U.S. Lags World in Grasp of Genetics and Acceptance of Evolution

Live Science ^ | 08/10/06 | Ker Than

[VOA]

"U.S. Lags World in Grasp of Genetics and Acceptance of Evolution"

BUT...
Snapshot of attitudes about actually using genetics...
In America: Don't you mess with the embryos!
In Europe: Don't you mess with the tomato!

That's a paraphrase of an observation by Matt Ridley, author of
a biography of Francis Crick.
He said that during his travels, he finds Europeans much more fearful
of application of genetic research and Americans much more excited about
benefiting from it.


Here's a link to the book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006082333X/sr=8-1/qid=1155339126/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-4548298-7623034?ie=UTF8

Here's a link to the info on Ridley's recent appearance on BookTV (C-Span2 weekends).
Looks like you can even watch Ridley's talk by clicking the "Watch"
link on the page.
http://www.booktv.org/PublicLives/index.asp?schedid=443&segid=7274

[aft_lizard]

I will wait until my degree is in hand so that not only can I answer your question but have my own set of supporting evidences as to why I answered them as such, until then I am nothing but an ex-military guy getting some A's in class.

[UndauntedR]

A well though out, reasoned response to many of Coulter's unfounded, and uneducated claims can be found here: http://www.talkreason.org/articles/coulter1.cfm
An entertaining read.

[RobbyS]

Not many of the linge rats talked about "evolution" except as a given. In any case, if you are teaching kids the basics of science and want to get away from textbook talk, the last thing you want to do is to spend time on "grand theories." If you do, then what they come away with is the notion of "gravity" as something "essential" to matter, or more creduly as a "force." Easy enough to start with a repetition of Galileo's experiments, and try to get them to record and see the pattern of the results. Not so easy to go from these to the standard formulas. in part because Galileo used geometry, not algebra, but kids will surprise you.
I have an an 8th grader pick up a relationship I never saw until I got to college. That's because his mind was not cluttered up with a lot of badly taught math. But for most people, even the bright ones, "generalities" in the bad sense are just easy to go with. So most physics students graduate from high school with only a slight advantage over Aristotle.

Now if they can't grasp something as simple and demonstrable as dynamics, how the heck are they going to deal with something like evolution? Even assuming it is right. it is as counterintuitive as relativity theory.

[RobbyS]

Call this variation --as I think Wallace did--rather than evolution. Evolution brings to mind an outward spiral from simplicity to complexity.

[RobbyS]

It is also possible that science will never achieve either goal , or that it will take another fifty years, or about the same time that our high schools produce literate graduates.

[gentlestrength]

"By the strictest definition of species (absolutely unable to interbreed); speciation has been observed several times both in and out of the lab.

IF they interbred, then they weren't species by definition!

I'm sorry that I don't have the detailed answers in front of me which I think you might appreciate, to counter your claim. I might suggest a book by Michael Behe, or an easier starter, even Ann Coulter's Godless: the Church of Liberalism has a third of the book on evolution. You might try online Reason to Believe in Pasadena California as well.

What I do have: let's work backwards from something you might think is irrelevant but which is not. We have historical documents of eyewitness accounts of the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Bible. The historical evidence is good,and the internal and external means to verify evidence are along the same standards as we would require in research of any other ancient document, verifying and affirming the claims.

Jesus rose from the dead proving His claims to be God the Son come to earth. Now, what does HE say about the beginning of the world? As God, He would know! He goes along with the teachings that the Bible is God's word and has accurate coverage of this. It is not a scientific textbook, but its account is true. The accounts in Genesis really happened, God actually created the beasts, and that man was created differently, "in the image of God." So we have God Himself, now who can be talked to, who has a fully human body because He has assumed a human nature along with His Divine nature, God the Son verifying that our historical records are correct for our cosmology.

We have a choice from there: when we hear theories which contradict Him, do we want to believe them, or Him? It is a widely accepted presupposition that miracles cannot happen, and yet Jesus raised Himself from the dead, so that 'scientific' presupposition is false, because the evidence overturns it. Do we want to believe a theory, or Him?

If evolution were true, God could have done it that way. But we don't have the evidence. What we have is lack of any evidence, with the godless liberals trying to push their anti-God beliefs upon us, not wanting this information to get out. There are changes within species, but there is no evidence that species evolve into higher species.

[Dante Alighieri]

What you mean by "if they interbred, they were species by definition?"

And indeed there is evidence, a wealth of evidence indeed. To summarily assert that there is no evidence is intellectual dishonest.

