I am sure you have seen some of the buzz around the new and improved Scopes trial in Kansas.
Quoting:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1601051,00.htmlKansas is one of a growing number of states to consider authorising schools to teach religious alternatives to Darwin — but a four-day hearing of the Kansas board has outraged mainstream scientists, who are boycotting the meeting and holding protests outside.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science declined an invitation to testify, arguing that the hearings would confuse rather than educate the public.
“This is a showcase trial,” Jack Krebs, vice-president of Kansas Citizens for Science, said. “They have hijacked science and education.” _____
Well wouldn't you know it, one of the first and foremost witnesses for the anti-science side was Jonathan Wells, who was outed as a recruit of Sun Mynug Moon's during cross examination. Quoting Wells's own words:
http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htmDarwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D. by Jonathan Wells, Ph.D.-Berkeley, CA
At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things.
He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them, he frequently criticized Darwin's theory that living things originated without God's purposeful, creative activity. My studies included modern theologians who took Darwinism for granted and thus saw no room for God's involvement in nature or history; in the process, they re- interpreted the fall, the incarnation, and even God as products of human imagination.
Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle. ...
The papers, including one by James Fowler of Emory University, took it for granted that the fall of Adam and Eve was a fiction rather than a historical fact. They made this assumption because Darwinism had presumably proven that the human species originated as a slowly evolving population rather than as two created individuals who disobeyed God. ...
...... A small, powerful elite controls all the official information outlets while the evidence against the official position swells quietly, like a wave building offshore. Someday soon, to the surprise of many people in academia and the media, the wave will break. I predict that the Darwinist establishment will come apart at the seams, just as the Soviet Empire did in 1990._______
Why is it so important for moonites to bring down all things Darwin?Because if Adam and Eve did not exist, Moon's whole "religion" is an exposed fraud, even to his recruits. Like most cults, the facts have to be molded to the situation. So, although Moon doesn't teach a literal interpretation of the Bible, (he thinks people who believe Jesus will return in the clouds are loopy, for instance) but when it comes to Adam and Eve, they are sacred to Moon's gambit.
Moon's whole "religion" crumbles if Adam and Eve didn't have the "fall." In Moon's game, Adam & Eve not only had to exist, Eve has to have screwed Satan which messed up humanity until "True Parents" came along to save the day. By seducing young Eve, Satan sullied the "blood lineage" of mankind.
This set up the whole reason for "True Parents." TP started the perfect family, cleansing the "blood lineage" - creating the "true" family by having sinless kids. Now, for you and I to be cleansed we must have our marriages blessed by the old devil. To Moon, one of Jesus' biggest failures was that He didn't have a family. Yep, according to the view via Moon colored glasses, God's real plan was for Jesus to have had family with a big batch of sinless children. Sinless kids like Moon's oldest son, Hyo Jin. He's the son whose child bride, Nansook Hong, divorced taking their five kids declaring her "sinless" husband was on drugs and beat her when she was pregnant.
So you see, if Wells doesn't beat Darwin then he knows he's spent his entire adult life dedicated to a fraud. Again quoting Wells from the link above:
The papers, including one by James Fowler of Emory University, took it for granted that the fall of Adam and Eve was a fiction rather than a historical fact._____
I have been reading about the Moon organization for some time. Not often that you don't find some deceiving going on...
quoting:
http://uti.dinggraphics.com/archives/000406.htmlWells is perhaps best known to the antievolution Intelligent Design Creationist (IDC) movement for his book
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? published in 2000. The title is chosen for the format in which Wells attack's evolutionary biology, choosing what he claims are central pillars of the concepts underlying modern evolutionary biology and exposing them as fraudulent or highly suspect. The book is packed with rather amateur arguments and riddled with falsehoods from the introduction which states
"During my years as a physical science undergraduate and biology graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I believed almost everything I read in my textbooks. I knew that the books contained a few misprints and minor factual errors, and I was skeptical of philosophical claims that went beyond the evidence, but I thought that most of what I was being taught was substantially true", thus giving the uninformed reader the impression that Wells was a trained molecular biologist who started out accepting the conventional view of evolution and common descent, but came to question it as he learned more about the details. ....
Icons only goes downhill from that first whopper as a number of reviewers have skillfully written about. I'll only add for the benefit of anyone who doesn't want to wade through it all that Wells primary shtick is to poorly present very old ideas, fringe ideas, and in some cases ideas that never even existed, about abiogenesis and evolution as the sole existing and critically essential underpinnings of the modern field of evolutionary biology, and then conclude that since it's all based on fraud, it all crumbles to dust. With the vague implication floating out there some where that somehow, some way, this would support IDC.
What's important to understand about this guy is that his books and articles aren't merely full of the clever misinformation and subtle mangling of logic found in the writing of Phillip Johnson or William Dembski. They're chock full of a dazzling array of more outright lies and the worst distortions I've seen west of Kent Hovind and Carl Baugh. The material is really, really,
that bad. I'm talking gigantic stinking whoppers folks. Anyone with Internet access and a smattering of science 101 courses taken twenty years ago in the haze of a hangover could sign on, point and click, do some light reading, and see through them all in a few hours.
Yet Icons is one of the primary 'textbooks' the Discovery's CSC touts as a legitimate science text and pushes on school districts they've infected with their antiscience religious agenda as a prima-facie holotype for how to 'teach the evidence against evolution'. Apparently misleading children under the aegis of science does not rate high among the moral values of Wells, The Unification Church, or The Discovery Institute. But then of course we are talking about creationists here._____
This is an excellent short post on ID.
