Majority of Americans Reject Theory of Evolution

AP
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is most accepted by those respondents who identify themselves as liberal.


NEW YORK (Oct. 23) - Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.

These views are similar to what they were in November 2004 shortly after the presidential election.

This question on the origin of human beings, asked both this month and in November 2004, offered the public three alternatives: 1. Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process; 2. Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process; or 3. God created human beings in their present form.

The results were not much different between the answers to that question and those given when a specific timeline was included in the final alternative: God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Americans most likely to believe in only evolution are liberals (36 percent), those who rarely or never attend religious services (25 percent), and those with a college degree or higher (24 percent).

White evangelicals (77 percent), weekly churchgoers (74 percent) and conservatives (64 percent), are mostly likely to say God created humans in their present form.

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Still, most Americans think it is possible to believe in both God and evolution. Sixty-seven percent say this is possible, while 29 percent disagree. Most demographic groups say it is possible to believe in both God and evolution, but just over half of white evangelical Christians say it is not possible.

Opinions on this question are tied to one’s views on the origin of human beings. Those who believe in evolution, whether guided by God or not, overwhelmingly think it is possible to believe in both God and evolution – 90 percent say this. However, people who believe God created humans in their present form are more divided: 48 percent think it possible to believe in both God and evolution, but the same number disagrees.

This poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 808 adults, interviewed by telephone October 3-5, 2005. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus four percentage points.

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/article....024100409990019

The obvious result of decades and decades of neglect in EDUCATION.

And not just neglect, but the dumbing down of it.

This is really disturbing, Jeff.

You said it!

No wonder they can not figure out that Bush is an idiot.

This may be the most discouraging thing I have read. Wow. Time to walk my dog.
Meltdown..........

This is why Hillary and Bill are trying to bridge the divide. Because the divide in America is not between "good" and "evil" people, but between facts, and beliefs. If this can be reconciled, they will unite and turn on the corrupt!

jeff, columbus fell off the edge of the world and the universe revolves around the earth... I found the poll work from the middle ages, with a plus or minus (what does per cent mean) confusing...

Look around you...what do you see?...Churches, Liquor Stores, Bars and
Discount Tobacco Stores.

Mocking a sizeable percentage of the American public for their beliefs is not a good way to go about winning elections.

If one thinks they can do that and win, then I have to wonder who the truly ignorant are.

My thoughts, exactly!

Also a good point.

A couple of points:

The Democratic Party, on a number of issues, has lost sight of the fact that it can be more important to do what is right rather than what wins elections. If the party were to come out and say that it opposes the teaching of evolution, for example, or supports the teaching of intelligent design, it would be a pandering travesty. The party must not, regardless of polls, go along with the notion that the United States of America should become an evangelical Christian-based theocracy.

Also, this poll's conclusions are not as broad as the headline would indicate. The poll only asks about *human* evolution, not evolution in general.

I can't believe that's even being debated!

The party that represents and advocates the views of a minority will become a minority party.

it's not being debated and I have no idea where dggfwtx came up with that. It looks to me as to be an attempt to say that if one doesn't oppose the teaching of Creationism in the public schools, then one must be supporting the establishment of a Christain theocracy here in the US.

I would vote #2 myself-- having studied neo-Darwinist theory and it's *scientific* alternatives. But my definition of "God" for that statement would not be particularly Christian.

It should also be noted that any complete theory of evolution would have to account not only for the evolution of human beings from less advanced life forms, but also the evolution of less advanced life forms from non-living matter/energy-- ie. of the origin of life.

I wasn't talking about the party, or us, debating its position; rather, the danger of following along with the polls. The party has already done this, much to its shame, on the same-sex marriage issue.

Of course, religious people should not be mocked or demeaned. But just because most people misguidedly take a position does not mean the party, if it has any principles, should meekly follow along.

What about the evolution of the HIV virus, the HSN1 virus, methicillin resistant Staph aureus, Vancomycin resistant enterococcus, etc.? Evolution is all around us.

I don't think the following has much to do with what you said but I watched an interesting show on either The Learning Channel or Discovery about dogs. One segment was about foxes kept in captivity and domesticated. Over a period of a few generations, the foxes tails began to curl, their ears drooped and their fur became a wide variety of colors. They looked more like little dogs then foxes.

