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Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

 
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 05:52 am
@reasoning logic,
He should be selling domestic appliances rl.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 07:54 am
@spendius,
spendius wrote:

I agree with Wilhelm Reich about Freud.


How do you feel about orgone accumlators? I was actually referencing Cameron's appalling quoting of Winner. He is a twat though, well they both are.
InfraBlue
 
  2  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 08:11 am
@spendius,
Quote:
I don't think your sophistry lays a glove on the quote.

Coleridge's quote stands on its own well enough. It is your mangled interpretation of it, and your attempt to conflate it with whom the Church has burned or not that's all wet.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 08:22 am
@izzythepush,
Quote:
How do you feel about orgone accumlators?


They're okay as long as you don't charge them up so fast. Evolution has determined how fast they should be charged up and anybody having recourse to artificial accelerators can't possibly be an evolutionist. Not from an intellectual point of view I mean. Of course they might claim to be evolutionists and they might even convince a few feeble minds that they actually are but once the intellectual test has been failed as it has, and fundamentally so, when (art)ificial stimulation of orgone accumulation has been brought to bear, then sturdier minds just giggle and assume that the idolatry of evolution theory has something to do with trying to undermine the Christian sexual morality prescriptions such as no wanking, no shagging etcetc before the proper permission has been granted, etc etc for reasons it would be bootless to provide because everybody knows what they are.

Obviously anti-evolutionists maintain their intellectual integrity no matter how fast they get their orgone accumulation into gear or what "arts" they employ to do so as long as they are not proscribed by the aforesaid authority.

And I do believe that the authority knows best despite the many difficulties which arise, in the course of the daily round, of always adhering to its strictures.
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 08:27 am
@spendius,
spendius wrote:

And I do believe that the authority knows best despite the many difficulties which arise, in the course of the daily round, of always adhering to its strictures.


Were they correct in impounding Reich's papers?
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 08:33 am
@InfraBlue,
Quote:
Coleridge's quote stands on its own well enough. It is your mangled interpretation of it, and your attempt to conflate it with whom the Church has burned or not that's all wet.


I'll repeat the post IB so that others may decide how wet it is.

Quote:
I can quote too wande--


Quote:
How it ought to humble us when we reflect that it was not in the Dark Ages, that it was not in countries struggling only out of barbarism, but in the very morning, in the brightness of reviving letters, in the age of a Kepler and a Galileo, when every department of human intellect was felt and supported in greatest splendour,--it was then that the dreadful contagion of witchcraft and persecution of witches raged, not in one country but passed like a postillion through all Europe, till it died in North America among the Puritans of New England. . . I mention this as a proof that it is not by learning merely, no, nor even by the knowledge of experimental physics, that the most disgraceful enthusiasm can at all times be prevented.




S.T.Coleridge. Philosophical Lectures. p.320.

Which is coming close to saying that the scientific revolution caused the witchburnings. After all the Church had existed for over a thousand years with no witchburning and the contagion appeared just when the scientific revolution was underway.

On that sociological analysis the anti-IDer's claims that religion caused such an evil contagion is up a gum tree. The very opposite of the truth.

And something very much like it surfaced in every system afterwards which embraced atheism.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 08:41 am
@izzythepush,
Quote:
Were they correct in impounding Reich's papers?


Possibly. Who am I to judge a matter as complex as that was at the time? The idea of subjecting Mom to critical scientific analysis might have been thought to risk unforeseen negative implications.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 09:18 am
@spendius,
A footnote on page 540 of Richard Holmes' brilliant but taxing book Coleridge: Darker Reflections says this--

Quote:
The idea that biological "selfishness" and relentless competition are the driving mechanisms of evolutionary "ascent", can be traced from Bernard Mandeville's poem The Fable of the Bees (1714) through Darwin to Richard Dawkin's (sic) The Selfish Gene(1976). Coleridge belongs to an alternative intellectual tradition which observes the same phenomena in terms of an emerging "altruism", which may be traced from the German Naturphilosophien to Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1888) to Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue,1996. But Coleridge's evolutionary thinking is always fundamentally religious, and he held what many scientist (sic) would currently dismiss as the "teleological heresy": that evolution has a purpose beyond survival and adaptation. To the end he mocked the "Boa Constrictor of Materialism"


1828. Letters, VI, p.737.

Bernard Mandeville eh? Another to add to the list of where Darwin copped it from. The evolutionary idea was "in the air" for a century before Darwin, in the prime of his youthful exuberance, set sail and left those lovely Shropshire heiresses to pine in unalloyed longing for five bloody years to say nothing of exchanging the country-house cuisine for hard-tack, sea-sickness, insect bites and the occasional gnaw on a racoon leg.

That's bigtime masochistic misogyny in my book.

0 Replies
 
wandeljw
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 09:25 am
KANSAS UPDATE
Quote:
Kansas joins national science standard team
(Associated Press, September 21, 2011)

Kansas has been named one of 20 lead states to help write academic science standards that could be used as a national model for public schools and will include requirements for teaching evolution, project leaders announced Tuesday.

