Scientists Take Charles Darwin On the Road 170
Hugh Pickens writes "A team of evolutionary scientists recently traveled to the heart of America, visiting rural schools and communities in Nebraska, Montana, and Virginia to share their excitement about science on the birthday of Charles Darwin, and were overwhelmed with the graciousness, enthusiasm and sincerity of the teachers, school administration and particularly the students that hosted them. 'Over the course of our visits, the questions we received from students were thoughtful and founded in sheer curiosity about the science we presented,' writes MacClain. 'Indeed, the questions were the most exciting part of our collective visits.' Another purpose of the trip was to introduce people to the diverse types of research scientists do, open students' minds to the possibilities of careers in science, and offer an alternative to stereotypes of science and scientists in general. Some criticize the Darwin Day Road Show for being nothing more than a 'Darwinist ministry,' others for it not being more explicit in its discussion of evolution and Darwin, but with this year's success, there will be a Darwin Day Road Show 2012 and the National Center for Science Education is planning to hit all 50 states by 2015. MacClain says the team has found a middle ground that allows scientists to stop communicating at and start communicating with the public. 'It reminds us all that interactions between science and society need not be contentious. At its heart, science is about questions, and we all naturally ask them.'"
another sequel? (Score:2)
So. Who else clicked on the article to see if the guys name was 'John'?
Please please, PLEASE! Come to Texas all 50 times! (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I know it may sound a bit selfish, but here in Texas is where the curriculum of much of the nation is decided due to our huge purchasing power of school books. The publishers do not bend to the will of the smaller states as readily, and they must buy the books that are available from these publishers (personally, give me reprints from the 50s -- they're not nearly as dumbed down). California gets it, last I heard they were banning books that had the Texas curriculum in them.
The problem is that here in Texas religious zealots are pushing to get "intelligent design" taught instead of the Science of evolution; Currently I.D. is being pushed as an alternative, with the hope that teachers can be found that will only want to teach one alternative -- I.D.
The children will not learn without exposure to the scientific information -- I used only MS OSs since MS DOS 3.1 because I did not know about Linux! No one was there to teach me that I had other options than MacOS or Windows.
Texas is the battleground that must be won to keep evolution in many schools across the country.
A huge problem is that many true I.D. believers can not be reasoned with, many are irrational and have no concept of science.
I once showed one of these fundamentalists a well known experiment I was running where each generation of mouse, at 4 weeks old (the brink of maturity for this breed), I put through a chute and if the mouse's tail got caught by the small rear sliding door, I would remove that mouse from the gene pool into a separate habitat. Each generation I shortened the measuring cell's length a bit.
I pointed to the mice in the two different environments and said: "You see -- These mice with the long tails came from the same parents as these mice over here with no tails. Because of the chute's environmental pressure, the mice evolved to be a tailless breed. It was more genetically advantageous for mature mice to have shorter tails here, while there the mice were under no such constraint.
Their response was that I was the intelligent designer -- I argued that it was only a demonstration, if one intelligently imposed environmental pressure could cause a change in the species, then other natural environmental pressures could also have effects that change a species.
They said, "God would be providing such natural pressures." -- I said, "Eureka! So, you agree -- Evolution exists, and may be the very tool your God used to make the variety of species, and that He was smart enough to give his creatures adaptability so they could survive environmental changes!"
They replied: "That is not what The Bible says, and therefore, that is not the truth. I still don't see why your theory of evolution should be taught in schools." I replied, "For the same reason we teach the theory of gravity!", and walked away.
You can't win a logical argument with a fundamentalist -- even if they agree with you, they still disagree on principal.
I hope that the they are just warming up with the "Darwin Day Road Show", so it doesn't seem like an attack at the very heart of the issue, but this is what must happen. Please come to Texas!
P.S. Teach religion in school, fine I don't care -- but just don't remove the Science!
TL;DR: Phhcht -- Houston, we have a fucking problem! We're screwing ourselves out of reasonable people; Over.
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I said, "Eureka! So, you agree -- Evolution exists, and may be the very tool your God used to make the variety of species, and that He was smart enough to give his creatures adaptability so they could survive environmental changes!"
I could be wrong, but isn't this exactly the idea of intelligent design?
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Yes, it is I.D. propaganda.
Re:Please please, PLEASE! Come to Texas all 50 tim (Score:4, Informative)
This is either hysterical nonsense, or a troll. Texas Science education standards [state.tx.us] require the teaching of evolution [state.tx.us].
