First Russian Anti-Evolution Suit Enters Court Room

sdriver writes "If you thought it was only the US giving Darwin a hard time, Russia has its own problems starting with evolution. A student has 'sued the St. Petersburg city education committee, claiming the 10th-grade biology textbook used at the Cervantes Gymnasium was offensive to believers and that teachers should offer an alternative to Darwin's famous theory.' The suit, the first of its kind in Russia, is being dismissed out of hand by the principal and teachers. The teacher of the science class had apparently even taken the step of stating at the start of the school year that there were other theories on the origin of life."

Comments

Sure! Here's your alternative

[jfengel]

If you don't like Darwinism, you're welcome to try Lysenkoism. It's got a long, if not exactly proud, history in Soviet Russia. It's been pretty thoroughly proven false, but unlike Creationism, it's at least a falsifiable theory.

Re:other theories

[Maxo-Texas]

No.
Evolutionists do not believe it started randomly.

They have seen evidence of natural selection.

They have fossil records that coordinate with geologic and other records showing a lack of human fossils fairly recently in history. Predictions made based on plate theory and other models of historical geology have been tested successfully.

The fossil record shows various waves of complex creatures but once you get back far enough, the creatures become simpler and more primitive.

Natural selection provides a reasonable explanation for how creatures can change from a mouse type creature to an elephant type creature in only about 10,000 years. We have observed new species to come into existence in our life time. We have strong evidence from dna that humans had severe pinch points in the very recent past and that we only existed as a species for a couple million years at most.

However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start.
Basically it only says that creatures who reproduce more have more children and so their children eventually become the population.
Given random mutations which have no affect in reproductive fitness, the random mutations will be carried.
Given random mutations that lower reproductive fitness, they will disappear (at a speed relative to how harmful they are).
Given beneficial mutations that increase reproductive fitness, those creatures with those mutations will rapidly come to dominate a population.

Looking at the record the best you can say is "it's likely that creatures were very simple before the earliest hard records.

However- it directly confronts religious text since it pretty much says man did not exist and "near men" did exist in pre-religious times. Just like a religion that says the earth is the center of the universe is provably WRONG, any religion that seriously says man only existed for under the last 10,000 years is provably wrong.

Re:other theories

[smooth wombat]

You're mixing and matching. The Theory of Evolution is not, and will never be, proven. But evolution itself, is proven. We have the fossil record to show how various creatures have evolved over time. It is only the mechanism(s) that cause or influence this process that is not proven. The act itself is a fact.

Same thing with gravity. We know gravity is real. We can measure it, we can experience. However, the Theory of Gravity and the Theory of Relativity are not proven and will never be. All these theroies do, as the Wiki indicated, is lay out a testable, verifiable process which best explains how these facts come about.