The state-led collaboration was assembled by the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, and a nonprofit education reform organization called Achieve. The effort is similar to one developed through the National Governors Association that led to the so-called common core standards in English and mathematics that were adopted by a majority of states, including Kansas.

"Kansas will have an increased opportunity to have its voice heard as these standards come together and will reap the benefits of collaboration with other states," state Education Commissioner Diane DeBacker said.

States have used standards developed by the National Research Council and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science to create their state standards. The new effort attempts to coordinate what is taught across states to improve science education nationally.

It also will allow Kansas, only a few years removed from a heated public fight over the teaching of evolution in public schools, the chance to establish itself as a leader in science curriculum. The State Board of Education approved the department's application to be part of the national discussion.

Dana Tofig, spokesman for Achieve, said Kansas was chosen in part because of its willingness to commit staff to the writing process, gather feedback and to consider adopting the standards once complete.
rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 01:02 pm
@wandeljw,
wandeljw wrote:

KANSAS UPDATE
Quote:
Kansas joins national science standard team
(Associated Press, September 21, 2011)

Kansas has been named one of 20 lead states to help write academic science standards that could be used as a national model for public schools and will include requirements for teaching evolution, project leaders announced Tuesday.

Hmmm, is this a good thing, or a bad thing?
wandeljw
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 01:50 pm
@rosborne979,
Definitely a good thing. Maybe Kansas has learned from its mistakes. Smile
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Wed 21 Sep, 2011 05:12 pm
@wandeljw,
How do you know that wande when you don't know what the requirements for teaching evolution and finding project leaders actually are.

You are getting to look like one of Pavlov's dogs which wagged its tail when a bell was rung. In your case the word "evolution".

Why don't you take on Coleridge's point? Does it frighten you?
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Sep, 2011 01:15 am
@spendius,
I love the way that whatever you're reading at the moment appears in your posts. It's Coleridge now, (and I do see you as the AM complete with eye) a few weeks ago it was Mailer.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Sep, 2011 03:31 am
@izzythepush,
I'm glad you love that izzy. It's common practice. There are many threads which contain material people have just read in their newspapers or seen on TV or are concerned with their current daily doings. You take part in threads which consist of people putting their kids to bed and feeling tired and you make no sarcastic comments about that. Your attitude to my posts suggests you are patronising them.

Do you love the way wande and ros sit at the debating table and Ignore the alternative intellectual tradition which is represented today by the Pope's visit to Germany. I've never seen Dawkins with a motorcade.

I didn't Ignore the "teleological heresy" idea of scientists and I wasn't scared of mentioning Rider Haggard's piss take of devout Christians delaying their entry into Paradise by seeking medical aid.

What I'm reading is fresh and allows me to make points which haven't been made before. Do you love the way wande fills up the spaces between my posts with repetitive drivel written by people whose literary capacities are so far short of that of Coleridge or Mailer that they might as well not exist. You should have been here when I was reading Spengler.

I'm on The Confessions of an Opium Eater now.

Do you think posters having me on Ignore are disqualified from the debate?
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Sep, 2011 05:57 am
@spendius,
I've got rather a broad range. I do put kids to bed myself. I would never put you on ignore because I enjoy your posts. I'm reading a book about Italian Theatre at the moment, academic, and a bit heavy going but enjoyable all the same.

I'm as guilty as you are by quoting Huxley, which I'm still plodding on with.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Sep, 2011 06:42 am
@izzythepush,
There's no guilt involved.

Have you read Stendhal's Life of Rossini?

What beats me is how anybody who only reads the paper, or PR from the NCSE and its satellites in corruptly recruited Media minion cadres, can come to think they have anything significant to say about the education of a superpower's 50,000,000 children.

The paucity of their vocabulary gives them clean away.
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Sep, 2011 07:04 am
@spendius,
I've not, but I have been to Lucca.
0 Replies
 
rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Fri 23 Sep, 2011 07:44 am
@wandeljw,
wandeljw wrote:
Definitely a good thing. Maybe Kansas has learned from its mistakes. Smile

Let's hope they don't end up spreading their mistakes to a larger venue.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 23 Sep, 2011 08:48 am
@rosborne979,
Everybody will hope for that I guess. Mistakes are not items that should be infectious.

Still--it depends on how "mistakes" are defined. What ros considers to be a mistake is not necessarily a mistake.

All his post says is that he's on the pro-evolution side and we knew that already. Goodness me don't we know it.

I suppose every political problem could be easily solved if we agreed to define "mistakes" as ros does.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Fri 23 Sep, 2011 09:18 am
@spendius,
BTW--I am not accusing wande and ros of mendacity. I think the extremity of ignorance on which their statements rest is something they can't do anything about or would wish to if they could.

When one has a circular argument on one's hands that is content with one lap it has to be admitted that an extremity of ignorance is involved.
0 Replies
 
 

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