August 2, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Words fail me
Bush has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design. My liberal friends and commenters are entitled to one "I told you so".
Posted by Jane Galt at August 2, 2005 4:09 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksWhy am I not concerned?
When so many people in this country are devout, and have been for so long, I'm not buying this notion that religion is a determent to scientific discovery.
The funny thing about "Intelligent Design" is that it means different things to different people. To some people, it means that God created Adam and Eve about 5000 years ago. To others, it means that God created the spark of life 3 billion years ago, or whenever it started on earth. Then there are the people who think that God has been "guiding" evolution. So when people say that they want to teach "Intelligent Design", I always wonder what exactly they are going to teach.
It's possible that this actually works out well because now, for those biology teachers who accept the theory of evolution (which hopefully is most of them), they are more easily able to teach it (so long as they also mention the possibility of Intelligent Design), which is a very important scientific theory and which they may have previously avoided teaching due to all the controversy.
Laura, I believe you may want to reword your last sentence, I had to re-read it three times to be sure you were calling evolution and not "intelligent design" a "very important scientific theory".
Unless, of course, my initial reading was correct, then I'd have to disagree with you...
I have no problem with a brief mention that the concept of intelligent design exists, but I don't think it should be "taught" in school, because that quickly becomes a purely theological exercise. I say this as someone who personally believes there has been at least some divine influence in the development of intelligent life. I just don't think that's something my kids need to get in a public school; that would be inappropriate.
I told you so!
But seriously...Look, the problem with intelligent design being taught in bio classes is that it's not science. It's faith. The theory of evolution is a theory (because no one was actually capable of watching it happen) but there is a great deal of evidence to support the theory. The same can not be said for intelligent design.
Look, if you want to teach your kids that God had it planned all along, that's great, but don't waste MY kid's time with that nonsense. There is enough that my kid needs to learn without your religious beliefs being foisted upon them in the classroom.
Not being religious, I nevertheless have no objection to a teacher being able to say "Scientists still don't fully understand how a spark of life originated. Evolution is an accepted scientific fact for how species developed from the 'spark' onward. Virtually all cultures have one sort of explanation or another involving a Supreme Being who 'sparked' it off and
planted the evolutionary code. Maybe in one of your other classes you'll learn more about these various religious beliefs." Knowing teenagers,
the "intelligent design" teaching will backfire,
causing snickering and rejection of religious beliefs. By the way, wouldn't an intelligent designer, Who is All Powerful, have come up with more simple ways to make, say, an eye work? Would
She have put nipples on men?
"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
Perhaps we should limit this exposure to ideas which are firmly rooted in reality and not to ideas that, while have withstood the test of time, have not withstood any sort of empirical testing.
While religion is important in that has and continues to shape the world, it belongs more with philosophy than with science.
I'm not hostile to the idea of intelligent design - I just have trouble coming up with any falsifiable hypotheses to test it against. You know, the science thing?
Unless, of course, you have the patience to oversee the evolution of a biological structure the ID folk say can't result from evolution - that would seem to set the bar pretty high, though.
I agree with Lara that it partly depends on what we're talking about when we say "intelligent design," but it depends on what the words "teach" and "expose" mean.
Should the story in Genesis get equal time in a biology class with evolution? Heck no.
Should a teacher mention that "by the way, we've spent X days studying what most scientists believe about the formation of life, but we can't be 100% sure about macro-evolution, so if your religious belief is to the contrary, we're not here to tell you you're wrong"? I don't have a problem with that.
"Intelligent design" is not "an important scientific theory." It is not scientific at all.
It is anti-science.
By defintion, a scientific theory is composed of testable propositions. One must, in theory, be able to prove these propositions true or false on the basis of observable evidence.
The federal courts threw out "creation science" as a legitimate science subject for the biology clasroom for precisely this reason: "Creation science" does not lend itself to any form of testing that would prove its propositions false. Instead, it uses scientific terminology to clothe simple (and untestable) assertions that life was created by supernatural forces.
So, if anyone thinks "intelligent design" is "scientific," please describe the experimental observations that would demonstrate to your satisfaction that the idea is false.
While we're at it, let's clarify terms. Evolution is not a theory. It is a fact, an observation, like seeing the sun rise in the east and the sun set in the west. The theory is the series of possible explanations that explains the fact of evolution. Darwin's theory to explain evolution was natural selection -- that small variations within a population would enable some individuals to survive changes in circumstances better than others. Nature, in other words, would select the fittest to survive. In that way, over a very long period of time, the dominant characteristics of a population would change, perhaps to the point when it would recognizably be a new species.
There have been many scientic critics of the theory of natural selection, and it has itself evolved mightily in the last 150 years. The observation of evolution itself, however, has been demonstrated and verified and cross-verified so many times and in so many irrefutable ways that it is simply not up for grabs.
Is "intelligent design" possible? Sure, but so is the idea that the light in the night sky that I can't identify is ipso facto an alien space craft. I can't disprove it, but that does not mean it is true. So what's the evidence that it IS true? And can that evidence be examined and critiqued? If not, it isn't science.
The biggest problem with the idea of "intelligent design," as science, is that it ends science. It's saying that we can go only so far into investigating a natural wonder but then we have to stop because it is fully explained by "intelligent design." The conversation is over, there's nothing more that can or should be said because you've just been told the final truth of the universe. That view might fly with Ayatolla Khomenei, but it has no place in a science classroom.
"Why am I not concerned?
When so many people in this country are devout, and have been for so long, I'm not buying this notion that religion is a determent to scientific discovery.
Posted by Alan Gutierrez at August 2, 2005 04:38 PM"
You know Al, the discussion about whether intelligent design is or is not science or good or bad science or even a surreal fantasy is beside the point.
Intelligent design can be taught by churches in sunday school, summer bible school, from the pulpit, by those devout parents home schooling their children, or just by those devout parents at the dinner table. Devout christian folk can also send them to christian schools, even if they must work 3 jobs to do it. (After all that is just the land of opportunity that the U.S. is.)
Now given that intelligent design can and does now get such equal billing with evolution (at least by those espouse it) why bring it to our public schools?
Why? Because it has nothing to do with science or the value of intelligent design as science. It is about PROSELYTIZATION. The intelligent design "theory" is a means to open avenue of indoctrination and conversion by placing it on equal footing as secular science. Proponents are duplicitous and intellectually dishonest theocrats.
I long to have a President who, when asked a question such as this, replies "The Executive Branch of our national government has no position on the curriculum of local school districts. Have a nice day!"
I know, I know, this means dismantling the Department of Education. Well, I can dream, can't I?.
I'm all for Bush's position. In fact, I hope the president's ideas on this subject evolve into a full-throttled support for mandatory instruction in a biblical literalist approach to evolution. Jurrasic Schmerassic. I have been longing for some left-wing support of hard core Milton Friedman-style school vouchers, and I think I can finally see the outlines of how this might come about.
The thing is evolutionary theory it self has undergone many revisions since the time of Drawin. As long as evolution is also taught along side it, I have no problem with Intelligent Design being taught.
Intelligent design is a red herring. The real problem is that public schools are subject to capture by weirdo interest groups.
I say shut down the taxpayer funded schools and let the market decide.
Ever heard about "The Anthropic Principle"? If the Universe was just slightly different in its basic properties, there would be no stars, no planets, and no life.
From this, you can argue different interpretations:
A) If our Universe wasn't so perfectly suited for life to emerge, we wouldn't be here to notice it. Hence, it is self-evident.
B) It is so unlikely that of all possible universes without life, THIS one exists -- so we need to explain it. (Pick one explanation: An infinite number of alternate universes, act of God, one Universe re-creating itself in an infinite cycle of variations, what-have-you.)
So we have no provable explanation. If you choose the "Act of God" explanation, it can't be tested -- it's your choice. But I honestly don't think God will get mad at you if you choose to ignore the Intelligent Design theory.
An entity which can create a universe, could also create a universe where people don't believe they were created by divine intervention...
Well, Will Allen, since we are in dreamland anyway, would your world also be one in which the judicial branch of the federal government had no position on the curricula of local school boards? Or are those appointed demigods to continue roaming the nation, doing good wherever they can?
I recall being inspired by Teilhard de Chardin's Alpha-Omega as a college student. A Rabbi discussing what the Jewish word for G-d is says that it 'is probably all vowels and some variant of the verb "being;" ' evolution might be seen as a subset of that. So if the president's remarks allow a teacher to acknowledge such ideas or 'intelligent design' in response to a student's question, that's fine. Teaching it is going to be more like the French farce Candide, however.
Pretty much, y81, in answer to your first question, that is. While I'm at it, I'd repeal the 17th Amendment, and go back to the old way of electing U.S. Senators. Maybe those gasbags would then cease to be a mortal threat to anybody who stood between them and a t.v. camera. If nuthin' else, local and state politics would become more interesting.
I think if you look closely at the video, you can see that it was W's thumb, and not his middle finger. I think this is another example of over-analizing what he does and trying to find some deep character flaw in an imagined off-the-cuff observation. Kinda like how the libs are all upset now cuz W likes to exercise.
Told you so ;-)
No mystery given Bush's science, environmental, energy, mining and climate change policies (not to mention his administration's feel for the numbers).
But the real underlying problem is the kind of wacko religiosity that pervades not just the religious right but a far slab of the rest of the USA. It's not much of a jump from human exceptionalism (all science except evolution is OK) to American exceptionalism.
The effect of faith-based exceptionalism centred on a God/Flag pseudo-deity extends way beyond science class rooms. It is at its nadir under Bush but it infects all US presidencies, Dem & GOP alike.
“Intelligent design” has no place in a scientific discussion, period, end of sentence, the subject, and our minds, is/are closed.
