Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

@spendius,

spendius wrote:

The ONLY challenge to teaching evolution is the social consequences of doing so when its scientific severities have become established over many years and no other explanations can even be thought of.

Other challenges are a complete waste of time. They are off topic and constitute real trolling.

There is much more to this subject than "social consequences." To solely focus on social consequences would bypass political, legal, religious, cultural, and educational factors.

If you wish to discuss this subject in terms of social consequences only, you should begin your own discussion thread and tailor it to your own liking.

1 Reply

@wandeljw,

There can't be anything else to it wande because it's science. It doesn't say anything about science in the thread title. The whole educational system from top to bottom has no other purpose or justification than to produce the desired social consequences.

Why would there be a heated debate for 150 years if only science was the consideration? They have had to invent string theory to try to retain a modicum of discussion within science. And a few other far-fetched stuffs. Everytime a new fossil, or a fake fossil, is discovered for our attention a new theory is teleologised into being.

That you obviously have other sciences on Ignore is simply, like all resort to that blinkered state, a convenience to save you having to face up to things you must have thought you would never have to face up to. And arrange your social contacts accordingly.

You're scared of arguing that atheism/materialism/evolution is necessary for national survival in this nasty competitive world and that a eugenics programme more scientific than the informal one we have now is needed and to remove all the romantic nonsense to the status of an anachronism so that future people can have a titter at our foolishness. As some already do.

1 Reply

@spendius,

One of the social consequences of education is that it produced you!

2 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

It didn't produce you though ci. You hatched out by the heat of the sun.

2 Replies

@spendius,

You fail at biology too!

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

You do. Where do you think the heat came from. The central heating boiler!!

0 Replies

@spendius,

It's not only the sun, spendi; you fail biology on the basics of failing to understand what is required for life. Let's just say that without the sun, you wouldn't exist either, but that's not what we are talking about.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

I know what's required for life. God said "let it be". And there was life. It's so simple that you can get on with life without bothering your head about any other explanations, most of which are quite absurd compared to a Magic Wand. All one gets with scientific ones is the opportunity to practice sophistry whilst sat on your fat arse while your best beloved busies herself around the house, or in the barn, to keep things up to the standard all self-respecting sophists are accustomed to in view of the importance of the issues they are sophistising upon with furrowed brows and a deeply serious expression on their jowled fissogs.

The lads who get down to the hop and mix it with the chicks, who just happen to know where to be best mixed with, can learn evolution in quick time if they are observant and what's the sense in teaching science to the unobservant when observations are all there is. It's the ones who don't mix it with the chicks who have to learn the slow way. The nerdy types. Calamity Jane knows a few scientists and she said they were all nerds. And I would trust Cal's observations before some stuff I've seen. Swots. Taking 18 years teaching people to read and write in order to accuse me of doing run-on sentences as if run-on sentences are the authentic sign of the pissed-up imbecile.

It's an industry.

1 Reply

@spendius,

spendi, It's evident you haven't kept up with the news on the origin of man. It all started in Africa, and there is DNA and other proof that primates are all related.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

That's not news ci. There were cartoons depicting Darwin as a monkey, which isn't that difficult, paying court to a lady in Victorian country-house-ball get up, within days of the publication of Origins. A photograph of the most famous one is in Desmond and Moore's biography of the randy old goat.

Did you like that book?

What's DNA? I know it's a double-helix thingy of atoms and easily mated molecules and free radical **** and that we get it in our system from some mysterious combination of the reproductive material of our Moms and Pops under conditions which are hard to determine due to their variability and it grows us how we are, bodily I mean, and that when instruments get better it will only be necessary to take a sample of the air in a room where a crime has been perped to get an instant printout of the names of all the suspects.

That's not knowing what it is. It will certainly look nothing like those visual aids with the wires and coloured balls one sees in scientific publications just as an electron will look nothing like a little x on a chalked circle. Those seem to me to be misleading people for the sake of misleading them.

And what we do know about DNA was made possible by physicists developing instruments and not biologists. Once you have the instrument what you see is what the instrument shows you. Like when you watch telly.

1 Reply

@spendius,

spendi, It doesn't matter which field of study discover how to study our environment; they usually cross-over from field to field, and support what was found in one scientific field by another. That's how science is supposed to work.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

It's call synergy ci. Progress across a broad front. Physicists and engineers make better instruments and biologist make better explanations of what they observe by using them.

