Push-Back Against 'Evolution' in Schools?

[PoliticalChic]

The specifics of Darwin have been modified and augmented. Darwin was an early thinker. Coming up with something he didn't fully understand is not an argument against evolution. And, it is ABSOLUTELY not an argument for existence of a god of any kind.

I don't know what you think the Burgess Shale proves or disproves. It certainly shows an explosion of new life, much of which was later eradicated - events of ebb and flow that are not unique in earth's biological history.

"The specifics of Darwin have been modified and augmented."
'Disproven' is the word you were hunting for.



"And, it is ABSOLUTELY not an argument for existence of a god of any kind."
What makes you bring that up?

Well...Darwin was endorsed by atheistic communists Marx and Engels.....I see the connection.

One of the first readers of 'On the Origin of Species' was Friedrich Engels, then living in Manchester. He wrote to Karl Marx: "Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect."
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Marx-Engels Collected Works" , vol. 40, p. 441.



"I don't know what you think the Burgess Shale proves or disproves."
That's true....you probably don't know.
It proves that Darwin was wrong.

Your motivation of course, PoliticalSpice. Only fundamentalist Christians are waging a "war on science".

I have a war on science the way Republicans have a war on women.

 

[PoliticalChic]

It's hard to take anyone serious who argues that because there is contradictory and incomplete evidence surrounding the theory of evolution it should be disregarded, while at the same time offering intelligent design as an alternative for which there is exactly zero scientific evidence.

"...contradictory...."

Indeed.


"It's hard to take anyone serious..."

If you are referring to me....you have either misunderstood the issue, or are obfuscating to win a point.


My argument is that not only was Darwin mistaken in his description of how evolution occurs, but evidence proves the exact of his thesis: the fossil record regularly shows fully formed brand new species without any trail of accumulated mutations.


Further..."And let us dispose of a common misconception. The complete transmutation of even one animal species into a different species has never been directly observed either in the laboratory or in the field." Dean H. Kenyon (Professor of Biology, San Francisco State University), affidavit presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, No. 85-1513, Brief of Appellants, prepared under the direction of William J. Guste, Jr., Attorney General of the State of Louisiana, October 1985, p. A-16.


Stephen Gould expresses the same view:
"Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed.'"
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge




Clearly you are uninformed.

There is a link right in the post you quoted.....clean off your specs, old timer.

 

[Old Rocks]

"The specifics of Darwin have been modified and augmented."
'Disproven' is the word you were hunting for.



"And, it is ABSOLUTELY not an argument for existence of a god of any kind."
What makes you bring that up?

Well...Darwin was endorsed by atheistic communists Marx and Engels.....I see the connection.

One of the first readers of 'On the Origin of Species' was Friedrich Engels, then living in Manchester. He wrote to Karl Marx: "Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect."
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Marx-Engels Collected Works" , vol. 40, p. 441.



"I don't know what you think the Burgess Shale proves or disproves."
That's true....you probably don't know.
It proves that Darwin was wrong.

Your motivation of course, PoliticalSpice. Only fundamentalist Christians are waging a "war on science".

I have a war on science the way Republicans have a war on women.

And you are losing in both.

 

[elektra]

Its a shame that the Liberal Democrats are attacking everything in the USA, Liberals are winning this battle, they completely control the brainwashing of children in our schools and they will not relinquish that power, its much to important to the Liberal agenda.

 

[Steven_R]

The judge in Kitzmiller is a Republican, nominated by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W Bush. This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of allowing nonscience in science classrooms.

You want Godditit (and let's be honest here about what the end goal is) in science classrooms then start producing peer-reviewed work. I don't mean in Creation Science Weekly either. Start getting work in Nature and Science and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Put it in places where the experts can actually examine the work and see if it stands up to technical scrutiny. Present papers at real conferences. Go through the process. Do enough of that and it will end up in grad students texts, then under grad texts, then survey course texts, then children's science texts.

Biologists would be chomping at the bit to disprove evolution. Overturn a century and a half of observations and testing means someone's getting a Nobel Prize. There's a reason that isn't being done and that reason is that regardless of what the e-warriors think, evolution works.

Or we could just blame it on the Democrats. That's good too.

