Yeah, which is what Disinfo Agent dropped into the discussion about Lysenkoism. Everyone wants to be right, so they'll do just about anything to make themselves look right when the results are published, or they'll just get their hands into the process and try to direct the outcome.

Foolish in any event.

And not to worry, I didn't really think you though anyone immoral, just that your argument was a bit incomplete as stated.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I wasn't impying anything about Sagan. I like the quote in your signature and used it as a counter argument to the idea that this swing away from science was somehow related to 9/11. I'm saying that it might have as much to do with the nonsense around the millenium, which was only two years earlier. Before I saw your signature I had never heard the quote nor knew it was from Sagan.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

Apparently not, if you look at it through the eyes of "the faithful".

This is sad...really, really sad.

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An open mind is like an open window...without a good screen you'll get all sorts of weird bugs!

In countering ID I think a possible line to focus on is mechanism.

OK, so let's assume the bacterium flagellum is designed. Now: how was it implemented? what process happened to get the flagellum "code" into the bacterial DNA? what traces might this process leave? etc.

I have seen absolutely no discussion of these matters and they seem to me to be critical to good science.

But ID is not science. So the topic never comes up.

Unless you redefine science to = religion.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

I Think, My FAVOURITE Counter-Point, Has to Do, With Examples, of Idiotic Design:

Like, The Human Reproductive System, Whose Bright Idea, Was It, To Run The Urethra, Riight Through, The Reproductive Vent; The Proverbial, Sewage Line, Through The Playground, Type of Design?

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Which redefinition I understand is happening in Kansas.

However my desire here is to add another line of argument. The more different ways that are common knowledge to counter the ID ambush of science, the better.

Another good counter; I'm trying to develop the mechanism challenge to add to this sort of thing.

Can I call these people nuts? I think it is Kansans. (No apostrophe).

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Can't ID proponents just counter with "we don't know why God did it that way, we can't know the mind of God..."?

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

True ...

But, Just Getting them, To Admit That, Is Part of The Battle!!!

UNFALLSIFIABLE, and All!

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

Mmm.. they probably can and do, but they shouldn't if they wish to maintain a scientific veneer. They might more circumspectly talk about the mind of the Designer of course. Even so, the ostensible grounding of ID is that the design is Intelligent, so examples of poor design are indeed a valid counter.

How does the mechanism argument sound to you?

I like ZaphodBeeblebrox's ideas about "bad designs". There are a lot of bad, or at least meaningless ones, just on humans: nipples on men, the appendix, the design of the knees and the spine (look at all the problems with those). IIRC, there was a Scientific American article many years ago on design improvements for humans (it wasn't about ID, more like about genetic engineering).

The other counter argument against ID is to get ID to explain current examples of evolution in action, such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria or the development of the flu pandemics. I suppose the IDers would say that the designer had a design review with his/her team and decided to make some changes before the new model year came out.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

I just read another thing that made me say WHOA!! (forgive me if it's been discussed already, but I have never seen this angle.)
It's a page from the website christian-oneness.org, describing a letter sent to the board in support of ID in June, 2005. The author tries to state that ID is ok to teach alongside evolution because they are both "scientific theories built on religious foundation."
A note added based on yesterday's decision:
bolding mine
So because evolution is naturalistic, which has pantheism as a religion, then evolution is linked to a religion! Gee, why didn't I ever make that connection?

No--the author is trying to assign a religion to evolution, so the argument "you teach that religious philosophy, why can't you teach ID?" is valid.

The author also states that evolution is an assumption, because "the occurrence of evolution millions of years before observable time began is also scientifically unverifiable," just as we say ID is scientifically unverifiable. Just because humans weren't around to observe it doesn't mean we don't have evidence we can observe today! That is true ignorance .

Another BAD design, that also is a proof that evolutions doesn't always involve "improvement", is the mutation of a gene on humans that now makes it unable to generate vitamin C. The gene to generate vitamin C is still there on humans, but just got mutated in a way that it cannot do its job anymore. Even worse is that humans cannot live without vitamin C, so this mutation would have been a fatal one. But, lucky that we are, almost every other organisms can generate their own vitamin C, so we can get it from them from eating. Some other organisms too got a mutation making their body unable to generate vitamin C. And there are a lot of other "deadly negative" mutations that occured on humans and other organism, but that the environment made it so that it wasn't really deadly after all.

But really, those that voted in favor of ID, what education did they get? I mean, I really can't get how people can't grasp the concepts of evolution... I mean I learned most of the concepts in secondary school, and most of the people that drop from school drop later than that! There is so much in evolution, and it's working are so obvious. I really don't get it. To me somebody that disbelieves evolution but understand the concept of the flu and of vaccines is like somebody that disbelieves electricity and uses a computer.
I also think that ID is much harder to understand than evolution. ID just take too many things for granted. I wouldn't be satisfied without the answer of where is the designer coming from, or more precisely not satisfied with not being ALLOWED to wonder where the designer is coming from... And I think that ID just ignores too many things... The avian flu is expected to mutate to be infexious from human to human... I wouldn't like the idea of being left with no answer like ID is actually doing.

