Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

I have barely got started and I'm put on Ignore by these proponents of academic freedom. Can you not understand that Ed? Really? If I bother them so much that they have made themselves look silly what do you think would happen in schools were headbanger evolutionists to be let loose on the kids.

Only the religious find evolution controversial, its their problem made everyone's problem.

The religious have made a mountain out of a mole hill.

Apart from the fact that evolution has some semblance of evidence. [quote/]

Can you not see that it is precisely because there is evidence for evolution that there is the problem? Which evidence though? Blood clotting in injured chiclids or sexual arousal and receptivity in the higher female animals. Guess which of those took the limelight at Dover.

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The evidence for ID sounds like a bunch of hippies went down to the beach after a joint and said 'wooOoo

What's up with that? It sounds pretty cool to me. It's better than a bunch of fossil collectors going "wooOoo" at a 600 million year-old bat's petrified knuckle-bone and going I bet I can get some tax funding out of this. Are we envisaging mixed company? I'll take the hippies.

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'Hi, I'm George and I believe the world is six thousand years old.

There are very few like George in the real Christian world. You can't build an argument on his ideas. It's a subtle form of Ignore.

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I'm gonna ram my shaft of truth down the throats of school children

What else is there to do with school children but ram stuff down their throats?

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who cares where we came from, how is it important?

It isn't important. I don't care where we came from either. Don't look back. It's where we are going that's important and only Christians flew to the moon and invented leveraged financial instruments. So social consequences are the only game for the serious.

I wear long-johns and they are--hang on- I'll have a look--grey. I have a pair of white ones but I never wear them. When you buy long-johns make sure the legs are roomy because it's no way to impress a lady struggling to get tight ones off. Take a tip from one who tried.

Smokers of the world unite to defeat this scientific conspiracy to rob us of our rights. I presume you know that non-smokers have slow-moving brain cells and intend to spend the last thirty years of their slow-moving life under expensive medical supervision and given enough success they'll bankrupt the whole ******* system if they have not already done so.

But the living does not think rationalistically, does not do or not do things "in order to. . ." It functions according to the primary plasmatic emotions the function of which is the gratification of biological tensions and needs. One would inevitably go astray were one to translate the language of the living immediately into the word language of the consciousness. To emphasize this is important because that rationalistic thinking which has given rise to mechanistic civilisation has extinguished the understanding of the basically different language of the living function.

Discovery Institute: Toad-Tested Medicine!
(TheSensuousCurmudgeon.com, December 7, 2008)

DOES THE theory of evolution have any value in the practice of medicine? That might strike you as a bizarre question. After all, if creationism were true, and all species were specially created, there would be no reason to do research and test our medicines on monkeys, as is commonly done. According to creationists, monkeys are no more related to us than " well, toads.

Toads would be a lot cheaper to use in the lab than monkeys, and their use should generate fewer objections from animal rights groups. So why not do all our research on toads? Would a creationist be brave enough to rely on toad-tested medicine?

Apparently there is one who would. The neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids) have posted this article at their blog: Darwinian Medicine 2.0.

The article was written by Michael Egnor, described at the Discoveroids’ website as a professor of neurosurgery. We’ll give you a few excerpts from his Discoveroid blog article:
"I recently pointed out that Darwinian stories about the evolution of diseases were of no tangible use to medical science. Few physicians and medical scientists and educators with genuine experience with medical education, research, and practice, and who are not ideologically committed to the materialist-atheist metaphysics for which Darwinism is the creation myth, honestly believe that evolutionary biology is important to medicine. … We’ve done very well for more than half a century without Darwinian medicine."

We’re not entirely clear on the meaning of “Darwinian medicine,” so let’s read a bit more:
"Years ago, medicine turned away from Darwinian “science” after eugenics was widely exposed and denounced in the aftermath of WWII."

Ah, the picture is becoming more clear:
"Eugenics was based on the explicit Darwinian postulate that man is an animal evolved by the process of natural selection. We are human because our ancestors struggled, often to the death. The Darwinian concern was that human civilization was corrupting natural selection by foolish solicitude for the unfit. The solution was to “take evolution into our own hands,” which was to breed human beings."

How much more of this do we need to read? Darwin was not an advocate of eugenics, and eugenics never needed Darwin as a justification. We’ve pointed out in an earlier essay that eugenics and selective breeding are at least as old as Athens and Sparta.

Here’s one final excerpt from the Discoveroid blog article:
"For more than half a century, “evolution-free” medicine has done very nicely. …We haven’t missed the mass sterilizations, the pseudo-diagnoses of “feeble-mindedness” and the carefully planned quarantine and even exterminations of the handicapped (merely planned in the U.S. " at the Eugenic Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor " but actually carried out in Germany). In American medicine in the past half-century, evolutionary biology wasn’t missed at all."

Right. We haven’t behaved like the physicians in the Third Reich. But, contrary to the Discoveroid propaganda, they weren’t Darwinians.

Anyway, Dr. Egnor seems happy to be practicing medicine without recourse to the theory of evolution. What’s it like? We shudder to think.

“Toad-tested medicine! Step right up folks, and get your toad-tested medicine!”

They have a habit of saying things that ends up challenging their own prior statements; they do not understand about a) consistency, b) science, and c) drugs.

And it has nothing to do with Darwin what some silly twat did with his stuff. It says nothing about Darwin's science. Like Hiroshima says nothing about Einstein. Those things only give pause for thought on scientific freedom. Not on the science. So it's political. Objectivity has flown up its own arse. As Marx said it would.

The article was written by Michael Egnor, described at the Discoveroids’ website as a professor of neurosurgery.

Surgeons are artists craftsmen.