The Lakeland Ledger published a second part to their story on the disconnect betweens citizens and science today: Public, Private Schools Diverge in Handling of Biology, Cosmology. (My post about the first article is here.)
There isn’t anything new revealed in either yesterday’s or today’s articles. Public schools are supposed to teach evolution while private religious schools can teach creationism. The insights provided in today’s article by some religious school students who have gone on to science related careers are interesting. But the reality, as they demonstrate, is that you can learn and retain what you must in order to perform in your chosen field, but you can also easily discard what you don’t believe if it isn’t something necessary to your daily work. Sad but true. Notice how one such person who is in the immunology field accepts some parts of evolution but not others:
Rice said he knows his acceptance of the Bible as the ultimate authority sets him apart from most scientists, but he said it “presents far fewer challenges in my professional life than one might think.” He stressed that it would be “foolish” to ignore the evolutionary nature of cells, viruses and organisms in his work as an immunologist, noting that each year’s development of an influenza vaccine relies upon an understanding of how the flu virus mutates and adapts.
Rice said he doesn’t consider acceptance of all the dominant scientific theories mandatory for being a good scientist.
“They may help a scientist form a particular approach, but I do not think he must hold fast to the tenets of natural selection above all else in order to achieve his goals and answer the questions that deeply interest him,” Rice said.
Other than one glaring error in yesterday’s article (that might have been just a simple typo that changed the whole meaning of the sentence), I think the reporter did a decent job on these articles. What do you think?
I agree not to bad.
… the tenets of natural selection above all else …
Apparently this scientist has not kept up too well with current developments in biology, which (per Laurence Moran, PZ Myers, et al) lay more emphasis on the mechanisms of genetics qua genetics than on Darwinian natural selection.
Possibly Dr. Rice’s selective rejection of core biological theory handicaps him more than he realizes.
Pierce
“Possibly Dr. Rice’s selective rejection of core biological theory handicaps him more than he realizes.”
Perhaps you might expound on the core biological theory thought a bit. You’ve touched an interesting point. I’ve never been shown where any of the fields of science must absolutely accept the single common ancestor idea for science to make sense. Other than teaching Darwinian evolution, printing it’s literature and curriculim, making fake fossils for fun and profit, cashing in on government grants or providing an secularist explanation for origins, there doesn’t seem to be any real utilitarian value to the notion.
If somebody out there gives a year-end award for non-sequiturs, Chris might get an honorable mention in the also-ran featherweight category.
What I was trying to say (& maybe did say to less ideologically-blinkered readers), is that Rice apparently hasn’t kept up with the professional literature of his field. Seemingly having convinced himself that biological changes are all attributed to natural selection and that he, he!, knows better than all of his colleagues, he has neglected his own education and reveals it by sharing his obsolete conception of current developments in research.
As for Chris’s inane query, I suggest he look up Theodosius Dobzhansky’s most-repeated dictum – or that he try to claim expertise in any field, in the presence of real experts, while insisting that the history of that subject can and should be ignored.
Every scientific field overlaps with many others, and the whole hangs together without mutual contradiction (though some models, such as Relativity and Quantum Dynamics, still need work to function together). Genetics dovetails with paleontology, geology with astronomy, astrophysics with electronics, on and on – and they all work, producing tangible results.
Meanwhile, every time creationists try to put detail to their ideas, they end up having to claim that well-supported findings in chemistry, thermodynamics, astronomy, etc, etc, have fatal flaws. Their pieces don’t fit into the rest of the puzzle at all, and creationism has so far made zero contributions that anyone in working science has found useful.
I was hopping you might have something to add of substance. But I guess regurgitating the standard talking points is only what you can produce, so sad. So we can surmise from your response that pond scum to people evolution and creationism both as ideology have made zero contributions to working science.
Dobzhansky’s idealized statement would be correct, if he was for correct. His belief that billions of years of evolution is God’s, or Nature’s method of creation, is just a belief. Biological evolution changes existing life, but it doesn’t create it. Biological evolution as a vehicle for the creation of life makes no scenes at all.
“Meanwhile, every time creationists try to put detail to their ideas, they end up having to claim that well-supported findings in chemistry, thermodynamics, astronomy, etc, etc, have fatal flaws. ” Help me out with this one. What would some of those fatal flaws be? Thanks.
Chris – For 2014, I recommend you read the Index to Creationist Claims.
Happy New Year!
Pierce
I always like reading the atheist site Talk Origins. How they have compiled so much twisted information into such a small space is amazing. I really enjoyed the first so called creationist claim. CA001 “Evolution is the foundation of an immoral worldview.” Source: Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon, who was a cult leader with mass weddings and self proclaimed messiah, Talk Origins is really working hard to get solid information. Most humorous. TO’s responses are just as comical. “The process of evolution leads naturally to social animals such as humans developing ethical principles such as the Golden Rule.” Golden rule, are we quoting Matthew 7:12 now?
I can’t seem to find anything where the laws of thernodynamics have fatal flaws.
Creationist Claim CF001 “The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends toward disorder, making evolutionary development impossible.”
TO’s response: “The second law of thermodynamics says no such thing. It says that heat will not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one or, equivalently, that total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease….”
Wikipedia “The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.”
A perpetual motion machine of the second kind is a machine which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work
Webster Entropy
2 a :Â the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity
b :Â a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder
Talk Origins, “The only processes necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection. All of these are seen to happen all the time, so, obviously, no physical laws are preventing them. In fact, connections between evolution and entropy have been studied in depth, and never to the detriment of evolution (Demetrius 2000). 

Several scientists have proposed that evolution and the origin of life is driven by entropy (McShea 1998). Some see the information content of organisms subject to diversification according to the second law (Brooks and Wiley 1988), so organisms diversify to fill empty niches much as a gas expands to fill an empty container. Others propose that highly ordered complex systems emerge and evolve to dissipate energy (and increase overall entropy) more efficiently (Schneider and Kay 1994). ”
In light of thermodynamic equilibrium the conclusions proposed by McShea and others are a good indication of the hopeless state evolutionist find themselves in explaining the origin of life. Or perhaps it’s a good indication of long term pot smoking.
Chris – Pls (a) count the changings-of-subject in the above thread, (b) tally how many came from you, and (c) look up “evasion” in the dictionary.
Chris,
I have never seen the “Gish Gallop” presented in writing before. Quite amazing!!
Stupid me. I thought you guys could connect the dots. My Mistake.