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Texas Board of Education Supports Evolution
somanyrobots writes with this excerpt from the Dallas News:
"In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be 'weaknesses' in the theory of evolution. Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life. Texas is particularly influential to textbook publishers because of the size of its market, so this could have a ripple effect on textbooks used in other states as well."
I think that we maybe have a stronger case for gravity than for evolution...
No, we haven't. Newtons theory is just one of many plausible models to explain the physics of the world. It has it's strengths and weaknesses like all the other models.
The theory of evolution is the only plausible model we have to explain/understand the diversity of life. It's also the most scrutinised scientific theory.
Unlike gravity, we have yet to find cases where the theory of evolution won't hold.
Newton's theory of gravity is known to be wrong.
It incorrectly predicts the orbit of Mercury.
It cannot explain gravitational lensing.
It assumes that gravity is instantaneous, when we know it must be limited by the speed of light.
Newton's theory is a very useful shortcut, as it is right most of the time. But it's been proven to be wrong. It's just good-enough wrong.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
We are apes!. And it is very likely that a fish, likely to be a Sarcopterygii of some type, was one of our ancestors. The Sarcopterygii includes the lungfishes, which as the name implies, were fish that evolved lungs and whose fins developed into stubby "limbs", allowing them to "walk" on land.
If the GP had mentioned a specific ape (like a monkey) or a specific fish (like a trout), then yeah, the objection would have been correct for that, but apes are a superfamily, not a specific species, and fish are similarly not a species but an enormous group of centered around, but not including, the tetrapods. Apes did evolve from something that evolved from fish, and our ancestor was another ape, just like us.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.