Evolution is being taught in Texas.
There is another bit of nonsense popular on Slashdot - that Christians cannot be scientists, let alone good scientists.
Collins: Why this scientist believes in God [cnn.com]
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I like how you subtly put windows and mac users into the I.D camp.
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P.C. is about respecting the subjective opinions and beliefs of others. A science class should be based on observed facts only unless it's made clear what is an unproven hypothesis.
I have no problem with someone taking a class which offers the view that life is intelligently designed [presenting opinion as opinion]. I have no problem with the details of natural selection and speciation being taught [presenting fact as fact]. I have a problem with intelligent design being presented as a definite fact [pre
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Now that's funny - isn't it against political correctness to say that one point of view is right and another is wrong?
And Slashdot is the internet's bastion of political correctness, right?
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Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none. Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations. You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations. This is nothing more than selective breeding, such as Man has done for millennia.
Bingo. Darwin figured out a century and a half ago that evolution *is* just selective breeding.
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
If it's random, you'd expect some to be good and some to be bad.
I suspect that the better something is adapted to its environment, the less likely a mutation will be good - just a simple statistical matter of having to beat something that's already better than purely random. But environments change, or populations move into new environments, and suddenly they aren't as optimized as they were before, so the odds o
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"Darwin figured out a century and a half ago that evolution *is* just selective breeding."
No, according to evolutionary biologists these days
See
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/cfol/ch2-means.asp [answersingenesis.org]
You may not agree but give it a fair read
"And Gould is far from an isolated example. Back in October of 1980, the world’s leading evolutionists met in Chicago for a conference summarized popularly by Adler and Carey in Newsweek18 and professionally by Lewin in Science19 According to the professional s
Re:Please please, PLEASE! Come to Texas all 50 tim (Score:5, Informative)
That appears to be a document written by a creationist who claims to be an Evolutionary Biologist from Ball State. I looked him up and while he did get a PHD from Ball State it was in Education. His dissertation was "Relationship of programmed instruction to test and discussion performance among beginning college biology students".
He quotes Gould and then clearly misinterprets what Gould says about micro vs macro Evolution. He quotes Pierre Grasse as if he were a modern Evolutionary Biologist rather than the last Lamarckist (a 19th century competing theory to Darwin) to hold the Chair of Evolutionary Biology in Paris.
He then quotes the frequently misquoted Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and his theory of syntropy and external force as proof of Creationism and goes so far to imply that Gyorgyi developed the model due to some discomfort with Evolution and Genetics. Gyorgyi developed that theory by first postulating a connection with quantum mechanics and then free radicals leading to his 1974 syntropy model for causes of cancer.
I particularly liked this bit:
Grasse’ is not (yet) a creationist. But he does say that his knowledge of the living world convinces him that there must be some “internal force” involved in the history of life.
Grasse was born in 1895 and died in 1985, he stopped being scientifically active in the 70's, yet Parker seems to imply that he's having some ongoing debate.
It's not a terribly rigorous document to begin with which would be fine but taking quotes out of context or intentionally misinterpreting the quotes so he can say 'see even these esteemed biologists knew evolution was wrong' is pretty pathetic.
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I looked him up - he's not a Ph.D but an Ed.D.
But the point I make is this:
"Darwin figured out a century and a half ago that evolution *is* just selective breeding."
No, according to evolutionary biologists these days
Do you agree?
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See
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/cfol/ch2-means.asp [answersingenesis.org]
You may not agree but give it a fair read
I strongly disagree with fraud, and in particular fraudulently misrepresenting what people have said.
Harvardâ(TM)s Stephen Gould16 quite clearly recognizes the difference between evolution and mutations.
Fraud. Gould recognizes the difference between evolution and mutations the same way he recognizes the difference between a drop of water and atoms.
Gould's position is that mutations do accumulate over time, just like water atoms accumulate in the air. Gould's argument is basically that water atoms accum
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Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.
No, no, no. That's doesn't count. That's just micro-evolution [wikimedia.org] and is completely different from Darwinism!!! I learned that from uncle, who lives in Texas, no joke. He's a lawyer and his daughter and son-in-law are both medical doctors...
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Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.
No, no, no. That's doesn't count. That's just micro-evolution [wikimedia.org] and is completely different from Darwinism!!! I learned that from uncle, who lives in Texas, no joke. He's a lawyer and his daughter and son-in-law are both medical doctors...
