Badtz Maru that would be fine except its a science class. Creationism and ID for all there posturing are not scientific hypotheses. They do not lend themselves to empirical evidence or experimentation and in no way belong in the science class room.
Badtz Maru, on the surface, your plan seems sounds. Who could argue with something like “Let’s present all the information, and let the students decide”.
The problem is most of the alternative views of the theory of evolution are not based on science, but rather on religious ideology or philosophy (like intelligent design theory). A science teacher is not trained to teach these concepts, nor should they be.
Not all hypotheses are equal, particularly in science. Presenting students with every hypothesis on the origin of life–whether it is based on science or not–is not appropriate. A teacher’s most important job is teaching students how to discriminate among different sources of information. I wouldn’t want a history teacher presenting all the possible explanations for the Civil War, including Martians from space infecting the Southerners with Rebel Disease. Their job is to winnow the information down and give me the most well-supported, widely accepted explanation(s) via the dialetical process.
Evolution is more than just an isolated theory. Without the framework of evolution to guide students, a sophisticated, higher-level synthesis of biology just isn’t possible. This is why scientists have their panties in a wad over this issue. It’s like a layperson telling a mathematician that they can understand calculus without a foundation in algebra and trigonometry. Um, not you can’t.
I don’t know anything about superstring theory, so I’m not qualified to speak on it. But with something as basic as evolution, anyone with any knowledge on the subject gleaned from reputable scientific sources knows that all available evidence supports it. Not having made your mind up would indicate lack of reliable information, i.e., ignorance, on the subject. Whether or not it’s relevant to one’s life doesn’t change the fact that not having an opinion conveys ignorance. Superstring theory is irrelevant to my life, and I am thus totally ignorant of it (although I should probably read up on it, since physics can be cool, at least when physicists do the math for me).
I’m not talking about Creationism or religion. I’m talking about the theory that life originated on Earth due to intelligent design. It’s a hypothesis about biogenesis - doesn’t seem like one of the more likely ones, but as nobody has proved yet where the original life came from, why not mention the I.D. hypothesis as well as life forming in tidal pools, in underwater vents, or in beds of clay? It’s not misinforming students, or teaching something counter to accepted scientific theory as there is no accepted scientific theory explaining biogenesis.
NOTE, when I said ‘theory’ I meant hypothesis the first time in my last post.
** Badtz Maru** As i said before ID does not offer serious scientific hypotheses (ie a hypotheses That could possibly produce empirical evidence or experiments). By your logic the science curricullum would have to make time for anyone who can come up with any hypotheses whteher it can produce evidence or not. Pretty soon john travolta will be down there teaching about Xenu and his psychic slaves.
Why do people get so het up about mispronouncing nuclear when every damned teacher I’ve ever had pronounce larynx as “lare nix”?
What the *%#$ is a larenix?
In any case, I rather expect nuclear/nucular to follow the path of jewelry/jewellery. Just so long as we don’t get larynx/larenix, I’ll be happy.
Julie
Badtz Maru, there are a lot of things that science has not produced a provable explanation for. That doesn’t mean that we should seek supernatural explanations as an alternative.
Intelligent design theory is a supernatural explanation. By defintion, science does not attempt to deal with the supernatural. Thus, intelligent design theory has no place in the science classroom.
I think what Badtz Maru is getting at is not the diversity of life on the planet but actually the origin of life, the biogenesis, whether catalytic RNA or protein or micelles or whatever.
There are a lot of good theories to biogenesis at the present, but unlike evolution, we lack the ability to test many of them. Yeah, there was Miller-Urey and chums, but the fact is that we can’t test exactly how self-replicating molecules came to be on the Earth 4 billion years ago or whatever. Even if we pin down the exact nature of the first self replicators, and we give some good ideas how those molecules came into existence, we cannot say exactly how they got here at that moment. It is certainly not outside the realm of possibilities that we find some “seeder” alien race who “designed” the first self-replicators. This fits the bill for “Intelligent Designer” but does not go outside of the realm of known science.
At this level, we are certainly beyond high school level science and at a realm that we only approached in a Nuclear Regulation class I had in grad school. So I don’t think we have to worry. Certainly (correct me if I’m wrong), Badtz Maru isn’t saying something like “The eye is too complicated to have arose independently; this is proof that it was designed.”
Dogface:
Not to hijack this thread (although at least it has been steered away from the mispronunciation angle), but…
Two things. First, IMHO selection is definitely part of evolution, and a primary mover of evolution. Other factors may lead to alleles gaining a high prevalence in a population, and I suppose these other factors could in theory lead to divergence. Selection, however, is the one that we think of most of the time – the allele is specifically selected with a change in environment. It is this process that enables different populations to move into different environments and diverge, which I think we all can agree is the textbook idea behind evolution.
How you get the variation is secondary. Mutations are (almost) never directed – whether they are duplications or point mutations or frameshifts or whatever. In fact, genetic variation in a population usually does not have a drastic phenotype. It is subtle, until the selection pressure changes.
My personal theory is that gene duplication in heterozygotes of dominant mutations is a key aspect of evolution. Most neomorphic dominant mutations that show advantages are very deleterious when homozygosed (think HbS, sickle cell hemoglobin). Gene duplication allows for the neomorphic mutation to remain without the possibility of homozygosis.
