Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

We don't need to in order to determine certain facts....gravity causes "falling"...this has measurable characteristics that occur 100% of the time .

I can see your point but we can prove things, otherwise we are still in the cave days .

I gave up trying to understand people a long time ago . Religious nutters feel science is threatening everything that makes life worth living . Thats pretty serious stuff and logic and reason dont get a look in .

How could science not threaten lingerie. There's no logic or reason in lingerie. Is there? Am I missing something?

What's the point in spending billions of dollars every year on competitive sexiness when it wouldn't make any difference if nothing was spent on it and which might even improve things.

Are the techniques of competitive sexiness illogical, unreasonable, not critically thought out and, as lies, completely unscientific.

Most definitely . Like birds growing pretty feathers, it is a sideline built on extra survival points . It is very unscientific .

I knew you was an fm fan Io. I sensed it. I can't see any of fm's points. Every position he takes is based on him not knowing anything about whatever matter he is pontificating about. Gravity is what tortured Jesus in the name of giving us a chance. On Darwin's stuff we have no chance.

Don't get me wrong Io. I don't mind evolved sexiness. I was talking about short cuts.

I dont know who will be the most shocked to learn that, me or him . But the point he made was actually religious if you had of taken the time to think about it .

Do we not prove anything at all in science? No probabilities, relationships, evidence or anything of that sort? When I ask this I am not asking in philosophical absolutes but rather in scientific facts that have peer reviews and so forth!

"Proof" in science means "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". It doesn't mean absolute philosophical proof. But proof beyond a reasonable doubt is sufficient to be functionally valuable, which is exactly why science has been such a rewarding pursuit for humanity.

Why would people question scientific findings based on available evidence when the primary goal is to learn about our environment?

Nothing in life is perfect/flawless; we live with much misinformation to guide our life, and we as humans make mistakes on what we consider important decisions concerning our character and direction of life.
Why do people expect perfection from science?

Proof beyond reasonable doubt should be sufficient.

Thinking about the great man Clarence Darrow. His words still ring true.

"If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church.

At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers.

After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. [Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925]

evidence is not proof sinceit fulfills a specific batch of conditions(not all). Probablilities are tests of robustness of the data as it fits a "model". Stats are used to affect the same relationships. We try to stay away from such things as correlations autocorrelations etc.

When the Oz one was yelling about "gravity" he failed to recognize that gravity is not even understoo=d as a force. Yet, under newtonian conditions we can mathematically apply results from evidence derived equations.

We CAN prove that our calculations and equations are at least stable (ie , left side and right side of the equals signs balance in units and units)
W can prove that the calculation for one set of data in the Unoversal Netonian Gravity equation is proven correct. But thats just one example of one set of data in one layer of how we even understand gravity.

"Peer reviews" prove nothing. Our pweers can all be wrong as they review and "approve" my paper , because I can be dead wrong. The field of Global tectonics revolutionized structural geology and geophysics. ENtire new realms of data and evidence in support of Continental drift and subduction have totally overthrown the old "geosynclinal models". Yet, in the 1950's , structural geology papares using Geosynclinal models was being peer revieed left and right. .It took a war and hunting for german submarines to begin the revolution that began to correlate what Alfred Wegener said in the 1920's that "It appears that, from the shape of the continents and the exact same species of fossils we find on both sides of the Atlantic, make me believe taht these continents drifetd apart".Wegener was laughed to scorn and went away a beaten man.

"Burden of Proof"
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt"

are legal terms
"Preponderence of the evidence" is also a legal term but best fits what science tries to do. We can still vote a theory up or down until the down votes are shown to be incorrect .
That condition was one that "The PErth Group" as I mentioned before is a small and dwindling group fo Australian researchers who are AIDs/HIV denialists. These folks had stated a bunch of claims that , since theyve stated them in the early 1990's, have been gradually debunked by EVIDENCE.

The word "proof" implies a firm fixed"one size fits all" while every lab experiment and condition foits the Uncertainty conditions wherein evrey experiment, by its own interference with a natural system, is unique and not a "one size fits all"

Dinosaurian evidence has as many examples of spwecimens that dont fit the curve of data and dont fit the expected evolutionary trend. Each piece of evidence helps us pork up the theory of evolution in manners that we had NO idea that it would.
"Proving" in science is kinda schlemiel pomposity. We have utmost confidence in most robust theories but we havent been able to explain every situation and every physical condition. Thats why gravity was a perfect example of preponderance of evidence , (But not evidence beyond a resonable doubt).
Scientists can work in this arena of unknowns. It actually allows us to get up and face the work because we KNOW fairly certain that NOT EVERYTHING IS KNOWN YET. In fact we are just on the verge of coming to grips with what we may never know (who knows?)

farmerman, Thanks for explaining how we should look at scientific findings as "preponderance of the evidence" up to that point in time, and not beyond a reasonable doubt, because even evidence can be proven wrong.

Here's an opinion piece by Gary Hurd in last weeks paper. It's long but worthwhile.

"The 20th was the century of the physicists. We are entering the century of the biologists. And, like the physics of the last century, future biological discovery is critical to human advancement and our national security. Paul James missed this entirely in his recent Palm Beach Post column. He also missed the point of the high school science teachers' opinion study he took as inspiration.

