The Social Learning Theory of
Julian B. Rotter

The main idea in Julian Rotter's Social Learning Theory is that personality represents an interaction of the individual with his or her environment. One cannot speak of a personality, internal to the individual, that is independent of the environment. Neither can one focus on behavior as being an automatic response to an objective set of environmental stimuli. Rather, to understand behavior, one must take both the individual (i.e., his or her life history of learning and experiences) and the environment (i.e., those stimuli that the person is aware of and responding to) into account. Rotter describes personality as a relatively stable set of potentials for responding to situations in a particular way.

Rotter's work sounds like what the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset summarized in one sentence: 
Soy yo y mi circunstancia.  I am me and my circumstance.

It's interesting when any Christian denies the feminine its place, since Jesus revealed Himself first to a woman upon His resurrection.  She was the first person to bring the "good news."  His male disciples would not believe her, and Jesus later upbraided them for it.  Also, the first person to have the plan of salvation and the Trinity revealed to her was a woman, Mary the mother of Jesus.  I don't think Jesus had a problem with women, so why do church folks?

From the earliest times (Clan of the Cave Bear). Women must have been seen as quite scary. They "create" other human beings right out of their bodies. Wow!! They must be supernatural! Superior? OH NO!! GRRR, see, I a Man am stronger than her. HA HA!! We will suppress them, control them, own them. Abuse them, to show how it is WE MALES, who are superior!! HOO YAA!!

What's that Mommy? Oh, gotta go guys, see ya!

Interesting question in there -- why did sexism evolve?

Did the males who dominated women leave more genetic heirs than males who respected them? (And would you conside lions, great apes and other animals are sexist?)

But what if sexual dimorphism worked against males? Imagine if we could spread a virus in the Middle East that would cause women to grow to an average of six foot eight inches and be athelic and strong while men only grew to five-foot two and not as strong. Would it be men whose votes vanish, who lose rights? Would their god aquire a female name?

Well, women are human too. I suspect they have their own dark side that could become sexist. Matriarchy could have been just as suppressive in the centuries before Patriarchy evolved. The Aryans who came out of the regions of Western China, and Southern Russia (still being researched) brought the end of Matriarchy. Interestingly enough, recent excavations have uncovered red headed women warriors mummified in ancient graves dating to 5000 years ago or earlier. Some scientists have speculated that these were the true Amazons that the Greeks told legends about (after the invasion of the pre-greek lands, and islands by the aryan forebears).

Therefore...reality is what you percieve or make of it....IS 5th grade philosphy...pure junk....

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one percieves it, its sound wave or anything abouit it, Did it really fall?
Of course it did.

And in fact inventors conform reality to their perceptions all the time by creating things that did not previously exist.

I sympathize with your plight, TheRestofUs, and in fact share it.  Every story has two sides, and it seems every side has it's extremists.  The suggestion that the existence of God can be disproven is absurd; if this were possible it would have a place in science as something that can be evaluated scientificly.

As I've said elsewhere, faith that cannot withstand scrutiny runs the risk of being less faith than obstinancy.  And at the end of the day, all of our believes rest on faith, if only faith in the veracity of our senses, which we generally accept as given without proof (now, does this sound like a description of faith, or of science?)  The certainty that the same experiment under the same conditions will repeatedly produce the same results is logical, but can't be proven; in fact, as has been so astutely noted, the Uncertainty Principle would actually argue against it both in theory and practice.  Test my faith, as shall I, but test yours also, as shall I, and don't insult my intelligence and infer yours by suggesting that material positivism or anything else is, well, anything else. 

As far as my acceptance of my parents beliefs: I've done my share of rebellion, and my faith has to do with them only to the extent that I have found some things they've said to be true from my own experience; there remain many disagreements.  Faith is not a consequence of ancestral traditions, and, in fact, the latter frequently inhibit the former, but its Source still supercedes the influence of human habit.  A little humility, submission, repentance, and a Loving request directed through the assigned Channel works wonders.  But ya gotta want it, more than anything else (which, after all, is the universal barrier.)  What have you got to lose?

Prove it.

I know we're rehashing old territory here, ...

Prove it.

Evolution: Blink and you'll miss it
09 July 2005
From New Scientist Print Edition. 
Bob Holmes

Enlarge image
Evolving fastEVERY weekend angler knows to throw back the tiddlers. Likewise, commercial fishermen use large-meshed nets to spare smaller fish. Both are working on the principle that by reducing their haul this way, they can keep fish populations vigorous and healthy. But they could be making a terrible mistake. It is becoming increasingly clear that such well-meaning strategies may actually have the opposite effect to what the fishermen intend.