At the risk of incurring the ire of those posters whose secular inerrancy is as rigid, certain and unyielding as any fundamentalist’s faith in biblical inerrancy, I have a few questions:
1. How did life form from non-life and why can’t it be duplicated? How long ago, roughly, did this happen?
2. How did chaos order itself into the universe we now have? If I understand Big Bang, chaos ordered itself on its first try. Wasn’t there only one Big Bang? The nascent universe didn’t keep exploding until it finally got itself organized, did it? What are the odds of that happening, absent someone loading the dice, so to speak?
3. When the first single cell life formed, was it an animal or plant?
4. Was it just one kind of cell that everything that has ever since existed evolved from?
5. Or, were a number of different kinds of single cell life formed over a period of time, some surviving to evolve into the world as we know it and others failing to survive the rigors of the primordial stew, essentially becoming extinct in one lifetime?
6. What were the conditions, environmentally speaking, when life first formed? Weren’t they pretty harsh? What kind of life forms under those conditions and then lives long enough to grow into every thing that ever lived?
7. When did plants first start to evolve into animals? How did that happen? Is it still happening? If not, why did it stop?
8. What is the documented evidence of transition between erectus and sapiens sapiens, over what period of time did the transition occur, and what happened that resulted in sapiens sapiens and whole new, never before seen style of art, tool making, social interaction, use of fire, tool kits, etc. popping up pretty much 40,000 years ago?
9. Did sapiens sapiens evolve throughout erectus’ range or in discrete areas? Doesn’t evolution from erectus to sapiens sapiens, with the necessary transitional development, if it occurred throughout erectus’ range imply parallel evolution? How does that happen?
Pick one or more than one, and give me the consensus answer approved by the scientific community. Thanks.
McKinneyTexas,
Hundreds of years ago, the Pope said that the sun revolved around the earth and the earth was the center of the universe. Anyone who thought otherwise was a heretic. The Pope, as it turns out, was wrong.
Hundreds of years ago, the earth was thought to be flat. As it turns out, it was not.
One hundred years ago, we did not know about the theory of relativity.
Until recently no one knew about the four laws of thermodynamics, DNA, or the nature of light. But we know now.
You ask a lot of good questions. Some of them, I doubt, will ever be answered. I am far from a scientist; maybe they have answers to some of those already. But do I think those are questions that should be answered by, “well, there is this all powerful being, see, and….”
No, I don’t. Because it seems like most of the time, when we attribute some miracle of science to some all powerful being, we turn out to be, just like the Pope who said the sun revolves around the earth and the earth is the center of the universe, wrong.
There is a long history of attributing God for things we don’t understand. Perhaps we should leave God out of it and just try to explain it with science. It seems to work.
Bush has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design. My liberal friends and commenters are entitled to one "I told you so".The proper response to your liberal friends and commenters is to remind them before they get too haughty that President Bush’s position on the teaching of evolution/creation in the government schools is identical as that taken by Senator Kerry in the 2004 presidential election:
Science: Should "intelligent design" or other scientific critiques of evolutionary theory be taught in public schools?KERRY: I believe that ideology should not trump science in the context of educating our children. Still, public school curriculum is a matter subject to local control. Communities must decide which sound, scientific theories are appropriate for the classroom.
BUSH: The federal government has no control over local curricula, and it is not the federal government's role to tell states and local boards of education what they should teach in the classroom. Of course, scientific critiques of any theory should be a normal part of the science curriculum.
Amazingly enough both candidates managed to give the correct response.
Source:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;306/5693/46
A) If our Universe wasn't so perfectly suited for life to emerge, we wouldn't be here to notice it. Hence, it is self-evident.
B) It is so unlikely that of all possible universes without life, THIS one exists -- so we need to explain it.
So we have no provable explanation
You're quite mistaken. (A) is demostrably true; intelligent life can only exist in universes which allow for intelligent life to exist. It's a tautology. We can say, with perfect certainty, that any universe in which intelligent beings can ponder their origins is one which is guaranteed to be a universe configured in a manner which allows for intelligent life to exist. There is, therefore, nothing to explain. The universe is as we would expect it to be. We can honestly make the scientifically and mathematically valid statement "the odds of any universe humans exist in allowing for the existance of humans are 1 in 1".
It is your second point, (B), which is unprovable. We don't know what the "odds" were of any given universe having this configuration, we don't know how many universes exist, and we don't know how many of those universes support native intelligent life. We cannot, therefore, make an honest claim that it is "unlikely" life would have been possible in our universe. For all we know, 100% of all possible universes can support life.
To sum up: it is a given that life exists in this universe and we have no scientific reason to suspect that that fact is unusual.
Thorley,
The reason both Bush & Kerry palmed ID off to states and school boards is the wacky US electorate. In no other advanced democracy (where Christianity less way out and politically polluted) would politicians be so timorous.
However tempting, correcting faith-based attitudes on faith-irrelevant matters is a losing political strategy.
1. How did life form from non-life
"Life" is just a name we slap on especially complicated "non-life"; humans are made of the exact same kinds of atoms as everything else in the universe. So the simple answer to your question is "it didn't; humans are made of non-life".
What you are really asking is "how did the complex structure we call 'a human being' get so complicated?". The answer to that question is "evolution by natural selection", starting with the first self-replicating molecules. I recommend the book "The Selfish Gene" for an exploration of the concept.
and why can’t it be duplicated?
Processes by which self-replicating molecules come into existance can and have been duplicated. As for more complicated life, the appropriate word is "hasn't", not "can't". There is no known reason why we couldn't build a human being from scratch out of individual atoms; we just don't have the technological capacity to do it.
How long ago, roughly, did this happen?
As noted above, there is no firm basis for drawing a distinction between life and non-life. To address your larger point: over the last several billion years.
How did chaos order itself into the universe we now have? If I understand Big Bang, chaos ordered itself on its first try. Wasn’t there only one Big Bang?
I'm afraid that's pretty much completely wrong.
First of all, the Big Bang did not create order out of chaos. The universe was at its *most* ordered at the point of the Big Bang; it has since become less ordered. Local areas of order, like rocks, trees, and human beings, are very much the exception. Most of the mass/energy of the universe consists of disorganized subatomic particles, heat, free-roaming atoms, etc. For that matter, even the so-called "ordered" parts, like the Earth, are still highly chaotic. Take thunderstorms, for example; can you predict where the next one will be and where each raindrop will fall?
Secondly, the Big Bang didn't actually create anything. The Big Bang is best understood as a boundary of space-time -- the point at which the length, width, height, and time of the universe were all exactly zero. There was no "before the Big Bang", just as there is no "north of the North Pole".
When the first single cell life formed, was it an animal or plant?
You seem to have forgotten the other four kingdoms of life. It would have been a prokaryote, a member of kingdom Eubacteria. Remember, there are five kingdoms, not two: prokaryotes, protista (amoebas, paramecia, algae), plants, animals, and fungus. The oldest fossils are of prokaryotes (single-celled organisms without nuclei).
Was it just one kind of cell that everything that has ever since existed evolved from?
We have no way of knowing if we're all descended from the same cell. We are, however, presumably all descended from the same self-replicating molecule, since all life uses DNA.
It is certainly possible that simple cells around here and there over the years and then failed. But early cells had a major advantage, namely a complete lack of competition from other cells, so they probably spread at an explosive rate (like mold on damp bread).
What were the conditions, environmentally speaking, when life first formed? Weren’t they pretty harsh?
Not if you define "harsh" as "incapable of supporting life". Bear in mind that various species of bacteria (i.e., prokaryotes) can survive in all sorts of conditions -- in boiling water, in blocks of ice, in toxic waste, in poisonous atmospheres, etc. A human being couldn't live on primordial Earth, but there are plenty of species we know of today that would think that environment was wonderful. Blue-green algae, for example, would love the higher temperatures and far greater C02 content.
When did plants first start to evolve into animals?
So far as we know, animals evolved from protista, not plants. Plants are our distant cousins, not our ancestors. Probably plants descended from algae (which use photosynthesis), and animals from protozoa (which ingest food).
Is it still happening?
Yes, evolution is still happening; we've observed it happening. But I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for new animal species to spawn from simpler single- and multi-celled organisms; the earliest prokaroyte fossils are 3.5 billion years old, while the oldest animals are only 600 million.
What is the documented evidence of transition between erectus and sapiens sapiens
I'm not sure what kind of "documented evidence" you're looking for. More recent homo erectus fossils look more human than older ones; the most recent are so similar to homo sapiens that creationists often argue that homo erectus WERE homo sapiens. To the increasing similarity add in the facts that (a) homo erectus disappeared at the same time homo sapiens took off, (b) they used fire and complex tools (just like humans, and unlike any other species), and (c) they shared the same habitat with humans. The conclusion is pretty obvious. What more documented evidence are you asking for?
Heck, I don't have ANY idea who my paternal grandparents are, since my dad was adopted. But I have stereotypical Caucasian features, as does my dad, as do my sisters and my nephew, so I'm willing to go out on a limb and state that my grandparents, whoever they were, they were caucasian too. Do I have "documented evidence" of this? Nope, just a mountain of circumstantial evidence that renders any claim that my grandparents were Japanese, or Indian, or Australian Aborigines, highly suspect. :)
Did sapiens sapiens evolve throughout erectus’ range or in discrete areas?
Sapiens evolved in one part of homo erectus' range and then spread to the rest of the world from there. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA has pretty well established that all humans have a single common ancestor from several hundred thousand years ago. So, no, multiple groups of humans did not arise in parallel.
Anyway, I hope that this helps you understand the modern scientific view of cosmology, abiogenesis, and evolution.
Processes by which self-replicating molecules come into existance can and have been duplicated.
