(KY Gov.) Fletcher lays out agenda (ID in public school)

[trogdor]

Mods, please cut me a break. The headline really didn't say anything at all.

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/13591634.htm

The money quote:

"What is wrong with teaching intelligent design in our schools. This is not a question about faith or religion. It's about self-evident truth."

Sheesh! Like Kentucky public schools don't already suck.

You know, it costs more to go to Trinity High School than it costs to go to the University of Louisville, and I bet they do NOT teach ID there.

[Imagine My Surprise]

1. As a fellow Louisvillian, I am less than amused to hear about this...

grrrr!

[bluestateguy]

2. Progressive Kentuckians, start looking for private schools

Schools that teach real science, that is.

[WindRavenX]

3. ID is psedo-science at its worse

Self evident? Give me a fucking break.

BTW, I'm still waiting to hear back from ID proponents giving me a fully testable hypothesis that allows ID to be compared to natural selection in terms of what is most likely the most valid mechanism for evolution.


I'll be waiting.

[megatherium]

5. It's tough to believe that the biochemical origins of life didn't involve

ID. Very tough: a former leader in research in the biochemical origins of life (Dean Kenyon, at San Francisco State) became a creationist.

But you're right, nobody has come up with an actual testable (falsifiable) hypothesis for ID. And there is plenty of evidence for contingency in the development of life. For example, my favorite, each of our cells contain mitochondria, which have been shown to be ancient cyanobacteria -- the eucaryotic cell (cells with nuclei, as opposed to bacteria) are now understood to be the result of ancient symbiotic relationships between bacteria!

[WindRavenX]

6. To me, It's actually quite easy to believe that it didn't involve ID

To me, I think many people don't want to believe that life is probably 1) very rare and 2)possibly random.

The latter I think is most disturbing to people and hardest to accept because for many, it diminishes their life.

Abiogenesis, and the whole beginning of life, deals more with biochemistry than I'm comfortable to comment on in detail. But from what I know, the progression from nucleic acids to RNA, to DNA, to the formation of "life" is possible. It's just something that probably happens randomly and probably doesn't happen very often even if conditions allow it.

You may enjoy "Rare Earth" for more on this topic. To me, just because the origin of life (and I should emphasize that this is a topic that does NOT concern evolution) is not very well understood doesn't mean that it should be rationalized with "oh, it's so hard to understand that someone or something MUST have had a role in it". That's just lazy thinking and not scientific thinking at all, which is something that is becoming pandemic in teaching science. We're skipping the hard thinking in favor of easy and fast thinking.

[megatherium]

12. I've read 'Rare Earth'. I was chagrined to learn that its authors

are actually creationists. (Rare Earth was published by Copernicus, a mainstream imprint of Springer-Verlag, a leading scientific publisher, so I had no way of knowing when I bought that book.) Yet they do make an intriguing case that life as we know it overcame long odds to develop on this planet.

I will admit: I believe the universe was created by God to be capable of supporting the random development of life -- God created life and that's how he did it. Completely hands-off. If I were the Creator, that's how I would do it: sit back and enjoy the show. The biochemical origins of life is still a big puzzle; only a few hints are available (e.g., I recall reading that the code of life was originally based on 2 base-pair codons). If it somehow turned out to be a direct intervention of the Creator, it wouldn't really surprise me. But I am not confident that is what happened, and I am certainly not confident that there will ever be any way of testing that notion -- ID remains squarely in the category of pseudoscience, at least for the time-being.

[C_U_L8R]

4. Maybe they should teach reading first....

cause this clown obviously hasn't
looked at a newspaper in months.
ID is dead dead dead....

But I do hear they're planning on
taking over Home Ec. or PhysEd.
(much less resistance there)

[ladjf]

7. "What's wrong with teaching ID in schools" ?

Because there is nothing to teach. In order for a subject to be taught, there must be a body of knowledge related to the subject. If it relates to science, it requires systematic subject questioning. And for the most part should be provable using scientific method.

ID is a religious notion. That's it. You now can make a 100 on the ID final examination.

[Hyernel]

8. Isn't this guy all but indicted out of office?

Or is Kentucky THAT insane.

[OKNancy]

9. trogdor

No need to cut you a break. You did exactly the right thing. It's fine to use a parenthesis for explanation.

:thumbsup:

[Judi Lynn]

10. Isn't it also a self-evident truth that the sun circles the earth,

just like the moon? What more information is needed?

The next step should be to replace the school nurses with faith healers.



No tax money needed for band-aids, rubbing alchohol, etc.

[M155Y_A1CH]

11. Republicans will say anything

Half the time the crap they spread around is just stupid!
They don't care about truth, so why are they always declaring it?