What they and most of the rest of us have overlooked is evolution - not the familiar glacier-slow process found in textbooks, which takes millennia to work its wonders, but a burbling freshet of evolutionary change that can occur in a matter of years or decades. By leaving the smaller fish, fishermen may be shifting the evolutionary goalposts, reshaping fish species as they go. In fact, biologists are starting to suspect that this phenomenon, which they have dubbed contemporary evolution, is happening all around us. Besides emptying fishing nets, rapid evolutionary change cripples the efforts of doctors and farmers, thwarts trophy hunters in search of the big prize, and frustrates conservation biologists trying to rescue endangered species.

What's more, in the decades to come, the pace of evolution may quicken still further, as human activities transform the Earth, forcing species to adapt or die. That makes our need to understand the forces at work even more compelling. If we know what's going on, we may be able to find ways to control evolution, and even shape it for our benefit and that of the world around us.

Evolutionary biologists have long known that the process can happen rapidly - Charles Darwin himself pointed out the observable changes wrought by pigeon fanciers and dog breeders. A century later biologists showed that peppered moths in England's industrial heartland had evolved darker colours to camouflage themselves against soot-blackened trees. And by the end of the 20th century everyone knew that bacteria, insects and weeds were able to evolve resistance to antibiotics and pesticides within a few years. But few thought such speedy evolution was more than just a special case.

"When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, the prevailing idea was that evolution was this gradual, slow process," says David Reznick of the University of California, Riverside. "We already knew there were instances of evolution that people had witnessed, but it was considered to be exceptional, not the usual pattern."

The experts had good reason to be sceptical that evolution could happen quickly. After all, evolution is driven by a mismatch between an organism's needs and its abilities to meet them. The prevailing wisdom was that most organisms were already well adapted to their circumstances. Although there would be genetic variation between individuals within a population, no combination of genes would be particularly better adapted than any other, so there would be little pressure for natural selection to favour the survival and reproduction of some individuals over others. In other words, selection would generally be low and evolution slow - except where humans used antibiotics or pesticides to wipe out all but the one-in-a-million resistant individuals, or allowed only the gaudiest pigeons to breed.

All change
But in the 1980s biologists began to realise that adaptation might be a more dynamic process than they had thought. For example, on one of the Galapagos Islands, Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University discovered that among one species of finch, individuals with small beaks do best in wet years, when small-seeded plants thrive, while their larger-beaked nestmates have the edge in drier years, when larger-seeded plants predominate. As a result, beak size see-saws back and forth rapidly.

More recently, a team led by Barry Sinervo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has found the same kind of rapid change in the side-blotched lizard in the south-western US. Male lizards pursue one of three different genetically determined mating strategies, each corresponding with a different throat colour. Orange-throated males are big and aggressive, and easily bully the more timid blue-throated males into ceding their females. Yellow-throated males, which sneak in disguised as females, can steal mating opportunities from the orange males while they are busy blustering, but fail to fool the blue males as these pay close attention to their precious mates. The result is a game of evolutionary rock-paper-scissors, with each strategy becoming dominant every four to five years.

No one knows how common this sort of contemporary evolution is, because it is hard to spot in the wild. The change happens so fast that biologists are likely to miss it unless they keep very detailed records of exactly the right characters - a complete reversal of the old view that evolution is too slow to see in real time. "There's no reason this couldn't be going on all the time in organisms all over the place," says Reznick.

Nor is rapid evolution confined to the cycling of different versions of the same trait. Sometimes evolution drives steadily in one direction. This may be crucial to our understanding of the biology of invasive species. Biologists have often noted that introduced species, such as zebra mussels or garlic mustard in the US, can lurk inconspicuously in their new home for decades or even centuries before suddenly exploding into problem pests. One possible, though not yet well tested, explanation is that the invaders are at first poorly adapted to their new setting, and cannot take off until they evolve a better match. And once that happens, the result can be dramatic. "Many of these invasions may reflect a genetic shift in the invading population," says Donald Waller from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "A lot of [organisms] are just a couple of percentage points above or below break-even, so it only takes a little change to make a big difference."

