Jeber’s

Creationism ≠ science

Christians cannot make up their minds. One day they insist that their god is beyond the reach of modern science and all one needs is faith to understand. The next they’re attempting to meld their creation story with science, which only produces a bastardized version of both that appeals to no one.

“The Quest for Right” is another attempt to sneak religious nonsense into the classroom disguised as serious science.

From the site:

THERE IS A NEW DISCIPLINE:

The Quest for Right, a series of 7 textbooks created for the public schools, represents the ultimate marriage between an in-depth knowledge of biblical phenomena and natural and physical sciences. The several volumes have accomplished that which, heretofore, was deemed impossible: to level the playing field between those who desire a return to physical science in the classroom and those who embrace the theory of evolution. The Quest for Right turns the tide by providing an authoritative and enlightening scientific explanation of natural phenomena which will ultimately dethrone the unprofitable Darwinian view.

The backbone of Darwinism is not biological evolution per se, but electronic interpretation, the tenet that all physical, chemical, and biological processes result from a change in the electron structure of the atom which, in turn, may be deciphered through the orderly application of mathematics, as outlined in quantum mechanics. A few of the supporting theories are: degrading stars, neutron stars, black holes, extraterrestrial water, antimatter, the absolute dating systems, and the big bang, the explosion of a singularity infinitely smaller than the dot of an “i” from which space, time, and the massive stellar bodies supposedly sprang into being.

The philosophy rejects any divine intervention. Therefore, let the philosophy of Darwinism be judged on these specifics: electron interpretation and quantum mechanics. Conversely, the view that God is both responsible for and rules all the phenomena of the universe will stand or fall when the facts are applied. The view will not hinge on faith alone, but will be tested by the weightier principle of verifiable truths – the new discipline.

The Quest for Right is not only better at explaining natural phenomena, but also may be verified through testing. As a consequence, the material in the several volumes will not violate the so-called constitutional separation of church and state. Physical science, the old science of cause and effect, will have a long-term sustainability, replacing irresponsible doctrines based on whim. Teachers and students will rejoice in the simplicity of earthly phenomena when entertained by the new discipline.

The Quest for Right is not only an academic resource designed for the public schools, but also contains a wealth of information on pertinent subjects that seminarians need to know to be effective: geology, biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry, paleontology, and in-depth Biblical studies. The nuggets from the pages of Biblical history alone will give seminarians literally hundreds of fresh ideas for sermons and teachings. The ministry resources contained in The Quest for Right serve as invaluable aids that will enrich graduates beyond their highest expectations.

You will not want to miss the adventure of a lifetime which awaits you in Volume 1 of The Quest for Right.

Visit the official website for additional information and to purchase a copy: http://questforright.com/

“A book that will change the world.” – Wayne Lin, Editor, Tate Publishing LLC

As usual, creationists cannot grasp the very simple fact that evolution does not address the development of the universe. Cosmology and physics, being poorly understood by them, get all muddled together with biological evolution. They don’t really care. It’s all science, and all the sciences are a big scary evil. If you believe all the evidence that nature provides, you’re left with little reason to shoehorn a god into the process.

Please note, Christians: disguising your ideas so as to make them resemble real science isn’t going to work. It’s too obvious. We’re aware of your tricks and will expose them for what they are at every opportunity. Stick to your faith. At least no atheist is going to challenge your right to believe anything you wish, no matter how ignorant of science it may be. But we will object to your frequent attempts to inject your 2000 year old mythology into school science classes.

And a geek-ish note to the author, C. David Parsons:  no serious author has an AOL email address.  That’s just another sign of your lack of credibility.  You have a domain, use an email address attached to it.  At least try to appear like you know what you’re doing.

Florida, still scientifically illiterate

I suggest if anyone wants to disprove evolution they use as an example the members of Florida school boards.

 Board Opposes Evolution Being Taught As Fact

Four of five members of the School Board of Highlands County oppose the proposed change in the state’s science standards that would present evolution as fact to students.

Some school board members across the state have opposed the proposed revisions to the science curriculum that specifies that evolution be taught as “fact” as opposed to a “theory,” School Board Attorney John McClure said at a recent school board meeting. School Board Chairman J. Ned Hancock said Thursday he would support the resolution to encourage the state not to approve the science standard of evolution as fact.

School Board Vice Chairman Andy Tuck said Thursday, “as a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory. “I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”(Source)

North Florida weighing in against evolution

A growing number of North Florida superintendents and school boards are objecting to the state’s proposed new science standards, saying the standards give too much credence to evolution and leave no room for alternative theories.

