10stone5 wrote:

“Do you want to couch this strictly as separation of church and state.”

Strictly? No. The creationists view this as both a religious war and a cultural war. The majority of their attacks may be seen as feints or diversions that lack enough substance to reach the courts dockets. (If they want to effect any meaningful and lasting change, setting precedence in the courts is the only option) I do view the Lemon test and the Overton ruling as the last line of defense for the few cases that do reach the courts.

I agree with you mike. Got a copy of ‘art of war’ on the shelf behind me. I also agree that we’ve got to identify which weak points deserve the most attention. As to rhetoric, a first year law student can mop the floor with the creationsts greatest efforts. (they are that weak)

I feel we should point out to the general public that the creationists are not only not representative of the typical American, they are not even representative of the typical christian. Within the christian world, they are a minority and are more of an obscure sect. They say this in their own words, while overlooking the significance:

“No major seminary and only a few small ones teach a recent creation and universal Flood.”

http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq...nd_sci_cre.htm

Another weakness is the attempt to equate ‘secular’ with ‘atheist’. Yet another is the dead horse ‘xian nation’ propaganda. Should they say 1000 times ‘take back the nation’, someone must respond 1001 times ‘you cant take back what you never had’. America began and remains a secular nation. We are a nation of immigrants with diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. E Pluribus Unum. (btw, it wouldn’t hurt to reinstate the original national motto)

It might help to attack one of their strengths as well. The stranglehold on school text books perhaps.

Let them attempt to reframe the issue and redefine half the English language and nearly all of modern science. Instead of trying to re-reframe the issue (a defensive reaction), let us simply correct their erroneous statements. (a rational response)

Last but not least, because they view this as war, we can probably count on their anti-American antics for at least a few more decades. No rest for the weary.

Perhaps we should be teaching evolution in math classes? After all, the process of natural selection occurs all the time, like in consumer products, social organizations, animal breeding, etc. Is anyone aware of a kind of generalized evolution thereom? Something that would go like:

Given a popluaton p with m units x, with each unit defined by a set of n characteristics c that can be replicated into q offspring, each with some variation of c given by a probablitiy function G and each with a finite probability of survival S and replication R in an environment E, where G, R, S, E, m, n, and c can all be functions of each other, each new generation of p will have on average characteristic sets c that will tend to maximize S and R for a given E.

I know it sounds muddy, and maybe it's not exactly complete, but here's my reasoning:

1) Math is a lot harder to argue with than biology. In some ways this is the equivalent to the IDers saying "we're not talking about God, we just want to discuss the possibilty that some intelligence is involved." We'd be saying "we're not talking about biology or human origins, we're just talking about a basic principal of mathematics."

2) This type of thing is currently used in optimization problems (like in engineering) in the form of Genetic Algorithms. It's a technical skill that kids should be familiar with if our future workforce is going to compete for jobs overseas.

3) It can be very easy to set up simple examples to show how the principal is self-evident (simple computer problems, examples from everyday life like the evolution of car models, etc).

4) If you demystify the process of evolution, and show how it is a natural and logical consequence of certain systems, then it becomes much harder to swallow that some external intelligence "must" have been involved. After all, you'd be having to argue that life, despite being so similar to other evolving systems, is "somehow" different, and so requires some mysterious entity to then get it to behave just like those same similar systems. Why do we need the "middle-man?"

Just some thoughts. What do you think?

[EDIT: Added an important part of the theorem I left out]

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You're kidding right? Have you read the threads on here of late wherein educated, rational people are struggling with math concepts? And these are people that primarily want to expand their knowledge and don't have any sort of religious agenda.

I think you're overly optimistic on this, but I'd love to hear any results of this method being tried.

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I don't think that evolutionary theory can be reduced to math, and, which is more important, I don't think that math teachers have the expertise or the time to teach evolution.

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I agree. I didn't communicate clearly. What I'd like to see is an evolution debate that featured math to see if it made any difference in anyone's mind.

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My post was a reply to HypersonicMan. 8)

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I realize that, but reading your post made me rethink my post of wanting to see the method tried. I just wanted to make certain I was being clear.

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The reason I bring math into this is that I do believe the concept of evolution is routed in mathematics. With biological evolution in particular, the functions are all highly non-linear and the number of variables is infinite for all intents and purposes, but the trends are still the same as they are in simpler systems. We've been producing evolution simulations on computers since at least the 1980's with great success. GA optimization techniques are used to solve real problems in engineering and elsewhere, so there is a long heritige of the principals of evolutionary selection in action.