Human activity is changing some ecosystems faster, and more dramatically, than ever before, and strong directional selection may be especially common in these cases. "It's possible these human-induced changes are not just greater, but more consistent and more permanent. They may be resulting in evolutionary changes that are rapid, but may also be persistent as well," says Andrew McAdam from Michigan State University in East Lansing. For example, ivory hunting has favoured the evolution of tuskless elephants in parts of Africa and Asia.

One of the best places to see evolution in action is high in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada, home of the largest bighorn sheep in North America. Hunters can pay six-figure sums for the right to shoot a big ram, the massive, curling horns of which make it the continent's most highly prized hunting trophy. On one peak, aptly named Ram Mountain, hunting has been so intense that rams can expect to live only a year or two after their horns reach the almost-360-degree curl that makes them a legal target for hunters. Not surprisingly, this has led to intense selection in favour of males whose horns never grow to reach trophy status.

Sure enough, a study led by Dave Coltman, now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, found that average horn size has declined by about 25 per cent over the past 30 years (Nature, vol 426, p 655). And the genetic erosion doesn't end there, because larger-horned rams tend to have better genes in general. "You start taking out the prime-quality rams and the next generation will be missing those genes, because their fathers will be lower quality," says Coltman. In other words, every time they pull the trigger, hunters are working against their own long-term interests. "It's a form of artificial selection where instead of getting more of what you want you're actually going to end up with less," he says.

The same thing happens at sea, where fishermen are typically only allowed to keep fish larger than a particular size. Three years ago, David Conover from Stony Brook University in New York showed just how counterproductive this might be. Conover and his colleague Stephan Munch simulated intense size-selective fishing on lab populations of a small commercial fish called the Atlantic silverside. After just four generations, fish from the "fished" populations - in which the largest 90 per cent of fish were removed before breeding - averaged barely half the size of fish in the "anti-fished" populations, in which the smallest 90 per cent were removed. As a result of the size difference, the total weight of fish removed (analogous to the fishery harvest) in the fifth generation of the fished population was barely half that of the anti-fished one (Science, vol 297, p 94).

Since then other researchers have shown that cod off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, have also evolved toward maturing at smaller sizes - presumably as a result of the capture of the largest fish. As well as contributing to the crash of the area's fishery, this shift may also hinder the cod's ability to recover, since small fish produce many fewer eggs than large fish. This could help explain why cod populations have failed to bounce back on the Grand Banks, off south-east Newfoundland, despite closure of the fishery there for the past 13 years.

If contemporary evolution really is a dominant force in heavily fished populations, then fisheries managers may unwittingly be doing just the opposite of what they should to maintain healthy stocks. Instead of catching the biggest fish and letting the rest go, we need to treasure the big fish as bearers of the best genes. One solution, says Conover, would be to let fishers take only medium-sized fish. If we did that, he says, a fish's best strategy would then be to grow through that window as fast as possible. Such a scheme would select for fast growth rates - a big improvement over the present system, which selects for scrawny fish that never reach the minimum catch size.

Turning evolution back from the "dark side" in fisheries can be done, but it won't be easy. "If you had a maximum size limit, under present trawl technology there wouldn't be a way to let the large ones go except by picking them out on your deck and throwing them back, and a lot of them wouldn't survive," says Conover. But, he notes, modern trawls often use large-mesh metal grates to shunt sea turtles away from the net mouth while allowing fish through, and these might be adapted to exclude large fish as well.

But there is another, more drastic way to put the brakes on evolution: introduce no-fishing zones before stocks become too depleted. Such protected areas provide a refuge where larger fish can survive and continue to produce disproportionate numbers of eggs, so diluting the selection that would otherwise drive fish toward smaller sizes. No-hunting zones for bighorn sheep - or regulations that allow hunters to take a small number of sheep, but of any size - would similarly blunt selection for smaller horns.

Contemporary evolution is not always a bad thing, though. It is already being used to fit microbes for useful work (see "Change for the better"). And with man-made climate change looming, plants and animals will need the ability to adapt quickly. Biologists have noticed that several species have already responded to the warmer temperatures, and hence earlier springs, of the past few years by migrating or breeding earlier. For example, Stan Boutin and his colleagues at the University of Alberta found that red squirrels in Canada's Yukon territory now give birth about 18 days earlier than they did just a decade ago. Using tissue samples to determine each squirrel's parentage, the researchers could see how much of the variation in birth date ran in families. From this they calculated that at least 13 per cent of the change - representing a shift of almost a full day per generation - was due to evolution and not behavioural flexibility.

