Mickey

Yeah, he was for the President but against all of his decisions, his policies and his advisers. Other than those details, he was pro-Bush all the way.

She is animated, literally. Gotta like that. Plus, as a cartoon character, she is not eligble to file a palimony suit.

Lott says Rumsfeld should go Credible in a reverse way. If he doesn't care for Rumsfeld, then Rummy must not be all bad.

...or the last sound she ever heard as they used her gun to kill her and her child. Thank God, both are alive.

I'd like to respond thoughtfully to your post but your avatar prevents any hope of me..umm..being..ermm.....trying.....uhhhh, what was I saying?

Trent freaking Lott wants Rumsfeld out within the year. I can't believe my ears. Next you'll be telling me that Syria is on the UN Security Council. I suspect there must be something to like about Rummy that I have missed. If Trent Lott doesn't like him, chances are he has some redeeming qualities. Really, why is Rumsfeld the scapegoat of his own party all of a sudden? Are these pols starting to hear some grumbling from their constituents about the war? What is going on here? Misca, I am starting to feel sorry for Rumsfeld.

We care if we survive, nature doesn't. So far, we are winning the survival game. Nothing says that has to last forever or even another hour. I think George Carlin said that the Earth will someday shake us off like a bad case of fleas. For all we know, God created us to amuse and feed viruses, his true chosen ones. Our sense of self importance won't let us consider the idea that we aren't all that special.

Don't mix evolution and natural selection. Evolution is a fact, natural selection is one theory as to evolution's mechanism. It is not the only one. The work being done to try and demonstrate the actual mechanism of evolution is some of the most exciting being done in the field right now. I recently read a study which found that the nature-nurture conflict is a mirage. It turns out that DNA (nature) can be altered by environmental (nurture) influences. I think I read it in Discover Magazine (not related to the TV channel), their year end issue on the most important scientific discoveries of the year. Bottom line, our DNA may actually be responsive to outside influences. Proving whether that is true and how it responds as well as why it does are truly fascinating questions. It may seem that I am posting a lot on this out of a desire to rap the fundamentalist on the head with evolution. That is really just a side benefit . My real motivation is that I find this to be one of the most truly fascinating fields of discovery around. I only hope I live long enough to see what they find out. I don't mind dying, I mind not knowing.

What makes you think they have stopped? DNA studies indicate that modern Apes and Humans share a common acestor. Credible attempts at dating the separation between the two have been made. Apes today are not the apes of yore. One interesting theory is that a climate change altered the environment in Africa inhabited by our common ancestors. The forested regions became much smaller and the savannahs dominated the area. They consisted of flat, open grass lands with clumps of trees here and there. There was competition between hominids for the forested areas remaining. Our ancestors lost that battle and had to adapt to survive on the savannah while ape ancestors remained in the trees. One adaptation, a key one in fact, was bipedalism. It is far more efficient for traveling long distances over open ground. Less of the body is exposed to the sun making it easier to avoid overheating. Walking on all fours would not be possible for long periods. You also need to see over the tall grass to help spot predators. There is geological evidence to prove that such a climate change took place and that it happened at about the same time the DNA evidence targets the divergence between apes and man. I do not present this as some sort of accepted fact beyond argument, just a fascinating hint of the kind of debates, studies and fossil findings that are out there. If they want balanced presentation of competing theories they ought to be arguing over the "Out of Africa" theory vs. contemporaneous or paralell evolution. That is the debate over whether many human ancestor came from Africa and migrated all over the place, each in their turn from australopithecus to Homo Sapiens or whether some long ago ancestor migrated everywhere and in separate locations developed along the same lines so that you have the same ancestors evolving at the same time in different locations. For example, could Homo Habilis have evolved more than once in many different locations? These are the kind of things that the actual scientists are arguing about, not evolution and intelligent design. It is elected officials, school boards, who are pushing this. In Dover Pa., the science teachers recommended a basic science book with standard evolution in it. It was the school board that decided to add in intelligent design and only after they were provided with free copies of a book pushing intelligent design. The fact that the book involved, "Of Pandas and People" has about as much credibility among scientists as the notion of a flat earth was of no concern to them. They are elected officials following a political agenda.

