Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

It just amazes me how personally vitriolic the creationist lobby is about Darwin in person. Regardless of how you feel, he was a great scientist. He's appeared on our banknotes. He's only guilty of arriving at a hypothesis, based on proper scientific procedure. And the way he is treated personally is disgraceful.

Darwin was listed the fourth greatest Briton of all time in a 2006 BBC poll. Third Place in the same poll astonishingly went to Diana, Princess of Wales.

You think I don't know that? Bloody hell. In fairness the poll was taken not that long after Diana's death. You know what some people are like for phoning up voting lines, and Diana fans are pretty fanatical.

Read Desmond & Moore and see how much you would have liked him as a pal. And us liking each other as pals might well be the evolutionary adaptation which enables us to survive as a species. I suppose "have a nice day" is paying lip service to that ideal. Except when it is snarled.

How is the inculcation of such a universally valid characteristic, using Kant's Categorial Imperitive as a guide, facilitated by teaching kids evolution and, in the nature of the case, allowing the teachings of Jesus to be set aside? It's tough enough getting Jesus a toe-hold these days without Him being wiped out altogether and us being stuck red in tooth and claw.

Animosity seems to be a popular enough pastime as it is. A proper comic doesn't go near animosity. Look at Stan Laurel and he was born just up the road judging by going for a pizza American-style standards.

Absurdity is the truly comic. Tommy Cooper. Harold Pinter. Eraserhead ****. Seeing Fred Emney doing a shaving routine was the cause, the first cause, of my beard. I had previously thought shaving was a perfectly natural thing to do. Fred was born less further up the road than Mr Laurel was.

I hated Lenny Bruce. No wonder Dylan said that a taxi ride with him took a couple of months.

Once again your focussed brilliance takes apart my last post with surgical precision. I am humbled.

"some people" eh. A real chattering class empathy hug with smug self-satisfying smirks spreading out in little ripples of low-level joy all around the company. Those lower down the social scale I suppose you mean. Reminding yourself of then allows you to rest from gazing longingly upwards at the posher end of the trough and rutting sheds and saves getting neck-crick.

It's not an expression I hear in my pub. ******* fat cats is what I hear.

Going back to Sir Charles, it is good for a man to be deconstructed because it allows his fans to rebut the charges and set them to rest for good and all. Why would a man leave that hothouse of rich Jane Austen fans to go on a five-year long cruise in a floating pig-sty, seasick all the way, and having to pay out his old man's good money to do it? In the very prime of his lusty anatomy. I ask you?

So much for the value of that poll.

That's where I started izzy. Thorstein Veblen did it to me but it was so funny I couldn't take exception as I believe those without a sense of proportion did. And still do.

Like Granville Barker who jumped out of a coach, delivering him to the theatre for another performance, on his lovely young wife and never set eyes on her again because she had asked him if he was going to continue making a fool of himself in public for the rest of his life.

The meek will inherit the earth. I don't suppose Jesus ever thought we would come along and risk there being nothing left to inherit.

Don't take the piss No 1 was Churchill. When the process was repeated in America the top American of all time was Ronald Reagan. Diana at no.4 doesn't look quite so bad now does it?

Actually izzy, ros used that like you used "some people". I don't think he was taking the piss. More like what I explained previously.

Id suggest reading David Quammens work The Reluctant Mr Darwin and Niles Eldredge's DARWIN, before you take on Desmond and Moores DARWIN. While Desmond and Moores work is exhaustive, it assumes a lot of scholarship has already gone on by the reader and it takes sides in what is a still raging "culture war" over Darwins "soul".
A "ripping yarn" is Darwins own "Voyage of the BEagle and if youre interested , in the story line of this mans life, its probably the place to start out.

PS, the theory of evolution by natural selection was voted as the greatest scientific idea of THE LAST MILLENIUM overwhelmigly in a poll of scientists

I will bear that in mind thank you. You also said.

PS, the theory of evolution by natural selection was voted as the greatest scientific idea of THE LAST MILLENIUM overwhelmigly in a poll of scientists

I am so out of touch. I thought it was pop tarts. However, I think that's the least of your problems. You've just mentioned a poll. I will accept your poll in it's entirity. But I suspect someone else may not.

True, polls are hardly a way to assure the very fact of the premise that was the subject of the poll. HOwever, this was a poll of a pool of scientists who were asked to rank the top ten ideas of the last millenium. It was part of the millenial celebration and I believe alcohol was involved.

What?? Before how to brew John Smith's Extra Smooth (silk in a glass") best bitter.

Sheesh!!! Are scientists under the cosh domestically speaking? Do they tuck their shirts into their underpants?

John Smith's? You don't want to go for anything advertised by Peter Kay. I would have put you down as 'old peculiar.'

we have Yuengling and OLD FROTHINGSLOSH "the beer with the head on the bottom" as two examples of the US brewing craft. We excel at hard cider.

And didn't Messer Francesco de Nianto, the Tuscan, discover how to read writing that is hard to make out?

If I want a change I go for Old Rosie's Cloudy or Abbey Well.

I can't comment on your ciders but Somerset is just down the road from me. There's a cider farm in a little village called Mudgeley, when you get there you get sat down and given a half pint, and he keeps offering top ups. You only pay for what you take home with you. Unfortuntately I'm always the one driving.

How can you isolate a phrase like 'some people,' and assume it's a symptom of bourgeous contempt for the proletariat. Diana mania cuts right across the classes. You're over analysing everything. Unfortunately when it comes to beer I'm not very patriotic. As far as I'm concerned the best beer comes from the Czech Republic. Urquell Pilsner or original Budweiser, or failing that anything with Tescos, Asda or Sainsbury's on the label, just as long as it has brewed in the Czech Republic written on it as well.