Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

What a pompous assed douche bag you are. You're an old fool spendi, a total waste of ejaculate.

Point to me anything in my quoted statement that is not true.

It's amazing how quickly threads devolve into troll food when trolls are not ignored

Creationism and Natural Selection
(The Sensuous Curmudgeon Blog, December 23, 2008)

AGAIN, dear reader, your Curmudgeon brings you the view from Answers in Genesis (AIG), one of the major sources of creationist wisdom. They have posted an article that does a surprisingly decent job of explaining Darwin’s concept of natural selection, and then they give the creationist position. The article is: Natural Selection"Theory or Reality? Excerpts, with bold added by us: "Darwin looked at life a little differently than his contemporaries. Natural theologians emphasized the balance and perfection of nature, but Darwin saw creatures at war with one another, struggling for limited resources. Those animals that were faster and stronger would prevail in this struggle over the slower, weaker animals."

The article then mentions others who had the same general idea about life’s struggle, but they regarded the death of the unfit as serving to preserve the “perfect balance” of nature. They don’t mention Thomas Malthus, whom Darwin credited with giving him his intellectual breakthrough.

Let’s continue, as they describe Darwin’s unique insight: "In contrast, Darwin imagined a world where variations could be bad or good, and new generations of creatures could be markedly better than their parents. As creatures with good variations preferentially survived and produced offspring more than creatures with not-so-good variations, the more “fit” creatures became the majority of the next generation."

Yes, that’s the general idea. In fact, they go on to say: "There is little wrong with the logic of natural selection. Given that organisms produce offspring with slight variations in a relatively hostile environment where only the best equipped survive, natural selection is inevitable. The question is the long-term result of natural selection."

And with that question, they open the door for the creationist position. Here we must interrupt the narrative to deal with their question now, before it slips by unchallenged.

What in the world could possibly be the long-term result of natural selection? If variations (we’d say mutations) always occur, and each new generation is produced only by those variants that are best equipped to survive, and if this continues for thousands of generations, is there anyone this side of brain death who doesn’t immediately see where this must lead? Although the changes are tiny from one generation to the next, the cumulative effect of this constant genetic sifting out of bad variations and preservation of good ones will be a generation that can’t be the same as its distant ancestors. The conclusion is inescapable. You go upstairs one step at a time; but if you keep going " unless something blocks your progress " the long-term result is that you’ll eventually climb the stairs all the way up to the next level. This isn’t difficult to understand.

But let’s return to the article. Having explained Darwin’s natural selection, they then discuss the history of the acceptance of Darwin’s theory " and in doing so they emphasize those who voiced objections. They even mention that great blowhard, William Jennings Bryan. All of this, we assume, is to give the impression that there was always an immense and continuing controversy over Darwin’s work. Among scientists, however, within a generation after Darwin published Origin of Species, acceptance was all but universal.

To enhance the illusion of scientific controversy, they also mention such people as Frank Marsh, a fringe character who coined the term Baraminology, the study of biblical “kinds” (non-evolved categories of specially-created creatures), and also Harold Clark , a creationist biologist who was a big fan of Noah’s Ark.

Contrary to the impression the article attempts to convey, the opinions of such marginal people had no impact on the scientific community, among whom Darwin’s theory hasn’t been in doubt for more than a century.

Then the article says: "Modern creationists disagree about the role of natural selection. Some think that natural selection might have played a role in developing species within kinds after the Flood. Others see natural selection as a maintenance device that destroys deviants …. Still others believe that natural selection doesn’t do much of anything. There really isn’t any such thing as the creationist position on the long-term effects of natural selection."

Such discord among creationists is entirely understandable. When you choose to ignore well-settled science, your options for foolishness are then wide open. The article does, however, make one concession to reality, in connection with well-documented observation of Galápagos finches: "Most creationists, however, do acknowledge that natural selection can work as a kind of fine-tuning agent within a kind."

Yes, but … "The Galápagos finches started out as finches, and after thirty years of natural selection, they were still the same species of finches."

Right. No finch produced an egg that hatched a kangaroo. So the jury is still out on Darwin’s theory. Then they conclude: "Though creationists don’t entirely agree on the long-term effects of natural selection, we all agree that all the animal and plant kinds had their origin during the Creation Week, when God called them into existence. We all agree that natural selection had no place in God’s original design, since natural selection works by killing. As creationists continue to research this fascinating topic, a better understanding of natural selection will undoubtedly emerge."

We have no idea what “will undoubtedly emerge” from continued creationist research. They don’t do any research, so in all likelihood nothing will emerge except more of the same.

Quote:

Creationism and Natural Selection
(The Sensuous Curmudgeon Blog, December 23, 2008)

"As creationists continue to research this fascinating topic, a better understanding of natural selection will undoubtedly emerge."

You go upstairs one step at a time; but if you keep going " unless something blocks your progress " the long-term result is that you’ll eventually climb the stairs all the way up to the next level. This isn’t difficult to understand.

