Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

This meaningless post deserves no answer.

When such a course is completed, what would be its purpose in use to the student?(I recall that, in developing a syllabus, this was the first thing we had to discuss to the committee)

Spendi posted something meaningless? I can't believe it.

I've been addressing the subject of challenges to the teaching of evolution and you keep raising challenges, in very truncated form, i.e. blurts, to teaching religion and the activities of some headbanger in any out of the way place you can dredge up in your search for comfort that your position is anything other than a load of half-baked, half puritan, illiterate bullshit in the service of propping up some justification or other for slipping out from under the lid of Christian morality in one or more of its aspects probably related to the rumpy-pumpy business at moments of high excitement.

You are too thrummy, un-cool, to suggest any other explanation. You argue like the standard issue Big Girl's Blouse. I've been called as ass, and a silly ass, by better lookers than you Wiz.

It's obvious that you are emotionally engaged whereas I am simply advising my fellow citizens in the Western World to not be too easily swayed by twaddle without ascertaining what the result will be for young men of the future, with whom I sympathise, who will be born after I have departed.

Rider Haggard said that writing for the future lads was the only respectable way to write. Proper intellectuals wouldn't be caught dead writing about their own emotions assuming they have any apart from those that inspired The Pub With No Beer song. . A doubtful proposition. They have bigger fish to fry.

One only need compare a page of Darwin to that of one of Veblen's to know which of them had their emotions flapping on the washing line in the front yard. There's a Homeric tone to Veblen which is absent from Darwin. Homer's tales are campfire tales for the boys. Soon to be men. Listening to them was voluntary and thus they had to be enthralling what with the "soon to be women" running loose in the bushes, and, at the same time prepare them for their manhood by teaching them to value certain things and to despise others by a very mysterious process which some call art. Arty-farty types usually. All good story-tellers do that.

And I could have sat and listened to Thorstein's low, droll monotonous droning all night long if he talked on a bar stool like he writes. Same with Proust. They are my sort of evolutionists. That Herman Melville--he's another. There's a lot--pretty much all famous. Mr Holly in Sir Henry's sequel to She Who Must Be Obeyed--Ayesha. Those conservatives who voted for Mrs Thatcher had obviously never read that.

The nuttiest so far is Mr Joyce. By some distance. That's why American institutions of the Higher Research Fellowship bids taxpayer $$$$$s, so you can work out your own contribution if you fancy, theoretically anyway, for scraps of paper on which he wrote stray thoughts when sat in a Euro-cafe with Balkan garlic millionaires drinking White Lightning. He didn't want a bronze bust in Dublin's main library. He wanted to create an industry. A memorial no dust could settle on. Better than selling an old bridge eh? No cranes required for scraps of paper. Phew!!

You, spendi, throw around words, like 'idiots,' and then ascribe them to others. Nowhere have I, in any seriousness, called a person an idiot simply for believing in a god. Militant IDers, on the other hand, resort to idiotic arguments and deserve nothing better.

Why does everything have to be of some use or purpose to a materialist.

Why does everything have to be of some use or purpose to a materialist.

Quote:
Why does everything have to be of some use or purpose to a materialist.

Why do you only love things that have no purpose?

How do you justify beer in your mind?

Said as you accuse others of being unable to make subtle distinctions.

When such a course is completed, what would be its purpose in use to the student?

Im concerned that the CReationist would ignore the same hard data (insert lie) in order to make his argument.

WHOSE gonna arbitrate what is true and whats bullshit?

How do you propose to reinforce the truth?

And , in fact, most of the data will refute their entire case.

Once a committee gets its sticky paws on Rebecca's suggestion you are back where you started with arguments raging about what her course might contain, how it is taught and what its utility is. Thus self-defeating. As your post clearly shows. fm's programme for the kids.

But I do have enough faith in the bright students that I know are in schools today to know that if people try to convince them of something which the evidence refutes and for which they have no hard data - they will figure it out.
They're not idiots - believe me.
So my answer to that is each individual student. And by that I mean the teacher is responsible for checking his or her facts and making sure s/he presents the facts as they exist. And by that I don't mean present creationism as facts - by that I mean that they present an accurate picture of what creationists say they believe. Just as they present accurately what has been discovered in the field of evolutionary biology.
Then once each student has these facts- an accurate depiction of what each theory espouses - the student decides what s/he believes. Do you as a teacher ever tell your students what is true and what they have to believe? Or do you say, 'This is what we know about this...' and let them draw their own conclusions, based on their own life experiences and religious and cultural backgrounds, or even emotional tendencies and personality traits?

Oh, so people who are interested and find meaning in subjects you don't, are idiots?

If what you are proposing is an elective, then I have enough faith in students that they would never enroll in such a class. They are not idiots.

I was almost never allowed to say, 'I can't'. He'd say, 'If you can't do it one way , find another... I don't want to hear can't - because 'Can't never could'.