Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

@plainoldme,

I would guess that you haven't the faintest idea about these matters pom. Your straw man about my imaginary book of quotations is fatuous. I do own the book you mention but I have not opened it for many years. If I do ever open it it will be for the Trivia games. I have dozens of dictionaries of one sort or another. Dictionary of Sexual Perversions for example. That's an eye opener and there's not one entry that an atheist could object to and, as de Sade said, trying them all out to see if they are any good.

gunga's post cannot be dealt with by blurting out what you did about it as if your blurt dismisses its significance. I have read it through and anybody who wishes to examine these two threads of wande's will see that I have covered almost all of the points raised in it at one time or another in my own inimitable style. Your style can be found on any street corner or under any hairdresser's drying machine. We all put together what we say from resources given to us by others. gunga's compilation certainly shows more respect for the thread, for the viewers, for A2K, for the debate and for science than the whole sum of what you and your ridiculous claque have ever said or written on the subject. You are all rank amateurs trying to justify sexual activities which are contrary to Christian teaching and which I think are contrary to the long term efficient functioning of our complex social system.

One doesn't even need to agree with the points gunga raises to be made aware that the teaching of evolution, a dangerous idea both sociologically and psychologically, by what is necessarily a group of biology teachers who have little more competence that you in the subject and likely to have similar personal motivations, is not something which anybody with the slightest interest in the education of the youth, or in science, would ever dream of contemplating. The comparison of the flagella organism with a mechanical valve proved beyond all doubt that Dover was a complete farce apart from the rip-off aspect. And I would have come at that courtroom from a completely different point of view than gunga would.

You are out of your depth pom and it really, really shows. And so are the other anti-IDers on these two threads. I think you are all irresponsible as well and I'll include Judge Jones in that charge. Your comments, and others, on my post of yesterday prove you have nothing of significance to say. And I would not sacrifice a hair on my head, and I have plenty, to defend your right to say it. You have no right to say those things when the education of 50 million kids is being debated.

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@spendius,

Quote:

One doesn't even need to agree with the points gunga raises to be made aware that the teaching of evolution, a dangerous idea both sociologically and psychologically...

That's basically the point. There actually are relatively harmless pseudosciences and false religions; evolution is not one of those. Evolution is junk science and, as junk science goes, a spectacularly evil and dangerous variety, with two world wars and two or three hundred million dead bodies lying around to its credit.

Moreover, there is no excuse for intelligent people or even quasi-intelligent people like formerman here to have kept it going any more recently than about 1970 when RNA and DNA were understood. I mean, you had the gigantic failure of the fruit fly experiments which were supposed to prove macro-evolution and there might have been questions in peoples minds as to what caused the failure at the time but the discovery of RNA/DNA had to have removed all doubt, i.e. our living world is governed by an information system more complex than any computer code and the only information there ever was in those early 1900s experiments was the information for fruit flies.

I mean, granted the fools might think evolution to be necessary as a life-style issue but what the hell sort of lifestyle justifies keeping a theory which has engendered Nazism, Communism, the eugenics movements, two world wars and every other sort of grief, AFTER that theory has been shown to be bullshit on pure scientific grounds??

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@farmerman,

That says nothing fm. It's meaningless.

Quote:

"Perhaps in no other area of modern biology is the challenge posed by the extreme complexity and ingenuity of biological adaptations more apparent than in the fascinating new molecular world of the cell. Viewed down a light microscope at a magnification of some several hundred times, such as would have been possible in Darwin's time, a living cell is a relatively
disappointing spectacle appearing only as an ever-changing and apparently
disordered pattern of blobs and particles which, under the influence of
unseen turbulent forces, are continually tossed haphazardly in all
directions. To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by
molecular biology, we must magnify the cell a thousand million times until
it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant air ship large
enough to cover a great city like London or New Your. What we would then
see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On
the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port
holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream
of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of those openings
we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering
complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits
branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some
leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly
plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical
chamber more than a kilometre in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome
inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered
arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of
products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in
a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the
outer regions of the cell.

You stick to your disordered patterns of blobs if it floats your boat but don't start laying down what a scientific society's kids should be taught on the strength of it and on the strength of an assumption of an ideal teacher being in every science classroom when it would be practically impossible to find one given the low salaries they are paid.

Anybody who has read Prof. Aidey's famous book The Physiology of Excitable Cells, as I have, will recognise the basic truth contained in that quote. And even then it is a gross over-simplification.

I think Darwin is older than all of the scientists gunga quotes. So your "OLD" argument wipes him out as well.

Quote:

HACKNEYED(Science has moved very far since 1979 and yet gunga seems lost in a time warp with overused trite "logic")

That's babyish. And talk about hackneyed. It's first division hackneyed.

You're floundering and hoping viewers here are too stupid to notice.

1 Reply

@farmerman,

My students are reading the Stephen Jay Gould book that is the source of the quote from him. I would never accept at face value anything gunga -- or several others -- post. He easily falls prey to extremists who self-publish baseless assumptions.

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@gungasnake,

And what are your scientific credentials?

