ID should warrant a quick mention when discussing the unexplained bits about evolution. It should not be presented as a detailed alternative theory....but as science is supposed to be objective...they should be acknowledging that there are some things that are not fully explainable throught evolution yet. Three or four sentences should just about cover the ID portion of the curriculum in science class.
I can't wait for nephew to come back from his Phrenology class. I have this weird bump on my head, and I'm pretty sure it's a sign that I'm excessively sassy.
And the lab portion would consist of...? And concrete steps towards proving or disproving the theory would be...? And one day, when computers are powerful enough, your mathematical model built to simulate it would be...?
There are two general ways to look at the question of ID and at least 3 distinctly different, entrenched groups trying to address it, maybe 4. The two ways are the political perspective and the scientific perspective. In general terms, anyone who tries to draw religion or “superstition”, into their argument, for or against ID, is in the former category. I don’t know that much about the American political context around this issue but it has been in the news more recently so I’m finding out. There appears to be a group on the Christian right who wish to use this issue to promote creationism. This is a political position and not a scientific one, or for the most part a Christian position either. (Christians are to seek truth, not be manipulative). Likewise there are those who oppose ID and try to characterise it as a Christian or a religious issue. This is also a political position and not a scientific one because religious issues have nothing to do with the essential position of ID. Both sides are merely engaging in rhetoric and manipulative practices to try to make people accept their position. Neither upholds the principles of good science. The second way to look at this is the scientific way, but I’ll divide this into the categories of good science and bad science. It has long been know that the scientific establishment has and continues to fall victim to political forces and forces of inertia and other things Thomas Kuhn describes in his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To try to boil it down, the bad scientists in this group will hold fast to the paradigm that they learned and that they have staked their careers in. They may not denounce ID as a religious theory but they will be inclined to say that evolution is “the truth” because it’s the theory they are heavily invested in in various ways. This is also essentially a political position but perhaps of a different kind, a more subliminal kind. Good science, otoh, looks at problems objectively. Sishir Chang raised what I think is the best way I’ve heard so far to explain ID, although he did it in another context. Let’s say that explorers were entering a remote part of the Brazilian jungle for the first time and they came across a pyramid made of stone. In order to attempt to discover where it came from they have different possible avenues to pursue. Did it grow there like the plants around it appear to have done? Or was it constructed by someone or something? In other words, is it some form of intelligent design? This is a legitimate scientific questions and it can be approached in purely scientific ways. Is there anything about this object that suggests that it grew like a plant? If so then drawing on botany may be the best way to approach the problem of finding out how it got there. It’s not an invalid approach in any event. If there is little or no evidence that this object randomly grew there then the question of ID becomes more prominent. Could someone have designed and constructed it? That’s an entirely possible and reasonable hypothesis. To find out who might have constructed it, however, you ask different kinds of questions. Could it have been people from the mountains, or from the coast? You might go to those places to look for structures that look like this one to explore that question. Could it have been built by an animal species, or even by extra terrestrials? Again, there are various things to be done to explore these possibilities. There are many avenues of exploration, almost all valid in their own way, but the thing that unites them is the take off point, the decision, based on scientific probability that there is realistic possibility that the structure was designed and didn’t just grow randomly. Life on earth is like the pyramid. Darwin looked at it and said, “could this be a random creation, evolving through a great length of time?” This seemed like an interesting scientific idea at the time and scientists headed off to explore it, but the politics entered the question very quickly too. Political Jews, Christians, and Muslims attacked it because they saw it as undermining their political position, and other political groups who opposed these groups held evolution up because they also thought it undermined the position of the former group. Spiritual Jews, Christians, and Muslims and those who have come to believe that their faiths are true have no problem with the scientific exploration of evolution, of course, as long as it’s conducted as good science that is. They don’t feel they have anything to fear by pursuing the truth. Indeed, that’s their mandate. As this investigation progressed interesting and very useful discoveries were made. Genes and gene theory proposed a couple of different broad possible mechanism for evolution, horizontal evolution and vertical evolution. Horizontal evolution proved to be a very robust theory and has proved itself many times and is a solidly established part of our science and our lives now. Vertical evolution, otoh, did not pan out the same way. In spite of decades of research now it does not appear to exist on the cell level, or in the fossil record, or anywhere else as far as science has been able to tell. They’re still working on it, and good for them for doing that, but as far as we know today cells don’t mutate in a way that would facilitate vertical evolution and the complexity of life we see today. In response to these findings more people are asking the question, could there be an element of ID involved in the existence of the life we see around us? The pyramid is not looking like it could have randomly grown now, or at the very least there are