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Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

 
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Tue 30 Jun, 2009 12:55 pm
@farmerman,
Quote:
I wonder what a typical day at camp will include?


Reveille at 6 am. Parade. Inspection. Museli buffet. Controlled play. Break for orange juice. Laughing at God session. Lunch on brocolli butties and spa water. Standing around in bunches being organised. Tea of cucumber sandwiches. Videos of Mr Dawkins looking responsible. Nursery rhymes. Charades. Putting spiders down girl's frocks. Lights out. Total silence.

No smoking.

I ******* hate adults.

0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Tue 30 Jun, 2009 12:57 pm
@farmerman,
Quote:
YEh, what do they think they are, some kind of Baptist Bible Camp?


The same goes for them too.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Tue 30 Jun, 2009 01:35 pm
Here's a "Tree of Life" artistic style.

Quote:
One morning the sisters were sketching by the side of Willey Water, at the remote end of the lake. Gudrun had waded out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water-plants that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, thick and cool and fleshy, very straight and turgid, thrusting out their leaves at right angles, and having dark lurid colours, dark green and blotches of black-purple and bronze. But she could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she knew how they thrust out from themselves, how they stood stiff and succulent against the air.

Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near the water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a jewel-life, a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and breathing with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there was a halo round them; ah, when they came tumbling nearer they were orange-tips, and it was the orange that had made the halo. Ursula rose and drifted away, unconscious like the butterflies.

Gudrun, absorbed in a stupor of apprehension of surging water-plants, sat crouched on a shoal, drawing, not looking up for a long time, and then staring unconsciously, absorbedly at the rigid, naked, succulent stems. Her feet were bare, her hat lay on the opposite bank.


Don't that just beat out of sight those silly, oversimplified "Tree of Life" visual aids that you silly sods want to show the kids with a few well known species fastened to a branch like pressies on a Christmas tree?

Rupert, you will remember, had to get up some very fancy speeches to tame Ursula but Gudrun killed the cutting-edge machine production scientist. Stone dead. Frozen stiff.
0 Replies
 
rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Tue 30 Jun, 2009 06:04 pm
@wandeljw,
wandeljw wrote:

Quote:
There are traditional outdoor activities...
canoeing
climbing
zip wire
high ropes...


The traditional stuff sounds pretty good to me. But I would add bow and arrow target shooting to the list as well as animal tracking.

I think nature is its own best instructor and you probably don't need to push the details of science as much as just letting kids get their feet wet and being there to answer their questions honestly and without making up **** (like God did it) when you don't know the answer.

Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Wed 1 Jul, 2009 09:42 am
@rosborne979,
How about animal photography -- could be a future National Geographic photog in the bunch.
0 Replies
 
wandeljw
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 08:57 am
Quote:
Put your affairs in order, biologists. Your time is nigh!
(by PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com, June 22, 2009)

We only have a month or two left. I have been reminded of a prediction made in the July/August 2004 issue of Touchstone magazine. Brace yourselves:
"Dembski: In the next five years, molecular Darwinism"the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level"will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.”

Man, I'm glad I'll be on sabbatical. It'll give me a year to patch up the radical changes I'll have to make in all of my courses after the ID revolution comes. The rest of you are going to be coming back to rubble in September.

Although, I should also mention that the very next paragraph in that article is the one credible paragraph Paul Nelson ever wrote:
Nelson: Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a real problem. Without a theory, it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we've got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as "irreducible complexity" and "specified complexity"--but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.”

Almost five years on, still no theory.
rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 09:00 am
@wandeljw,
wandeljw wrote:

Quote:
Put your affairs in order, biologists. Your time is nigh!
(by PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com, June 22, 2009)
For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.”[/i]


What they got instead was talented new propagandists.
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 09:22 am
@rosborne979,
Wishful thinking -- they're still attributing characteristics to Darwin's "paradigm" than actually exist, so their very foundation is false. How does any scientist proceed from an initially proven false premise? It's like trying to prove the Earth was made out of play dough (you know, the kind you can "roll into a ball" Laughing )
0 Replies
 
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 09:30 am
@wandeljw,
I was able to get hold of one of my old Paleontology professors (retired 2006) at UCLA to obtain the DVD's of this lecture series which I was unable to attend and we unfortunately don't receive the channel on our Time Warner cable:

http://www.eeb.ucla.edu/news.php
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 06:12 pm
@Lightwizard,
You can bet that Erick De la Barrera and William K. Smith got top marks.
0 Replies
 
wandeljw
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 07:32 am
Quote:
Evolution of confusion: pupils take dinosaur fiction for fact
(By Adi Bloom, Times Education Supplement, July 3, 2009)

All pupils should be taught evolution from primary school onwards so they do not mistake Barney the dinosaur for scientific fact, a leading science education academic has said.

