Posted on 05/12/2005 5:30:04 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
With its lavish illustrations of colorful, cuddly critters, "Our Family Tree" looks like the kind of book kids keep by their bedside to read again and again.
But when its St. Paul author, Lisa Westberg Peters, planned to talk about the book in classroom appearances today and Friday at a Monticello, Minn., elementary school, educators got cold feet.
"Our Family Tree" focuses on evolution, the scientific explanation for human origins that some believe contradicts biblical teachings. Peters' appearances, which were to focus on helping kids learn how to write, were canceled.
"It's a cute book. There's nothing wrong with it. We just don't need that kind of debate," said Brad Sanderson, principal at Pinewood Elementary.
Monticello's assistant superintendent, Jim Johnson, said school officials made a reasonable request of Peters to talk about writing but leave the discussion about evolution to teachers. When she refused, the visit was scuttled.
Across the country, there has been increasing opposition to teaching evolution. Peters said officials at two other Minnesota school districts have asked her not to talk about the book in visits over the past year.
The author believes that she is being censored -- something the schools deny.
"Once you start censoring, it's a slippery slope. Are geology and physics next? You have to stop it right away," said Peters, who won a Minnesota Book Award for "Our Family Tree," published in 2003.
In Kansas, the State Board of Education is expected to require that teachers tell students that evolution is controversial. Bills have been introduced in Georgia and Alabama to allow educators to question evolution in the classroom and offer alternatives.
Last year, the Grantsburg, Wis., school district drew widespread attention when a new policy urged teachers to explore alternative theories to evolution.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
I have no problem reconciling God and most of Darwin and Drawin doesn't diminish my faith but there are areas, but I'd call them minor, but I do have questions that Darwin doesn't address that cause me to think (and again, as a non-scientist).
Firstly the explosion, based on the fossil record, of the explosion of the number of species in the cambrian period. It would appear, to me, that evolutions time line doesn't account for the myrid short term changes.
Secondly, and I readily admit this is my "common sense" thinking here or, if you prefer a "hunch", I see no way over the (relatively) short period of time for the eyeball to develop the way it has. It's one highly complex system.
To me saying the eyeball developed from ooze over millions or even billions of years is akin to Mt. Rushmore being a result of erosion.
Not being a scientist I can't check my "common sense" at the door and perhaps that's a condition that will never allow me to fully accept it and perhaps that's just plain wrong but allow me to stress that my thoughts are in no way hostile to the theory, just issues this lay person has a hard time dealing with given the tools he has.
Wackjobs.
I don't really see how what he said reinforces any of your previous points, though. In fact, it would seem to support my comment about theories never "graduating" to anything further.
Nice to meet you as well. I gave up all psych, even just thinking about it when I ran across computer programming. I was sick of psych and programming allowed me to express my own creativity rather than boosting other's egos. I doubt I could remember anything from any of my texts without going back to them. (I kept them all though, I wonder what that means...hmmmm...?) ;> I now communicate with computers a lot better than I do humans I'm afraid.
Yup! That would be the life alright. Lots of money, adoring sycophants, pliable women, great hours, political pull.
Sigh...I have to much self respect for that...don't I?
snip
Sigh...I have to much self respect for that...don't I?
I'll say a prayer for you too...
TaxRelief points out:
"Despite the social "gaps", home-schooled kids are frequently better mannered and make better eye-contact."
You are right. I'd never thought about the eye contact thing. That implies some nasty things about public school. There's much to said against massing children together without a LOT of adult leavening.
You are getting your information from an idiot. See for yourself; here's the court's opinion:
Selman v. Cobb County School District. The Georgia textbook sticker case.
---Call me empathic, but I sense some hostility.---
I mean no disrespect, especially to a Marine! Lord forbid, I need no enemies like them and prefer them much more as friends. I appreciate your military service, friend.
---This doesn't really mean anything. For one thing, the Enlightenment period was the 18th century, and Darwin was a product of the 19th century.
Darwin's contribution to evolutionary theory was his theory of natural selection. Modern evolutionary theory combines his theory of natural selection with Mendel's theory of inheritence, and further advances in molecular biology that have come about since the description of the DNA molecule by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and others.---
http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/darwin4
You may not be familiar with his relationship to Lamarck's ideas. This is taken from the site above.
The Fuss about Evolution
Evolutionary theory was not a new idea in the nineteenth century, even at the time of Darwin's birth. His own paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was one of evolution's loudest Enlightenment-era spokesmen, extolling the wonders of evolution in his book Zoonomia, with which, Darwin was to say the least, quite familiar.
It was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, however, a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century French scientist—and the creator of the very term "biology"—whose ideas about evolution, published in 1809, proved to be the frame upon which Darwin's evolution was to be built.