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@spendius,

I simply did not bother to read your tirade against me after the first sentence because you have no idea what a strawman argument is, let alone anything more complex. You also seem to think Bartlett's is an imaginary book. Perhaps, you know it is real, but your writing style hampers your ability to make yourself understood.

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@plainoldme,

Where did you find that ugly-looking cat (for the avatar)?

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@plainoldme,

Look pom--gunga should be judged on his posts and not on any credentials he might have or be capable of saying he has. You sound like you would swallow any bait.

Your remarks are aimed at us falling prey to your self-publicising. Although I must admit you are not very extreme.

Answer his posts. Not some straw man figment of your own Pisonian imagination invented for no other reason than to pretend to Ignore what he said and insulting our intelligence by assuming we don't know that's what it is.

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

but the discovery of RNA/DNA had to have removed all doubt, i.e. our living world is governed by an information system more complex than any computer code and the only information there ever was in those early 1900s experiments was the information for fruit flies

A bold statement, seems you have a "secret understanding" about DNA and the genome. I would just love to hear it.

Did you flunk biology really badly?

A very good and short book (However, no cartoons) is

RELICS OF EDEN, The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA.

Daniel J Fairbanks
PROMETHEUS BOOKS
2007

I know, its not "Aged" enough to be a book that gunga likes to consult, but it goes to gungas misdirected bullswhit opinions about the genome and DNA

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

(addressing Gunga Dim) And what are your scientific credentials?

He knows how to cut and paste from creationist web sites.

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@spendius,

Ivan Illich wrote in Deschooling Society--

Quote:

Children are protected by neither the First nor the Fifth Amendment when they stand before that secular priest, the teacher. The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown, like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet, and priest-he is at once guide, teacher, and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory institution--church or state.

And you anti-IDers want to empower the teacher to give the nation's kids a dangerous doctrine which can be challenged scientifically and pulped from a sociological and psychological point of view.

My hypothesis that anti-IDers are a new priesthood, which has not been challenged, implies that evolution is a religious doctrine and thus it should not be taught at public expense.

And there is the famous Illich calling teachers priests.

The book can be read online but I don't recommend it and especially not to those who are fond of using expressions such as "my students". They have been schooled goodstyle. That schooling is important and other ways of learning are inferior to it is one giant pile of strawmen. Schools might even inhibit learning. Teaching is not learning.

Most parents don't care what their kids are taught so long as they come out with certificates to get jobs with. Once it becomes necessary to answer exam questions to the approval of evolutionists they are home and dry. But the certificates would be handed out to roughly the same people whether evolution was taught or not. And there are a large number of people who work in the biological field who never heard a peep about evolution at school.

Don't tell me I don't understand what a straw man is pom. Besides the blurt meaning nothing it shows that the only strawmen you recognise are the Stage 1 variety of which the blurt is the simplest version.

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@Setanta,

Ive been fighting a maxillary sinus infection that because our sinuses dont drain DOWN (ever since humans began walking on two legs). Evolution can cause some disturbing maladies from the way things useto be.

We cant even make our pwn vitamin C anymore.

1 Reply

The sort of thing Spendius is referring to:

Quote:

‘If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…’

Jeffrey Dahmer, in an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC, Nov. 29, 1994.

A psychopath is basically some sort of a throwback; he lacks some faculty the rest of us have for modeling other people and their feelings, and experts like Robert Hare claim that it isn't like one person in every ten million or anything like that, but more like one in fifty or a hundred or something. The basic ideas of normal religion are thus hard-wired in most of us which is why secular societies like Canada or England work at all, but that thirtieth or fiftieth person really does not need to be hearing that he should view his neighbor as a meat byproduct of random events and not as a fellow child of God.

THAT is the price you pay for whatever life-style you think you're protecting by defending evolution.

http://www.hare.org/

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Leave it to Gunga Dim to look to Jeffrey Dahmer for wisdom . . .

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Jeffrey Dahmer, isn't he that guy that got caught selling arms to Iraq? or was it feet to the Contras?

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@farmerman,

Quote:

Ive been fighting a maxillary sinus infection that because our sinuses dont drain DOWN (ever since humans began walking on two legs).

But we all walk on two legs and I've never heard of maxillary sinus infection so it must be rare. And no drain ever goes up. I would guess the condition is caused by something else such as looking down the nose sniffily at uneducated weaklings.

I can make Vit.C. I go out every autumn and pick a lot of fruit. Plums, damsons and blackberries. Then I freeze or bottle or jam them. I still have a pile left and I eat some of it everyday.

1 Reply

@spendius,

Quote:

But we all walk on two legs

Walking on two legs is not that big a deal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxDI3s21yf8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-VY6JiyDU

Give this guy a briefcase or a lunch pail to carry around and he could walk down the sidewalk in New York City without even frightening anybody.

2 Replies

@plainoldme,

Internet Ugly Cat Contest:

http://www.dunster.com/uglycats.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NF5XU-k2Vk

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@gungasnake,

The first one walks like it's been wet farting for a while. A bit like Groucho Marx.

1 Reply

@spendius,

Groucho Marx had wit; you have none.

1 Reply

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