Of what real value is evolutionary "knowledge"?

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well get right on winning your nobel prize with coming up with an alternative SCIENTIFIC THEORY that explains how everything came to be.

WHY HAVE ALL THESE TYPES OF RELIGIONS IF ALL YOU NEED IS BELIEF IN GOD?

SHOW ME THIS INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE>>> MAYBE I SPLAIN IT BETTER TO YOU

<3

yes you can.... go find a scientific research paper on evolution... read it... and explain to us why it is crap.

it's actually harder to debunk something than to simply endorse it... which is exactly what you are relying on by supporting your religion... yet because of this... you make no real attempt to debunk evolution cause you don't really know enough of the mechanics.

either that... or tell us how to SCIENTIFICALLY disprove evolution... ie... how would you design a test to show how wrong it is?

IMAGINE THIS IS YOUR ALTERNATIVE ESSAY ASSIGNMENT IN MY EVOLUTION CLASS

write me an essay on your experiment. (can be short for internets boards)

Guys, I think Ragtime is trolling.

Well, it is very important for the successful pursuit of biological study. Frankly, the issue of questioning evolution is an issue of singling it out for unusual levels of scrutiny. As well, the issue of having evolution taught in schools and not allowing for ID is because a court of law has shown ID to not be science but rather to be creationism(which has already been outlawed) revamped and given a new name. ID does not fit under the definition of science given by the National Association of Science, and it's supporters recognize that and accordingly have accepted a definition for science so broad that it could include astrology:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8178.html
Not only that, but ID is non-falsifiable as stated by Dr. Behe as well, and there is no debate within the scientific community over ID either as there are no papers or anything published by ID proponents.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -5,00.html
Frankly, ID does not deserve to be in schools. I don't mind if these people go around selling books and misleading people, but it is essentially a fact of logic that ID is not science.


It is demanded that no teacher allow room for a scientific possibility other than Darwinian evolution because currently there is no debate within science on what theory works best for the formation of life. As well, there is no proof in science, only theories and evolution is the scientific theory that best matches the facts. Frankly, I doubt that a lot of this is personal, and some of the proponents of evolution are Christian, such as cell biologist Ken Miller who has participated with trials against ID who is a Roman Catholic(Behe is a Roman Catholic too btw, so don't even throw the Catholics out given Behe is the leading proponent of irreducible complexity). Evolution is like macroeconomics class where you are taught the Keynesian model because that model is considered the best by the profession despite what Marxists, Post-Keynesians or Austrians think on the matter(and I would bet that there are more of both in economics academia than there are ID proponents in biology).

Not really. Most phenomena we see in our everyday lives can be explained naturalistically, and the rest of the evidence is subjective, and finally, not all of this evidence will even point to the right God, as recognized by Blaise Pascal who faults classical apologetics to pointing to the God of the philosophers rather than the Christian God, so a lot of this evidence could be taken as heading towards Deism.


Um... the statement X has not been proven, is a positive statement. The statement that X does not exist is a negative one. Therefore, you can be expected to argue why something has not been proven, but you cannot be expected to argue that something does not exist.


Right, I actually do believe you could never be persuaded, and it has nothing to do with the best arguments being utter crap either.

Well, it is very important for the successful pursuit of biological study. Frankly, the issue of questioning evolution is an issue of singling it out for unusual levels of scrutiny. As well, the issue of having evolution taught in schools and not allowing for ID is because a court of law has shown ID to not be science but rather to be creationism(which has already been outlawed) revamped and given a new name. ID does not fit under the definition of science given by the National Association of Science, and it's supporters recognize that and accordingly have accepted a definition for science so broad that it could include astrology:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8178.html
Not only that, but ID is non-falsifiable as stated by Dr. Behe as well, and there is no debate within the scientific community over ID either as there are no papers or anything published by ID proponents.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -5,00.html
Frankly, ID does not deserve to be in schools. I don't mind if these people go around selling books and misleading people, but it is essentially a fact of logic that ID is not science.


It is demanded that no teacher allow room for a scientific possibility other than Darwinian evolution because currently there is no debate within science on what theory works best for the formation of life. As well, there is no proof in science, only theories and evolution is the scientific theory that best matches the facts. Frankly, I doubt that a lot of this is personal, and some of the proponents of evolution are Christian, such as cell biologist Ken Miller who has participated with trials against ID who is a Roman Catholic(Behe is a Roman Catholic too btw, so don't even throw the Catholics out given Behe is the leading proponent of irreducible complexity). Evolution is like macroeconomics class where you are taught the Keynesian model because that model is considered the best by the profession despite what Marxists, Post-Keynesians or Austrians think on the matter(and I would bet that there are more of both in economics academia than there are ID proponents in biology).

