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]

<< Both use the same sentence structure and same arguments. The only difference is, one posts in blue and the other doesn't. Makes me wonder ... >>

Hey, we've got 'em going gore3000, don't we?

Yeah Con X-poser, we've got those evolutionists so confused, they don't know how many of us there are.

But why would they wanna think we are the same person?

Because they would feel outnumbered if they thought there were TWO of us!.

[balrog666]

Can you tell the difference? Come on, speak up where BP couldn't, can you tell the difference?

What's the matter, X-Con? Devil got your tongue? What, again?

[balrog666]

You're either a moron or a liar.

Oh, come on, let's give the devil his due - he could be both!

[Con X-Poser]

<< What's the matter, X-Con? Devil got your tongue? What, again? >>

No, it's Con X-Poser, not X-Con. You got it backwards again. The fact that you see things backwards helps explain why you believe in evolution.

[Con X-Poser]

An evo-lulu said:

<< Remember folks, if you can't understand it, ridicule it. >>

Thank you for admitting that most of your evolutionary comrades lack understanding. If you read the thread, you'd see 90% of the ridicule has come from them.

Just follow along and watch the evos prove me right.

They are proving me right again and again! Here's the latest:


Junior: You're either a moron or a liar.

666: Oh, come on, let's give the devil his due - he could be both!

X: They ran out of substance, so now we see the results of substance abuse. All they can do is mock.

[AndrewC]

I see specific species "diverging" from an inferred "true" line of descent.

Gee, I see Sinosauropteryx which has feathers coming from the same point as Compsognathus which does not have feathers. This coupled with the following description from the origin of that cladogram tells me that Jello™ should be suing the Darwininians.

Cladograms depend on two main scientific ideas. The first is that time flows in one direction only. The cladogram represents this by moving strictly from left to right. Thus, common ancestors of related groups must arise prior to these descendants in time, just as in genealogy parents arise before their children. Just as parents cannot inherit characteristics from their children, an hypothesis of ancestry requires that the “ancestor”; occurred earlier in time than its first “descendants.”

If time was not relevant why mention it? Order is sufficient.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I owe a nice thanks for the joke.

[AndrewC]

So now Lucy's a chimp?

Well, that might have been strong. Let us just say uncertain(whatever that means).

Lucy, Meet Ken

Image Credit-- FRED SPOOR, © National Museums of Kenya

NEW ENTRY into the hominid ranks

When the American Association of Physical Anthropologists gathered in Kansas City, Mo., in March, Kenyanthropus platyops stole the show. Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya talked about the 3.2-million to 3.5-million-year-old fossil remains from northern Kenya's Turkana Basin. Previously, the only hominid thought to have existed during that time was Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famed Lucy fossil belongs and from which all later hominids—including ourselves—appeared to be descended. But the new fossil leaves Lucy's ancestral status uncertain. This early hominid diversity, Leakey says, may have resulted from adaptations to new ecological niches opened up by the spread of so-called C4 plants, which created bushy grasslands and grassy woodlands—a shift that has been used to explain diversification among other mammals from that period. Not everyone agrees that the new fossil warrants a new genus, however. "Time will tell whether we were right or wrong," Leakey remarked. "At least this makes people ask more questions."

[Dataman]

I see the evolutionary 'puddle' has been upgraded to "deep water" in a vain effort to avoind the things which are destructive to the building blocks of life.

Not only that but the "primitive atmosphere" of methane and ammonia necessary for that first cell to emerge is now irrelevant.

[Dataman]

Of course we know how honest Piltdown man was for 40 years, and how honest Haeckel's embryo drawings were for 140 years, and how honest gluing peppered moths to trees was, and how honest archaeoraptor was. One wonders how many others we don't know about?

Don't forget to mention the discredited evolution of the horse.

They make it up as they go along and keep printing the lies in the textbooks after being proven lies. Then when the make a new "discovery" they wonder why people are skeptical.

Btw, the lies in the textbooks are one of the easiest ways to show an evolutionist how he's been lied to all along.

[ThinkPlease]

Ah, there's no oxygen in deep water, huh?

I see the evolutionary 'puddle' has been upgraded to "deep water" in a vain effort to avoind the things which are destructive to the building blocks of life.

Mayhap you should read the review paper I sent along to AndrewC in post 825. There, you can understand all of the experiments that are being done in the field instead of mocking what you don't understand.

[VadeRetro]

Well, that [Lucy = chimp] might have been strong.

It might have been wrong. Has Lucy's bipedel posture been discredited?

Let us just say uncertain(whatever that means).

When Lucy [ = Australopithecus afarensis] was the only known hominid species of her time, she was the best [ = so far only] candidate to carry the human ancestral lineage. Now she has a contemporary, so there's another candidate. That would seem to be the uncertainty, not that she's suddenly a chimp as is often claimed in the kind of pamphlet trash which only a naysaying Luddite dolt would credit.

[VadeRetro]

bipedel

Bipedal. (Sheesh!)

[Junior]

There, you can understand all of the experiments that are being done in the field instead of mocking what you don't understand.

If it weren't for mocking, he'd have no voice at all... (with apologies to Hee Haw).

[Doctor Stochastic]

Piltdown man was considered questionable at least as far back as the fall of 1912 (except for the English who wanted their own fossil to keep up with the French and the Germans.) The parts of the Piltdown skull didn't fit according to evolutionary theory. The Creationists did nothing to expose the fraud. American and German paleontologists were skeptical from the first; they didn't believe that the jaw and skull were from the same species. In the 1950s, C₁₄ dating indicated differing dates for both the jaw and skull.

This brings up the question of why do the Creationists believe that the Piltdown skull is a fake? The two biological indications of fakery are the failure to fit with evolutionary theory (1912) and the C₁₄ dating (1950s) data. Both of these types of analysis have claimed by Creationists to be invalid.

[VadeRetro]

If time was not relevant why mention it?

Time is relevant, as "order" on a cladogram is chronological order. It's a historical narrative. For a better understanding of cladograms and why there are competing ones, try a Workshop on Biosystematics.

More on cladistic principles in Character Analysis. It's a narrative constructed entirely from character traits themselves. The results tend to correlate to a with the observed appearances in the fossil record. Nevertheless, it's not unthinkable that that they won't always. The fault may be suspected in the fossil record, but the cladogram isn't gospel. In fact, the links were obtained by a Yahoo! on "competing cladograms." Note that the fossil record is viewed as an interesting external test for evaluating dueling cladograms.

[ThinkPlease]

Not only that, he had to cheat and separate the amino acids he did produce, lest they be destroyed if left in their natural surroundings. No doubt there was a laboratory near the first living cell that arose out of dead matter, so it could be separated from its environment, lest it die.

BTW, if Miller had been succesful, he would've proved an INTELLIGENT DESIGNER can CREATE life. That's what we've been saying all along.

I enjoy it when a creationist completely misunderstands the point behind an experiment. It appears that you think that Millery-Urey was actually meant to create life. No. It was an experiment to create an environment like the early Earth (what it was believed to be at the time), and see what kind of organic molcules shake out.

What's even more funny is that there are experiments that have occurred in the past 5 years that have achieved many of the same results that Miller/Urey did, with an atmosphere much like the atmosphere that the early earth is currently believed to have. Check out Some interesting Miller-Urey observations. I've never read Jonanthan Wells, but it appears you folks are spouting his bad arguments verbatim.

[AndrewC]

Time is relevant, as "order" on a cladogram is chronological order.

No it is not! In the case we are discussing the "feather" evidence is placed ~22 million years prior to the dating of the fossil bearing that evidence.

[AndrewC]

Has Lucy's bipedel posture been discredited?