This probably couldn't be considered evolution as it's in their genes and certain conditions bring this out.

I don't have time to fully explain my views... and this may be a bit confusing for some:

I see both the orthodox Scientistic explanation for evolution and the religious ID/ creationist viewpoints as being equally inadequate.

While it's easy to mock the simple religious thinking on this, behind the empirical falsehoods and mythological thinking lies a deep kernel of truth; namely, the recognition that a Scientistic worldview has falsely "disenchanted" (to use M.Weber's term) the world; de-sacralized and reified the world; reduced the world's objects to atoms and particles, propelled or held together by "forces" capable of being described only by mathematics, and no longer by art, imagery, or spiritual realization. The falseness of this worldview is no better evident than in the failures of neo-Darwinism to adequately explain the facts of evolution. The Christian/ ID views also fail to explain the facts of evolution, but they nevertheless point to fundamental truths which lie outside our ability to comprehend at this time, and perhaps for all time.

Furthermore, those secular liberals who look down upon the benighted Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates perhaps would be a bit less judgmental if they fully understood that the false SCIENTISM reflected in neo-Darwinism is ideologically foundational to the very things things they often oppose most vehemently: militarism, colonialism, imperialism, corporate-greed- globalization, , exploitation of cheap labor, the brutality of market fundamentalism, neo-conservatism, out-of-control destruction of the environment, the war in Iraq, and so on.

The party is the people and gets it's power from the people. Stray too far from the majority on too many issues for too long a time and the party will cease to exist.

Never said it wasn't!!



Do you see anything in that statement that denies the fact of evolution?

While I agree with that in principle, there are certain core issues you can't just go with popular opinion on. I would contend that separation of church and state is one of those core issues. Ditto equal rights for *all* Americans.

DB, I don't see anything about either statement or their possible relationship to each other which could possibly add to anyone's understanding of evolution.
What am I missing?

Must be the same thing I am missing.

I'm not sure what statements your talking about, or if they were even intended to add anyone's understanding of evolution.

I simply said I personally would pick the # 2 option in the survey-- And that that option did not deny the fact(s) of evolution.

What am I missing?

I'm looking... I see all that... but wait... I don't see a discount tobacco store...

Okay, I'm not an supporter of "Intelligent Design" theories, though I do think there is something to concepts of "irreducible complexity" and the like. I've read through thousands of pages on this subject to come my own views.

In any case, I thought I'd throw in the voice of an ID scientist just for educational value:
==========================================================
Darwin's Predictable Defenders

A response by William Dembski to the NCSE

By William A. Dembski

The National School Boards Association enlisted Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch to criticize intelligent design bullet point fashion. Here I want to respond to these bullet-point assertions. I would repeat the entire article, but copyright restrictions prevent me. The article is available at The article is available at http://nsba.org/sbn/02-jul/070202-8.htm.

The article begins by asking whether intelligent design (or ID) has a legitimate place in the public school science curriculum. It admits that ID is not identical with creation science, but then remarks that ID involves an intervening deity and is more vague about what happened and when.

Comment: ID is not an interventionist theory. It's only commitment is that the design in the world be empirically detectable. All the design could therefore have emerged through a cosmic evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang. What's more, the designer need not be a deity. It could be an extraterrestrial or a telic process inherent in the universe. ID has no doctrine of creation. Scott and Branch at best could argue that many of the ID proponents are religious believers in a deity, but that has no bearing on the content of the theory. As for being "vague" about what happened and when, that is utterly misleading. ID claims that many naturalistic evolutionary scenarios (like the origin of life) are unsupported by evidence and that we simply do not know the answer at this time to what happened. This is not a matter of being vague but rather of not pretending to knowledge that we don't have.

Next the authors comment that "ID proponents are tactically silent on an alternative to common descent. Teachers exhorted to teach ID, then, are left with little to teach other than 'evolution didn't happen'."

