Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

So then, Don Quixote, evolution is not a myth, you're a genuine evolutionist, yet you tilt against it from of all things, a moral perspective, and then you further the non sequitur by assuming that evolution must be carried forward to its "logical" moral ends. Morality is not logical insofar as it follows principles of reasoning (it doesn't nearly as much as it does a dynamic of individual and collective sentimentality), and neither is the process of evolution which is governed by natural processes and mechanisms.

In general I think that performance enhancing drugs and procedures should be allowed in sports as they are technologies that can advance the human condition in many of its aspects, but their use should be researched and regulated.

How does your position on performance enhancing drugs jibe with your IDism?

InfraBlue, Good post.

Well IB-- I don't "tilt" at evolution. I have read DQ. I have read Nabokov's analysis of it and Laurence Sterne's use of it for his own masterpiece.

I'm against the teaching of it to adolescents. Of course evolution theory, if taught to all the kids, must be followed to its logical conclusions. Not doing would render the teaching futile.



You are assuming there are only principles of reasoning you are familiar with.



Whose dynamics of individual and collective sentimentalities? What does your collective consist of?

Are you saying that evolutionary processes are not logical when viewed in hindsight?

I'm not an IDer. I'm an anti-anti IDer because they all look to be unhinged and I don't fancy a future under their guidance.

I agree with what you say about PEDs up to "regulated". I would have said that knowledge of their dangers should be published as is the case with tobacco. Coffee and tea are performance enhancers. As are many other substances.

I am firmly convinced that promotion of the teaching of evolution is a reaction against Christian morality on sexual behaviour for self-justification purposes.

Is there a front-line politician, who has been elected, who goes on the stump promoting such teaching? All we have is a grass roots campaign by political non-entities. Members of the lower orders chafing at the bit.

spendi, What's the logical conclusion for ID? What and who is the primary source?

The individual belief. What else could it be.

You're getting closer to the truth - that's if you also understand that "individual belief" can be irrational.

That's easy to understand ci. with you showing how it's done everyday.

Nabokov: Right about evolution:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?pagewanted=1&ref=science
Meanwhile, only a few million years after the Big Bang: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/science/space/27galaxy.html?ref=science

Say what you want, be ID or anti-anti ID, you are being left behind about as fast as the galaxies fly across this tiny universe.
Joe(not much else to say)Nation

441 pages to conclude that Spendius (i) believes in evolution, and (ii) does not believe in ID. Someone please remind me what the argument was about...

Thanks Joe--now I'm up to speed again. In five minutes. You should be on TV.

Spendi is being disengenuous by not "stashing his poke" along with the IDers. Hed been insisting for several years that he believed in "True ID" , then when he was backed into a corner he failed to develop his "thesis" about what true ID even was. SOmewhere after that he began pushing a new thesis that teaching evolution would lead to atheistic education(it alredy is mostly atheistic , as per atheisms real definition)
For some reason obvious only to him hed been critical of widely teaching evolution to our kids in their biology curriculum. (atheism or not, evolution is a foundation of modern biology and we still insist on teaching biology in secondary school)That was certainly a strange road which was instrumental in my decision to totally ignore him without any periodic "peeking". That decision has been quite gratifying for me and this thread has benefited because the number of folks still feeding him has been reduced to just a few who like arguing with his circular reasoning.

I enjoy reading the newsclips that wandel posts and some of them are from obscure news sources. To these we comment on the substance of the articles wrt our US culture. What I really dont need is some Brit clown who insists that this entire thread is about granting him license to merely criticize the reporter of every damn article for poor writing, and then favoring us with a huge plop of run on mostly baseless and pointless, really baaaad writing.

If you notice, spendi seems to be ignoring me as well and this has relieved the thread of pointless pages wherein all I did was respond to his "fine" writing and all he did was pile up more tripe.

To sum up, he's been wasting our time for 441 pages and he's down for the count. Do you really think you have any credible opposition - anywhere?

dont put it on me. ci delivered the truth serum.

We are all disingenuous fm to some extent.

I have never said I believe in ID. I have never been backed into a corner. Leastwise on here I've not. I know what "true" ID is. A career opportunity. Just like anti-ID. Assuming being good at it. Amateurs probably have, or have had, hopes of turning pro.

