Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Go talk to the kinders ci. I said "pro-sport". I never mentioned which team or which sport. I'm talking about MONEY you silly ******. Bums on seats. No wonder your Mrs watches TV all day.

There a log floating across the Atlantic they say which has the Jaguars on it. Will it prosper in the UK?

Think how much more successful turkeys are than bald eagles on a number count. And chickens are serious evolutionary ****. I've heard that bald eagles have to be nursed and protected like they might be in danger of going under and becoming extinct. The successful creatures are now those that taste good or can bring tears to your eyes just by looking at you in a manner that can be construed to be admiringly or piteously and have big fluffy ears which they can cock one at once or in unison alarmingly fetchingly.

On the basis of evolution theory American football is a ****-witted platypus.

It's stuck on your island. Nobody else wants it. Role models going on 20 stone. Sheesh!! Equipment costing $$$$$s. The kids play proper football on the beaches in swimming trunks. At 8. Like Maradonna and Pele had. Speed at sport is measured relative to the speed of the opposition. In fractions of a second. Including eye to brain and brain to body speeds. And the fastest play whatever game allows them to show off their superiority and very often without the need for a money motive. To show the ladies who to mate with if they want fast kids. It's cruel I know but nobody ever said evolution isn't cruel.

Other methods of looking good, with which this thread has many examples of, do not get past the ladies evolved selection processes. It is axiomatic that they want fast kids. The ones who sit at a desk slowly cruddling over sentences designed to make them look good, and which often have quite the opposite effect, should know that it won't convince any intelligent ladies. An intelligent lady would not go to a sperm bank and risk getting the semen of a hard up student who was making $140 a week at $10 a throw even if there was a wide range of CVs attached to each sample in the freezer.

Your "You never did understand science" remark is only good for a laugh. You haven't even bothered with the cruddling. If you had you might have seen how ridiculously silly was your "for ever" phrase on an evolution thread.

You really don't belong on this thread ci. You're out of the loop from a scientific perspective. "Blessed are your eyes, since they see, and your ears, since they hear." Jesus said. ( Matt. 13. 16.). There's your scientist. And notice how the sublime beauty of the idea's expression is hidden by its deceptive simplicity.

Then in comes Paul saying " The good things prepared for the just no eye has seen nor ear heard." ( 1 Corinthians 2.9.)

And there's your polarity in Doctor Atomic. It isn't about Dr Oppenheimer at all. Somebody else would have been there if Dr Oppenheimer's Mom and Pop had had a burst cistern tank on the night he was conceived. Art is not about "somebody". A somebody carries what art is about. Any somebody is interesting if studied enough. There's probably not 5% of the real JR in Doctor Atomic. If the real Mrs Oppenheimer was as sexy as that bint who played her in the show I'm surprised Bobby turned up for work most days.

Rather than take time to compose anything about the opera, sorry, but it is exactly about the characters, starring J. Robert Oppenheimer albeit accompanied by borrowed philosophical commentary. You're drinking and watching TV again, right? I didn't, of course, leave other people out just in favor of JRO -- it was in the course of being brief.

Quote:

The first act takes place about a month before the bomb is to be tested, and the second act is set in the early morning of July 15, 1945 (the day of the test). During the second act, time frequently slows down for the characters and then snaps back into reality. The opera ends in the final, prolonged moment before the bomb is detonated. Although the original commission for the opera suggested that U.S. physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," be fashioned as a twentieth-century Doctor Faustus, Adams and Sellars deliberately attempted to avoid this characterization.

The work centers on key players in the Manhattan Project, especially Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves, and also features Kitty Oppenheimer, Robert's wife, and her anxiety over her husband's project. Sellars adapted the libretto from primary historical sources. The libretto also quotes from the Bhagavad Gita, songs of the Tewa, the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser.

Doctor Atomic is similar in style to previous Adams operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, both of which explored the characters and personalities that were involved in historical incidents, rather than a re-enactment of the events themselves.

Unquote

I love Adam's music -- it has completed the circle of the modern minimalist genre where Phillip Glass got sidetracked doing film scores (not that they're anything to scoff at -- "Mishima" and "Koyaanisqatsi" are enlightening and invigorating without the movie).

Now we begin the discussion of musical evolution. Glass and Adam's going back to the minimalist composition one might have heard from the first pipe carved out of wood, it means were headed back into being ape-like animals.

spendi, It doesn't matter whether it's pro-sports or amateur sports. You didn't even understand the sentence you copied and pasted from my previous post. Stick with the simple stuff, spendi. You lose all perspective once you start on your keyboard.