Comment: The most prominent design theorist, Michael Behe, is on record to holding to common descent (the evolutionary interrelatedness of all organisms back to a common ancestor). No design theorist I know wants to teach that evolution didn't happen. There is a question about the extent of evolution, but that is a question being raised by non-ID scientists. Carl Woese in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just a few weeks ago published a piece where he explicitly rejects common descent. What ID proponents want is to teach is the evidence for evolution as well as whatever evidence places limits on evolutionary change (like Carl Woese's idea of lateral gene transfer). Scott and Branch are here merely playing on fears of school boards and educators.

Next Scott and Branch mention my work on the design inference and Behe's work on irreducible complexity. After the barest summary, they conclude " Neither Dembski's design inference nor Behe's irreducible complexity has fared well in the scholarly world." To which they add that our work is not mentioned in the peer reviewed literature.

Michael Behe
Professor of Biochemistry
Department of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University

Comment: Note that they did not say that our ideas were refuted. Indeed, they have not been refuted. They have been vigorously opposed, but that's something different. The history of science is filled with violent altercations. As for our ideas not appearing in the peer-reviewed literature, that's not the case. Irreducible complexity was, for instance, the focus of an article by Thornhill and Ussery in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Why did Scott and Branch's "search of scientific data-bases, such as PubMed or SciSearch" fail to find that article? What else did their search fail to find? As for my work on the design inference, it's certainly created a stir in the philosophy of science community and is now working its way into the sciences proper (e.g., the bioinformatics community). My newest book was just reviewed in Nature.

Next Scott and Branch bring up the old chestnut about ID amounting to an "argument from ignorance," relying upon "a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: Lacking a natural explanation, we assume intelligent cause."

Comment: Lacking a natural explanation of Mount Rushmore, are we making an argument from ignorance by inferring that an intelligent cause is behind it? The design inference is not an argument from ignorance. It's not just that we eliminate natural explanations (by which biologists mean explanations that involve no intelligent causation), but that in eliminating natural explanations we find features that in our experience are only the result of intelligent causation. Consider, for instance, the bacterial flagellum. This is a little outboard rotary motor on the backs of certain bacteria. It includes a propeller, a hook joint, a drive shaft, O-rings, a stator, and a bidirectional acid powered motor. We are seeing here a machine of the sort that in our experience only intelligence can produce. What's more, the biological community has come up empty on how systems like this could emerge apart from intelligence. This is not an argument from ignorance. This is an argument from what we know about the causal powers of intelligence and the shortfall of unintelligent causes.

Next Scott and Branch remark, "Most scientists would reply that unexplained is not unexplainable, and that 'we don't know yet' is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside of science."

Comment: This is the standard ploy of turning the subject matter of ID into a completely different subject matter from that of science. Accordingly, there's ID, with its religious invocation of supernatural sprites and spirits, and then there's "science" (said with a deep voice and plenty of gravitas), which investigates "natural causes" (said with the same deep voice and gravitas). But in fact, there's only one subject here, namely complex biological systems, and the question is whether natural causes, understood as unintelligent causes ruled by blind unbroken natural laws, can account for them. There are two possibilities: (1) natural causes are up to this sort of explanatory work or (2) intelligent causes are required as well. To say that if ID is correct, then the phenomena in question are "unexplainable" is to define science an enterprise that can explain only by natural causes (understood in a reductionist, design-excluding way). Scott and Branch are playing a game of definitions. Science is a search for the truth underlying natural phenomena. Whether an intelligent cause is involved is not something that can be excluded on a priori grounds.

Next, Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution is called in for the appropriate abuse. Scott and Branch write, "Although the reviews of Wells' book by scientists have unanimously regarded it as dishonest and devoid of scientific or educational value, it is being widely circulated among creationists and cited at school board meetings around the country."

Comment: Interestingly, the textbooks are changing in response to Wells's book, correcting or at least modifying the icons to which Wells refers. But before siding with Scott and Branch against Wells, do have a look at Wells's response to critics (see Critics Rave Over Icons of Evolution: A Response to Published Reviews). The charge of dishonesty and lack of educational scientific and educational value seems more appropriately leveled at his critics. At the very least Wells has pointed to pervasive errors in biology textbooks regarding evolution. If evolutionary biology were not so politically charged, that ev-bio community should be thanking Wells for helping them clean up their act. Instead, he's treated as a black sheep who's uncovered a dysfunctional family's dirty laundry. Fix the problem and quit complaining about the messenger who's uncovered the problem.