No, they haven't. There was the famous (and pretty much debunked) Miller Experiment , but the sludge that they ended up with was in no sense "self replicating". The problem is, even the simplest self-replicators that we know of are incredibly complex machines. There is no current plausible explanation for how they "just happened"...
No, they haven't. There was the famous (and pretty much debunked) Miller Experiment
First, Miller conducted many experiments in many different kinds of environments (reducing vs non-reducing atmospheres, for example). I recommend here for a brief overview. If by "debunked" you mean "widely reproduced and still widely accepted by biologists" then, yes, Miller's work has been debunked. :) If you mean "demonstrated to be a bad theory", on the other hand, you're quite mistaken. Miller's work is still respected for the aid it gave us in understanding of the formation of organic molecules.
Secondly, abiogenesis research didn't stop with Miller (or start with Miller, for that matter). I recommend here for more links.
Thirdly, I didn't say self-replicating molecules had been created, although I realize that's a plausible reading of what I wrote. I meant only that we had successfully replicated the circumstances under which it would be possible for them to form. The actual formation took billions of years and a whole planet's worth of matter to pull off the first time around, so it would be unlikely that we'd be able to duplicate it in a lab. :)
Finally, this is all somewhat moot. The discovery that amino acids and other building blocks of life are naturally occurring in space answers the key question of whether they can form from inorganic compounds -- that answer is now definitively known to be "yes". So the only question is whether they formed here or got dumped here from space.
There is no current plausible explanation for how they "just happened"...
Of course there is. Billions of years of opportunity times a few quintillion quintillion of the right kind of atoms times a tiny chance of it happening to any given set of atoms = it happens. Remember, it only has to happen once. Put a bunch of amino acids together, wait patiently, they rest handles itself. :)
The vigorous antipathy Bush's remark has raised is providing no small amount of amusement for me, as someone who has spent time looking into the creation/evolution debate and found far too much faith and philosophy lurking in the pro-evolution viewpoint, couched in clever, debate-ending language like "scientific fact."
Teaching strictly what is scientific with respect to evolution would be just fine, if we mean strictly observable, testable methodology and its results. Unfortunately, that really wouldn't leave much to talk about in terms of actual irrevocable evidence for evolution. The natural world wouldn't change in the slightest on account of that, nor would the observations that can be made about it. What would change is the power of the governing worldview interpreting those observations, and no small seague of the pro-evolution camp has goals in that regard that are implicitly (and sometimes, explicitly) atheistic. They have also had varying degrees of success at inculcating these ideas into school curricula and popular periodicals.
The backlash, in the US at least where the Judeo-Christian heritage still has enough influence to keep people's minds open to non-atheistic alternatives, has been a long time coming. This comment Bush has made (and the reaction) will probably just dry up in a week or two, but it's nice to see proponents of the status quo do a bit of richly deserved squirming.
As for those pontificating about the forthcoming theocratic classroom: go soak your heads. We live in a social climate where even the most mealy-mouthed, non-denominational forune-cookie invocation by any school district official has been nearly eliminated, if it dares to mention God, by a litany of hostile court actions. Take two helpings of perspective and call me in the morning.
This brings up a related point. We live in an open marketplace of ideas, where (particularly in the libertarian vision) the best ideas survive because they prove themselves -- by natural selection, if you will -- as being the most fit. If evolution has the best case in the evidence, there will be no harm in holding it up against its competitors. A cynic might suspect that the heresy denouncers popping out of every crack in the woodwork DO have something to fear from competition, however, and would like to see the debate ended in their favor by official fiat.
How convenient.
Scientific theory:
a) Fits all available data
b) is capable of making predictions
c) is testable
(Contemporary theories of Evolution, Entropy, Gravity fit all three criteria, ID fits none of them.)
Religious belief:
something you want to or feel you should believe.
Evolution fits either definition, ID fits only into religious belief.
I’m fine with the teaching of intelligent design.
"There are those who argue that the development of life was planned and guided, perhaps by God or some other definition of a Supreme Being. Whether this is so or not is unknown, but if there was such a designer they certainly did it so that it looks like evolution is a true theory. So that’s what we will be studying in our biology classes for the rest of your time in this school."
Re; Kate's statement, "Hundreds of years ago, the earth was thought to be flat. As it turns out, it was not."
As a paid-up memeber of the Flat Earth society, I resent and object to such negative statements from one obviously not in tune with modern thinking!
As I said, just the other day, to my good friend, Elvis..........
anony-mouse:
Ah, the demand for "strictly observable, testable methodology and its results."
This is an extension of the methodology appropriate for physics, chemistry, and some aspects of biology, which is an innapropriate and unrealisable demand for any of the historical sciences.
Not only would evolutionary biology be ruled out by this, but also anything beyond much more than mere cataloguing of observtions in astronomy, geology, physical geography, paleontology and climatology.
In the context of science teaching, evolutionary biology is the only coherent scientific approach extant. Intelligent Design in biology is no more "science" than would be "Creative Design" in geography:
"...never mind ice ages and plate tectonics, obviously the Atlantic was designed the shape it is to produce the Gulf Stream. And the mountains aren't produced by vulcanism, deposition, uplift and erosion. They were shaped to look real pretty and keep Nevada from getting mixed up with California."
Mike!!!!
How is Elvis! Was he with James Dean and Marilyn?
Let me say how sorry I am for offending you. I now know the error of my ways. I am going to request that the President allow for the teaching of "Alternative Plainal Geography" to be taught in our schools as an effort to get everyone's viewpoint across. Why to those evil liberals deny the teachings of Alternative Plainal Geography? Shouldn't we have an open forum?
Pick one or more than one, and give me the consensus answer approved by the scientific community. Thanks.
None of these questions, no matter how they are answered speak to the alleged merits of teaching so called "Intelligent Design" in public schools.
Billions of years of opportunity times a few quintillion quintillion of the right kind of atoms times a tiny chance of it happening to any given set of atoms = it happens.
Ummm... HOW tiny of a chance? Of WHAT happening? How many years do I have to shake that box of parts before I end up with a Rolls Royce? (And not just any Rolls Royce, mind you, but one that has been designed with the factory built in...)
Could this have happened? Yeah, sure, I suppose. But assuming it did, and teaching it as fact to a bunch of students, is nothing more than the expression of blind faith in atheistic materialism: i.e., "We don't know how it happened, but we know God wasn't involved". That's faith, not science.
I'd be interested in having the various critics of the intelligent design concept list the various books on the subject that they have read.
ducrider:
"blind faith in atheistic materialism"
A presumption of the non-involvement of God is an essential basis of science.
Otherwise any problem in science could be answered, now or at any point in the history of science, with "...oh, God did that."
At which point science STOPS. Sure, it has been done (for instance with the "winding up god" of the Newtownian "clockwork" universe) but it is by definition outside science, and the "god of the gaps" has generally embarassed natural theologians when scientists get round to looking at the supposed "gap" with new techniques.
This is precisely WHY religious issues do not belong in science education.
Or scientific ones in matters of theology, for that matter; unless you'd like to include, as an alternative to God as designer/creator the "multiple designers hypothesis" of Intelligent Design; i.e. multiple, competing, antagonistic and periodically incompetent and occasionally sadistic designers.
Religion and science are separate, distinct in methodology, epistemology and ontology, in ethical significance and the very nature of knowing and understanding.
Confusing them is a recipe for grief on all sides.
George,
Books? None. Articles? Many (I am sure I can get you a bibliography if you would like, but I'm not wasting Jane's bandwidth...post an email address I can send to if you would like). Basically I know enough about the subject to know it does not warrent further attention, like reading books on the subject. I'd rather used my reading time for something more based in reality. Like Harry Potter.
There are two things meant by "Evolution". One is the theory about how we get new species. The other is a theory about how we got the species we have.
The first is science, the second is history.
It's really a great pity that people take "science" to mean, simply, "correct" and then want to create "scientific" sub-sets out of all disciplines.
The origin of species is nothing whatever like physics.
(Incidentally, why does the inability to infer unobervable phenomena not apply to planets we can't see but are affecting the gravity of other bodies, or particles we can't directly observe, but must be there because the rest of the world sure looks as if they are?)
Oops, by "gravity of other planets" I mean "orbits of other planets".
A presumption of the non-involvement of God is an essential basis of science.
I agree, from a methodological standpoint. But saying, at this stage of the game, "Random processes created life", goes beyond this methodological materialism into an absolutist philosophical materialism. At that point, you are no longer teaching science, you are teaching religion.
A good article on this:
http://fredoneverything.net/Haldane.shtml
ctl:
This argument would exclude from the category "science" not only historical evolutionary biology, but also little beyond basic observation in astronomy, geography, climatology, etc.
Historical sciences are no less science - which is an approach, rather than a assumption of rectitude - because they do not follow the same requirements for "real-time" experimentation as physics.
"The origin of species is nothing whatever like physics." Perhaps not. But it is like historical geology/geomorphology, which IS a science, like it or not.
"Intelligent Design" in biology is equivalent to proposing that the formation of lakes, mountains, rivers, continents and vast folded strata of rock was not produced by variaous natural processe but by some Supernatural Landcape Artist.
(With Slartibartfast subcontractor for fjords, presumably)
As my earlier questions might suggest, I am not a scientist. However, I have cross-examined many, many ‘experts’, medical, engineering, chemist, physicists, metallurgists, etc. In nearly every instance, once the specialist’s vocabulary is stripped away, the concept of cause and effect accounts for much of what is known or believed in various disciplines, and can be understood by lay people, i.e. juries, some judges and the occasional lawyer. So, instead of answering by trying to score technical points or side-stepping (“’life’ is just a name we slap on especially complicated ‘non-life’”—this may be an answer, but it is not an answer to the question asked, typical for experts who don’t have a satisfactory answer but don’t want to say so), most of the answers Dan offers are either incomplete, evasive or wrong.