Not really. Most phenomena we see in our everyday lives can be explained naturalistically, and the rest of the evidence is subjective, and finally, not all of this evidence will even point to the right God, as recognized by Blaise Pascal who faults classical apologetics to pointing to the God of the philosophers rather than the Christian God, so a lot of this evidence could be taken as heading towards Deism.


Um... the statement X has not been proven, is a positive statement. The statement that X does not exist is a negative one. Therefore, you can be expected to argue why something has not been proven, but you cannot be expected to argue that something does not exist.


Right, I actually do believe you could never be persuaded, and it has nothing to do with the best arguments being utter crap either.

It depends on what the goals of the biologist are. If the main goal (as it seems to be with most pure scientists) is determining what is most likely to be true, then your question amounts to a re-hashing of "Why do you think evolution is true?" In any coherent sense I can see, it's the same as asking how knowledge of quantum mechanics makes one a better astrophysicist. Certainly there exists work one can do in astrophysics without understanding QM, but it is necessary to make sense of a lot of things that are routinely used in the field.

If the goal is having a coherent understanding of how things are and what has caused them to be the way they are, then evolutionary biology is essential to biology in general, and QM is essential to astrophysics.



That's not always the case. For those creationists that believe that the universe and/or planet are only a few thousand years old, there must be quite a bit of "alternative" physics.

The only things I see in evolutionary biology that could fairly be called "just-so stories" occur in debates with creationists who make an assertion of the form "There is no way X could have evolved." Unless the specific history of the evolution of X already have evidence that spells out what happened, the best (and still quite legitimate) way to counter that claim is to give a "just-so story" that spells out a process by which X could have evolved.

Perhaps evolutionary hypotheses start out similarly, but comparing details of morphology and molecular sequences can provide evidence for or against some of them. Simply declaring all similarities to be "homoplasies" is a very strong claim. The striking thing about cladograms is that they're highly consistent, even when they're generated by comparisons of different molecules, or different aspects of morphology. I've never seen a sensible explanation for this phenomenon that wasn't based on evolution.


If quantum mechanics were eliminated from astrophysics it would still be a study of the interaction of heavenly bodies, even if the mechanism of some of those interactions were not understood. Similarly, if evolution were eliminated from biology, it's not that the field would no longer exist, it's that it would have eliminated a powerful, unifying theoretical basis for a lot of the things it describes.

no... he's just expressing what he honestly believes.

he's a good guy and my friend... this is just one o my obsessions i guess

In my experience it's not "demanded that no teacher allow room for a scientific possibility other than Darwinian evolution." It's demanded that science teachers teach the best science available, and as it happens that doesn't include ID, creationism, or any alternative possibility to evolution yet put forward.

A guy I had as a public school science teacher from 6th grade through 9th grade biology (the set of courses he taught changed from one year to the next in a way that followed my class) would talk about how scientific knowledge is tentative, and how what we're taught is simply the best understanding available to us today, not the only one possible. He taught evolutionary biology (despite immense pressure from other faculty NOT to do so, as is often the case in the rural parts of East TX) because that is by far the best understanding of the evidence that we have now. As it happens, he was also one of the faculty sponsors for the club "Youth for Christ" and evidently a Christian, so the suggestion that it's only the "god-hating" (or even religion-hating) that are behind teaching evolution is evidently false too.

Teaching one thing in science doesn't mean that there are no other possibilities. Indeed, any set of data has an infinite number of possible explanations, but that doesn't mean that any is as good as any other. Not all possibilities are equally probable.

I'd be careful about characterizing evolution as an explanation of "how everything came to be". It's an explanation for how the diversity of life came to be. I'm sure that's what you meant, but it seems that some folks have started to lump that in with much, much more.

There is no evidence for the existance of God. And the FACT of evolution is obvious to anyone who actually understands biology.

Oh, and my 7th grade Life Science teacher is a very devout Lutheran and yet she has no problem with evolution. So she "personally dislike God,: huh? The pastor at my parent's church (the same one the teach goes to) has a degree in biology and he has no problem with evolution.

true... i didn't mean EVERYTHING.... else we'd be teaching evo in physics class, lol thanks

Well, it is BECAUSE Darwinian evolution is the best science available. We are saying the same thing, just putting emphasis on different factors. I say we teach Darwinian evolution because that is the best science, you say we teach the best science and that happens to be Darwinian evolution. Also, before anyone questions the term "Darwinian", I am only doing this to distinguish from Lamarckian evolution or something of that nature.

Well, obviously your pastor isn't teaching the Bible correctly as he is not teaching things such as 7 day creationism and the 6000 year old world, and probably not that homosexuality is the most evil thing a person can do.