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One more post for today. The Boston Globe has an article about the fight against teaching evolution in public schools (link from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
gibsonfeed). One thing mentioned is a label placed on the title page of a biology textbook: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." I happen to agree strongly with these statements, but the point is that everything should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. It's sort of redundant to put it on a textbook when this implicitly applies to all textbooks. Somehow I don't think putting the same label on bibles would be accepted by anyone, though.
Really, I'd be happy if human evolution were taken out of schools, as long as it's replaced by a greater emphasis on critical thinking, logic, and the scientific method. Teach a man to fish, etc. Of course schools should also continue to teach genetic reproduction and natural selection, since those theories are straightforward to test with experiments. Actually, natural selection isn't even a theory, it logically follows from genetic reproduction.
The article also quotes the 100-year-old Ernest Mayr: "What it really amounts to is a break with our Constitution, which tells you that you should keep religion out of public life." If only the Constitution actually said that!
gibsonfeed). One thing mentioned is a label placed on the title page of a biology textbook: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." I happen to agree strongly with these statements, but the point is that everything should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. It's sort of redundant to put it on a textbook when this implicitly applies to all textbooks. Somehow I don't think putting the same label on bibles would be accepted by anyone, though.Really, I'd be happy if human evolution were taken out of schools, as long as it's replaced by a greater emphasis on critical thinking, logic, and the scientific method. Teach a man to fish, etc. Of course schools should also continue to teach genetic reproduction and natural selection, since those theories are straightforward to test with experiments. Actually, natural selection isn't even a theory, it logically follows from genetic reproduction.
The article also quotes the 100-year-old Ernest Mayr: "What it really amounts to is a break with our Constitution, which tells you that you should keep religion out of public life." If only the Constitution actually said that!
From:
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Evolution, in the sense of, "did it happen?", isn't some random hypothesis that's currently hotly debated; the fossil record is so voluminous, that it's completely absurd to assert that this is anything other than a fact as well established as anything else in science. In fact, this much was mostly settled even before Darwin.
Moreover the evolutionary classification of living things forms the core of modern biology. Without evolution, biology just becomes this random taxonomy with no rhyme or reason to it and you don't have a prayer at understanding what's going on.
What Darwin did was come up with a mechanism, Natural Selection, and while there are debates about whether it accounts for everything (answer: it probably doesn't), that's a completely different question, one that creationists (often purposely) confuse with a debate about evolution itself.