same altitude as people, yet have acute senses of smell. Anywhere but in perfectly open territory, a sense of smell is obviously important in detecting predators, as it is at night, when many things hunt. Excessively small nasal apparatus? Cats and rats have little room for olfactory equipment yet have acute senses of smell. Do sensitive ears take up more space than sorry ones?

(7) Without weapons, humans would appear to be easy prey for almost anything. A persistent forty-pound dog would be a challenge for a single man. A pack of hyenas would have no trouble killing him. Any big cat would need about ten seconds.

People are weak. I once had a semi-domesticated monkey of perhaps thirty pounds jump on me in Bali because it wanted a banana I was eating. I was a husky 180 and lifted weights. I tried to push the thing off of me, and instantly realized I couldn’t. The little beast was ferociously strong. I gave it the banana.

A man cannot outrun a toy poodle, cannot climb well (and anyway there aren’t trees in open territory), cannot swim naturally, has teeth useless as weapons, no claws, and poor musculature. (Why the latter? Strength isn’t of value in survival?) He can neither smell nor hear an approaching big cat (say) and, unless armed, couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Hiding isn’t a choice: People are noisy, their children uncontrollably so. When unwashed, humans reek. Our young are extraordinarily helpless for long years.

Were we already packing heat when we swung down from the trees?

(8) So much of evolution contradicts other parts. Sparrows evolved drab and brown so that predators won’t see them. Cockatoos and guacamayas are gaudy as casinos in Las Vegas so they can find each other and mate. But…but….

The answers to these questions either lapse into a convoluted search for plausibility or else boil down to the idea that since guacamayas are as they are, their coloration must have adaptive value. That is, it is the duty of the evidence to fit the theory, rather than of the theory to fit the evidence. This is science?

Billy Hollis,

And Evolutionists say "It just happened, it is obvious since everything exists." That is about as much a science as Tarot.

Please.

Niven's Ringworld posited a world where humans moved into all the different niches out there. Human carnivors, human necrovors, human herbivors, etc. If evolution is a fact, why have humans only evolved into the human niche?

Omnivorious predator. Veagans are insane, not an evidence of evolution.

Fred Reed,

Thanks for your wonderful posts. They are mighty funny, and a very good read.

Now, could you try and give the same treatment to ID ? I doubt that you can. You don't ridicule a cripple (for example), it's not done, it's not funny.

I don't know. Maybe you could give it a try.

Anyway, thanks for your posts.

Fred Reed,

When you've quite finished hacking those straw men to pieces, please do join the debate.

Time to start a college fund for Fred Reed.

Fred Reed is an accomplished journalist with his own website. Someone has obviously cherry picked some of his articles and posted them here. I seriously doubt it was Fred Reed.

Believers in the One True Faith always talk down to people who don’t buy into evolution (and that is without even buying into creationism, they just don’t buy anything since every proposition is lacking adequate evidence) and say, “Oh, you don’t know anything about science you Bible thumper.” So, you start talking the science. Then they just call you an idiot and walk away, unable to refute you.

Darwin said,”if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” (Origin of Species, 6th ed. (1988), p. 154)

Irreducible complexity is the final nail in the coffin for evolution dogmatists. They can howl and insult all they like, but in the end the current theories of evolution to explain macro-evolution are just not cutting the mustard and do not have enough scientific backing to be worthy of the vehemence with which they are defended.

Am I saying that God created the world in six days? Nope. I just know the evidence says that evolution is a load of half baked hooey.

P.S. My personal position is that we currently do not have anywhere near enough data to be certain of the way in which complex life came to be on this planet. And by “complex life” I include even the simplest cells which are still incredibly complex. Heck, we can put a man on the moon and forsee colonies on Mars, create super computers and weapons which can wipe out human life. But with all of our tools we cannot currently create bacteria from scratch and do not see it happening in the forseeable future. That’s complex, baby.

Anyone who can actually do the work and read the science in this field (Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box was published in 1996 and is just the beginning of the necessary research) and still have the certainty to scream heretic “idiot” at me. . .well, I don’t argue with fanatics. My only certainty is we cannot be certain. . .yet.

Gerald,
Is it worth even gently and politely pointing out to you that there are errors in pointing to one passage in Darwin as "proof" of all-or-nothing perfection of his theory?
Or that his absolute pronouncements were BEFORE the 1930s genetics of Fisher, Haldane etc?

So Jody,

Are you saying that Fisher, Haldane, etc. have demonstrated that a complex organ exists which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications - and furthermore that they have explained how that fits into Evolutionary Theory anyway?

One of the problems of current scientific practice is that scientists cheat in how they enforce their rules against unscientific misuse of science. The misuse of pedagogy by atheist science teachers to promote atheism is just as scurrilous as the misuse of pedagogy by religious science teachers to promote their personal views. But scientific organizations do not rouse themselves to the same great efforts to fight against the former as they do the latter. This is dishonest.

This dishonesty shows up in various ways, most recently in the storm of controversy at a NYT editorial by an Austrian bishop who emphasized a continuing Catholic position, that evolution must be seen by Catholics as a mechanism used by God in his creation of the Universe (or they cease to be Catholic). Polite society immediately got the vapors but if science does not concern itself with ultimate causes that go beyond the material, it would not have.

