The Dover trial

[HereIStand]

I think it would be helpful if the curriculum focused more on how to explore scientific evidence regardless of the actual controversy. An emphasis on genetics could pretty much ignore Darwinian/Malthusian natural selection and still make scientific research more comprehensive. I don't want to see another round of culture wars polluting an otherwise interesting intellectual controversy. The doctrine of creation is profoundly religious, I know of know way of teaching it without the testimony of Scripture being contrasted with Darwinian naturalistic assumptions. I see no reason this should be taught in a classroom setting, it's too inextricably linked to religious conviction.

Evolution is profoundly religious as well. It's difficult to separate genetics from the selfish gene/survival of the fittest philosophy. My vote is for home schooling, if it can be done well.

 

[Kenny'sID]

Open to debate.

And even if debated and proven fact, still they only have a few facts they "claim" proves evolution because it is there opinion it does.

Hence we have the perfect example of deception/smokescreen. "see this is fact so evolution must be" when one doesn't equate to the other, the last part only opinion, but doesn't matter, some fall for it.

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

Since we are on the subject of evolutionists smokescreens and deception, could you offer example that proves their whole agenda is not a smoke screen/deception. I mean we might as well go all the way with this.

How does one 'prove' a negative?

Open to debate.

Just a quick rundown on proof evolution is the reason for all life as we know it today will be fine.

Endogenous retroviruses are a knock-down argument for the diversity of life & our shared ancestory with all other life on this planet...

 

[Kenny'sID]

How does one 'prove' a negative?

Can you address the question please?

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

Evolution is profoundly religious as well. It's difficult to separate genetics from the selfish gene/survival of the fittest philosophy. My vote is for home schooling, if it can be done well.

In what way is it 'religious'? And are you acknowledging that religion is not a desirable position on matters of fact??

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

Can you address the question please?

I Did, it's a non-sensical question, which is why I asked you how I'm supposed to prove a negative...

 

[Kenny'sID]

Endogenous retroviruses are a knock-down argument for the diversity of life & our shared ancestory with all other life on this planet...

Explain in your own words how exactly that proves evolution, and without assumption.

 

[Kenny'sID]

I Did, it's a non-sensical question, which is why I asked you how I'm supposed to prove a negative...

Proving evolution to be a fact is nonsensical? There are a lot of so called scientists out there that aren't going to like that.

Now stop evading a very reasonable question.

 

[mark kennedy]

Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live --- By CARL SAFINA

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more. By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

No don't kill 'ole flycatcher', he's not hurting anybody. Over the years I've grown found of him and let's not forget no matter how many flaws in Darwinian logic, Darwinism was a unified theory at a time Mendelian genetics was still not considered a real science. As bizarre as that might sound genetics and molecular biology couldn't bridge the gap between cause (physical, molecular) and effect (outward traits), until the DNA double helix. Your certainly not going to be able to purge the use of 'selection' in scientific terminology, 'selection coefficient' and 'selective constraints' for example, are vital in the lexicon of genetics. His natural history philosophy could die a natural death and the life sciences would continue on unimpeded, a little more coherent due to the use of 'selection' in the terminology.

That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too. In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical. Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.

If I would credit Charles Darwin with something credible and lasting it was his ability to make complex scientific discourse more comprehensive. Darwin seldom discussed evolution, he was comparing artificial selection with natural selection which is the whole reason for the term 'selection' in the first place. He was pretty candid about problems like infertility in hybrids and offered a strong null hypothesis for his theory. Evolution isn't one thing it's two, it's the change of alleles in populations over time. At the same time it's the a priori assumption of universal common descent by exclusively naturalistic means:

Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his "Philosophie Zoologique,' and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertébres.' In these works he upholds the doctrine that species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. (Darwin, On the Origin of Species)
​

He wasn't the first to suggest universal common descent, naturalists existed before and have flourished since.

Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term “dinosaur.” Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things. Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science.

Science as we know it goes back to the scientific revolution, it came in the wake of the rise of Protestantism. It was suggested early that an inductive approach to natural science was preferred to the deductive logic of Aristotelian scholasticism. Physics was what was being developed and the most practical applications were the y squared and the principles of motion, resulting in the development of calculus. Astronomy benefited greatly as well but not because of the epistemology we call science but the development of the telescope. The first telescope was developed by a Dutch astronomer but Galileo developed one that could magnify the heavens 35x. Science was anything but primitive in the days of Darwin and it should be noted, Darwin was a poor scientist at best.

“Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution? Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.

Darwinism was synthesized with genetics during the Modern Synthesis, that's why the term keeps popping up.

The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis reconciling Charles Darwin's and Gregor Mendel's ideas in a joint mathematical framework that established evolution as biology's central paradigm. (Modern Synthesis)​

Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science. That’s why Darwin must go.

Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how. Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter “natural selection.” What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.

But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin. Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.

Charles Darwin didn't give enough credit to his grandfather for his ideals of natural history:

“Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and rais’d in Ocean’s pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.”
― Erasmus Darwin​

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.

Indeed, Gregor Mendel was given full credit for his foundational work that spurred science ahead by leaps and bounds for a hundred years:

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century. The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity, with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same.

The last quarter of a century has been marked by a relentless drive to decipher first genes and then entire genomes, spawning the field of genomics. (Initial Sequence of the Human Genome, Nature 2001)​

Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right. But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

You don't need to kill it, just quit equivocating Darwinism with science and evolution.

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

Can you address the question please?

I guess I could point out that Scientists (...or Evolutionists if you like) from a wide variety of backgrounds, including Christians, Muslims, Jewish, Hindu, Sikhs, Buddhists and Atheists alike, all come to the same conclusion based on the same evidence with near 100% of the scientific community in agreement regarding the Theory of Evolution...

