Intelligent Design has no Place in the Classroom of Science

In your philosophy maybe.But what makes your creation story any more believable than all the others. Take this one that the ancient greeks (and maybe some today for all i know) believed in

quote:

---

In the beginning there was nothing but Chaos. It was thought of as an abyss that was immeasurable. But then, by some miracle, out of this bleak nothingness came a small miracle, Love. This newfound hope, Love, started to drive away all of the nothingness and confusion of Chaos. Love created Light and with Light came Day.

---

quote:

---

Nobody ever tried to explain how Earth came into existence. It just did and people did not try to describe how, just as Love did, it just came to be. So then Mother Earth (Gaia) and Father Sky (Uranus) came to be. The first creatures to appear on the earth were the offspring of Mother Earth and Father Sky. These first creatures were monsters, and thought of as similar in intelligence to humans.

---

quote:

---

Mother Earth however, was very angry with Father Sky for the treatment of her children. So, Mother Earth went to her children and begged for their help. Only one of the Titans was brave enough to help their mother, the Titan Cronus. Cronus laid in wait for his father and ended up wounding him greatly. After this, Cronus and his sister, Rhea, became the King and Queen of the universe.

​

Cronus and Rhea had six children and they would end up being the first Olympians. But, every child that Cronus had he swallowed because he received an oracle that said one of his children would grow up to over throw him. This went on through the first five children. But, when the sixth one was born, Rhea could not bear to have it swallowed. So, instead she gave him a rock wrapped in a blanket and Cronus quickly swallowed it. The child's name was Zeus. Later, when Zeus was grown up he, with the help of Mother Earth, made his father Cronus give back up the children of Cronus and Rhea. After this there was a great war between Cronus and the Titans, and Zeus and his five brothers and sisters. Zeus eventually won the war because the hundred-handed monsters helped him that he released from the depths of the earth. After the war was won there were other attempts at overthrowing Zeus, but these attempts were also knocked down. After this, the world was cleared of the monsters and was ready for mankind

---

Read the rest of the story here if you are interestedWhat if I were to defend this creation story just as zelously as you defend the bible? Would that make it any more infalable?Quoting religious texts proves absolutely nothing and only serves to weaken your position. In fact that is the very reason that ID must be kept out of the classrooms.
The bible is just a story. So are all the other myriad creation stories are. I could quote chapter and verse from "the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" too but it wouldn't prove anything. The only difference is that the Hitch-hiker's guide makes a lot more sense.ID is just religion in a thinly veiled disguise.
It predicts nothing.
It explains nothing.
It means nothing
Not one ID proponent that I have ever heard of has ever even proposed a mechanism by which the designer performed his designing.
We can't test it!
We can't reproduce it in the lab!
We can't independently verify it!
We can't falsify it since nothing has ever been proposed to falsify.
These reasons, along with the obvious religion connection are why ID has no place in any kind of Science classroom. It blatently is NOT science.

random mutation is able to make things that are way more complex than anything that a mere inteligence can come up with.have you ever played with artificial life computer algoriths?Check out DarwinBots for an example of this at work.Simple little "DNA" programs can be created then left to mutate under a framework of physical laws.
A few thousand generations down the line it is almost impossible to understand how the "robots" actually survive at all let alone do it so well as they do. Their "DNA" code is garbled and messed up, yet they still work and in many cases, better than their ancestors.Electronic circuits have been made this way too. Designed pretty much randomly by computers with a specific niche to fill. In the end they work better than anything we could have designed and are so complex that nobody can figure out how they work at all.A quick Google search has failed to turn up anything about this. I think I read it in the New Scientist a while back. Does anyone know of any links to this?(ABE) Yup i was right. It was New Scientist. Here is a link to one of the simpler experiments.This message has been edited by PurpleYouko, 02-09-2006 06:08 PM

The radio part of the device in question was completely incidental. They wanted an oscilator. The device learned to cheat by using a radio reciever to pick up an external source of oscilation from emmisions coming from other nearby machines.I don't feel that "potentially" is really required since the device essentially did precisely what random mutation and selective pressure, selected it for, thereby clearly confirming that random mutation is able to make complex stuff that works in very strange ways.
I didn't say it always does it. I just said that it is able to do it.I guess we can add a "potentially" if you really want to. It doesn't change much of the meaning anyway.I haven't spent a significant amount of time researching this subject so I can't give other examples off the top of my head. If I come up with some I will post them.You could always check out my other link to DarwinBots and play with some artificial life mutations yourself. Nah!! Don't see the point really.

IMO there is no such thing as an "objective truth" so the answer would of course be NO.

All I can say here is DUH!!That is pretty much what we have all been telling you all along.When there are infinite tiny accidents then at least one of them are bound to go in a direction which gives the descendent of an organism a survival advantage under specific environmental conditions.Improvements will be selected for. Just as they were in the successive generations of devices that finally came up with the radio reciever/oscilator.With life, it isn't the experimenter who dismisses the ones who don't do the job properly (unless you believe an invisible designer is taking a direct hand). It is natural selection that does it. Organisms that don't have the correct "fitness function" for a given set of conditions do not survive to pass on their genes.Exactly the same principal. It makes no difference what the selective pressures are. They can be environmental, arbitrary acts of God or a set of rules put into place by an experimenter. The result is the same. Evolution.This message has been edited by PurpleYouko, 02-12-2006 04:58 PM

Then it is not (by definition) science as it has just failed one of the fundamental tests.
It is not falsifiable!So it is out!

There are?Not to try and put you on the spot or anything, but could you point me in the direction of one of them please?I honestly don't know of any.All scientific theories that I am aware of, at least explain how things work and make predictions based on the proposed mechanisms.
Even if those predictions are still complete theory (such as "M" theory), they can still be potentially falsified if the next bit of evidence points to something different or the next stage of the mathematical "proofs" don't meet the predicted results.

Yes I guess it does make a difference.[ABE]
Then again it is also not currently possible to falsify my theory that there are immaterial, invisible fairies in my house that mess about with all my stuff yet I have a bunch of circumstantial evidence that says that there are.This message has been edited by PurpleYouko, 02-17-2006 04:16 PM

I don't think that was the real issue here. We were just juggling semantics.
Potential for future falsification by some means as yet unknown against falsification via currently possible methods.For me the biggest deal is how you falsify something which has yet to actually propose anything.