Quoting:
http://carringtonvanston.net/eatmywords/?keyphrase=inelegantSo what is science? Well, a big part of it is "the application of theories that are falsifiable." A theory that is not falsifiable is not a scientific theory by definition, because the most basic and essential process of science is the attempt to disprove theories.
Science requires that we supply means by which our theories may be disproved, and so if we want to include "God exists" as part of a theory we must supply a means by which God can be proven to not exist. If I cannot supply a means by which one could prove that God doesn't exist, then "God exists" is simply not part of science. It doesn't mean it's true or false, it's just outside of science. And things that are outside of science should stay outside of science classrooms.
And usually they do, unless you live in a state that elects a bunch of Creationists to your State Board of Education. Creationists who go on to Create a lesson plan that's derived in part directly from the seminal text in Intelligent Design (Jonathan Wells's I
cons Of Evolution) while swearing up and down that the lesson plan doesn't actually include Intelligent Design. And then after nobody believed them, do you know how they solved the problem?
They removed the Wells book from the bibliography.
Seriously. That's it. They didn't change the plan itself, oh no. They just deleted the Intelligent Design source book from the lesson plan's bibliography. They left in the Intelligent Design material, and turned their own school lesson plan into a work of plagiarism.
______
This site has an in depth take down of Wells book.
quoting:
http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/index.htmEvolution is the unifying paradigm, the organizing principle of biology. Paradigms are accepted for their overall explanatory power, their "best fit" with all the available data in their fields. A paradigm functions as the glue that holds an entire field together, connecting disparate subfields and relating them to one another. A paradigm is also important because it fosters a research program creating a series of questions that give researchers new directions to explore in order to better understand the phenomena being studied. For example, the unifying paradigm of geology is plate tectonics; although not all geologists work on it, it connects the entire field and organizes the various disciplines of geology, providing them with their research programs. A paradigm does not stand or fall on a single piece of evidence; rather, it is justified by its success in overall explanatory power and the fostering of research questions. A paradigm is important for the questions it leads to, rather than the answers it gives. Therefore, the health of a scientific field is based on how well its central theory explains all the available data and how many new research directions it is spawning. By these criteria, evolution is a very healthy paradigm for the field of biology.....
According to Wells, the "icons" are the Miller-Urey experiment, Darwin's tree of life, the homology of the vertebrate limbs, Haeckel's embryos,
Archaeopteryx, the peppered moths, and "Darwin's" finches. (Although he discusses three other "icons" -- four-winged fruit flies, horse evolution, and human evolution -- he does not evaluate textbooks' treatments of them.) Wells is right about at least one thing: these seven examples do appear in nearly all biology textbooks. Yet no textbook presents the "icons" as a list of our "best evidence" for evolution, as Wells implies. The "icons" that Wells singles out are discussed in different parts of the textbooks for different pedagogical reasons. The Miller-Urey experiment isn't considered "evidence for evolution;" it is considered part of our experimental research about the origin of life and is discussed in chapters and sections on the "history of life." Likewise, Darwin's finches are used as examples of an evolutionary process (natural selection), not as evidence for evolution.
Archaeopteryx is frequently presented in discussions of the origin of birds, not as evidence for evolution itself. Finally, textbooks do not present a single "tree of life"; rather, they present numerous topic-specific phylogenetic trees to show how relevant organisms are related.
Wells's entire discussion assumes that the evidence for evolution is a list of facts stored somewhere, rather than the predictive value of the theory in explaining the patterns of the past and present biological world.___
Quoting:
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:sZ5Bf_ohzcMJ:rnaworld.bio.ukans.edu/id-intro/Sect4.html+Phillip+Johnson+uts&hl=enAlthough from 1995 to 1999 Wells repeated called himself, and let himself be billed as, a "developmental biology post-doc at UC-Berkeley", in reality he never performed post-doctoral research at Berkeley or anywhere else. Instead, he was a staff member of the Discovery Institute, and his "appointment" at Berkeley was an unpaid title arranged with the help of Phillip Johnson.
_____
Quoting:
http://carringtonvanston.net/eatmywords/?keyphrase=inelegantMost dictionaries and Fox television news reporters define evolution as "the gradual process by which plants and animals arose from earlier more primitive organisms." Sounds about right, huh? If you went door to door and showed that definition to a hundred people, ninety-seven of them would agree that's what evolution is. (Two of the others were out at a movie, and the third pretended not to be home when you knocked because Final Jeopardy was coming on.)
There's only one problem with that definition, though: it's totally inaccurate. That's not what "evolution" means at all, at least not to scientists.
Evolution is actually just the process that results in heritable changes in a population over multiple generations. Or as Curtis and Barnes put it in Biology: "In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next." But that doesn't roll of the tongue too easily, does it? It's so much easier to say "gradual changes from monkey to man."
But biological evolution has nothing to do with a "gradual" process. It is, on the other hand, a straightforward and easily demonstrated one. It is a theory, but it is also a fact. In science, facts are the observable data we collect about the world, theories are collections of statements to explain and interpret those facts, and nerds are the people who do the collecting. Wait, scratch that last one. What I meant to say was that biological evolution is a fact in that we can observe it in action today and its historical evidence is overwhelming._________________________________
_________________________________
Mr. Wells is another example of our nation being changed - not through the free market of ideas nor any democratic process. He's another piece of the theocracy puzzle brought to you by conservative's savior and go to guy - the one who brought theofascism to the good old U.S. of A. - the one who has more to with our nation's current political situation than ANYONE.
http://cellwhitman.blogspot.com/
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