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Evolution No Longer Worth Learning, Says Government
Davemania writes "New York Times reports that the Evolution biology subject has disappeared from a list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The Education department has described this as a Clerical Mistake but others are skeptical about this. 'Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. "It's just awfully coincidental," said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.'" As someone who made use of one of those grants to study Evolutionary Biology, I find this more than a little galling.
Actually, the whole concept of the "dark" ages as a backward period has been discredited by modern historians who no longer use the term.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Government spending generally helps out a lot more than it hurts. States which higher taxes and higher spending do better in a whole host of things than states which don't. There's not a lot of wiggle room for libertarian theories when you've got a whole bunch of actual states to look at. The real world has a very surprising and well-known liberal bias.
Also, Hillary is going to get bitchslapped in the future, because the Democratic party is moving left while she is not. She's part of the old Democratic leadership which believed that the best way to get elected was to be Republican lite. Look at how we're fucking Lieberman. He's the first. The rest had better become real liberals, or just join the Republicans.
The war on drugs is going to be harder to deal with, but the left elements of the Democratic party, of which I am one, are HIGHLY against the war on drugs. I personally believe that even heroin should be legal. Pot should be sold in the grocery stores right next to the bottles of vodka.
Gun control isn't even an issue in the Democratic left. Take a look around. There's no major gun control cases anywhere on the national scene. Nobody's even introducing a bill to control guns. I can tell you that in the groups I hang around with, we have a VERY serious issue with prohibitions of any kind. We cannot rationally justify it. We're liberals through and through.
Finally, take a look at the results. Bill Clinton gave us budget surpluses, and all the Republicans going back 25 years have pushed us into 10 trillion dollars worth of debt. Frankly, I am encouraged that you're holding your nose and voting Democratic, but I'm dismayed that you split the blame equally between the two big parties. I hope that will change once you see what the more liberal Democratic party does in future years. We understand and can communicate our moral values in a way that Democrats haven't done in 50 years.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
> Until Macroevolution can be observed it is just another religion.
Bullshit, it's an untested theory. There's plenty of those in science, and they're all extrapolations from current knowledge, not whole-cloth fabrications that must be taken on faith.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
They might not anymore but they did until they lost that fight a few hundred years ago.
http://evolution.mbdojo.com/conflict.html
The fight over evolution is the same irrationalism and fear all over again. The only difference is that it is happening now.
Fundamentalists regard the religious writings as gospel (pun intended) rather than a bunch of fallible people thousands of years ago writing down their interpretation of things. More moderate religious people see the writings for the historical context they were written in and wouldn't let the possibility of factual errors in them shake their own faith.
It seems a little ironic that those want to think they have the strongest faith are the least confident in the ability of their own faith to stand up to a little questioning.
What do you mean by "macroevolution"? If we take the defintion of the Wikipedia article you link to, "evolution that occurs above the level of species, over long periods of time, that leads to speciation", well then speciation has in fact been observed. And the fossil record shows how this process occurs over long periods of time.
Many of our observations are indirect, but so what?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
ampmouse: "Remember that Science can only explain observable events."
.. Huuuuuh?
Huuuuuuh? You're not a scientist, I hope. What do you think of the theoretical sciences? Many things we know about Space and Time we know without being able to OBSERVE them. Many things we know only because physics/mathematics tells us that it HAS TO BE SO. A good example would be the gravitational lensing of light as it passes massive objects on its way to earth.. That is exactly how we can detect the "black holes" and other super-massives out there, which, due to their very light-sucking nature*, cannot be observed.
That you actually made such a statement is almost as profound as the statement itself. Science explains a lot of things, past and present. I would hardly call the fossil formation of an ancient trilobyte an "observable event" yet, by various means of spectrometry and x-ray crystallography, etc, we can determine exactly how the fossil was formed, exactly how the mineral leaching occurred and replaced the organic substances with stone. Observable? No. Science? Yes.
In fact, many of these fossils are DIRECT EVIDENCE of your so-called "macroevolution" !! All the signs of macroevolution are here! Last time I looked, I didn't see any primordial soup puddled anywhere around here recently.. Those Cro-Magnon fossil bones mean that Cro-Magnon man must not have existed, since we cannot observe them in existence..? Oh wait, how about dinosaurs? Based on your philosophy, they never existed; the fossil bones are "Science" while the actual idea of dinosaurs is "Religion"
Science is the search for knowledge. Nowhere does anything (except YOU!) state that "Science can only explain observable events." !!! Perhaps you're trying to tell us that science (and/or macroevolution) is faith-based??
Please, stop misleading people already. Just because it is not observable doesn't mean it's not true**. To quote Ed Wuncler III, "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!"
-Weasel5i2
* Not to be confused with "dark-sucking"
** See another reader's "science = TRUTH, religion=FAITH" reply above
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
Actually, macroevolution has quite a bit of solid proof. The best is the DNA record, which confirms inheritance and branchings predicted by the evolutionary tree.
The main objection to macroevolution is that no one has actually seen one species of macro-fauna spontaneously transform into another. This is true, because the process takes thousands of years. We just haven't been looking that long. But there are examples where the intermediate stages still exist in an unbroken chain between two species. Richard Dawkins mentions the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull, which cannot interbreed and are therefore seperate species. Both exist in Europe. But if you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward around the north pole, to North America, Alaska, Siberia, and back to Europe, you encounter all the intermediate stages leading to the Black-backed Gull. In each area around this ring, the gulls in that area can interbreed with their neighbours. Only when you get to Europe do you have two seperate species.
The objection that nobody has actually observed macro-evolution in action is based upon a complete misunderstanding of science. By this reasoning, nearly all of cosmology would collapse because nobody can actually see most of the celestial bodies in question, only measure their emanations. It's analogous to saying we have no idea how far away the sun is because nobody has a tape measure that long.
My point was that freedom of speech is as much a freedom guaranteed by the constitution as a woman's right to controll her own body and what grows in it.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Actually, we're having a rather heated immigration debate in the UK too, at the moment. Actually, there's a stronger argument against it in the UK because this island is incredibly overpopulated already, whereas the US isn't. However, my main problem is the language barrier. I'm of the strong belief that it's a good thing for everyone in a country to speak one language; ideally, i'd have everyone in the world speaking one language. Immigrants coming in and speaking Spanish in the US sounds like a bad idea. The language barrier is, IMHO, the biggest barrier to human interaction and telling most Americans to learn Spanish is a really stupid way to solve the problem rather than vice versa.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Face it. Every attempt to eradicate or exile a given group within a population of humans has failed since the dawn of history*.
Face it. Charlemagne eradicated the Avars with some help from the Bulgarians. ...the Avar people the language the civilization. ...all gone.
Chandragupta II also did his share of ethnic cleansing. Also known as "Vikramaditya, he "unburdened the sacred earth of the Barbarians like the Shakas, Mlecchas, Kambojas, Yavanas, Tusharas, Parasikas, Hunas, etc. by annihilating these sinners completely."
I wouldn't advocate such public policy here, but never underestimate what your fellow humans are capable of doing to your other fellow humans.