Gee, I don't know, maybe it was that line about how we should "disband public education". Seems to me that would entail closing thousands and thousands of schools. I only wish every Republican politician would run on a platform of disbanding public schools. "the market will fill the void"???? Yeah, the way it did before we had public education in the United States. How exactly would the children of the poor and struggling middle class pay for a private school offered up by the magical, all powerful "market"? Lots of people, many of them working people who play by the rules and do the best they can do not own property and thus do not pay school taxes as it is. Simply dropping public education and returning the taxes to those who pay them would not provide the resources such people would need to pay for a private education. If you want to see what type of educational opportunities the market offers children of those who have enough trouble keeping food on the table and the rent paid, read some history or maybe Dickens. That is the precise "system" that was such a complete and utter failure as well as a virtual apostasy for a supposedly democratic society that led to the establishment of public education as a right to begin with. Here is a short passage on pre-public education in America and the establishment of public schools: "Until the 1840s the education system was highly localized and available only to wealthy people. Reformers who wanted all children to gain the benefits of education opposed this. Prominent among them were Horace Mann in Massachusetts and Henry Barnard in Connecticut. Mann started the publication of the Common School Journal, which took the educational issues to the public. The common-school reformers argued for the case on the belief that common schooling could create good citizens, unite society and prevent crime and poverty. As a result of their efforts, free public education at the elementary level was available for all American children by the end of the 19th century. Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance laws in 1852, followed by New York in 1853. By 1918 all states had passed laws requiring children to attend at least elementary school. The Catholics were, however, opposed to common schooling and created their own private schools. Their decision was supported by the 1925 Supreme Court rule in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that states could not compel children to attend public schools, and that children could attend private schools instead." See, History of Public Education in the United States As for commies, I agree, they are bad. So what? Are you trying to say that the NEA is part of a commie plot based on some garbage from 1963? I thought the cold war was over.

I don't think it is a fair leap to go from not teaching religion in science class to elimenating "any concept of faith". That is not the object here. As I have said before, there are plenty of scientists who believe in theistic evolution, an embrace of the science without rejection of the divine. Look, if I was against teaching math in art class would that mean that I reject any concept of math? The only religious opposition to evolution comes from those who believe in the literal truth of the bible which just simply cannot be squared with much, much scientific fact, not just evolution. The age of the earth is one example. Once you remove the insistence on literal truth, there is no conflict between faith and science. Politically, they need that conflict so on and on it goes. How are scientists who believe in theistic evolution mocking out believers? They are believers themselves. Who is it that considers believers to be stupid and inferior? Is it the Catholic church which also subscribes to theistic evolution? The idea that there are squadrons of atheist scientists trying to prove God doesn't exist and that everyone who believes in God is a trailer park lunatic is a delusion bordering on paranoia. It ain't so. Most scientists believe in God. Your description of your own belief is essentially a recitation of theistic evolution, are you mocking out believers as stupid and inferior? As for your concern that the time periods involved are not sufficient, I implore you to do more research using the links I have provided. We know of hominids, proto-humans if you will, existing 6-7 million years ago and they were themselves many times removed from the viruses you are talking about. The time periods are incomprehensibly vast.

Sure, the best way to learn is to get rid of schools. Maybe the best way to get rid of death is to get rid of hospitals? Really, people are dying all the time so clearly the hospitals are an abject failure, close them down I say.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Dembski, including links to his own web site: William Dembski Where should I go for information about evolution, scientists who have spent their lives studying these things or someplace else? Critique the substance of their work, that I can respond to. Discounting them simply because they are scientists contributing to a web site and ignoring their extensive citiation to sources is unfair. If you are not going to listen to scientists on an issue of science then who are you going to listen to? School boards?

The theory of gravity doesn't explain everything either. No single theory does. As for human evolution stopping, compare the average height and weight of human beings today with those in, say 1850, or better yet, their respective life spans. Pretty major change. That concern really is directed more at natural selection, not evolution. On that basis, we are doing just fine when it comes to survival so there has been no need to change, at least not to the extent of growing horns or something that dramatic. Further, these changes occur over millions of year, how would we see a change between humanity on tuesday and humanity on wednesday? The "God of the gaps" argument is an old one. It basically says that God is the explanation for everything science can't explain. Evolution doesn't explain such and such therefore, creationism or some other divine explanation must be the answer. Our ancestors couldn't explain thunder so they put it down to the gods. We eventually learned that it wasn't the gods, one less gap for the divine to fill. Maybe that is what God is, science we haven't discovered yet.

