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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.
That's good. Very good. However, they have a response. Everything that supports evolution is fake. No need for them to worry about the "voodoo" of radiometric dating. To them, it's just a convenient mystery that we admit Piltdown was a fake.
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Paradoxically, Piltdown Man didn't support evolution. Therefore, it should have been real.
So many devious paths for a creationoid to take. But if they support Piltdown, it would mean that for the first time in the sorry, shabby history of creationism, they could claim to have some actual "evidence" on their side. They wouldn't know what to do with it. Because if they had one shred of evidence, people would then ask them why they didn't have anything else. Much better to be "intellectually pure" and to have no evidence at all.
A cladogram is not a chart of fossil-record appearance dates.
Relationships and durations of Hymenopteran Families (modified from Rasnitsyn (1988)).
Your new poster-boy for "fossil gaps" is something called Xiphydriidae. It "needs" (according to Rasnitsyn's cladogram) to have been around since the mid-Jurassic but has only popped up recently so far as anyone has noticed in the fossil record. You needn't thank me.
Yeah right. The Sinosauropteryx is placed ~22 million years from its dating.
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Not only that but the "primitive atmosphere" of methane and ammonia necessary for that first cell to emerge is now irrelevant.
Quote & full article:
Early cells may have used membrane pigments to protect themselves from the then intensive UV. The excitation of these pigments could become coupled to proton pumping and the resultant gradient used to drive ATP synthesis. Bacteriorhodopsin does this in some modern bacteria. Modern proteobacteria split hydrogen sulphide to provide electrons for this process, and this probably pre-dates oxygenic photosynthesis. However, water is obviously very abundant so there would have selection pressure to split water and so release oxygen. Initially, oxygen released by photosynthesis was absorbed by iron (II), then abundant in the sea, thus oxidising it to insoluble iron (III) oxide (ie, rust!). Red 'banded iron deposits'of iron (III) oxide are marked in marine sediments of ca.2500 mya. Once most/all iron (II) had been oxidised to iron (III), then oxygen appeared in, and began to increase in, the atmosphere, gradually building up from zero ca.2000 mya to approximately present levels ca. 500 mya. This was the "oxygen revolution". Oxygen is corrosive, so prokaryotic life then either became extinct, or survived in anaerobic (oxygen free) environments (and do so to this day), or evolved antioxidant protective mechanisms. The latter could begin to use oxygen to pull electrons from organic molecules, leading to aerobic respiration. The respiratory electron transport chain probably evolved from established photosynthetic electron transport, and the citric acid cycle probably evolved using steps from several biosynthetic pathways (it still has key links to biosynthesis today).
http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/sciences/biology/Handbooks/evolearly.htm
Okay, so UV light is not only not a problem for the formation of life, it was probably essential. I found another source which I can't pin down at the moment, which stated that in an addition to the poisonous presence of oxygen causing a major round of extinction, the development of the ozone layer also forced the extinction of those UV-dependent life forms.
Next will come lots of naysaying about the use of the words "may have" and "probably" in the above quote
I take that as an apology. You are correct, there are lots of those terms. It is a patchwork of imagination.
If it is not a problem why have protection?
You seem to think that because this is an area of current research and in which major developments have yet to be made, you can just dismiss it as mere conjecture. I wonder why you are not making similar claims about cutting-edge research in physics and other areas?
That would depend on the reference of the pronoun "it." A cladogram contains details of relationships which in evolution are understood to be the product a historical diverging, branching process. Thus, a cladogram is only evidence that someone thinks the relationship is what the cladogram says. A fossil is evidence that an individual thing lived at a time.
Read the prior logic, you are the one saying protection. That means it breaks something important that preexists(unless a cell thinks). That makes it a problem.
Thus it is part of the theory.
You are going the wrong way.
The cladogram is theory. Its raw input is anatomy. Its timeline is the output, not the input, of the analysis. Your relentless confusion is understood to mean that on future threads we should expect to see you trolling with the same trap. We knew that already.
Because this particular area is based on absolutely absurd assumptions. It is an attempt to make the absurd sound scientific. It is not dissimilar to the positive spin put on Clinton's criminal behavior.
Life does not arise from non-life. This is scientific fact. The contrary cannot be demonstrated nor can a semi-believable explanation of how it supposedly happened be developed.
Spontaneous generation, science tells us, is an old wives' tale. Yet this old wives' tale persists in the name of science.
The chances of life arising by itself are less than statistical zero science tells us. Yet it is believed because the only alternative is that God created and that is unacceptable. What kind of reasoning is that? It is nothing but denial of the probable and adhering to the impossible in order that certain implications be avoided.
That's not science, it's not logic, it's not honesty. It's cowardice, lies and willful ignorance. (Please note I am speaking of the theory of abiogenesis and not you personally.)
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