Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

You must then be less than 12, because you keep making childish statements, and I feel the need to explain them to you in elementary language. I try to be patient with a child like you.

Time to take time and wish everybody who plays on this thread a Very Merry Christmas . Nobody here celebrates BoxingDay much, although sometimes sometimes some folks, in a state of extreme festiveness, will beat the **** out of each other, even though it be sans Marquis of Queensbury.

The "Bellsnickels" of Lititz are going around wishing and gifting good little boys and girls with Springerlich , and, conversely, chasing and throttling bad little boys and girls.

farmerman wrote:

Time to take time and wish everybody who plays on this thread a Very Merry Christmas . Nobody here celebrates BoxingDay much, although sometimes sometimes some folks, in a state of extreme festiveness, will beat the **** out of each other, even though it be sans Marquis of Queensbury.

The "Bellsnickels" of Lititz are going around wishing and gifting good little boys and girls with Springerlich , and, conversely, chasing and throttling bad little boys and girls.

Happy Holidays to Everyone!

Brecheen says the religion of evolution is plagued with falsehoods
(by State Senator Josh Brecheen, Durant Daily Democrat, December 24, 2010)

Many students buying into the religion of evolution have been persuaded by the Miller experiment, even though it is plagued with falsehoods. The Miller experiment, taught nationwide, presents the findings of a 1953 experiment using a hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia and water vapor which produced amino acids (building blocks of life). Only 7 years following this experiment the scientific community began asserting (now majority of scientific community consensus) hydrogen could not have been present in a formless and void atmosphere (due to nature of the element to escape into space).

In revisiting the experiment with accurate ingredients of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor (as agreed upon by the scientific community) the results produce formaldehyde and cyanide. Outside of killing embryos, chemists know embalming fluid is the results of mixing these two toxic organic molecules.

Geochemists have known this since the 1960s yet it is still a major emphasis in textbooks across America. Although totally false, the Miller experiment is continually used as one of the more convincing arguments used to indoctrinate impressionable young adults.

Given column constraints we don't have time to dismantle the “Java” man's shoddy excavation techniques (nor Java's limited bones mirroring today's human remains) or a myriad of other key evolution misleading’s but I encourage all readers to buy the scientifically reviewed bestseller “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel. It's time we truly educate ourselves and our students.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting of God reaching out with a pointed finger is no less worthy of being placed alongside Darwin's drawing of monkeys morphing into humans. In an attempt to explain our existence the teaching of evolution is ironically working against its own theory. For the blind followers, it is making monkeys out of them as they ignore the full gamut of scientific facts.

There is one thing the scientific community agrees upon. It is a mystery.

Even biochemist and creation skeptic Francis Crick has stated, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going,” he said. Francis Crick is not just an ordinary scientist but a Nobel Prize awardee for discovering the molecular structure of DNA.

According to polls, 90 percent of Americans believe in God and 80 percent believe in miracles. Will we continue to check our brains at the church door every Sunday or is it possible a loving creator is behind that first miracle? The religion of evolution depends upon miraculous sets of circumstances so why continue to ignore the super majority of Americans’ belief in a miracle worker?

Let me speculate for a minute why the attempt to ignore relevant facts is ongoing despite what the scientific community has learned in the last 30 years. If I admit the possibility of a loving God then I entertain biblical teaching whereas I am responsible for immoral behavior. In a world that has no desire for accountability for right and wrong, this is unacceptable. To a society believing that bad behavior is relative (if it feels good it must be good) that is the big rub. So, only selective science that aligns with the religion of evolution is allowed in the classroom.

There are other consequences to this misinformation. If Darwin is right then I am free to be the strongest by eating all in my way (forget “love thy neighbor”). Additionally, we put zero thought to the psychological consequences of low self-esteem as people are taught their existence is as purposeless as their “brother and sister animals.” This produces a value system where protecting beetles is prioritized but unborn children are not.

The philosophy taught in the classroom today will be the governing philosophy 20 years from now. We must not use tax dollars to teach hypothesis as fact.

