Re: Politics in America sometimes avoids fundamental issues, but not in Kansas

From: Stephen E. Jones (sejones@iinet.net.au)
Date: Mon Jul 17 2000 - 16:59:04 EDT

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    Reflectorites

    Here are excerpts from web articles for the period 7- 16 July
    2000, with my comments in square brackets.

    Steve

    ===================================================
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000166941319210&rtmo=aq49hqXJ&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/00/7/14/wkan14.html
    Electronic Telegraph ... 14 July 2000. Kansas poll evolves into a debate on
    Darwin .... Politics in America sometimes avoids fundamental issues, but
    not in Kansas. As election season looms, very basic questions are being
    batted back and forth: who are we, where did we come from and what role,
    if any, was played by God? ... The state splits five to three in support of
    scientific orthodoxy but the size of that minority of Christian social
    conservatives makes this ... far more than a theoretical discourse: they are
    part of election campaigns being fought fervently across the state.
    Controversy sprang up last year when the Kansas State Board of
    Education, an elected body that controls every aspect of schooling,
    ordained new "standards" for science teaching that critics say wrote
    Darwin out of the curriculum. The standards tell teachers what children
    must know for the end-of- year exams. With growing emphasis on results,
    critics say there is great pressure to teach only subjects in the standards.
    The Board appointed a panel of experts to write the standards, but heavily
    edited the resulting document, removing all references to Darwin,
    evolution, the Big Bang, even tectonic plates. That triumph of Christian
    conservatives over the curriculum provoked liberals and centrist members
    of the Republican party, which dominates the state. Now, with a
    Republican primary due on Aug 1 for one of four Kansas seats in
    Congress, Darwin, Adam and Eve are key political players. The campaign
    has split the party, pitting supporters of evolution against religious
    conservatives. Greg Musil, campaigning for the liberal wing, says the board
    embarrassed the state and could harm its economy. He asks: "Who wants
    to invest somewhere where the workforce is ignorant of science everyone
    else takes for granted?" ... In the middle, hoping to sweep up moderates
    alienated by both sides, is Gary Morsch, a GP who believes in the theory of
    "intelligent design", which accepts an evolutionary process but says God
    originated and guided it. He says: "Sometimes an idea becomes so big and
    so widespread that it should be taught in schools alongside the orthodoxy."
    ... [An unusually fair summary of the KBoE's actions - by a reporter *from
    Kansas*. The liberal Musil's remarks about "science everyone else takes for
    granted" unwittingly highlights the problem. It is gratifying to see that ID is
    sinking in to the public consciousness as the moderate position. It is even
    more gratifying seeing it in a *British* newspaper! An interesting thought
    that ID should be taught alongside the scientific "orthodoxy" simply
    because it is "so big and so widespread."]

    http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/scopes000713.html
    ABCNEWS ... Scopes Trial Revisited Trial Still Relevant, But Now
    Creationists Claim Censorship ... The Associated Press LAWRENCE,
    Kan., July 13 - ... Seventy-five years after the Scopes "monkey trial" over
    the teaching of evolution, parts of the landmark court case were reenacted
    in Kansas, the latest ground zero in the battle over what to teach kids about
    the origin of life. As about 1,500 people watched, actors read from
    transcripts of the 1925 trial in Tennessee that pitted William Jennings
    Bryan against defense attorney Clarence Darrow. The outcome was never
    in doubt. Biology teacher John Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for
    teaching evolution. His conviction was later overturned by the Tennessee
    Supreme Court on procedural grounds. Trial Issues Still Relevant ... The
    People for the American Way Foundation sponsored the event, as well as a
    panel discussion and debate on evolution and creationism following the
    performance. Foundation president Ralph Neas said ... "How Kansas
    resolves this dispute will ripple out in all directions to affect the education
    of millions of children who have never even set foot in this state," Neas
    said. ... Evolution, first propounded by Charles Darwin, advocates that the
    Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions of
    years. Creationism, or creation science, teaches that the Earth and most life
    forms came into existence suddenly about 6,000 years ago. Critics have
    attacked it as a disguise for a literal translation of the Bible's Book of
    Genesis. A Gallup Poll conducted last year found that 68 percent of
    American adults favored teaching both creationism and evolution in the
    public schools. By a margin of 55 percent to 40 percent, they opposed
    replacing evolution with creationism. ... The debate has heated up recently
    in a number of states ... from efforts to delete evolution from science
    standards and tests to including a disclaimer in textbooks downplaying the
    importance of the theory.... Creationists Complain of Censorship The
    education board's decision to approve the standards has focused national
    attention on Kansas and made evolution a political issue.... Linda
    Holloway...the board's chairwoman ... is seeking re-election, said that while
    the evolution debate continues 75 years after the Scopes trial, creationists
    are the ones under attack now. "We've come 180 degrees; now we've got
    censorship the other way," Holloway said ... Before the re-creation, Kansas
    native Asner said scientists have accumulated evidence in "a million
    different ways" to support evolution since the Scopes trial. "Kansas has put
    itself in a more bumbling situation with this board than Tennessee was 75
    years ago," he said. ... [I like the "a million different ways" - shades of the
    famous AAAS claim that "the 100 million fossils identified and dated in the
    world's museums `constitute 100 million facts that prove evolution beyond
    any doubt whatever.'" (Fix W.R., "The Bone Peddlers," 1984, pp.xiv).
    Neas puts his finger on why Kansas is so important. It is instructive how
    the two concepts are defined so that evolution can hardly be false and
    creation can hardly be true: "Evolution ... Earth is billions of years old and
    that life forms developed over millions of years" is contrasted with
    "Creationism..." (note the "-ism!) "...the Earth and most life forms came
    into existence suddenly about 6,000 years ago." It is interesting how the
    wheel has turned full circle since 1925 and now it is the evolutionists who
    are demanding State-supported censorship of opposing ideas!]