This one you mean?



Of course I understand it. It means you just make incoherent noises.

That's because you don't understand plain English like everybody else. Your last paragraph is a direct contradiction - whether you realize it or not.

I understand incoherent noises ci. I should do from the amount of experience I have of exposure to them. Socialists for example who promote evolution theory.

You're the best example of "incoherent noises," but people love to humour you, because we all know that a2k is your only world outside of your local pub.

Which does not mean that the attempt was successful assuming the assertion that it was deliberately avoided is valid. Doctor Faustus is merely a personifaction of the idea that knowledge may be dangerous to humanity. That idea was the theme of Doctor Atomic as the title suggest. A healer with fire in his hands.

It is a grave error to asume that an assertion that the Faustian idea was "deliberately avoided" is evidence that it actually was avoided.

Those questioning the potential dangers in the CERN project or in stem-cell research are making the same point.

The Pagan woman, Pasqualita, (the Willendorf figure) warns of the dangers. Mrs O is sympathetic. Mr O is wobbly enough for the general to order him to be watched.

Cuts from Wiki don't do justice to the theme which is, of course, the fear of science and the too ready acceptance of its credo in the face of the temptations it offers for easy solutions.

You're an idiot.

Let's read it directly from John Adams instead of some amateur in Britain (as if anyone would pay attention to analysis of any music by a fool):

Interview with John Adams excerpted from
the forthcoming book by Thomas May, A John Adams Reader.

You have talked about your reading habits in terms of a general aesthetic. What specific things have fed into this project? For example, there’s that famous book by Richard Rhodes.

That was the first book I read. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a very influential book, and far more than a mere description of the bomb. It is, in fact, a history of physics in the first half of the twentieth century.

I read the Rhodes book and its sequel, Dark Star, which is less about science and more about the Cold War, thermonuclear weapons and Soviet-American espionage. I’ve read a collection of Oppenheimer’s letters. When some people see this opera and hear Oppenheimer singing Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita and a John Donne sonnet, they’re likely to think that its creators are being much too arty. But in fact, if you read about Oppenheimer and read his own letters, you see that he was quite possibly the most cultured scientist who ever lived--more so than Newton or Einstein or Neils Bohr. He did indeed quote the Sanskrit poetry (which he read in the original!), and he and his wife Kitty had little coded signals to each other that were based on Baudelaire lines or some such text. When he was a 17-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, he and his roommates would have sonnet-writing contests. So it’s appropriate, and no stretch of the imagination, that in this opera Oppenheimer would express his deepest thoughts in great poetry.

There are passages from the letters too?

No, I didn’t use any of Oppenheimer’s letters, but at the end of the first act I set John Donne’s sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God” as a soliloquy for him. He is alone"a rare moment of solitude for him"and feels a very deep dissonance within himself over the fact that he is about to bring forth this terrible weapon, something that is going to introduce an unknowable amount of pain and destruction into the world. The Donne sonnet, which Oppenheimer later said prompted him to name the test site “Trinity,” is a poem of almost unbearable self-awareness, an agonistic struggle between good and evil, darkness and light.

[The poem:

Holy Sonnet No. 14

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.]

The poet speaks as one whose soul, “like an usurped town,” has been taken captive by dark forces"the dark “shadow” of his own self. The real God must come forth and batter him and break him and bend him and destroy him, and make him whole and new again. It’s a very profound moment in the opera. Later, after I’d set this sonnet to music, I read in a new biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, how Oppenheimer went into a deep depression after the initial euphoria of the bomb’s success wore off.

But you don’t cover that in Dr. Atomic-- it ends with the Trinity test?

Yes, that’s right. It ends with the Trinity test. We’d originally planned an epilogue, a setting of a declassified transcript of a phone conversation between General Groves and an Army doctor about two weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. It’s clear from this phone conversation that General Groves considered all the stories about horrible death from radiation as nothing more than Japanese propaganda. He, like many others in the government, refused to believe that radiation could cause such devastating forms of suffering and death. He was, as we’d say today “in major denial.” People were only just beginning to realize the horrific long-term effects of a nuclear attack.

What was the first musical impulse you had for the opera?

