Forced Education in Homosexuality and Evolution Leads to Exodus of Mennonites from Quebec

A community of a dozen Mennonite families in Quebec is ready to leave the province rather than succumb to provincial government demands that would require their children to be taught evolution and homosexuality. While the government sees its actions as nothing more than enforcing technical regulations, many view the case as intolerance of Christian faith.

The community runs a small Mennonite school out of a church in Roxton Falls where eleven children in elementary grades were expected to commence studies this Fall. Subjects include reading, writing, math, science, geography, social sciences, music and French. However, they are not schooled in evolution and homosexuality (sex education) as demanded by the official provincial curriculum.

Quebec Education Ministry Spokesman Francois Lefebvre told LifeSiteNews.com that the province has two requirements for approval of private schools. "That the teachers are certified and that the provincial curriculum which is mandatory in all Quebec schools is followed," he said.

Ronald Goossen, a spokesman for the families, told LifeSiteNews.com the community rejects both demands. With regard to certified teachers, he said, "we have pulled our students out of public schools and by asking us to have certified teachers they are asking us to send our teachers to public school. So basically they're asking something of us that we don't feel we can do."

Regarding the curriculum, Goosen said, "Some of the things - the theory of evolution would be a problem, the attitudes portrayed, the lifestyles we don't ascribe to, making it look that single motherhood is fine, that alternate lifestyles are fine - gay 'marriage', we'd be very much against that."

After visiting the Mennonites in November, the Ministry of Education told the school that their teaching was not up to standard and threatened them with legal action. Parents were informed that their children must be enrolled in government-approved schools by the fall.

Given other incidents in the province, Goossen was concerned that if they don't comply, children might be taken from their families by social workers. In 2002, social workers in Aylmer removed seven children from a Mennonite family because the family used spanking as a form of discipline.

This move is an enactment of the Ministry of Education's decision last year to shut down schools that don't teach the full government-approved curriculum. The Ministry threatened to shut down private Evangelical schools that didn't want to teach evolution and sex-education (See http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/oct/06102404.html ).

The Mayor of Roxton Falls, Jean-Marie Laplante, said that the majority of non-Mennonites in his town support the school. Laplante has complained to the education department and Education Minister Michelle Courchesne to save the school from being shut down.

"We want to keep these people here - they're part of our community," the Mayor told the National Post. "They're good neighbours. They integrated into the community, they work hard, they have farms, they work in businesses in the region."

The prospect of losing the families, said the Mayor, "hurts economically, but it also hurts because everybody loves these people and we're saying, 'Why? Why is this happening?' "

Goosen told LifeSiteNews.com that the families are serious about moving and will be gone in a couple of weeks when school commences. He noted that most have already rented housing in Ontario. Should the government reconsider and allow them the freedom to educate their children within the boundaries of their faith, the community would gladly stay he said.

Lefebvre told LifeSiteNews.com that the school had not yet applied for permission to run privately. However, Goosen responded that the ministry of education had all the required information and his application was not 'officially' submitted only due to a technicality related to the online submission process.

Moreover, said Goosen, "we have been informed that our application would be rejected since they require certified teachers and adherence to the curriculum."

Lefebvre at first seemed conciliatory. He claimed that the regulations "do not exclude giving other courses or teachings related to their religious convictions, but at this moment it is outside of the official program of education."

LifeSiteNews.com asked whether a compromise could be reached, whether it would be possible to eliminate from the school's curriculum the offensive parts which deal with evolution and homosexuality. Lefebvre replied, "It's difficult to say because the educational program insists that students acquire competence in the whole program therefore how could you eliminate one part of the program and still have a general competence?" He referred to religious schools in Quebec, emphasizing that they also have to "respect the program of education (curriculum) of Quebec."

Goosen told LifeSiteNews.com that the Mennonite community has its own curriculum which is accepted in seven other Canadian provinces. "Our own curriculum system has served us well and produced good results," he said.

The option of home schooling is permitted, Lefebvre stated in answer to another question, as long as the progress of the children is reported as satisfactory to the local education ministry. He told LifeSiteNews.com that homeschoolers in the province must be receiving an equivalent education as those in public schools, which means the provincial curriculum must be followed. That curriculum, with its pro-gay sex education and its teaching of evolution, remains unacceptable to many.

Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport Édifice Marie-Guyart 1035, rue De La Chevrotière 16e étage Québec (Québec) G1R5A5 Phone : 418 644-0664 Fax : 418 646-7551 ministre@mels.gouv.qc.ca

You certainly have given evolution very serious thought, and I will never be able to convince you to change sides. You write in a very intellectual manner, so I am surprised that you have not given evolution more consideration. My main question for you is whether or not you accept that the earth and universe are both billions of years old. If you do not, we will have to agree to disagree.

If you do, than the points you have raised are insignificant because our existance could be explained on mathematics, ie. Chaos theory:

Creationists say that order cannot come from chaos. If you shuffle a deck enough times you will statistically end up with the order you started with eventually. It has to. Nuclear reactors are designed by engineers to reduce the chance that neutrons will not miss all the uranium atoms and fail to cause the chain reaction needed. They accomplish this by increasing the amount of the core material so that there are more atoms for the neutron to hit. The same is true of evolution. In the early 1900s scientists tried to make life in a lab mimicking the conditions that the first cell would have needed to be created. This of course failed, which they went on to say that it couldn’t be duplicated so it wasn’t true. However, if you take those conditions and increase the size of the conditions infinitely and the time infinitely, it is mathematically impossible for life not to form. There are infinite numbers of chemical reactions happening all over the planet all the time. For all we know a whale has popped into existence and died instantly in conditions that didn’t work for it. If life has a potential conditions it will form.

Once you understand chaos theory and realize that it is a purely mathematical proven science, evolution is a lot more difficult to disprove or dismiss.
The reason chaos theory works is because of the extraordinarily long periods of time required; the billions of years of time that evolution needs is something humans will never be able to comprehend mentally, thus presenting the problem with many people not understandng evolution.

As for the points you raised, I will not be able to explain the specific biology to the extent of an evolutionary biologist, however, I will make an attempt.

“The outright failure of laboratory tests intended to prove the idea of macroevolution, particularly the tests involving fruit flies.”

While details of macroevolution are continuously studied by the scientific community, the overall theory behind macroevolution (i.e. common descent) has been overwhelmingly consistent with empirical data. Creationists attempt to differentiate between microevolution and macroevolution, asserting various hypotheses which are considered to have no scientific basis by any mainstream scientific organization, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“The problems involving mathematics and probability theory. The biggest single group of evolution non-believers appears to be mathematicians and not Christians.”

I highly doubt that is the case, especially since chaos theory cannot be logically disproven.

“The problems which arise from the realm of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through large herds of animals.”

Haldane’s dilemma has never been a barrier to evolution, despite some misrepresentations by creationists. Recent work from the Human, Chimpanzee and Macaque genome projects underlines the fact that Haldane’s dilemma does not prevent evolution. Some creationists claim that 1,667 beneficial mutations are too few to make an Einstein from an ape, therefore Haldane’s dilemma shows evolution cannot account for humans. The recent genome results directly address this argument. While the majority of variation is neutral, the question remains exactly how much variation is due to selection, and does it break Haldane’s “speed limit”. Recent comparisons of Human and Chimp genomes, have given a good idea of how many genes have been fixed since the last common ancestor of chimps and humans, 154. Given that we have around 22,000 genes in our genome, then if the same percentage of beneficial mutations holds for the rest of the genome, no more than 238 fixed beneficial mutations is what separates us from the last common ancestor of chimps and humans. (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0701705104v1)

“The total lack of undisputed intermediate fossils.”

This position is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of what represents a transitional feature. A common creationist argument is that no fossils are found with partially functional features. It is plausible, however, that a complex feature with one function can adapt a wholly different function through evolution. The precursor to, for example, a wing, might originally have only been meant for gliding, trapping flying prey, and/or mating display. Nowadays, wings can still have all of these functions, but they are also used in active flight. Although transitional fossils elucidate the evolutionary transition of one life-form to another, they only exemplify snapshots of this process. Due to the special circumstances required for preservation of living beings, only a very small percentage of all life-forms that ever have existed can be expected to be discovered. Thus, the transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, but it will never be known in detail. However, progressing research and discovery managed to fill in several gaps and continues to do so.

“The logical failure of the supposed new variant, PE.”