1 Reply

@spendius,

Precisely!

0 Replies

ILLINOIS UPDATE

Quote:

Administrators confirm creationism was referenced in science curriculum
(By Amy Alderman, Chicago Tribune, March 9, 2011)

Libertyville High School officials have confirmed that a teacher was referencing creationism in a science classroom, adding that steps have been taken to ensure the religious views are eliminated from the curriculum.

District 128 administrators were responding to comments during a recent school board meeting, when Buffalo Grove-based activist Rob Sherman said that a student’s older sibling alleged that a biology and human genetics teacher, Beau Schaefer, had been promoting creationist beliefs while discrediting evolution.

“A teacher is teaching that creationism and intelligent design is more relevant than evolution,” Sherman said. “You cannot compare and contrast creationism and evolution in a public classroom. If the facts bear out that he is teaching this, I’m asking you to determine the appropriate response. Maybe you need to get someone else in there to ‘un-teach’ everything Mr. Schaefer has taught them.”

Sherman, who is also working to garner support for a state law repealing the Moment of Silence, said he raised the issue in District 128 out of the concern that young minds may be influenced by an authority figure.

“I am expressing grave concern and frustration that this is going on in a class,” Sherman said. “There’s a perception among students that it’s okay if a teacher is doing something in a classroom.”

For example, in a quiz allegedly assigned by Schaefer, Sherman claims some questions lead students to creationist beliefs, swaying them toward the notion that evolution is not scientific. That goes against the Illinois State Board of Education’s 11-th grade science assessment framework, Sherman said.

On Tuesday Libertyville High School administrators said they had spoken with Schaefer, and determined that creationism was being taught in his classroom.

“The administration looked into the matter and found that one LHS science teacher was referencing creationism in a unit on evolution,” said Mary Todoric, director of communications. “Steps have been taken to ensure that this teacher will no longer use creationism as part of his classroom instruction. Furthermore, the district has taken appropriate steps to ensure that all science teachers are not referencing or teaching creationism.”

District 128 officials won’t comment on whether there has been any disciplinary action.

Schaefer has not returned several phone calls.

1 Reply

@wandeljw,

This kind of **** goes on all the time and in most cases its not detected as countering the scientific method.
It happened in our area several years back after the {A school curricula standards were established. Thois teacher was teaching the Creationist/ID version and wasnt detected until a year later when the Dover case was kicking in. The school bord did a good thibg by presenting the issue to students in the format of how the ID/Creationism is fact free and evidence free while science is built strictly from evisdence. The kids got the point and tnhe teacher, while censured, was not foired or disciplined more seriously. The Dover decision came like two years later and that teacher went off to teach in a charter school run by some right wing oitfit.(The charter school went out of business in 2009 due to shrinking enrollment)

1 Reply

@farmerman,

Quote:

The school bord did a good thibg by presenting the issue to students in the format of how the ID/Creationism is fact free and evidence free while science is built strictly from evisdence.

Here we go again. Of course ID/C is fact free within the limited definition fm is using of "fact". It's a BIG FACT that without ID/C we get atheism and all the package that comes with it.

But fm can Ignore that because he is old enough, as I am, and the process is slow enough, for it not to matter much to him. He has either no care for the future or he thinks atheism is needed to provide the care. And he won't go within miles of the reality of atheism whilst he's got a Christian, just about, society to kick around.

1 Reply

@spendius,

spendi, You are being inconsistent with FACTS; they apply to most things that are agreed upon when it involves objective facts. You're trying to imply that objective facts are the same as religious "facts;" it won't wash.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

It's not a religious fact because, first, such things don't exist, and second, because atheism is what you get with ID/C, as a fact. And the BIG FACT I referred to. An objective fact.

You can't read.

1 Reply

@spendius,

True, but without any religion, atheism would not exist. What came first, the egg or the chicken?

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

I imagine atheism came first. Then the missing link. Then us. Our simian ancestors would be atheists.

Those in the "monkey *******" video I put up looked like atheists to me. Especially the young lad. Imagine, what with all that DNA being a common legacy, doing that to one's Dad at such a moment. They were atheists alright. Christians don't do that sort of thing. Although Laurence Sterne got close figuratively speaking. But his father was dead when he performed the trick.

You lot are Christian atheists. Sorry!!

1 Reply

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