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MarkG
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Grand Lord of Apolyton, Owner of all this land as far as the eye can see
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quote:
Bush Says 'Intelligent Design' Should Be Taught
WASHINGTON (Aug. 2) - President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss ''intelligent design'' alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.
During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.
''I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,'' Bush said. ''You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.''
The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation.
Christian conservatives - a substantial part of Bush's voting base - have been pushing for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Scientists have rejected the theory as an attempt to force religion into science education.
On other topics during the group interview, the president:
-Refused to discuss the investigation into whether political aide Karl Rove or any other White House official leaked a CIA officer's identity, but he stood behind Rove. ''Karl's got my complete confidence. He's a valuable member of my team,'' Bush said.
-Said he did not ask Supreme Court nominee John Roberts about his views on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.
-Said he hopes to work with Congress to pass an immigration reform bill this fall, including provisions for guest workers and enhanced security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Bush spoke with reporters from the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Austin American-Statesman. |
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MarkG
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Grand Lord of Apolyton, Owner of all this land as far as the eye can see
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quote:
Intelligent donation?
Why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave more than $10 million to the Discovery Institute, champions of "intelligent design."
Aug. 26, 2005 | No one could deny that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation cares deeply about science. The foundation, by far the nation's largest philanthropic organization, donates hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promising medical research, including vaccines and treatments for malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis. The foundation also cares about education. In 2004, it donated $720 million to improve American schools. Both Bill and Melinda Gates themselves frequently argue for schools to ramp up their science and math programs to create a competitive American workforce for the future.
It comes as no small surprise, then, to learn that during the past five years the Gates Foundation has pledged more than $10 million to the Discovery Institute, the Seattle think tank that is leading the charge to bring "intelligent design" to the masses. Advocates of I.D. say Darwin's theory of evolution is flawed and that certain complex biological features -- such as, for instance, the human eye -- point to the presence of a "designer" at the source of creation. The scientific establishment roundly rejects I.D. They say it represents a back door through which religious views are being snuck into public education. Due to the Discovery Institute, I.D. is popping up in school districts all over the country, fueling a renewed controversy over evolution that has even made its way into national politics. George W. Bush recently espoused Discovery's views by urging teachers to make sure "both sides" -- that is, I.D. as well as evolution -- are "properly taught."
The Gates Foundation responds that it hasn't abandoned science to back intelligent design. Greg Shaw, Pacific Northwest director, explains that the grant to Discovery underwrites the institute's "Cascadia Project," which strictly focuses on transportation in the Northwest. The Discovery Web site lists several program goals, including financing of high-speed passenger rail systems and reduction of automobile congestion in the Cascadia region, which encompasses Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. (The Gates Foundation, which is based in Seattle, gives a small slice of its money -- about $40 million in 2004 -- to groups that aim to improve life in the Pacific Northwest.) Poor transportation is a key problem for low-income families, Shaw says, and "when Cascadia came to the Foundation, there was a sense that there had not been a regional approach to studying transportation. Cascadia's plan to solve the transportation problem "was very much a bipartisan state, local and regional approach with a variety of states and counties and mayors." He didn't know if people at the foundation were aware of Discovery's I.D. work at the time they decided to fund Cascadia. "It is absolutely true that we care about sound science as it pertains to saving lives," he says. "The question of intelligent design is not something that we have ever considered. It's not something that we fund."
The Gates Foundation first gave money to Discovery in 2000 -- $1 million for the Cascadia initiative. In 2003, the foundation promised $9.35 million, with $1.1 million distributed annually for the first three years, and the rest dispersed according to Cascadia's progress. Only since Discovery stepped up its promotion of intelligent design has public scrutiny of the conservative think tank increased. Time magazine recently noted the Gates affiliation with Discovery, as did Jodi Wilgoren in her profile of Discovery in Sunday's New York Times. Wilgoren pointed out that an annual $50,000 of the grant goes to the salary of Bruce Chapman, the founder and president of Discovery. Chapman oversees the entire institute -- including both the Gates-funded Cascadia work and the center's promotion of intelligent design. But Shaw says the foundation money for Chapman "is for the time he's putting in on the transportation project," not for the work he's doing on I.D.
Several biologists and representatives at organizations that promote evolution education say they have no problem with the Gates grants to Cascadia. "I've been getting so many e-mails from people who are frothing at the mouth at this," says Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, whose tag line is "Defending the Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools." "There is confusion about, 'What is Bill Gates doing supporting intelligent design?'" As far as Scott is concerned, the Microsoft chairman is not funding intelligent design.
Even if the Gates money doesn't directly fund Discovery's I.D. work, the grant has created an image problem for the foundation. "Its support of the Discovery Institute is not commendable because of the murky situation created," wrote Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, in an e-mail. "Many people will not notice that Gates' support is restricted to one particular project ... I am reminded of the saying, 'The wife of Caesar not only should be chaste, but also appear to be so.'" Ayala raises an intriguing question: As the Discovery Institute becomes increasingly associated with intelligent design, does the Gates foundation worry that its own good name might get tied up in the political storm? "It's a good question," Shaw says. "When a grantee's work is so much associated with something not related to the work you are funding, how does that affect your grant? I don't know the answer to that. It's something we are going to have to look at."
