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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (10624)	12/7/2010 4:46:16 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 69300

Question on an old subject: If scientists ever discover genes that predispose people to become homosexuals, how would you feel morally about parents using amniotic testing to eliminate gays from the gene pool?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (10624)	12/7/2010 4:47:21 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

So we're left with a 'theory of evolution' that says species have come into being and gone extinct and over time the complexity of species has increased. Thats it. And we can't really say why. ---------------------------------- >Also, if the mechanism of speciation is unknown, how can ID be rejected as a hypothesis? < On that basis it can't be rejected. But I don't see how it can be favored either. My principal gripe with ID is that it is "top-down science" that draws its ultimate authority from an unscientific, and traditionally antiscientific, source. It's the scientific equivalent of what Biblical scholars call eisegesis, "reading into" the text from an external prejudice. I know the real problem anyone has with ID is that Ultimate Authority. I will point out that the requirement that the cause of speciation, not to mention the cause of the origin of life, be entirely and only the result of naturalistic forces is ALSO an unscientific, metaphysical top down reading into science from an external prejudice: ‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’ Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.