I assume you are talking about punctuated evolution? Scientists have scrutinized the fossil records of many organisms looking for evidence of punctuated evolution. One group of coral sea organisms called bryozoan, shows this kind of pattern. The well-preserved fossil record of bryozoans shows that one species first appeared about 140 million years ago and remained unchanged for its first 40 million years. Then there was an explosion of diversification, followed by another period of stability for vast amounts of time. Thats just one example. There is no real logical failure here. (Evolutionary Analysis, by Scott Freeman and Jon C. Herron. Copyright1998 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.)

“The emerging indications that the age of dinosaurs was a few thousand years in the past or a few tens of thousands at most, leaving no time for evolution.”

There are no human fossils or artifacts found with dinosaurs, and there are no dinosaur fossils found with human fossils (except birds, which are descended from dinosaurs; out-of-place human traces such as the Paluxy footprints do not withstand examination). Furthermore, there is an approximately sixty-four million year gap in the fossil record when there are neither dinosaur nor human fossils. If humans and dinosaurs coexisted, traces of the two should be found in the same time places. At the very least, there should not be such a dramatic separation between them.

“The information code which is DNA/RNA, and the fact that information codes do not exist other than for being created.”

There are many many hypotheses that are currently still being tested as to why “junk” DNA exists. Increasing evidence is now indicating that this DNA is not “junk” at all. Especially, it has been found to have various regulatory roles. This means that this so-called “non-coding DNA” influences the behavior of the genes, the “coding DNA”, in important ways. Below are some examples I have found just by some quick research:

A 2002 study from the University of Michigan showed that segments of junk DNA called LINE-1 elements, once thought to be “leftovers from the distant evolutionary past” now “deserve more respect” because they are capable of repairing broken strands of DNA.
A 2003 study from Tel Aviv University found crucial uses for “junk” sequences in human DNA.
A 2004 study from the Cell Press suggests that “more than one third of the mouse and human genomes, previously thought to be non-functional, may play some role in the regulation of gene expression and promotion of genetic diversity.”
A 2005 study from the National Institutes of Health found that social behavior in rodents (and, possibly humans) was affected by portions of the genetic code once thought to be “junk.”
A 2005 study from University of California-San Diego suggested that junk DNA is “critically important to an organism’s evolutionary survival.”
Findings from Purdue University in 2005 stated that “many DNA sequences previously believed to have no function actually may play specialized roles in cell behavior.”
Researchers at the University of Illinois Society for Experimental Biology found an antifreeze-protein gene in a species of fish which “evolved” from junk DNA.
In 2006, University of Iowa researchers documented segments of RNA (previously considered “junk”) that regulated protein production, and could generate microRNAs.
A 2007 study from Stanford University School of Medicine found that “Large swaths of garbled human DNA once dismissed as junk appear to contain some valuable sections.

The overwhelming complexity of the simplest life forms and the failure of all attempts to create any such from scratch or raw materials in labs.

In 1953 Urey and Miller performed their famous expirement. Starting with some elements presumed to be present in the primordial atmosphere (carbon dioxide, water, ammonia, hydrogen, methane, etc.), Miller and Urey were able to produce some amino acid precursors. From the Urey/Miller experiment it has been hypothesized that random combinations of chemicals present in the atmosphere of the primordial earth, helped along by lightning, produced the chemicals which are the building-blocks of the amino acids.

In 1961, Joan Oró found that amino acids could be made from hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and ammonia in a water solution. He also found that his experiment produced a large amount of the nucleotide base adenine. Experiments conducted later showed that the other RNA and DNA bases could be obtained through simulated prebiotic chemistry with a reducing atmosphere.

More recent experiments by chemist Jeffrey Bada at Scripps Institution of Oceanography were similar to those performed by Miller. However Bada noted that in current models of early Earth conditions carbon dioxide and nitrogen create nitrites, which destroy amino acids as fast as they form. However, the early Earth may have had significant amounts of iron and carbonate minerals able to neutralize the effects of the nitrites. When Bada performed the Miller-type experiment with the addition of iron and carbonate minerals, the products were rich in amino acids. This suggests the origin of significant amounts of amino acids may have occurred on Earth even with an atmosphere containing carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
In 2006 another experiment showed that a thick organic haze might have blanketed Early Earth. An organic haze can form over a wide range of methane and carbon dioxide concentrations, believed to be present in the atmosphere of Early Earth. After forming, these organic molecules would have floated down all over the Earth, allowing life to flourish globally.