I thought about the art, music and films that emerged out of the immediate postwar period--in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s--and how it expressed a chilling awareness of man’s ability to destroy himself. Science fiction movies started appearing, and a typical plot would involve a nuclear explosion in the desert--in Nevada perhaps. This would result in some disturbing phenomenon, something frightening and threatening. Nature would go awry or a monster would appear. And of course, the truth is, some of the physicists working on the bomb in Los Alamos were not 100% certain that their invention wouldn’t ignite the entire earth’s atmosphere.

So I had several ideas. One was to evoke science fiction movie music, which was one of the reasons why I decided to call it Doctor Atomic--I wanted to give that sense of science fiction, plus of course the backdoor reference to Doctor Faustus, a book which comes from the same postwar era. But actually the first really strong musical idea came to me when I thought about the late music of Varèse" a work like Déserts, which suggests to me a post-nuclear holocaust landscape. That was my first inspiration, and I went with those ideas--Varèse and science fiction music. You can hear it in the very opening bars of music. This comes after one of several musique concrète preludes that are interwoven into the operatic structure.

You’ve spoken earlier about landscape in your music. How much landscape is present here?

I’ve used some sound effects that will come up on loudspeakers--weather sounds mostly, rain, thunder, wind. It’s very eerie when you hear it-- both eerie and mysteriously beautiful, just the sound of rain, for example. On the night before the scheduled test, on the 15th-16th of July, 1945 when they were getting ready to detonate the first plutonium bomb, a tremendous electrical storm came out of nowhere. It was completely unseasonal and fearsomely dangerous, as the bomb had already been hoisted up on scaffolding, ready to detonate. You’d be hard put to deny that there’s something mythic and portentous about a storm of this magnitude suddenly appearing right as the world’s first atomic bomb was about to explode.

One of the things I came across in the course of reading about nuclear energy was a homely little analogy, perhaps a bit oversimplified, but nevertheless very vivid: it expresses how much energy is involved in keeping an atom stable. If you imagine that there is roughly enough energy binding the atoms in a glass of water to power the Queen Mary across the Atlantic and back you can get an idea of the forces involved. That is an astonishing thing. It expresses how vast is the amount of energy in a very small amount of mass. And if all of that mass can be liberated into pure energy, think of how much power is unleashed. You’ve seen these pictures of a thermonuclear explosion, or even just the bomb that was detonated at Trinity? That plutonium explosion had the force of a hurricane and for a moment approximated the heat of the sun. And it was nothing more than a very small mass that caused it, a plutonium sphere the size of a grapefruit. Even that sphere itself was not entirely solid"it was packed with tamper. So the actual material that fissioned was very small. The understanding of that interchangeable relationship between energy and matter, e=mc2, is what revolutionized twentieth century thinking and what made the bomb possible.

Are there any trickster elements in this opera? Any need for comic relief?

These scientists and their wives all found ways to unwind, but life was undeniably difficult. The men all worked six days a week, and the wives who were not themselves scientists were either given very menial jobs or were just left to cope with the primitive living conditions. Remember that Los Alamos was almost entirely created by the Army slapping together rickety housing with poor plumbing and only a single, wood-burning stove in each cabin. They were very young people, remember, mostly in their twenties and thirties. I read accounts of life on the mesa. Everyone was cooped up and under guard by Army MPs. Most unwound with big parties on the weekend, heavy drinking, practical joking, and doubtless for those fortunate enough, plenty of sex. But this is basically a male story: Oppie and General Groves were the “elders,” and Oppie himself was only in his early forties. Teller and most of the other people were in their thirties and even twenties. So, by and large, you have to imagine the sound of men, male energy, male thinking, male voices, the violence that this male activity is going to produce. The two women in the cast-- Kitty Oppenheimer and her Navajo maid, Pasqualita"almost by default become prophetic voices, in contrast to the men and their science. Do you know the term das Ewig-Weibliche?

Yes-the end of Faust.

That’s right. The “eternal feminine,” sort of a German equivalent to “Gaia knowledge.” The phrase das Ewig-Weibliche appears at the very end of Goethe’s Faust Part II. In Doctor Atomic Kitty Oppenheimer assumes the role of eternal feminine, a Cassandra, channeling human history in her long soliloquies. She carries a deep moral awareness of the consequences of what is being done there on the mesa, an awareness that was much slower to dawn on the men.

Of course women were not allowed on the actual test site at Alamagordo; they were not even supposed to know what their husbands were doing. There’s something very symbolic about that as well: as much as to say “You can’t know. I just want you here in my bed when I get home.”