A plain reading of Dan’s answer to the first question is that science has yet to answer the basic question: how did inert, inorganic material formed in the forge of Big Bang and its aftermath become organic life, regardless of whatever non-pronounceable name science gives to it? Then, having identified that mechanism, by what further mechanism (cause and effect, X producing Y, you get the picture) does this first ‘thing’ become everything living that has since existed? And, why can’t it be reproduced?
Dan states, “there is no firm basis for drawing a distinction between life and non-life.” With respect, this is a bit of a dodge. Of course there is. Rocks are not alive, animals and plants are.” There are empirical distinctions. At one point, the theory of evolution holds, there were only rocks (speaking generically) and then one day there was something that was a non-rock and it ultimately became us. Whether you call it a self-replicating molecule or a banana, the label being beside the point, something transitioned from the inorganic to the organic to what we have today? What was it and how did it happen?
Dan says, “animals evolved from protista, not plants. Plants are our distant cousins, not our ancestors.” If plants are our distant cousins and protista our ancestors, then they both had a common ancestor or plants couldn’t be our cousins. Who/what was that common ancestor? How did it come into being? Is this provable or an assumption?
Dan says, “the Big Bang didn't actually create anything. The Big Bang is best understood as a boundary of space-time -- the point at which the length, width, height, and time of the universe were all exactly zero. There was no "before the Big Bang", just as there is no "north of the North Pole".” What? Let me try to translate, “In the beginning there was zero, and then there was Big Bang and now there is now.” Yes, that is my understanding of the order of things too. The question remains, how does chaos, i.e. Big Bang, order itself, i.e. produce what he have today as a matter of random chance? What are the odds?
I could go on in this vein for sometime, but I have a living to make. One parting shot though: It is “established that all humans have a single common ancestor from several hundred thousand years ago”, says Dan. Doesn’t this mean that billions of years of evolution and erectus’ 1.5 ± million years on earth produced only one sapiens sapiens progenitor who—good for us—managed to live long enough to produce?
Natural Selection is an extremely subtle and powerful concept. Teaching it in lower grades is like introducing Calculus in third grade. Without the introductions to biology and chemistry the student cannot hope to grasp the impact of small changes in species over vast numbers and lengths of time.
I firmly believe the much of public school curriculums in evolution are both incompetent and/or motivated by anti-religious reasons. Deferring serious discussion of evolution/natural selction to 11th/12th grade would greatly reduce policy issues. The students would be both prepared scientifically and intellectually to handle it.
Ducrider:
"...absolutist philosophical materialism."
Well, umm, yes and no.
If teaching science the materialist absolutism is a given.
I would certainly say re. origin-of-life "we don't know, exactly". I would continue "that's no cause for including supernatural explanations".
What I might be inclined to say (if asked) that this was an operational necessity with no philosophical implications whatever (at risk of scandalous generalisation, I'd venture most scientists tend to accord philosophy about the same value as pocket lint).
As far as theological consideration goes, I'd be inclined not to drag it in at all. But if I did, I might say "God so formed the cosmos and its laws that even apparently purely random events could produce life".
My point: science and religion (and philosophy as third pole maybe?)are incommensurable activities.
You can edit???
Sorry everyone! Evolution is the important biological theory. All multi-cellular living beings on earth share important characterists. For example, they all have DNA, all the animals have blood, etc. And the ones that are closer to each other on the evolutionary tree share more characteristics, their DNA is more similar, etc. If you don't talk about evolution, then you have to skip all this stuff.
Intelligent design is not a theory at all, but I was just thinking... I have heard that because evolution is controversial for the extremely devout, there are a lot of biology textbooks that don't mention evolution at all. It would be better if they mentioned both evolution and intelligent design, than to mention neither.
Dan: What a tour de force of lucid explantion. Let me doff my chapeau, if that doesn't upset the Franco-phobes too much.
Just to amplify one of your points: One of the key creationist ideas is that the odds against life emerging spontaneously are so long, only a miracle could explain its emergence. What this view overlooks is the trillions and trillions and trillions of opportunities that existed for self-replicating molecules to emerge somewhere in the millions of acres of chemical slime that festooned the primordial shoreline--over a period of hundreds of millions of years, at least.
If you play the state lottery once, the chances of winning look slender. But if you play a million times, or a billion times or a trillion times, winning at least once does not look nearly so miraculous. Indeed, given enough tries, winning (at least once) becomes virtually inevitable.
From the standpoint of the universe itself, given the billions of galaxies we now know to exist, and the billions of stars within each, and the numbers of planets that each star could host, what are the odds that not a single one of those stars contains a planet conducive to life? When you add the time dimension, I rather suspect that the odds are stacked in favor of life, rather than against it. Life is a wonder--but not a miracle.
So what does it matter whether a pseudo-science like creationism (or its modern spawn, "intelligent design") is wedged into a science curriculum? Is it any more harmful, say, than doing ESP experiments in the psychology department? The short anyswer is that the pseudo-science of ESP research was indeed tested -- and found to be baseless. It is no longer researched, as far as I know, by any reputable university.
So what would it take for the non-scientific nature of "ID" to be demonstrated suffciently for its proponents to accept that they may have it all wrong? This is a question they never get around to answering, relying instead on throwing stones at Darwin. Finding fault with some of the evidence for natural selection, though, does nothing to aduce positive proofs for their "alternative." This is the false dichotomy on which so much of "creation science" depends.
Moreover, I think it matters a lot whether science teachers are compelled to give public deference to non-scientific, faith-based ideas. When Galileo was tried for heresy, and forced to recant, the Renaissance in Italy essentially stopped. The focus of learning shifted to Northern Europe, to great disadvantage of Italy. Talk about dumbing down!
I think the ID debate is about a lot more than whether high school kids should learn X rather than Y about a small subset of a course that most will forget anyway within a year. I think it's about whether the rationalist view that enabled the Renaissance should be suppressed in favor of the medieval view that preceded it. I see the religious right (consciously or not) as pushing a pre-renaissance world view.
A few examples of religious-right medieval thinking I've heard espoused on cable TV in the last two weeks:
1) That we are engaged (literally) in a crusade in the Middle East and that that's all to the good.
2) The necessity of the father to be the king of his family and for the wife to serve him in all things. (My wife took umbrage at this, for some reason.)
3) That all of morality flows from religious faith and that the faithless can therefore never be seen as moral.
4) That torture is just and necessary.
5) That this blessed water (which you can receive at no charge by writing in) will cure cancer, arthritis and AIDS (complete with testimonials).
None of the above would have been considered exceptionable in 1500. All of the above would have been subject to serious doubt in 1900. So why would we want to turn our clock back 500 years?
Maybe it's because faith-based thinking represents a huge mental shortcut. No need for education, much less homework, if everything you need to know is based on a few simple, faith-based ideas. No need (if you're a guy) to earn your authority--you just have it because you're a guy. No need to deal with shades of gray when everyting is good or evil, black or white. Hell, who needs a health plan if the free blessed water heals all?
Evolution and the science-based theories that explain its major features is about the best established theoretical construct in all of science. If the cognicenti lose that one, they pretty well lose it all. That's why it matters.
But assuming it did, and teaching it as fact to a bunch of students, is nothing more than the expression of blind faith in atheistic materialism
I'm sorry, but that's a bit ridiculous. Materialistic scientific theory demonstrably works; unlike prayer and theology, it yields tangible, reproducable results. It is not "blind faith" to believe that something will work because just because it always does. It may, perhaps, be called "faith", but it is a vastly more justified faith than that of any religion in the history of the world.
i.e., "We don't know how it happened, but we know God wasn't involved".
Science doesn't tell us "God wasn't involved". It tells us "there is no rational reason to believe God exists" and "supernatural forces are not necessary for the creation of life".
The reason why kids shouldn't be taught the Creationist theory of abiogenesis isn't "we know for a fact that God didn't create the first replicators". The reason kids shouldn't be taught it is that there is precisely zero reason to believe that a god COULD have created them, and therefore precisely zero reason to suspect that one did. In contrast, we know that replicators *could* have originated naturally, and we know of no more-likely explanation, so that's what we teach.
There are a literally infinite number of theories for how life could have originated. Only a handful of them can be reasoned from known facts about the the universe. Creationism isn't on that short list.
This is an excellent discussion, everyone. I really like blogs like this that have a reasoned and polite comment community.
As far as teaching "intelligent design" goes...
I think it's a pity that I missed out on a religious training in my secular upbringing, since it would have taught me more about the crux of theology, things like orthodoxy, heresy, and knowing when a leap of faith is made.
The notion that there is a logical explanation for everything is just such a leap of faith.
Pulling from the above:
> Science doesn't tell us "God wasn't involved". It tells us "there is no rational reason to believe God exists" and "supernatural forces are not necessary for the creation of life".
Oh, really? It seems to me that there may well be a rational reason to believe that God exists, we simply have not made that discovery. Certainly, you're not advocating the teaching of science without teaching the unanswered questions of science?
>> A presumption of the non-involvement of God is an essential basis of science.
> I think the ID debate is about a lot more than whether high school kids should learn X rather than Y about a small subset of a course that most will forget anyway within a year. I think it's about whether the rationalist view that enabled the Renaissance should be suppressed in favor of the medieval view that preceded it. I see the religious right (consciously or not) as pushing a pre-renaissance world view.
This is the left edge of the debate. Without the strictest adherence to secular teachings in public school, we face a collapse of civilization. This only lends credence to the fears of the devout that the current curriculum is some sort of political teaching or indoctrination. There are people who find religious education to be a threat to society and wish to use science education as a counter weight.
