A Modest Proposal for Academic Freedom Bills
| March 7, 2010 | Posted by johnnyb under Intelligent Design |
One endless discussion that always happens with the proposal of academic freedom bills in state legislatures is that the Darwin camp always says that they are about introducing religion into science classrooms. Even if the bill says, “this does not permit anyone to introduce religion into the classrooms,” the pro-Darwin crowd somehow misses this clause, or thinks that judges interpret bills based on the “secret agenda” of those proposing them, rather than the actual language of the bill.
I think a better way of settling this, is to formally define what constitutes legitimate scientific discussion in a science class. I think that there is, at least for biology, a perfectly reasonable reposity of standard information – Pubmed.
Pubmed is run by the NIH, and its purpose is to help the dissemination of information for medicine. Rather than argue tirelessly about what constitutes the introduction of religion into the classroom, why not just punt the definition of science to the NIH, and simply say something like “any paper indexed by Pubmed within the last 20 years should be considered a valid topic of discussion in the sciences.” That way, if someone thinks that these papers are about religion, then someone needs to explain what the NIH is doing indexing papers on religion!
I think this would give the academic freedom movement a more objective means of determining scientific discourse, and would mean that our detractors would have to spell out why they think that the NIH is incapable of distinguishing science from non-science, and why they think that the NIH is indexing papers on religious topics.
I, frankly, would enjoy listening to that conversation.
95 Responses to A Modest Proposal for Academic Freedom Bills
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There is something potentially unwholesome in this line of reasoning, namely the idea: “Something is not haphazard because it would fail to be functional.”
But there is no a priori reason that it needs to be functional in the first place. Functionality is a privilege not an inevitable guarantee by nature! The fact that something is exists to make something else functional in the natural world does not mean mindless forces will necessarily assemble the functionality.
If we used such reasoning to say fuel injectors make fuel injected cars functional, therefore mindless forces made cars, it would be obvious a non-sequitur has been put forward. The same issue applies here regarding the sequencing of DNA to allow quadruplex topographies!
scordova,
Sorry for the delay in replying.
Please stick to the subject. Genetic Entropy, mutation, radiation elevated rates of mutation
That isn’t the subject of this thread.
No, but somehow “cobalt bomb lab” experiments aren’t either.
By the way Nak, recombination won’t prevail if the mutation rates are sufficently high relative to the excess reproduction rate. I gave reasons to infer that we get at least 100 new mutations per individual. Nachman put the limit at about 3. We’re way beyond 3!
You gave? This is a back of the envelope calculation you did or are you citing research? Nachman’s own number for total mutations was about 175, and for deleterious mutations about 3. If you think you have evidence that the whole neutral theory of mutation is wrong, bring it on.
High Frequency of Cryptic Deleterious Mutations in Caenorhabditis elegans ( Esther K. Davies, Andrew D. Peters, Peter D. Keightley)
“In fitness assays, only about 4 percent of the deleterious mutations fixed in each line were detectable. The remaining 96 percent, though cryptic, are significant for mutation load…the presence of a large class of mildly deleterious mutations can never be ruled out.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...../5434/1748
Contamination of the genome by very slightly deleterious mutations: why have we not died 100 times over? Kondrashov A.S.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/.....4/art00167
The Frailty of the Darwinian Hypothesis
“The net effect of genetic drift in such (vertebrate) populations is “to encourage the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations and discourage the promotion of beneficial mutations,” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2......html#more
High genomic deleterious mutation rates in hominids
Excerpt: Furthermore, the level of selective constraint in hominid protein-coding sequences is atypically (unusually) low. A large number of slightly deleterious mutations may therefore have become fixed in hominid lineages.
http://www.nature.com/nature/j.....344a0.html
#89 bornagain
“You must get paid money for holding your unreasonable position.”
So now we are at ad hominems. Very nice.
It might well be that I hold unreasonable positions but if so I haven’t talked about any position I personally hold in this thread. I talked about things that have been measured and experimentally characterized over and over. e. g. that g-quadruplexes form spontaneously due to the inherent chemistry of the guanine nucleotide in solution is an observation not a position I happen to hold. That the formation of this complex structure is favored by the second law is also an experimental finding since the entropy change connected with g-quadruplex formation has been measured. and so on …
rna, I’m sorry if you take it personally, but do you or do you not get paid for money for work related to the belief that the chemical evolutionary origin of life is possible?
As well, try to look at what you have presented un-biasedly, just how much of a violation of the second law did you have to “tolerate” in order to have the DNA molecule in the first place so as to have the “limited reaction” to a thermodynamic equilibrium state with it? As well rna, as pointed out previously, there is a molecular machine that lays down the specific sequences in question:
Telomere Replication
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJNoTmWsE0s
Please tell me why this machine even exists if your position is correct.
So apparently rna, from the existance of the machine, there is a very desirable reason for having these particular sequences in very specific places in the DNA molecule that they are at, so as to help achieve the stunning levels of information packing we witness in the DNA molecule, which is trillions of level higher that what we have been able to accomplish with our most advanced computer chips:
rna, You stated you felt insulted that I would question if you got money for holding your unreasonable position, yet when looking at the evidence once again, I feel intellectually insulted that you hold your position in the first place, surely you can’t be this stubborn as to deny the obvious.