(I have used some online materials including Scientific American Magazine, Animal Genome Size Database, Nature Magazine, as well as the textbook BSCS Biology, A Moelcular Approach in my explanations)

I would just like to address one more thing. I get the feeling that some members here, as well as yourself, feel that evolution is a Satanic viewpoint, placed on earth by the Devil in order to deceive good Christians and lead them away from God. Organized science, therefore, consists largely of atheists and anti-Christians who, whether through design or ignorance, are doing the work of Satan by spreading evolutionism and repressing the true Christian viewpoint of creationism. I would say that the threat to Christianity absolutely does not come from research scientists, rather, it comes from liberalism and radical Islam. The liberals at the ACLU try to take away holy crosses at cemeteries for troops killed in Iraq, thats just one of many examples. Radical Islam’s goal, obviously, is to convert or kill any non-muslim. My argument is that science and religion do not have to conflict. The only threat science poses to Christianity is with regard to moral issues, such as cloning, abortion, genetic engineering, etc. Those issues, dealing heavily in scientific ETHICS, will be left up to politicians and ethicists.

I probably didn’t change your mind about evolution. It is obviously a personal issue. The real question is weather or not it should be taught in school science classes. I stand by the assertion that it should, however, creationism should be discussed in history and/or philosophy classes. The reason that creationism cannot be taught in science class is that scriptures and religion must be factored in, and that would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution (and Article I, Section 3 of the Pennsylvania State Constitution) as discussed in “Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al.”

Creationists say that order cannot come from chaos....

INFORMATION does not arise from chaos. RNA/DNA is an information code. The chance of something like that just sort of happening to arise from raw materials via random events is exactly zero.

However, if you take those conditions and increase the size of the conditions infinitely and the time infinitely, it is mathematically impossible for life not to form...

You do not HAVE infinite time. In fact, you don't even have the tens of millions of years which are commonly supposed. You can do your own google searches on 'tyrannosaur' and 'soft tissue' and read about the blood vessels and collagen found inside the tyrannosaur bone or, in fact, search on 'tyrannosaur', 'soft tissue', and 'chicken' to read about the recent sequencing of proteins from that same tyrannosaur bone and the fact that those proteins were nearly identical to those of a chicken. The tyrannosaur turns out to be a big chicken with sharp teeth which died a few thousand years ago. For those bones not to be totally petrified after even one million years it would have to have never rained in Montana or the Dakotas for that much time.

When you're done reading that, try google searches on 'stegosaur' and 'cambodia'. As in North America where you see stegosaur images (petroglyphs) on canyon walls and around rivers and lakes, they've now turned up a totally accurate image of this creature on one of the column stones at Angkor:

Not when you cannot replicate it in the lab. That is, the common descent part of it could be the same sort of common descent you see going from a 1920s car to the automobiles of today, i.e. a sequence of small design changes, but macroevolution via mutation and selection has been completely tested in the labs, and the theory failed the test as I noted.

Haldane’s dilemma has never been a barrier to evolution, despite some misrepresentations by creationists.

Sorry, but you cannot hand-wave the Haldane dilemma away like that. The Haldane dilemma is one of the two major motivations for punctuated equilibria, the other being the lack of intermediate fossils, and you can do your own research on that. If the Haldane dilemma were not a problem, Gould, Eldridge, Mayr, and the others would not have gone to the trouble.

In fact when you read through evolutionite literature you will find claims to have "debunked" every argument used against evolution and few of those claims will be more transparant than in the case of the Haldane dilemma. The dilemma is not difficult to comprehend and does not involve higher math. Simplistic versions of it indicate that even if a population of higher animals were to substitute a new genetic change entirely through the population EVERY GENERATION, i.e. at a rate vastly beyond what is possible, they could still never amount to meaningful morphological changes or new kinds of animals in anything like the amounts of time which even standard theories claim are involved.

“The total lack of undisputed intermediate fossils.”

This position is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of what represents a transitional feature.

The lack of intermediate fossils is well known and undisputed; it is the other major motivation for PE. Again, as in the case of the Haldane dilemma, if there were no problem, then Gould and the others would not have gone to the trouble to devise PE. Think about it.