Fast forward
Whether evolution can move fast enough to cope with the unprecedented rates of climate change expected over the next century remains to be seen. Clearly though, a species cannot evolve a new adaptation unless it has the right genes - and larger populations are more likely to possess this genetic capital than small ones. This means the losers in the climate-change shuffle are likely to be the species that are already rare. Conservationists might even need to consider abandoning some marginal populations and concentrating on those with the genetic resources to evolve successfully, says Boutin. "That means we maybe don't save every caribou herd in Alberta, but we focus on the ones with the highest probability of success."

And if rapid contemporary evolution really is as widespread as some researchers are beginning to suspect, it has one more unsettling implication: we may have to modify our notion of "preserving" rare species, because every effort to rescue a species through captive breeding, founding new wild populations, or modifying existing habitats may cause it to evolve away from its starting point.

"This brings up an interesting philosophical question," says McAdam. "What is it that we're hoping to conserve? Is it particular species, or is it something about those species? Would we be happy if we were able to maintain all the species we have today, but human-induced evolutionary changes were so great that they essentially became functionally domesticated? Would we be satisfied with that? I would say no, that's not satisfying - at least to me."

From issue 2507 of New Scientist magazine, 09 July 2005, page 28
Change for the better
When it comes to rapid evolution, microbes are the clear champions - just ask any physician struggling to treat an antibiotic-resistant infection. But that same evolutionary precociousness also makes microbes an unparalleled tool for cleaning up toxic messes.

Take weedkillers such as atrazine and 2,4-D, or nitrotoluenes such as TNT. Born in chemists' labs, these chemicals had never existed on Earth before. Yet just a few decades after their introduction, bacteria whose ancestors have been around for 3.5 billion years had evolved the enzymes needed to break them down for food. Their secret? They can pick up second-hand genes from their neighbours at what is essentially a vast, freewheeling flea market, and then tinker with them to alter their function.

Microbiologist Michael Sadowsky from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has found evidence for this in the soil bacterium Pseudomonas. The four genes it uses to break down atrazine are scattered at random in its genome, suggesting that they were picked up one at a time. What's more, each is bracketed by transposons, bits of mobile DNA often implicated in genetic reshuffling.

Off-the-shelf genes, even in new combinations, will not always work against novel chemicals. But bacteria have other ways of opening the evolutionary throttle when they need to. One tactic is to up the mutation rate when times are tough. Some bacterial plasmids carry a gene encoding an error-prone DNA-copying enzyme called DNA polymerase V that is activated during times of stress. More mutations mean more tickets in the genetic lottery, which increases the chance that some lucky bacterium ends up with a useful new variant on an old enzyme.

Creationism special: A battle for science's soul
09 July 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Debora MacKenzie
Keith Miller, Kansas State University
National Center for Science Education
Smithsonian Institution

Kenneth Miller, Brown University

ON 10 July 1925, a drama was played out in a small courtroom in a Tennessee town that touched off a far-reaching ideological battle. John Scopes, a schoolteacher, was found guilty of teaching evolution (see "The monkey trial - below"). Despite the verdict, Scopes, and the wider scientific project he sought to promote, seemed at the time to have been vindicated by the backlash in the urban press against his creationist opponents.

Yet 80 years on, creationist ideas have a powerful hold in the US, and science is still under attack. US Supreme Court decisions have made it impossible to teach divine creation as science in state-funded schools. But in response, creationists have invented "intelligent design", which they say is a scientific alternative to Darwinism (see "A sceptic's guide to intelligent design"). ID has already affected the way science is taught and perceived in schools, museums, zoos and national parks across the US.

In the US, Kansas has long been a focus of creationist activity. In 1999 creationists on the Kansas school board had all mention of evolution deleted from its state school standards. Their decision was reversed after conservative Christian board members were defeated in elections in 2002. But more elections brought a conservative majority in November 2004, and the standards are under threat again.

This time the creationists' proposals are "far more radical and much more dangerous", says Keith Miller of Kansas State University, a leading pro-evolution campaigner. "They redefine science itself to include non-natural or supernatural explanations for natural phenomena." The Kansas standards now state that science finds "natural" explanations for things. But conservatives on the board want that changed to "adequate". They also want to define evolution as being based on an atheistic religious viewpoint. "Then they can argue that intelligent design must be included as 'balance'," Miller says.

