defanatic wrote:I think a high school student would be able to debate him. When I was in high school, I would have been able to point out that he doesn't know what evolution actually is, and that we have seen all the things he lists. That evolution is both a fact and theory (it has happened, and has mechanisms). And so-on. A high school education is enough to trounce this guy.
Ask him what Ph.D. he holds--- oh wait! A high school teacher talking ojut of his rear doesn't need to think. He's a /teacher/. A physics teacher, who believes himself an expert on biology, abiogenesis, morality and theology.
C'mon, some high school kid needs to kick his face in. Verbally and factually.
defanatic wrote:I think a high school student would be able to debate him.
Being right doesn't guarantee victory. These people offer up these debates because they know they can play to the crowd and win. Your high school student isn't going to have either the debate experience, nor the depth of knowledge necessary to win against these kind of people.
The most basic assumption about the world is that it does not contradict itself.
While I would like to jump on the "he's a physics teacher not a biology teacher" bandwagon, I would caution as using authority as the only reason to oppose the guy. It's a losing battle because sooner or later there will be a deceptive or ideologically founded person who will go through the work, reject its authenticity and get a Ph.D. in biology just for the hell of it.
It will be scattergun tactics. Pump out a lot of information in as little time as possible with a lot of unverifiable facts or even plain lies that need research to bring counterexamples to debunk. Maybe he won't even know they're lies since he'll be reading creationist propaganda.
It's about rhetoric, not research. So he could win. They're going to the public because they know that scientific journals wouldn't print their bullshit.
brianeyci wrote:It's about rhetoric, not research. So he could win. They're going to the public because they know that scientific journals wouldn't print their bullshit.
And that is the issue here: in the United States, the people are the final arbiter of what gets taught and what doesn't. Taking the issue straight to the people is the most direct way to circumvent what creationists are incapable of accomplishing scientifically: validation for the theory. Since the American public is generally weak-minded, with rotting brains (products of a broken education system), they are convinced by anybody who both appeals to them and speaks with conviction and sincerity -- as the election and reelection of George Bush attests. A creationist both appeals to the folksy, rural, religious ideal most people hold of an idyllic life, and, because he believes his own bullshit, speaks with utter certainty that he is correct. This is why going straight to the people is so dangerous: people can be easily persuaded and played.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
Who wants to bet this butthead hand picks the high schoolers who will be the jury?
"everytime a person is born the Earth weighs just a little more."--DMJ on StarTrek.com
"You see now you are using your thinking and that is not a good thing!" DMJay on StarTrek.com
"Watching Sarli argue with Vympel, Stas, Schatten and the others is as bizarre as the idea of the 40-year-old Virgin telling Hugh Hefner that Hef knows nothing about pussy, and that he is the expert."--Elfdart
Darth Servo wrote:Who wants to bet this butthead hand picks the high schoolers who will be the jury?
Of course he will. The fix was in on this from the jump.
When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln
People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House
Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)
Wicked Pilot wrote:You mean people who can't find Canada on a map should be allowed to dictate the scientific validity of well established biology theories? We'll see how far that flies.
C'mon, Canada is hard to find...all tucked away down there...
"The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles."
petesampras wrote:"Yet science has yet to build even a rudimentary computer than can contemplate its own existence1, the hallmark of the human brain."
What exactly is a test for whether or not something is capable of contemplating its own existance? As far as I can see this is inherently untestable, therefore can not be used as a judge of AI. Anti-AI people say stuff like this a lot, yet fail to come up with any objective test for the criteria.
I know this thread is about evolution, rather than AI, but I saw that and it pissed me off.
The guy clearly has no background in the field. (What a shock.) While there are some people still trying to achieve this lofty goal of creating a self-aware artificial intelligence, we've long-since realized that AI is much better-suited to pattern recognition and specialized problem-solving. AI has plenty of objectively-testable criteria for performance.
Damien Sorresso
"Ever see what them computa bitchez do to numbas? It ain't natural. Numbas ain't supposed to be code, they supposed to quantify shit."
- The Onion
If this school hasn't already shut this down, either their biology teachers are morons, or their administration is.
...and on the topic of high schoolers debating him... I know several people at my school who could both defeat him at debate, and win the public support. Of course, there's also the people that curbstomp him in debate, but they don't really go for the public support.
Darth Wong wrote:Any high-school teacher who wants a public debate with his own students as the judging panel is not just a liar, he's also an asshole.
Hey now, no reason to insult all the assholes in the world by grouping this turd in with them. Wait did I just insults the turd population??
Darth Wong wrote:Any high-school teacher who wants a public debate with his own students as the judging panel is not just a liar, he's also an asshole.
Aren't all creationists who want ID in school?
