A good day for the 21st Century

Hurray for science

MARIETTA, Ga. - Workers in Cobb County have begun removing controversial evolution disclaimer stickers from science textbooks to comply with a judge's order.

By the end of the day Monday, several thousand stickers, which said evolution was a theory and not a fact, had been scraped off. The school district had put 34,452 stickers on textbooks across the county.

The evolution disclaimers read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

Six parents sued to remove the stickers saying the disclaimers violated the principle of the separation of church and state. A federal judge in January agreed and ordered the stickers removed.

An appeal by the school system, north of Atlanta, is pending.

"It's a sad day in Cobb County," said Larry Taylor, a parent who favors including alternatives to evolution in science classes. "I hate to see the stickers go. I thought they were a fair compromise."

But Jeffrey Selman, who was the lead parent among a group who sued to remove the stickers, said he was glad they were being removed. "I'm optimistic, but it ain't over till it's over," Selman said.

I'm all for teaching alternatives to Evolution. It is a theory after all. But until we come up with something that isn't religion based, it's all we got. Let the churches and private Catholic schools teach whatever they want.

And "intelligent design," no matter how agnostic, is still religious at its base.

"Theory" means something different in the scientific world than what we use it for everyday language. It means that it has been supported by many different independent hypotheses over time and has not been disproven by any of them. A Theory is as close to "fact" as you can get from doing scientific experiments. Sure it could be disproven later on in the future, but it hasn't yet, so all we have is the large amount of data backing it up.

As Lianne said, this points to a fundamental misunderstanding of what a scientific theory actually is:



Quoted from The Scientific American's 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Evolution itself is pretty factual. It's happening all around us everyday. It is a slow process, but the human race is evolving as we speak, as are many non-human life forms, such as animals, insects, bacteria and viruses.

Life evolves, in order to become more efficient and in many cases, in order to survive. Take a look at skeletal structure, average height, and average weight, and compare them to those people living a few hunded years ago. We are evolving and there is proof galore.

However, as to how the human race came into being in the first place, there are still alot of questions. Of course there is a lot of evidence pointing toward evolution from a primitive life form, including fossils, ancient artifacts, cave paintings, etc.

As to the biblical theory, there isn't a shred of real evidence to support it, and even the bible leaves huge gaps. If Adam and Eve had two children, named Cain and Able, and Cain killed Able, and there weren't any sisters...umm..how did the race continue?

So...evolution as the origins of the human race could indeed be considered a scientific theory, but wouldn't that make the bible's telling of human creation a non-scientific fairytale?

So..while I'm fine with classes such as, "The Bible as Literature" being taught in public schools, I'd prefer any science taught to have at least a basis in..well..science..

Well I can sure tell you who's not evolving.

My ex-boyfriends!

I think their knuckles are actually getting closer to the ground.

Most churches do not teach apologetics very well, particularly for the Book of Genesis.

Genesis
Chapter 5

1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;

2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth:

4 And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:

5 And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

And in case anyone else is wondering...

Genesis
Chapter 7
Verse 7

7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.

And don't get me wrong. I do believe in evolution, but I also think there is a balance between the two. As for the school, well we are suppose to have a seperation of church and state.

Every time someone tells me "Evolution is just a theory," I tell them "So's gravity." Nobody seems to have a problem believing the Theory of Gravity, though.

Of course, what really pisses them off is when I mention that Creationism is only a theory, too. And then I ask them if I can come to their church and teach evolution. Its only fair to give them a balanced outlook, right? Funny, they never see it that way.

Good point .


Also a good point .


That's a bit different . A school is suppose to teach everyone. A church is choosen by a select few because it meets their needs. So perhaps the schools should teach evolution, with a side note mentioning that there are other thoughts to our origins . Having more than one side to a story couldn't hurt .

I'm a firm believer in the dangers of inbreeding. Just drive through Kentucky

As long as none of the sides have religon as their base, I'm good with that.

One another hand, if you say that ID should be taught along with evolution just to get more than one side, then you should be teaching ALL of the various religous creation stories from every religon.

Or, you could keep mythology out of schools and teach science.

Well thats the basis of everything . Evolution or creationism. (asexual reproduction excluded)


That's not a bad idea actually, I don't think we should be limited to just one or two views. It takes at most 2 days to cover a subject like that at the basic level, so what's another week or so to teach more veiwpoints. Information is neutral, teaching another way is NOT going to brainwash someone into believing one thing over another.

Let's go test the theory of gravity - easiest thing in the world.

Testing whether life forms evolve in one way or another - doable, relatively easy to observe on any farm, or in the lab with insects and such.