In January in Dover, Pennsylvania, 9th-grade biology students were read a statement from the school board that said state standards "require students to learn about Darwin's theory of evolution. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence". Intelligent design, it went on, "is an explanation for the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view". Fifty donated copies of an ID textbook would be kept in each science classroom. Although ID was not formally taught, students were "encouraged to keep an open mind".

“Proposed school standards redefine science to include supernatural explanations for natural phenomena”These moves are part of numerous recent efforts by fundamentalist Christians, emboldened by a permissive political climate, to discredit evolution. "As of January this year 18 pieces of legislation had been introduced in 13 states," says Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which helps oppose creationist campaigns. That is twice the typical number in recent years, and it stretched from Texas and South Carolina to Ohio and New York (see Map). The legislation seeks mainly to force the teaching of ID, or at least "evidence against evolution", in science classes.

The fight is being waged on other fronts as well. Scott counts 39 creationist "incidents" other than legislative efforts in 20 states so far this year. In June, for example, the august Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC allowed the showing of an ID film on its premises and with its unwitting endorsement. After an outcry, the endorsement was withdrawn - officials insisted that it was all a mistake, although the screening did go ahead (New Scientist, 11 June, p 4).

Also in June, a publicly funded zoo in Tulsa, Oklahoma, voted to install a display showing the six-day creation described in Genesis. The science museum in Fort Worth, Texas, decided in March not to show an IMAX film entitled Volcanoes of the Deep Sea after negative reaction to its acceptance of evolution from a trial audience. The museum changed its mind after press coverage evoked an outcry, but IMAX theatres elsewhere in the US have not screened science films with evolutionary content to avoid controversy. Since 2003 the bookstores at the Grand Canyon, part of the US National Park Service, have sold a young-Earth creationist book about the canyon, repeating the creationist assertion that it was formed by Noah's flood.

“Creationists depict evolutionists as a cultural elite, out of touch with American society”Anti-Darwin campaigners have not won everywhere. A Georgia court ruled that stickers describing evolution as "theory not fact" must be removed from textbooks. A bill in Florida that might have allowed students to sue teachers "biased" towards evolution died. And Alaska rewrote its school science standards to emphasise evolution. But religious fundamentalists have succeeded in insinuating a general mistrust of evolution. "Creationists depict evolutionists as a cultural elite, out of touch with American society," says Kenneth Miller of Brown University in Rhode Island.

Creationism has had less cultural impact in Europe, but in the UK some state schools are incorporating it into science classes. The English education system allows private donors to invest in the refurbishment of state-funded schools in deprived areas, in return for controls over what is taught there. Emmanuel College at Gateshead in north-east England opened in 1990, financed by millionaire car dealer and Christian fundamentalist Peter Vardy. It teaches both evolution and creationism in science classes and, school officials say, lets children make up their own minds. Little notice was taken until 2002, when Vardy proposed opening more schools. A second opened last year in Middlesbrough, and a third will open near Doncaster in September.

Last September, Serbia briefly banned the teaching of evolution in schools. It changed its mind days later after scientists and even Serbian Orthodox bishops spoke out. There was also uproar over creationism in the Netherlands. The Dutch have several sects that teach creationism in their own schools. But in May, Cees Dekker, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology published a book on ID, and persuaded education minister Maria van der Hoeven that discussion of ID might promote dialogue between religious groups. She proposed a conference in autumn, but dropped the plan after an outcry from Dutch scientists.

In Turkey there is a strong creationist movement, sparked initially by contact with US creationists. Since 1999, when Turkish professors who taught evolution were harassed and threatened, there is no longer public opposition to creationism, which is all that is presented in school texts. In another Muslim country, Pakistan, evolution is no longer taught in universities.

“What is happening is a political effort to force a change in the nature of science itself”Fundamentalist Christianity is also sweeping Africa and Latin America. Last year Brazilian scientists protested when Rio de Janeiro's education department started teaching creationism in religious education classes.

The fear among creationism's critics is that a pattern is emerging that will culminate in a new wave of creationist teaching. They are worried that this will undermine science education and science's place in society. "The politicisation of science has increased at all levels," says Miller. "What is happening is a political effort to force a change in the content and nature of science itself."