Coulter's arguments were the same creationist arguments which have been continually refuted; also, Behe's IC proposition was shown to be false multiple times.

Evolution is not a belief, as you implicitly posit. It is however a scientific theory.

[WFTR]

This article is noteworthy for the things that the author failed to say. The most interesting thing I noticed is around this statement:

The current study also analyzed the results from a 10-country survey in which adults were tested with 10 true or false statements about basic concepts from genetics. One of the statements was "All plants and animals have DNA." Americans had a median score of 4. (The correct answer is "yes.")

They state that Americans have a median score of 4 as if that statistic by itself has some meaning. Their implication is that Americans doubt evolution because Americans don't know as much about genetics as non-Americans. However, they failed to state the median score of any non-Americans. What was the median score of those from other countries? I suspect that they didn't give this statistic because this statistic wouldn't support their opinion. If the median score for other countries was also 4 or near 4, then ignorance of genetics is not the explanation for Americans' skepticism about evolution. I also noted that they didn't try to compare the median score of Americans who don't believe in evolution with the median score of Americans who do believe in evolution. Again, if the evolutionists generally have a much higher score, they would have some support for their smear that only people who are ignorant of biology are skeptical of evolution.

I'm also curious why they used median scores and not average scores. I'd like to see the distribution of scores. I suspect that they'd like us to believe that scores were a normal distribution around that median. I also suspect that the real scores were much more scattered.

Science alone is not enough

But the problem is more than one of education—it goes deeper, and is a function of our country's culture and history, said study co-author Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education in California.

“The rejection of evolution is not something that will be solved by throwing science at it,” Scott said in a telephone interview.

In other words, Americans don't doubt evolution because we lack knowledge of science. This guy is admitting that the problem isn't ignorance of biology. Instead, he's just upset because educated people believe something different from what he believes.

The article makes clear that there are fanatics on both sides of the issue. In this article, most of the attention is given to the pro-evolution fanatics and advancing their point of view. Personally, I have no use for the fanatics on either side of the issue. Evolution is one of the least likely areas of research to produce anything useful. People care about evolution because they are asking science to tell them who they are. I think science is a poor tool for telling me who I am.

Bill

[RobbyS]

My point is that the term "variation" is sufficient for discussion of what we can see. Evolution goes far beyond that to encompass virtually every field of knowledge. It is interesting, however, that you should mention animal husbandry. Almost as soon as Darwin published, he and many of his supporters began to relativize human life. Like it or not, eugenics is part and parcel of darwinism.

[RobbyS]

No, eugenics is a philosophy that has bearing on research. It is analogous to marxism, where revolutionary actioin is supposed to "speed up" an inevitable process. The term "natural selection" is value laden, because it leads people to help nature along. The biologist tends to play the role that deity does in ID. We recognized this in the work of the Nazi scientists. I see it in the work of the IVF practioneers and the cloners and the stem cell researchers ( the ones that lust after the flesh of enbryos)

[RobbyS]

I mentioned Marx because he presented his views as scientific. The harm he did was less in the economic or sociological theories he proposed than in what opportunists like Lenin made f it. The basis of the present furor over stem cell research is the resurgence of eugenics, not as a legitimate scientific theory but as a kind of view of what is moral. The researchers who demand access to the "extra" embryos generated by the horrific IVF industry have a view of human nature like Francis Galton's. It is related to evolution per se only by the famous recapitulation theory of embryology, which (falsely) compared stages of human development to stages of human evolution. The implication, of course, is that if champs are less than human beings, then certain kinds of human beings are likewise also not fully "evolved," fully human. Since personal traits are inherited, it is allowed to work toward a kind of "speciation " by the manipulation of genetic "matter." Human nature becomes a kind of garden and the researcher is allowed to operate like some modern day Luther Burbank.

[Mark Felton]

LOL

Good grief, you clearly show your utter ignorance. The development of agriculture did not begin in those Western regions which later dominated the phenomenl growth in technology and culture over the past 2000 years


Agriculture began in mesopatamia, north eastern Africa and spread to central Asia and then to the West.

Those nations which originated agriculturalism ;ater fell far behind western nations because they did not embrace Christianity. (the correlation is prfound if you would care to scratch below the surface, should your preconceived bias allow such)

You take exception to the blatantly obvious, so there is clearly some agenda or bogtry in your "argument".

In particular consider the explosive expansion of economies and technology as Christianity took on even purer form after the Reformation.