"everytime a person is born the Earth weighs just a little more."--DMJ on StarTrek.com
"You see now you are using your thinking and that is not a good thing!" DMJay on StarTrek.com
"Watching Sarli argue with Vympel, Stas, Schatten and the others is as bizarre as the idea of the 40-year-old Virgin telling Hugh Hefner that Hef knows nothing about pussy, and that he is the expert."--Elfdart
Darth Wong wrote:Any high-school teacher who wants a public debate with his own students as the judging panel is not just a liar, he's also an asshole.
Aren't all creationists who want ID in school?
Is the Space Pope reptillian?
Mayabird is my girlfriend
Justice League:BotM:MM:SDnet City Watch:Cybertron's Finest "Well then, science is bullshit. "
-revprez, with yet another brilliant rebuttal.
Darth Wong wrote:Any high-school teacher who wants a public debate with his own students as the judging panel is not just a liar, he's also an asshole.
If they're his own students, then he's practically, if not in name, coercing their support; it's quite possible his position of authority over them will intimidate them into voting for him.
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
“I want to put one of these evolutionists on the spot,” Ritter said yesterday while standing in his chemistry-lab classroom at Annville-Cleona High School. “I want them to put their money where their mouth is. Let’s belly up to the bar and see what you’re made of.”
No, IDers should belly up to the bar, and publish something in a peer-reviewed journal. A bunch of fuckwitted highschoolers aren't "the bar."
“I’m interested in science. I believe teaching evolution as fact perverts science. You could teach evolution as a theory, and I’d have no problem with that.
Sweet Jesus, this guy is supposed to have gone to college? Don't they elucidate basic scientific jargon for you in the first year?
1. No one has demonstrated that life can evolve where none existed before.
Of course not. Non-living organic matter can't evolve into life. That' s gross misunderstanding of the concept of evolution.
2. No one has demonstrated that a new sexual species can evolve.
Donkeys and horses. Lions and Tigers. Bacteria (though since you stipulate "sexual species" I guess these don't count -- why is that?). Fruit Flies. Dogs and Wolves (though these may be considered mere subspecies).
The rest are irrelevant to evolution, and show that he's clearly just attacking godlessness.
"If one needed proof that a guitar was more than wood and string, that a song was more than notes and words, and that a man could be more than a name and a few faded pictures, then Robert Johnson’s recordings were all one could ask for."
2. No one has demonstrated that a new sexual species can evolve.
Bullshit, we have proposed mechanisms for the evolution of sex itself, my favourite being the parasites driven idea. So by definition that includes all 'sexual' species.
Sexual Species. How come I've never heard this term before? It sounds like something Frankenfurter would say in Rocky Horror.
Don't abandon democracy folks, or an alien star-god may replace your ruler. - NecronLord
--If anyone has the time and is interested I believe they could win this "debate" under these circumstances.
-The 2nd rule is:
dumbass wrote:The resolution will be: "Unless the teacher acknowledges a possible alternative, teaching materialistic evolution as an explanation for the origin of life, the variety of sexual species or the existence of the human mind is an article of faith."
Tom Ritter will defend the affirmative position.
-As it is phrased all one has to do is show that Tom Ritter's opinion on the matter doesn't matter one bit with respect the question of whether evolution is a matter of faith. One can show this regardless of whether they use logic or faith (clearly Tom Ritter is not the pope or even a preist).
-One should point this out clearly and hammer on it and it alone.
-One will also have to appeal to the students using whatever method they feel is best (such as appealing to their sense of fairness, playing a poor guy looking for some quick cash, whatever).
Nova Andromeda, he is probably a fundamentalist, so probably will adhere to the doctrine of biblical literalism, and anyone being able to intrepret the Bible.
brianeyci wrote:It's about rhetoric, not research. So he could win. They're going to the public because they know that scientific journals wouldn't print their bullshit.
Brian
They'll print their bullshit, but only if they've got a man on the inside.
Cool there's exactly the bullshit from Mike's Creationism pages in that "inside job" hahaha.
Many scientists and mathematicians have questioned the ability of mutation and selection to generate information in the form of novel genes and proteins. Such skepticism often derives from consideration of the extreme improbability (and specificity) of functional genes and proteins.
A typical gene contains over one thousand precisely arranged bases. For any specific arrangement of four nucleotide bases of length n, there is a corresponding number of possible arrangements of bases, 4n. For any protein, there are 20n possible arrangements of protein-forming amino acids. A gene 999 bases in length represents one of 4999 possible nucleotide sequences; a protein of 333 amino acids is one of 20333 possibilities.
Since the 1960s, some biologists have thought functional proteins to be rare among the set of possible amino acid sequences. Some have used an analogy with human language to illustrate why this should be the case. Denton (1986, 309-311), for example, has shown that meaningful words and sentences are extremely rare among the set of possible combinations of English letters, especially as sequence length grows. (The ratio of meaningful 12-letter words to 12-letter sequences is 1/1014, the ratio of 100-letter sentences to possible 100-letter strings is 1/10100.) Further, Denton shows that most meaningful sentences are highly isolated from one another in the space of possible combinations, so that random substitutions of letters will, after a very few changes, inevitably degrade meaning. Apart from a few closely clustered sentences accessible by random substitution, the overwhelming majority of meaningful sentences lie, probabilistically speaking, beyond the reach of random search.
