Eden and Evolution

The Washington Post ^ | February 5, 2005 | Shankar Vedantam

[CobaltBlue]

Ricky Nguyen and Mariama Lowe never really believed in evolution to begin with. But as they took their seats in Room CC-121 at Northern Virginia Community College on November 2, they fully expected to hear what students usually hear in any Biology 101 class: that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was true.

As professor Caroline Crocker took the lectern, Nguyen sat in the back of the class of 60 students, Lowe in the front. Crocker, who wore a light brown sweater and slacks, flashed a slide showing a cartoon of a cheerful monkey eating a banana. An arrow led from the monkey to a photograph of an exceptionally unattractive man sitting in his underwear on a couch. Above the arrow was a question mark.

Crocker was about to establish a small beachhead for an insurgency that ultimately aims to topple Darwin's view that humans and apes are distant cousins. The lecture she was to deliver had caused her to lose a job at a previous university, she told me earlier, and she was taking a risk by delivering it again. As a nontenured professor, she had little institutional protection. But this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.

[PatrickHenry]

Evolution Ping The List-O-Links

A conservative, pro-evolution science list, now with over 340 names. See the list's explanation, then FReepmail to be added or dropped. To assist beginners: But it's "just a theory", Evo-Troll's Toolkit, and How to argue against a scientific theory.

[furball4paws]

Sure. Things have been a bit dull lately.

[CobaltBlue]

I'd like to take a look at that textbook. Not difficult, Nova is two miles from me, I could just drive there and look in the bookstore.

If they are teaching the moths and the primordial soup theory, then I would have to ask why.

[balrog666]

No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory.

What an incredibly ignorant Liar-for-the-Lord - I hope this fool is already fired by now (again).

[andysandmikesmom]

I agree completely with your last sentence in your post, which reads "(for the record, I think it's downright nonsense, if not deliberate deceit, to link Hitler's crimes to either Darwin or Christianity. )"

Indeed...evil people do evil things, and trying to link their evil deeds to anothers religion or philosophy or world view, is as you say, nonsense and deceit...its also stupid, shallow, and clearly linked by people with some sort of axe to grind...

[VadeRetro]

The Miller experiment was a demonstration that very simple inorganics will combine to make complex organics with no "intelligent design" involved. That was an impressive beginning to abiogenesis research and still relevant. (However, it doesn't have an awful lot to do directly with Darwin's theory of how life forms diversify.)

The peppered moths are a fine example of natural selection. I don't think they really speciated, so someone can yell "That's just microevolution!" and it's true as far as it goes. But macroevolution is just lots of accumulated micro-.

[From many - one.]

Check back to see if thread evolves.

[CobaltBlue]

The peppered moth story has too many problems to be taught with a straight face. I don't have a problem with teaching it as an example of science gone wrong.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_1999_Spring/ai_54321422

[phantomworker]

Crocker said she came to her views on evolution not because of her religious faith but while working on a PhD in biology, when she learned about the complexity of the cell and the immune system

Did they say which University she graduated from? Couldn't imagine any PhD committee allowing her to profess those beliefs!

Must not take much to teach at a community college these days.

[Rudder]

No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory.

If you were with Tim Leary, Owsley and I during 1967's summer in Berkeley, you would have.

[CobaltBlue]

And the primordial soup theory, while interesting, is just that. I don't think it's any more worth teaching in an intro biology class than ID.

[furball4paws]

Did you know his brother, Really?

[PatrickHenry]

The peppered moth story has too many problems to be taught with a straight face.

Not really. It's a pretty good example of natural selection. But the anti-evos have made such a mountain out of the molehill that the moths were positioned for the photo ... it's become to evolution what Sally Hemmings is to Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps it's much easier to use some of the many other common examples -- DDT resistant bugs, for example.

[EarlyBird]

And evolutionary science has a great deal to say about ethics and morality, Dawkins said. Being "pro-life in debates on abortion or stem cell research always means pro-human life, for no sensibly articulated reason," he once wrote. The fact that humans think of themselves as altogether distinct from other animals -- and the biblical notion that humans have dominion over other animals -- is a sort of racism, Dawkins said. Evolution shows that fox hunters and bullfighters are tormenting their own distant cousins, which is why the biologist sends money to anti-bullfighting groups in Spain, and why he notes with pride that fox hunting was banned on the family farm. "The melancholy fact," Dawkins wrote in an essay called "Gaps in the Mind," "is that, at present, society's moral attitudes rest almost entirely on the . . . speciesist imperative."

I think one can reasonably infer from this exposition that Dawkins is pro-abortion. The "Gap in the Mind" in his head is that tormenting "distant cousins" (bulls, foxes) is much more repugnant that murdering your own, direct offspring.

[Rudder]

Brother, brother where art thou?

Whose brother?

[jonathanmo]

A quick google indicates that she received a PhD in immunopharmacology from the University of Southampton, UK...

[furball4paws]

Tim's - sorry I couldn't resist a little toss of the hat to an old George Carlin routine.

[VadeRetro]

There do appear to be complications in the moth's story. Much of their activity is at night, and camouflage from birds is not the only thing going on. Much of that is conceded by other sources. Still, that author seems to have a bit of the chip on the shoulder.

The overall summary on T.O. mentions the same arguments with more perspective.

[furball4paws]

Hey, all. Drudge has a link to a story about 100's of new species just found in New Guinea:

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article343740.ece

I guess cannibalism has its positive aspects in preserving species that might otherwise make it in the pot.

Not too many of these ultra-remote places left for finding a plethora (yes I said plethora) of new species.

[Rudder]

I knew Tim Leary personally (he was daft in the extreme, we both got our doctorates from Berkeley and we both had the same favorite professor in the same dept.

I usually fall over laughing when I listen to Carlin, but please fill me in on this routine.