Degsme:

Let's leave off the accusations of slavery, ok? We all know the difference between using/abusing a child for one's own pleasure and doing things one believes to be in the interest of the child, even if they include discomfort for the child. The line may be fuzzy when we consider things like wanting the child to grow up to be wealthy, or just like us, etc, but we can all agree that this isn't prima facia abuse or slavery.

The issue isn't "a parent wants it, so it is good." The issue is "a parent thinks it is good for the child" and that parent, by virtue of status as a parent, has the right to give it a shot.

As far as what is science - there were lots of things that were 'science' in the past that aren't now, and there are probably things that are now that won't be in the future, and in so much as these things have entered the educational system, it is unfortunate, I feel. However, the small number of parents who are really interested in making ID part of their children's education is not one of our larger problems. After all, most parents who want to teach religion are going to go for straight out creationism, and the few that know enough science to make a run of ID yet still care to do so are hardly a threat to civilization. Yes, they get your dander up...

Maybe I'm not familiar with Mendelyev, or perhaps you are referring to Gregor Mendel? Hmm. Who was (falsely) accused of cooking his data, as a published analysis of his notes (yes, I did the analysis...) has demonstrated?

Anyway, my objection to the early evolution stuff is not that it isn't consistent with the scientific method, but that it proves barely anything and is so far from conclusive or even descriptive that teaching it to children is nothing but propaganda dolled up in scientific jargon. They don't have the tools to critique the flawed experiments, and their teachers don't either, and don't present the data in its proper context. Instead, while they are learning about perfectly good science, like carbon dating and uranium lead dating and oxygen in antarctic ice, they are also being told about lightning in ammoniated atmospheres making the first cells.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

I have NEVER said that we should hire a bunch of creationists to balance the evolutionary biologists in a biology department. Find where I said that, prove it.

What I said is that a person's work in one area shouldn't be judged based on his incompetence in another - or worse, based on his ideology or religion.

Watson was fired for bad reason, if he was fired because people suddenly didn't trust his science. No. Not even the CSH people would dare say that. He was fired because he suddenly became a liability for fundraising; perhaps because people viewed him as a potentially problematic manager; and because as a figurehead he was suddenly tainted. He was not fired because his science was in doubt, or his scientific capability. But he was no longer a working scientist, anyway.

Same thing with L. Summers - he wasn't replaced because his economics was bad. He was replaced because he marched into an ambush and handed some people with a political axe to grind the ammunition they needed. He also managed to force Harvard's hand and make them select a female president to limit the damage feminist critics could do.

No, Summers could passionately wish all women were lobotomized slaves and that wouldn't make him a worse economist. Watson could put up funds for a plantation in the Congo and the double helix would still be a double helix. Drew Faust could be seeking a toxin activated by Y chromosomes and actively consigning Hispanic professors to peruvian death squads, and her statements about antebellum funeral rites would still be based on original documents.

You are wrong - and worse, you are arguing an effectively unscientific position, by taking a sort of ad hominum character matters anti-positivist stance on the nature of scientific truth as related to the character of its discoverer. You couldn't possibly be less consistent.

Damn I should have double checked that name - I'm terrible with names - yes Mendel (Mendeleyev created the periodic table). So it was a false accusation? I thought that his data, and the data of Millikan (luckily I looked up that name to get it right) were found to have been too good to properly include statistical error.

Perfectly good or not good science. Well I'll grant you that some of what passes for science in K-5 is nonsense. I remember reading stuff about how dinosaurs and plants were the sources of all of our petroleum deposits, when that wasn't clear at all. But at the same time, you have to start at some level of abstraction and work down more and more.

You can't - for example - start off by teaching partially ordered set theory and how + is really just the Greatest Common Lower Bound and that 2+2 only = 4 in the calculus of real, natural and integer numbers. If you did that you'd never get anywhere.

But the flip side problem of math is that right now we primarily teach ONLY 2+2 as "MATH" when it really is arithmetic. As a result most americans do not know how to reason MATHEMATICALLY. And if you teach only Carbon Dating, O2 in Antarctic Ice etc. without the broader context, you end up with citizens that cannot reason about GMOs, cousin marriage and race.

Summers was fired because he was supposed to be an administrator that unites rather than divides and yet he managed to alienate most of the faculty. IOW he failed the competence test.

There is a difference between Watson putting up funds for a Congolese plantation and Watson expressing his opinion on genetic predisposition ex cathedra as a geneticist. Now it may be unfair to someone like Watson to put him in such a role, yet his personal willingness to take on leadership position (rather than continuing as a scientist in the trenches) exposes him to the associated consequences of his speech.

And thus, he needed to be cognizent of the fact that his speech WOULD be treated with the logical fallacy of "appeal to higher authority", and hence in matters of science he would actually be more restricted in his speech.

So yeah, he was fired for not being scientific enough in his speech and deservedly so. Summers was fired for being an incompetent leader

So, first, there is pedagogy and its discontents... we could start a whole other set of threads about teaching methods and strategies, age appropriate and the like. What I object to is self-aggrandizing teachers using questionable data to make grand statements because they want to demonstrate how their mediocre command of an immature subject renders them the universal judges over morality, ethics and the meaning of life.

But then, there is Mendel, the other topic, also complex but more easily managed. His data indeed is unlikely given 95% CIs and Chi-squared tests. Fine. The accusation is that he faked his data. That he made it up and wrote it down.

That is so unlikely as to be libelous.

First, there is the possibility that he just got lucky. After all, historical events happen once and only once. He may have stumbled on unusually good data.