But whether there is an Intelligent Designer or not, and derivative questions relating to Its competence, I do not feel qualified, nor inclined, to take a position on. Your spat with Frank Apisa showed well enough how much you fear that position. It places the argument on grounds you won't go near. The social consequences. The other side won't go near it either as Dover demonstrated. Judge Jones, it seems to me, looked foolish when he ended up making a big decision about a public education system designed for no other purpose than to have the desired social consequences and picking out one small aspect of the curriculum and treating it with the social consequences on Ignore. It opens the door for other aspects of the curriculum to be treated in a like manner.

The actuality of Dover, and it's a large actuality if you think about it for a while, proves the importance of that small aspect.

When I began on the other thread many years ago I had only one idea in mind. It was never a "new thesis". That is a figment of your imagination stemming from your inabilty to read properly and readiness to jump to any conclusion at a moment's notice which suits those purposes I referred to at the start of this post. I thought then, and I think now, that teaching evolution to adolescents will lead in time to the influence of atheism being increased and eventually becoming universally accepted. Which I think is a bad thing for a large number of reasons. Universal acceptance of atheism necessarily includes the power elite. Your atheism is neither here nor there as it affects nothing. In fact it might be thought counterproductive if it causes your opponents in debate to reduce you to a sprawled back dude gasping for breath with two dinner-ladies fanning you with tea-towels and everybody laughing at you. The authentic manifestation of Ignore.

The reason that was obvious to me, as it is obvious to anybody not being crassly disingenuous, was that I knew the effect the teaching of evolution had on me. It ended up with one lady accusing me of not being satisfied until I had shagged every female in Lancashire ( pop'n 1.45 million) and me being unable to dispute the matter with her. It didn't take me long to project my conclusions to the ladies themselves, what with all the aces being in their hands under the sexual offences regulations which were being strictly enforced and even distorted by the well known capacity of ladies to be able to win over a jury far better than any man can. I could see mayhem.

And one might say that there is a sense that with the increasing dissemination of evolution theory there has been an increase in mayhem. I don't, btw, consider World Wars to be mayhem in case you want to dart down that bolthole which, as an evolutionist, would be silly anyway. A very large number of ladies with these advantages represent, as a subject of contemplation I mean, a thought experiment so to say, a difficult knot to undo. So much so that Christianity had to be invented to deal with the problem even though the ladies of the times only had a few of the aforesaid advantages. Possibly only one. Male stupidity. I have seen the regulations from the Courts of Love in the Dark Ages brought up to date by the collective efforts of a typing pool. The Camelot era. The Romance of the Rose and all that. Some latter day Sterne might suggest male infanticide as the humane option.

I'm not entirely convinced we should teach biology either. Seeing a chart of a six-foot lifesize depiction of a flayed example of the two sexes to show the muscles and sinews didn't exactly prepare me for a tryst with a Widow Wadman type. The germination of a pea in a jam jar containing some moist blotting paper is alright.

And I do not have you on Ignore fm. I read all your posts on this thread and a few others.

And it is you who is circular. The last word of your post is an unproved assertion and everything you say is dependent upon it. The real question is whether viewers to the debate think the assertion is true. It's obvious I don't.

But Ignore is wimpy.

Spendi pretty much admitted to knowing evolution truly happens long ago. He was in that incarnation opposing evolution on moral grounds.

I have no moral grounds ed.

I oppose evolution teaching to adolescents on purely practical grounds. All my opponents can say on practical grounds is that not teaching the ideas of evolution will hold back American science. I don't believe that for a moment. American science is not in the hands of the 50 million kids. It is in the hands of specialists. American science is facilitated by the population as a whole. Evolution theory is 5 minutes work for those specialising in the applications of it. Which are technology and not science.

I believe that we should train young auto mechanics in all things mechanical EXCEPT for electronics. Electronics can lead to poor posture and appetites for unhealthy foodtsuffs. It would be on entirely bad nutritinal choice to teach things to kids that would have our entire civilization roiling in fatness. Its just for our own good that I insist on this

Assuming that the results are as you say I suppose no harm will be done teaching such poor specimens of humanity evolution theory because they would not be participating in the sexual melee. With gross fatness, bad posture, teeth rotting, hair falling out, piles, sciatica and all the other well known conditions associated with such things they will be effectively impotent and thus, from an evolutionary point of view, out of the game.

One look at any of them will be quite sufficient to get any intelligent person to take no notice of anything they say. Some might even adopt an opposed stance on that visual evidence alone.

spendi, You are a genius at using analogy that doesn't even fit what you're trying to say. LOL

It fits exactly with what I was trying to say. Perhaps you don't understand evolution theory sufficiently well to see that.