    http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0711-116.html
    Darwinism, Design and the Consequences for American Education U.S.
    Newswire. 11 Jul ... Darwinism, Design and the Consequences for
    American Education ... Discovery Institute Fellows will be the main
    speakers at a national symposium in Kansas City, Saturday, July 15, called
    "Darwin, Design & Democracy: Teaching the evidence in science
    education." The Kansas State Board of Education ignited a firestorm last
    year when they adopted a new set of science standards that critics claimed
    de-emphasized the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools.
    Detractors screamed that Biblical creationism was pushing out scientific
    evolution and the debate became a maelstrom of misrepresentation and
    inaccuracies. Few pundits understood the politics of the debate or the
    scientific evidence that fueled it. Now the Intelligent Design Network, Inc.
    is gathering together a group of scientists and other scholars to explore the
    debate between Darwinism and Design, and look at the consequences for
    American education. The symposium will feature four fellows of Discovery
    Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture: Michael J. Behe,
    ...Walter Bradley, ... David K. DeWolf, ... and Jonathan Wells, ... author of
    the forthcoming book "Icons of Evolution" (Regnery Press, 2000). Panels
    and presentations will include discussion of viewpoint neutrality in the
    classroom, a critique of High school science textbooks, and answers to
    criticism of intelligent design ... [The subtitle "Teaching the evidence in
    science education" aptly summarised ID's position. That is, teach *all* the
    evidence, including the hidden philosophical *assumptions* underlying
    naturalistic evolution, and the *problems* for the theory!]