Darwin and creationism do not belong in the same classroom
(Tim Radford, Guardian Education Newa, 23 December 2008)

On the brink of 2009, in the year that the reasoning world celebrates 200 years from the birth of Charles Darwin, and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, a poll has just discovered that one in three British science teachers think that creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary theory and the Big Bang.

Creationism was in fact once standard teaching in schools. It was called religious education, and my own view is that holy writ should be taught, even in secular schools. If you don't know anything about Judaism and Christianity, about Moses and the Book of Job and the Evangelists, then Dante, Milton, Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio will be deprived of most of their meaning. It was taught in Catholic and Church of England schools, of course, because both parents and teachers " and sometimes even their pupils " believed holy writ to be just that, divinely inspired: not always literally true, but rewarding in some spiritual and philosophical sense.

But even at the most solemn and even bigoted church schools, no serious teacher ever confused creationism with biology, or physics. One of these subjects was a matter for faith, the others for science: that is, something that could be tested by hypothesis and experiment.

But here we are up against people prepared to discount logic and turn away from evidence. At a guess in the course of 2009 the number of people who choose to claim that Darwin was wrong, and has been repeatedly proved wrong by everybody who knows anything, apart from all those evolutionary biologists involved in a worldwide conspiracy, will probably increase. The recruits to this cause will include religious fundamentalists; people who instinctively dig in their heels whenever persuaded in one direction rather than another; people who don't know, and don't really want to know what Darwin and his inheritors have been saying; and people who just like to deny reality.

The reality is that almost 100 years of discovery in zoology, botany, geology, palaeontology, medical science, microbiology, cell biology and genetics has confirmed, over and over again, that all living things share the same mutable DNA; that all living things are subject to natural selection; and that all living things share characteristics and a lineage that seem to link to a universal common ancestor.

That doesn't mean that evolutionary theory has delivered all the explanations. It just means that the Darwinian argument makes objective sense in a way that the fundamentalist argument that an omnipotent hand fashioned the world in seven 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago, complete with fake fossils to tempt the faithful, does not make objective sense.

Sensible people can have no quarrel with those who believe what they devoutly believe, although one might wonder whether they would still necessarily believe the scriptures to be divinely dictated and therefore literally true, if they knew more about the confused history of these documents, and why some of them were selected as genuine and others denounced as apocryphal, misleading or heretical. Nevertheless, the devout are people who have considered two positions, and then placed their faith in one of them.

Likewise, there can be no serious quarrel with those who like to be difficult for the sake of it. They keep the rest of us on our toes. In a democracy, you carry an argument by making a case, and if you don't win the argument then maybe you didn't make a good enough case. The same applies to those who think Darwin was wrong, because they heard somebody in a saloon bar say so: if that's what they think, then maybe the education system has let them down. Even so, these people still belong to the subgroup that questions orthodoxies, rather than denies reality.

And then there is the final category. In 1968, the International Flat Earth Society had its headquarters in Dover, Kent, and when 40 years ago, Apollo 8 rounded the moon, and brought back that astonishing picture of a blue and distant earth rising over a barren moonscape, a reporter colleague rang up the normally combative Samuel Shenton, director of the society, who then said (I am writing from memory) "We may have to think about this." He didn't admit he had been wrong, but at least he conceded that he might have to think about it. I left the Dover Express that year, and imagined that the flat earth contrarians had probably dissolved in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Not a bit of it. Samuel Shenton died in 1971. The Flat Earth Society was reborn in California. As far as I know, it still exists, and some people still take the flat-earthers seriously. Even more people will still condemn Darwin " and therefore most of the planet's geologists, botanists, zoologists, medical scientists and palaeontologists " as wicked, wrong or just deluded. A number of people will still condemn global warming as unscientific or at least unproven assertion, but at least this ever-vocal group won't include the president of the United States, and his cabinet. So some things will move on.

UK UPDATE

Quote:

Darwin and creationism do not belong in the same classroom
(Tim Radford, Guardian Education Newa, 23 December 2008)

The reality is that almost 100 years of discovery in zoology, botany, geology, palaeontology, medical science, microbiology, cell biology and genetics has confirmed, over and over again, that all living things share the same mutable DNA; that all living things are subject to natural selection; and that all living things share characteristics and a lineage that seem to link to a universal common ancestor.

That doesn't mean that evolutionary theory has delivered all the explanations. It just means that the Darwinian argument makes objective sense in a way that the fundamentalist argument that an omnipotent hand fashioned the world in seven 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago, complete with fake fossils to tempt the faithful, does not make objective sense.

Good article Wand. Very concise in particular paragraphs.

It's just too bad that it has to be said over and over again in various different ways.

