Just After Darwin Day...

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

You really have to feel sorry for kids living in the world's last remaining superpower, don't you?

I mean, it is not their fault that they get fed on junk food from Macdonalds that gives them an obesity problem, is it?
And now, people who are old enough to know better want to bring in legislation that will ' teach the controversy' in schools, and develope their 'critical thinking'... yeah, right !!!

Oh, before I forget, have a link:-
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2011/02/11/%E2%80%98science-guy%E2%80%99-speaks-out-bill-nye-says-nay-to-anti-evolution-crusade-as-bills-pop-up-in-the-states/

Now, the obligatory opinion....

The fact is, there is no controversy regarding biological Evolution in science. Scientists are people who go into the field and into the lab and do their own original research and make their own discoveries and publish the findings for peer review among people well qualified in the same and in related fields, and the consensus among the scientific community is that the Earth is billions of years old and that our species has been around for a lot longer than the 6,000 years allowed for by a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

OTOH, Craetionists turn out overwhelmingly to be people who quotemine and misrepresent the findings of others, and then go on to copypaste the claims on Creationist websites. Rather than doing original research and making ground breaking discoveries like 'Lucy', the big names in Creationism, people like Kent Hovind, Duane Gish and Ken Ham simply sell their books and videos to make money off of a gullible audience. These websites, and the related books and videos advertsied thereon, are packed with misrepresentations and inaccuracies - and sadly, this is what some adult Americans actually believe to be true.

In a recent discussion on Facebook, the following comment was made-
Marcus Clark What they don't tell you is that "Lucy" is not only a compilation of bone fragments of multiple bodies but likely of multiple species. These bone fragments were also collected over a rather large area. By doing a little "digging" you'll find that "Lucy" is a total farce.

And this was cited as ' evidence'

Marcus Clark
http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/x0714_lucy_fails_test.html
and
http://www.trueauthority.com/cvse/lucy.htm
and
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/0825lawrence.asp
...and
http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/reprints/truthlucy.pdf
just to show a few.See more

However, as this crushing refutal shows, the original claim was misrepresentation - nobody claimed that the 1973 find was part of the Lucy skeleton, (except the creationists , of course) and the guy who discovered Lucy was quite clear that the knee joint find was from another individual, albeit of the same species - A aferensis.

Go take a look -

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/knee-joint.html
Saturday at 12:53

Now, if this ever comes up in class, how many teachers of the creationist persuasion are going to show both sides of the case, and how many are going to do a good job in demolishing guys like Hovind, Ham and Gish? How many Creationists are actually honest?

It does not bode well for the future of the USA when an agenda driven by the Religious Right gets taught as fact in the classroom. I hope that American kids will get a good deal for once and that this legislation will be rejected for what it is, a cunning plot to bring Creationism into class - but I am a realist. I know how many Americans believe in Creationism, and that many of these will sit on School boards, and have a vote in State politics. People do have a right to be wrong if they choose, it goes with the turf in a democratic nation. However, I don't thiink that these people are making a choice that willbe good for their kids or their country's future if they allow Creationism into the class room.

Comments

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Isn't science supposed to go into matters totally unbiased and looking for what would come out of the exploration?

Well, scientists do construct a preliminary working project of a theory, they don't just plunge into the unknown. Surely they'd be more than happy to be proven wrong and to have themselves swayed into a brand new direction by observation. Like the LHC project - they do expect/hope to find a particle which is responsible for giving mass to energy but they're open to the possibility that it simply doesn't exist and they could be wrong on all this. In fact the guys at CERN say that they'd be much more excited if no Higgs boson comes out of particle collisions, than if they had actually found the Higgs. It would mean that there's a whole new horizon opening in front of them and they need to go into another direction. Often not finding something is more fascinating than finding what you were expecting to find.

