Ayatollahs in the classroom [Evolution and Creationism]

Berkshire Eagle (Mass.) ^ | 22 January 2005 | Staff

[PatrickHenry]

A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it's a handful of judges -- "activist judges" in the view of their critics -- who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America's public-school classrooms.

The ruling this month in Georgia by Federal District Judge Clarence Cooper ordering the Cobb County School Board to remove stickers it had inserted in biology textbooks questioning Darwin's theory of evolution is being appealed by the suburban Atlanta district. Similar legal battles pitting evolution against biblical creationism are erupting across the country. Judges are conscientiously observing the constitutionally required separation of church and state, and specifically a 1987 Supreme Court ruling forbidding the teaching of creationism, a religious belief, in public schools. But seekers of scientific truth have to be unnerved by a November 2004 CBS News poll in which nearly two-thirds of Americans favored teaching creationism, the notion that God created heaven and earth in six days, alongside evolution in schools.

If this style of "science" ever took hold in U.S. schools, it is safe to say that as a nation we could well be headed for Third World status, along with everything that dire label implies. Much of the Arab world is stuck in a miasma of imam-enforced repression and non-thought. Could it happen here? Our Constitution protects creativity and dissent, but no civilization has lasted forever, and our current national leaders seem happy with the present trends.

It is the creationists, of course, who forecast doom if U.S. schools follow a secularist path. Science, however, by its nature, relies on evidence, and all the fossil and other evidence points toward an evolved human species over millions of years on a planet tens of millions of years old [ooops!] in a universe over two billion years in existence [ooops again!].

Some creationists are promoting an idea they call "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwinism, eliminating the randomness and survival-of-the-fittest of Darwinian thought. But, again, no evidence exists to support any theory of evolution except Charles Darwin's. Science classes can only teach the scientific method or they become meaningless.

Many creationists say that teaching Darwin is tantamount to teaching atheism, but most science teachers, believers as well as non-believers, scoff at that. The Rev. Warren Eschbach, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa., believes that "science is figuring out what God has already done" and the book of Genesis was never "meant to be a science textbook for the 21st century." Rev. Eschbach is the father of Robert Eschbach, one of the science teachers in Dover, Pa., who refused to teach a school-board-mandated statement to biology students criticizing the theory of evolution and promoting intelligent design. Last week, the school district gathered students together and the statement was read to them by an assistant superintendent.

Similar pro-creationist initiatives are underway in Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina. And a newly elected creationist majority on the state board of education in Kansas plans to rewrite the entire state's science curriculum this spring. This means the state's public-school science teachers will have to choose between being scientists or ayatollahs -- or perhaps abandoning their students and fleeing Kansas, like academic truth-seekers in China in the 1980s or Tehran today.

[Alacarte]

Do like I do and no one will get hurt. Consider only the raw scientific data and spit out the bones of interpretation. We all have fully functioning brains.

I'm impressed if you feel you can understand scientific biology data without interpretation from the scientific community.

If you just mean not letting the data filter through a third party first, like the media, or god forbid an ID website, then I agree fully.

Though I trust sites like scientific american, there are enough professionals that read sci-am that errors get jumped on pretty quick, and it happens all the time in their letters section.

[js1138]

This threat is a real keeper. The sun is on fire. It's gravity is weakening. Bacteria have recessive traits. Not since the days of 1⁷²⁰ have we had so much fun. Time to post an ascii bat.

[js1138]

threat=thread.

[VadeRetro]

But if you had any integrity, you wouldn't be Southack.

Does this sound harsh to the novice lurker? Did I just jump in and issue a note of condemnation before the guy has had a chance to answer? Note that Southack has definitely, positively, absolutely, grasped for an invalid, mistaken, and utterly wrong straw in his quest to prove that increases in genetic diversity never happen.

I'm having a psychic moment. You will now witness (apologies to P. I. Tchaikovsky) "The Dance of the Super-Dumb Larry," a man brazening out a mistake so obvious a cub reporter like Dan Rather could spot it.

[VadeRetro]

Time to post an ascii bat.

Sometimes I think we made a mistake banning BatMan. But then, again ...

[js1138]

You know, I've been reading for years on these threads the claim that the bacteria/antibiotic experiment is just selecting traits already present, but is never occurred to me how anyone could arrive at that claim.

Now I know. Antibiotic resistence is a RECESSIVE trait. Wow. It's so simple. Someone should get a Nobel prize for this. And to think, so many tenured professors of biology have overlooked this for so long.

[VadeRetro]

Good post, but you ruined it with that ungodly reply number!

