Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

No--he was so repulsive he had to knuckle under to get a sniff. I know a few myself in the same boat. But at least Socrates only bore up under the nagging. He didn't have to spend his weekends and his wages in B&Q kitting himself out with instruments of low level torture such as Black & Decker Workmates and lawn mowers.

That's why pubs are so important.

Oh now I see!

I assume you know rl that the Church invented pubs. That wine you drink is not like the gnat's piss the Romans drank. It needed hundreds of years of monastic research to bring it to the perfection you now so casually take for granted.

And Socrates never experienced lingerie which is what I think the rebels in the Arab Spring are really after.

Did DArwin suffer from Chaga's Disease? Do we ,sonsequently,stop drawing him as some pussy whose own hypochondriasis was the reason for his inability to defend his theory in public fora? pparently Chaga's can have a delayed onset and that the symptomology of said sickness can be debilitating by the infection . It also can lead to creeping cardiac involvement, a continued complaint of Darwin and an ultimate cause of his death many years after his Beagle voyage.

Its a hypothesis among Darwin scholars. Im just presenting it as a new wrinkle into the pwrsonna of Darwin .

I think he was a raging neurotic and most of his health problems were psychosomatic. I can't think why his publications don't defend his theories adequately and there were others, Huxley in particular, who stood in for him in that respect.

To suggest that his poor health influenced his theories is to attack his scientific integrity which, within the limitations of its own field, I wouldn't do.

The dynamite social, economic and psychological implications of his theories are the source of my objections to teaching, probably incompetently, the evolution theory to a captive student body at a stage when it has not been graded to select those who can deal with it scientifically rather than emotionally or politically. And I cannot see the use of the theory to at least 95% of grade students or to the system they are going to spend the rest of their lives in and that difficulty is exacerbated in proprtion to their understanding of it.

I think proponents of teaching evolution in grade schools are politically and emotionally motivated.

That has been the popular concl;usion drawn about him but of course noone with experience inlatent progressive chronic ailemnts has looked at his symptomology until recently. This newest theory is as a result of a collabortion between epidemiologists at some UK med Unis.
His increasing cardiac involvement from the 1850s onward have been re-interpreted by medical evidence rather than mere opinion. Im willing to let em go without comment because neither you nor I can add anything of value to the investigation.
There is some hair of the great man that is from his old age beard and pate. Perhaps they can do a DNA assessment and look for alleles associated with Chagas.


. SO you have no care about the attainment of excellence for anyone but yourself?
Thats quite consistent with a Conservative view of the world.'The poor you shall always have with you, " to which you add "So shall you, the stupid".
I then conclude that you sum up with "So we should let all the l;ittle buggers go and collect offal and pomace for their daily trade". "

I believe that, even in your school systems where you have a trade and technical education option, th e students therein still have to take biology , chemistry, and physics because these subjects are the basis for all mechanical and medical trades . SOmehow, for some reason the regents dont agree with your worldview's base.

There's a large amount of circumstantial evidence that he was a neurotic. His theory alone is an anxiety source for someone in his social circumstances. It is today imo. Darwin did refer to the feeling that he had committed a murder with his theory. His marriage was incestuous both biologically and socially. He addressed his wife as "Mammy".

Others were exposed to the bug that causes Chagas.

Exhuming his body is a possibility. I don't see why the Dean of Westminster should be able to refuse scientific enquiries. Exhumations of bodies are common in criminal investigations. The idea that Darwin's body is somehow different (sacred) is inconsistent with his theory it seems to me.

I think that a posthumous psychoanalysis is quite in order.

You Americans should dig up your own corpses and leave ours alone. Although Darwin was a bit of a 'beardy weirdy.'

Your edit addon was fatuous. I have marked sufficient exam papers and course essays and projects to know that "excellence" as a general principle is a utopian's delusion. And I'm not convinced it would be any use.

Excellence is not something that can be asserted in order to be popular.

Dont need to dig im up. Theres so much hair and Leech blood left over (somebody must have figured hed be famous just the way they manipulated little BArry Obamas birth certificate because they knew 50 years ago that he was gonna be a president)

Weve got lots of DArwin DNA , we can let the guy moulder at the Abbey a bit longer, science doesnt need a corpus wve got the hirsutus.

Then your own investments in teaching those classes were wasted efforts by a "clock puncher". A true teacher wishes to have as many students exceed his own efforts , not despair and ridicule the outcomes.
We should all strive for excellence and only reluctantly accept average performance . Like a good Muslim I demand for excellence and destroy mediocrity. You seem to accept failure and rejoice at mediocrity. Anyway, I dont see how you could competently grade and read if you yourself did not understand AVogadro's Number and its significance.

Yes--but such examinations, being in the hands of experts not much different from those in East Anglia would cause more controversy.

Psychoanalysis of actual records is a safer bet. To abandon those posh county girls in their lingerie and go on a trip involving such discomfort and privation, at that age, is a very large issue.

That is silly. Average performance is always with us no matter how excellent it is.

Give us a quick rundown of the staffing and services of the best institution that had the benefit of your excellence. From the "Director" down to the bog cleaners. You can't escape the charge of elitism by using flowery language.

SAdly there is some truth in your pllaver. However, must you rejoice in it?
I like the rejoinder about the kids in Lake Wobegon.
Anyway, where I taught , an avergae SAT wouldnt get you in.

Money gets people in here. I presume it does in the US. Parental money too. A total betrayal of the most basic evolutionary principles.

One might win the lottery and the kids are in Oxbridge. I saw a survey once which showed how "intelligence" is correlated to the number of rooms in the parental breeding hutch.

This whole subject is bedevilled by the denial of elitism.

Where's the list of staffing in your institution of the Higher Learning? You're an elitist fm from your bald patch to the soles of your feet. And it's corrupt from pole to pole. Which wouldn't be a problem if the confetti diplomas didn't go to people's heads.

jealous cause youre a trade school dropout with delusions of adequacy?

All elitists talk like that when cornered.

Ok then, but what difference would it make? Isn't this supposed to be about the science. What difference does Darwin's health, mental or otherwise have to do with the science. That's like saying Oppenheimer developed the bomb because he was a paranoid schizophrenic. What difference does that make to Hiroshima?

You have a very great deal to catch up with izzy. Check out the thread title to begin with. I don't expect you to read the thread through, you're obviously too impulsive for that, but if you did you will find that such an argument was dealt with years ago. That you should think it hadn't been does rather underestimate the company you have joined.

One of the problems I found in my few years teaching was that my colleagues underestimated everybody from government ministers downwards.

The only sense your post makes to me is that teaching evolution will be as large a bombshell as nuclear technology is.

The teaching of evolution will put the revolution in sexual permissiveness into full flood and those supporting it will make profit from the deluge. In the short term I mean.

Do you think the resistance to teaching evolution to 13-18 year olds, en masse and captives, is irrational and mounted in order to take us back to the Dark Ages?

Darwin was personally unattached to the defense of his theory. Thus it appeared that he was a mere playboy or country parson throughout his life post "The Origin..."

The point of Chagas Disease as an explanation would add to the understanding of why he remained so unattached (publically).
I found it an interesting aside , perhaps you didnt but it will be a tidbit that will be included in classes about how "The Origin..." was not well recieved and the author was not around to defend it.

Remember , it was announced as the Darwin Wallace theory and Wallace provided a mere outline of his own cut at this theory(Wallace had few , meaningless observations and NO attempts at prediction like Darwin). Wallace "phoned in" his work from halfway around the wprld. Wallace was not around to defend anything either. He took up a keen interest inspiritualism and just turned into a medium.