Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

@spendius,

Scuse me, I meant to say that I wish I said what Wilso said, not you. You are a breast beating dullard wilt nothing new. I stiill have you on ignore so I hadda peek when I saw that there were actually 2 of your yappy nonsensicalposts after Wilsos. Sorry mate!.

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@spendius,

Quote:

Religion does stay out of science classes in the main.

Then you HAVE had your head up your ass for these last few years . I was actually wondering about that and I believe I said so a few hundred pages back on the Intel Design thread.

Now youve confirmed that you have no concept of the goings on in the US culture wars(and soon to be UK)

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@farmerman,

I can see how religion might be brought into advanced science classes with Hume, Mill, Kant, Coleridge,Burke and company but not into Grade schools. In those there's no way reason and rational thinking can be shown to be subjective from a scientific point of view.

How is it done? Do they give rabbits for dissection the last rites or something before putting them to sleep?

I can't see this nonsense coming here. As far as I can tell nobody gives a flying **** about Darwin. The feminists in media are having a go at winding it up for the anniversary but they are well discredited now.

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@farmerman,

For someone not convinced by theories, that's a theory that religion stays out of the science classes. Specifically, biology, paleontology and evolution science classes? How much science is discussed in church? It's such a hot potato subject now, I'm sure students bring it up and parishioners bring it up. The teacher and the cleric has to address it somehow, although I don't believe they go into much detail. The answer may be the same as I experienced years ago in science classes and the teacher would just state that anyone can study the Bible and Creation individually or in Bible studies and decide for themselves, the reverse by the cleric. They aren't chocking science down their throats. I think there's more likely more chocking down the throat of "religion good," "evolution bad," especially in a venue like a Southern Baptist church. That's the paranoia of the conservative fundamentalists and why they want to force teachers to present ID and/or Creationism into a science class. They're afraid of converts to evolution and they are slipping in their recruiting into the church which also cuts off funds, so they are frightened. So what do they do? The use their scare tactics to get religion into school curriculum's.

I don't believe any evolution scientist or advocate wants all religion abolished. The truth is, the religious leaders are pissed because the attitude is to ignore them.

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Actually, I personally don't care if religion exists or not. I have family (my niece is Catholic and goes to church) and friends who are religious. They don't bother me about science and I don't bother them about church. I think most people are like that. This doesn't mean they can't be criticized in a public forum when they try to pull a fast one and slip religion into science classes.

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Most of us don't mind that religion exists. We just can't abide the idjuts like spendi and gunga (both of whom I have on ignore).

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@spendius,

spendius wrote:

What's "scary" (scary my arse-you live a life of molloy-coddled ease) is that you won't answer the simple question I have asked you. The whole argument hinges on it and has done from long before Darwin was born. It is why the argument exists at all.

We would all prefer a complete secularisation of society if it wasn't for fear of the social consequences just as we would all prefer a life with no dentists.

The fact that you won't answer the question, none of you, means you have lost the argument all the way down the line because if you can't face up to a completely secularised society then you have to have religion. There are no fences to sit on.

Like I keep saying, you act awfully cowardly to be making this kind of gambit so often. If you really, reeeeeeally want to intellectually masturbate about the horrible consequences of teaching evolution (or everyone being atheists, wherever the hell your incoherent announcements ramblingly find focus), make a thread about it. The fact that you don't (and ignore it every time I point it out) is evidence enough that you don't care: you're all bluster, no substance.

1 Reply

@Shirakawasuna,

Shirakawasuna wrote:

spendius wrote:
What's "scary" (scary my arse-you live a life of molloy-coddled ease) is that you won't answer the simple question I have asked you. The whole argument hinges on it and has done from long before Darwin was born. It is why the argument exists at all.

We would all prefer a complete secularisation of society if it wasn't for fear of the social consequences just as we would all prefer a life with no dentists.

The fact that you won't answer the question, none of you, means you have lost the argument all the way down the line because if you can't face up to a completely secularised society then you have to have religion. There are no fences to sit on.

Like I keep saying, you act awfully cowardly to be making this kind of gambit so often. If you really, reeeeeeally want to intellectually masturbate about the horrible consequences of teaching evolution (or everyone being atheists, wherever the hell your incoherent announcements ramblingly find focus), make a thread about it. The fact that you don't (and ignore it every time I point it out) is evidence enough that you don't care: you're all bluster, no substance.