> I agree, from a methodological standpoint. But saying, at this stage of the game, "Random processes created life", goes beyond this methodological materialism into an absolutist philosophical materialism. At that point, you are no longer teaching science, you are teaching religion.
Indeed. That's a valid concern. Is science taught in public schools in a manor hostile to non-secular faiths.
Ach! I MISQUOTED in my ABOVE posting...
I broke apart a quoted exchange...
>> A presumption of the non-involvement of God is an essential basis of science.
> I agree, from a methodological standpoint. But saying, at this stage of the game, "Random processes created life", goes beyond this methodological materialism into an absolutist philosophical materialism. At that point, you are no longer teaching science, you are teaching religion.
So, instead of answering by trying to score technical points or side-stepping ('life' is just a name we slap on especially complicated 'non-life'—this may be an answer, but it is not an answer to the question asked
You asked an invalid question. The distinction between "life" and "non-life" is entirely arbitrary. If you want and answer to the question "when did non-life become life", please provide a definition of "life" that we can work with. Do you mean when the very simplest cells first formed?
how did inert, inorganic material formed in the forge of Big Bang and its aftermath become organic life
Inert, inorganic material became inert, organic material (such as amino acids). That this occurs naturally is known, since we've found amino acids free-floating in space. Inert, organic material then became noninert organic material, i.e. replicators. Selective pressures then led to more and more complicated noninert organic materials -- probionts (similar to viruses), then protobacteria, then bacteria, then eukaryotes like amoebas and algae, then to simple plants, animals, and fungi, and then to more complicated versions of the same. Take your pick as to which of these transitions (each of which had other steps between them) you want to slap the label of "non-life becoming life" on.
And, why can’t it be reproduced?
For much the same reason that we "couldn't" build airplanes in 1800 AD. It wasn't that building them was impossible; it was just that we hadn't figured out how to do it yet.
If plants are our distant cousins and protista our ancestors, then they both had a common ancestor or plants couldn’t be our cousins. Who/what was that common ancestor?
Both plants and animals have ancestors that would have been classified as protista. The common ancestor was an early protista from before the differentiation into photosyntheic/food-eating subgroups. In layman's terms, animals and plants parted ways way back when we were all a bunch of extremely primitive single-celled organisms.
Let me try to translate, 'In the beginning there was zero, and then there was Big Bang and now there is now.'
I apologize for confusing you. In layman's terms: the Big Bang was the beginning of time. There was no "before the Big Bang", because time *started* at the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the point at which the universe had no height, no width, no length, and no time (i.e, no time had passed yet). That is why I say that asking "what came before the Big Bang" is like asking "what is north of the North Pole". The question is, by definition, nonsensical. There is no "north of the north pole" and there is no "before the beginning of time".
So, no, none of that silliness about "the Big Bang ordering chaos" has any basis in reality.
Oh, really? It seems to me that there may well be a rational reason to believe that God exists, we simply have not made that discovery.
I used the present tense. There *is*, present tense, no rational reason to believe God exists.
It sounds like you're claiming that it is rational to believe absolutely anything you please, since absolutely anything *might* turn out to be true at some point in the unknown future. I beg to differ; it is only rational to believe things in light of the evidence and theory you actually have to work with.
you're not advocating the teaching of science without teaching the unanswered questions of science?
"Does God exist?" is not an unanswered question of science. It is an unanswered question of religion. An "unanswered question of science" is when science is unable to explain observed phenomena.
mckinneytexas:
With apologies to Dan, some alternative answers to your questions:
1. "How did life form from non-life..."
We don't know.
We have some guesses about possible formation of pre-RNA or lipid sphere replicators, but nothing solid yet. We can probably never know, absolutely, as the paleontological evidence is likely nil; but advances in modelling organic/biochemical interaction may show how it MAY have come about.
Absolute proof will likely always be beyond us. However, if we are to do science, rather than toss it into the lap of the "god of the gaps", it's the only course open.
BTW, the question of origins is by definition distinct from evolution as such.
"How long ago, roughly, did this happen?"
Unknown. Earliest geological evidence of organisms are in rocks dated c. 3.5 billion years ago. This is probably within the acceptable range for genetic drift dating, also.
2. "How did chaos order itself..."
This is one for the cosmologists and theoretical physicists. I'll stand clear of that fracas.
But historical biology it surely ain't; so it's hardly relevant to natural selection v. ID in that area.
3. "When the first single cell life formed, was it an animal or plant?"
Neither.
It looks, from the DNA sequences, that one group of eukaryotes took up photosynthesising bacteria like blue-green algae as symbiotes, and became the plant line of descent.
Another, related eukaryotic group took up pre-mitochondrial bacteria as symbiotes and that line led to "animals" (and fungi and a lot of others too, IIRC).
Other lines, not plant nor "animal" nor fungi, are also descended from earlier lines.
4. "Was it just one kind of cell that everything ...evolved from?"
Looks like it, based on commonality of DNA/RNA coding, protein chemistry, structures etc.
5. "Or, were a number of different kinds ..."
That we can probably never know. Common biochemistry indicates commonality of descent of all the forms we know today.
6. "What were the conditions ..."
Unknown. We know life can survive in amazingly harsh environments.
7. "When did plants first start to evolve..."
See 3) above.
8. "...evidence of transition between erectus and sapiens..."
Earliest erectus is from c. 1.5 million years ago; earliest sapiens 100,000 to 160,000 depending on whether you include the Herto forms as sapiens or archaic sapiens. There are transitional types e.g. archaic sapiens, neanderthals.
"...what happened that resulted in ...art, tool making, social interaction, use of fire, tool kits...40,000 years ago".
Big question, and much debated.
Why this shift apparently after fully skeletally modern homo sapiens has been around for some 60,000 years minimum?
Why the lack of recorded technique development before? Integration of the brain? More complex language capacity? Environmental/social pressures on reproduction?
We don't know. Above are the best current hypotheses, AFAIAA. Our best hope may be in tracing back genetics re. brain development. We may never know.
9. "Did sapiens sapiens evolve throughout erectus’ range ...parallel evolution?"
Best evidence of genetics and remains suggest diffusion of sapiens from Africa. This is still contested by a minority. Parallel evolution is not impossible, given similar selection pressures and genetic variation potential, especially if there are gene-flows between groups.
But "out-of-Africa" looks the way to bet.
Single detected ancestry does NOT preclude co-evolving breeding populations in either diffusion or multi-regional models; the single ancestor -or ancestral pair- is a common image, but deceptive. For intance, male and female line genetic analysis indicates "single shared ancestry"; but at different times in the male and female lines.
"Bush has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design. "
Yeah he did and pardon my outburst but WHERE THE HELL ARE THE DEMOCRATS on this? Lazy, stupid, or gutless, WHERE ARE THEY? Why aren't they raking his fundamentalist ass over the coals for this?
I think I know why, actually ...
Half of them ain't any brighter than him, and the rest are scared that their constituencies are on the same page as him. Please please somebody prove me wrong.
"Yeah he did and pardon my outburst but WHERE THE HELL ARE THE DEMOCRATS on this? Lazy, stupid, or gutless, WHERE ARE THEY? Why aren't they raking his fundamentalist ass over the coals for this?
I think I know why, actually ...
Half of them ain't any brighter than him, and the rest are scared that their constituencies are on the same page as him. Please please somebody prove me wrong."
See this link for a response:
http://deaconsway.blogspot.com/2005/08/unintelligent-responses-to-intelligent.html
>See this link for a response:
http://deaconsway.blogspot.com/2005/08/unintelligent-responses-to-intelligent.html
Posted by Kelly at August 3, 2005 04:32 PM
Okay my bad, I stand admonished, let me rephrase my outburst:
Where the hell are the PROFESSIONAL democrats? The ones who make legislation and stuff, that is.
Using statistics (there are billions of stars in the universe, so life must evolve in the vicinity of one or more of them) to argue for the creation of life is absurd. It's like saying, "I have in my right hand a black marble. In my left a jar containing 100 white marbles. Therefore, at least one of the marbles in the jar is black." Clearly, thousands of different variables had to come together in just the right way to create life on Earth. Speculation on these variables coming together somewhere else is just that, speculation. One could also argue life exists in environents on Earth we previously considered too hostile, so life could arise in a hostile environment somewhere else, or life could be based on something other than organic (hydrocarbons) matter. But it's still speculation.
As for time beginning with the Big Bang, the irony is this is a uniquely Judeo-Christian view, that everything must have a beginning. And believing that the universe we know today, at one time had a "length, height and depth of zero," requires a leap of faith bigger than that of believing in God.
Dan - Put that way, it does sound silly. I'm sure I could press the argument somehow, but I'm more interested in the political motivations. I'm trying to note that there is an appearance of a political agenda that goes beyond preparing children for careers in science and engineering.
My objection to objections about intelligent design are that they ignore the threat that the devout feel towards religious teaching. It does not have to be the case that science education and religious education refute one another.
Why the lack of recorded technique development before? Integration of the brain? More complex language capacity? Environmental/social pressures on reproduction?
We don't know. Above are the best current hypotheses, AFAIAA.
Hm, I'm not so sure that those are the best hypotheses. Why does there need to be a biological explanation for the technological shift at all? Humans are, today, almost genetically identical to humans from five thousand years ago, but the difference in our respective technology is even greater than the difference between that of erectus and sapiens. It seems to me that the question of specific technologies were invented at the point where they were invented is a memetic, rather than genetic, one.
It is also worth noting that social interaction didn't start with homo sapiens. Heck, social interaction isn't even limited to homo sapiens today -- all sorts of creatures, such as dogs, dolphins, and primates, exhibit complex social interaction.