    http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/82/xcursion/essay ... HMS Beagle. The
    BioMedNet Magazine. Issue 82. July 7 - 20, 2000 ... Science in Translation
    from Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures
    and Time (pp. 232-235) by Scott L. Montgomery ... The University of
    Chicago Press ...June 23, 2000 ... Here Montgomery describes the
    introduction in the late nineteenth century of Darwin's theories to Japan ...
    Western knowledge was embraced by the Japanese at this time in the
    context of a nationalism ...The term for "evolution," shinka, Ishikawa either
    coined himself or adopted from ...works...on Darwinian ideas, most notably
    Izawa Shuji's 1879 translation of Thomas Huxley's Lectures on the Origin
    of Species (1862). ... It was, however, an excellent choice: comprising the
    characters for "advancement" and "change," ... It was a term that could be
    said to have embodied two sensibilities at once: Darwin's own Victorian
    view of evolution as a process of continual improvement and, more
    immediately, the ideology of the Japanese Enlightenment, with its call to a
    civilizing nationalism. The political side to Darwinian language, therefore,
    was aptly retained, to serve the purposes of Japanese selfimagery. ...
    Japanese authors, meanwhile, took up Spencerian ideas and disseminated
    them broadly in copious writings, at times with government support.
    During the 1880s and 1890s, as the intellectual atmosphere of Japan grew
    increasingly conservative and nationalistic, many thinkers, officials, and
    students found themselves drawn to the concept of a struggle between
    nations, with "higher" species eventually winning out over "lower" ones
    (Nagazumi 1983). Indeed, the theory had no small attraction for those who
    argued against further Westernization .... "Survival of the fittest" became
    "victory of the superior and defeat of the inferior ... the language of
    evolution took on a more striking cast ... by the late 1880s and early 1890s,
    the pitch of nationalism had shifted to more reactionary concerns about
    national moral standards, loyalty among the people, and at the same time,
    about national destiny in terms of empire (teikoku). Western nations were
    being viewed more in oppositional terms, again as colonial aggressors, and
    as destructive models for Japanese character and virtue. ... Not satisfied
    with a literal rendering of Darwin's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest,"
    so central to Spencer's own philosophy, Kato felt compelled to evoke more
    of what he perceived to be its deeper significance ... "victory of the
    superior and defeat of the inferior." This, he asserted, was "the law of
    heaven," governing the world of plants and animals as well as that of
    human beings and the cultures they build...For a brief time, Kato's "victory
    of the superior. . ." was actually adopted into biological discourse. Though
    largely abandoned before the second decade of the twentieth century ...
    Kato's phrase was nonetheless revived during the era of rising militarism in
    the 1920s and 1930s, when eugenics came to Japan. ... [So Darwinism was
    responsible for providing the ideological justification not only for Nazism,
    Marxism, Stalinism, `robber-baron' capitalism, but even for Japanese
    militarism!]

    http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/07/13/fossil.air.enn/ ENN ... Earth's
    ancient atmosphere trapped in rocks ... July 13, 2000 ... Scientists on a
    quest to characterize the long-term chemical evolution of Earth's
    atmosphere need to understand what the air was like millions of years ago.
    To do this, they've come to realize they can leave no stone unturned.
    Uncovering the signature of so-called "fossil air" in terrestrial rocks and
    sediment is reported for the first time ... The signature is in the form of an
    irregular isotope of oxygen that gets transferred from ozone and other
    atmospheric oxidants to sulfate during the oxidation of reduced sulfur
    gases, according to Huiming Bao ... These oxidized gases become
    incorporated into sulfate minerals in solid deposits on Earth's surface.
    Scientists have searched for this signature for decades. They finally found it
    in gypsum deposits from the Namibian desert in Africa and in volcanic ash
    deposits in Nebraska and South Dakota. Detection of the isotope anomaly
    gives scientists an important new tool to answer questions about the
    composition of Earth's early atmosphere, the atmospheric processes of
    ancient volcanic eruptions, past ocean circulation patterns and early
    biological productivity. "No one has found a way you can measure the
    ancient atmosphere in solid examples," said Mark Thiemens ... "Ice cores
    don't go back far (about 250,000 years). Now one can go back hundreds of
    millions of years or billions of years." .... See also:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_830000/830514.stm [It
    will be interesting if they can tell whether the early Earth's atmosphere ~4.0
    bya contained significant amounts of oxygen. Even small amounts of
    oxygen ruin origin of life simulations.]

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_836000/836148.stm BBC
    ... 16 July, 2000 ... Biting beetle gives away secrets ... Scientists have
    described a species of beetle that lived at least 66 million years ago, even
    though they have little idea of what it looked like because they have no
    fossil of the creature's body. The only record they have of the minibeast are
    the marks it left as it chomped its way through its favourite food, ancient
    ginger leaves. ... Each had the characteristic chew marks that on some
    modern ginger plants and heliconias are left only by what are referred to as
    rolled-leaf hispine beetles. Paleobotanist Dr Wilf ... "People ask how we
    can claim a beetle did the damage when we don't have its fossil. But these
    traces in the leaves are as diagnostic of a beetle as tyres marks on a
    highway are of a skidding car. There's just no doubt about it." ... Dr Wilf's
    group say the oldest bite marks they have come across date back 66 million
    years, to the Mesozoic. This is about 20 million years older than any body
    fossils so far found ... The researchers believe the fossilised bite marks may
    be vital in shedding light on the evolutionary relationship between beetles
    and flowering plants. ... One theory has it that as flowering plants evolved
    many new species in the late Cretaceous so many new beetles evolved to
    fill in the ecological niches that suddenly became available. "The suggestion
    is that the reason we have hundreds of thousands of beetles today has
    everything to do with the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of
    species of flowering plants, " Dr Wilf said. With so few body fossils to
    study, the researchers say that the best way to test this theory is to look at
    the damage the insects left on the plants instead. "The damage can provide
    valuable data that otherwise would be unavailable if one depended only on
    the body-fossil record of insects," said co-author Dr Conrad Labandeira ...
    [The point is that beetles' distinctive mouthparts were already designed in
    advance to fit beautifully with the flowering plants' reproductive systems
    when they appeared: "The great radiation of modern insects began 245
    million years ago and was not accelerated by the expansion of angiosperms
    during the Cretaceous period. The basic trophic machinery of insects was
    in place nearly 100 million years before angiosperms appeared in the fossil
    record" (Labandeira, C.C., & J.J. Sepkoski, "Insect Diversity in the Fossil
    Record," Science, Vol. 261, 16 July 1993, p.310)]