The basic problem which you DON'T read in evolutionite literature is that classical Darwinism demands that THE VAST BULK OF ALL FOSSILS SHOULD BE CLEAR CUT INTERMEDIATES and, after a hundred and fifty years of searching, all they have is a tiny handful of very questionable cases.

It's as if I had a theory which demanded that all of the world's people were blond and all I could show anybody was four or five dishwater blondes living in Kansas. I wouldn't get very far with such a theory, would I?

“The logical failure of the supposed new variant, PE.”

I assume you are talking about punctuated evolution?

Punctuated Equilibria amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals (i.e. gets them past the Haldane dilemma) and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. As Walter Remine notes, you need a fairly sizeable population of animals before you'd ever see a "beneficial mutation" (the thing the whole business hinges on in theory). PE eliminates this possibility.
2. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the advocates of this theory are climing that the lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...

3. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
4. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
5. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
6. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 4 and 6 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's writings:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place magically somehow or other.

I mean, I hate to be the party pooper or the person to disillusion everybody, but evolution is basically a dead theory walking as we speak. The problems with it are all major; any one of them would suffice to kill off any normal sort of science theory, i.e. any theory which did not involve ideologies, lifestyles, and yuppie careers.

“You do not HAVE infinite time. In fact, you don’t even have the tens of millions of years which are commonly supposed.”

The age of the universe is 14 billion years, which must be accepted in order for evolution to work. The dating methods used by scientists on fossils have not been debunked by creationists-the age of the earth is 4.5 billion years, this fugure is universally accepted by scientists.

Chaos theory shows how life evolves from a seemingly chaotic situation (which could be gasses and hot matter in the early universe).
A classical example that proves chaos theory is the development of convection currents in water when it is heated in a utensil. Heat provides energy to each water molecule, which darts around at random and in chaotic fashion all over inside the utensil. However, after a certain time a band of convection currents develop in which the heated water molecules rise up and are replaced by cold water molecules. This band is like a tube or a structure through which the water flows. Thus the seemingly chaotic behavior of water molecules is converted into an orderly structure. If the heat is removed, this structure collapses. I explained in my previous post how matter in the early universe, along with electrical energy could form amino acids over a long period of time.

“the recent sequencing of proteins from that same tyrannosaur bone and the fact that those proteins were nearly identical to those of a chicken. The tyrannosaur turns out to be a big chicken with sharp teeth which died a few thousand years ago”

“collegen has been extracted from the remains of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex”, according to two the document you provided. The article does not state that TRex was a few thousand years old. “When conditions for preservation are just right, she said, “degradation rates may differ from predictions. Data from both [new] papers suggest that original protein may be preserved.”-This is no proof of dinosaurs existing a few thousand years ago.

“tegosaur images (petroglyphs) on canyon walls and around rivers and lakes, they’ve now turned up a totally accurate image of this creature on one of the column stones at Angkor:”

I noticed several things about this image. First, the color of the stegosaur is lighter than the surrounding rock, sugesting that it may be just a more recent attempt at a hoax. Secondly, the head is way too big, the “plates” flare out widely at the top and its missing its tail spikes for it to be a tegasaur. It could just as easily be a Rhino on a pretty background. Thirdly, etchings on walls of ancient temples showing dinosaurs does not indicate that humans lived with them recently. It could just as easily have been the artists rendering of fossils discovered by ancient people, or a good imagination.
Creationists are too quick to dismiss evolution when confronted with seemingly conflicting evidence that really just requires explanation.

“Not when you cannot replicate it in the lab. That is, the common descent part of it could be the same sort of common descent you see going from a 1920s car to the automobiles of today, i.e. a sequence of small design changes, but macroevolution via mutation and selection has been completely tested in the labs, and the theory failed the test as I noted.”

You cannot replicate macroevolution in lab unless you invent a time machine and observe an experiment over hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
It is a concept that has very strong evidence supported by several scientific discoveries in many fields, and traced biologically through genetics. The creationist’s various hypotheses distinguishing micro and macroevolution are considered to have no scientific basis by any mainstream scientific organization, acording to the National Academy of Science.

“Sorry, but you cannot hand-wave the Haldane dilemma away like that.”