 

[elektra]

The judge in Kitzmiller is a Republican, nominated by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W Bush. This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of allowing nonscience in science classrooms.

You want Godditit (and let's be honest here about what the end goal is) in science classrooms then start producing peer-reviewed work. I don't mean in Creation Science Weekly either. Start getting work in Nature and Science and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Put it in places where the experts can actually examine the work and see if it stands up to technical scrutiny. Present papers at real conferences. Go through the process. Do enough of that and it will end up in grad students texts, then under grad texts, then survey course texts, then children's science texts.

Biologists would be chomping at the bit to disprove evolution. Overturn a century and a half of observations and testing means someone's getting a Nobel Prize. There's a reason that isn't being done and that reason is that regardless of what the e-warriors think, evolution works.

Or we could just blame it on the Democrats. That's good too.

Science, you could not hack it as a Scientist, we know nothing compared to the amount of knowledge we have yet to learn. A Scientist must accept all possibilities, otherwise he is a bit closed minded, and being closed minded makes for a poor scientist.

 

[Steven_R]

Feel free to tell that to the National Academies of Science.

Many scientific theories are so well-established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics). Like these other foundational scientific theories, the theory of evolution is supported by so many observations and confirming experiments that scientists are confident that the basic components of the theory will not be overturned by new evidence. However, like all scientific theories, the theory of evolution is subject to continuing refinement as new areas of science emerge or as new technologies enable observations and experiments that were not possible previously.

Evolution Resources from the National Academies

Please let us know their response.

 

[FA_Q2]

These threads always have a single common problem that obliterates the core idea. They ALWAYS focus on supposed holes in evolutionary theory. Aside from the fact that the vast majority of those holes are due to a direct misunderstanding of evolutionary theory and the supporting evidence, they are rather meaningless. If you want creationism to be taught in schools then disproving evolution is not going to help one whit. You need to establish creationism as a scientific theory. The sad truth is that it is not. Creationism is a faith based belief, bereft of any actual evidence. It does not need evidence any more than your belief in God requires it – those are personal faith decisions and do not belong in the classroom.

As has been stated here, you can homeschool your children or take them to private institutions that teach such. That is your right and your freedom but you cannot demand that those things become part of the public education system. Your personal beliefs, no matter how sacred they are to you, simply do not belong there.

 

[Derideo_Te]

The judge in Kitzmiller is a Republican, nominated by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W Bush. This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of allowing nonscience in science classrooms.

You want Godditit (and let's be honest here about what the end goal is) in science classrooms then start producing peer-reviewed work. I don't mean in Creation Science Weekly either. Start getting work in Nature and Science and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Put it in places where the experts can actually examine the work and see if it stands up to technical scrutiny. Present papers at real conferences. Go through the process. Do enough of that and it will end up in grad students texts, then under grad texts, then survey course texts, then children's science texts.

Biologists would be chomping at the bit to disprove evolution. Overturn a century and a half of observations and testing means someone's getting a Nobel Prize. There's a reason that isn't being done and that reason is that regardless of what the e-warriors think, evolution works.

Or we could just blame it on the Democrats. That's good too.

Science, you could not hack it as a Scientist, we know nothing compared to the amount of knowledge we have yet to learn. A Scientist must accept all possibilities, otherwise he is a bit closed minded, and being closed minded makes for a poor scientist.

Irony squared!

Since you have no way to measure what we "have yet to learn" it is utterly foolish to make such a comparison. But that explains why you can't "hack it as a Scientist".

 

[NYcarbineer]

Its a shame that the Liberal Democrats are attacking everything in the USA, Liberals are winning this battle, they completely control the brainwashing of children in our schools and they will not relinquish that power, its much to important to the Liberal agenda.

Do you honestly believe that future advances in scientific knowledge in the area of evolution/origin of life/ etc. is going to move us backwards,

closer to the rendition provided in Genesis in the Bible?

 

[NYcarbineer]

The judge in Kitzmiller is a Republican, nominated by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W Bush. This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of allowing nonscience in science classrooms.

You want Godditit (and let's be honest here about what the end goal is) in science classrooms then start producing peer-reviewed work. I don't mean in Creation Science Weekly either. Start getting work in Nature and Science and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Put it in places where the experts can actually examine the work and see if it stands up to technical scrutiny. Present papers at real conferences. Go through the process. Do enough of that and it will end up in grad students texts, then under grad texts, then survey course texts, then children's science texts.