ID isn't a theory, it is religious belief, its own proponents define it as such (Intelligent Design is religion, so say its own proponents.) In fact, they designate a belief in the credibility of evolution as atheism. If they have an alternative scientific theory with some credibility, ie has reached broad acceptance by the scientific community, to present along with evolution, fine. Dressing up religious faith as a "theory" doesn't make it so. By the way, what do you expect them to say? "We are implementing this program to force feed religion to your children"??? By the way, Dembski is, in the opinion of some, a joke: Dr. Dembski's Compass or "How to lose one's way while looking for misdirection", Not a free lunch but a box of choclates As for Behe, please see: Irreducible Complexity As for peer review, please see: Peer Review and Creationists (much "peer review" of creationist work is done by philosophers, not scientists). The only real peer reviewed paper is the one by Meyers which was published in a minor journal and has been fairly well debunked to the extent it supported intelligent design (not its focus, it was on the subject of taxonomy). Here is just one article: Response to Meyer If every "theory" supported by a handful of scientists were worthy of teaching to kids, science classes would be endless. Funny, you don't see all this jumping about when it comes to so many other theories with far more scientific support than creationism but then, they don't have anything to do with God so nobody cares. We only seem to need this imagined "balance" when it comes to evolution. In reveiwing the entire statement by the district, it is clear that the science teachers themselves did not recommend this but instead approved the purchase of textbooks that covered evolution and not creationism. The board however received a donation of 60 copies of "Of Pandas and People", they don't say from whom though I suspect it was from the Discovery Institute, a creationist group dedicated to replacing evolution with creationismin public schools. Here is one of their policy goals which they refer to as Phase III of their Wedge Strategy: "Phase III. Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings. We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula. The attention, publicity, and influence of design theory should draw scientific materialists into open debate with design theorists, and we will be ready. With an added emphasis to the social sciences and humanities, we will begin to address the specific social consequences of materialism and the Darwinist theory that supports it in the sciences." Does that sound like a bunch of scientists genuinely concerned about curriculum or a bunch of politcal-religious fringies looking for a fight?

So now you need a reason to be a wise @$$? Talk about a lousy theory.

Actually I am referring to all school districts where prayer in school, among other similar issues, is being fought over. Did you not see the "lamenting that God is kept out of schools" part of my original post? Read the post again and maybe you can find something else to hit me with. I can only speculate on what schools have spent on attorneys trying to get a prayer service at graduation ceremonies to pass constitutional muster or similar endeavors. As for evolution/creationist clashes, see this site for links to states where this has been an issue including Alabama, Kansas and Georgia to name a few. Talk.design In addition to Dover, Pa., this has been a problem recently in Cobb county Ga. and in Grantsburg Wisconsin. It was a state wide fight in Kansas that lasted 2 years, from 1999-2001. There is legislation pending in Michigan mandating intelligent design. I would think that education budgets would be thin enough without inviting litigation by insisting on forced prayers, nativity scenes and rewriting science textbooks.

I have never seen the t-shirts you are talking about. What mockery I have seen goes both ways. For the scientists who do poke fun at others, it is not all believers they mock, just those who insist on a literal interpretation of the bible. As I said before, most scientists are believers themselves. They aren't mocking the vast majority of those who subscribe to a theistic form of evolution. That is the prevailing personal view of most scientists. Evolution or rather, natural selection, is not so easily tested in a lab because of the impossibly vast periods of time involved. Still, you have the same problem with continental drift but no one is going on and on about it being a lousy theory. Though continental drift can't be observed or tested easily, there is plenty of proof establishing it as a fact. Evolution is like that. No one doubts that bacteria change to more virulent strains in response to antibiotics. There you have a profound change in a living thing in direct response to an environmental change threatening its survival. Bacterial generations reproduce quickly enough to observe this in our own lifetimes. We see fossil records of our own changes which simply occurred over a longer period of time. Recorded human history only goes back around 5-6 thousand years ago (I haven't checked that, it is an estimate). That covers from Sumerian scratches on tablets to the moon shot. Neanderthals along with pretty much modern humans were living at the same time around 30,000 years ago when the neanderthals died out. In terms of time, that is enough to cover all of recorded human history five or six times over. That is a long time. The australopithecus afarensis (the "Lucy" fossil you have probably heard of) is 3.2 million years old. That is all of human history 640 times over. Sahelanthropus Tchadensis (discovered in Chad) is 6-7 million years old so we are talking human history 1,200 times over give or take. Is it enough time? Yeah, it is. The story of human origins is the ultimate puzzle and piece by piece we are putting it together. What new finding might there be around the corner? What will the final picture tell us? Will it exclude God or simply bring us even closer to him following the clues he has given us buried in the sands? I don't know. I sure want to be part of the search though. I think these discoveries are literally wondrous. It burns me that instead of being treated as such, so many are so threatened by them that more people study ways of discounting these discoveries than understanding them.

