April 9, 2005

Playing judge.

Speaking of judges, I've got to go play judge in a moot court competition today. I think I'll leave the computer behind, take the bench memo, and hole up in a nice café near the court house and get myself into the appropriate frame of mind. The problem is about teaching "intelligent design" theory along with evolution in schools. I'll blog about this later.

2 comments:

Cervus said...

The main problem is that "Intelligent Design" is not a scientific theory. Most of their argument focuses on attacking evolution instead of providing an alternative. You might be intersted in a blog called The Panda's Thumb, which deals with these issues on a daily basis:

http://www.pandasthumb.org/

Also, TalkOrigins is an invaluable resource for this issue:

http://www.talkorigins.org/

Cervus said...

eddiep: I'd like to point you two a couple pages on TalkOrigins that will clarify what a theory actually is:

In the words of evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould:

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

And no scientific proof for evolution? Read this:

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution

ID is not a theory because it fails the test of actually predicting the behavior of the Designer it says exists.

However, this blog isn't really the place to debate this issue. I highly reccommend The Panda's Thumb and TalkOrigins.