How long can questions be repressed?
A while. Maybe even a long while.
But not forever:
BBC News: Let us test Darwin, teacher says
Science teaching materials deemed “not appropriate” by the government should be allowed in class, Education Secretary Alan Johnson has been urged.
Chemistry teacher at Liverpool’s Blue Coat School, Nick Cowan, says the packs promoting intelligent design are useful in debating Darwinist evolution.
Education officials insist intelligent design is not recognised as science.
It argues that evolution cannot explain everything so the Universe must have had an intelligent creator.
The packs were sent out to 5,000 secondary schools by a group of academics and clerics known as Truth in Science.
The Department for Education and Skills said they were inappropriate and not supportive of the science curriculum.
Reacting to Mr Cowan’s letter, a DfES spokesman said: “Neither creationism nor intelligent design are taught as a subject in schools, and are not specified in the science curriculum.
“The National Curriculum for science clearly sets down that pupils should be taught that the fossil record is evidence for evolution, and how variation and selection may lead to evolution or extinction.”
This last line is funny. Even celebrated Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould confessed that “the vast majority of species appear fully formed in the fossil record and do not change substantially during the long period of their later existence.” This is evidence for evolution? … a fossil record that lacks transitional forms between species?
The call from Mr Cowan – former head of the school’s chemistry department – comes as the Guardian reported that the Truth in Science materials were being used in 59 schools.
Mr Cowan says they are “very scholarly” and could be extremely useful in helping children understand the importance of scientific debate.
He told the BBC: “Darwin has for many people become a sacred cow.
“There’s a sense that if you criticise Darwin you must be some kind of religious nut case.
“We might as well have said Einstein shouldn’t have said what he did because it criticised Newton.”
He argues that science only moves forward by reviewing and reworking previous theories and that these materials foster an understanding of this.
He also points out that the Truth in Science materials, which he describes as outstanding, do not mention creationism or even God.
He says the GCSE syllabus requires children to appreciate how science works and understand the nature of scientific controversy.
As opposed to the British National Curriculum for science, which requires teenagers to swallow ipse dixit declarations that evolution has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“The government wants children to be exposed to scientific debate at the age of 14 or 15.
Contrary to its own practice of shielding teenagers from the big, bad, social-fabric-threatening questions some scientists are asking about evolution.
“All the Truth in Science stuff does is put forward stuff that says here’s a controversy.
“This is exactly the kind of thing that young people should be exposed to,” Mr Cowan added.
The chairman of the parliamentary science and technology committee, Phil Willis, said using the packs in science classes “elevated creationism” to the same level of debate as Darwinism and that there was no justification for that.
He added: “There’s little enough time with the school curriculum to deal with real science like climate change, energy and the weather.
“This is quite frankly a distraction that science teachers can well do without.”
Read: “This is quite frankly an issue I wish would lie down and die so that people like me wouldn’t have to reconsider our convenient assumptions about life.”
Dr Evan Harris, honorary associate of the National Secular Society and Liberal Democrat science spokesman, said it was worrying that some schools were giving “this nonsense” any credence.
After all, the best way to refute a scientific argument is to label it “nonsense.”
Many leading scientists argue that ideas about intelligent design should not be allowed in school because they are simply not scientific.
Of course Darwinism isn’t scientific either, nor is any attempt to explain the past. Are past events observable? Are they reproducible? No. We may use scientific tools in exploring what happened in the past, but the endeavor itself falls in the realm of forensics — not science.
Back in April, the Royal Society warned against allowing creationism in school saying that pupils must understand that science backs Darwin’s theory of evolution.
“They must. They simply must. And we must make them. In fact we have ways to make them. They must understand we have many ways to make them.”
The society’s statement said: “Young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs.”
The great irony, of course, is that the same people who champion Darwin as Boat-Rocker and Establishment-Shaker are now those who work frantically to protect Darwinism from all questions. Sacred cow indeed!