I know this gets away from my earlier posts about attacking this as a political problem, but when thinking about other people suggesting trying to change the argument. By pointing out that evolution can and does occur all the time, we change the question from "How could life have evolved?" to "How could life not have evolved?"

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Is there any way to plug in the variables from the ID stuff and see what it does?

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

There is some math to it, but we can't prove that evolution happens with formulas. Only physical evidence can do that. On the other hand, I've just remembered that there's also an interesting field called evolutionary algorithms, which may be able to provide good illustrations of how evolution occurs (I don't know much about this field)...

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"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Arguing that evolution vs. creationisum is a religious issue surely is the equivelent of arguing that the teaching of eating pork etc as being right or wrong is a religious issue visa vi the Jewish religion, evolution vs. creationisum is mainly a fundamental christian issue.


.

You've lost me. It seems like both of those would be religious issues.

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I took an optimization class where we did some GA optimizations. It's a very useful technique for a lot of optimization problems that are difficult to solve using traditional techniques. It's good at finding global optimums and works well even if your intitial condition is no where near optimum, but convergence rates can be slow compared with other techniques.

As far as illustrations into how evolution works, there's a whole field of study on aritificial life simulated on computers that goes all the way back to the late 1960's apparantly. Here's a pretty comprehensive link:

Zooland

I've rarely ever hear this brought up, but to me it's a powerful example that the basic principals of evolution are sound, and that life certainly meets the criterias needed to make evolving systems. I guess the idea of computer simulations may be a bit too abstract for people, since most of us consider life "special," and with computer simulations there is an intelligence behind the scenes. However, one thing that the intelligence never does is design the outcomes. We just make the system with certain rules, and see what happens. The actual evolving happens naturally. I guess you could argue that God created the universe with certain rules and evolution just happened, but that is far different than ID that makes some intelligent agent vital to the evolutionary process itself.

The idea of using these things in arguments is to show that there's nothing unusual about evolution, and that you can still believe that God created it all and also accept that evolution through natural selection happened. I'd have no problem with that, as long as the deity aspects were kept to philosophy or theology classes and out of biology and physics classes.

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There are good analogies all around, and exploring them is a good idea.

One example is written/spoken language itself. While the jump from arbitrary noises to the association of sounds with either material objects or more abstract actions cannot ever be recovered, languages themselves exhibit much of the pattern of 'descent with modification'.

While I'm only passing familiar with phonetic/alphabetical languages, just look there. Languages start, spread and modify, go extinct and speciate. Micro-evolution (everything from accents to phrasing) to macroevolution (mutually incomprehensible). I know, but Tower of Babel aside, we have records of the modification, at least for the last few millenia. There are changes of meaning of the same word with time ('that's bad!'), different spellings of the same word (color/colour), identical words that change meaning only in context (lead, lead), words that sound the same but are written differently (to, too, two), new words appearing at random (hello, blog) even neutral drift (the 'k' in 'knife', or pronouncing 'Worchester' as Wooster').

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We should emphasize that Evolution says nothing about God. Actually, by stating that Life arose through Natural Laws, Evolution states that the "God-created" natural laws were perfect, no need for a second "divine intervention" to transform non-life into Life... and ID/ Creationism implies a more imperfect Creator, which had to interfere several times in her own Creation to make more stuff.

With this argument I have left several creationists without an answer. Because one of the major driving forces behind ID/Creationism is that of a "moral Crusade" to "bring God back into science/people's life" so on. Once we say that Evolution by Means of Natural Selection implies a perfect creation instead of the "patched up" creation where Life had to be especially developed later, we ruin the moral driving force of anti-Evolutionisms...

one of the reasons I chose biology for my final science class in college was its lack of math! I don't think trying to teach me evolution using math would have increased my understanding; it would have decreased it. I also don't think I'm the only person for whom this is true.

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that wouldn't matter though, if you didn't like maths you wouldn't be learning it that way.

I'm sure the maths students would be able to approach evolution using maths.

ID claims it has nothing to do with God and creation, so that won't work. And I don't see why evolution would equal a perfect creation, but that would lead us into a religious discussion, I fear, and this is not the board for that.

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Current biology now has a strong marriage with what is called bioinformatics. Genetic science has to deal with very large amounts of data. So genetic researchers have teamed up wit a whole new field of computer science that develops programs that can analyze the data. Bioinformatics isn't just writing the computer programs. It has turned into a science of it's own. How to ask the question, how to manage huge data bases, how to collect and sort the data and so on requires