Yeah, lots of creationists have already surrendered to the extent of recognizing microevolution. But they can't explain why millions of years of microevolution don't result in macroevolution.
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Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none.
Mutations occur naturally, in every living thing. It is statistically impossible to not have new mutations in each individual that is born.
Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations.
The "source" is life. Mutations are unavoidable in living things. Mutations are random, so it is unavoidable that some of them will be "beneficial", (where "beneficial" or is largely determined by the current enviornment).
You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations.
It would require DNA analysis to specifically identify the genetics, but presumably there were no tailless mice in his original population :D
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
Only if yo
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Garbage. If there is already variation there - which there apparently is or their tails would all be the same length - then evolution can work by altering the relative frequency of the different alleles.
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", evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: "
We use it to make predictions. If species D evolved from species A, we can then say species B, and C must be found between earth layers where we found A and D.
And that has been used to make accurate predictions, many many times.
So yea, it's tested.
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"Eventually..."
Not by your criteria. It would entail having the complete sequence immediately before and after the mutation. You see, DNA mutates constantly and your goal post can't be satisfied. You'd simply claim the gene was introduced
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Nylonase-generating organisms are merely speculated to have evolved a gene change via a beneficial mutation. None has been observed
Your information is out of date. After the discovery of natural evolution of nylonase in the wild, controlled laboratory experiments were conducted. We have in fact observed the evolution of nylonase in controlled experiments. Read the paper that was published on it. [asm.org]
the mutation has not been observed through gene sequencing before- and after-mutation populations, nor a mutagen identified. Indeed, until sequencing is perhaps a milllon times faster than today, such observation is virtually impossible.
First of all, I have no idea why you would expect some mutagen to be identified. Mutations naturally occur all the time. If a mutagen is applied it merely inflates natural mutation rates.
Secondly, you appear to be posting from a "today" which i
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No, ID isn't a theory. It's a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the facts. Behe's "irreducible complexity" only shows that he doesn't understand evolution at the layman level (or perhaps that he does, and is merely being dishonest about it -- pick your poison). Dembski's bullshit about "specified complexity" and "no free lunch" is just that: bullshit. A crapload of misrepresentations to produce a number that lets him say "I can't believe that happened without God's help!".
Evolution, OTOH, is supported by
Science missionaries (Score:2)
Great, now we have missionaries in science. Fight fire with fire?
Re:Science missionaries (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, now we have missionaries in science. Fight fire with fire?
Antibody response.
Kind of like the Gay Pride movement, which IMO was a response the the 1980s habit of social conservatives peaking into closets hoping to 'out' homosexuals. Well, now they're out, and the people who were outing them wish they were back in.
Law of unintended consequences, etc.
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As to the Dihydrogen Monoxide issue, a town in California tried to ban it. I don't see what the big deal was, it's not like they have enough of it to start with, they keep trying to take ours we have here in Oregon every couple of years. Ok, California does have one really large supply of it, but they can't use it for too much as it's been far too contaminated with a chlorine based substance, and it's kind of expensive to purify.
Indoctrination (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah, I see this as an attempt to counteract that while they're still young enough for it to make an impact.
Those complaining that this kind of thing is indoctrination are really complaining about it being a lack of indoctrination their way. (That statement also applies in many other situations.)
[Insert Title Here] (Score:2)
Taking Darwin on the road, in this day and age? Doesn't he rattle incessantly?
Good stuff, though, this can only be applauded.
So the REAL headline would be different. (Score:2)
Einstein on religion and science (Score:2)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm [sacred-texts.com]
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the cleare
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Great idea. (Score:2)
Credit to these scientists for their tactical decisions here.
I think this is a great idea , to look at the technical details of evolution without getting into the religious/political arguments.
I fondly remember taking a class in high school that was an extended version of this.
There are better wonders out there. (Score:2)
Re:Darwin is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Darwin is "wrong" about evolution in the same way Isaac Newton is "wrong" about physics, you stupid troll.
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Troll, but not stupid.
"when biology was a backwater field designed for heterosexual people on a man-only ship crew" is actually a pretty funny lure.
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So where are all the intermediate stages of evolution.
The fact that some transitional fossils are not preserved does not disprove evolution. Evolutionary biologists do not expect that all transitional forms will be found and realize that many species leave no fossils at all. Lots of organisms don't fossilize well and the environmental conditions for forming good fossils are not that common. So, science actually predicts that for many evolutionary changes there will be gaps in the record.