Nevertheless, questions cannot stay repressed forever. Darwinism is in for a fall; too many scientists are peeling at its frayed edges. Though Darwinism is entrenched and extremely politicized, the fact remains that scientists make names for themselves not by confirming established beliefs, but by rocking the boat — and the easiest way to rock Darwinism is to cease propping it up.
What will replace it is hard to say. Certainly it’ll still be materialistic — on principle the worldwide scientific community will never accept Intelligent Design, much less creationism. Perhaps future evolutionists will follow the lead of Noam Chomsky, the linguist who got away with arguing that the human brain is hard-wired for language. Maybe physicists will join up with biochemists to link string theory to DNA (just kidding).
Whichever way it goes, Darwinism’s lack of evidence is catching up to it, dragging us to the verge of a huge paradigm shift.
Darwin would be proud.
November 28, 2006 at 3:37 pm |
… and to think that someone would have the audacity to question Darwinism after last year’s definitive Dover trial! Do free thinkers never cease? Whatever happened to making a graceful concession?
Some people just have no respect for the rule of law.
November 28, 2006 at 5:23 pm |
Er…that’s not quite right. As you yourself note, intelligent design is not science, as it either posits a a bigger gap than evolution (by postulating a designer) or requires a supernatural element, and of course, there is no evidence for intelligent design.
Your understanding of the fossil record is flawed. Fossilization, of course, is an extremely rare event, and we are quite lucky that organisms are fossilized at all. But even if there were no fossil record at all, studying modern life forms and comparing genomes alone provide overwhelming evidence for evolution. We are fortunate that some organisms fossilize; this allows for further confirmation as well as illuminating more precisely the paths evolution has taken.
Your question about transitional species seems odd—what exactly do you suppose such a fossil would look like? There is no organism “in flux,” evolving towards a future perfect animal. Species were always adapted to fit the niche at the time, and only in retrospect do we see patterns. Whenever we find a new fossil that falls within a previous gap, naturally, there are two new, smaller gaps formed. And given the rarity of fossilization, there will always be gaps.
The analogy with Einstein, is, of course, silly. Einstein offered a model that fit observations better than Newton’s did. He did not simply claim we should abandon Newton’s ideas because there was no evidence that gravity from other stars or galaxies was affecting us, or such.
While there may be religious controversy, there is really none within the scientific community. Certainly, there could be in the future, but at this point, there is no model that comes even close to evolution for explaining biology, and of course much of biology and the medical sciences is built on evolution. Despite your assertion, I don’t believe there is any evidence that support for evolution is decreasing within the scientific community; it actually seems quite stable. Sure, it can be questioned, but until there is a model that approaches the success of evolution, they’ll just remain questions.
November 28, 2006 at 9:54 pm |
Hi Darmok, thanks for chiming in! I appreciate your approach because you don’t disdain questions, but instead seek to answer them. That’s a lot better than those who shun questions altogether.
In response to this statement from you …
… I’ve rewritten a line in my post, which now reads:
By that account, yes, I would say Intelligent Design isn’t science, in the same way that Darwinism isn’t science. Both use scientific tools in attempting to explain what occurred in the past. ID scientists aren’t just sitting around arguing that Darwinism has holes that must be filled by God — they’re actually using empirical methods from other fields (particularly SETI) to identify telltale features of deliberate design in nature. From Dembski’s Intelligent Design:
If the methods used by ID are the same used by SETI, why should the conclusions be automatically thrown out based on an a priori resolve against the possibility of a Designer? This smacks of dogmatism rather than scientific challenge. Conclusions that are bunk should be easy enough to discredit scientifically. If ID scientists proclaimed that the sun god Apollo lives in our system’s star, a review of their work would be enough to demonstrate their error in finding evidence of intelligence in solar radiation.
This argument rides on an a priori commitment to Darwinism. I could just as easily argue that comparing genomes provides overwhelming evidence for Intelligent Design, as they demonstrate a unique signature, a single “language” spoken by one Designer in creating all life forms.