"Transmutation…insinuated something heretical: that all species came from the same germ of life. That is, God had not created the billions of species on earth; they had separated from each other from some central point of origin."
Lamarck's vision of evolution was an attempt to answer the question of how new species are formed. His answer—and one not satisfactory to most respectable scientists of the day—was that species formed from one another.
"Transmutation," the idea was called. When Darwin secretly became a transmutationist in the months and years after the Beagle expedition, he felt as if he crossed over to the enemy camp, as Lamarckism was the object of much ridicule and scorn. Transmutation—and this was the problem, or, at least, part of it—insinuated something heretical: that all species came from the same germ of life. That is, God had not created the billions of species on earth; they had separated from each other from some central point of origin.
Transmutation, though, was just about the extent of common ground between Darwin and Lamarck. Lamarck's theory was based on a sort of ladder of evolution, leading from those invertebrate species on the lowest rung—sponges one could barely call animals—up an ever ascending line of species, all the way to the top, where man comfortably stood as master.
Darwin's line of thinking was, in fact, more radical. He believed that the diagram was not at all a ladder, but a tree, much like one of the peerage family trees aristocrats kept track of to assure their bloodlines. Mankind, in Darwin's theory, did not really sit at the top of anything but its own branch. The upshot of this, Darwin understood, was that man was to lose his elevated status among beasts, and that he fit into this chain of development just as did mollusks, monkeys, and—appallingly enough—trees.
Furthermore, Darwin's evolution relied upon a revolutionary, and, to most, absurd idea that there was no design to nature, not a guided one, anyway. Nature, as we know it, was the result of thousands of millennia of chance occurrences. New species were formed from genetic mutations. If those mutations were advantageous, then the survival of that particular organism was assured, and eventually, the survival of its descendents.
Even to Charles Lyell, another Darwin mentor and close friend, who himself had been in his time a bit of a radical, arguing in The Principles of Geology that life predated the deluge by hundreds of thousands of years, could hardly stomach what Darwin was suggesting. It seemed to him and many others that God had no part in a world of random selections and interminable struggle. If Darwin was right, then Christianity was once again on the ropes, and man's eternal soul an ominous question mark.
---snip
As I said, I believe in microevolution. I witnessed it in college with fruit flies. However, the movement for Intelligent Design which is attracting even atheists is a response that the classic tenets of Darwinism cannot hold. To begin with a pool of some carbon compounds, an atmosphere of caustic gas and some lightning is not going to produce something like the eye in a few billion years. My tenet is that Darwinism has reached the state of a religious belief and is, in fact, a secular religion. Like many such beliefs, they are taught as "Gospel" (pun intended).
---I'm not talking about history class, and I'm not talking about religious studies. I'm talking about science class. All of the sciences have made rapid advances in the century. We don't teach geo-centricism in astronomy class. And why should we? Just because a belief is held for a long time does not make it the correct one. We don't teach the theory of the aether. For thousands of years people believed the sun went around the earth, but now we know different. Why should biology be any different? We know vastly more about biology than we did even 150 years ago.---
The outlines for a response to these points is in the book Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed (the real one). I defer to that as opposed to going into the cross current of science vs. theology in an on-line post.
Kind regards,
Frank
Why, thank you!
Agreed.
2. Textbooks written and approved by scientists, not committees.
Absolutely.
3. Massive infusions of math instruction, so that students can actually understand science beyond the level of "This is a fungus. Don't eat that mushroom!"
No, not math! Anything but that!
Actually, I went to a party once and struck up a conversation with a high school math teacher. I told her that I use math, up through calculus, in my daily work. She told me she was going to tell that to her students, to motivate them. Apparently, they didn't think math has any application in real life.
HAH! I made the same turn you did, long ago. lol. I was so disgusted with "modern psychology"... I went into puters. I think it has something to do with studying "contained universes".. maybe that's where the natural-switch-of-interest-path lies coincident with available market demands.
Does the work of Kostelecky and Davies on the relativity theory hold any water with serious scientists?
I'm kind of curious about Davies as I must admit that he has a way of explaining things that are easy for me to understand. I'd hate to find out he's on the fringe but I was kinda going on the fact that he'd won the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Award as an indication that he might have some standing.
But; what about his AFTERLIFE?
...I have to much self respect for that...
Both are taken seriously. But their observations on fine spectrum shift need to be repeated. The methods they used has been known for several decades without anyone getting similar results.
If verified (and alpha is to remain constant in this universe), rather than a changing speed of light a quantum gravity seems to be indicated.
But if alpha is not constant or the numbers can't explain discrete "gravitron", then we just toss the whole 'particles & forces' theory over the side and go with M-strings and 10 dimension manifolds.
Oh, come on!
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