Saturday, January 24, 2009

Evolution Education Round-up

Texas school board voted against requiring discussion of evolution's 'weaknesses'... Yeah!!!
Louisiana is allowing a pro Intelligent Design book in their classrooms.. Boo!!
Mississippi is pr0posing to add this to their textbooks... Boo!!!

1/3 Ain't bad... lets dive a little deeper into Mississippi's textbook addition shall we?
"Evolution refers to the unproven belief that random, undirected forces produced living things. There are many topics with unanswered questions about the origin of life which are not mentioned in your textbook, including: the sudden appearance of the major groups of animals in the fossil record (known as the Cambrian Explosion); the lack of new major groups of other living things appearing in the fossil record; the lack of transitional forms of major groups of plants and animals in the fossil record; and the complete and complex set of instructions for building a living body possessed by all living things."





This is great except just about everything in this statement is wrong. 1) Unproven? How much more evidence do you need? In case you have missed reading just about any scientific paper or textbook in the last century validating evolution time after time after time (I am looking at you here Mississippi), here is a handy chart to show you every fossilized transitional species from a land creature to a whale... The fact that we have not identified every transitional species for every major class does not invalidate evolution. Just because I don't have a garage with every car from the Model T to the 2009 Mustang doesn't mean that the Ford Motor company doesn't exist.
2) Just because science can't explain everything doesn't mean a) it must be supernatural or magic in origin and b) it won't be understood eventually by science... give us some time.
3) undirected forces? sure they are directed.. they are directed by environmental pressures (that is kind of the basis of the whole theory).
4) The first sentence confuses (as these idiots so love to do) the origin of life question with evolutionary theory. Evolution doesn't not make a prediction about the origin of life. It simply states that species change over time due to environmental pressures and create new species.

I could go on, but I have to go perform some directed evolution to make better drugs for fighting diseases...

2 comments:

emily said...

I just spent a really long time reading The Christian Post, thanks to your link. They sure are obsessed with Haggard. The movie reviews were particularly interesting. The reviewers have to catalog every swear word, every lord's name-vain, every "sucks" and "stupid", every bare midriff, short skirt, and shirtless man. Needless to say, not many movies were approved.

JB said...

Only an elder can watch a bare midriff and not go into a debaucherous rampage. They are doing a service for the younglings in training whose eyes would bleed at the meer sight of of an open mouth kiss.