John:
"...a uniquely Judeo-Christian view, that everything must have a beginning."
Hardly. Indian (and IIRC Meso-American) cosmolgies tended to the cyclical.
But singular "explanations" of origins are pretty common in other cultures e.g. Islam, Germanic and Classical mythologies, Hellenic philosophy etc. etc. etc.
I'm trying to note that there is an appearance of a political agenda
All that opponents of Creationism ask is that we teach science in our science classes. That's not a political agenda. The political agenda at work here is that well-financed special interest groups want Judeo-Christian creation myths taught as science.
My objection to objections about intelligent design are that they ignore the threat that the devout feel towards religious teaching.
Why is it my problem that some religious people can't deal with reality? Why is the fact that they feel "threatened" by the truth a good reason to let them teach a lie? What about white southerners who feel threatened by the modern understanding that the southern states committed a gross evil by keeping slaves? Shall we tell them the old myth, popular for so long, that black slaves were well-treated and had better lives than working-class northerners?
No. Here's an idea: let's tell our kids the truth. They're perfectly capable of learning the mythology on their own time.
It does not have to be the case that science education and religious education refute one another.
Pardon me, but so long as religions persist in making claims that are at direct odds with observed reality, it will very much be the case that science education refutes religious education. Some religions, such as that of "the Bible is literally true" Christians, are, quite simply, false. They are fantasy, not reality, and we know that for a fact. The types of religion that are compatable with science are those which stick to metaphysical issues.
Dan:
Once technology takes off, cultural factors predominate, agreed. And yes, there's the enormous difference in modern and Cro-magnon toolkits.
But why the period when sapiens looks anatomically modern but toolkits seem to be fixed at little more than erectus level for tens of millenia, with little evidence of innovation, or artistry at all. Why the stasis?
Then *WHAM*, takeoff. Within just a few millenia you have sophisticated multiple stone and bone toolkits, rock paintings, figurines, etc. And a pretty steady trend up to neolithic, agriculture, metallurgy etc. in multiple favourable centres.
Granted it doesn't have to be biology based; as you suggest, an advance in "software" i.e. social evolution of language perhaps, and its potential for abstraction and sophisticated instuction and complex conditional indication of intention?
Then again, we can hardly exclude biological change, perhaps a parallel/interacting process. Research needed!
Dan -I don't know if you can call science education truth, and I'd be leery of any textbook that claimed to contain truth. I'd quickly dismiss any curriculum that was presented to me as truth.
If there is a debate in our society, we cannot simply strike it from the classroom. True separation of church and state means that state respects the teaching of the church, and does not set an agenda to refute those teachings. Separation of church and state is not so absolute that the state has to subscribe to atheist indoctrination.
The changes in American attitudes toward race were not brought about by the issue of a new textbook. It took years of politics, protest, violence, and debate. Education is not programming.
I home that good American children are going to sense that they are being railroaded and start to rebel. You'll find them rejecting evolution and adopting creationist arguments in the classroom. If only for laughs.
You are so certain you are right Dan, and that, to me, is what what you have most in common with the creationists you oppose.
mckinneytexas,
My best effort:
1. How? No one knows. There are a lot of theories and they all have major holes in them. When? Some time around 3.5 billion years ago (fossil stromatolites in Ediacara rocks in Australia).
2. Again, no one really knows. There is a whole "theory of inflation" but it is not completely satisfactory. The recent discovery that more than 80% of the universe consists of "dark matter" and "dark energy" that doesn't behave like regular matter and energy may change theories. But since we have almost no idea how dark matter and energy do behave, probably not any time soon. I think Steven Weinberg's popularization The First Three Minutes still describes the theory pretty well.
3. Almost certainly neither. Probably closer to a very, very simple bacteria.
4., 5. Again, no one knows. One possibility that seems on its way to becoming conventional wisdom is that most all cells nowadays are mergers of earlier cells. I.e., that nuclei, mitochondria, and chloroplasts were once free living cells that got absorbed (perhaps a dinner that wouldn't be eaten). The big name here is Lynn Margulis.
6. You state well the problem with all "origin of life" theories. I have to repeat my answer to 1. "No one knows."
7. Margulis would say that plants essentially began when formerly free-living chloroplasts (which turn sunlight into food) were absorbed into cells. These cells then evolved into the plants we know today. (Did the absorption happen just once or many times? I hope this isn't getting boring but No one knows.)
8. At this point I'm out of my league (though I think the majority of paleontologists now think that Neanderthals were not transitional forms to Homo sapiens sapiens but an offshoot--from Homo erectus--of the family tree that died out sometime near the end of the last ice age) . And one of the great mysteries is how come Homo sapiens sapiens seems to have been around more than 100,000 years ago but there's a big culture change 40,000 years ago? There's lots of speculation--a slight change in vocal cords which made modern speech possible? a slight change in brain organization that made cooperation more possible?--but no agreement.
9. This is the big debate between the "Out of Africa" hypothesis (Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Africa and then moved out 100,000-plus years ago, causing the extinction of populations of Homo erectus who had moved out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years before and remained relatively unchanged) and the hypothesis of parallel evolution (Homo erectus moved out of Africa many hundreds of thousands of years ago and evolved in slightly different ways in different places to become varous forms of Homo sapiens sapiens around the world). There are also mixed theories: two major migrations out of Africa but some parallel evolution with gene flow back and forth. Again, no one knows, though most people working in the field subscribe to some fairly strong variant of the Out of Africa hypothesis.
John F--thanks for straightforward answers to my questions and conceding the unknown where it is unknown, and using appropriate qualifiers where needed.
Dan--Sorry friend, but as one who demands that all fall down before reason and logic, positing
1. "Inert, inorganic material became inert, organic material (such as amino acids)", lacks both. The operative word is 'became'. How? When? Show me. "Became" is not synonymous with 'abracadabra.' What external force(s) transforms one into the other?
2. "That this occurs naturally is known, since we've found amino acids free-floating in space." Again, a failure in causal logic. You are saying that one thing becomes another because the other was found in space. What does space have to do with it? We have both inert inorganics and inert organics right here on earth. Their presence alone does not prove that one converted into to the other nor does it explain the conversion process.
3. "Inert, organic material then became noninert organic material, i.e. replicators." Again, this is creationism for aethists: first there was nothing, then a big boom, then there was something and the something interacted with itself through a long series of nearly infinite processes and now, here we are today along with everything else.
John F--One quibble: Big Bang and Evolution have to relate, and in a big way. Evolution's seed, indeed the beginning of everything there is, lay in BB. BB was the catalyst and source for the entire universe. As Dan tells us, the universe sprung from nothing, or zero, if there is a difference. An explanation of how nothing/zero can explode into something and then morph over billions of years OF ITS OWN IMPETUS, BECOMING EVERMORE ORGANIZED UP THROUGH TODAY AND WITHOUT THE APPLICATION OF ANY EXTERNAL FORCE WHATSOEVER is still lacking.
By the way, I am not a Creationist (as in Adam and Eve, seven days, etc.), nor do I believe in Biblical inerrancy, nor do I have more than a quess as to what Intelligent Design is (or is not). Rather, I raise these questions because I am blown away by the fact that a large segment of thinking people in a society that supposedly values free speech, open inquiry and tolerance for differing views would declare certain subjects to be off limits and simply not open to debate. And, at least on the state of today's knowledge, there are a lot of basic, unanswered questions. To a slightly lesser degree, the dripping contempt and intolerance for people who find secularists' assurances a bit dry and lacking has all of the self-righteous zeal and certitude of the worst religous bigots. Think of an atheist Jerry Falwell with too much coffeee on board.
Roger Sweeney--thanks for informative and useful answers. As with John F, you've confirmed with a knowledge of the issues what I've sensed--as a liberal arts type--from popular reading: many theories and much fact based on evidence, observation, reason and inference, many of which resonate, but many unanswered questions, including many at the most basic level, still remaining. Thanks again.
mckinneytexas,
Dan--Sorry friend, but as one who demands that all fall down before reason and logic, positing
1. "Inert, inorganic material became inert, organic material (such as amino acids)", lacks both. The operative word is 'became'. How? When? Show me. "Became" is not synonymous with 'abracadabra.' What external force(s) transforms one into the other?
It's time for the S. Harris classic:
http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery.htm
You say of the Big Bang and after, "the universe sprung from nothing, or zero, if there is a difference. An explanation of how nothing/zero can explode into something and then morph over billions of years OF ITS OWN IMPETUS, BECOMING EVERMORE ORGANIZED UP THROUGH TODAY AND WITHOUT THE APPLICATION OF ANY EXTERNAL FORCE WHATSOEVER is still lacking."
But in terms of entropy, it has become less and less organized up through today. Some small pockets have become more organized, e.g. there is life on earth. But this has happened because there has been a massive increase in entropy in the sun which has sprayed out millions upon millions of joules of energy, some of which has been captured by the self-replicating localized decreases of entropy that we call life on earth.
Without fusion in the sun (a massively entropy-increasing process) there is no significant life on earth.
Roger Sweeney--I can easily accept the notion: no sun, no life. I think I get the point that entropy goes in different directions at different times and locations. What I still don't get is, how does all of this happen on its own?
Using statistics (there are billions of stars in the universe, so life must evolve in the vicinity of one or more of them)
There are, according to our best estimates, 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. You're off by around 13 orders of magnitude just to start with.
The other problem with your example is that we don't know what color any of the other "marbles" are. We know that Earth has life, we know that the Moon doesn't, and we're unsure about Mars. So far as the rest of the 69,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 stars and their planets are concerned, we've got no idea.