The catholic church has no objections to evolution nor does it require teaching half baked bunkum in science class. It subscribes to a theistic from of evolution which creationists most assuredly do not. It is not an either/or situation at all. It is the creationists that would have it so. Learn religion in religious studies classes, theology in theology class and science in science class. Easy.

Yes there are around 4 schools in Chicago and maybe 3 in NYC that have condom availabiltiy programs, all of them High Schools so 4th graders are not involved. I can see why you would blame the poor test results across the entire nation in thousands of schools in 4th grade on a program in a handful of schools applicable to Grades 10-12 only. Makes sense.

Do you want to put science to a vote? What if the majority votes that the world is flat, as in another time it surely would have, should we teach the kids that? That is the beauty of science, it transcends political agendas and "belief". Gravity is gravity and it isn't going to go away because some people vote that it doesn't exist. Why is it so offensive to think that scientists should decide what is taught in a science class? Actually, I didn't argue in favor of condoms in school at all. What I did do is present the stats that showed that the government funded abstinence only program wasn't doing so well. At the same time I pointed out that the actual number of condom availability programs is mind blowingly lower than one would think given the constant gripe about them on the right. I added that, unlike the propaganda about them, parental permission was required and in the handful of schools that have them, they appear to be doing well. I know that the actual facts can be tedious and it takes time to present them but is it really an acceptable alternative to short hand it all into something as misleading as "chief advocate of cucumber condom 101"?

"progressing and improving" are subjective terms. Species adapt to survive. Intelligence is one survival strategy and so far it has worked for us but could certainly even destroy us so it is not a prefect survival strategy. Having big teeth is also a pretty spectaculary succesful survival strategy. I suppose becoming more "god like" would be a survival strategy as well but unlike in theology, in science they don't really suspend the laws of physics so we aren't going to evolve into possessing omnipotence or omniscience. The idea that scientists have an agenda to mock believers is something I respecfully disagree with you over. Most scientists in fact subscribe to a version of evolution that is theistic. They embrace both God and the fundamental principles of evolution. Unless they are intending to mock themselves, I don't thinke they are mocking believers. Evolution is not really a theory on the creation of life, it is a theory on the development of life, its changes over long stretches of time. It does pretty much preclude a literal interpretation of Genesis but beyond that it doesn't really present much of a conflict with faith. I am not sure where you get the idea that evolution does not meet the standard to which other scientific theories are held. That is not the case. Biological evolution is a fact, not even "just" a theory. It can be demonstrated today and the evidence for its occurence in the past is overwhelming. The precise mechanism of evolution is a theory, in fact, there are more than one theories for the mechanism of evolution. The theory most are familiar with is "natural selection" which is the one you mention. Geographical isolation is another, so is "genetic drift". The idea that man descended from ape-like creatures, australopithecines and the like, is a fact. How we did so, by the process of natural selection or some other process, is a theory. The study in this area is, in my geek-o-nerd world, about as exciting as science gets. Take geographical isolation for example. Lets say you have a large group of one species living and reproducing together. Then, for many reasons that are so easy to imagine I won't bother listing examples, the group is split into two isolated groups. Over an almost incomprehesible period of time, small changes occur in each population. Over more time, those chages become more significant and numerous. Suddenly, their isolation ends, they rejoin only to not be able to recognize or even reproduce with eachother anymore. There you have it, speciation. If one group was isolated from the other in a warmer area and the other in a colder area, wouldn't the ones with hair reproduce more in the cold area and the ones with darker skin reproduce more in the sunnier climate? One group gets harrier and the other darker. And so on. Natural selection and isolation. Two theories working together to promote adaptations that in turn promote survival.