That research, by Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer, found that only 28 percent of U.S. teachers are competent to teach basic biology, another 18 percent personally support creationism, with 13 percent who actively encourage students to reject science. In conservative school districts, science denial can reach up to 40 percent of science teachers. They also found the remaining teachers avoided teaching about evolution, even suggesting that there still was scientific controversy regarding evolution.

However, these same teachers admitted that they lacked professional training in evolution and were unable to correctly present the curriculum. Messrs Berkman and Plutzer saw this as an opportunity for intervention - by improving the requirements for teacher certification, and offering current teachers remedial study in biology, the nearly 60 percent of deficient teachers could become proficient

Mr. James used the bulk of his column ironically demonstrating why we are locked into a "cycle of ignorance." He is apparently ignorant that there are dozens of published new and emerging species. We have, of course, directly observed the emergence of new species, conclusively demonstrating common descent, the core hypothesis of evolutionary theory. We are also tracking the specific mutations in the particular genes that are generating these new species. This is as much a proof of evolution as dropping a bowling ball on your foot proves gravity.

Creationists, like Mr. James, commonly object that evolutionary theory lacks a definitive answer for the origin of life, or for the origin of the universe. Charles Darwin barely speculated about the origin of life. Writing a private letter sent to botanist Joseph Hooker in 1871, he wrote, "It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."

Evolutionary theory is exclusively concerned with the diversity of life as we find it, and not its origin. Evolution will occur as it does today no matter how life began. The origin of life moved from speculation to experimental science in 1953 with the famous Miller/Urey experiment that generated amino acids from simple stock chemicals under conditions simulating the ancient Earth. The past 10 years have seen more origin-of-life research advances than in the preceding century. Today's discoveries about the origin of the universe are a part of astrophysics, not biology, but 140 years after Darwin's complaint, we are also closing in on the origin of matter itself.

Sadly, such research success is shifting away from the United States toward nations not infected with politically powerful opponents to science motivated by religious ideology. The anti-science book by Lee Strobel, which Paul James promoted as "interviews with top scientists," is a case in point. Not one of Mr. Strobel's interviews was with a significant scientist. A good example is Mr. Strobel's interview with Jonathan Wells. Following his doctorate in theology, Mr. Wells was ordained by self-proclaimed messiah Sun Myung Moon, ordered to earn a doctoral degree in biology and dedicate his life to "destroying Darwinism." With no significant scientific publications, he is still following orders.

Mr. James concludes that American teenagers should find contentment and meaning in religion, and not science. But, it is scientists who are healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked (see Matthew 25).

Perhaps we scientists are living meaningful lives after all.

Gary Hurd has a doctorate in social science from the University of California, Irvine. He has taught at several medical schools and served on the staff of the Orange County (Calif.) Museum of Natural History.

I do agree with your view on gravity! I explored many different views on this matter and it seemed that Neil Tyson explained it best. This is not the video of him explaining it because I could not find it, but it is Neil!

You did a good job of explaining it yourself!

What do you think about Neil?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hig74yhS3SA&playnext=1&list=PLE5E2E205B7EDD3AB

Is he the guy from the Museum of Natural History? If thats the guy, he has done more to make science accessible for kids than almost anyone I can think of. Hes a highly qualifed cosmologist and yet he never gets lost in arcane jargon so that his intended audience is awlays the one hes speaking to at the moment. I heard him during the "Darwin Days" whe he was down at U Penn .He was scholarly and very bright.

I dont like Mishi Ohkaku who takes on so many areas that hes barely qualified in that you know hes being coached and that robs cred from these guys. Tyson always has someone who can back him up wiith the detail and he handles his areas of expertise .

Yelling ?? I failed to recognise what now ? Desperation makes you say stupid things . The practical applications of gravity are well established facts...whether it is the same throughout the universe is another matter .

We can also send a satellite to Pluto thats a little more than equations .

The point is that we EVIDENCE gravity's effects(not gravity itself). I guarantee you a Nobel prize if you can answer a simple question. WHAT IS GRAVITY??

I guarantee that you wont come up witha correct answer (curvature of space a force, a weak force, not a force but a plane).Guys are going bat **** now (STILL, 400 years afyer Newton ) and we still dont know what it is.
How can you prove something that allows you only to know it by is effects?
Sure its good enough for application, thats myentire point and you keep repeating it for me. The arguments that we make re: evolution are always something like
"Evolution is the basis of biology and its laws, try to apply the "Science of Creationism" to come up with any applications".

Thats all evidence that lies behind evolution, and no evidence lies behind Cretionism. Creationsistall feel that they have "proof" of their beliefs
1World is too complicted to not to have been CREATED"

2Bible Proves the path of the Creation of the World.

Thats their "Proof", I say we merely counter those beliefs with counter evidence.

It may sound like mere word games to you but thats the way we roll.

Sansbury's work and the basic Podkletnov experiment (which ESA replicated in 06) strongly indicate that gravity is a kind of a polarized form of electrostatic force. Best description I am aware of:

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=89xdcmfs

That's all true, but at a deeper level nobody understands any of the other fundamental forces either. We know Maxwell's equations work even without any ether for them to work in - but how? And nobody really understands weak and strong nuclear forces either; one of the greatest physicists ever, being asked about yet another newly discovered "fundamental particle" said "if I could remember so many of their names I would have become a botanist".