Next, Scott and Branch focus on the "cultural renewal" component of ID, which "focuses on ideological and religious rather than scholarly goals." They conclude:

"The sectarian orientation of the ID movement cannot be ignored in decisions about whether to include ID in the curriculum."

Comment: When Stephen Jay Gould testified at the Arkansas Creation Trial in 1981, should his Marxism, and thus sectarianism, have played a role in undermining his testimony. The goals, aspirations, and vision for society of Seattle's Discovery Institute is irrelevant to any court or school board decision to include ID in a public school science curriculum. The issue is whether ID is true and the grounds for thinking that it is true or false. The issue therefore comes down to the evidence in its support and the counterevidence to the reigning Darwinian paradigm and how that evidence is to be evaluated.

Next, Scott and Branch try to identify the designer of ID with the God of Christian theism. They do this by conflating the cultural renewal interest of some ID proponents with the theory of intelligent design. This conflation would, of course, be insupportable in a court of law, so they change gears and stress ID's need to prove itself in the scientific mainstream: "If the scholarly aspect of ID becomes established -- if ID truly becomes incorporated into the scientific mainstream -- then, and only then, should school boards consider whether to add it to the curriculum." They continue: "Until that day, proposals to introduce ID into curricula should be met with polite but firm explanations that there is as yet no scientific evidence in favor of ID...."

Comment: Scott and Branch have defined science as relying entirely on natural explanations and that to invoke an intelligent design explanation would constitute a nonexplanation -- to attribute design, as they pointed out earlier in their piece, is the equivalent of saying that something is "unexplainable." As a consequence, there's no way that ID could according to them ever enter the scientific mainstream. Indeed, they've defined science precisely so as to preclude intelligent design. As for there being no evidence for ID, what counts as evidence is always assessed against a backdrop of assumptions about how inquiry (the process of revising our beliefs) ought to proceed. The bacterial flagellum, its irreducible and specified complexity, from the vantage of ID provides overwhelming evidence for its design. But from a naturalistic perspective, this sort of evidence is merely evidence that scientists haven't worked hard enough and haven't figured out how blind natural causes might have produced the biological system in question.

Scott and Branch add, "... the sectarian orientation of ID renders it unsuitable for constitutional reasons."

Comment: They are herewith throwing down the gauntlet. I'll wager a bottle of single-malt scotch, should it ever go to trial whether ID may legitimately be taught in public school science curricula, that ID will pass all constitutional hurdles. To see why, check out the fine Utah Law Review article by David DeWolf et al. at http://www.arn.org/docs/dewolf/utah.pdf.

Scott and Branch conclude: "School board members should be aware that introducing ID into the curriculum is likely to lead to strong opposition -- up to and including lawsuits -- from those, including parents, teachers, scientists, and clergy, who do not want science education to be compromised."

Comment: In other words, if you don't want to face social and legal intimidation from the ACLU, NCSE, and other groups and individuals in that small ten percent of the population that are hostile to ID (Gallup poll after Gallup poll confirms that about 90 percent of the U.S. population are behind some form of intelligent design), stay clear of intelligent design. All it will take is a few school boards and individuals to stand up against this pressure, and in short order we'll see a Taliban-style collapse of the Darwinian stranglehold over public education.

New York Times, August 13, 1999,
Teach Evolution and Ask Hard Questions
By Michael J. Behe

http://www.arn.org/authors/behe.html

Michael J. Behe, Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University, is author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.

BETHLEHEM, PA.The debate leading the Kansas Board of Education to abolish the requirement for teaching evolution has about the same connection to reality as the play "Inherit the Wind" had to the actual Scopes trial. In both cases complex historical, scientific and philosophical issues gave way to the simplifying demands of the morality play. If the schoolchildren of Kansas and other states are to receive a good science education, however, then we'll have to forgo the fun of demonizing each other, take a deep breath and start making a few distinctions.

Regrettably, the action of the Kansas board makes that much more difficult. Not only are teachers there now discouraged from discussing evidence in support of Darwin's theory, results questioning it won't be heard either.