But then again I know that their goal really isn't to explain anything, but to get political power by presenting the idea of ignoring reality as good and understanding the world as bad. My view is those that voted for presenting ID really do know evolution, but just don't care to ignore reality if it can give them power.


To summarize (and partly quote somebody that I forgot...):
Anything that I don't understand cannot possibly be understood by any person living or yet to be born on this planet. Yeah, I'm that pretentious.
I don't understand differential calculus: so Go... err... The Designer is behind it.

Oh heck, now ya opened the OTHER can of worms, whether ID'ers allow for "micro"evolution versus "macro"evolution.

You wanna see some wild verbal gymnastics, get an IDer started on that line of cocaine.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

Here's what I think. I think those of us who are both religious and know science should be the ones fighting the fight, not those who says all religious people are ignorant savages. Now, granted, your average IDer's not going to accept my arguments in favor of evolution, on account of I'm a heathen, and I've yet to find a Pagan IDer. However, my Catholic mother could talk to other Catholics about it, because her faith is the same as theirs, and yet it doesn't blind her to science. (Or even with science, a la Tom Dolby.)

I think the courts need to make very clear that ID isn't science, it's religion, and therefore it cannot be taught in science class any more than we can teach that Pele creates volcanoes or Thor thunder. (And boy, wouldn't that go over well with the ID crowd!)

I have faith that, if children are properly taught science and those churches that accept evolution teach them that the two are not incompatible, ID will fade into the background. However, in this country at least, not all children belong to faiths that accept evolution. There are all those fundamentalist Biblical literalists, and so people are indoctrinated instead of educated. However, that should not excuse taking science out of science classes.

And, yes, if I were an intelligent designer, the first design modification I'd make on humans would be to make babies come out of the front, not between the legs where the size of the opening is so limited. The second thing I'd do would be fix backs, including and especially my own.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yeah ...

They'll Start with Some, Weak Arguement, About Mystical Kinds, Sometimes, Mentioning The Ark ...

Then, Sidestep your Objections, By Saying, "Noah, had The Clap!"

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

I have read that one way to determine whether ID should be taken seriously as a theory, is to examen the central arguments ID proponents use to support their claim. The problem is that jornalist often neglect to do this and instead make the mistake of giving equal coverage to both sides (without even exploring science).




Titana...........

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

I wish you were the intelligent designer...my son weighed over 10 pounds at birth. I'd have campaigned for that marsupial pouch idea (the birth weight being in ounces) being incorporated into the human design!

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An open mind is like an open window...without a good screen you'll get all sorts of weird bugs!

A favorite example of the ID crowd for something that is so perfect that it is irreducibly complex is the human eye. I will ignore for now the fact that basically every proposed stage in the evolution of the so-called "irreducibly complex" eye still exists in nature.

However, the fact is that the human eye is very poorly designed. Sure it has a very effective liens and cornea for focusing light, but beyond that it is just a mess. For one thing, the photoreceptors in the human eye are in the back of the eye. Light has to pass through a layer of neuron axons, a layer of neuron cell bodies, then another 2 layers of axons and another 2 layers of cell bodies, then it has to pass through the cell bodies of the receptors themselves, and only then does it reach the photoreceptors.

The human fovea is an area where the axons and cell bodies have all been pushed to the side to reduce distortion, and in fact this is the only area of the eye that we can actually see clearly out of. However, it only has about a 1mm diameter, and because of this it only covers a very small area of the visual field. This is easy to test. Hold piece of paper with regular-sized text on it at arms length directly in front of your face, and focus on the text so you can read the top line. Now move the piece of paper about 3 inches down without altering your gaze. You can't read it at all. Other animals have horizontal foveas. Considering we are at our core a planes animal, and all our predators and prey would be about around the horizon, a horizontal fovea like many other planes animals have would be ideal. Better yet, having both a circular fovea and a horizontal fovea like a cheetah, which gives it very accurate forward vision and a very accurate vision of the horizon. Or perhaps like bats, who have a bunch of foveas scattered all over the visual field. We have one fovea, which I guess makes the most sense for an arboreal species. But that brings us back to evolving from apes once again.