From issue 2507 of New Scientist magazine, 09 July 2005, page 8
The monkey trial
In 1925, John Thomas Scopes was a 24-year-old physical education teacher at the secondary school in Dayton, Tennessee. He was put on trial after confessing to teaching evolution while acting as a substitute biology teacher - something Tennessee had recently made illegal. The so-called "monkey" trial became a media circus and struck a powerful chord in American society.

The reasons are still with us. Natural selection provides an explanation for the origins of living things, including humans, that depends entirely on the workings of natural laws. It says nothing about the existence, or otherwise, of God.

But to many believers in such a God, if humans are just another product of nature with no special status, then there is no need for morality. Worse, evolution with its dictum of survival of the fittest seems to encourage the unprincipled pursuit of selfishness. At the time of the Scopes trial these were not merely academic concerns. The first world war had convinced many of the brutalising effects of modernity.

Scopes lost. The newborn American Civil Liberties Union paid his $100 fine and planned to appeal to the US Supreme Court, where they hoped laws like Tennessee's would be declared illegal. They were thwarted when the verdict was overturned on a technicality.

In Dayton, though, it appeared that Darwin had won. The anti-evolutionists and rural, religious society generally had been held up to nationwide ridicule by the urban press covering the trial. As a result there were few overt efforts to pursue such legal attacks on evolution for decades.

But for some historians Scopes was no victory for Darwinism. The prosecutor, populist politician William Jennings Bryan, was seen as speaking for the "common people". Those people, repelled by an alien, arrogant, scientific world that seemed opposed to them and their values, developed a separate society increasingly bound to strict religious laws. Before the trial, evolution had not been an important issue for these people. Now it was. For many Americans, being in favour of evolution is still equated with being against God.

Debora MacKenzie

Creationism special: A sceptic's guide to intelligent design
09 July 2005
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Bob Holmes
James Randerson

ADVOCATES of intelligent design argue that it deserves to be taken seriously as a rigorous scientific alternative to evolution by natural selection. But just what is it, and is it science at all?

Intelligent design (ID) is more sophisticated than its predecessor, "creation science", which sought to gather scientific evidence in support of the Christian creation story. By starting from a pre-conceived conclusion and selectively using evidence to back it up, creation science was clearly unscientific.

ID is different. Its supporters argue that we can use science to find evidence of a designer's handiwork in nature, while claiming to be agnostic about exactly who the designer is. "Often people think the designer is the Big Guy in the Sky. But it doesn't have to be that at all," says William Dembski, a mathematician, philosopher and leading ID proponent affiliated with the Discovery Institute, a creationist think tank in Seattle. He describes ID as a scientific programme that leads to an understanding of a generic supernatural intelligence.

Like many creation scientists ID advocates are happy to accept a small role for natural selection, for example, in the evolution of antibiotic resistance. Unlike creation scientists, many of them are also willing to accept that all organisms came from a common ancestor. But that's where advocates of ID and Darwinism part company.

“Predicting that we should find evidence of a designer is merely a catch-all for what natural selection has yet to explain”The difference, says Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a leading proponent of ID, "is that Darwinism postulates random mutations and natural selection for essentially all aspects of life. ID says that at least some parts of life did not happen randomly but through purposeful design." Nevertheless, the arguments for the inadequacy of Darwinian evolution are nearly identical to those used unsuccessfully by traditional creationists.

Their case centres on the question of how complex structures originated. Living things are full of multi-component structures that only function if all their parts are present. The bacterial flagellum, a spinning whip-like tail, for example, is made up of 40 or more proteins; blood clotting involves the coordinated interaction of 10 different proteins.

These systems are examples of what Behe calls "irreducible complexity", meaning that they cannot function properly without all their components. Such systems, he says, could not evolve by the accumulation of chance mutations, since partial assemblies are useless.

Dembski argues that the odds against getting complex structures from chance mutations are insurmountable. For two proteins to interact to perform some new function, for example, their shapes would have to fit together. So in principle, he says, we can calculate the probability that one protein could change by chance to fit perfectly with another. Two such studies have been done. In both cases, Dembski claims the odds were so long as to rule out an explanation based on chance events.

But these calculations are logically flawed because they focus on a single, specified outcome, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, a leading critic of ID. "It's what statisticians call a retrospective fallacy." It is like equating the odds of drawing two pairs in poker with the odds of drawing a particular two-pair hand - say a pair of red queens, a pair of black 10s and the ace of clubs. "By demanding a particular outcome, as opposed to a functional outcome, you stack the odds," Miller says. What these calculations fail to recognise is that many different protein sequences can be functional. It is not uncommon for proteins in different species to vary by 80 to 90 per cent, yet still perform the same function.