So yes, they do have expectations and they base their theories on them, but those expectations/predictions don't come out of thin air, they're based on a long and unstopping string of prior discoveries and often theoretical/mathematical calculations that could not be proven at the time they're being made. Einstein also made a bunch of predictions based on his mindworks and a few mathematical calculations. Only later was it possible to actually test them and prove them or disprove them. In fact Einstein had his own doubts about a number of his own theories - for example he claimed he didn't like the idea of a dynamic universe so he added the Cosmological constant to his equations in order to make them work. Later, when the observations pointed to a dynamic universe as opposed to a static one, he regretted inventing the Cosmological constant. He called it his biggest error. But yet some time later, it turns out that the mysterious Dark energy or whatever is driving the universe apart somehow strangely corresponds to his Cosmological constant. So in a way Einstein was vindicated.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Same could be said about String Theory. Is it real science or philosophy? At this point it cannot be tested. But does this mean it should be totally scrapped? No.

Same about Creationism. It's a theory with no evidence. This is why I think it should be included in textbooks in one single lesson called "Other/Alternative Theories" and that's it. Whoever would like to study it in more details should be able to pick it up as an optional subject, not mandatory.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Chances are that a number of suppositions could never be tested (although, of course, we cant be sure about THAT, either). Like M-theory.

An interesting anecdote tells about the strange fact that we're now at a specific stage of expansion of the Universe where dark energy is still at a relatively low level compared to the sum of matter + dark matter (in fact they're comparable, dark energy is "still" just 3 times bigger than matter), which means that space in the Universe is still not expanding faster than light.

This means that we can still see distant galaxies, even despite the red Doppler shift. But imagine what will happen with the observable Universe in a few hundred billion years. A possible observer would be sitting here and watching the stars, and he'd never be able to observe other galaxies than our own, because they're departing faster than light (the lightspeed limit applies only to information, i.e. energy/matter traveling through space, but it doesnt apply to the expansion of space itself, and in fact it did expand beyond the speed of light for a short period after its creation, the so-called "cosmic inflation" stage). So that future observer would never see other galaxies and he'd naturally conclude that the Milky Way is the whole Universe! And even if someone made the outrageous suggestion that there's more to the Universe than meets the eye, people would probably dismiss it as bullshit because there's no evidence for that and there could never possibly be any evidence. Would it mean that the theory would be wrong? Not really.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

This opens the door to the possibility that Creationism could be right. Sure, it could. As could a myriad of other alternative theories. Should all of them be taught in school as science? I think they should be mentioned, sure. The more kids know about the world and all the theories that purport to explain it, the better. But those theories being taught as a gospel, as something given, proven, and mainstream? Not really.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Same could be said about String Theory. Is it real science or philosophy?

Its a model. The issue is how do we test the accuracy of that model. We can make many many models for reality. The issue is whether things the model predict we can then go test and see if its also true for reality. If the model can predict a great many things, its useful. If it can't, it is not so useful.

That's why we still use newtonian physics often though, because even though its "wrong", it is accurate enough to figure everyday stuff close enough.

Creationism could be viewed as a model too, but a totally useless one as nothing it would predict is replicated by reality.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Problem being it is not a scientific theory at all. So it should not be included in science classes as an alternative theory, as it isn't.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

"Same about Creationism. It's a theory with no evidence."

This is a weird claim, given that you accurately identified an alleged piece of such evidence in a previous comment to me in this thread. But you seem to consistently confuse the falseness of the evidentiary basis for creationism with its absence, which is kind of weird.

"This is why I think it should be included in textbooks in one single lesson called 'Other/Alternative Theories' and that's it."

No, it shouldn't be included at all, since it's neither an aspect of scientific consensus nor an important scientific debate.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what we're arguing here any more.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Yes, scientists are constantly trying to defeat mainstream theories that are established as a consensus paradigm. A scientist disproving something previously accepted is the top achievement for a scientist, and it's a potential Nobel prize. The notion that somehow all scientists agree to never speak about the flaws of mainstream science and ignore the blank spots just for the sake of some dubious mass conspiracy (consensus) is nonsense. Who wouldn't like to dissect the existing paradigms and smash them to pieces and become the new hero?