Haldanes dilemma has been misrepresented. Haldane himself gives examples where the evolutionary rates accord with his calculations (average rate of speciation in the carnivora, and mammalia on page 522, his conclusion: “the agreement with the theory developed here is satisfactory”)
(http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/classictexts/haldane2.pdf)
Haldane also gave examples where evolution could fix substitutions faster than under his assumptions (see page 523, where he discusses radiation of species into environments with few or no competitors, and the introduction, where he discusses intense selection)
Haldane also gave examples where evolution could fix substitutions faster than under his assumptions (ReMine misrepresents Haldane and the significance of his work). Haldane also explicitly acknowledged that these were preliminary approaches to developing a mathematical treatment of selection. In 1961 he produced a paper where he revised his approach, and found at least one more circumstance where evolution could proceed faster than with his original assumptions (eeb.uconn.edu). So, the amount of measured variation in the genome meant that if Haldane’s assumptions were right, all vertebrates would be dead. So we know that Haldane was wrong. Exactly where he was wrong occupied many pages of journal articles in the 60’s and 70’s. Kimura (Kimura, 1968) used the heterozygosity problem to advance the neutral theory (eeb.uconn.edu). In neutral theory, most mutations are neutral with respect to fitness, and neutral alleles are fixed by drift. Since the alleles have no effect on fitness, a very large number of allelic variants can be in the population and not reduce its fitness, thus solving the heterozygosity problem (Kimura, M. 1983 The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. Cambridge University Press).

I had also explained in my last posting to you that recently, the Human Genome project had not even come close to exceeding Haldanes “speed limit” when they discovered 238 out of 22,000 genes had been fixed since the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor and most variation is due to neutral mutations.

Neither Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the “species problem”: how multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for the concept ‘species’. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. Gould’s works were sometimes used out of context as a “proof” that scientists no longer understood how organisms evolved. Gould himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his writings in his later works.

“The basic problem which you DON’T read in evolutionite literature is that classical Darwinism demands that THE VAST BULK OF ALL FOSSILS SHOULD BE CLEAR CUT INTERMEDIATES and, after a hundred and fifty years of searching, all they have is a tiny handful of very questionable cases”

Although transitional fossils elucidate the evolutionary transition of one life-form to another, they only exemplify snapshots of this process. Due to the special circumstances required for preservation of living beings, only a very small percentage of all life-forms that ever have existed can be expected to be discovered. Thus, the transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, but it will never be known in detail. However, progressing research and discovery managed to fill in several gaps and continues to do so. Transitional forms are found all the time. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/11/051116173945.htm)

“Punctuated Equilibria amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals (i.e. gets them past the Haldane dilemma) and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).”

(Haldane’s dilemma is a non-issue, as I have shown) The theory of punctuated equilibrium developed by Gould and Eldredge is often misrepresented. This theory, however, pertains only to well-documented transitions within taxa (organism or group of organisms) or between closely related taxa over a geologically short period of time. These transitions, usually traceable in the same geological outcrop, often show small jumps in morphology between periods of morphological stability. To explain these jumps, Gould and Eldredge envisaged comparatively long periods of genetic stability separated by periods of rapid evolution (which I had explained with evidence of the undersea coral in the previous post). (You can read more about punctuated equilibrium at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html)

“I mean, I hate to be the party pooper or the person to disillusion everybody, but evolution is basically a dead theory walking as we speak.”

With regard to teaching evolution in schools, I would highly recommend that you read the (conservative, Bush appointed) Judge’s opinion in “Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District et al” @ http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf

Evolution, ands its thousands of components, are misrepresented by creationists to make it seem like there are many holes in the theory that prevent it from being taught in science classes. Sure, there are many things we don’t know about evolution, but the field of biology would collapse if evolution wasn’t there to tie everything together. The point that I still don’t understand is that this whole controversy is really just over one thing. The interpretation of what the word “day” in Genesis means. “Day” may also be understood to mean “separate period of time,” and thus the time-scale for God having organized the earth from matter in the early universe could extend over billions of years of “earth time,” (in other words, God’s timescale may be a “fast forwarding” of earths time). Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII said that “ the conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent matter.” Pope John Paul II said: “In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points....Today, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies — which was neither planned nor sought — constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.” (John Paul II, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Evolution)

My argument is finally this: Christians should focus their energy on reducing the number of abortions, pushing conservative security, fiscal, and immigration policies, and helping heal the sick, etc. Evolution is not a life and death issue in terms of our survival today.

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