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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.
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
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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.