Denton (1986:301-324) and others have argued that similar constraints apply to genes and proteins. They have questioned whether an undirected search via mutation and selection would have a reasonable chance of locating new islands of function--representing fundamentally new genes or proteins--within the time available (Eden 1967, Shutzenberger 1967, Lovtrup 1979). Some have also argued that alterations in sequencing would likely result in loss of protein function before fundamentally new function could arise (Eden 1967, Denton 1986). Nevertheless, neither the extent to which genes and proteins are sensitive to functional loss as a result of sequence change, nor the extent to which functional proteins are isolated within sequence space, has been fully known
Ritter wants to argue the topic and have the debate judged by a panel of high-school students, with a cash prize at stake.
Since when does the consensus of the ignorant establish truth? Impartiality and consensus are so overemphasised and, well, wanked.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." - Benjamin Franklin.
Robert Gilruth to Max Faget on the Apollo program: “Max, we’re going to go back there one day, and when we do, they’re going to find out how tough it is.”
Nova Andromeda wrote:--If anyone has the time and is interested I believe they could win this "debate" under these circumstances.
-The 2nd rule is:
dumbass wrote:The resolution will be: "Unless the teacher acknowledges a possible alternative, teaching materialistic evolution as an explanation for the origin of life, the variety of sexual species or the existence of the human mind is an article of faith."
Tom Ritter will defend the affirmative position.
-As it is phrased all one has to do is show that Tom Ritter's opinion on the matter doesn't matter one bit with respect the question of whether evolution is a matter of faith. One can show this regardless of whether they use logic or faith (clearly Tom Ritter is not the pope or even a preist).
-One should point this out clearly and hammer on it and it alone.
-One will also have to appeal to the students using whatever method they feel is best (such as appealing to their sense of fairness, playing a poor guy looking for some quick cash, whatever).
From the way it is phrased (particularly "unless the teacher acknowledges a possible alternative"), he's already put the resolution in his favorite, since if the arguer for evolution can't convince him or his students, they automatically assume that it's nonsense. That makes for a hard debate, although you could probably score points with his students by making him look like a dumbass.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." -Margaret Atwood
Ritter wants to argue the topic and have the debate judged by a panel of high-school students, with a cash prize at stake.
Since when does the consensus of the ignorant establish truth? Impartiality and consensus are so overemphasised and, well, wanked.
It's part of that mindless "balance" argument which is based upon a Golden Mean Fallacy and assumes that the most reasonable judge is always one who is situated between two opposing opinions, or who has no pre-existing opinion at all. Of course, by this brain damaged logic, my dog is the ideal judge.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Nova Andromeda wrote:--If anyone has the time and is interested I believe they could win this "debate" under these circumstances.
-The 2nd rule is:
dumbass wrote:The resolution will be: "Unless the teacher acknowledges a possible alternative, teaching materialistic evolution as an explanation for the origin of life, the variety of sexual species or the existence of the human mind is an article of faith."
Tom Ritter will defend the affirmative position.
-As it is phrased all one has to do is show that Tom Ritter's opinion on the matter doesn't matter one bit with respect the question of whether evolution is a matter of faith. One can show this regardless of whether they use logic or faith (clearly Tom Ritter is not the pope or even a preist).
-One should point this out clearly and hammer on it and it alone.
-One will also have to appeal to the students using whatever method they feel is best (such as appealing to their sense of fairness, playing a poor guy looking for some quick cash, whatever).
From the way it is phrased (particularly "unless the teacher acknowledges a possible alternative"), he's already put the resolution in his favorite, since if the arguer for evolution can't convince him or his students, they automatically assume that it's nonsense. That makes for a hard debate, although you could probably score points with his students by making him look like a dumbass.
--Actually, it makes the debate easy. They won't be his students and all you will need to do is convince them that he made a mistake in phrasing the debate question. As it is phrased, the question is whether what he says about evolution has any impact on the truth of the matter. Even a brain dead slug can see that it does not since he can say whatever he wants. The rest is a simple matter of being nice and getting the high schoolers to like you. You can entirely avoid taking a position on evolution at all.....
Ritter wants to argue the topic and have the debate judged by a panel of high-school students, with a cash prize at stake.
Since when does the consensus of the ignorant establish truth? Impartiality and consensus are so overemphasised and, well, wanked.
It's part of that mindless "balance" argument which is based upon a Golden Mean Fallacy and assumes that the most reasonable judge is always one who is situated between two opposing opinions, or who has no pre-existing opinion at all. Of course, by this brain damaged logic, my dog is the ideal judge.
--On a related note, is there any reason this teacher would have an advantage in the "debate" if he isn't particularly skilled at rhetoric, beyond 50/50 chance that is?