Testing out natural selection as the means of evolution - now we're getting onto shaky ground. Insisting on it requires throwing out a lot of anomalies, such as organisms demonstrating traits that seem to have been picked up after the parent died of something. The circumlocutions you have to go through to explain how something such as the eye could evolve are extensive. Explaining human societies and behavior is even more problematic, and adopting some of the ideas suggested in this line has led to some of the worst atrocities of the past century.

Testing out the complete randomness of chemical interactions leading to the beginning of life - hasn't been done. The odds calculated against it happening are so long that you need to postulate that our universe has already been selected out from an incredibly huge multitude of universes as the lucky one, to even get to the point of it happening on Earth.

Sometimes I want to just shake both sides of this debate and say, "Just look for once!" If you can see something happening admit it. If you don't really know how it came about, admit it!

It is amazing isn't it?

Self ---> mind ---> symbol ---> language coding ---> physical output(keyboard) ---> CPU ---> IP ---> network(s) ---> CPU ---> video display ---> vision ---> language decoding ---> symbol comparison ---> mind ---> self (other).

How many more via's could we add before the whole thing grinds to a halt? Heh, SL sometimes shows the strain of it.

The eye is still a controversial subject among creationists and others
who do not believe evolution, but it is not a hard structure to explain.
The central idea is that if all creatures were originally blind, 1% of an
eye is better than nothing and will be preferentially selected. The best
idea of this apparent evolutionary change (a flat area of skin or epithelium
with light sensors, then folding inward to form first an open cavity and
later a closed cavity, first without a lens and then with a lens) is
illustrated in many evolution textbooks and popular books.

What is really neat is that we can find invertebrate animals like scallops,
worms, etc. that have eyes with each of these "intermediate" conditions
(i.e., open cavity with no lens, etc.). It is also neat that while our eye
and the octopus eye look very similar, our retina is inside out (the rods
and cones on the outside of the retina, *below* the blood vessels and the
neuronal wiring) while the octopus has a retina with the rods and cones on
the inside of the retina. (This is why we can see moving blood cells when an
ophthamologist shines a bright light into your eye.) It is clear that these
different eyes evolved separately.

A clue to the origin of eyes is also found in the protein structure of our
lens and those of other animals. Since these proteins, called crystallins,
are simply globular proteins that don't stick to each other (the lens is not
a crystal, but merely a fluid of nonattracting hard spheres, the proteins
themselves) it turns out that many types of proteins, originally used for
different metabolic functions in ordinary cells, were co-opted for use in
the eye. Crocodiles and some birds use a lactate dehydrogenase enzyme in
their lens (this enzyme removes a hydrogen from lactic acid, which you eat
in yoghurt and saurkraut), most birds and reptiles use argininosuccinate
lyase, and we and many other vertebrates use a heat shock protein, a helper
molecule called a chaperone that repairs other proteins if they get bent out
of shape (inproperly folded) after being exposed to excess heat. It is
amazing that so many types of metabolic enzymes have been used in the eye in
this structural role of focusing light, rather than a unique protein being
created just for this purpose. By the way, I have no trouble believing in a
supernatural creator who used evolution.

It might get lonely, unless we all learn how to jam out on a keyboard .

I've said it before, i'll say it again. There are some really smart people in SL

I somewhat disagree with that statement, Lora. Religion is a series of culturally oriented worship practices. Intelligent design merely acknowledges that some ambiguous universal intelligence may have had a hand in architecting the creative framework. Keep in mind that the separation of church and state is intended to prohibit government from establishing or sanctioning specific religious practices. Acknowledging the possibility of intelligent design is not, in my form, an establishment act.

David - Note that many creation scientists completely agree with you regarding micro, intra-species evolution. It's the transitory, macro form of evolution with which they generally take exception.

I thought the traits were random mutations in the offspring from birth that made them better able to live through a change in environmental conditions (or at the minimum, able to breed faster or make them more sexually desirable), not traits "picked up after the parents died of something." Do any animals somehow develop mutant genetic traits after they are older? That seems to be what you are suggesting, but I don't think that's what is commonly understood. Maybe that's where your trouble stems from. Viruses do similar things- acquiring random mutations that make some strains more infectious or better able to spread while other strains are overcome.

On a somewhat unrelated note, evolution doesn't necessarily mean "better." Imagine a tropical island full of really smart, hairless toddlers and two retarded, extremely hairy toddlers. Boom, ice age. The retarded, hairy toddlers live (and their descendents move to Connecticut, send their kids to Yale, and later pretend to be Texan )

Bahaha
*wipes tears from eyes*
That was great .

The freezing point of water is variable dependent on air pressure... Air pressure that God creates with the flapping of a thousand seraphs' wings while they look out from the four corners of the earth.