Evolution is “going to be taught as fact, and everyone knows it’s not fact,” said Dennis Bennett, the superintendent in Dixie County, west of Gainesville. “There’s holes in it you can drive a truck through.”

At least seven of Florida’s 67 school boards – all north of Ocala – have passed opposition resolutions, according to the Florida Citizens for Science, a group that supports the standards and has been methodically searching board minutes.

That number could double by the time the state Board of Education votes on the standards Feb. 19, said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.

Dominated by Baptist churches and dotted with military bases, most of North Florida makes no bones about its political and cultural conservatism. Throw an election year into the mix, Blanton said, and it’s no surprise that school officials in places like Bonifay and Macclenny are “going to try to do some things their constituents want.”

“We just wanted to get it on the record that we’re a Judeo-Christian community, and we believe in academic freedom,” Bennett said.

“I’m a Christian. And I believe I was created by God, and that I didn’t come from an amoeba or a monkey,” said Ken Hall, a School Board member in Madison County, east of Tallahassee.

The St. John’s resolution says the standards should “allow for balanced, objective and intellectually open instruction” that doesn’t treat evolution as “dogmatic fact.”

“Anybody with half a brain can see that natural selection takes place,” said Beverly Slough, a St. John’s board member who is president-elect of the Florida School Boards Association. “But to make great leaps from a fish to a man … the fossil record doesn’t support all that.”(Source)

Half-a-brain indeed. That seems to be the only requirement to be a Florida Board of Education member.

A lonely voice of reason:

 Schools Should Teach Evolution

Florida children may soon be the laughingstock of the nation, especially if they have a public school education.

There’s a move afoot to include the Bible story of creation as part of our science classes — you know the one: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh?

Instead, Florida children should be learning about evolution in science class. The theory of evolution is just that, a scientific theory, with facts and fossils and proven timelines and carbon dating.

I’m sorry. The Bible story, the fable of creationism, has no place in official science class. No place in public school altogether, unless you’re taking some sort of comparative religion class. What’s next? Jonah and the whale instead of marine biology?

Teaching fables as real science does our children a disservice when they get out in the real world. Save the religious stories for Sunday school and let our Florida science teachers use real science to educate our students. (Source)

Scientists find missing evolutionary link using tiny fungus crystal

Creationists like to latch on to minor points to try and make major claims. One of the more popular latch points for them is the transition from single cell, or simple, lifeforms to the more complex, multicellular forms. Since up until now science has not had a ready explanation for that jump, creationists and the ID crowd want to assume that god must have been responsible. It does no good to tell these people that just because we don’t have an answer to the “how” in many of nature’s processes this does not lead logically to a conclusion that “god did it”.

Well, now we are a bit closer to understanding that change from simple to complex life, and there’s still no sign of a god’s involvement.

The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex.

By studying the three-dimensional version of the fungus protein bound to an RNA molecule, scientists from Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin have been able to visualize how life progressed from an early self-replicating molecule that also performed chemical reactions to one in which proteins assumed some of the work.

“Now we can see how RNA progressed to share functions with proteins,” said Alan Lambowitz, director of the University of Texas Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. “This was a critical missing step.”

Results of the study were published in Thursday’s (Jan. 3) issue of the journal Nature.

“It’s thought that RNA, or a molecule like it, may have been among the first molecules of life, both carrying genetic code that can be transmitted from generation to generation and folding into structures so these molecules could work inside cells,” said Purdue structural biologist Barbara Golden. “At some point, RNA evolved and became capable of making proteins. At that point, proteins started taking over roles that RNA played previously – acting as catalysts and building structures in cells.”

In order to show this and learn more about the evolution from RNA to more complex life forms, Lambowitz and Paul Paukstelis, lead author and a research scientist at the Texas institute, needed to be able to see how the fungus’ protein worked. That’s where Golden’s team joined the effort and crystallized the molecule at Purdue’s macromolecular crystallization facility.

“Obviously, we can’t see the process of moving from RNA to RNA and proteins and then to DNA, without a time machine,” Golden said. “But by using this fungus protein, we can see this process occurring in modern life.”

Looking at the crystal, the scientists saw two things, Golden said. One was that this protein uses two completely different molecular surfaces to perform its two roles. The second is that the protein seems to perform the same job that RNA performed in other simple organisms.

“The crystal structure provides a snapshot of how, during evolution, protein molecules came to assist RNA molecules in their biological functions and ultimately assumed roles previously played by RNA,” Golden said.