For example, let's look at three claims of evidence for Darwinian evolution often cited by high school textbooks. First, as the use of antibiotics has become common, mutant strains of resistant bacteria have become more common, threatening public health. Second, darkcolored variants of a certain moth species evaded predation by birds because their color matched the sooty tree trunks of industrial England. Third, the embryos of fish, amphibians, birds and mammals look virtually identical in an early stage of development, becoming different only at later stages.

A relevant distinction, however, is that only the first example is true. The second example is unsupported by current evidence, while the third is downright false. Although light and darkcolored moths did vary in expected ways in some regions of England, elsewhere they didn't. Further, textbook photographs showing moths resting on tree trunks in the day, where birds supposedly ate them, run afoul of the fact that the moths are active at night and don't normally rest on tree trunks. After learning about the problems with this favorite Darwinian example, an evolutionary scientist wrote in the journal Nature that he felt the way he did as a boy when he learned there was no Santa Claus.

The story of the embryos is an object lesson in seeing what you want to see. Sketches of vertebrate embryos were first made in the late 19th century by Ernst Haeckel, an admirer of Darwin. In the intervening years, apparently nobody verified the accuracy of Haeckel's drawings. Prominent scientists declared in textbooks that the theory of evolution predicted, explained and was supported by the striking similarity of vertebrate embryos. And that is what generations of American students have learned.

Recently, however, an international team of scientists decided to check the drawings' reliability. They found that Haeckel had, well, taken liberties: the embryos are significantly different from each other. In Nature, the head of the research team observed that "it looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology." What's more, the embryonic stages shown in the drawings are actually not the earliest ones. The earliest stages show much greater variation.

If I were teaching a high school biology course, I certainly would want my students to understand Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which explains antibiotic resistance and a lot of other things. I would want them to know the many similarities among organisms that are interpreted in terms of common descent, as well as to understand the laboratory experiments that show organisms changing in response to selective pressure.

But I would also want them to learn to make distinctions and ask tough questions. Questions we might discuss include these:

If it's so difficult to demonstrate that small changes in modern moths are the result of natural selection, how confident can we be that Darwinian selection drove large changes in the distant past? If supposedly identical embryos were touted as strong evidence for evolution, does the recent demonstration of variation in embryos now count as evidence against evolution? If some scientists relied for a century on an old, mistaken piece of data because they thought it supported the accepted theory, is it possible they might even now give short shrift to legitimate contrary data or interpretations?

Discussing questions like these would help students see that sometimes a theory actively shapes the way we think, and also that there are still exciting, unanswered questions in biology that may require fresh ideas.

It's a shame that Kansas students won't get to take part in such a discussion. We should make sure that the students of other states do.

QUOTE

Emotions run very deep on the subject of evolution, and while the morality play generally casts religious people as the ones who want to limit discussion, some scientists on the "rational" side could fit that role, too. But if we want our children to become educated citizens, we have to broaden discussion, not limit it.

Teach Darwin's elegant theory. But also discuss where it has real problems accounting for the data, where data are severely limited, where scientists might be engaged in wishful thinking and where alternative even "heretical" explanations are possible.

One more... then, I'll give it a break.

The neo-Darwinian account of the evolution of life rests on two key pillars, each of which is deeply woven into the modern secular worldview: random mutation and natural selection. Today, however, the entire fabric of neo-Darwinism is beginning to fray, if not unravel. Consider the phenomenon of "adaptive mutation" which is currently being researched by a number of microbiologists and is the subject of heated scientific debate. The concept is a direct challenge to the neo-Darwinian insistence that all genetic mutation, which provides the basis for natural selection, is random. This opens the possibility of self-directing intelligence being a factor in evolution (rather than intelligent "design from above"). Needless to say, this is a huge, complicated and controversial subject-- but anyone interested in biological evolution and the evolution of Science, may want to look into it. I myself have had several email conversations on the topic with Susan Rosenberg:



Susan M Rosenberg, PhD Cullen Professor of Molecular Genetics
Departments of Molecular and Human Genetics,
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Molecular Virology and Microbiology
Baylor College of Medicine
http://imgen.bcm.tmc.edu/molgen/facultyaz/rosenberg.html

See her paper "Evolving responsively: adaptive mutation" (2001) as well as a series of three papers August 2004 issue of the Journal of Bacteriology. They are a debate format called a "Dialogue" between three parties: Susan Rosenberg and collaborator PJ Hastings, John Roth, and Patricia Foster.

