"What people object to is the teaching of an atheistic world view in the guise of science." Moorad Alexanian Theoretical Physicist / Professor of Physics University of North Carolina Wilmington http://origins.swau.edu/who/moorad/cmoorad98.html
"If you ever find anyone actually doing that, feel free to let me know and I'll object to it too. But don't try to pretend that that's what the anti-evolution crusaders are actually objecting to. They're objecting to the teaching of the *science* itself." ~ Ichneumon
If you want to know what he's referring to, you should ask him, not me - since he's the one who said it. LOL
In the meantime a quick search of google turned up this tip-of-the-iceberg gem (excerpts):
http://www.mansfield.ohio-state.edu/~sabedon/campbl22.htm
"...It is almost as though biology consists of two very different sciences, a reductionist science that seeks to emulate chemistry or physics (113), and a much more philosophical science that is interested as much in the subtleties of history as it is in rigors of the more exact physical sciences (114). This is not to say that we will not be learning real science in Biology 114, but instead that the general approach of learning that we will employ in Biology 114 will be different from that of Biology 113. In Biology 113, basically, you sought to understand how a cell works. Here we will deal with such squishy topics as why it is the cells that we observe exist at all. .."
"Darwinian thinking is not confined to biology; it anchors a naturalistic understanding of all complex order, even including our own intelligence. Hence today, Darwinism is central to a thoroughly naturalistic picture of the world."
Ultimately, if we go back far enough in time, all living (i.e., extant) species may be collapsed into a single, universal ancestral species (which in all likelihood was a bacterium)
(Anonymous, Iconoclast of the Century. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Time December 31, 1999, p. 186) “Darwinism remains one of the most successful scientific theories ever promulgated. There is hardly an element of humanity – not capitalism, not gender relations, certainly not biology – that can be fully understood without its help."
"Microevolution can be studied directly. Macroevolution cannot. Macroevolution is studied by examining patterns in biological populations and groups of related organisms and inferring process from pattern. Given the observation of microevolution and the knowledge that the earth is billions of years old -- macroevolution could be postulated.
But this extrapolation, in and of itself, does not provide a compelling explanation of the patterns of biological diversity we see today.
Evidence [not the same as "proof"] for macroevolution, or common ancestry and modification with descent, comes from several other fields of study. These include: comparative biochemical and genetic studies, comparative developmental biology, patterns of biogeography, comparative morphology and anatomy and the fossil record." (Talk.Origins)]
(19) Extant populations
(a) Evolutionary change is easily observed in extant (i.e., currently existing) populations as changes in genotypes that occur over time
(b) The hard part is attributing that change to natural selection
(c) Your text examines one such attempt on pp. 437-438 (Campbell & Reece, 2002) [snip]
Good post. I'm not sure why you posted it, but it's pretty good.