He just wants to disrupt productive thought, not foster real dialog.

1 Reply

@edgarblythe,

That's the definition of a troll.

I'm not sure if I'd simply label him as a troll or as an intellectual coward who massages his ego in his inane posts. Is his motivation misanthropy/entertainment by annoying people, or is he actually just that douchey in his attempts to impress himself?

Maybe providing summaries of his needlessly verbose BS will be more effective. At least when you can understand what he's saying.

Let's take his longish response to farmerman recently. I'd say: "farmerman and Wilso act douchey, I'm great and non-douchey. Look at my pleasant pedantry to confirm! Oh, and teaching evolution to kids is the scariest thing ever."

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I'm the only one with any productive thought. That's why Ed has me on ignore. He just wants to come on wittering platitudes.

Religion is the premier conditioning force of our culture. It sets our festivals, our table manners, our language, our dress codes, our ceremonials at birth, marriage and death, and our sexual mores. How can it be kept out of schools?

Science classes are part of schools and communities not islands of special knowledge.

The members of the Electrical Trades Union didn't much care who ran their union and one day they woke up and found it had been taken over by communists. It's of no consequence that a couple of posters here say they don't care if religion exists. The people running the show which they help empower do care. They want to be the premier conditioning force.

Another question I have asked a few times and which has not been answered is what is the anti-IDers explanation for the length of time this debate has been going on (over 2000 years) and the ferocity in which it has been conducted. It seems rather odd that so much effort has been put into promoting anti-religion if nobody cares much about it. Both sides are proved to care a very great deal and that is inexplicable if the matter can be dealt with as simply as anti-IDers are trying to make out.

Anybody who thinks this is a simple, cut-and-dried, issue is not at the races.

Personal experiences are neither here nor there.

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@Shirakawasuna,

Wilso and I were shouting at the spendid one because all that youve stated , has been said to spendi several times in the distant past. Hes been invited to start threads about his own interests many times by almost everyone whose been on this board. He doesnt listen , he cares noting for others, and hes insensitive to everyone except to the occasional visitor who claims to see a deeper meaning to his babblings. That gives his ego a boost , thats really all hes here for, attention.

The ignore feature was tailor made for him.

1 Reply

@farmerman,

We all know these tricks effemm. Browbeat your opponents out of the room and then you can have the floor to yourself. No dice. It might work with the sensitive souls it is obvious you have been hitherto engaged with but it won't work with me.

Is the "occasional visitor who claims to see a deeper meaning to my babblings" to be discountenanced as well. The late lamented timberlanko once nodded in that direction in case you have forgotten.

Your wofflings are pointless. Anybody can do that stuff.

You misunderstand the nature of the case. I assume it isn't wilfully.

In discussing S.T. Coleridge's attitude to God Professor Willey wrote-

Quote:

Coleridge's characteristic approach, his cast of mind, can be well seen in the first of these: the belief in God. It is a treatment which adumbrates the great modern change in the technique of apologetics--the change, I mean, which has come about since the times when the existence of God was supposed to be self evident, rationally demonstrable, ontologically certain, or proved by the evidences of Nature and Revelation. For Coleridge the essential mark of this belief is precisely that it is not intellectually demonstrable, but morally necessary: " The law of conscience peremptorily commands it." Like the belief in Free Will. it is one of the necesaary postulates of the good life--postulates which differ from those of mathematics in that those of mathematics no man can deny, whereas those of morality no good man will deny. They are ideas, not that we must believe in, but that we ought to believe in:

(quoting Coleridge now)

"conscience.... unconditionally commands us to attribute reality, and actual existence, to those ideas, and to those only, without which the conscience itself would be baseless and contradictory, to the ideas of soul, of free will, of immortality, and of God!"

Evolution theory has no room for soul, for free will, for immortality or for God and I can't see how the subject would be properly taught by anyone who has any room for any of those concepts.

Your attempts to trivialise the matter make no difference to the substance of the debate which is, of course, to promote atheism and mechanical, materialistic determinism. And to start in the schools which is where any serious agenda always has to start in order to take root.

