Professor Dumped Over Evolution Beliefs

http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/3/112003a.asp ^ | March 11, 2003 | Jim Brown and Ed Vitagliano

[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.

[Con X-Poser]

<< I've not seen this defense raised before. How far away from Haeckel does something have to be before it's a real fossil? Note that one specimen, mis-identified until 1970, was found in 1855, well before the 1861 London specimen. Three specimens were found after 1950. The preceding link also demolishes most creationist arguments related to Archaeopteryx. >>

The link demolishes the credibility of those who've dealt with archy:

<< The Feather >> - they actually count a feather as a separate specimen!

<< Huxley, who was a staunch "Darwinist" failed to recognise the true import of the fossil and merely remarked on it as a "reptile-like bird" >> (He was closer to the truth in the first place)

<< complete head, albeit badly crushed, >>

<< This specimen is of the torso only ... the specimen was found to be missing ... It's whereabouts remain unknown. >>

<< It (your pre-feather specimen) lay in a museum after being classified as Pterodactylus crassipes >> (If you look at your own link, this is one of the most incomplete specimens)

<< differs in other aspects such as the tooth structure and the poorly ossified shoulder bones >> (maybe it's not an Archy?)

<< First identified as Compsognathus, >> (Do they misidentify all of them?)

<< information is limited. The specimen has been classified as a new species >> (yet another misidentification)

You are putting a lot of stock in something that your evolutionary comrades have wrestled with for 100 years. Misclassifications, reclassifications, lost specimens, incomplete specimens, crushed specimens, and Huxley called it closest to the truth upon first examination.

<< The appearance of demaninding physical evidence is just posturing for the bystanders. Inferring (in the wrong direction) from physical evidence, no matter how plentiful or how detailed said evidence may be, is "conjecture." >>

The "posturing" is the evolutionists vainly trying to PRETEND something is transitional. Many, perhaps most, of your evolutionary comrades disagree with you on Archy being transitional. From Huxley to Olsen and Feduccia, and multitudes more, they believe it's a bird.

[PatrickHenry]

Nobody screams for "the transitionals" like a creationist, but nothing is ever ever ever a transitional to a creationist

Every "transitional" was, in its day, a fully-developed, walking-around, eating, drinking, and reproducing species. They didn't have half a leg sticking out of their backs or something -- which is probably what the typical creationoid thinks of when he calls for transitionals. So when the creationoid -- blinders firmly in place -- examines the fossil of a transitional and sees nothing amiss, he has no problem dismissing it. After all, it's a full-blown species isn't it? It is exactly what it is, no more and no less. It doesn't wear a sign that proclaims it a transitional. So what's "transitional" about it? Thus, the creationoid exhibits his total incapacity (or unwillingness) to connect the dots and see the bigger picture. Hopeless. Simply hopeless.

[VadeRetro]

Lovely illustration of creationist "quote-science" in action. If one specimen is headless, and another has a crushed head, all are tarred with the same charge!

The "posturing" is the evolutionists vainly trying to PRETEND something is transitional. Many, perhaps most, of your evolutionary comrades disagree with you on Archy being transitional. From Huxley to Olsen and Feduccia, and multitudes more, they believe it's a bird.

1) What does it mean when something like that is "just a bird?" Why don't birds of today have so many, many, many reptilian characteristics? OK, they still have some. Many scientists say that they are coelurosaurs, after all.

2) Feduccia is an evolutionist who simply thinks the bird divergence came earlier. He argues for a more avian interpretation of some Archaeopteryx features but is not a "transitionals" denier. You similarly mischaracterize Huxley on the significance of Archaeopteryx. He considered it a bird, but a very reptilian one and thus evidence for the evolution of birds from dinosaurs.

Confronted with evidence, you simply retreat behind a wall of see-nothing, think-nothing, Twist-and-Shout denial. So why ask for evidence in the first place?

[Youngblood]

Who said size matters? It's the same type of canyon. The Mt. St. Helens eruption and aftermath (including flooding), was not of global nature as was Noah's flood.

Is it really the same type of canyon, eroded through huge layers of rocks that had been deposited in various kinds of environments (including deserts)? And where is this evidence of a global flood? There is certainly evidence of large local and regional floods, such as the flooding of the Black Sea when the Mediterranean burst through the Bosphorus a couple of thousand years ago, but there is no evidence of a global flood. On the other hand, if you have any, please present it.