If the odds of an Earth-like planet forming around any given star were one in a billion, and the odds of life arising on such a planet over the course of the star's 10-billion-year lifetime were one in a trillion, that would mean that around 70 stars in the universe have Earthlike worlds with life on them. And before you say "what are the odds that this would be one of them", let me answer: the same as the odds of it being any OTHER star. It is like winning the lottery -- incredibly unlikely for any given person, but inevitable for SOME person. No god is required.
Roger, Dan, John F;
Forget it. mckinneytexas is just a troll trying to pretend to think. There is nothing you can do that would persuade him. A panel of Nobel winning scientists couldn't do it. Don't accept any of his denials about it being a religious issue with him. He's just being purposefully obtuse.
It's funny how much of the discussion here (and at many other sites) focuses on how life began.
Folks, evolution had nothing to say on that subject. Evolution only comes into play after life already exists. (Or, if you like, after self-replicating entities capable of heritable variation already exist.)
And guess what else? If you listen to the major proponents of ID - folks like Behe, Dembski, Johnson, etc. - ID isn't about the origin of life either!
ID basically argues that certain complex features of living creatures "couldn't possibly" have arisen through biological evolution. Therefore (so they say), an intelligence must have been involved.
Jim - There is a nice, honest debate taking place in these comments. You are not contributing by calling someone who disagrees with you a troll.
Dan -I don't know if you can call science education truth, and I'd be leery of any textbook that claimed to contain truth. I'd quickly dismiss any curriculum that was presented to me as truth
If anything in the universe deserves to be called "truth", scientific knowledge does. It describes reality -- the stuff that, as Phil Dick put it, doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
If there is a debate in our society, we cannot simply strike it from the classroom.
Why not? There is a finite amount of classroom time. Creationism is not a scientific theory and has absolutely no evidence supporting it. So how can you possibly justify spending taxpayer money to "teach" it to children?
True separation of church and state means that state respects the teaching of the church, and does not set an agenda to refute those teachings.
The simple act of accurately describing the real world is not "an agenda to refute church teachings". It is not the government's fault that fundamentalists are ignorant of reality.
Separation of church and state is not so absolute that the state has to subscribe to atheist indoctrination.
"Atheist indoctrination?" There are hundreds of millions of Christians in the world who accept the theory of evolution. There is nothing inherently atheistic about understanding the real world.
> If anything in the universe deserves to be called "truth", scientific knowledge does. It describes reality -- the stuff that, as Phil Dick put it, doesn't go away when you stop believing in it.
You agree then, that there is a value judgment. I'm a layman, but I don't see science in terms of truth and lies, rather as procedure. I'd prefer that children are taught science without it becoming something of a surrogate for religion. It is not the only path to truth that is available.
> Why not? There is a finite amount of classroom time. Creationism is not a scientific theory and has absolutely no evidence supporting it. So how can you possibly justify spending taxpayer money to "teach" it to children?
> The simple act of accurately describing the real world is not "an agenda to refute church teachings". It is not the government's fault that fundamentalists are ignorant of reality.
Yeah, sure. Agreed. I'm not a creationist, myself. Nor am I cultural relativist. But, I understand that fundamentalism exists, and in some school districts it is more of a force that in others.
You are not going to remove the cultural influence of the Bible. It's probably better to address it, or leave plenty of room for it, than to deny that it is there.
>> Separation of church and state is not so absolute that the state has to subscribe to atheist indoctrination.
> "Atheist indoctrination?" There are hundreds of millions of Christians in the world who accept the theory of evolution. There is nothing inherently atheistic about understanding the real world.
No, there isn't. And I believe that is the point behind Intelligent Design.
Forget it. mckinneytexas is just a troll trying to pretend to think.
I'm aware of that, but it is still worth responding to his remarks for the benefit of other readers.
"Inert, inorganic material became inert, organic material (such as amino acids)", lacks both. The operative word is 'became'. How? When? Show me.
H20 (water), CH4 (methane), NH3 (ammonia), and H2 (hydrogen) combined to form chemicals such as NH2CH2COOH (glycine, an amino acid). All of the above chemicals (glycine included) occur naturally on Earth, in space, and on several other planets we've examined.
Anyway, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to "show" you a chemical reaction over the net, especially given that you have a tendency to start whining whenever I use technical terms. Suffice it to say, in layman's terms: mix water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in the proportions of your choosing, apply energy, voila. You get similar results with a variety of other chemicals, so long as those chemicals contain carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.
What external force(s) transforms one into the other?
No external force is necessary, unless you think basic laws of chemistry qualify as an external force.
You are saying that one thing becomes another because the other was found in space
Um, no. In the simplest possible terms, I'm saying that it doesn't matter if one thing became another on Earth specifically, because that other occurs naturally throughout the universe. Think of it this way: let's say you found a rock lying on the ground, and managed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's no way that rock originated on Earth through natural processes. Does that mean God made the rock? Of course not, because the universe is full of rocks, and they fall to Earth with considerable regularity. We don't have a pressing need to explain the presence of "inert organic chemicals" on Earth, because those chemicals are quite common in the universe as a whole.
first there was nothing, then a big boom
No, first there were complex organic compounds (described above), and then there was a chemical reaction, and the result of that reaction was a molecule that replicates itself, presumably RNA- or DNA-like.
then there was something and the something interacted with itself through a long series of nearly infinite processes and now, here we are today along with everything else
So your complaint is that the scientific explanation for the processes by which complex life forms came to exist is complex and difficult for a layman to understand?
Well, yes, it is. Because -- and I hope this doesn't come as a shock to you -- life itself is pretty darn complex. Not everything can be as simplistic as "God magically made it happen". :)
An explanation of how nothing/zero can explode into something
Nothing didn't explode into something. All the energy that exists in the universe existed at the point of the Big Bang. So, as you would put it, "something" exploded into a big messy scattered "something else".
and then morph over billions of years OF ITS OWN IMPETUS
Why are you shocked by the notion that a vast assortment of zillions of atoms might change over time? You have, I'd hope, heard of chemical reactions? Of gravity? Of quantum mechanics?
Heck, if you could somehow find a way to isolate a single hydrogen atom in a perfect vaccuum and remove all external influences, it would *still* change over time.
BECOMING EVERMORE ORGANIZED UP THROUGH TODAY AND WITHOUT THE APPLICATION OF ANY EXTERNAL FORCE WHATSOEVER
I'm tired of explaning this, but I'll try for the third time: the universe has not been becoming evermore organized since the Big Bang. It has been becoming ever LESS organized since the Big Bang.
Now, it is true that life on Earth has become more organized, but that's because there *is* an external force feeding energy into the system -- namely, the Sun. All life on Earth either lives off of sunlight or lives off of something that lives off of sunlight. There is no need for magical "external forces"; life on Earth is able to exist because we parasitically live off the heat of our slowly-dying sun.
You claim to not be a Creationist. Perhaps not. But you can't honestly expect anyone to buy your story about having no firm beliefs on this subject; your sneering rejection of even the most basic science involved indicates otherwise.
You agree then, that there is a value judgment.
I agree that scientific knowledge deserves to be treated as superior to all other forms of knowledge, if that's what you mean.
It is not the only path to truth that is available.
If by "truth" you mean "things that make us feel better but which have no discernable relationship to the real world" then, yes, there are other paths to truth. But otherwise, no, there aren't.
You are not going to remove the cultural influence of the Bible.
If that is true, then it must necessarily also be true that no possible harm can be done to Christianity by excluding the teaching of Creationism from science classes. So why not exclude it, since we both agree that it isn't science anyway? What is the purpose of education -- imparting knowledge, or making fundamentalist Christians feel good at the expense of scientifically literate Christians and atheists?
Kate,
Paragraph 1: Nope; just flat plain wrong. The Pope never said that; the controversy with Galileo was far, far different than you imagine. For starters, you might check out what Acquinas actually said about the Ptolemaic model of the universe. (Hint: he knew it was just a model.)
Paragraph 2: Nope; not only did the ancient Greeks know the world was round, they actually measured its circumference (to a very acceptable degree of accuracy, given the primitive timekeeping and observation tools they had.) Nor did this knowledge die out in the so-called "Dark Ages". As just one example, Dante in his Inferno depicts the reversal of the direction of gravity as he travels through the center of the earth and starts heading up to the other side.
Paragraphs 3 and 4 aren't so spectaculary wrong, but the depiction of "then we knew nothing but know we know it all" is just as misguided.
If the odds of an Earth-like planet forming around any given star were one in a billion, ...
Key word here is "if." We don't know what the odds are of an Earth-like planet forming around any given star. There are far too many variables involved to calculate these odds. All we know for sure is that there is one Earth-like planet. Anything else is speculation, which is not science.
Dan--if I sneered, I didn't mean to. I am not a Creationist in the sense that I discount/deny any of the following: Big Bang, evolution, the age of the universe, the age of the earth, the hard sciences from biology to physics and everything on either side of them. Nor should you infer that I favor any form of publicly funded instruction on creationism, because, in fact, I do not. If I, or anyone else, miss many or most of the discrete scientific complexities, it does not follow that (1) fair questions cannot be raised by the great unwashed and (2) a fair answers from those who know should be more than ipsi dixit assertions. Let me try to explain:
I fully concede that you and others who've posted above are much more scientifically grounded than I am. But, what separates you from some of the others who've addressed these issues is that the phrase "No one knows" doesn't fit into your program. For instance, instead of saying that you (meaning the scientific community in general) don’t know how inorganic material translates into organic, or non-life into life, you sidestep with argumentative assertions that life is too imprecise a notion to allow for an answer (or something along those lines).