significant questions about whether there is another explanation. As we all know, good science is not afraid of pursuing other explanations. Bad science and people with entrenched political positions, otoh, are. These people want you to believe that evolution is the only possible way. They will call it “truth” when in fact it’s one of the most poorly supported theories in science today. Good science is not afraid of challenging questions. Could life have come from another planet? Most scientist believe that it’s unlikely that we are the only life in the universe, and as we begin to advance technologically and venture out into space it becomes more and more believable that other life forms in the universe could do the same and quite possibly even be more advanced than us. If so, could they have come here and influenced life on earth? That’s not a far fetched suggestion at all. Are there life forms of a sort we don’t yet understand here now that could have created or influenced earth as we know it? And yes, even the question of whether there is a spiritual explanation of some kind is valid as well. Are there other possible explanations? There are many avenues of exploration, but they all rely on the ability to pursue the question of how we got here in other ways, ways that acknowledge that vertical evolution is not a rock solid theory (and indeed it’s much less than that) and that some form of ID could possibly be involved. To summarize, the good scientist will not be afraid of ID. It’s a perfectly legitimate and scientific starting point for exploration. Bad scientists and people with entrenched political positions will be afraid of it. There will also be people with entrenched political positions who will try to hijack ID and use it to promote their own agendas, like the manipulative promotion of creationism, for example, so the issue can get very muddy indeed. (Note, however, that a non-manipulative pursuit of the question of creationism is perfectly legitimate. It will not be afraid of good science as it seeks truth, as does good science.) So how should this issue be approach in schools? How it should be approached is with good science, of course. Almost no theory should be presented in school as “truth”, only as the current understanding or perhaps simply as a theory. A theory as unsupported as vertical evolution should obviously never be presented as “truth”, and alternative theories should always be presented in such a case to encourage the inquiring scientific mind. In practical terms neither vertical evolution nor any of the other theories that fall under the banner of ID are taught much at levels below post secondary school because they are almost all quite speculative (including vertical evolution) and there is little hard evidence for any of them. For some there will be other avenues of inquiry that approach this question from a different angle, but there are different classes for that. I guess the bottom line for me is that no theory that hasn’t been proved to a very high confidence level should ever be called a “truth”, and perhaps no theory should ever be called a truth, only as the current thinking. Reasonable alternatives should always be mentioned to encourage the inquisitive scientific mind, and to encourage good science. There will always political forces present and forces that create bad science (see Thomas Kuhn) so in our education system we should be diligent in protecting the principles of good science. Unfortunately this issue is so politicised now that the real issue is barely recognisable underneath all the manipulation and fear that exists in the other three camps. Many people are for various reasons deeply threatened by this issue, and that fact will, I suspect, have to be dealt with first before we can get close to the real issue.
Oh geez. I'm really trying to stay out of this never-ending topic again, but this is a load of bull****. I guess I should not be surprised considering it is taken from another one of grizzled's novels on theory and scientific method, two things he has never understood and continually misrepresents.
From a scientific perspective (of which I possess little) I cannot agree with your opinions. But I am a little tired of this D&D subject. Just running out of gas...... Normally this is where I try to take it sentence by senten.............
ID may be mentioned briefly in a science course and taught in a philosophy or religion course. But in no way it should be taught in a science course. ID is not science. It's just a philosophical theory. Scientific theories are generally built upon previous evidence to explain natural phenomenan, and there are usually various ways to do experiments later on to verify them. Darwin didnt sit on his ass to propose his evolution theory. He toured around the world and did tons of scientific observation. Can you say the same for ID? There are some scientific conjectures like "Big Bang" which are based on previous scientific theories. It explains some phenomena about our universe although we dont have any means to verify it yet. Still, they are science and not like some pure spirtual things like ID. Last time I checked, they dont teach scientific conjectures to kids. Just a brief mention. Teaching ID in science class is very inappropriate. Can you imagine that Buddists, Islam or Taoists all push to include their own versions of ID into the science class? The science course would be filled with loads of crap.
And this is why the NSTA has withdrawn permission for the Kansas School System to use it's copyrighted work, or even cite them. Of course, I doubt the morons in the Kansas School Authority even know what the NSTA is: A couple of choice quotes from one of the Einsteins on that board: Now, who's being manipulative again? EDIT: meh - I'm done here. This topic has long since ceased to be interesting and is now just a waste of time.
I remember being taught the BIG BANG theory To say it is unverifiable but is SCIENCE while ID is unverifiable but it is NOT SCIENCE seems to be subjective to me Rocket River
While there is much we do not completely understand about the beginnings and evolution of the universe, the Big Bang is not a conjecture. It is a full fledged theory that followed as a result of astronomical observations and other theories. There have also been experiments done to test this theory, such as the measurement of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