In wrapping this up, I have introduced legislation requiring every publically funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution using the known science, even that which conflicts with Darwin's religion. The state of Texas has given their children access to this information and so should our Oklahoma schools.

May God bless America as we honor Him!

Brecheen says the religion of evolution is plagued with falsehoods
(by State Senator Josh Brecheen, Durant Daily Democrat, December 24, 2010)

Many students buying into the religion of evolution have been persuaded by the Miller experiment, even though it is plagued with falsehoods.

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

There is a 19th century observation, made by multiple scientists and easily replicated today, that embryos go through a period called the phylotypic stage (and in vertebrates, called the pharyngula stage), in which species within a phylum exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity to one another. This is simply a fact: stop by my lab and I can pull out a series of slides of birds and mammals and reptiles and fish and show you how they all exhibit a set of characters, the presence of a tailbud and pharyngeal arches and somites and so forth, that are the hallmark of this relatively well-conserved stage. Now in the 19th century, Haeckel over-interpreted them to postulate a recapitulation of evolution within the development of an embryo, an idea now known to be false; Jonathan Wells' strategy has always been to point to an obsolete and falsified explanation for the similarities to argue that the evolutionary relationships are untenable. It's a sleazy sleight of hand. Recapitulation theory is not in any way endorsed any more, but the similarities at the phylotopic stage are undeniable…yet Wells condemns any textbook that even shows photos of embryonic similarities.

That's the central problem here. We have a phenomenon, the similarities between embryos at one stage of development, for which the creationists have no explanation, so they're reduced to frantically denying the phenomenon. This isn't the way science should work. The phenomenon is real; that these common similarities between embryos is better explained by common descent than by design may make creationists uncomfortable, but what a scientist should do is find an answer, not try to wave the problem away (or worse, accuse everyone who has seen these similarities as guilty of fraud).

I'd go further than to argue that the creationists are trying to hide data that defies their ideology. They're trying to bury something that is almost paradigmatic of juicy, exciting science. There are a couple of properties of significant scientific questions that I consider emblematic of exactly the kind of work that is of great value:
1. It has to address a universal phenomenon. The problem of phylotypy isn't representative of all of life by any means, but it seems to be a near-universal within the animal kingdom. Why do organisms as diverse as insects and mammals exhibit this morphological bottleneck in their development? It's a great question; it doesn't deserve to be swept under the rug as the creationists would like to do.
2. It has to be a non-trivial problem. Trying to figure out exactly what is going on in phylotypy isn't easy, because the current best hypotheses all involve interactions within complex gene networks, not the most tractable problem, and solving it will require both comparative and computational tools. It's the complexity of the subject that makes it both challenging and rewarding to solve.
3. One thing guaranteed to spur interest if the postulated mechanisms are controversial. Proposed mechanisms for phylotypy are non-Darwinian: they involve selection for intrinsic properties of networks of developmental genes that establish large scale properties of embryonic patterning. Notice that it isn't anti-Darwinian, or the creationists would be happy with it; the mechanism fits within the context of our understanding of evolution, but extends it somewhat to include conservation of a kind of sophisticated, modular array of genes that work together to build the body plan. It's not just the alleles that matter, but the connections between them.
4. Maybe I should have mentioned this one first. A key quality of good science is that it is doable — we have to be able to sit down and do measurements and experiments. Truth be told, a lot of ordinary science doesn't engage the first three principles I listed above as much as it permits the rapid and routine collection of data. The phylotypy hasn't been quite so tractable, and to move beyond a kind of morphological phenomenology that has characterized much of the work so far, requires comparative analysis of large dataset of developmental gene expression data. Until recently, that kind of information simply hasn't been available.

I used the past tense there: that data hasn't been available. But that's changing fast now with new techniques in molecular and developmental biology, and later today I'll summarize a couple of beautiful recent articles that have revealed some of the underpinnings of the phylotypic stage. The creationists weren't just wrong, they're on the wrong side of history, and day by day they are bing shown to be increasingly far off base.