The latest test scores for 4th and 8th graders in Math and Science shows that the US is lagging behind Asian and some European countries. US kids lagging behind Maybe we should spend more time thinking about how to improve the education our kids are getting than we do lamenting that God isn't allowed in public shools or that we should be nudging aside the fundamentals of science to make room for "creation science". Then again, we could be satisfied with the scores our kids are getting. After all, they did nudge out those braniacs from the Republic of Moldova. Though we might not be able to compete with Singapore and Japan, maybe we should be happy with kicking Moldovian butt. (US avg. score on the 4th grade Math was 518 while the Moldavians scored a pathetic 504, yeeeeha). Since I am a christ hating pagan, my estimate is bound to be lop sided so let me field guestimates from the rest of you, what is the ratio of "let god back in school" and similar posts on the board to posts about how to improve actual learning? I am thinking that both sides need to worry less about using schools to craft morality of anykind and more about education in the "teaching kids" sense of the word. I know, it's a radical stance but there it is.

I respect your viewpoint but within the whole of what you have stated are some fundamental misunderstandings regarding evolution. For example, the idea that evolution holds that suddenly, for unknown reasons, there was an explosion of life is not what the theory of evolution holds at all. Not unless you view "suddenly" as something that took millions of years. Referring to evolution dictating that life began only by chance, by random event is also not quite accurate. It was the combination of chance and the laws of physics which, fortunately for us, existed well before we developed as a species and "discovered" them. Further, the probablity of a If you are interested, here is a site with a wealth of information regarding this debate. There are more scholarly articles at this site then you could imagine. Rather than me repeat what is there, I'll give you the link because I know you have so much spare time to devote to this. Talk.Origins and its subsite: Talk.design They are one sided but have links to creationist snake oil type sites. I mean "snake oil" in the nicest way. There is a pretty healthy block of people who subscribe to a theistic form of evolution where the fundamentals of evolution are not denied but are embraced. At the same time, the existence of a God, even a judeo-christian one, is also embraced. No real conflict exists there unless one interprets the bible literally. Intelligent Design, which is not a theory by any stretch, is simply religious faith dressed up as scientific theory inorder to shoe-horn it into classrooms. Even if you accept it as some sort of half baked "theory" you should know that it does NOT allow for even a theistic form of evolution. What you have stated looks to me more like a form of theistic evolution. If so, ID would in fact not suffer that belief. In fact, one of the founders and leading proponents of "Intelligent Design" )Phillip Johnson) equates theistic evolution with atheism because of its acceptance of evolution. If you accept evolution, intelligent design proponents and their "theory" would conclude that you are the worst form of atheist: an atheist who thinks he is a believer. I have no problem with people discussing their faith in a variety of forums outside of science classes. One of the great debates of our age is between science and religion starting at least as far back as Galileo. This is the Age of Science. Scientific advancement has been so great and so extensive that it can't avoid bumping into faith. Rethinking our faith in light of our science is unavoidable. I don't think however that it is a debate we need to burden 10 year olds with who have a hard enough time figuring out the periodic chart of the elements. Maybe when we are no longer gettin hammered in math and the sciences by kids in Asian and some European countries we can afford the luxury of devoting class time to theological debates. If we spent half the concern, cash and political posturing on actual learning in schools as we do on God back in school, maybe our kids would be able to compete with kids from southeast Asia in an increasingly technological economy. Never fear, the kids can pray all they want hoisting boxes of hi-tech goods from Singapore at the loading dock making minimum wage because they learned intelligent design while the Hong Kong kids were doing calculus in their heads.

I haven't given this tons of thought but I'll take a stab anyway. Extending our life spans that much would really constitute a fundamental reodering of our life cycles that would require that just about everything else change as well. We would have to make such changes for that much of an extension of our lives to be viable. The number of changes would be too numerous and complex to even attempt to go through them here. Providing we do make the changes necessary, I have no problem with such an extension of our life spans wether it be achieved through genetic egineering or cleaner living. As for overpopulation and lack of jobs, I'm thinking that people living to be 200 would entail a much longer period of youthfulness and many other changes that would create additional jobs. We would have to have kids much later in life. These are all solvable problems.