talkpolitics | Just After Darwin Day...

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Just After Darwin Day...

You really have to feel sorry for kids living in the world's last remaining superpower, don't you?

I mean, it is not their fault that they get fed on junk food from Macdonalds that gives them an obesity problem, is it?
And now, people who are old enough to know better want to bring in legislation that will ' teach the controversy' in schools, and develope their 'critical thinking'... yeah, right !!!

Oh, before I forget, have a link:-
http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2011/02/11/%E2%80%98science-guy%E2%80%99-speaks-out-bill-nye-says-nay-to-anti-evolution-crusade-as-bills-pop-up-in-the-states/

Now, the obligatory opinion....

The fact is, there is no controversy regarding biological Evolution in science. Scientists are people who go into the field and into the lab and do their own original research and make their own discoveries and publish the findings for peer review among people well qualified in the same and in related fields, and the consensus among the scientific community is that the Earth is billions of years old and that our species has been around for a lot longer than the 6,000 years allowed for by a literal reading of the book of Genesis.

OTOH, Craetionists turn out overwhelmingly to be people who quotemine and misrepresent the findings of others, and then go on to copypaste the claims on Creationist websites. Rather than doing original research and making ground breaking discoveries like 'Lucy', the big names in Creationism, people like Kent Hovind, Duane Gish and Ken Ham simply sell their books and videos to make money off of a gullible audience. These websites, and the related books and videos advertsied thereon, are packed with misrepresentations and inaccuracies - and sadly, this is what some adult Americans actually believe to be true.

In a recent discussion on Facebook, the following comment was made-
Marcus Clark What they don't tell you is that "Lucy" is not only a compilation of bone fragments of multiple bodies but likely of multiple species. These bone fragments were also collected over a rather large area. By doing a little "digging" you'll find that "Lucy" is a total farce.

And this was cited as ' evidence'

Marcus Clark
http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/x0714_lucy_fails_test.html
and
http://www.trueauthority.com/cvse/lucy.htm
and
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/0825lawrence.asp
...and
http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/reprints/truthlucy.pdf
just to show a few.See more

However, as this crushing refutal shows, the original claim was misrepresentation - nobody claimed that the 1973 find was part of the Lucy skeleton, (except the creationists , of course) and the guy who discovered Lucy was quite clear that the knee joint find was from another individual, albeit of the same species - A aferensis.

Go take a look -

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/knee-joint.html
Saturday at 12:53

Now, if this ever comes up in class, how many teachers of the creationist persuasion are going to show both sides of the case, and how many are going to do a good job in demolishing guys like Hovind, Ham and Gish? How many Creationists are actually honest?

It does not bode well for the future of the USA when an agenda driven by the Religious Right gets taught as fact in the classroom. I hope that American kids will get a good deal for once and that this legislation will be rejected for what it is, a cunning plot to bring Creationism into class - but I am a realist. I know how many Americans believe in Creationism, and that many of these will sit on School boards, and have a vote in State politics. People do have a right to be wrong if they choose, it goes with the turf in a democratic nation. However, I don't thiink that these people are making a choice that willbe good for their kids or their country's future if they allow Creationism into the class room.

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People's willful attempts to keep themselves ignorant has never stopped boggling me.

Automatically filling the blank spots that still remain here and there in our knowledge about many things - with a deity of some sorts - reminds me of the fairy tales we often tell our very young kids whenever they ask "daddy, where did I come from?" Then we start talking about bees and birds and everything is all right. Funny, many people choose to remain in eternal childhood forever. It would've remained just funny-full-stop, unless entire groups of those eventually started pushing their ignorant agenda onto the rest of society and make turn this into a political issue, now that's where things turn ugly.

Teach the controversy is a nice way to move the goalposts of free speech into a slippery area. By the same logic, why not teach Astrology in class? Many people trust it, don't they?

There's nothing inherently non-nutritious about fast food.

>>Now, if this ever comes up in class, how many teachers of the creationist persuasion are going to show both sides of the case

This has always been my beef with the idea of "teach the controversy." Forgiving, of course, the fact that there isn't a controversy outside of the handful of willfully ignorant individuals who reject the broad findings of the entire scientific community.

Separation of church and state, baby. Religion has no place in public schools. Period.

Besides, a "scientific" theory entirely constructed around the purpose of denying another theory is a very bad idea, not to mention how little it has to do with science of any sorts.

1. Of the three states I've lived in, two are heavily Fundamentalist, each seeing precisely this kind of Creationism vs. Evolution drama played out in the schools. It's ridiculous and offensive both to anyone with common sense, anyone who believes in the separation of Church and State, and anyone who has had the privilege of a college education.

2, However, as

panookah already said, the United States doesn't have a monolithic, homogeneous socioreligious culture, which is something I think non-North Americans largely misunderstand. It's like the UK headline I remember seeing after the 2004 elections, "how can 62 million people be so dumb?" or some such, which wholly ignored the 60 million people who didn't vote for Bush. If you traveled to Arkansas and Massachusetts, you'd see widely variant prevailing religious and political cultures, but the world media seems happy to portray America as being some monolithic, Texas cowboy/Fundamentalist Christian stereotype.

This Catholic, bisexual, politically moderate, evolution-supporting American in the Deep South says we're more diverse than you think, and most of us aren't crazy Darwin-bashing morons. The morons merely scream the loudest. Thus, you hear about the school boards that try to impose idiotic ideas, but I don't see much about the vast majority of school boards that don't. Sure, I know, non-controversial, sane activity isn't newsworthy...but that just makes the news less useful.

I've always wanted to visit the Creation Museum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Museum). Must be something like Sun City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_City,_South_Africa), i.e. - fun! :D

What this world needs, now more than at any time in our history, is an unstoppable Zombie Stephen Jay Gould.

Ironically Creationism's own premise has two problems: it tries to conflate biology with physics and astronomy because like the rest of that particularly US mutation of Christianity it cannot tolerate one break in the system or the rotten structure comes tumbling down. When even Answers in Genesis admits that distant starlight seen 1 billion or more light years away *has to actually be* 1 billion or more light years away, that's a sign that the YEC crowd cannot support their own arguments without reverting to gabbling about nonsense.

Not to mention that Creationism in the schools is little different than teaching geocentrism or that the Earth and the Stars are supported by cosmic pillars, with stars living beings traveling in divinely-ordained courses through the Heavens, which is itself all revolving around the Earth in pre-determined epicycles, while North and South America and Australia and Antarctica cannot exist.

The good thing about our system is that laws have to follow the Constitution. The idea that creationism should be taught as science in public schools has already been thoroughly ground to pieces by a federal judge's ruling (Kitzmiller v. Dover School District). That's a fantastic precedent to have in the first case testing whether creationism should be taught as science in public schools.

If you haven't seen it already, the NOVA episode (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/intelligent-design-trial.html) about the Dover case is great.

Gah, I am sick to death of this.

Seriously, wasn't this settled in 1925?

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