The rest of the article, and a cool animation of the crystal, at: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080102GoldenEnzyme.html

ID, it deserves to be Expelled

Writing on the ScienceBlogs, pharyngula is someone I read daily. A while ago he posted this video, which he describes better than I ever could, and attempts to correct a few of the glaring misconceptions spouted by O’Reilly and Stein.

Two people vying to out-stupid each other

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Evolution (or as he called it, “Darwinism”) is a weak theory with many gaps that was fit for the 19th century, but not the 21st. This is a ludicrous statement; Darwin would scarcely recognize what we were talking about if he attended an evolutionary biology conference today. We’ve added genetics, population genetics, molecular biology, and developmental biology to the heart of the theory.
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ID is an effort to fill in the gaps, and is a sincere effort to add new knowledge to the theory. That’s false. Look at the books written by IDists: from Darwin’s Black Box to Icons of Evolution to The Edge of Evolution, they are all about complaining about evolution while providing no new useful suggestions for research.
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This is a free speech issue, we just want to be able to express our side of the story. I don’t see anyone rushing to censor Fox News, or shutting down the printing presses that dare to publish Behe’s or Gonzalez’s books. This is not about free speech, and no one’s speech is being restricted. It is about quality education: will we have our kids taught baseless nonsense because some people want to smuggle their idiosyncratic religious beliefs into the classroom? It’s about quality research: shall we fund and support unproductive and scientifically indefensible ideas because a third-rate character actor likes them? It’s about defending what science is: science is not about wishing something were true and inventing excuse for it; it’s about serious self-criticism and substantial work going into testing ideas. ID simply isn’t science.

I think we get a good glimpse of the dogmatic and dishonest tack Expelled is going to take. It’s going to be one solid wall of lies, insisting that we must privilege the hypothesis that “a deity created life” with the same seriousness that we do population genetics or the biochemistry of abiogenesis.

Has anyone who doesn’t buy into the whole Intelligent Design nonsense seen this movie yet? I’d love to read an objective review.

2008 National High School Essay Contest

From Alliance for Science:
2008 National High School Essay Contest
For our second annual National High School Essay Contest we invite students to submit essays of not more than 1,000 words on one of two topics — “Climate and Evolution” or “Agriculture and Evolution.”

Submission deadline is February 29, 2008.

Student prizes start with $300 for first place, and includes incentives for sponsoring teachers. Watch those word counts! Several essays among our early submissions have no word count on the registration form, or the word count is over 1,000. Read the Official Rules – essays must be no longer than 1,000 words!

Eligibility:

All students in grade twelve or below in the United States or U.S. territories. Eligible students must be attending a public, private, parochial school, home school or participating in a high school correspondence program. Eligibility of
prospective winners will be verified before the award of any prizes. Alliance for Science members and their families are not eligible. Essay contest judges and their families are also not eligible.

Essay Ideas:

Throughout the ages, the earth has undergone major climate change. Some present-day cities were once covered in sheets of ice and some temperate zones were once lush tropics. These changes had a significant effect on the types of animals that thrived and the species that became extinct. If climate change speeds up, what will happen to the environments where endangered animals now live? How do the latest scientific projections of the rate of climate change compare with the spans of time over which evolution has occurred? Will new species of plants and animals arise with the characteristics needed to adapt to an altered climate, or will many forms of life simply become extinct?
When considering this issue, think about how evolution has shaped the variation in animal characteristics like fur and insulating features like the down feathers of geese that protect against the cold. “Warm blooded” animals such as mammals are generally more able to cope with temperature variation than reptiles. Are changes in global climate pattern likely to affect the distribution of these different animal types? Consider migratory animals – will changes in the weather disrupt the timing or destinations of migratory birds or animal herds?
Even the human body may not be immune to the impact of climate. Will this alter the future evolution of the human species, or will technological factors completely compensate for any potential change in climate?

Modern times causing human evolution to accelerate

Human evolution is speeding up. Around 40,000 years ago our genes began to evolve much faster. By 5000 years ago they were evolving 30 to 40 times faster than ever before and it seems highly likely that we continue to evolve at this super speed today.

Our population explosion and rapidly changing lifestyles seem to be the drivers of this acceleration, the discovery of which contradicts the widely held notion that our technological and medical advances have removed most of the selection pressures acting upon us. (Source, subscription required)

Genetically we’re evolving faster, while mentally and philosophically we’re still mired in the Dark Ages.  In too many ways we’re nothing more than 1st century nomads with technology.