Like the communists in the ETU I mentioned earlier, you are engaged in "Entryism" and all your bombast, bluster, cheap insults and whatnot won't deter me from exposing the Coalition in that regard.

And I have already shown what the Coalition basically consists of and the materialist motives from which they proceed.

All institutions are jealous of the power of other institutions. Even the Army and Navy and Air Force, despite having one objective and one commander, are well known for their rivalries. Media wants to control everybody's minds, the scientific profession want to command rather than be a tool, and the legal profession circles in the sky contemplating the mayhem resulting from atheistic materialism with relish.

The dupes, the poor bloody infantry, will be dropped like a hot potato, if it happens. Which it won't.

My interests are irrelevant. And I certainly wouldn't insult the intelligence of A2Kers supporting them with a string of tired and washed out assertions all of which add up to, when decoded, the chap with big feet telling us that he takes a large shoe size. Endlessly. Or at least until somebody puts a sock in his gob.

You might ignore me but I won't ignore you. I'm not a big girl's blouse. There's nothing you can say which scares me.

So carry on lecturing what you obviously think are the dim-witted amongst us. You might assert that I care nothing for others but I care enough for them to not be continually insulting their intelligence as you do.

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@spendius,

Quote:

So carry on lecturing what you obviously think are the dim-witted amongst us. You might assert that I care nothing for others but I care enough for them to not be continually insulting their intelligence as you do.

Thats an appeal to numbers . However, by saying that you DONT insult anyones intelligence is merely a way of insulting peoples intelligence. I dont worry about such things and am therefore not manipulative like you. You havent been able to cobble any decent arguments ,and all of your irrelevant inserts are no more than smoke and mirrors. "Lots of format, but no substance". (Thats a quote from Timberlandko , said about you over 4 years ago)

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@spendius,

Quote:

gunga-- it is a lapse in good taste to participate in a discussion in which you close yourself off from another contributor to it no matter what is said. You should welcome Wilso's efforts because they expose to view the true nature of the atheist position...

That's not quite what I got out of it. What I saw was something like:

Quote:

Hey, get lost asshole, we have our own version of reality here and we're not interested in anybody elses....

It's not obvious to me that there's any meaningful reply or response to that.

A sage once noted that everybody is entitled to his own opinions, but that nobody is entitled to his own FACTS. That appears to be the problem with democrats and liberals of late; too many of them appear to believe they are entitled to their own facts up to and including their own versions of history and science and their reaction to anybody not buying into their versions of these things as you observe here is to come unglued and recite mantras.

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@farmerman,

Quote:

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics

TLKING out of your ass agin gunga. Im really tired of your mantra about no intermediates. For the inquisitve children who may actually believe that Gsnake has even the slightest idea about what hes talking about, go visit the Collection of index fossils and intermediate fossils at the SMithsonian, there are several hundred species to make the point. Gsnake tries to sound informed, but hes woefully ignorant of paleo(and evolutionary theory)

For anybody who might have missed it....

The original formulation of evolution, Darwinian gradualism, demanded that living forms be in a permanent state of flux and therefore also that the vast bulk of all fossils be intermediate forms.

Nonetheless it is well known that there are no such transitional forms. Steve Gould and a number of his associates went to the trouble to devise an entirely new version of evolution ( punctuated equilibria) precisely to explain this lack of intermediate forms and the actual geological record which indicates that animal species arise fully formed at fixed points in time, go on for long periods without meaningful change, and then either die out or are still walking around in their original forms other than for changes which one could call MICRO-evolution, which nobody disputes.

The sort of claim which farmerman makes is therefore seen as bullshit. If there actually were even as many as a hundred such forms in existence, Gould, Eldridge, Mayr et. al. very obviously would not have gone to all that trouble.

What evolutionites actually have is a little collection of oddities, the nature of which are open to interpretation, and most if not all of them are debunked within a few years of their turning up.

One recent such case is that of the 'tiktaalik', a supposed intermediate between fish and walking creatures:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1626926/posts
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/09/the_rise_and_fall_of_tiktaalik.html

Archeopteryx has long since been abandoned with similar stories involved and the only person who hasn't yet gotten the news appears to be farmerman, e.g.

http://askville.amazon.com/SimilarQuestions.do?req=Archaeopteryx-true-bird-transitional-life-form-reptile

Quote:

Modern paleontology has consistently placed Archaeopteryx as the most primitive bird. It is not thought to be a true ancestor of modern birds but, rather, a close relative of that ancestor (see Avialae and Aves).[54]

Nonetheless, Archaeopteryx is so often used as a model of the true ancestral bird that it has seemed almost heretical to suggest otherwise.

