You can watch this special by clicking here
Quotes:
Once Christian woman said '"In the beginning God created". That is all I need to know'. Wow such a clear claim to wanting to be ignorant.
It is a very informative video if you want to learn about evolution and how well it is supported. So, what a shame these Xians are trying to force ignorance on children, but the trial showed how INTELLIGENT evolution is.
Ken Miller brilliantly defended the teaching of evolution at the Dover trial and he recently visited my blog!!!
ReplyDeleteHe certainly blew a hole in Behe irreducible complexity argument
ReplyDeleteIn the trial, both Michael Behe and Scott Minnich [a microbiologist at the University of Idaho who is a proponent of intelligent design] claim that intelligent design is testable, but then they say that they don't conduct those tests. What does that indicate to you?
Ken Miller:
One of the biggest problems with intelligent design is it's not empirical. It doesn't feature any testing. The advocates of intelligent design are not experimentalists. They're not going out in the lab and doing experiments to see this. Both Michael Behe and Scott Minnich have said that one could disprove intelligent design by taking a bacterium in the laboratory that didn't have a flagellum and evolving a flagellum in it.
Well, that's a ridiculous proposal for an experiment for two very simple reasons. First of all, the experiment would probably take 10 to 100 million years to carry out, and it's kind of hard to get funding for that long. The second reason is that what they propose is to retrace the path of an existing sequence of evolutionary changes. Evolution doesn't repeat itself like that. So even if we were absolutely certain the flagellum had been produced by evolution, we wouldn't expect the same sequence of events to happen again. That's a critical point.
A better test for the whole notion of irreducible complexity is just to compare various bacterial genomes and see if their arguments are correct. Their arguments are that none of the genes that produce the proteins of the flagellum are used for any other purpose in any other organism. Well, that test has been done, and it turns out their premise is not correct, that these individual proteins and individual genes are used for other purposes in other organisms, which is the direct prediction of evolution.
In essence, when one looks closely at the arguments that are raised of intelligent design, these are not arguments that are raised to advance science, because if they were, the advocates of intelligent design would be busy in the laboratory and they'd be producing research papers. What they're really busy doing is raising a series of arguments against evolution. The purpose of these arguments, quite frankly, is to prop open the schoolhouse door long enough to get a religiously inspired doctrine into the science classroom under the pretense that it's authentic science when it's not.