Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You

[LWsciencejunkie]

TedHOhio wrote:

<quoted text>
One of my friends would disagree with you. He says there isn't a problem that can't be solved with a backhoe! A Rock Hammer would just be to small to do the job right :-)

I hear ya! I have a next-door neighbor with a backhoe and every time I use his services he creates more problems. Those things tear up the place ten times as much as they do the work needed.

A rock hammer has the elegance of appropriate, "green" technology and the satisfaction of the sight and heft of the glittering arc, thud and crunch of impact, the victim's shock and terror, and back-spatter.

[Todd]

Easter Bunny wrote:

<quoted text>
Blind links are not compelling. Got something to say?

TedHOhio was asking about the proof of design in nature. I gave him the link. http://www.imm.org/publications/pnas/
and I quote:
"The existence of this range of components in nature indicates that power-driven mechanical systems can be constructed on a molecular scale."

[PoKay1kaDuB]

StopTheInsanity wrote:

<quoted text>
How useful.
Supercollider physicist: "Hey, what was that particle?"
Shinning electr0n: "Well, it wasn't a toaster".
Do you have any other brain spasms to share with us?

would it matter if you called it a toaster or a quark? We still make the same observations about it. A quark is a label, big deal. You're such a genius.

[TedHOhio]

hexene wrote:

<quoted text>
Hi LW!!
Ah..Yes the french word poser! She pretends to be what she is not. Maybe guilt of pretending got to her or maybe embarrassment. I'd doubt it. LOL!

I think there is more than a little "be the person you always wanted to be" here one these forums. I mean there is so little accountability, so some people say things they would never admit to in 'real life'. Some of them pose, others -- as we have all seen -- abuse other folks.

That's why I frequently put my email address, my blog address, and even my real pic in my profile here. Hmm, LW, for some reason no one ever asked ME if it's my real pic ... why is that?:-)

[e-mail]
http://sciencestandards.blogspot.com/

[LWsciencejunkie]

Zeke wrote:

What is with this Aussie 911-troofer? Now he's posting his garbage as replies to unrelated posts, as if that slips them under the radar.

He's a muzzie. Pro'lly. His posts and his reply to your post above are both indicative.

[polymath257]

Todd wrote:

<quoted text>
You are using God's dirt to create something.
I'm saying, make your own dirt. Create something out of nothing like he did. You may have learned how to harness his electricity, but not make your own. Isn't that why we are all fighting over the "natural resources" like oil, gas, coal? You want to disprove God's existance and say it's all based on evolution. I say there is no such thing as evolution, only adaptation. DNA base elements (nucleotide pairs) already exist.. where did they come from? Why are new base elements not being created or added to it's structure?

The bases are composed of atoms (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc) which did not exist 13 billion years ago. Those atoms are made from protons, neutrons, and electrons, with the protons nd neutrons made out of quarks of various types.

So what you seem to be asking us to do is violate the law of conservation of mass and energy. In other words, you want us to prove that the laws of nature are correct by violating them????? Anything else and you simply say we are 'using God's dirt'. Fiddle.

[TerryL]

LWsciencejunkie wrote:

<quoted text>
I hear ya! I have a next-door neighbor with a backhoe and every time I use his services he creates more problems. Those things tear up the place ten times as much as they do the work needed.
A rock hammer has the elegance of appropriate, "green" technology and the satisfaction of the sight and heft of the glittering arc, thud and crunch of impact, the victim's shock and terror, and back-spatter.

Bang, Bang LW's silver hammer
came down on their heads!!!

[LWsciencejunkie]

TedHOhio wrote:

<quoted text>
I think there is more than a little "be the person you always wanted to be" here one these forums. I mean there is so little accountability, so some people say things they would never admit to in 'real life'. Some of them pose, others -- as we have all seen -- abuse other folks.
That's why I frequently put my email address, my blog address, and even my real pic in my profile here. Hmm, LW, for some reason no one ever asked ME if it's my real pic ... why is that?:-)
[e-mail]
http://sciencestandards.blogspot.com/

OHhhh..........phooey. I was in the fricking desert for three days hunting fossils (finding 'em too- I sent some to Fossil Bob). Next time I'll post a glamour-shot. Why don't you post a COMMANDOOOOO shot?
I used to post my real name too- and for the same reasons you do, but the spooks where my husband works spanked me. I post a lot of, um...rather blunt material on Islamic threads by, primarily using their own scriptures and was getting a lot of death-threats which included what they were going to do to me before I died- which was another reason.

[LWsciencejunkie]

Hey, fundies and friendlies, check this out!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13b...

[Done That]

StopTheInsanity wrote:

<quoted text>
Me?
Here is you version of a scientific theory:
"...I'll feel free to refer to theory as a kind of hypothesis that has yet to be proven".
Here is your idea of the filter for what "ideas" to teach students:
"....... it made sense to inform students of positions taken by many people, whether well-grounded or not. What exactly is your objection to that"?
So in your world of education theories are SWAGs and any "position taken by many people" should be dumped on the teachers and students.
Seriously, do understand the absurdity of what you've said?