Compare my writing to that of Mark Twain. If my total vocabulary usage is 96% similar to his, you could conclude that my writing evolved from his. Then if you compared my writing to K-Fed and found only a 50% similarity, you could conclude that my writing and K-Fed’s are further apart on the evolutionary tree. The problem is that writing doesn’t evolve. My writing is mine — it emerges from my skull alone. While the numbers may suggest influences of language and culture, they just as easily confound real understanding by indicating false connections across centuries.
From this perspective it would make just as much sense to explain how the Big Bang caused the constellations to form. Just because we see a Gemini and an Orion, that doesn’t mean astrological relationships between those stars really exist, or that they played a role in each other’s formation.
Funny, I would say it’s your understanding of the fossil record that is flawed, perhaps because you’ve never thought to question what we see there. The fact that fossilization is rare is irrelevant — no matter how often the statistical sampling is taken, if Darwinism were true we would see a fossil pattern entirely unlike the one that exists.
You say “there is no organism ‘in flux’”, but this is precisely wrong — all organisms are in flux. I never argued that evolution suggests the movement toward “a future perfect animal,” yet you seem to believe that species reach developmental plateaus. “Species were always adapted to fit the niche at the time” — adapted in the past tense? Not according to Darwin, who insisted that all species are at all times adapting, present tense, to their environments. The only constant is change. This is true considering natural selection pressures, and even more true considering genetic mutations.
So what we should see, every time we dig up another fossil, is a veritable kaleidoscope of changes, a parade of creatures smeared like a rainbow blur of color from bacteria to human, each unique, each filling a gap between other fossils. We should be designating new species upon every find.
That’s not what the fossil record shows us. Instead we dig and, yup, it’s a Tyrannosaurus rex alright — the bone lengths and ratios all match up. Oh look, here’s another Brontosaurus. It’s the happy archaeologist who stumbles across a new species, publishing the discovery and making headlines. Otherwise what we find is predictable, falling in pretty rigid categories of already-known species. In 150 years of digging we became familiar with what was underground awfully quickly — there just wasn’t that much variety.
Disagree? Stephen Jay Gould didn’t. Credit him for seeing the problem as it was — fully formed species in the fossil record, no transitional forms — which is why he devised the prevailing model Darwinists use to explain away this phenomenon: punctuated equilibrium. Really it’s a clever way of saying that evolution occurred in a way that didn’t leave behind any proof.
I know you’ll be tempted to respond with this again …
… to which I will answer again that Stephen Jay Gould didn’t do all that brainy equivocation for nothing. The gaps were simply too gaping even for him to dismiss.
I agree. I didn’t quote the article because I liked that analogy. I included it as I included everything else — because I appreciated the whole article and didn’t want it to disappear in cyberspace, as so many do.
I agree that evolution is stable and secure for now, primarily because it has been so heavily politicized (ever read about what happened to Richard Sternberg?). I don’t think, however, that such stubborn inertia can be sustained, for the reasons I explained in my post. Questions can’t be suppressed forever.
As for explaining biology — as a Darwin dissenter I’m not at all disadvantaged in understanding biology or medical science. In fact I don’t have a problem with any sciences. A common ploy by propagandists is to pretend that a rejection of Darwinism is a rejection of all science, which is silly: just because I disagree with how the human heart came into being doesn’t mean I can’t comprehend its function here and now. Again the crucial distinction is on what is truly science, which is observable and reproducible — and Darwin dissenters like me don’t have any issue with observable and reproducible science.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts. Feel free to respond again, and/or read other posts I’ve written about evolution here.