To get a flavor of some of the work being done:
2003-10-24

Adaptive Mutation Is Common In E. Coli, Say Indiana University Researchers

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The quickening of genetic mutation rates in bacteria may not only happen when the microorganisms find themselves in strange and stressful circumstances. A new report in Molecular Microbiology by Indiana University Bloomington researchers shows that at least one bacterium, Escherichia coli, ratchets up its "adaptive mutation" machinery when it simply runs out of food.

Biologists Patricia Foster and Jill Layton found that as E. coli cells begin to starve, the bacteria quadruple their expression of DNA Polymerase IV (Pol IV), a mutation-causing enzyme that is notoriously bad at copying DNA accurately. The culprit, the scientists discovered, is sigma-38, a stress protein that appears to activate expression of the Pol IV gene.

"We've known that bacteria respond to different kinds of stress by activating 30 genes or so," said Foster, who led the study. "We now know Pol IV is part of the response to starvation, which E. coli experience regularly during their life cycles. This polymerase may provide the bacterium with new properties that help them get out of difficulty by, for example, giving them the ability to use other food sources for growth."

The identification of genes controlling increased mutation rates in other, more dangerous bacteria could arm hospitals with a new type of weapon that helps them keep up with nosocomial infections caused by quickly mutating bacteria.

But the discovery also feeds a fiery theoretical debate over when and why a bacterium might increase its mutation rate. Many scientists contend that dramatically increased rates of mutation are almost always bad for bacteria, while others believe the bacteria depend on adaptive mutation to outlast the trials of harsh environments. Previously, the increased expression of Pol IV was thought to be limited to weird, drastic circumstances, the kind which might force a bacterium to mutate or die. But Foster and Layton have shown that a very common situation in nature -- one in which bacteria use up available food -- is enough to cause bacteria to activate Pol IV's gene, which in turn leads to increased mutations.

"In many instances where a more accurate polymerase might work, this one could now be substituted, so more mutations will occur," Foster said. "This results in more genetic variation and more properties on which natural selection might act."

DNA mutations are usually bad for bacteria, since altered genes rarely work properly. But sometimes mutations give rise to genes with new functions, endowing offspring bacteria with new properties, such as resistance to antibiotics.

Whenever bacteria reproduce, they divide in two and must make a copy of everything inside them, including their chromosomes. E. coli's DNA polymerases are replication enzymes responsible for making copies of the bacterium's DNA. Among the bacterium's suite of different DNA polymerases, Pol I, Pol II, and Pol III are extremely accurate, making exact duplicates, or near-exact duplicates, of the DNA they copy. Pol IV and Pol V, however, are remarkably error-prone, mutating the copied chromosome so that it differs in sequence from the original chromosome. Pol IV and Pol V are also known to be the only DNA polymerases that can get past DNA lesions, such as DNA damage ccaused by a traumatic chemical event inside the cell.

Foster and Layton studied the Pol IV expression patterns of 24 experimental strains of E. coli. Some strains had a functional Pol IV, and some didn't. Some strains had a functional form of the stress protein sigma-38, and some didn't. Cellular levels of sigma-38 increase during stationary phase, a slow-growth behavior caused by starvation. Under starvation conditions, the researchers found that Pol IV expression is increased from basal levels, about 250 copies of Pol IV in a single cell, to as many as 1,000 copies of Pol IV in a cell. They also learned that levels of Pol IV were about as low in E. coli strains missing a functional sigma-38 as in normal strains growing in non-starving conditions. This led Foster and Layton to conclude that sigma-38 helps control to what extent Pol IV is expressed.

To me a big part of the problem is equating evolution with Darwinian
Evolution, whether neo-darwinian or just Darwinian. The ID enthusiasists
addition of, "blind" to the concept of natural causes. Certainly, nature is
anything but blind. It is also not deaf and dumb. I guess is that most
people will eventually recognize that nature and evolution and intelligence
are all the same thing. If someone needs to employ a religious concept of
"God" in order to feel happy and secure, then let God be a synonym for
this process of which all is a part.

