Texas Science Director Forced To Resign Over ID Statements 984
jeffporcaro writes "Texas' Director of Science Curriculum was 'forced to step down' for favoring evolution over intelligent design (ID). She apparently circulated an e-mail that was critical of ID — although state regulations require her not to have any opinion 'on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.' 'The agency documents say that officials recommended firing Ms. Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination. The officials said forwarding the e-mail message conflicted with her job responsibilities and violated a directive that she not communicate with anyone outside the agency regarding a pending science curriculum review.'"
What the!?!?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's nice how they call it "design" implying that there is actually some science behind the whole thing.
Probably Justified (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Probably Justified (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually do plan on leaving the US and relocating permanently to New Zealand as soon as it is feasible for me to do so. I can pretty much do my job from anywhere there is an internet connection, and I heard the kiwis just got that working recently.
The Church of Filet Mignon (Score:4, Interesting)
Intelligent Design is a contrived scientific theory crafted for nonscientific purposes. It's the scientific equivalent of the Church of Filet Mignon.
USA is going the wrong way ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Religeon and Science should be seperate. (Score:5, Interesting)
I myself was educated by an order of Catholic Brothers"(a bit like monks) in Scotland. There were an impressive list of eccentrics, as one would expect, and some eccentric beliefs to match (anyone for a procession of angels?). These were people who had sacrificed a lot for their beliefs, you know vows of poverty and chastity and obedience.
However when it came to Science they were bang on. The closest they ever came to ID was Brother Francis (The Biology Teacher) when if pressed on evolution would say that he would like to think that perhaps there was room for a little Divine nudge, but that this was not in the curriculum, and not in the Science of Biology and would never be included in the classroom. In fact I remember in the morning religious knowledge period the Biblical creationist theorem being taken apart, and really discarded.
It is of course a great irony that Charles Darwin himself was a theology student, but he arrived at the theory of evolution via Scientific method. Religion and Science are not incompatible, they just dont deal with the same areas.
To sum up, the creationists are an embarrassment to both religion and Science and should get some education.
Re:how, exactly (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:how, exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
1. form a hypothesis
2. ???
3. profit!
Because in step 2, it requires that you design an experiment that will either prove or disprove the hypothesis.
Can you tell me an experiment that you can design and run within your lifetime and would either prove or disprove Darwinian evolution on the grand scale (from a single-celled organism to a warm-blooded animal)?
I agree "intelligent design" is just as scientific as this leftover cup of coffee from last night. But it's not like its competitor is on a solid ground as far as scientific principles go. Because so far evolution remains a observational "science", one where you have a rather plausible reason for any lack of evidence ("some organisms just don't leave good fossils", etc), a very reasonable scientific mind can have doubts about its validity.
It's almost like someone positing existence of "black holes" in the 1800s and everyone accepting the idea in the 1950s even though no one ever saw a black hole because, well, you just can't get any light from a black hole!
But that's not how astronomy worked back then (it took a lot of circumstantial evidences, such as X-ray emissions from accretion disk and motions of visible stars, before people accepted that black holes could exist---and this was after someone already showed that a black hole is a possible solution for Einstein's equation!), and that's not how biology should work now. People, especially those scientifically minded, must demand evidences for this "evolutionary theory", and that evidence must be thoroughly thorough, especially in the absense of falsifiability through experimentation.
Re:err, what? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:how, exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like there's quite a few (progression from less to more complex organisms, commonality of microscopic biological features between species, observed changes of organisms) that seem to in general point at a mechanism, but there are enough oddball organisms and gaps in the fossil record that seem to throw small exceptions in the general theories I've heard, and cause the theory to change to adapt to them.
So, out of curiosity, at this point (given the evidence we have in favor of evolution) what would we have to find to disprove it? Since the ability to be proved false stands at the core of the criticism of ID.
I'm not trying to argue for ID - I think it's a load of bullocks and evolution has a whole lot of research going for it. I'm just curious for those of us who didn't have to take more than high school bio what would actually prove evolution false?
