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Judgement Day: Intelligent Design On Trial
In this two-hour special, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers, and town officials, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. This program was coproduced with Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Productions, Inc. In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design--the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state. "There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism." NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as "What is evolution?" and "Is intelligent design a scientifically valid alternative?" Kitzmiller v. Dover was the first legal test of intelligent design as a scientific theory, with the plaintiffs arguing that it is a thinly veiled form of creationism, the view that a literal interpretation of the Bible accounts for all observed facts about nature. During the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs showed that evolution is one of the best-tested and most thoroughly confirmed theories in the history of science, and that its unresolved questions are normal research problems--the type that arise in any flourishing scientific field. U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III ultimately decided for the plaintiffs, writing in his decision that intelligent design "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents." As part of his decision, Judge Jones ordered the Dover school board to pay legal fees and damages, which were eventually set at $1 million. "Judgment Day captures on film a landmark court case with a powerful scientific message at its core," says Paula Apsell, NOVA's Senior Executive Producer. "Evolution is one of the most essential yet, for many people, least understood of all scientific theories, the foundation of biological science. We felt it was important for NOVA to do this program to heighten the public understanding of what constitutes science and what does not, and therefore, what is acceptable for inclusion in the science curriculum in our public schools." For years to come, the lessons from Dover will continue to have a profound impact on how science is viewed in our society and how it is taught in the classroom.
From ErniePyle on: 5/26/11views: 1289 -
The Incredible Human Journey: Europe
Follow the trail of ancient Europeans! Dr Alice Roberts describes the various waves of anatomically modern humans that settled the continent of Europe. She crosses the Bosphorus and travels up the Danube River, following their likely route. She then describes the already resident population of Neanderthals, and visits Gibraltar, the last known site occupied by Neanderthals. She suggests that the principal difference between them and Homo sapiens was the latter's ability to create art, and visits the cave paintings at Lascaux. She discusses the theories about why Europeans have white skin and describes the birth of agriculture and the societal changes that took place as a result, visiting a spectacular Neolithic temple in Turkey. There are seven billion humans on Earth, spread across the whole planet. Scientific evidence suggests that most of us can trace our origins to one tiny group of people who left Africa around 70,000 years ago. When our species first arrived in Europe, the peak of the Ice Age was approaching and the continent was already crawling with a rival: stronger, at home in the cold and even (contrary to the popular image) brainier than us. So how did the European pioneers survive first the Neanderthals and then the deep freeze as they pushed across the continent? Alice Roberts reconstructs the head of the 'first European' to come face to face with one of our ancestors; she discovers how art became crucial for survival in the face of Neanderthal competition; and what happened to change the skin colour of these European pioneers. Finally, spectacular new finds on the edge of Europe suggest that the first known temples may have been a spark for a huge revolution in our ancestors' way of life - agriculture. More @ http://www.alice-roberts.co.uk/
From ErniePyle on: 5/12/11views: 2577 -
The Incredible Human Journey: Asia
Dr Alice Roberts travels the globe to discover the incredible story of how humans left Africa to colonize the world. Alice Roberts travels to Siberia and visits an isolated community of indigenous people who still practice reindeer hunting. With reference to them, she asks how ancient Africans could have adapted to the hostile climate of northern Asia, and why Asian people look so different from Africans. Roberts then explores an alternative to the Out of Africa theory, the multiregional hypothesis that has gained support in some scientific communities in China. According to this theory, the Chinese are descended from a human species called Homo erectus rather than from the Homo sapiens from which the rest of humanity evolved. Roberts visits the Zhoukoudian caves, in which Peking Man, the supposed Homo erectus ancestor of the Chinese, was discovered. Roberts notes that some Chinese anthropologists and palaeontologists have shown modern Chinese physical characteristics in the fossil skulls, such as broad cheek bones, cranial skull shape and shovel-shaped incisors that are absent in almost all other humans. She also notes that the stone tools found in China seem more primitive than those elsewhere, and infers that they were made exclusively by Homo erectus. However, she argues that the skull evidence is only subtle. She interviews an American palaeontologist, who presents his hypothesis that the ancient Chinese humans used bamboo instead of stone, explaining the absence of sophisticated stone tools, despite the absence of archaeological evidence to support this hypothesis. Finally, Roberts interviews Chinese geneticist Jin Li, who ran a study of more than 10,000 individuals scattered throughout China from 160 ethnic groups. The study initially hypothesised that the modern Chinese population evolved from Homo erectus in China but concluded that the Chinese people did in fact evolve and migrate from Africa like the rest of world's population. More @ http://www.alice-roberts.co.uk/
