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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, 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.