If the desire is to study biogenesis, then the hypothesis of a “seeder” alien race doesn’t provide any explanatory value, and only moves the question back one step. IMO, the study of biogenesis is concerned with the origin of life. Using advanced life as the creator of life isn’t addressing the topic, so the alien hypothesis only dodges the question – Where did the aliens come from, and how did their life begin?
Even if we did have solid evidence of alien intervention (which, of course, we have exactly zero), the ultimate origin of life itself should be the focus of any biogenesis study.
Damnit, why does everyone keep saying that Intelligent Design has to implicate something supernatural? Yes, most people who have latched onto the idea are trying to say that their god did it, but that doesn’t mean everyone who wants to present the idea that the first life may have been designed instead of spontaneously appearing is trying to put religion in the science class.
I think there are a lot of closed-minded people here. You want evolution to be taught, which I agree with, as it’s a well-proven theory. But you don’t want anything taught that might contradict with your personal worldview, even when you don’t have a better alternate explanation. You just ‘feel like’ some explanations are more likely than others, when we have NO idea how life arose on this planet. Yes, intelligent design may be harder to prove or disprove than other explanations, but it might very well be the opposite - we might never have a working theory for biogenesis because we may never be able to duplicate it or witness the process as it occurs. For all we know, the odds against life appearing are so slim that the fact it’s happened once is unlikely, and it could remain a mystery forever - or, some aliens may show up some day, say ‘Yeah, we made life on this planet, here’s how we did it’, and the ID hypothesis becomes a theory.
—Damnit, why does everyone keep saying that Intelligent Design has to implicate something supernatural?—
At the very least, it’s not a particularly satisfying theory, because it uses intelligence to explain precisely what we are ultimately trying to explain: intelligence.
If we truly have no idea how biogenesis first occurred then we shouldnt pass off unproven hypotheses as established science. We never really covered in my bio class except to say that it was a highly dubious area to speculate on. I’m no expert I assume there are a few legitmate scientific theories floatin about, but most of them aint gonna get no real class time till they serve up some empirical evidence. The argument no one has an answer so we might as well teach this one is a fallacy not a basis for real science.
Evolution is not biogenesis!
Evolutionary Theory is concerned with the changes of life. It says nothing about the origin of that life.
The concept of evolution can indeed be applied to patterns of all types. Logic does indeed indicate that patterns that persist will accumulate, which suggests that unliving matter could indeed become “alive”, but that is not what is taught in schools.
However many witches the left might or might not have, it is, nevertheless, quite powerful. There are less in political office, but whom do you think dominates US colleges? What is sad is that their dogma only strengthens the dogma of the right wing, since both deny basic biology in favor of a special status for humans.
Speaking of mispronunciations, I remember that in one of the very early debates, Bush was asked to comment on the Microsoft case, and replied that Microsoft would no longer be the monopoly it was, since it would now be competing with…Loonix!
I was surprised that no one called him on it.
To the OP, I agree in point of fact, but I think we should be far more concerned with the inadequacies of math and science education in the schools, and the need to encourage more students, especially minorities, to consider careers in science and technology. In the IT department in which I work, almost everyone is of European or Asian descent.
As stated previously, multiple times, biogenesis <> evolution. Evolution explains how we have gone from single celllular life to (mostly) intelligent beings that post on message boards. Evolution has nothing to do with biogenesis - it doesn’t matter whether the first lifeform was the result of complex chemicals replicating themselves in sea foam, fell from space on matter ejected from other planets, or was shat into the ocean by an invisible pink unicorn, none of that contradicts the proven theory that life evolved from that into the millions of species we have now.
I don’t think we should totally ignore biogenesis because it’s still a mystery. As I said several posts back, I think biology classes should spend maybe a day going over various hypotheses regarding biogenesis, but it should be made clear that none of these competing hypotheses is better than another because none of them have any evidence for them.
Badtz MaruIf indeed none of the hypotheses provide evidence, none of them should be taught as science. Unless your willing to allow any hypotheses that can be formed into a proposition (unicorns, xenu, etc) which will take far more then a day to explain.
See, here’s the thing: all of the primary proponents of ID have outright denied naturalism as a viable metaphysic, therefore deny any creative power to evolution. They aren’t attempting to pass it off as an alternative biogenic explanation, they are trying to pass it off as an alternative to evolution as a whole: life is too complex for natural selection to have created what we see, therefore we must look to the supernatural for an explanation. Positing an alien designer clearly solves nothing, as hardcore observed earlier. Nor do many ID proponents even go that route, except in an effort to deflect criticism for it being, ultimately, a re-hash of creationism. Indeed, going the “alien designer” route only serves to create more questions, while providing no further answers. Since we currently have as much evidence for extraterrestrial, intelligent life as we do a Divine Intelligence, substituting one for the other accomplishes nothing as far as making ID more scientific.
It is not a single theory, but a suite of theoretical concepts who’s many nooks and crannies morph every day. We have a general idea of how Evolution has acted with respect to life on this planet, but that specific observations that make up that general idea are under constant change.
My emphasis was not meant to imply that it is the “Law of Evolution”, but that refering to it as a single theory is making some signifigant and mentionable assumptions.
Why didn’t I explain the use of emphasis in the first place? Laziness.