From ErniePyle on: 5/6/11views: 2296 -
The Incredible Human Journey : Out Of Africa
The Incredible Human Journey is a five-episode science documentary and accompanying book, written and presented by Alice Roberts, first broadcast on BBC television in May and June 2009 in the United Kingdom. It explains the evidence for the theory of early human migrations out of Africa and subsequently around the world, attempting to argue in support of the Out of Africa Theory which states that all modern humans are descended from anatomically modern African Homo Sapiens rather than from the more archaic European/Middle Eastern Homo Neanderthalensis or the indigenous Chinese Homo Pekinensis. And that the modern African Homo Sapiens did not interbreed with the other separate species of archaic humans. Each episode concerns a different continent, and the series features scenes filmed on location in each of the continents featured. In the first episode, Dr Alice Roberts introduces the notion that genetic analysis suggests that all modern humans are descended from Africans. She visits the site of the Omo remains in Ethiopia, which are the earliest known anatomically modern humans, and visits the San people of Namibia to demonstrate the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In South Africa, she visits Pinnacle Point, to see the cave in which very early humans lived. She then explains that genetics suggests that all non-Africans may descend from a single, small group of Africans who left the continent tens of thousands of years ago. She explores various theories as to the route they took. She describes the Jebel Qafzeh remains in Israel as a likely dead end of a traverse across Suez, and sees a route across the Red Sea and the around the Arabian coast as the likelier route for modern human ancestors, especially given the lower sea levels in the past. Web sites of related interest http://www.familytreedna.com http://www.ancestry.com http://www.alice-roberts.co.uk/
From ErniePyle on: 4/6/11views: 2903 -
Devistating blow to the the evolution of the genetic code
Biophysicist Hubert Yockey has determined that natural selection would have to explore 1.40 x 10^70 different genetic codes to discover the optimal universal genetic code that is found in nature. He states that the maximum amount of time available for it to originate is 6.3 x 10^15 seconds, and that Natural Selection would have to evaluate roughly 10^55 codes per second to find the one that is optimal, which amount to one trillion times the 15 billion years of the imagined age of the universe for natural Selection to have created the genetic code, and therefore, the genetic code cannot have been produced by evolutionary processes. He states also that the genetic code possesses characteristics which could only have been a product of intelligence. Information is 1 : the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence Mutations do not communicate or possess knowledge or intelligence. ... 2 a (1) : knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction Mutations are random, and to not convey knowledge, which is specific, they do not investigate, study, or instruct. The changes they cause are not instruction because instruction is the communication of specific knowledge. Mutations do not possess or communicate knowledge. Changes to color or pattern caused by mutation are side effects of the corruption of information. Corrupting the code which determines color so that the code produces a different color is not the conveyance or production of information. It's merely a side effect. (3) : facts, data b : the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects Mutations do not produce facts or data. Facts and data are specific and produced only by intelligence. Mutations cannot communicate because communication is a process of intelligence. The change to the arrangement of nucleotides caused by mutation is not the communication of facts or data. It is merely corruption, modification of existing information. c (1) : a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data Mutations do not produce signals or characters which represent data. Data is a product of investigation and study which are activities of intelligence. Being random, mutations do not represent anything at all. (2) : something (as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct Mutations do not communicate messages or data. Constructs are products of intelligence. d : a quantitative measure of the content of information; specifically : a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed Mutations are random mistakes. They do not measure anything, nor do they convey knowledge. They cause entropy to the genetic code and are the single most important reason that all life on Earth is moving towards extinction. This is the opposite of the antiquated claims of evolutionists that mutation is the base mechanism for evolution and has produced the varieties of life. Evolutionism is an antiquated concept born in a time when people rode horses and used candles and oil lamps to light their homes. Modern science has discredited evolutionism in every imaginable way, and all new claims of evolutionists are discredited by what is already known in science.
From nowyouseetv on: 12/12/10views: 1001 -
GOD IS SPEAKING - Through encoded messages! Amazing Info here!
This is a stand-alone clip from "THE BIBLE THE BODY AND BIOCHEMISTRY" From ICHTHUS FILMS. This vid sets forth the proposition that God HAS spoken and IS speaking through the "encoded" message of DNA. It is far more complex than Egyptian or Greek - or anything that SETI has looked for from space. It is exacting - predictable and understandable. It is mathematical and undeniably amazing...Could it be that God is speaking and we are just not listening?
From nowyouseetv on: 9/2/10views: 919