Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.


Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.

A lot of gas.

Man and it stinks to high heaven.

Where in the world did he get the idea the President in charge has much to do with who is hired at NSF or IGERT?

Where is any proof of how many IDiots are working there?

More and more brain farting

probably goes with the beer farts and I pity the person who's in his home.

If you ask questions like that on here panzade you will get meaningless answers such as the one effemm has seen fit to burn our retinas with.

It won't affect the study of evolution.

It depends on the funding really and who your friends and relations are.

The correct attitude to adopt panzade is the one Holden Caulfield's tutor adopted when discussing the lad's essay on Egypt.

This made me sad because I realized you hadn't even bothered to read the article I offered,where it is obvious even to Harry Patch that the factors that drove animals to evolve are being questioned.

Taken together, several lines of evidence indicated to us that these early animals lived in a lake environment."

This discovery raises questions as to how and why animals appeared when they did.

Ideally speaking, art shares with politics precisely that which distinguishes both from the deliberate rationality of science and the blue-prints of ideological programmes: that it springs from the elemental human need to discipline into articulate form and communicable convention the inarticulate and rationally incommunicable forces of life, the chthonic ground of existence; and a rationality cut off from those roots leads to the corruption of the arts and the degradation of politics. Then both art and politics are exposed in hysterical impotence to the revenge of Nature which, betrayed by the Reason, and indeed as the crowning paradox of the Reason's own manoeuvres, mockingly regains its primeval and unmanageable demonic powers, condemning the speech of the political animal to hectic trivialities in the face of brainwashers, scientifically equipped sadists, and radioactive cataclysms, and the artistic productions of the creative creature to banal anger or desperate distraction and abstraction.

Heller was born at Chomutov (German: Komotau) in Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic), to the family of a Jewish physician. He graduated a doctor of law from the German University in Prague (Deutsche Universität in Prag, Juridische Fakultät) on 11 February 1935, at the age of 23. In 1939 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he began his professional career as a Germanist, being active at Cambridge and London (England) and at Swansea (Wales). Heller became a British subject in 1947. From 1960 onwards he was based in the United States, primarily at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he was initially Professor of German, and subsequently Avalon Professor of the Humanities until his retirement in 1979.

For Heller, German letters as an academic discipline was something of an avocation, a marriage of convenience to supply a vehicle for the conveyance of thought of a wider scope. He kept a certain distance from the scholarly community around him, believing (with Jacob Burckhardt) this community's pedantry and unremitting quest for precision to be ‘one of the most cunning enemies of truth’, their cumulative effect being ‘the absence of true comprehension’.

Prof. Erich Heller wrote, in The Ironic German, his brilliant book about Thomas Mann-

Evangelical course that treats Nessie as fact endorsed by government agency
(By: Michael Shaw, Times Educational Supplement, July 31, 2009)

Exams for an Evangelical Christian curriculum in which pupils have been taught that the Loch Ness monster disproves evolution and racial segregation is beneficial have been ruled equivalent to international A- levels by a UK government agency.

The National Recognition Information Centre (Naric), which guides universities and employers on the validity of different qualifications, has judged the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE) officially comparable to qualifications offered by the Cambridge International exam board.

Hundreds of teenagers at around 50 private Christian schools in Britain study for the certificates, as well as several home-educated students.

The courses are based around the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme, which originated in Texas in the 1970s. Pupils study a range of subjects, including science and English, but spend half their studies learning from Bible-influenced US textbooks, often in isolation from each other, Jonny Scaramanga, a music lecturer who attended an ACE school in Bath as a child, said he was astonished the courses were judged comparable to international A-levels and O-levels.

In a complaint to Naric, he provided examples of the material taught on the courses. These included claims in its science and history textbooks that:
-the Loch Ness monster, which “appears to be a plesiosaur” from photographs, helps to disprove evolution;
-apartheid was beneficial to South Africa; reasons include the claim that segregated schools “made it possible for each group to maintain and pass on their culture and heritage to their children”;
-“unquestionable proofs” and “unarguable evidences” existed for creationism.

Scaramanga said: “Those who challenge the explanations given in the materials are described as ‘godless’, ‘anti-biblical’, and ‘foolish’. There needs to be greater public awareness of what these schools tell students.”

The evangelical content of ACE courses taught in Britain and the US have attracted criticism over the past decade. The scientist Professor Richard Dawkins visited a London school which used the curriculum in 2006. He said he was appalled to learn that pupils were taught that Noah’s Ark was real and that Aids victims were sinners.

But Naric, which is funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, nevertheless carried out a "benchmarking exercise” on the ICCE last summer. It ruled that the course’s general certificate, which involves two to three years of study, should be compared to Cambridge International’s O-level at grades C to E; the intermediate certificate to the international O-level at grades A to B; and the advanced certificate to an international A-level.

In a statement on the decision in August 2008, Naric said: “The ICCE are delighted by the results of the project and we feel that this work also helps improve awareness and understanding of such international qualifications.”

Tim Buttress, Naric’s spokesman, told The TES that the agency’s role was to guide universities and employers on the “rigour” of qualifications, but investigating curriculum content was outside its remit.

“It’s like comparing an engineering degree at Luton University and Sheffield Hallam - the degrees are at the same level, but the content may be different,” he said.

However, Brenda Lewis, ICCE chief executive officer in the UK, said tNaric had examined the content. “We were taken aback by how thorough they were,” she said.

British teachers found ACE textbooks useful, she said, but sometimes pointed out comments they regarded as unreasonable to pupils.

Mrs Lewis had not noticed the Loch Ness monster claims, which she suggested may have been a “slip at the typewriter”, adding that the science curriculum had helped a student to gain a place to study natural sciences at Oxford University.

She also said she had never seen the apartheid claims, but stressed that British teachers would strongly challenge them.

This is a funny coincidence. My father earned a PhD. in German Literature at Northwestern University in 1966. Erich Heller was the professor who guided my father's dissertation.