Re:how, exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
----
Here's a simple experiment anyone that is half-competent with science-y things can do.
Take a single bacteria and cultivate it.
Take a any two individual bacteria from that culture and cultivate them separately. Take a third bacteria from this original culture and sequence its DNA for future comparison.
Continue to re-sample each culture and start a new culture, keeping the descendants of the original "split" separate.
After some number of generations, sample and sequence the DNA from each descendant colony. Compare them against each other and the sequence from the original culture.
I predict they will all be different. The fact that both cultures are ultimately descended from a SINGLE bacteria eliminates the possibility that all of these unique DNA sequences existed simultaneously, and the fact that they are different proves that non-lethal mutations have been occurring over time.
As an extra bonus, I also predict that the cultures will have different reactions to the same antibiotic.
As an extra extra bonus, if we continue to develop these two lines of ancestry I predict they will eventually diverge enough in genetic makeup that they can be considered a new species of bacteria. Tada! Macroevolution is the cumulative effect of microevolution!
Science. It works, bitches.
=Smidge=
Re:Please explain (Score:3, Interesting)
Fear of Forrest (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, ID/creationists are terrified of Barbara Forrest, because she has meticulously documented how "intelligent design" is merely a rebranding of "creationism." She has become even more dangerous to them since the Dover trial, since discovery gave her access to early drafts of the key "intelligent design" textbook "Of Pandas and People," which revealed how it started life as a creationist textbook, and became an "intelligent design" book by a simple search & replace. Hilariously, at one point, they botched the replace, and "creationists" became "cdesign proponentists."
Re:how, exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time a gene is sequenced, it is a test of natural selection. Natural selection makes numerous predictions in this area--the commonality of the genetic code, close relatedness of genes in higher organisms, even down to the degree of similarity. Failure of these predictions to hold up would force the abandonment of natural selection in its current form.
Of course, creationists have worked very hard to promote a nonsensical "two model" idea that the alternative to natural selection is creationism, but the notion that disproof of natural selection would force a return to creationism is nonsensical. When Newton's Laws of motion were shown to be incorrect, science did not return to Aristotle's ideas of motion--a new theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, supplanted it--one that included Newton's Laws as a special case approximation.
It is worth noting that natural selection is not even the only theory of evolution. Remember Lamarck? Darwin came along at a time when scientists were looking for an evolutionary theory, because the predictions of creationism were inconsistent with the data (unlike intelligent design, which is intentionally vague and more a religious notion than a scientific theory, the creationism of Darwin's time was genuinely scientific, in that it made actual predictions).
Re:how, exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
Islam has very little connection to Judaism or Christianity other than plagiarizing a few snips here and there. Originally, they were polytheistic pagans and had many of the same rituals, such as worshiping the black stone. When converting a group of people it's easier if they can keep doing their usual rituals and only have to change the same. Just like how the Christians took pagan holidays such as the Sol Invictus winter solstice festival and turned it into Christmas. Then of course the fools today get all bent out of shape when someone insults their stolen holiday and calls it a holiday tree instead of Christmas tree.
Allah is the name of a god not the word that means god, that word is illah.
Their popular saying translates to "there is no god but allah" not "there is no god but god".
As for Christianity, their god is only the Old Testament God when dealing with homosexuals and the new covenant only applies when it's convenient. It also might was well be called Paulism.
Please put commenter country of origin in subject (Score:2, Interesting)
Man this kind of bullshit is the reason I'm going to ditch my Scientific American subscription. The fact that they even have to waste editorial space for this kind of nonsense is pathetic: it's the 21st century for f***s sake!! The last straw for Scientific American by the way was an article about choosing sexual abstention over birth control. bwwwggh
It often strikes me that the U.S. religious zealots have more in common with the Iranian ayatollahs than with any group in the western world.
Is "New Scientist" any better by the way?
Re:how, exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to play the "infinity" card against an IDer recently, the "paradox of evil" as you put it (and they put it). For the uninitiated, the argument goes: God is infinite, which means by definition that he includes everything. Ergo, if evil exists then it too must be part of God. This requires one of three conclusions, (a) God is not all good, (b) God is not infinite, or (c) evil doesn't exist.