A theory is not necessarily proven. It is proven until it is disproven by a better theory. Hawken was at his prime a few years ago when no one was able to disprove his theories, now a few years later he is out of favor because better proof was found. A theory is like a painting. More people are able to understand a painting than mathematics. Numbers don't really exist they are just a code to represent thought. Some can look at those numbers and in their minds eye see the thought. Theory base on what we know about the way things work on earth are being found to be wrong as we learn more about space. Kind of like the concept of a day on some planets is longer than its year.

[Tinka]

LWsciencejunkie wrote:

<quoted text>
It's me. My dad took it with a regular camera and had to scan it. Then I had him blur out my b...s...you know; thin shirt, hot day, strong light. It was a little on the skanky side.

LOL
That's awesome...You look like you had a great time..

[TedHOhio]

A Peculiar people wrote:

<quoted text>
Why wouldn't I? I am not opposed to reading material to determine it's validity. I used to believe evolution to be true and have been on the side of evolution for most of my life. But once it was revealed to me that carbon dating was inaccurate, I began to question more things that have been presented to me as facts. There is so much in science that we don't know, that it makes you wander what we do know.

OK, do some more reading. Carbon dating is not inaccurate, but since Carbon-14 has a short half-life, it's not used much past 60,000 years. That's why there are other forms of radiometric dating that can accurately date things back in the 3-4 billion year range. Sure the error range is +/- 2 million years, that fact you are going back so far makes that type of error range pretty insignificant.

So one form of dating made you question all of evoluton, and it's not even a form of dating used very often in evolution because the time-frame is too short. I love reading on Creationist website how inaccurate Caron-14 dating is when it comes to dating fossils! They do it really sneakily. The explain that Caron-dating is one form of radiometric dating. Then they tell you the limits on carbon-14 dating when applied to fossils -- something that it is not used for. Then they take their argument and imply that it applies to all radiometric dating. Where I went to school we would call that a LIE. It's also a form of logical fallacy, but I like to keep things simple and just call it a lie.

Yes, there is much in science we don't know, no one has ever claimed anything else. But you are invalidating things that we do know based on a bad assumption. Yes, there are gaps in the theories of light, gravity, the atom, evolution, thermodynamics ... but that still doesn't make what we do currently know invalid. It means there is still more work to be done, and nice to know there are plenty of people doing that work. We know considerably more than we did 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago ..I am pretty confident in saying that in 10 years, 20 years, 50 or 100 years form now we will know considerably more.

[Zeke]

LWsciencejunkie wrote:

He's a muzzie. Pro'lly. His posts and his reply to your post above are both indicative.

What was the tip off? The characteristic charm or the dedication to polite (and relevant) discussion?[Insert "rollingeyes" emoticon here.]

[Darwins Stepchild]

LWsciencejunkie wrote:

<quoted text>
...Hey! I was talking to another girl! And that pic should've had a scratch-'n-sniff feature for the sake of authenticity. The reeking reality of three days of living rough in the desert is NOT "attractive".
Check out this column in the NYT today by
David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13b...

A friend of mine that was in the Army related a story a few months back. He had been in the field for a week without a shower. As things were winding down, he got a chance to take a field shower. When he got back, he suddenly realized how bad his driver smelled and order him to go to the showers.

[Done That]

TedHOhio wrote:

<quoted text>
I think you are looking at things from the wrong direction. You claim design because you are looking from the top down and saying things work because they were designed to work. Sounds like a pointy-haired boss who has no real idea why they work, just making an assumption.
If you look from the bottom up you will see things work because what works survives and propagates those mechanisms that work to a new generation. Change is constantly happening literally from one generation to another.
One piece of evidence: How does your design idea answer the species that no longer exist for which we have a huge amount of evidence? Poor design? Should we consider an extinct species like wadded up paper in a writer's trash bin? Just ideas that didn't work out?
Evolutionary theory says that when a species reaches a point where change no longer supports a species survival -- in other words some environmental factor forms that they cannot account for in a short enough period of time before their gene pool is too small to an increase in population -- they become extinct.
Gee which one matches the evidence of the hundreds of thousands of species that have gone extinct? One explanation requires a designer that ID 'idea-ists' will only name in secret. The other requires no designer. Hmmm, ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Close shave. I really have no argument with you about 99% of evolution and the 1% will be filled in by future science explanation. My idea of a designer is a clock maker who has little interest in every tick of what he started. How can the designed explain the designer? I just see both order and randomness. The designer put all the mechanisms in motion

[LWsciencejunkie]

TerryL wrote:

<quoted text>
Bang, Bang LW's silver hammer
came down on their heads!!!

Bang-Bang, LW's silver hammer
Made sure that they were dead.