Other foundations that have given money to Discovery also seem unsure whether the donations may tarnish their image. Still, all insist the money they gave to Discovery does not go to fund Discovery's intelligent design work. Alberto Canal, a spokesman for the Verizon Foundation, says the five-year, $74,000 grant the foundation made to Discovery in 2001 was earmarked for a lecture series focusing on technology. "We weren't looking at what some of the other centers [at Discovery] were doing," Canal says. Discovery's lecture series focused on "technology and how it fits into public policy," areas that are in line with Verizon's goals. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation gave $200,000 to Discovery's Cascadia center in 2002. Chris DeCardy, a spokesman, says that "we now know they focus on intelligent design, and with the investments we make in science, it's not an area we would support." A spokesman for the the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation -- affiliated with the Weyerhaeuser forest-products company -- says that the foundation's several donations (many more than $20,000) over the past five years also went to fund Cascadia work, not intelligent design.
The Gates Foundation's grants to Discovery are not the only connection Microsoft has to the institute. Mark Ryland, who heads the institute's Washington office, is a former Microsoft executive, and a Microsoft employee named Michael Martin is a current member of Discovery's board. A spokeswoman for Microsoft says that Martin served on the board in his personal capacity, not as a representative of the company. In an e-mail, Keith Pennock, the program administrator of Discovery's Center for Science and Culture (which runs its intelligent design work), concurs. "Mr. Martin is a member of the Discovery Board in his individual capacity and does not represent the Microsoft Corporation. Does Microsoft support Discovery's work on intelligent design? No."
Pennock ends his e-mail to Salon with criticism over the inquiry into the groups that finance Discovery's work. "Finally, I have been asked to advise you that it is unseemly for people who dislike one program at a think tank (or a university -- or an on-line magazine, for that matter) to try to pressure funders of other programs there," he writes. "It is illiberal and contrary to the spirit of free speech." |
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MarkG
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Grand Lord of Apolyton, Owner of all this land as far as the eye can see
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bolding and smilies by your's truly
quote:
Just Check the ID
By Sally Jenkins
Monday, August 29, 2005; Page E01
Athletes do things that seem transcendental -- and they can also do things that are transcendentally stupid. They choke, trip and dope. Nevertheless, they possess a deep physical knowledge the rest of us can learn from, bound as we are by our ordinary, trudging, cumbersome selves. Ever get the feeling that they are in touch with something that we aren't? What is that thing? Could it be their random, mutant talent, or could it be evidence of, gulp, intelligent design? 
The sports section would not seem to be a place to discuss intelligent design, the notion that nature shows signs of an intrinsic intelligence too highly organized to be solely the product of evolution. It's an odd intersection, admittedly. You might ask, what's so intelligently designed about ballplayers (or sportswriters)? Jose Canseco once let a baseball hit him in the head and bounce over the fence for a home run. Former Washington Redskins quarterback Gus Frerotte gave himself a concussion by running helmet-first into a wall in a fit of exuberance. But athletes also are explorers of the boundaries of physiology and neuroscience, and some intelligent design proponents therefore suggest they can be walking human laboratories for their theories.
First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have to be a creationist to think there might be something to it, or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."
The idea, so contentious in other contexts, actually rings a loud bell in sports. Athletes often talk of feeling an absolute fulfillment of purpose, of something powerful moving through them or in them that is not just the result of training. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, "intrinsic intelligence." Schwartz wants to launch a study of NASCAR drivers, to better understand their extraordinary focus. He finds Darwinism, as it applies to a high-performance athlete such as Tony Stewart, to be problematic. To claim that Stewart's mental state as he handles a high-speed car "is a result of nothing more than random processes coming together in a machine-like way is not a coherent explanation," Schwartz said.
Instead, Schwartz theorizes that when a great athlete focuses, he or she may be "making a connection with something deep within nature itself, which lends itself to deepening our intelligence." It's fascinating thought. And Schwartz would like to prove it's scientifically justifiable.
Steve Stenstrom, who played quarterback for the Bears and 49ers, works as a religious-life adviser to athletes at Stanford, where he organized a controversial forum on intelligent design last May. "I don't think it's a reach at all," he said. "Talk to any athlete, and if they really are honest, they realize that while they have worked and trained, and put a lot of effort into being great, they started with some raw material that was advantageous to them, and that it was meant to work a certain way. We all recognize that we have a certain design element."
A strict Darwinist would suggest this is an illusion and point out that there are obvious flaws in the body. Peter Weyand, a researcher in kinesiology and biomechanics at Rice University, observes, "Humans in the realm of the animal kingdom aren't terribly athletic."