Yes, neo-Darwinian theory is what is taught in all standard biology textbooks. That's what is being debated-- should anything else be taught?


Actually, it's NOT the ID enthusiasts that add that concept. It's widely promoted by the defenders of the "scientific" orthodoxy. One of the most prolifice, popular and influencial defenders of that orthodoxy is Richard Dawkins. And guess what the title is of one of his most famous books?

"The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design"




Tell that to Dawkins and the vast majority of the scientific establishment who embrace that metaphor, or at least the ideas behind it.



That sounds like a good argument for allowing discussion of ID theory--- and IC theory and others-- into the classroom.

I have no problem at all with including discussion of the "Intelligent Design"
argument as part of a science unit on Evolution. I just object to calling the argument a scientific theory. There are a number of scientific theories dealing
with evolution but neither creationism or Intelligent design are one of them.

Good-- that sounds like a basis for common ground...


That would require a MAJOR change in most classrooms-- but that's also what I would like to see: a variety of scientific theories discussed, rather than the near total focus on one very weak theory as is the case now.

Do you have any problem with teaching the numerous shortcomings and scientific failures of neo-Darwinism? Ie. junk the dogmatic pro-neo-Darwinist "biology"textbooks and go for something less biased and ideological?

How about Behe's and other scientists concepts of "irreducible complexity" or the concept of "adaptive mutation"-- and their critiques of neo-Darwinism?

Are you okay with teaching the scientific reasoning behind neo-Lamarckianism?

Are you okay with teaching -- not inculcating-- *about* the various theories of "intelligent design"?

Also, do you have any problem with teaching the limitations of Science? The ideological nature of Science? The unacceptability of the notion that Scientific knowledge is the only TRUE knowledge?

I think the first step is to recognize that there is arrogance and dogmatism on BOTH sides of this debate.

There is a certain amount of arrogance and dogmatism anytime a humanoid
of any stripe opens her or his mouth. I haven't kept up with developments in
the typical science curriculum during the last 30 years. In general, my argument
would be at the high school and undergraduate levels, to put more focus on
teaching scientific methodology--especially, what theories are and how they function in science. My second emphasize would be on developing a general systems language capable of integrating the different sciences without geting
bogged down in reductionistic and dualistic either or questions that typically generate more heat than light.

True-- but it would seem that there is an assumption around "liberal" circles that the dogmatists are the Creationists and ID "enthusiasts", rather than the "teachers of evolution".

Glad you recognize the inaccuracy of that assumption, and that there is equal dogmatism on both sides of this controversy.




Sounds good.

DB, I have very limited knowledge in higher math and the natural sciences, but
it seems to me that modern scientists working at the frontiers of evolution would
generally agree that Darwin put way too much emphasize on the concept of randomness and would be in agreement with such concepts adaptative mutation and other emergent forms of evolutionary process which utilize the power of
aggregates and part-whole relationships inherrent in the concept
of organization . When mankind recognizes itself as part of nature, it is
not at all difficult to see that evolutionary nature is intelligence. It was from the
observation of nature that mankind created the concept of intelligence and of
science. I believe the medium (systematic observation) is the message.

Unfortunately, what is not at all difficult for you to see, is apparently extremely difficult for the scientific establisment to see or accept. Your statements would be flat-out rejected-- indeed mocked-- as quasi-religious, or to use Dawkin's favored epithet of dismissal, "neo-mysticism".

Currently, mainstream Science rejects--could not even entertain-- the notion of "evolutionary nature is intelligence" and are clinging strongly to the fundamental axiom of randonmness. It goes to the very heart of the "scientific" worldview. The Scientific establishment, contrary to your statement, does NOT agaree that too much emphasis has been put on randomess --they have been fighting tooth and nail against challenges to the unviolability of the randomness-principle presented by concepts like "adaptive mutation". With all due respect, I feel you are not fully aware of the Scientifc establishment's dogmatism and ideological rigidity.

(Btw, the "randomness" aspect is more closely associated to the modern genetic contribution to evolutionary theory, hence the term neo-Darwinism.")

As far as systematic observation being the message-- yes, that's fundamental-- but equally important is logic. We cannot directly observe millions of years of historical processes, nor test past evolutions, so logical deduction and inference play an especially large role in evolution theory.