Also, scientists have found many transitional fossils. For example, there
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No, reality dictates that the fossil record is not going to be stored in its entirety, any more than every single movement of a killer from his bloody bedroom in the morning to when he kills someone that evening is going to be recorded. No area of science is going to have perfect and absolute knowledge. But it isn't necessary, any more than statistics require every single data point. You get enough data to build a model or a theory from.
Fortunately, for evolution, the fossil record is not the only eviden
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So where are all the intermediate stages of evolution.
We're finding them. Slowly. Its a big planet and fossils (some just a few chips of bone) are difficult to find. Keep in mind that, at one point, the population of homo sapiens may have been reduced to a few thousand individuals due to environmental conditions.
The important point here is that; although there are large holes in the fossil record, no evidence has been found to date that doesn't fit the evolutionary path from the ape/man ancestor several million years ago to where we are today. Given a certain
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So where are all the intermediate stages of evolution.
Every species is an intermediate stage of evolution. So long ago we humans had an apelike ancestor. So you said where's the thing between humans and ape? So we found Homo Erectus. Then you said, now there are two gaps, where's the thing between the apelike ancestor and Homo Erectus and the thing between Homo Erectus and modern humans? So then we found Australopithecus Africanis and Homo Habilis. And then you said now there are 4 gaps, where's the thing between the apelike ancestor and Australopithe
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You weren't transformed from apes, you were transformed from a descendant of the human and ape strains.
Hrm... I'm pretty sure it would have been an ancestor, evolving from a descendant would take more than faith in a theory, it would require magic and/or a time machine.
Re:Darwin is wrong (Score:5, Funny)
The monkeys don't want to acknowledge that they share a common ancestor with you either.
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What a ludicrous and false statement. Darwin's theory was incomplete, but as Stephen Jay Gould, in the large picture it was pretty spot on. Darwin lacked a theory of heredity, to be sure, but then again modern physics lacks a demonstrable quantum theory of gravity. By your tortured logic, that would make QM and GR wrong.
What I think is that you're just a fucking moron who makes grand proclamations like this, but, in fact you're just an ignoramus.
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Darwin never said we originated from monkeys
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Creationism really isn't science because it cannot be disproven. That's the fundamental flaw of the field and why you could, theoretically, be a creationist and a scientist, but not a creationist scientist.
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(If you're really interested, you can google it and dig through the mass of false hits.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Evolutionary scientists?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The sudden appearance of a unique species with no apparent ancestors. If we were to find -- either in the fossil record or in some deep jungle -- a six-legged three-eyed mammal-like species, for example, that would something hard to explain via evolution.
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Devil's advocate: What would be a disproof of evolution?
Someone answered this once. Rabbit fossils next to a dinosaur's fossils. Same layer.
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Can a scientist be not "evolutionary"? Can you be an "creationist scientist"? Is creationism even considered "science"?
1. Yes, but they're very unlikely to be correct.
2. Yes, you can be a walking oxymoron.
3. No, "god did it" is a bald assertion.
Re:Evolutionary scientists?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can a scientist be not "evolutionary"? Can you be an "creationist scientist"? Is creationism even considered "science"?
I interpret "evolutionary scientist" as a scientist specializing in evolutionary biology. [wikipedia.org]
Welcome to the 21st century (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, Biology is hard science. I recommend reading 'Your Inner Fish' to understand why. Evolution - as a good scientific theory - is able to make predictions. Based on those Tiktaalik was found. What is Tiktaalik? Well, Google it and be amazed.
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Evolution - as a good scientific theory - is able to make predictions. Based on those Tiktaalik was found. What is Tiktaalik? Well, Google it and be amazed.
I Googled it. Tiktaalik was found because Edward B. Daeschler, Neil H. Shubin, and Professor Farish A. Jenkins, Jr were digging around in the shale. It wasn't found because of any evolutionary theory. It doesn't do science any favours to make false claims about it.
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And they were digging around in the shale because they were looking for something like tiktaalik: "As Shubin's team studied the species they saw to their excitement that it was exactly the missing intermediate they were looking for." [wikipedia.org]
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Biology is a rather soft science though - is it even a science at all when compared to rigorous subjects like physics and chemistry?
Oh come on. Maybe 60 years ago Biology was a "soft science". I can assure that in the modern world it's very far from a "soft science". Biology is just as rigorous as physics and chemistry.