While we are at it, why do we need a fovea at all? The way the photoreceptors are set up, they need to have their ends embedded in the layer of epithelial tissue that is directly behind the retina. Absolutely every vertebrate has this pattern. However, it is not necessary. Squids and octopi have eyes that are basically the same as our. The main difference is that their photoreceptors are on the top surface of their retina, with all the other tissue below them. They have sharp vision over their entire eye. Of course, the ID crowd could claim that setup is better for the environment squids and octopi came from, while the vertebrate eye is better for the environment vertebrate came from. But what about fish? There are fish, which naturally have vertebrate eyes, that live in effectively the same environment as any squid or octopus species you can find. Debating which structure is better is pointless. One of these approaches must be inferior to the other. Since two creatures in the same environment have different versions of the same structure with one version being inferior to the other is proof that design in nature is not optimal.

Another problem is that the retina is not directly attached to the epithelium that lies behind it. The tips of the photoreceptors are lodged in it, but the retina comes loose pretty easily. The retina is only really connected at the optic disk (aka blind spot) and the edges near the front of the eye. If a loose retina is not corrected quickly, the receptors die without the support of the epithelium and the person goes blind. This is what you hear about when they use laser to weld the retina back in place. Why couldn't there be connective tissue holding the retina in place? Outside the fovea there could be very small connective tissue pieces holding the retina in place without significantly effecting vision. After all, we are absolutely blind right near the center of vision where the optic nerve comes in (the optic disc or blind spot), but you have to play tricks on your eyes to even make it noticeable, and even then you would miss it if you weren't looking for it. And lets not forget that if we had eyes like a squid or octopus, we would not even have a blind spot or a need to anchor the retina.

While we are at it, what about the photoreceptors themselves? Humans have 3 types of color photoreceptors. Each one detects a different color. The more photoreceptors we have, the more colors we can differentiate. That is the problem with most color-blind people, they only have 2 photoreceptors so they can not tell apart many colors people with 3 photoreceptors can. But what about birds that have 5 different receptors? They can tell apart far more colors than humans can. And, as an aside, the evolution of the pigments used to detect light is well-established, by comparing the amino acid structure and gene loci it is clear that the pigments are very closely related evolutionarily, although to varying degrees.

Additionally, some vertebrates have small oil droplets in their retina that act as color filters, allowing them to differentiate even more colors than just their photoreceptors would allow.

Another problem is the fluid flow in the eye. The aqueous humor, which is the liquid around the lens and the liquid between the iris and the cornea is created near the Len's, flows around it, flows through the hole in the iris, enters the region between the cornea and the iris, flows through a dense mesh of cells around the edge of the cornea, and flows through a duct to be broken down elsewhere. If the mesh become a little too dense, the fluid flow is restricted and pressure builds. If the duct gets blocked somehow, the fluid flow is restricted and pressure builds up. If the edge of the iris gets too close to the edge of the cornea, the fluid flow is restricted and pressure builds up. The the lens moves a little too far forward or the iris a little too far back and they get too close, the fluid flow is restricted and the pressure builds up. If not corrected, the pressure will quickly grow. Since the eye is coated with a solid shell of connective tissue, the only place that can expand is around the optic nerve. This puts pressure on the neurons leading into the optic nerve, cutting off their ability to send messages. If a neuron can't send messages, it dies. What the victim ends up with is a gradual area of blindness around the edge of vision. Because we are so dependent on our fovea, most people do not start to notice the blind area until roughly 40% of their vision is irrevocably lost. This is called glaucoma, and is a very common disorder due to the poor design of the human eye.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

These are both great ideas. They should be taught in school!!

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

I am not sure a letter from an outstater is the effective thing to do. Leave Kansas to the Kansans.

if you want to do something, write a letter to the school board in your own state, beacuse even if it isn't in the news now, believe me, these nuts are active in every state, working hard to wrest control of our kids minds away from the forces of reason. A letter of prevention is worth a book of cure.

This is great:

A guide to the varieties of creationism, by our friends at Panda's Thumb.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

thanks for the link. had to share that with my non-educated friends.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

While my daughter was only 7 lbs, 7 oz, her head didn't change shape. Believe me, I wish children came out somewhere else.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Well, Now ....

That SURE, Clears Things Up!!!

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If you Ignore YOUR Rights, they Will go away.

NC Moore and Gillian..... I think you are asking for some Highly Inteligent Design which seems to be HID, in some cases. My wife's 5'-2" mother gave birth to a 12 lb-1oz son.

To make your case more serious, IIRC, 3rd world countries loose almost 2% of mothers at childbirth.

This doesn't change my faith in God, but it does beg the question, IMO, that if ID's God is supernaturally tweaking everything, why does He make Himself look so un-super at so many discernable places? Also, why does it look more favorable that He made super evolutionary laws instead?

So, what happens next in Kansas? Will the civil liberties union find another Scopes for the schools which ban evolution teaching (assuming this happens, I suppose)?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

What we're all forgetting is that the designer is much smarter than ourselves. So measly humans can't actually understand why the designer put what seems to us to be a useless or inefficient part.

Maybe I shouldn't say that, I haven't heard an ID comment along the lines of that yet.