Similarly, your own description of Big Bang fairly raises a number of questions: what happened before Big Bang and what produced or caused the Big Bang and how did a random explosion produce a more or less ordered universe of its own impetus? You say there was no 'before' before Big Bang and then the discussion seems to be some combination of the universe not being organized except for pockets of organization such as earth, and the sun produces energy and that produces the complex system we have today. Again, that sidesteps the issue: there is no disagreement that earth is complex, ditto the universe, etc. etc. But, Big Bang was either a random release of energy or it had some degree of focus (if I am wrong on this, straighten me out). If the initial release was random, is it the scientific community's view that the pockets of organization such as earth are purely the result of random chance over great amounts of time? If not random chance, then what? If the energy release was focused in any degree, (a) how do we know that and (b) what is the source of the focus?
Dan, in your world, if I get what you are saying, your position as set forth in your posts is 'the truth' as it should be taught in school--and, for the most part, I agree in the sense that science should be taught in school free and clear of philosophical issues. Where you and I part company is that I would permit free discussion, if raised by students, of the unknowns. My sense is you would dismiss those questions as outside the scope of a scientific inquiry. In doing so, however, you would have to say, in effect, “no further questions as to what existed prior to Big Bang will be entertained. I’ve told you, there was nothing before Big Bang, you are wasting my time, end of discussion.” Call me an obtuse troll who only pretends to think, but that doesn’t strike me as much of an answer for a scientist to give a student.
Dan et (a few) al.:
What's so threatening about acknowledging that the origin of life is not perfectly understood? I'm not a creationist either, nor a fan of ID to the extent that I understand its premise, and as a geologist I have some training in observations of the real world that tend to support the theory of evolution, but I do confess to a belief that a creator Being was and continues to be involved in life, the universe, and everything. It doesn't interfere one little bit with my ability to accept evolutionary processes as THE mechanism for speciation (unless and until a more plausible mechanism comes along) - though it might affect my personal feelings about the "motive," so to speak.
I myself don't think ID should be taught alongside the theory of evolution, based on the little I know about ID. But I do think teachers of the theory of evolution in public pre-college school ought either to steer clear of the question of life's origin (by which I mean "the spark," as has been discussed, and at this level probably doesn't need more definition - but if it does, maybe the suite of behaviors comprising self-initiated self-replication plus internal and self-initiated conversion of matter or energy to other matter or energy=growth and/or mobility, plus whatever-all else - I am not a biologist, obviously) altogether, or to acknowledge that beliefs about how "the spark" happened range from "all by itself" through "divine intervention" to "divine hand." Teaching, instead, that the theory of evolution depends on a "natural" (as if a god would be unnatural) or non-divine life origin strikes me as unnecessarily dogmatic, and unscientific to boot.
mckinneytexas,
I can easily accept the notion: no sun, no life. I think I get the point that entropy goes in different directions at different times and locations. What I still don't get is, how does all of this happen on its own?
I'm not sure exactly how to answer that. But first a clarification. The total entropy ("disorder") in any "closed system" has to go up over time. That is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It can go down in one part only if it goes up at least as much in some other part. The creation of increasing disorder in one part essentially provides the useful energy required to decrease disorder in another part. In the words of Dan, "life on Earth is able to exist because we parasitically live off the heat of our slowly-dying sun."
This is sometimes expressed as "earth is an open system." I.e. it gets useful energy from the outside, energy caused by an increase in disorder somewhere else. Thus, disorder can decrease in the "open system."
How does order increase "on it's own" via "evolution"? The idea is that there are self-replicating localized decreases in entropy, what we call living things. (Where did they come from originally? No one knows. But once they're here, the story goes like this.) These living things can live and grow because they use energy from the slowly-consuming-itself sun. When they replicate, they don't always do it perfectly. It takes more energy and more complicated machinery to perfectly copy your genes. This is one part--the more random part--of the evolutionary process.
Some of those "mistakes" in replication will make the organism more complex. Some will make it more likely to survive and reproduce. Some will do both. Very few--but one tree will produce thousands of seeds a year, one spider will produce hundreds of eggs at a time, one mouse can have 20 offspring in a year. So every once in a while a favorable complexifying "mistake" will survive and spread. This is the other--the much less random--part of the evolutionary process.
Now, over time, no organism can average more than one offspring. Else that species would take over the world. So what starts as thousands of seedlings ends up as one tree. What begins as twenty mice ends up as two (one for the birth-giver, one for the sperm donor). There is a lot of opportunity for creation of "mistakes" and then a drastic culling of the results. Each generation of reproducing organisms is what remains after the great majority of that generation has died or failed to successfuly reproduce. Boom and bust, with the fittest surviving. Then another boom and bust, starting with that perhaps more fit generation. Generation of diversity, drastic pruning, then the creation of more diversity from the new base. Evolution only works because of this constant two-step.
If life begins as pretty simple organisms, it can't get much less complex. But there are lots of possible more complex forms it can take. So over time, there will an increase in the complexity of organisms. Most will stay pretty simple. And some will get less complex with time, if that is a survival advantage. But the most complex can continue to get more and more complex (if, and only if, the benefits exceed the costs). In effect the right-hand tail of the "complexity distribution" extends out further and further.
Jamie,
A commenter on another thread made a distinction between "methodological materialism" and "philosophical materialism."
"Methodological materialism" says, "Hey, we can only do experiments on material things so our explanations have to be material ones. God or Krishna or a thousand supersmart monkeys may have a part in all this but 'the ways of the Lord are mysterious and varied.' You can't build a science on that."
"Philosophical materialism" says, "Everything is material. There is nothing else."
"Methodolical materialsim" is agnostic about the existence of an Intelligent Designer or anything else that can't be observed and measured. "Philosophical materialism" has a faith that nothing like that exists.
Of course, methodolical materialism puts some constraints on how the ID works. Either He created the earth a long time ago and allowed many creatures to live and then go extinct in what looks like an orderly pattern, or He created an earth recently but made things look like there is great ancientness and a constant turnover of creatures (or perhaps He created everything a second ago and implanted false memories in all of us. Or perhaps we are, as the elder Mark Twain believed, just part of His dream.) Of course, some of those possibilities seem more reasonable than others. Though when you come right down to it, who are we to say what's reasonable to God?
Folks:
There's an entire forum devoted to this topic, over at TalkOrigins.com, with sidebar explorations of every related topic imaginable. Some brilliant stuff appears over there, and some genuine idiocy as well.
Not that a lot of this stuff, in this thread, isn't real damn good, because it certainly is. But the political dimension of this problem may be getting short shrift here.
I seriously fear that there may be a drastic shortage of the political will required to oppose the introduction of this creationist malarkey into the public schools. Nathan's complaint, "The real problem is that public schools are subject to capture by weirdo interest groups," is spot on, and yeah, the Dems are historically guilty of abetting way too much of this kind of thing. But this time it's the Reps making the mischief, so if there's going to be any opposition to this nonsense, it's going to have to come from the Dems. And I just don't see them picking up the cudgels.
Parker
>>I'm not hostile to the idea of intelligent design - I just have trouble coming up with any falsifiable hypotheses to test it against. You know, the science thing?
Don't claim to be a scientist, but the most reasonable test I can think of would be to see whether mutation follows a random white noise pattern. If so, then Intelligent Disign kind of falls by the wayside. If not, then Darwinian evolutionary theory would need to provide some alternate explanation. Not taking a side, just suggesting.
> This brings up a related point. We live in an open marketplace of ideas, where (particularly in the libertarian vision) the best ideas survive because they prove themselves -- by natural selection, if you will -- as being the most fit. If evolution has the best case in the evidence, there will be no harm in holding it up against its competitors. A cynic might suspect that the heresy denouncers popping out of every crack in the woodwork DO have something to fear from competition, however, and would like to see the debate ended in their favor by official fiat.
The marketplace of ideas argument in favor of teaching ID (quoted above) strikes me as pretty lame. Some people believe that Holocaust didn't occur, the heart is the seat of human emotions, human babies are delivered by storks, and space aliens built the Egyptian pyramids. But it would be pretty stupid to waste students class time on these other "schools of thought." If ID doesn't have significant scientific support, it shouldn't be taught just to satisify someone's political agenda.
If a significant number of students thought storks delivered babies, this is probably something the public schools should address. The larger issue of the political angle cuts both ways.
From the right, there is too much of a confrontational, 'looking for a good lawsuit'attitude in some religous quarters that seems fed by a fondness for publicity and no-pain martydom (having a court rule you can't put the 10 commandments in the courthouse doesn't really hurt anyone, but some people seem to enjoy acting as if their world has come to an end). I suspect that is what is fueling the Odessa, Texas creationism drive. It will fail and everyone can have a good cry about how the government hates Jesus.
From the left, there are those who relish, loud and long, poking their fingers in believers' eyes. This is done in a number of ways, from insulting people for not being aetheists to acting as if school vouchers will put us just one step away from a theocracy.
Call it a lack of civility or comity or tolerance, but neither side should delude themselves into thinking that they are the sole owners of the white hats or that it is just the other side with an agenda.
"If the odds of an Earth-like planet forming around any given star were one in a billion,"
Key word here is "if." We don't know what the odds are of an Earth-like planet forming around any given star.
Our best understanding of the manner in which stars and planets form indicates that Earthlike worlds should be a great deal more common than one in a billion.
There are far too many variables involved to calculate these odds.
That's funny... Creationists don't seem to have any trouble stating that the odds are so remote that divine intervention must have happened.
You're looking at this backwards. We know that it is possible for natural processes to lead to life. That means that it is perfectly legitimate to form the scientific theory that life arose via natural means. Now, one possible objection to this theory is that the odds of life arising by natural means may be too remote, and conditions too rare, for it to be likely that life could have arisen naturally.
Yes, they *may* have been. But it is up to the people posing that objection to demostrate that they *are*. Science works by the iterative process of people finding demonstrable problems with existing theory, not by the iterative process of Creationists making unsupported claims about probability.