[Junior]

Naw. I just caught his post before I caught yours. Temporal discontinuity, and all that.

[js1138]

That's twice in two weeks, and completely unintentional and unguided. What are the odds?

[VadeRetro]

What are the odds?

1⁷²⁰! Consider yourself caught out.

[PatrickHenry]

The odds are 69 to 1, because it's all about sex.

[VadeRetro]

The odds are 69 to 1, because it's all about sex.

A couple of posters from the creo side seem to have that idea of late. Let's just say they're obsessed with the idea that WE'RE obsessed with sex.

But I'm going back to the football game for a bit.

[WildTurkey]

And this judge will be overturned. His holding and justification for same is inept. jwalsh, you may not agree with the SCOTUS rulings but Anguish and Narby did provide you with the judicial realities of the situation.

No. Because the sticker contained false information. False information that is being spread (and countered) here, also. The creationists are not content with the facts, they want to play upon the ignorant with their anti-evolution false propaganda.

[bondserv]

I'm impressed if you feel you can understand scientific biology data without interpretation from the scientific community.

This is one of the reasons our court system is so gummed up. Oftentimes Lawyers hire these experts to explain the obvious to the jury. If you watched the O.J. trial, you were privy to the bentness of scientific expert analysis. They so obviously sided with the agenda of those paying them the money.

Any juror using common sense -- which goes out the window with an education from our Liberal Education Establishment -- could have discerned the misleading testimony in a second.

So that leaves us with self-educating and discerning the truth for ourself. We are accountable for our own ideas, and being always spoon fed by experts, shuts off the critical thinker.

Evidenced by the refusal to put disclaimers regarding the Theory of Evolution -- which facts shift with the wind -- the Education Establishment wishes to strong arm any critical discussion about their clearly anti-religious nature.

Dumb grows in modern Universities. Good Professors are such an exception that to wade through the other clowns to learn from one good one becomes self-defeating.

A little piece of trivia for you. Only 23 of the top 71 richest people in the world have a college degree. Many of the 23 degrees are from socalled less than reputable colleges. (I heard this information on the Dennis Prager radio show).

[WildTurkey]

Was I too subtle?

Yes. When compared to VadeRetro (#159).

[WildTurkey]

159 >>659

[js1138]

#659 must be recessive.

[jwalsh07]

No. Because the sticker contained false information. False information that is being spread (and countered) here, also. The creationists are not content with the facts, they want to play upon the ignorant with their anti-evolution false propaganda.

You're a nanny stater, you are under the impression that the federal government in the form of unelected judges, has the power to judge what local school boards can or can't do.

It isn't the "creationists" that threaten this Constitutional Republic, it is you and your brethern who support federal dictates when it accords with your world view. Don't kid yourself Turkey, your views are Marxian, not Jeffersonian.

[VadeRetro]

That's for sexual species with specific X and Y sex chromosomes.

I messed this up a bit. js1138 asked me about it in freepmail. He wasn't sure but it looked wrong to him.

The sex chromosome pair is an instance in which the usual dominant/recessive situation often does not apply. In males a gene on the X we get from Mama seldom has a counterpart in the Y we got from Papa. We thus have only one chance to get things right for those genes, which accounts for some male tendencies to color blindness and pattern baldness. (Yes, you get male pattern baldness from your mother!) The other chromosome pairs are symmetrical.

[Southack]

"Explain to us how recessive traits work in bacteria."

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/75/9/4470

September 1, 1978 | vol. 75 | no. 9 | 4470-4473
Copyright © 1978 by the National Academy of Sciences

Jos A. M. Van De Klundert, Peter H. Van Der Meide, PieterVan De Putte, and Leendert Bosch

Genetic analysis of a mutant of Escherichia coli resistant to the antibiotic mocimycin is presented. This resistance is due to alterations in both tuf genes coding for the elongation factor Tu. Mocimycin resistance is recessive. Bacteria carrying only one tuf gene from the resistant mutant are still mocimycin sensitive. If the mutant gene is the tufA gene, the sensitive cells can be made resistant through inactivation of the tufB gene by insertion of the bacteriophage Mu genome. Conditional mocimycin-resistant mutants can also be isolated when the tufB gene is altered by an amber or a temperature-sensitive mutation. When only the tufB allele from the original mocimycin-resistant mutant is present, inactivation of the wild-type tufA gene fails to give viable mocimycin-resistant progeny. We conclude that the tufA mutant allele codes for a functional mocimycin-resistant EF-Tu, whereas the mutant tufB gene does not code for a functional product.