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Politics : A Neutral Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (1812)	12/27/2005 3:58:59 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 2253

"What's wrong with intelligent design, and with its critics By Alexander George Good article. I think I agree with it. I am against any school district imposing ID as part of the science curiculum, but I also have some problems with the recent court decision getting rid of it. "either we should find alternatives to the courts to protect our curricula from bad science" Which is exactly what happened in that school district even before the final decision of the court was released. The school board was voted out. Tim

To: Lane3 who wrote (1812)	12/28/2005 7:25:35 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2253

..anything that involves the supernatural is inherently not science. Science deals with the natural world. Is "natural world" just a way of saying the "real world"? Religion and philosophy deal with the "real world" too, not just the world of ideas. Let me suppose a what if? What if something tangible yet supernatural were discovered? Would scientists decide that isn't for us to explore? Clearly philosophical materialism - the concept that nothing but matter exists - is not a necesarry cornerstone of science. Historically it hasn't been - science existed for centuries during which virtually all scientists were Christians who said they were exploring God's creation. Yet people like that were nevertheless scientists and they did scientific work. The other problem is that it's not an advanced enough "theory." It's a lowly hypothesis .. Okay, that is a very valid claim. I would support the idea that it should not be taught as proven fact, for sure. Course, I think we are being too quick to teach either natural selection or SET as the sole explanation for all life too. We not only need to teach science in the classroom, we need to teach our best science. We have enough problems without making our kids unnecessarily ignorant. Yet the most interesting areas of science are those where things aren't nailed down and cut and dried. Those are the things that draw human interest and probably increase student interest. Another way to assess whether something is science is by watching for the scientific community to deem it such. That's the way it works. Heh, yes, that's the way it works all right. How I got there from being a Catholic is a long story.. OK, was just curious. I see there are a lot of issues you mention. I liked the article in general - in particular the admissions in this paragraph: Science employs the scientific method. No, there's no such method: Doing science is not like baking a cake. Science can be proved on the basis of observable data. No, general theories about the natural world can't be proved at all. Our theories make claims that go beyond the finite amount of data that we've collected. There's no way such extrapolations from the evidence can be proved to be correct. Science can be disproved, or falsified, on the basis of observable data. No, for it's always possible to protect a theory from an apparently confuting observation. Theories are never tested in isolation but only in conjunction with many other extra-theoretical assumptions Re. the characterization of ID as "poor science", my main objection would be that the scientific alternatives to it offered - neo-darwinism, SET, are pretty poor too IMO. Darwin looked at gross anatomy - finch's beaks etc. - and came up with a way of explaining things based on the idea of the competition for survival. His (and everyone else's at the time) understanding of the biochemical basis of life was very primitive. Lynn Margulis looks at bacteria and sees lots of symbiotic relationships - ie cooperation and collaborative combinations. Ultimately the "scientific" theories rest upon reasonable sounding arguments about how such and such can explain what we see in the living world. What I would like to see - and have looked for - are reasonable sounding arguments which would explain the irreducibly complex systems which Behe describes. Ther's no doubt they exist. So what is the explanation for how they come to be? Like for example, what is the evolutionary explanation for the bacterial rotary motor which some bacteria use to propel themselves through liquid? I have skimmed through a number of books looking for this type of thing - mostly all I see are claims "its not science" or "its just creationism". That's not an argument for or against anything - its an attempt to rule out having to make an argument. The sole attempt to mount an explanation came from a guy named Kenneth Miller. And his non-explanation is inadequate IMO. It amounts to saying there is a somewhat similar structure in other bacteria which does something else. Clearly to me, this at best simply produces yet one more irreducibly complex structure which needs to be explained. Here is a discussion of Miller's argument which does a good job of showing why his argument is inadequate: Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University who argues in favor of Darwinian evolution, made a splash when he announced (and he bolded the language in his article) that "the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex." Miller cited a cellular structure known as the type III secretory system (TTSS) that allows certain bacteria to inject toxins through the cell walls of their hosts. This "nasty little device," in Miller's words, is a feature of several bacteria, including Y. pestis, the bacterium that is responsible for bubonic plague. According to research cited by Miller, the TTSS is made up of several proteins that are "homologous" to a set of proteins from the base of the flagellum. Miller argued that the injector pump is probably an "evolutionary precursor" to the flagellum, and it is fully functional although it has fewer parts. Therefore, "the claim of irreducible complexity has collapsed, and with it any 'evidence' that the flagellum was designed." The "flagellum has been unspun," Miller concluded. But there was a little problem with Miller's declaration of victory. As it turns out, the bubonic plague bacterium already has the full set of genes necessary to make a flagellum. Rather than making a flagellum, Y. pestis uses only part of the genes that are present to manufacture that nasty little injector instead. As pointed out in a recent article by design theorist Stephen Meyer and microbiologist Scott Minnich (an expert on the flagellar system), the gene sequences suggest that "flagellar proteins arose first and those of the pump came later." If evolution was involved, the pump came from the motor, not the motor from the pump. Also, "the other thirty proteins in the flagellar motor (that are not present in the [pump]), are unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system." Undirected evolutionary processes do not produce 30 novel proteins, of just the needed kind, to laze around idly in the cell for millennia so that a pump could some day transform itself into a motor. In short, the proteins in the TTSS do not provide a "gradualist" Darwinian pathway to explain the step-by-step evolution of the irreducibly complex flagellar motor. spectator.org