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@gungasnake,

Quote:

Modern paleontology has consistently placed Archaeopteryx as the most primitive bird. It is not thought to be a true ancestor of modern birds but, rather, a close relative of that ancestor (see Avialae and Aves).[54]

CAn you say "common ancestor"? In essence you are agreeing with me and you didnt even know it. By trying to be specifically factual, you are , actually being specifically fatuous. The line of archeopteryx had been proposed as a dead end about 40 years ago by E H Colbert. So theres nothing new here. However, to deny its association is like denying the lineage of neanderthals.

Archeopteryx shares about 20 features that are "intermediate structures" (eg a beak with teeth, a dorsal scarp, reptilian nares, , etc etc) .

Punctuated Equilibrium was a "Special case" proposed by Gould and Eldredge to develop a mechanism for several species of animals that didnt appear gradualistic They only used two species of Brachipods . However, more detailed sampling of their sample sites has indicated that , indeed , intermediate forms do exist if the unconformities that existed in Goulds study area were carried in from adjacent formation boundaries.

Your second point about how this isnt borne out by genetics doesnt even make sense. Genetic studies (based upon accumiulation of mutations) indicates that the diversion of key species and higher taxa occurs in just the right geologic time when a new higher taxa appears.
My constant admonition to you (which you alays conveniently ignore) is, where are the scientific principles, based upon your worldview, being used in applied sciences today? ANSWER: THERE ARE NONE, The standard evolutionary model and all the supportive sciences ACTUALLY WORKS.

When you can support your side with some applied scinces, Id love to see em. Thats about a 3 year old question with you and REal Life. As I recall, youve never graced me with an answer.

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

Quote:

The original formulation of evolution, Darwinian gradualism, demanded that living forms be in a permanent state of flux and therefore also that the vast bulk of all fossils be intermediate forms.

Nonetheless it is well known that there are no such transitional forms.

Bullshit; all forms are transitional. What you call 'micro-evolution' leads to macro-evolution as environments and needs change.

Quote:

One recent such case is that of the 'tiktaalik', a supposed intermediate between fish and walking creatures:

All you have to look at is a Mud Skipper fish to see that.

http://www.wwf.org.hk/images/maipo/wildlife/fish/Blue-spotted-Mud-Skipper_(Leung-Wai-Ki,-WWF-HK)-l.jpg

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

The snake is a lower form of life -- what do we expect out of the brain of a snake? Maybe it needs some of that "evolution formula." Drink up and be enlightened. "But, Miss Scarlett, I don't know nuttin' about birthin' species."

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@gungasnake,

The Evolution NEws article (produced by the Discovery Institute) made a big deal that Pandericthys would be a much better "fishapod" than would Tiiktalik. DUUUUH, perhaps the DI ought to get a copy of the Treatise on Paleo (budget constraints I imagine). pandericthys SHOULD be slightly more "fishapodistic" than Tiiktalik, it came ferom the Devonian of 5 to 10 million years later tha Tiik...
In otherwords, their own example (submitted to show how paleo is in a turmoil) actually submits pandericthys as a later fossil with even more developed "feet fins"

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@gungasnake,

I cannot believe this. Gunga has the testones to quote what weve said to him

Quote:

A sage once noted that everybody is entitled to his own opinions, but that nobody is entitled to his own FACTS.

.
I DEFY gunga to recreate his own facts. PS those facts need to be based upon rationale, methods, and results.

If hes telling us that a GREAT FLOOD EXISTED, he had better come up with observable facts and evidence. Hes been sorely lacking in that department (other than his "stegosaurs in the Great Lakes" petroglyphs, or IKA stone crap)

Quote:

Hey, get lost asshole, we have our own version of reality here and we're not interested in anybody elses....

Can you tell who actually said that? I doubt if it were anyone here. Its rude. I believe that you just made that up and stuck it in a quaote box . Did I catch you in another one?

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