Completely nonplussed, my ID opponent had a ready answer. I have no trouble, he said, with understanding that God is infinite but separate, because God is an infinite presence. He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I tried to counter that this does not fit the definition of infinite, although it might meet the definition of pervasive. He would have none of it, and repeated that he had no trouble understanding infinite-but-separate, as if the failure of reasoning was on me.
Now the lesson of this story is that there is no limit to weaseling out of logic if one's precious mental schema is at stake.
As a post-script, here is one other anecdote. In college I was party to a similar debate. One girl, arguing the ID side, was at one point confronted by another student with the statement, "This is basic logic!" To which she replied, "Yeah, human logic, maybe."
Re:how, exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
DNA. When DNA was discovered, well after Darwin's time, it could have easily rendered large swathes of evolution irrelevant. It didn't. It verified and strengthened the theory.
Chromosomes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs; the other great apes have 24. By evolutionary theory, we should find that somewhere along the line, human genes mutated and two of our chromosomes fused. A chromosome has two markers called telomeres, one on each end, and a single centromere in the middle. (T__C___T) What we would expect to find is a chromosome with telomeres on each end, telomeres in the middle (where the fusion happened) and two centromeres. If we don't, our current understanding of evolution is wrong.
But we did find a fused chromosome, exactly as predicted; our chromosome #2. (T__c___TT___C__T)
Re:how, exactly (Score:4, Interesting)
What should I have done? First off I was 9 and had just lived in Louisiana for a few months. Second most of the class likely agreed with him from their own parents' teachings.
It just made me uncomfortable. Incidentally the subject we were supposed to be studying at the time was the names of the different cloud shapes. I guess our teacher just wanted to imprint us while we were young.
Re:Please put commenter country of origin in subje (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:how, exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
We could be part of a gigantic world simulator -- like those commonly used to run video games, for example -- where when nobody is around to hear it, the simulation glosses over and skips most of the intervening steps, so that in fact it did not make a noise. (To preserve untestability, we'll say whenever anyone does anything that requires answering the question, the simulation backfills missing data.) There, if you want to exclude this possibility now you need to demonstrate that we're not in the Matrix.
Re:how, exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
In particular infinite -> includes everything is NOT TRUE. Did you know there are exactly the same number of a) postive integers, and b) positive even numbers? They have the same size: infinitely large. n -> 2n is a bijection. And there are exactly the same number of real numbers a) between 0 and 1, and b) between 1 and postitive infinity (n -> 1/n is also a bijection). It's quite easy to construct infinite objects that do not encompass the whole of the space they occupy.
Seperate questions, really. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now there is a great deal of contempt for religion here on slashdot. I fathom this is for two reasons-first, the frequently embarrasing and damaging conduct of people who boisterously proclaim their faith, and second, a complete and utter ignorance of how religion and faith in God has been entirely necessary for our current civilization to arise. The former is obvious and explaining the latter to the religion-ignorant people on this website is beyond my scope. I just want to point out that maybe you shouldn't be so f*cking proud of how smart you are for thinking all religion is rubbish.
Let me start off with some bait for pretty much everyone in this thread- though it might get less tasty if you read on.
I believe God created the earth and everything on it.
There! I must be a knuckle dragging creationist, right?
But wait! Here's the rest:
I believe science is our best bet for deciphering how He did it.
We live in a cause-and-effect world, God or no God. He's not in the habit of miracle'ng our asses out of tight situations, or populating entire continents with new species over night. He lets good people get cancer, bad people go free, and little boys get raped by priests.
Why? Because, given a belief in God, the only way existence makes sense is if there are defined, unyielding physical rules and free will.
So the only way God could have created anything in such a world is if He set up the initial state and the 'rules' from the beginning to reach a certain endgame- the last 6,000 or so years of recorded history, if you will.
That, however, is a philosophical stance for which I can offer no evidence. Taking that particular stance neither detracts from nor adds to our understanding of the unyielding, physical laws that govern our daily lives.