 

[mark kennedy]

Evolution is profoundly religious as well. It's difficult to separate genetics from the selfish gene/survival of the fittest philosophy. My vote is for home schooling, if it can be done well.

Charter schools are on the rise as well, that's going to be a big deal going forward. Evolution itself isn't the problem, it's a phenomenon in nature, not to be confused with the Darwinian theory of natural history. Darwinism is one long argument against creationism, I have often wondered, how is that not religious.

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

Proving evolution to be a fact is nonsensical? There are a lot of so called scientists out there that aren't going to like that.

Now stop evading a very reasonable question.

Oh, I thought you were asking me to disprove that Evolution is a deception, or smokescreen, or something or other... then in that case, I answered this in Post 23:

Endogenous retroviruses are a knock-down argument for the diversity of life & our shared ancestry with all other life on this planet...

 

[JackRT]

No don't kill 'ole flycatcher', he's not hurting anybody. Over the years I've grown found of him and let's not forget no matter how many flaws in Darwinian logic, Darwinism was a unified theory at a time Mendelian genetics was still not considered a real science. As bizarre as that might sound genetics and molecular biology couldn't bridge the gap between cause (physical, molecular) and effect (outward traits), until the DNA double helix. Your certainly not going to be able to purge the use of 'selection' in scientific terminology, 'selection coefficient' and 'selective constraints' for example, are vital in the lexicon of genetics. His natural history philosophy could die a natural death and the life sciences would continue on unimpeded, a little more coherent due to the use of 'selection' in the terminology.



If I would credit Charles Darwin with something credible and lasting it was his ability to make complex scientific discourse more comprehensive. Darwin seldom discussed evolution, he was comparing artificial selection with natural selection which is the whole reason for the term 'selection' in the first place. He was pretty candid about problems like infertility in hybrids and offered a strong null hypothesis for his theory. Evolution isn't one thing it's two, it's the change of alleles in populations over time. At the same time it's the a priori assumption of universal common descent by exclusively naturalistic means:

Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his "Philosophie Zoologique,' and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertébres.' In these works he upholds the doctrine that species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. (Darwin, On the Origin of Species)
​

He wasn't the first to suggest universal common descent, naturalists existed before and have flourished since.



Science as we know it goes back to the scientific revolution, it came in the wake of the rise of Protestantism. It was suggested early that an inductive approach to natural science was preferred to the deductive logic of Aristotelian scholasticism. Physics was what was being developed and the most practical applications were the y squared and the principles of motion, resulting in the development of calculus. Astronomy benefited greatly as well but not because of the epistemology we call science but the development of the telescope. The first telescope was developed by a Dutch astronomer but Galileo developed one that could magnify the heavens 35x. Science was anything but primitive in the days of Darwin and it should be noted, Darwin was a poor scientist at best.



Darwinism was synthesized with genetics during the Modern Synthesis, that's why the term keeps popping up.

The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis reconciling Charles Darwin's and Gregor Mendel's ideas in a joint mathematical framework that established evolution as biology's central paradigm. (Modern Synthesis)​

Charles Darwin didn't give enough credit to his grandfather for his ideals of natural history:

“Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and rais’d in Ocean’s pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.”
― Erasmus Darwin​

Indeed, Gregor Mendel was given full credit for his foundational work that spurred science ahead by leaps and bounds for a hundred years:

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century. The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity, with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same.

The last quarter of a century has been marked by a relentless drive to decipher first genes and then entire genomes, spawning the field of genomics. (Initial Sequence of the Human Genome, Nature 2001)​

You don't need to kill it, just quit equivocating Darwinism with science and evolution.

Thank you for the most interesting commentary. Sadly, I'm aftraid that those who most need to read it simply won't.

 

[Kenny'sID]

I guess I could point out that Scientists (...or Evolutionists if you like) from a wide variety of backgrounds, including Christians, Muslims, Jewish, Hindu, Sikhs, Buddhists and Atheists alike, all come to the same conclusion based on the same evidence with near 100% of the scientific community in agreement regarding the Theory of Evolution...

Please understand part of the deception is to say go look at this, go look at that, we have all this evidence so it must be true, but when pinned down for an explanation of how it all comes together to prove evolution, many evade, and those brave enough to try, fail. I've even seen people get very angry when non evolutionists don't see the "evidence" to mean what they say or want it to mean.

So, the question remains, and if a question they "say" they have an answer for is now going to be cited as nonsensical, how can that do anything but scream "cop out"? Surely you see the logic?

 

[Speedwell]

1. I'm in the buckle of Bible belt (Alabama) and I'm unaware of creationism being taught in public schools.

A Map of Thousands of Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism With Taxpayer Money

 

[Kenny'sID]

Oh, I thought you were asking me to disprove that Evolution is a deception, or smokescreen, or something or other... then in that case, I answered this in Post 23:

No you did not answer there.

 

[Kenny'sID]

Oh, I thought you were asking me to disprove that Evolution is a deception, or smokescreen, or something or other.

Understood, and no problem. That would negate part of post 34 but not all of it.

 

[Bugeyedcreepy]

No you did not answer there.

Why are ERVs not an answer, do you not know what ERVs are and how they demonstrate evolution and common descent beyond any reasonable doubt?

 

[essentialsaltes]

What anti-science? Are you actually saying because a creationists science doesn't agree with yours/evolutionary, then they must be against science period?

No, much of creationists' 'science' is at odds with reality. It is not science, it is pseudoscience.

 

[HereIStand]

A Map of Thousands of Schools That Are Allowed to Teach Creationism With Taxpayer Money

Well, it looks like creationism is clearly in the minority. As First Things has noted, liberal Protestantism is dead organizationally, but culturally it has won.