Yay well done was was it on?

HaloBurn wrote:

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Yay well done was was it on?

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Pillows and fluffy cushions?

Hmm.  Maybe not that tight...

Evolution, facial musculature and facial communication.  Although I might sidestep into the realm of fluffy pillows as suggested by Stead.

Sooooo pleased the basserd is finished.  Pub time now, yippeeee!!

To be fair, though.  Fluffy pillows are cooler!

Heh heh heh.  Halo, Copper... shall we dance?

Cheeky monkey... er... primate... er... damned dirty ape...

Hmm.  Not really, no.

Yeah Intelligent Design is not science and teaching it in classrooms is dumb.

Think that about covers all the necessary points and ticks all the boxes on the subject.

A good article from the Guardian on this particular subject.

Why evolution has no 'other side'

Guardian Weekly

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.

One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

Article continues
As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? Why would we join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"?

The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.

Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sexual selection; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class.

So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the essay topics we listed above? Here's why.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

What is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil that would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths results in a fossil anyway.

The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.

Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such a fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Jerry Coyne is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago

HaloBurn wrote:

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 It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

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Heh.  Obviously, George is the best qualified person to answer this question.

It should be borne in mind that I have never, ever (except when I'm stirring it up or playing Devils A) come down on either side of the fence on evolution/intelligent design.  All I have said is that I treat each with equal suspicion on the basis that I'm not in the habit of accepting something as fact simply because I read it somewhere or because someone told me it was so.  I have an inherently suspicious nature... which is probably as a direct result of my job.

I'm satisfied that the evidence documented by people I don't know strongly suggests that evolution has taken (and indeed continues to take) place over millions of years and am content to accept that as the most likely explanation, given the data available.

I'm not, however happy to accept that evolution cannot be the means by which Intelligent Design by God (or the Flying Spagetti Monster, if you prefer) has cobbled together the world we see around us.  It seems to me that these so called objective scientists simply discount this entirely because it's religion.  God creating the world an everything on in it is one of the basic cornerstone type things of the Christian faith and I ain't gonna be discounting it just 'cos some boffins can't get their heads around it! I can't get my head around particle physiscs, but I'm not gonna say that it's doesn't exist. 

Personally, I see Intelligent Design and Creationism as two different things:

Creationism to me, seems to be the belief the the world is 6000 years old and was created as is by God in 7 days as is stated at the beginning of the bible.  I don't really buy this for a number of reasons.

ID, however simply means (again, to me) that the world and everything in it is the result of a design process.  That process could be evolution.  It could be creationism.  It could be Spagetti Monsterism. 

As for teaching it in science lessons... Don't really care whether it gets covered or not - as long as your science teacher is genuinely objective and covers the fact that there are alternative theories that do not have as much evidence to support 'em.

Now, in true rabid creationist style, I'm gonna discredit you by picking trivial and irrelevant holes in your selected text:

HaloBurn wrote:

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Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.

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Well, duh.  That's cos he failed to predict the popularity of VHS over Betamax.  That and his archangels ain't the most competent cameramen  (cameraengels?) around.  They play harps, fer gawds sake.

HaloBurn wrote:

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... Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi ...

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Eh... whut?

Copper wrote:

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Not really - in the light of overwhelming evidence and an objective perspective not blinded by religion. 

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I present, for you delectation, an objective response from a proper scientist, like.

What makes you assume that the existence of God cannot be proven by scientific means?

ddvmor wrote:

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I'm not, however happy to accept that evolution cannot be the means by which Intelligent Design by God (or the Flying Spagetti Monster, if you prefer) has cobbled together the world we see around us. 

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As I have said before, there is nothing about evolutionary theory which explains the origin of the universe, it just explains how/why living organisms change through time.  If you think God started the big bang then fine!  As I said, many of my most esteemed colleagues are christians (or other denominations).

Exactly - debating the existence of God is not an interesting topic to me either.  The evolution of life, however, is very interesting, and gets muddy and confused when religious types get upset about our ancestral past.  Dum di dum, did I mention my thesis is submitted?  Woot!!!