Until those who claim they believe in an honest, impartial, just look at the evidence science stop cheating and shielding the atheists when they make unjustified attacks on the religious, expect scientists to have continuing problems with those who believe in the Divine.

As to abortion, if unassisted life is the hallmark of humanity, it would be so at all stages of life. This has radical implications on current law. Are those on kidney dialysis human? I think so, but I'm not sure how their humanity would be judged by a consistent viability standard.

Pro Choice ____

Pro Life ____

Pro Football ___X

Have you ever disected all of the shortcomings in Evolutionary Theory?
I doubt it. If you were to delve into the many portions of evolution that have become dogma, you'd become a healthy skeptic of anything science has to say about the subject. Evolution proponents have kept a number of dirty little secrets , look these up and become enlightened.
Myself, I don'tknow; but I don't take at face value anything an evolutionist posits.

The only problem with your abortion stance (which is pretty similar to my own - though I could be convinced to favor a waiting period that is exactly as long as the waiting period to buy a pistol in the relevant jurisdiction - ie if 0 then 0), and that is that "health of the woman" means absolutely jacksh*t. I guaran-frickin-ty you that this would allow any woman to get an abortion at any time since a helpful pro-abortion doctor would be more than eager to write her a note saying that carrying the baby to term would damage her emotional health (trust me, this was pretty much the case in BC in the early 1980s, and that is exactly what happened). That's why the PBA law did not include such an exeption - 'cause it makes the law totally worthless.

I love when people explain how they support abortion. Because no matter what people say or don't say, we all know it's wrong.

I don't care who you are and how much you claim your mind will not change. You know it's wrong.

End of story. In any case, perhaps the problem with the English Professor's rules (as fabulous as they are at the freshman writing level) is that they encourage people to leave their thoughts about abortion, etc., at the high-school level.

But even then, hey, we all knew it was killing an unborn child. Which is wrong. As we all know.

End of rant. End of debate.

During my undergraduate time at Mizzou I needed an English course to fulfill a requirement in my last semester of my senior year.

Unfortunately the only one available was filled with grad students and English majors.

Teaching the class was a full bearded santicmonious douchebag.

Of all the instructors at Mizzou this clown was the worst I had dealt with.

"But even then, hey, we all knew it was killing an unborn child. Which is wrong. As we all know."

While not aborting means torture and lifelong misery for an already born and living human being - the woman.

All "pro this" or "pro that" should at least aknowledge there is a tough chioce involved. It's not a trivial question as you try to make it.

Fred Reed

Your ignorance of evolution and genetics is extraordinarily profound. In an attempt to cure this, I will answer your questions.

(1) Recessive genes. A mutation can be recessive; it is passed on to offspring but does not have any effect unless it is inherited from both parents. A strongly counter-productive gene can persist indefinitely. Some harmful recessive genes are actually positive adaptations in the right environment. The gene for sickle-cell anemia also confers resistance to the malaria parasite. Not surprisingly, sickle-cell anemia is far more common in Central Africa than in Northern Europe.

(2) See (1). Also, we don't know if there are genes that predispose one towards homosexuality.

(3) Pain cannot distinguish between an injury you can do something about and one you can't. The pain of kidney stones isn't something that evolved; rather, kidney stones aren't common enough, or sufficiently counter-survival, for a solution to kidney-stone pain to have evolved. There's no reason for kidney stones not to be painful. There is a partial solution to birth pains, however (large quantities of endorphins are release after birth).

(4) In evolution, fitness simply means surviving to produce offspring. That's all it means. The rest of your question is nonsense because it's based on a complete misunderstanding of evolution.

(5) Intelligence promotes survival. It is also enormously expensive, metabolically speaking. Intelligence in fact arose quite early - only not very much of it. More intelligent creatures evolved over time, often (not always) having an advantage over the less intelligent competition.

(6) Horses, much of the time, have their eyes right down near ground level, because they are eating grass. Horses are completely different animals to humans in completely different environmental niches and so are under completely different evolutionary pressures; there is no reason at all to expect them to evolve in the same way. Note, for example, the positions of human and equine eyes.

(7) Humans are less weak than you suppose, especially those that do not live sedentary lives. Modern humans have an aversion to pain and to causing injury that makes them think they are weaker than they really are. That aside, the use of tools and weapons predates the evolution of our species by about two million years. So yes, the use of weapons and tools had a significant impact on human evolution.

(8) In different environments, you get different selective pressures. That much is obvious. "But but" does not seem to be a coherent objection.

Oh, and: Colour vision didn't evolve all at once. Any sort of ability to distinguish colours could present an evolutionary advantage. Just as any sort of vision, even just being able to sense the difference between daylight and night, can be an advantage.

Irreducible complexity is bunk, because things evolve towards the end product, not backwards from it. So if you take one component away from the finished product, it breaks? So what? That has nothing whatsoever to do with how it evolved.

What I want to know is precisely what paradigm of evolution lead to a bear with an odd number of teats...