    http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/heart000713.html
    ABCNEWS ... The two, separate primordial heart buds of a zebra fish
    embryo. Scientists have found the substance that causes the two halves to
    join. (University of California San Francisco) ... July 13 - There is a
    moment in the life of every vertebrate, be it fish, human or hamster, when
    the heart literally comes together. This is when two separate, primordial
    heart buds join inside the embryo and begin to beat. Now scientists have
    located the molecule that jump-starts this critical merging. "... called S1P ...
    but the name of the gene that triggers S1P to start working is ..."miles
    apart." Zwartkruis identified the "miles apart" gene in ... the zebra fish. ...
    The eggs are transparent, as are the embryos inside. ... scientists have
    observed as two heart buds inside the zebra fish embryo migrate toward
    each other and merge about 22 hours into the embryo's life. The heart
    begins beating soon thereafter. To zero in on the gene and the molecule
    that cause the two sides of the heart to join, Didier and Zwartkruis
    analyzed the eggs of zebra fish whose mutations prevented their primordial
    heart halves from binding. When it isn't blocked, the S1P molecules create
    a field that attracts the heart buds and draws them together. ... S1P... plays
    a significant role in wound healing. The presence of the molecule causes
    cells to cluster around the edges of a wound and then heal up. ... "There
    are no good models of wound healing," .... "But by studying the molecule
    in the Zebra fish, we might find ways to speed up the healing process." ...
    understanding how the heart forms is also interesting in itself ...the two
    human primordial heart buds join when the embryo is about three week's
    old. By understanding what substances cause this critical fusion to happen,
    Didier says scientists are one step closer to understanding how life
    develops at its earliest moments. [This sounds like another Irreducible
    Complexity problem. To prepare two halves of a system and then bring
    them together at a final stage would normally be considered a mark of
    advanced intelligent design. But to make it so that it would also serve in
    wound healing is the mark of a virtuoso! I would be interested to see an
    explanation of how an undirected `blind watchmaker' mechanism even
    *could* discover such an *ingenious* solution (see tagline), bearing in
    mind that having some form of heart and wound healing is *fundamental*
    to animal life: "The circulatory system is the first functional unit in the
    developing embryo, and the heart is the first functional organ" (Gilbert
    S.F., "Developmental Biology," 1994, p.342)]

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_830000/830193.stm BBC
    ... "It may be impossible for humans to live in weightless conditions" ... 12
    July, 2000 ... Space living 'would damage health' Lack of gravity in space
    causes problems for the body's cells Scientists have uncovered a compelling
    reason why the dream of colonising space may be a non-starter. It seems
    that the skeletons within living cells may not form properly in zero gravity.
    This means that it may be impossible to live in space over the long-term
    without creating a form of artificial gravity. Most cells have skeletons made
    up of microtubules made from fibres of the protein tubulin. ... When the
    mixture was warmed to body temperature for six minutes, microtubules
    began to form in distinct bands at right angles to gravity. Next, the team
    sent up tubulin on a European Space Agency ... rocket to expose it to the
    effect of weightlessness. They found that when microtubules formed, they
    pointed in all directions. Dr Tabony said: "This shows gravity triggers the
    pattern." ... Dr Lewis's team tested the impact of weightlessness on human
    white blood cells that were flown on board the space shuttle. After a day in
    orbit, the microtubules grew in random directions. The findings might
    explain some of the health problems people living in space have, such as
    depressed immune systems. ... Anderton, an expert in cell structures ... said
    microtubules played a vital role in the successful division of cells. ... This
    could blunt the function of the immune system, which relies on rapid
    production of white blood cells to fight off invaders when the body is
    infected. It could also cause problems with the renewal of epithelial tissues
    which line organs in the body. For instance, it could cause problems with
    the gut. ... "If it is really true that weightlessness interferes with
    microtubule function one could expect to see the same kind of adverse
    effects that are associated with quite a lot of anti-cancer drugs." ... [More
    problems with extended space travel and colonisation. Also, another
    finetuning parameter for life-maybe cells can only exist on a planet within a
    narrow Earth-like gravitational range?]