The "improbability argument" also misrepresents natural selection. It is correct to say that a set of simultaneous mutations that form a complex protein structure is so unlikely as to be unfeasible, but that is not what Darwin advocated. His explanation is based on small accumulated changes that take place without a final goal. Each step must be advantageous in its own right, although biologists may not yet understand the reason behind all of them.

There is also evidence that "irreducible complexity" is an illusion. Take, for example, the bacterial flagellum with its 40 proteins. One species, the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori, has a flagellum with just 33 proteins - "irreducibility" reduced. More tellingly, a subset of flagellar proteins turns out to serve an entirely different function, forming a mechanism called the type III secretory system, which pathogenic bacteria use to inject toxins into their host's cells. Similarly, jawless fish accomplish blood clotting with just six proteins instead of the full 10.

So while it is true that no biologist has worked out the precise series of events that resulted in a flagellum, that in itself is not a refutation of natural selection, says Miller. It has long been argued that natural selection works by adapting pre-existing systems for new roles. The evidence so far points to exactly this process for the flagellum.

“Most advocates of intelligent design are professed Christians, yet avoid spelling out the kind of designer they have in mind”Crucially, ID does not make testable predictions. Its prediction that we should find evidence of a designer is actually nothing of the kind, say scientists: rather, it is a catch-all that takes up anything that natural selection cannot - so far, at least - explain. Dembski admits as much in his 2004 book The Design Revolution: "To require of ID that it predict specific novel instances of design in nature is to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience."

Though almost all ID advocates are professed Christians, they avoid spelling out exactly what kind of designer they have in mind. "The reason is they think the designer is God, and if they mention God then the jig is up," says Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a pro-evolution organisation based in Oakland, California. This helps ID's supporters argue that it is not subject to the ban on teaching creationism in science classes, he says. But being vague about how the designer is supposed to operate also makes ID impossible to test.

And this is the nub of it. A scientific theory must be falsifiable in principle; it must be possible to imagine evidence that would knock it down. This is not the case for ID. So even if proponents of ID were persuaded that, say, the bacterial flagellum was indeed the product of natural selection, that would not send them packing. ID says that we should be able to find evidence of design in nature, not that every structure has been designed. So ID proponents could simply concede that natural selection operated there, and then shift their ground to another molecular structure.

ID's appeal to supernatural forces by definition puts it outside the scope of science, says Eugenie Scott head of the NCSE. After all, saying "God did it" can never be disproved.

And that's the point. Underlying the ID agenda is a challenge to the basis of scientific method. The infamous Wedge Strategy, written in 1999 by fellows at the Discovery Institute, bemoans the "devastating" cultural consequences of scientific materialism. It also details a 20-year plan to defeat it "and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies". The strategy aims "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".

“ID's appeal to supernatural forces puts it outside the scope of science. Saying 'God did it' can never be disproved”In response to the controversy that followed the document's release on the internet, the Discovery Institute says the Wedge Strategy is merely a "fund-raising document", and should not be portrayed as some kind of sinister master plan. "We are challenging the philosophy of scientific materialism, not science itself," it states. But far from just redefining science, most scientists would argue that introducing the supernatural will destroy it.

And that's the point. Underlying the ID agenda is a challenge to the basis of scientific method. The infamous Wedge Strategy, written in 1999 by fellows at the Discovery Institute, bemoans the "devastating" cultural consequences of scientific materialism. It also details a 20-year plan to defeat it "and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies". The strategy aims "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God".

Their case centres on the question of how complex structures originated. Living things are full of multi-component structures that only function if all their parts are present. The bacterial flagellum, a spinning whip-like tail, for example, is made up of 40 or more proteins; blood clotting involves the coordinated interaction of 10 different proteins.

These systems are examples of what Behe calls "irreducible complexity", meaning that they cannot function properly without all their components. Such systems, he says, could not evolve by the accumulation of chance mutations, since partial assemblies are useless.

James Kennedy had another installment of his anti-evolution message on Sunday August 7, 2005. He also spoke about it on his radio program today.

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"Lies of Evolution"
People "descended from a puddle of slime"
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Evolution is what athiests believe. No christian should believe it.

Book: The Collapse of Evolution by Scott Huse