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As it was used in the article, "evolutionary scientist" means "
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Hell, if you want to count computer scientists as scientists, they work pretty exclusively in the realm of things that were intelligently designed by teams of intelligent designers. (That is, microchips and compilers and languages and so forth.)
It is an absolute unrelated coincidence if a computer scientist ever discovers they are near or using a computer. Computer Science has nothing at all to do with computers. Computer Science is a merely a subset of Mathematics, and everyone knows mathematics isn't science (or the common phrase "math and science" would be redundant) and never had a first chance to pop into existence like physics or chemistry. Mathematics was there long, long, long before any tedious sequence of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.
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It is an absolute unrelated coincidence if a computer scientist ever discovers they are near or using a computer.
Depends on the field. Your references to mathematics seems to indicate that you equate "computer science" with theoretical computer science, such as computational complexity theory. However, other specializations rely on computers very much, such as operating systems (which uses lots of simulation) and machine learning (which is inherently experimental, though some theory does exist).
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Physics and chemistry didn't evolve; they sprang into existence fully formed. (Mankind's understanding of them is continually advancing, but the necessary formulas haven't changed since the Big Bang.)
Oops -- there were no "formulas" around until we thinking beings discovered a way to describe the interactions we were seeing. Physics and chemistry did evolve as we had to create and refine them, in reality there is no such thing as chemistry or physics -- these are just mental tools we have created to help us predict future events... it is not really how things happen, even if the happenings appear similar to our predictions, it is only because we choose to classify them as such.
There were clearly thi
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? Can you be an "creationist scientist"?
Sure. You could be a creationist physicist, say. Just as long as your work had nothing to do with biology. Your colleagues would probably have a hard time taking you seriously though.
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? Can you be an "creationist scientist"?
Sure. You could be a creationist physicist, say. Just as long as your work had nothing to do with biology. Your colleagues would probably have a hard time taking you seriously though.
I deal with a number of scientists/professionals of various flavors, including a computer scientist who is almost certainly a creationist. But his computer science does get taken seriously, presumably because he doesn't try to mix proselyting with his research and teaching.
I've got no problem with someone holding religious beliefs, so long as they don't insist on them as the basis for public policy, or insist on using public institutions and tax money for proselytizing, and so long as the beliefs don't mak
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Around a decade ago there was a condensed-matter physicist (IIRC, he worked in magnetic field detection by lasers, or something ; it was vaguely related to petrophysics stuff I had to understand) who provided the ICR with impressive-looking mathematical models that he purported provided some sort of model for a Young-Earth-Creationist universe with the appearance of an Old-Earth-Creationist universe (i.e., our universe). Which sounded great for them. Until so
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Can you be an "creationist scientist"?
No, for creationism.Yes, for "intelligent design", meaning that one accepts evolution, but sees it as a tool used by god to tweak and direct evolution.
Is creationism even considered "science"?
No, because scientific method has not been applied. It's based on blind faith which is the inverse of science.
If you want people to pay attention to what you're saying, then the first thing to avoid doing is to avoid offending them. Religious people tend to get quite offended when you dismiss their religion.
So, the trick, or "middle ground", is to not talk
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Those boobs that put out the paper for I.D. screwed up and didn't erase the metadata, so people dug into the edits and discovered that little gem.
(A couple of times a year some group or another forgets about metadata, and the adobe stuff has a purge metadata function in it's menu... morons.)
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I thought that creationism is "Poof, there's a universe", as compared to intelligent design that doesn't actually refute scientific findings (even accepting that it's billions of years old), but ascribes all the wonderous things we see to sky daddy's imagination.
That makes two very different ideas. The first is pure fairy tale, the other is closer to science fiction.
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As the used to say on talk.origins, intelligent design is creationism with the serial number filed off.
Or creationism dressed up in a lab coat.
It has no purpose but to make the world safe for creationism, first, by filing the serial number off in hopes that the courts wouldn't recognize it for what it is, and second by putting it in a lab coat and casting it in big words, so that people who are eager to have their mythology validated can congratulate themselves that the boffins discovered that they were rig
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Intelligent Design IS creationism with a global search and replace god with intelligent design.
Those boobs that put out the paper for I.D. screwed up and didn't erase the metadata, so people dug into the edits and discovered that little gem.
