Intelligent Design vs. Evolution – Get ready to laugh

I originally posted this at my other blog but, since it deals with biology and school, I thought I’d republish it here.

I’ve tried to avoid blogging about this, but I just can’t bite my tongue any more. It’s too sore as it is. This whole “intelligent design” thing is just too funny. The Dover PA school district doesn’t think so, but maybe they’ve just lost their sense of humor.

Let me start out my saying that I am a person of faith. I believe in God, and most people would consider me a Christian. I’m also studying biology in college. While I don’t think that evolutionary theory is complete and correct, I’m not above talking about in a science class because it’s one of the core themes of biology. It’s only uniformed religious bigots that like to try and use it to prove that God doesn’t exist. In fact, there are a lot of biologists who don’t see a conflict between evolution and their faith in God.

I also don’t support the idea of teaching intelligent design in schools. It’s not science; it’s metaphysics. Save that for the philosophy and religion classes, please.

These quote from the Dover PA trial just made me shake my head, though. The star witness for the defense is Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist. Get a load of this:

The statement read to Dover students states in part, "Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered." Miller said the words are "tremendously damaging," falsely undermining the scientific status of evolution.
"What that tells students is that science can't be relied upon and certainly is not the kind of profession you want to go into," he said.
"There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory," he added.

Cough . . . choke . . . sputter. What? Since when? First off, it may be damaging to Darwin’s theory, but it’s not damaging to kids thinking about biological sciences as a career choice. And since when is there no controversy in biology over evolution? Saying there’s no controversy is like saying Swiss cheese doesn’t have holes.
The double talk gets thicker, though.

During his cross-examination of Miller, Robert Muise, another attorney for the law center, repeatedly asked whether he questioned the completeness of Darwin's theory.
"Would you agree that Darwin's theory is not the absolute truth?" Muise said.
"We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth," Miller responded.

Okay. Let me get this straight. We want to teach science, but we don’t regard science as truth? We don’t want to question the validity of evolutionary theory, even though science is all about questioning what we know, and don’t know? That sounds like religious dogma to me. Don’t question Darwin, but go ahead and question God? Isn’t that a double standard? I think Mr. Miller is just having a tough time explaining it because for him, and may others proponents of evolutionary theory (whether they wants to admit it or not), evolution is a matter of faith.
Go put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while.

Ever have one of those days?

This last weekend was a stressful one. I’d been very worried about a biology test that I had coming up, and so I was taking every free moment I could find to study. When I’d get tired and need to take a break, I studied my chemistry instead. (I had my second chemistry test this morning.) When my brain started to bleed I’d take a break, and mess around with my kids until they either got tired of me, or the bleeding stopped. Once I was ready to resume it was back to biology.

Monday morning went pretty well. I got up at a reasonable time, had breakfast at home (instead of in the car on the way to class) and generally had a good day. We had a review in chemistry for the upcoming test, and things seemed to go well. I wasn’t too worried about the chemistry test because I’d done well the last time. Frankly, I was too busy worrying about my biology test to worry about anything else.

The day went pretty well, too. I was able to sneak some more study and review for biology in during the day, and the test was relatively stress-free. There was only one question I raised my eyebrows on and that was because I had neglected to study that particular topic. That was okay, though, it was only a small part of an essay question so I’ll still get some points for the rest of. Feeling pretty good about my biology test I went home, screwed around with my two oldest kids (who hadn’t gone to bed yet) and then reviewed a bit of chemistry, watched a bit of TV to wind down, and went to bed. A good day was had.

This morning the universe decided I’d had enough good days, I think. I got up late, rushed to get out the door. Tried to cobble together some breakfast and ended up spilling vegetable juice on my shirt. After changing shirts I couldn’t find a clean glass that I could take in the car, and ending up spilling more stuff on my second shirt. Not having any other clean shirts I could wear, I cleaned this spill up (thank goodness it wasn’t bad), and headed out the door without breakfast. A glass of orange juice, a half a glass of vegetable juice, and my blood pressure medication would have to do.

I got to chemistry on time, thank goodness, and got everything ready to take the test. The test started out quite well. Nothing too fancy and I was prepared for it. Or so I thought. The last question was to identify ten elements according to a graph showing their atomic number vs. their atomic radius. No problem, thought I. Then it hit me that the ten elements he wanted us to identify weren’t on listed on the graph. The graph was there, but which ten? Fortunately I wasn’t the only student to figure this out and someone got up to ask the professor about it. He explained which ten he wanted, apologized for screwing up the test question, and I proceeded to fill everything out.

My lab partner (Lab boy) finished about the same time I did, so as we left class we chatted about the test.

“That went better than I expected,” I said.

“Yeah, I was surprised. I know I got a few wrong though.” LB replied.

“Oh? Which ones?” I asked.

“The one where you had to determine the unknown elements charge, considering it was bonded to two sulfur ions with an ionic charge of 2- each. I forgot to consider the number of sulfur ions and put 2+, instead of 4+.”

“The only one I had trouble with was the last one.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think it was too bad, though. I remembered that the noble gasses have the smallest atomic radii.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “I thought it was the other way around.”

“I’m not sure.” LB said. “It might be. We’ll have to look it up.”

And look it up I did.  Crap and nonsense! LB was right, and I had screwed the pooch. The question was worth quite a few points, too, and there was no way I could get partial credit. I really did screw it up that bad. What else did I mess up, I wonder? Here I was obsessing over my biology exam and I mucked up my chemistry test instead. I hope this isn’t a portend of finals.

Why has it gotten suddenly warm, and what am I doing in a hand-basket? I just hope the rest of the day is better.

Mad Scientist

This last weekend was a rough one for me. I ran out of gas on the way home from school, my wife’s grandfather died, and just about everyone on the roads decided they were going to act like jerks. In spite of those, and other problems, I still got to have some fun in my science labs.

Biology was great. We learned about how to use a light microscope, and a spectrographic one. Most of it was just getting used to using one, but finally we got to do a wet slide prep of some kind of water plant (I forget the name of it) and check it out. It was cool! Even under the spectrographic scope we could see real cell structures along the leaves of this plant.

Chemistry was even more fun. Not from any grand, “look at me I’m doing real science” kind of way. More in an “I’m still a kid again and pretending to be a mad scientist” sort of way.

MUWahahah!

Anyway, we got to mix up a bunch of chemicals in test tubes and then figure out if they were undergoing physical or chemical changes. It was fun to mix clear chemicals and get cool colors, or mix other substances and watch them bubble and boil, and make all kinds of cool smoke!

It was a good break in the action. Now I have to go prepare for my next round of tests. Oh, well. Back to the student grind, I guess.

Test Results

I got my results back from my first chemistry test. I did pretty well. 95%. You may remember that I blogged about one of the questions here a bit ago, where I was asking about units and significant figures being screwed up. Well, it turns out that I was right. The professor had screwed up the answer. He’d actually messed up a couple of questions and, because a few of us caught him, he’s giving us extra points. Yup. He said, ‘the test was a little hard, so I’m going to give each of you an additional 5%.” Cool news for me. Can’t beat 100%.