The purpose of science is to discover and utilize the laws of nature. Saying "God did it" is all fine and dandy, but I want to know how God did it, given the cause-and-effect, physical rule based world we live in.
Re:how, exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
I had dinner with devout Christians last night... (Score:4, Interesting)
At some point they were talking about a new testament biblical passage that dated from around 1900 years ago. The writings referred to the society of the day, which was fairly advanced. And then one of the guys said, "And when I went to school, they taught me that was the caveman days! Ha ha! Jerks!" He then shook his head and rolled his eyes. Everyone at the table save me nodded and laughed about how ridiculous secular teaching is.
This is something I see so often with Christians: they have a lack of knowledge, spend very little time thinking about a topic, and yet have absolute conviction that they're right. Sure, that's a common human flaw, but it seems most pronounced in the Christians I know. Even if you're a young-earth creationist certainly you should know that "cavemen" are not generally claimed to have been around 1900 years ago, but much earlier. I don't think anyone ever taught that the Romans were cavemen. Even if you think the earliest people were from 6000 years ago, you should be able to understand that society changed a lot from the time of Adam to the time of Jesus.
And even if someone did tell him there were cavemen in 100 AD -- I don't know -- wasn't there a whole world beyond the Mediterranean on which the Bible says nothing? Even if there was a developed society in that area, isn't it conceivable that there were people living a sort of "caveman" life elsewhere at that time? It just bugs me how little thinking goes into the average Christian's position, and how it's usually driven by a desire to support their belief than by a desire for understanding.
Of course this is just one small group of people with wacky misunderstandings of the world and secular education. Most Christians aren't this confused. But most people who lack critical thinking abilities are drawn to fundamental Christianity for some reason.
Anyways.
Newton was right (Score:3, Interesting)
Only if everything we know is wrong.
Newton's laws are correct. They are also not universal.
They are completely correct, except at extremes-- extreme velocity, extreme mass, extreme distances. This is no different that standard chemistry, which is correct at non-extremes (say, 0 kelvin, or plasma temperatures, or extreme pressures, or.... ). This doesn't make our chemical models of crystalline quartz any less correct.
They are tools that model our universe sufficiently to be useful. That is all we have-- tools to model our universe. Either the tools are useful ("correct"), or they are not.
To say they are not "correct" is to say that we have no knowledge whatsoever. Almost every single physical law we know today is bounded by constraints. There is no single formula, no single concept, no single universal model that works from one end of the spectrum of extremes to the other. At the moment, you can't use our understanding of the forces that hold an atom together to explain galaxies. That's why physicists are so interested in a single Grand Unified Theory. We desire the simplicity of a single description of the universe, rather than this hodge-podge of formula and concepts that work within their own realms, but fall apart outside their bounds.
Hell, we don't even have one single clue about the state of the universe in the first few femtoseconds of existence, so extremes of time also matter.
That certainly doesn't make our current models, including Newton's laws, less correct.
Re:how, exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it isn't. In a philosophy classroom, ID would be completely appropriate. But not in a science classroom. Hence the upset by people who give a crap about science.
As for why ID is always conflated with religion, it's because the only people pushing ID are Creationist Protestant Christians, and the last thing they would accept is a philosopher questioning their statements in any classes where ID is taught.
Re:how, exactly (Score:3, Interesting)
"Allele" is not vague at all, to a geneticist.
An allele is a specific sequence of DNA letters found at a particular locus. In simple terms, an allele is a "version" of a gene.
A gene is the set of all possible alleles that could be found at a particular locus. A mutation creates a new allele from an existing allele, and adds the new one to the set.
A locus is a region of DNA at a particular position on a particular chromosome. There are certain regulators (promoters, inhibitors, and the like) found nearby that control how often (and under what conditions) the gene at that locus is activated.
Technically, I'm being a bit inaccurate, since genes can jump chromosomes, hopefully with their regulators in tow, but in scientific jargon the loci themselves aren't normally said to jump (in keeping with the literal Latin meaning of "locus": location). But other than that, I think it's a good, clear description.