James Williams, lecturer in education at the University of Sussex, believes TV programmes such as The Flintstones and Barney & Friends, as well as films such as One Million Years BC, starring Raquel Welch as a bikini-clad cavewoman, have created a pop-culture cliche of interaction between humans and dinosaurs which is exploited by creationists.

Addressing the British Humanist Association this month, Mr Williams said creationists deliberately feed children scientific misconceptions. Children then build on these, adapting all new knowledge so that it fits into their mistaken understanding of the world.

He said: “It is intellectual abuse when a person in a position of power and authority, claiming expertise in science, deliberately provides a non- scientific explanation for the development and diversity of life on earth.”

The earlier and more established the misconceptions, the more difficult it can be to correct them in later life, he said.

Because most children love dinosaurs, creationists tempt them with books, toys and museums featuring assorted prehistoric wildlife. Their literature targets primary pupils, presenting pseudoscientific explanations alongside images of dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden or descriptions of dinosaurs dying out during the great flood. Popular culture unwittingly reinforces this, with images of Fred Flintstone riding a dinosaur to work or Raquel Welch fending off a giant tortoise.

“We’re often on the back foot, responding to creationist attacks, rather than getting on with the job of preventing bankrupt pseudoscience from making an impression on young minds,” Mr Williams said.

He called for education about evolution to start early. At the moment, far too much is left until key stage 4, he said. “Misconceptions set in primary will be very difficult, if not impossible, to correct over 10 years later.”

Teachers should be practised in combating creationist arguments, he said. “Science is about the acceptance of evidence, and is not a belief system. We should resist talking about a belief in evolution.”

And scientists should watch their language, he said. Many mistakenly confuse the words “theory” and “hypothesis”: in scientific terms, a theory is a clearly proven fact.

“As a community of scientists and science educators, we can prevent the ideas being taken on as factual, and we can prevent the misconceptions taking hold,” Mr Williams said. “We can only do this, however, if we are proactive in teaching evolution at an earlier stage in schooling, and we can only prevent it with robust examples from the vast weight of scientific evidence for evolution that currently exists.”
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 09:18 am
@wandeljw,
Here you go. As I predicted years ago. They want to censor films and books and entertainment.

They are very dangerous people and the public is well justified in treating them with suspicion and fear.

The very last thing they are is "humanists".

The real humanist recognises that human beings are irrational, unreasonable, emotional and ridiculous and works with those facts instead of pretending they are non existent (the ostrich) or can be corrected (the mad control freak).

0 Replies
 
MontereyJack
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 11:25 am
Do you need new glasses, spendi? Do try reading what is there, rather than what you think is there. I see nothing about censorship. I do see something about teaching the facts as we know them. That's what most of us think teaching is about. We know you don't. Silly you.
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 11:36 am
@MontereyJack,
Spendi confirms his suppositions by describing himself in the final paragraph.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 03:40 pm
@MontereyJack,
Quote:
James Williams, lecturer in education at the University of Sussex, believes TV programmes such as The Flintstones and Barney & Friends, as well as films such as One Million Years BC, starring Raquel Welch as a bikini-clad cavewoman, have created a pop-culture cliche of interaction between humans and dinosaurs which is exploited by creationists.


That's a start on censoring TV content Jack. If it isn't to you I guess you must be one of the ones who will be in charge of the censoring when such radical and dangerous idea metamorphise from bud, through blossom, to fruit.

And what does "Silly you" mean? We need to keep people who debate in that manner well away from education. It's a cat spitting. And no more.

We all know that Williams believes exploitation by Creationists to be evil so one assumes he wishes to take editorial control of The Flintstones and Barney & Friends and Raquel. Fat chance unless we all lie down before him.


0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 05:29 pm
@Lightwizard,
I'm a bit pissed so I'll try again.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 05:37 pm
@Lightwizard,
Quote:
Spendi confirms his suppositions by describing himself in the final paragraph.


By which I assume that LW thinks that he is not irrational, unreasonable, emotional and ridiculous.

Now that is a delusion of momentous proportions and I recommend to anyone reading here that if they partake of a similar delusion they would be well advised to seek remedial treatment at the earliest opportunity.
0 Replies
 
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 05:39 pm
You mean you're so pissed you can't decide whether you are non-existent (the ostrich) or can be corrected (the mad control freak). I'll be happy to verify you are both.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 05:52 pm
@Lightwizard,
Stop floundering LW. There are intelligent people reading here. Obviously something you are not used to.
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Fri 3 Jul, 2009 06:12 pm
@spendius,
There are -- farmerman, Ros, edgarblythe, Monterey Jack and I could go on -- it's just that you aren't one of them. You're the floundering fish out of water, an English pub red neck geek who believes he's well read when he hasn't really understood nearly any of it and writes in the same manner, changing style and syntax to mimic really great writers, which you are not.
 

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