    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000713/sc/aids_drugs_dc_3.html
    Yahoo! ... July 13 ... Drug Firms Face Fight on Generic AIDS Drugs By ...
    DURBAN, South Africa (Reuters) - Officials from developing countries
    and the U.N. have been meeting behind closed doors to devise ways to get
    cheaper generic drugs to AIDS patients despite international patents on
    many of the products. .... The talks, facilitated by the U.N.'s own AIDS
    agency, UNAIDS, could make critically needed drug treatments affordable
    for the nearly 35 million people living with HIV or AIDS, most of whom
    are in the developing world ... Drug representatives reacted angrily to the
    efforts in Durban, denouncing the rise of "pirated drugs" as medically
    dangerous and a deterrent for the industry to make investments to find a
    cure for AIDS, which is crippling large parts of the developing world. ...
    Western drug firms could see potentially vast markets for their AIDS drugs
    in developing countries curtailed by an initiative to supply cheaper generic
    versions of their products to the world's poorest AIDS victims, ... Talks
    with generic producers stem from the growing frustration of some African
    and Asian governments over what they see as heavy-handed tactics by
    leading drug firms who are charged with being slow to reduce prices on
    branded drugs. ... A joint offer in May by the world's top five drug firms
    and the United Nations to cut prices of some drugs by 85 percent was ...
    not satisfactory ... International medical aid group Medecins Sans
    Frontieres (MSF) has joined the growing chorus of pressure groups urging
    the use of generic drugs to get them into the hands of the poor. ... See also:
    http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000713/sc/aids_apotex_dc_1.html
    Yahoo! ... July 13 ... Corporation Joins Call for Generic AIDS Drugs ...
    MONTREAL (Reuters) - Drug maker Apotex Inc. joined the international
    call for generic AIDS drugs ... saying it would be prepared to make them at
    cost if the Canadian government lifted the 20-year patents on brand-name
    medications. ... manufacturers of generic drugs would have to circumvent
    patents that protect the drug firms that make and market medications to
    which they own property rights. ... At the AIDS conference ... Canada
    would support the suspension of international drug patent agreements to
    make generic drugs more accessible to developing countries, especially in
    cases of emergencies. "...AIDS is war and that we must use every weapon
    we have to fight it," ... "We encourage the federal government to
    immediately use its powers under the Patent Act to grant the licenses that
    are required to save people who are dying needlessly." ... [If the drug
    companies really believed that hundreds of millions of people in poor
    nations will die of AIDS unless they receive their drugs, then they are
    morally bound to provide those drugs at a price that the poor nations can
    afford. To put their huge profits ahead of hundreds of millions of lives
    would be morally monstrous. Of course if they know their drugs don't
    work, there is a different moral problem!]
    ===================================================

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    "Evolution by natural selection is, as stressed above, in essence merely a
    special case of problem solving by trial and error. This implies that every
    evolutionary route followed during the course of evolution to every
    adaptive end must have been initially discovered and traced out as the
    result of a process which is in the end nothing more nor less than a gigantic
    random search. While it is easy to accept that a random search might hit on
    mutational routes leading to relatively trivial sorts of adaptive ends, such as
    the best coloration for a stoat or ptarmigan or the most efficient beak forms
    for each of the different species of Galapagos finch. But as to whether the
    same blind undirected search mechanism could have discovered the
    mutational routes to very complex and ingenious adaptations such as the
    vertebrate camera eye, the feather, the organ of corti or the mammalian
    kidney is altogether another question. To common sense it seems incredible
    to attribute such ends to random search mechanisms, known by experience
    to be incapable, at least in finite time, of achieving even the simplest of
    ends." (Denton M.J., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books:
    London, 1985, p.61)
    Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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