Racehorses are much faster, and, for that matter, so are hummingbirds. We seem to have a basic quest to go higher, farther, faster -- one of our distinguishing features is that we push our limits for a reason other than survival, and construct artificial scales of achievement -- but we have some built-in debilities. Human muscle can only get so strong, it will only produce as much force as it has area, about 3.5 kilograms of weight per square centimeter. "We're endowed with what we have by virtue of evolution, and it's not like engineering where we can pick materials and throw out what doesn't work," Weyand said.
Our bodies break down a lot. If we were designed more intelligently, presumably we wouldn't have osteoporosis or broken hips when we get old. Some evolutionists suppose that the process through which people evolved from four-legged creatures to two, has had negative orthopedic consequences.
We are flawed cardiovascularly. Horses carry much more oxygen in their blood, and have a storage system for red blood cells in their spleens, a natural system of blood doping. Humans don't. Also, while a lot of aerobics can make our hearts bigger, our lungs are unique. They don't adapt to training. They're fixed. We're stuck with them, and can only envy the antelopes.
None of which satisfies Schwartz, or Stenstrom. "I don't think we can attach athletic design to 'better' design," Stenstrom said. ". . . Some people are designed with an ear for music, others with a capacity to think deep thoughts about the world."
Schwarz finds little or nothing in natural selection to explain the ability of athletes to reinterpret physical events from moment to moment, the super-awareness that they seem to possess. He has a term for it, the ability to be an "impartial spectator" to your own actions. "The capacity to stand outside yourself and be aware of where you are," he said. "Deep within the complexities of molecular organization lies an intrinsic intelligence that accounts for that deep organization, and is something that we can connect with through the willful focus of our minds," he theorizes.
Crackpot speculation? Maybe -- maybe not. ID certainly lacks a body of scientific data, and opponents are right to argue that the idea isn't developed enough to be taught as equivalent to evolution. But Darwin himself admitted he didn't know everything about everything. "When I see a tail feather on a peacock, it makes me sick," he once said, before he understood it was for mating. And try telling a baseball fan that pure Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said, "If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio -- and he did."
None of this is to say that we shouldn't be wary of the uses for which ID might be hijacked. In the last year, numerous states have experienced some sort of anti-evolution movement. That makes it all the more important for the layman to distinguish the various gradations between evolutionists, serious scientists who are interested in ID, "neo-Creos," and Biblical literalists. One of the things we learn in a grade school science class is a concrete way of thinking, a sound, systematic way of exploring the natural world.
But science class also teaches us how crucial it is to maintain adventurousness, and surely it's worthwhile to suggest that an athlete in motion conveys an inkling of something marvelous in nature that perhaps isn't explained by mere molecules. Johann Kepler was the first to accurately plot the laws of planetary motion. But he only got there because he believed that their movements, if translated musically, would result in a celestial harmony. He also believed in astrology. And then there was Albert Einstein, who remarked that "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." Historically, scientific theorists are sandlot athletes, drawing up plays in the dirt. |
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Jon Miller
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ID would be fine to teach in a philosophy class, or even ethics or something...
but in a science class?
no
JM
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JimmyCracksCorn
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Macedonia - Sovereign country north of Greece.
Dec 2002
time: 05:34
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MarkG, once again you've gone off the deep end.
As much as I dislike Bush, "discussing alongside" is completely different than to teach exclusively. And we know Bush supports the idea of ID, he's a born-again. Where's the news here?
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mitch
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Can anyone point me to one reasonable argument on why ID should be taught in schools alongside the Theory of Evolution? Might as well teach the Intelligent Falling alongside gravity, too right? As a biology major it is mind boggling to me that people can still uncategorically deny evolution. Theories in science are put forth and accepted when all available evidence supports it. Just like the theory of gravity, when all observable phenomena take place in accordance with it, it is accepted as a theory. Until a major contradiction arises, it will continue to be the main theory used to explain certain things. The same is true for evolutionary theory.
There are no contradictions in this theory. And there is a mountain of evidence (moreso than some other theories) to support it. Maybe if we found an ape fossil that dated back to 500 million years ago there might be a problem. But so far all the fossil evidence shows that as time went on in the world, more and more complicated species arose. The only thing that is missing in evolutionary theory is the mechanism of how drastic changes occur. Several theories have been put forth (like Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium) but not one explains the actual mechanism on how it would come about and take place. But just because you don't know how those specific changes would have occured it is dangerous to fill in the gaps with "hey its too complicated, it must be God." For thousands of years mankind has been using God to explain the universe. Until a few hundred years ago, many people continued to believe such falsehoods like the earth was the center of the universe despite sound scientific claims otherwise. Slowly but surely science has always found a way to explain how the universe functioned. But the fact is evolution challenges a fundemental belief of the major religions. Its going to be a long fight, but in a couple of hundred years I'm sure evolution will be accepted just like any other theory.
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30-08-2005 19:53
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