(This is undeniable evidence of how bizarre our family was and is.) One of the many songs we all knew and sang along on long car trips was Maxwell's Silver Hammer...my sister and I were little kids! Another was this sort of four-part, very long Gregorian-esque choral that had this one line of lyrics: Worm. Worm-eee, worm-eee, worm. Worm-ee, worm-ee, worm-ee, worm-ee-WOOOOORMMMMM."
This was a disparaging and sinister ode to bait fishermen which we looked down upon, being the children of a passionate fly fisherman.
Every summer we all went on camping/backpacking trips to be with my dad on his geology field trips. We used to take our peculiar old cat with us. He had a litterbox in the very back of our old International station wagon. One time we pulled up to a stoplight in this little town in Montana and, of course the windows were down (no AC) and the cat took the opportunity to poop, but we didn't notice everyone cracking up around us because we were all concentrating very hard, and at the top of our lungs, on the latest version of Wormee-worm.
Can you imagine? I bet that story is around to this day.
I deserve a lemon for this one.

[TedHOhio]

PoKay1kaDuB wrote:

<quoted text>Exactly, science has to start doing the work. I'm not making a claim yet, I am just saying that there is good reason to go after this area of study. Use your imagination. You mean you would not like to know if you actually die into extinction at death? You are confident in science's guess that we do? Science says consciousness is a product of the brain and not separate, so this means they are confident that we die into extinction. They cannot be more than 50% confident, but it is this kind of science that (supposedly) validates your macroevolution of the first replicators and on up to complex systems and divergence. I swear they purposely defined speciation as the ability to produce viable offspring so that we can think that a little geographic separation is all that is needed for speciation. Well a finch that cannot reproduce with another finch, is a finch just the same.

You need to redefine what a species is, because there are multiple species of finches. Geographic separation is ONE of the methods speciation is seen to have happened, the technical term is Allopatric speciation.

Peripatric speciation is when a new species are formed from isolated, small peripheral populations which are prevented from exchanging genes with the main population. The London Underground mosquito is a variant of the mosquito Culex pipiens which entered in the London Underground in the nineteenth century and is now a separate species through peripatric speciation.

Parapatric speciation, the zones of two diverging populations are separate but do overlap. Ring species are an excellent example.

Sympatric speciation, species diverge while inhabiting the same place. Three-spined sticklebacks and Tennessee cave salamanders are examples.

It's more than just geographic separation that can cause speciation, many environmental factors can contribute, geographical separation is just one of them, and the one mose easily recognized.

[Done That]

TedHOhio wrote:

<quoted text>
It's like the flood. Ever civilization has stories of floods. So regardless of the fact every civilization lived nears rivers, lakes, and oceans. And regardless of the fact that these things tend to flood. And regardless of the fact the geological evidence shows multiple flood events across multiple times, but in geographically isolated areas -- biblical scholars claim that this is evidence of a world-wide flood event.
So there is evidence of Egypt kicking out several groups of undesirables at various times and there is evidence that Jews were basically kicked out of many places and traveled a great deal. Biblical scholars use this as evidence of a mass exodus of Jews from Egypt.
See what happens when you use the Bible as a filter for any information?
I wonder what Nostradamus would say?:-)

Many cultures believe in dragons. Why? Because they existed. Or at least that was the best way to describe them when you found examples in fossils

[LWsciencejunkie]

Darwins Stepchild wrote:

<quoted text>
A friend of mine that was in the Army related a story a few months back. He had been in the field for a week without a shower. As things were winding down, he got a chance to take a field shower. When he got back, he suddenly realized how bad his driver smelled and order him to go to the showers.

When we got back my mom gave us the supreme cut, saying to me; "I don't know who smells worse, you, Laura, or that old hobo you dragged in; now- where's your dad?"

[Tinka]

Easter Bunny wrote:

<quoted text>
Your argument is not exactly of the form: if A = B and B = C then A = C. Hey, I "like the language" as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I think you can prove things by just manipulating words unless the underlying concepts and things are clearly in parallel with those words.
The problem comes in when we have "equivocation on a term" or just "equivocation" for short. In this case, nobody would argue that intelligence is handy for scientists. However, the use of that word in this discussion generally has a different connotation. If we don't pay attention to these meaningful differences, we end up with arguments like this one:
1) Russian threats are no news.
2) No news is good news.
Therefore Russian threats are good news.
We also don't know that a designer can design anything. I'm pretty good at designing databases, but I don't know squat about telescopes.
So, making the words "align" is not the same thing as making the meanings align in a useful or illuminating way.
And as far as it being an elective class, we all very well know that the history of religion has been one of coercion in every sphere of their influence. They cannot be trusted to exercise any restraint in this.

Merely an opinion on your part..as everyone has one, an opinion..
I think if you can't trust a teenager...(which I think it should be an elective in highschool)..to make a decision for him/her self it is pretty dang adult of you! As far as it making it into the schools at all..is still not for certain anyways...
We all know people will never see to eye on just about anything..
As far as teenagers, I am sure they are capable to decide what they are interested in...given the opportunity to think for themselves that is..