X: This indicates the unique avian one-way lung design which could not evolve into a two-way bellows system like ours without asphyxiating the poor bird.

Y: And it is claimed where exactly that the mammalian respiratory system evolved from that of birds or dinsaurs?

Who said that?

Maybe you should recheck your first statement, but no matter, I'll accept that it wasn't what you meant.

[VadeRetro]

They didn't have half a leg sticking out of their backs or something ...

Another dodge, yes. If it's "integrated and fully functional" it's not a transitional. Darwin would spin in his grave to hear he postulated dis-integrated non-functional steps as other than dead ends.

[balrog666]

Poseur-placemarker.

[VadeRetro]

Post 637 [to Youngblood and your longed-for but so-far absent cheerleader, Jael:] Archaeopteryx was a bird with fully-formed flying feathers and a wishbone.

Post 626 [to me:] Only two of the specimens (both found in the stomping grounds of Ernst "Faker" Haeckel) are well enough defined to be useable. One of your six specimens consists of A feather! I thought it was a stretch to build up a specimen based on A tooth, but this exceeds that when it comes to evolutionary imagination.

Are you having trouble making up your mind? Is Archaeopteryx:

1. A clear, unambiguous fossil species of an ordinary modern bird?
2. A muddled interpretation from inadequate, headless, crushed-headed, only-a-feather-for-God's-sake data?
3. A fake which Ernst Haeckel fashioned and planted around to support Darwin's theory of evolution? (Starting in 1855, four years before Darwin published?)

Please try to pick one and find some evidence.

[VadeRetro]

even some evolutionists, like John Ruben of Oregon State University in Corvallis, are sceptical about the claim of downy feathers. He believes that they are 'just collagen' -- internal connective-tissue fibres left behind when the flesh decayed.

Ruben, IIRC, is reviewing this earlier Sinornithosaurus fossil, not the later one.

The later one is clearer and has more than one kind of impression, much harder to dismiss.

Have to wonder if Ruben is still singing the same tune.

[Junior]

A "birds of a feather" placemarker.

[VadeRetro]

Try the ones who did all the wildly different artist renditions of homo rudolphensis and zinjanthropus (see them at http://www.mbowden.surf3.net/Aprecon.htm).

Your link into Malcom Bowden's website doesn't work. Maybe you'd like to recommend this article of his instead:

The Evidence for Geocentricity.

[PatrickHenry]

Dark side of 650 placemarker.

[VadeRetro]

Dark side of 650 placemarker.

Heavens! I thought you were younger than I am!

[longshadow]

waiting for "Piltdown_Woman" to debunk the geo-insanity placemarker

[Youngblood]

Wow! Heliocentricity is part of the great evolutionist plot as well!

[VadeRetro]

Wow! Heliocentricity is part of the great evolutionist plot as well!

Perhaps Heliocentricity and Geocentricity are both just theories. Expose kids to the evidence for both and let them make up their own minds, right?

[Robert_Paulson2]

One of the indissoluable articles of faith, on our leftist campuses is the THEORY of evolution. In order to eliminate, even "relative morality" debates, the concept of a GOD who sets standards for each generation based on their accountability.. MUST be eliminated.

This lady has blasphemed the god of secular humanism and socialist psychology... she will be 'dealt with' in tolerance no doubt... and excorriated by the leftists on our Nation's campussies.

Other tenets of the faith whose star is falling?
feminism
multiculturalism
homoeroticism
heterophobia
anglophobia
veritaphobia
constitutionaphobia
militant matriarchy
christophobia
abortaprimacy

[f.Christian]

Teach evolution ? ? ?

(( revolve science around darwin // evolution )) ...

is like trying ---

to put the sun (( Truth )) around ---

a filthy assteroid (( evolution )) --- gas // vapors ...

a mirage // hoax --- FOOLISHNESS !

[js1138]

indissoluable placemarker

[PatrickHenry]

Evolution is "only a theory"!!! Oooooo, oooooo!!!! Wow, what a knockout punch.

[Youngblood]

Exactly. The evidence for heliocentricity supports geocentricity equally well. I mean, the sun and the stars and the moon obviously move in a circular path around the sky and thus the earth.