How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?
(By Archie Bland, The Independent, 30 December 2008)

From the back of a £10 note to the awards in his name that celebrate those who remove themselves from the gene pool by dying in foolish ways, Charles Darwin's legacy is everywhere. He has been on more stamps than anyone save members of the royal family, and yesterday the Royal Mail unveiled another one, to celebrate 2009 as the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th of the publication of his landmark work, The Origin of Species. But that's not the only way the occasion is being marked, and Darwin's influence is felt in far more profound ways than his popular cultural contributions to this day.

Why were Darwin's ideas so important?

It's a mark of how extraordinary a step Darwin took on humanity's behalf that a principle that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial today " that random mutations would make some species better suited to their environments than others, and that those species would be more likely to breed " could have caused such extraordinary upheaval as recently as 1859. Still, that's what happened.

The general idea of evolution preceded Darwin, and he shied away from making the explicit and incendiary claim that even humans were evolved from other creatures. But his explanation of natural selection as a mechanism that made evolution plausibly able to explain the origin of species without reference to a creator up-ended the contemporary orthodoxy. It set a new course that no subsequent scientific work could ignore. And according to the eminent late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, "Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day."

How did Darwin first come to science?

Born in 1809, Darwin's early life was not especially distinguished. He was removed from school in Shrewsbury because of his poor progress, and dropped out of a medical course at Edinburgh University because he was revolted by working on bodies; "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," his father wrote to him, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." But on a divinity course at Cambridge, in preparation for life in the church, Darwin's interest in natural history really began to develop, as a protege of the botany professor John Stevens Henslow.

And how did he develop his ideas?

In 1831, after graduating from Cambridge, Darwin joined the HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalist on a five-year voyage around South America. Darwin later credited that trip with establishing the knowledge and working methods that would sustain his subsequent scientific career. His observations in South America, particularly on the variation in mockingbirds on different islands in the Galapagos, gave him the first inkling of what would subsequently become The Origin of Species. Famously, the first surviving record of his insight is in a sketch of a simple evolutionary tree under the tentative heading "I think". Over the next twenty-three years, he continued to develop and test that hypothesis, until in 1859 he was finally ready to publish the scientific theory that rocked the world.

Why was it so controversial?

Because before Darwin came to the subject, even the most devout adherents to the evolutionary theory had failed to come up with a good explanation of exactly how species became better suited to their environment over time. "Up until 1859," noted Ernst Mayr, "all evolutionary proposals endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater perfection."

Darwin stripped away that sense of fate. Simultaneously, he made available to the general public an understanding of the development of humankind that did away with the need for a creator. and introduced a way of looking at the world that seemed dangerous to many members of the establishment. Well aware of the subversive implications of his discoveries, he once said that explaining his beliefs was like "confessing to a murder".

What was the public reaction at the time?

The first public presentation of Darwin's ideas, alongside those of fellow pioneering evolutionary biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, drew little public reaction. But the publication of The Origin of Species sparked massive international interest, and the first print run of the book sold out before it appeared. While many hailed his findings as a huge step forward " including some within the clergy " the work also drew much opposition.

"Why not accept direct interference, rather than evolutions of law, and needlessly indirect or remote action?" one early review asked. "Having introduced the author and his work, we must leave them to the mercies of the Divinity Hall, the College, the Lecture Room and the Museum." And Darwin was denied a knighthood for his achievements by the influence of the church. Natural selection did not become a widely accepted principle until the 1930s. But in the end, one measure of how widely accepted Darwin's significance was, came in his death, when he became one of only five people outside of the royal family to be buried in Westminster Abbey in the nineteenth century.

So how influential are Darwin's ideas today?

Their importance in science is inescapable: the whole field of evolutionary biology is founded on his work. More generally, his influence can be felt in how the Christian orthodoxy that underpinned most science has fallen away, and even in our understanding of human interactions, summed up by the phrase "social Darwinism".

Even the church recently recanted its initial opposition to The Origin of Species, issuing a public apology in September. It read: "Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still." Still, many people remain sceptical. The continued influence of creationism and intelligent design in the US is well-documented, and here, a 2006 poll said that only 48 per cent of the general public accepted the theory of evolution.

What is being done to change that?

Many organisations devoted to the public understanding of science have seized on the bicentennial of Darwin's birth as a chance to make people more aware of why his work is important, and celebrate him as a great British figure. The Natural History Museum hosts the biggest ever Darwin exhibition until April 2009; moves are afoot to have his home and living laboratory of forty years, Downe, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco; celebrations will take place across the country on 12 February, his birthday, or "Darwin Day". Even Hollywood has taken note of the romance of his marriage and tragedy of the death of three of his children, and a movie starring Paul Bettany will appear later this year.

So is Darwin the most important scientist of modern times?

Possibly. But any complacency about his place in history should be tempered by an awareness that his significance could easily be forgotten. In 2006, a public poll conducted by the BBC judged him the fourth greatest Briton of all time " one place behind Diana, Princess of Wales.

"Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still."