Posted on 03/11/2003 3:01:59 PM PST by Remedy
A university professor said she was asked to resign for introducing elite students to flaws in Darwinian thought, and she now says academic freedom at her school is just a charade.
During a recent honors forum at Mississippi University for Women (MUW), Dr. Nancy Bryson gave a presentation titled "Critical Thinking on Evolution" -- which covered alternate views to evolution such as intelligent design. Bryson said that following the presentation, a senior professor of biology told her she was unqualified and not a professional biologist, and said her presentation was "religion masquerading as science."
The next day, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Vagn Hansen asked Bryson to resign from her position as head of the school's Division of Science and Mathematics.
"The academy is all about free thought and academic freedom. He hadn't even heard my talk," Bryson told American Family Radio News. "[W]ithout knowing anything about my talk, he makes that decision. I think it's just really an outrage."
Bryson believes she was punished for challenging evolutionary thought and said she hopes her dismissal will smooth the way for more campus debate on the theory of evolution. University counsel Perry Sansing said MUW will not comment on why Bryson was asked to resign because it is a personnel matter.
"The best reaction," Bryson says, "and the most encouraging reaction I have received has been from the students." She added that the students who have heard the talk, "They have been so enthusiastically supportive of me."
Bryson has contacted the American Family Association Center for Law and Policy and is considering taking legal action against the school.
I took enough geology in college to know that prospecting has everything to do with probablility and nothing to do with evolution or so-called geologic time.
I have a meeting in 20 minutes so I'll be brief and give a few reasons why the earth is young:
Because the growth of coral reefs has been measured, no coral formaton need be over 3400 years old
The same with stalagmites and stalactites Radiometric contradictions abound, making it unreliable.
The geologic column exists only in text books. If the earth's layers were formed over millions of years, they should be relatively consistent everywhere.
Human artifacts have been found in layers dating back millions of years.
Human footprints dating back 150 million to 600 million years ago have been found in Utah, Kentucky, Missouri, possibly PA and TX.
Radioactive decay of only uranium and thorium would produce all the atmosphere's He in only 40k years. The atmosphere has not yet stabilized.
Lead diffuses from zircon crystals at a known rate. The rate increases with temperature. Greater depths and temps should reveal less pb in the crystals. If the earth were even a fraction of the supposed geologic age, we should be able to measure a difference in the crystals found in the first 2 miles of the earth's crust. Instead, no measurable difference is found between the crystals near the surface and the crystals deep in the hot earth.
Since you claim to be familiar with the oil drilling business, you may know that gas, oil and water are trapped in relatively permeable rock. The pressure disappears somewhere between 10k and 100k years. There is no possible way for the oil to be trapped for 50 million years.I am talking about serious men (often Christian men) who raise their families based on tests which tell them where the oil, gold, copper, uranium might be due to geological movements of millions of years.
Volcanoes belch a cubic mile of debris into the atmosphere each year. If the earth is 4.6 billion years old, about 10x the earth's volume should have been put into the atmosphere and that's at current rates. Evos claim that volcanic activity was higher in the past.
The rate of continental erosion indicates a young earth.
River sediment transport indicates a young earth
The rate of accumulation of minerals and salts in the ocean indicates a young earth.
Meteorite material is found in relatively shallow earth.
Meteoric dust accumulation indicates a young earth.
The rate of decay of the earth's magnetic fields indicates a young earth.
The rate of cooling of the earth indicates a young earth.
The rate of recession of the moon indicates a young earth.
The accumulation of dust on the moon indicates a young moon.
There are many more reasons such as OOP artifacts but I'm late for the meeting.
87 posted on 02/02/2003 3:33 PM PST by Dataman
.. .. .. 'lifted' (( link // #87 )) !
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances... could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." (Charles Darwin)
"Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life." (Harvard University's Rules and Precepts, 1642)
I wanted to acknowledge you're two-thirds right about George Washington Carver and crop rotation.
http://www.mountvernon.org/pioneer/lite/farms/rotation.html
The scientific content of your posts is matched only by their integrity.
Nonsense. Feel free to document an alleged "billion year gap" if you think you can. This ought to be amusing.
Name *anyone* who believes in "spontaneous generation macroevolution". Hint: You're making word hash out of two different and separate fields, like "biological origin of the solar system".
Yeah, yeah, yadda yadda...
Name your single best example. If it turns out to be fatally flawed itself, will you admit that your "evidence" against evolution isn't as good as you presumed it was?
A great many people believe in God the creator and in evolution. No one is claiming that atheism is a requirement for teaching science.
Are you saying you have the right to mischaracterize in a "good" cause? Or are you an ignorant dupe?
Highly unlikely. Evolutionary scientists themselves "think critically about evolution" and encourage/expect others to do so as well. That's how science advances. No one gets in trouble for just "thinking critically" about *any* field of science, or asking others to do so.
More likely, as the presentation of "flaws" described in the article implies, she was one of those cranks who shovel loads of long-discredited "disproofs" at people and muddy the discussion with garbage that any truly qualified teacher or scientist would laugh off the stage. If she was presenting some of the silly BS I've seen given as "evidence against evolution" through the years, then that alone serves as strong evidence that the woman is not fit to be a teacher of science, because most decently educated high school students can recognize the flaws in them -- and if she couldn't, well...
Wow, *two* amazingly ignorant and trivially false claims in a single sentence. I'm impressed.
No, no one can, although many have tried.
You'll note, though, that this doesn't stop creationists from repeating it endlessly. Let this be a lesson on the quality of their honesty and reliability.
Damme, I've given Carver credit for being a good applied scientist, and having done remarkably well given his horrible beginnings. I've been simply arguing against claims he was a great scientist, 'the chemist's chemist' etc.. Somehow my failure to recognize his seminal place in chemistry shows I'm ignorant of chemistry, and a racist to boot. But have mercy on me, I was trained in a foreign land, where this particular sacred cow is unknown, and had no idea questioning his achievements was so taboo, least of all on FreeRepublic.
FWIW, I dunno how you can say 'considering his background', X could have been Y. That's an impossible calculation to make. But in terms of what Carver actually invented and patented, there's no comparison with Edison. Edison died with 1093 patents. Carver had 3.
Instead of yet another ad hominem attack, why don't you state what the two claims were, and then demonstrate their falsity?
(Also let us know what your scientific degrees are, and where they are from. If you got a really good score on one or more of the SATs or similar relevant standardized tests you could let us know about that too.)
ML/NJ
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