Biologists would be chomping at the bit to disprove evolution. Overturn a century and a half of observations and testing means someone's getting a Nobel Prize. There's a reason that isn't being done and that reason is that regardless of what the e-warriors think, evolution works.

Or we could just blame it on the Democrats. That's good too.

Science, you could not hack it as a Scientist, we know nothing compared to the amount of knowledge we have yet to learn. A Scientist must accept all possibilities, otherwise he is a bit closed minded, and being closed minded makes for a poor scientist.

If a scientist has to accept all possibilites, then I suppose he has to accept the possibility that everything is an illusion, the possibility for example that the Earth only seems to be 5 or 6 billion years old because a supernatural supreme being tricked us by making it look that way.

So does a scientist have to accept that possibility? You say yes. But does not a scientist also have the right to categorize the relative merit of that possibility?

Does he not also have the right, and in fact the responsibility, to use reason, logic, and his knowledge of the available evidence to judge the odds of that possibility as high or as low as he sees fit?

 

[FA_Q2]

The judge in Kitzmiller is a Republican, nominated by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W Bush. This isn't a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of allowing nonscience in science classrooms.

You want Godditit (and let's be honest here about what the end goal is) in science classrooms then start producing peer-reviewed work. I don't mean in Creation Science Weekly either. Start getting work in Nature and Science and the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Put it in places where the experts can actually examine the work and see if it stands up to technical scrutiny. Present papers at real conferences. Go through the process. Do enough of that and it will end up in grad students texts, then under grad texts, then survey course texts, then children's science texts.

Biologists would be chomping at the bit to disprove evolution. Overturn a century and a half of observations and testing means someone's getting a Nobel Prize. There's a reason that isn't being done and that reason is that regardless of what the e-warriors think, evolution works.

Or we could just blame it on the Democrats. That's good too.

Science, you could not hack it as a Scientist, we know nothing compared to the amount of knowledge we have yet to learn. A Scientist must accept all possibilities, otherwise he is a bit closed minded, and being closed minded makes for a poor scientist.

Irony squared!

Since you have no way to measure what we "have yet to learn" it is utterly foolish to make such a comparison. But that explains why you can't "hack it as a Scientist".

I would not say that. You actually can measure what is unknown (I don’t know what is in my neighbor’s house and I know that I don’t know it ) and science is quite clear that it definitely does not know half of what’s out there. What we can’t measure is what we think we know but is actually incorrect but history shows us that most of what we think of as simple fact today is likely incorrect. Hell, we still use some of those models that are known to be incorrect because they are far simpler. Bohr’s Atom is a good example of that.

All that, of course, does not justify the disregard of scientific theory based on, well, nothing. The funny part is that when what we thought is overturned it is not by some declaration of faith or another answer that was already ‘known’ but by another scientific theory that fits the facts that are already established.

 

[Derideo_Te]

Science, you could not hack it as a Scientist, we know nothing compared to the amount of knowledge we have yet to learn. A Scientist must accept all possibilities, otherwise he is a bit closed minded, and being closed minded makes for a poor scientist.

Irony squared!

Since you have no way to measure what we "have yet to learn" it is utterly foolish to make such a comparison. But that explains why you can't "hack it as a Scientist".

I would not say that. You actually can measure what is unknown (I don’t know what is in my neighbor’s house and I know that I don’t know it ) and science is quite clear that it definitely does not know half of what’s out there. What we can’t measure is what we think we know but is actually incorrect but history shows us that most of what we think of as simple fact today is likely incorrect. Hell, we still use some of those models that are known to be incorrect because they are far simpler. Bohr’s Atom is a good example of that.

All that, of course, does not justify the disregard of scientific theory based on, well, nothing. The funny part is that when what we thought is overturned it is not by some declaration of faith or another answer that was already ‘known’ but by another scientific theory that fits the facts that are already established.

It is the comparison that is utterly meaningless. Your neighbor's house is finite. Knowledge might be finite or infinite but we don't know that yet. So comparing what we know against an imaginary quantity of unknown knowledge means that the result is 99.999999999999% wrong.