To be more specific, it was a textbook (or draft, IIRC) that was revised to replace "creationism" with "intelligent design" right after the US Supreme Court ruled against creationism in public schools. But they did a sloppy job with the find-and-replace, which is why you get about 10,000 Google hits for the unlikely phrase "cdesign proponentsists" and various nearby misspellings. (I don't know what the actual spelling was.)
That revelation was the poleaxe that killed ID as a mechanism for sneaking creation
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Religious people tend to get quite offended when you dismiss their religion.
So, should I get offended because many (but not all) religious people dismiss my atheism? Of course, I don't get offended, because their viewpoint is rooted in a fantasy, utterly divorced from tangible reality. Instead, I try to be be accommodative of their beliefs and don't push my own (neither do I pretend not to be atheist). Is it too much to ask for some reciprocal consideration?
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OK. The first one is an opinion about something, whereas the second describes the writer's action, or rather his refraining from it.
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Try again. Here is a hint - the sentence contradicts itself.
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No it does not; the first describes his personal beliefs, while the second describes his behaviour towards the people that hold them.
For example, just because I think someone's an idiot doesn't mean I have to act like it or dismiss everything they say out of hand.
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For example, just because I think someone's an idiot doesn't mean I have to act like it or dismiss everything they say out of hand.
Exactly. The same courtesy is extended to those I consider idiots and those I consider geniuses. Their opinion of me should similarly be shrouded in good manners. If it is not, they may be exposing more of their character than they might realize.
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Can a scientist be not "evolutionary"?
Yes. As far as I can see it refers to a specialism, not a position on the issue. And anyway, a physicist for example could -- at least in theory -- decline to take a position on evolution on the grounds that it's outside their field and they didn't believe that they'd considered the issue in sufficient detail.
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Is creationism even considered "science"?
Supposedly the "creation science" movement of the 1980s was a genuine attempt at science-based creationism. Of course, science is ruled by the evidence, so it couldn't stay both creationism and science very long.
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and the Holy Trinity
He's playing golf with himself? WTF?
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you're surprised at what a guy who's his own father can do? really?
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Never mind. Same time tomorrow? [youtube.com]
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A boring one. Also did you notice they were going to universities? FTA:
"The day before we rolled into Grant, Yanega and I visited the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where we met with undergraduates and lectured to both university and public audiences."
Really? They needed to teach evolution at universities too? I mean I can understand some little backwards high school somewhere believing creationism, but universities need help too?
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I think what this story really illustrates is that young people are not stupid, and they hate being told lies. Creationism is so obviously implausible that you can only believe it if you force your eyes shut and work hard at staying ignorant.
Science - and the theory of evolution as part of it - is so obviously driven by a sincere wish to find the truth; science respects the intelligence of the audience by saying "these are the facts and this is what we think explains them - what do you think?". If creationi
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Creationism is so obviously implausible that you can only believe it if you force your eyes shut and work hard at staying ignorant.
That's why creationists are so desperate to keep their kids from hearing about reality in school, and have a propensity for home schooling when they can't control the curriculum.
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Also that creationism is only believed in a tiny percentage of people that have nothing better to do then raise a stink about something that know nothing about.
Pi = 3. 2 = 2 pi/3. 2 pi/3 + 2 pi/3 = 4 pi/3. (Score:2)
Anybody knows the answer is roughly 4.1888.
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"Being a theist does not equal being a creationist."
But most theists believe in things which they derived from writings of men, the mistakes therein which science shows are demonstrably not true. The source of most peoples theistic beliefs are not credible at all.
Theism is derived from the writings of ancient ignorant peoples. The idea that we can take seriously people's theism the majority of which is based on writings of ancient human beings in pre-scientific and pre-literate times is still ludicrous.
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Science is not derived from the writing of men? ... Tell me more of this Radiance which delivers Science deus ex machina.
"The idea that we can take seriously people's theism the majority of which is based on writings of ancient human beings in pre-scientific and pre-literate times is still ludicrous."
And yet we use their science without question.
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"Or anything much more advanced than 2+2 (which equals 4 for any Creationists reading this.)" - Yes you said that exactly.
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The rule says "all natural systems will progress from a state of order to a state of chaos"
That's the problem with a non-technical understanding of physics. That's not what the second law states. Your definition would make water freezing into ice impossible, The 2nd law more correctly states that in a closed system entropy will increase. Entropy is not chaos and is not disorder. And you may have noticed that the Earth is not a closed system. As a whole the earth takes low entropy sunlight and converts it into high entropy infrared radiation. There's plenty of room in the intermediate st
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