Kitty has her own Brangäne, a female soul mate, in the Navajo maid, Pasqualita. A lot of what Pasqualita sings verges on the incomprehensible-- poetry by Muriel Rukeyser that has vague references to some tribal past, some prehistoric consciousness, with a hint of land being corrupted and a people being destroyed. The second act poetry for both women is richly ambiguous, provoking for me a strange and mysterious quality. There’s a line for Kitty:

“To the farthest west, the sea and the striped country
and deep in the camps among the wounded cities”

Of course, you know it’s 1945, and “camps” makes one think of concentration camps. But then just before we have the image “striped country.” Anyone can have his own reaction to the mysterious “striped country,” but for me it evokes the Southwest, the canyons and their rock formations. And “striped” also made Peter think of the striped uniforms that concentration camp prisoners were made to wear. Poetry like that is very nonlinear, purely imagistic, skirting the irrational, but it’s immensely evocative.

End of quote

The sets at San Francisco were from San Francisco.

What about that fm? Hardly anti-ID is it?

At least I have seen Doctor Atomic. Twice. And on 47 inch TV which doesn't have the distractions of a concert hall. And I wasn't required to applaud the idea that I didn't know what to think.

Did they loosen the restraints?

Gobsmacked again are we?

Having to rest on Basic Fall-Back Position No 1 certainly suggests that is the case.

Dr. Atomic must have really been trippy after the shock treatments.

Pure vacuity. Have you not seen the thing then?

It wasn't in the least "trippy". It was funny, as I said earlier. Wagner's trippy.

The Pa legislature is working on CEU requirements for teaching disciplines in HS's within the Commonwealth. I think that, were these passed requiring that science and business teachers be required to demonstrate INCREASING PROFICIENCY in what they teach, it would be , at least a start in the upgrade of our schools and the removal of all these fringe elements that clamour ofr their place on curricula.

You're pissing into the wind fm. They are not "fringe elements". They are bedded in and they'll cling on to what they've got like you would cling to log if you were adrift in one of the lagoons of the west Atlantic. Tightly I mean.

I could have just said tightly in the first place and cut out the fancy flummery about the log but my literary style would have suffered even though my meaning hadn't.

It might even be that those working on the CEU requirements are a fringe element. An added layer making its way in the world. Exponentially I shouldn't wonder given the attractions of talking about education rather than doing any educating. It is the essence of a bureaucracy that it ends up simply maintaining itself like when there's ten admirals to a ship or a gritting fleet with no grit which latter we have come close to recently here. The budget of the fleet had nothing left for the grit. It's useless as a status signifier is grit. A bit like students. One hasn't reached the giddy heights in the education bureaucracy if one is still in having to deal with the bloody students.

And who would measure this INCREASING PROFICIENCY you so glibly speak of. It wouldn't be yourself by any chance would it? I can spot somebody who has spotted a door ajar from miles away. One might have to inaugurate a committee to supervise the assessment of the increased proficiency. Assuming there is some. Which there will be because it might easily be asserted that there is and evidence provided to prove it by increasing the number of certificates handed out and raising all the grades a notch or two. Astute handling of media and bingo!! INCREASED PROFICIENCY. Just like that as Tommy Cooper often said. He even popped off "just like that" live on telly.

And even then it would only be, as you wisely say, "at least a start". If you get a choice of office fm look out for the plumbing. It can be distracting in a meeting convened to discuss progress in the programme directed towards that laudable goal of INCREASED PROFICIENCY in education if the ladies powder room is next door. Or on the floor above. And not aiming to have a busy DEPARTMENT of INCREASED PROFICIENCY (DIP) is not unlike a wide receiver not aiming for a touchdown.

The general student body is, I'm afraid to say, a rather recalcitrant object and cannot be reasonably discussed in the loose language you use no matter how high sounding it--well--sounds.

But good luck fm. I feel sure your rhetoric is up to the job.

Of course a Watchdog would be required to report to the public on the service DIP was providing and to check out its proficiency.

Jesus christ.

Dr. Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian pastor, has written an interesting paper on the issue of whether Christians are actually required to deny evolutionary science as some fundamentalists have insisted.

The paper is titled: "Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople"

http://www.biologos.org/uploads/projects/Keller_white_paper.pdf

youve held the door open to believable belief you wickedly polite boy