December 1, 2006 at 1:54 pm |
I would like to add a few things, but am at work. So I will just throw this in the mix. As far as your question about the fossil record Forester, let me just say that not having the gaps could possibly be explained by evolutionist. I like how you worded what we should find when we look into the fossil record
“veritable kaleidoscope of changes, a parade of creatures smeared like a rainbow blur of color from bacteria to human”
One could argue that the events that cause fossilization are not random, so as not to give a random sampling of fossils over time. This could explain the grouping effect, so to say. But if this arguement were used then they would also have to argue that the cause of fossilization happens at certain times in history and not other times. And they would hold the burden of explaining why fossilization happens this way. This is not my argument. I tend more to agree with you, just giving some food for thought that one could argue this stance to explain why we dont see more intermeadiate fossils
December 1, 2006 at 5:03 pm |
My problem with evolution comes mostly from when I try to imagine it actually happening mutation by mutation. I can see things like apes becomming man and horses becomming giraffes since the old term dreaded by evolutionist “micro evolution” could take care of those transformations (ape to man and horse to giraffe) by just changing size, shape and color. When I try to envision mice becomming bats and I try to come up with an advantage of a mouse with super long forefinger (many think that is one of the first stages of bat evolution) but no ability to fly. I picture just a mouse with an extraordinary ability to point at other mice. Obviosly I am oversimplifying. there would be 20 or more intermediate species. but the point still stands that there must have been an advantage to each one of those intermediates. It just doesn’t make sense.
Take for example the cat. Gather 20,000 cats together and examine all of them. Record anything that could be considered a mutation. Then try and think of some enviormental change that could happen and figure out which of those mutations would be an advantage to that enviormental change. Then pretend you can make that enviormental change happen. Not only does that mutation have to be an advantage, but it has to be so much of an advantage that all of the other cats without this advantage will eventuially (maybe not in the first generation, may take many) die out. I can think of mutations that would work for this situation. Perhaps the mutation is a thicker coat of fur. Perhaps the enviormental change is colder wheather. Then maybe in just one or two generations the cat (or cats) with the mutation end up replacing the species. But I cant for the life of me come up with mechanical mutations that lead to complex features like hands. This is what I think many overlook when thinking about evolution. It must happen advantage by advantage. Easy for things like warmer fur, not so easy for things like hands. I can even come up with an advantage for a finger with no hand. But even the finger is very complex. So it would have to start with an advantage with just a stub. And chance mutations don’t know to put the stub at the end of your arm (if for some reason you would have an arm without a hand at the end) so in order for chance to get the species with a stub at the end of the arm it would have to have other members of the species with stubs in other spots. One guy has a stub sticking out his belly the other guy has one at the top of his head, until the one with the stub at the end of his arm has an advantage (like the ability to dig grubs, lets say). Now I realize that evolutionaist would say thay all our features stem from more primitive features. I obviosly know that this is not how anyone is claiming a hand got started. But my point is valid that in order for animals to get mutations that present a significant advantage (like a stub could be) Nature would be a hideous monster, with mutations abound! and covering. You don’t get a signifcant advantage that can lead to complex features like hands by just making thicker fur on cats. I am not sure I clearly got my point across, but this is my real question about evolution. Where are all the mutations? We should be covered with them. And dont give me that they are here, but ther just very subtle and have to add up to be shown. Because stuff this subtle can’t present a big enough advantage.
the forester talks about real science like creating repeatable results. When ever we test the theory in nature by actually changing the enviorment of an animal (like humans always do) we either drive a species to extinction or close to it. but we never see a change. Thats the other thing people don’t talk about in evolution. We say that it takes millions of years for mutations to take hold. That would be great if the enviorment would cooperate and only change over millions of years, but it doesn’t, it changes abruptly. This year a food source can be plenty, next year gone. This year warm and rainy, next year drought. If evolution were to react to enviorment, mutations would have to be a plenty and ready to go.
January 29, 2007 at 7:13 am |
I agree with the fact that ID creates much-needed controversey in schools. However you need to understand where the anti-ID people are coming from.
However much is wrong with Darwinism it is still the one that is best able to explain all the data we have right now, even if it is forensics.
Right now to most students ID is just a hype, not some concrete scientific theory, and this is in part caused by the unwillingness in letting it be taught. If right now ID were introduced without a lot of thought in how to present it, it might destroy or seriously weaken our believes that darwinism is correct.
In this case, it is all or nothing. ID should be introduced as either a theory on the same level as the accepeted one, with as much scientific data to back it up, and actual examples, in short, it should be developed into a whole curriculum, whereby I mean for example you assume that it is correct and teach from there.
Otherwise, it shouldn’t be taught at all.