Alternatively, out of the hundreds of experiments he did, he may have thrown out 4-6 that he felt 'just didn't work' for reasons unknown. He may have considered them human error, or not been sure whether the starting seeds were good. Nowdays, we prefer that scientists address all the data good and bad, but those were earlier days. Further, still most scientists tend to discard data they feel is fundamentally flawed. Sometimes entire studies are discarded. We really only get upset when those people are big Pharma or people we hate for other reasons - like ideology and politics.

Personally, I'm inclined to think it was a mix. He discarded a couple outliers and got generally lucky - after all, he was very lucky in his choice of organism, model system, and traits.

Nature, Science, and any one of the evolutionary journals would publish a paper that said "there is no evolution" as long as there was data to back it up. You can also be quite sure that Ken Ham's journal is not going to publish papers that demonstrate evolution.

...the idea here is to give the goofy journal the veneer of respectability.

Well, parsed, Ben, to a point. ID is indeed a hypothesis - but it is inherently untestable. The trouble is that the hypothesized supernatural (or at least massively superhuman) Designer is consistent with any given observation we could make or experiment we could do. Say I can come up with at test of the hypothesis that the plagues of Egypt (from Exodus) are actually descriptions of purely natural events - the ID'er just turns around and says, "Ah, yes, but God set those events in motion on a level we can't detect." God (or anyone with the same skill set) can set up the entire universe to play silly buggers with us if He wants to.

OK so is it abuse to "homeschool" a child and to teach them little more than what they would learn in a madrassa (except you teach the "christian version" of it)?

such a child, once grown up, is largely missing the tools necessary to function in modern society. Is that child abuse?

What about "homeschooling" them and refusing to let them read because reading is devils work?

What you are missing about the group that is trying to drive Intelligent Design into schools is that they are doing so not by a majority or even a plurarlity approach. They are doing so by strategic politicized control of school boards, and the intent IS to teach creationism (which is what ID really is) to EVERYONE. And once creationism is secure, they want to return school prayer and outlaw many other subjects including human health.

My wife worked in a "homeschool support center" under contract to the local school district. The number of kids who were not at grade level in their reading was astonishing. And invariably these were the same kids who thought Harry Potter was "evil".

In the same vein, something called 'evolution' would also be untestable if it was restricted to the definition that 'life came from non-life by natural random processes and all other life came from that life' without defining issues of when, what the original life looked like, and so on. This leaves open things as divergent as RNA world, panspermia, etc. The actual testability isn't in the notion of evolution per se but in the individual implementations, cases and examples.

What we need is a much more nailed down hypothesis from the ID folk, so we can test it. For instance, if you gave me a hypothesis that the Vedic scriptures would be found in the genome of an Indian Elephant in a letter substitution code - well, I could run all such codes in known Indian languages and scripts, and if I came up with anything even vaguely close we might consider it something of a stunning success.

Actually, evolution as such (the fact of evolution) is as testable as any hypothesis about how it might have happened. The broadest possible definition of evolution is that living species change over time - a specific, testable prediction of that hypothesis is that species present on Earth today will not be found in fossil form in the deepest (oldest) strata. Which is what we find. An additional hypothesis, first proposed formally by Darwin, is that species changing over time form a branching pattern of common ancestry. This is, again, testable by the fossil record, and in recent years by analysis of DNA similarities between existing species. Either of these data sets could, conceivably, produce results that are not consistent with branching evolution. But they do not.

OK, evolution has been predictively demonstrated. the most compelling work is from Hawaii where lava flows have created isolated patches of vegetation that previously were connected and had identical insect species. Given the short lifecycle of insects, within a short period of time, genetic divergence and emergence of distinguishable sub-species has been observed.

This is exactly what Evolution would predict. And the ID explanation of this would require that there have been divine intervention in these derived species - yet the null hypothesis precludes this.

The evolutionarily null hypothesis is that something other than random mutation amplified by natural selection caused the divergence. Given the small and almost identical nature of these vegetation islands, it can be shown that nothing observable is consistent with that null hypothesis . QED

Now the hard part is to invoke induction and to assert that this simplified model of the whole world extends to the whole world. Furthermore this is a small period in time so you have to show that these models apply accross the millenia.

Again Parsimony suggests this, but the proof lacks full closure. But that is dramatically different than anything the Flood and ID advocates can claim. And unlike Plate Tectonics or ulcer causing bacteria, those seeking to disprove Darwin have been at it for a long long time, with very little success.

Hey hey, I agree that mutation and selection has been observed. Duh. As usual, we agree more than we disagree. I just dislike those people who say that ID is too flexible and can weasel around all tests with their pet theory is apparently an immobile block of granite that has never required modification in the face of new evidence. It ain't so. There have been competing versions of evolution, some of which have gone down in flames. The framework keeps changing, too, in the face of things like horizontal gene transfer - and early evolution still has to find a solid theory to pronounce truly 'likely.'

Granted- but you are talking about the kind of nuances that are involved in can you get complete closure on a POSET to describe all possible types of computational hardware - which requires redefining the "+" operator. Its an important area of research for denotational semantics but teaching 1-8th graders that "+" is polymorphic and hence

2+2 does not always = 4.

isn't helpful or in the long run useful. The issue here really is that the ID/creationist advocates are dismayed that their belief-view of the world, one infused with the active presence of deity, is losing ground. And they want to bring in the equivilent of the polymorphism discussion into the K-8 realm so as to reduce the rate at which their belief-view is eroded.