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.

[CobaltBlue]

Ping?

[PatrickHenry]

I donno. Lemme mull it over a bit.

[Hoplite]

a photograph of an exceptionally unattractive man sitting in his underwear on a couch

She said those photographs were for personal use only!

I feel more violated than Paris Hilton!

Well... maybe not that violated.

[ahayes]

Ping to self.

[mlc9852]

A lot to think about.

[CobaltBlue]

It's long -- from the WashPost Magazine. This type of long, deep thinkpiece is the type of thing the WashPost does best, IMO, they let the writer just stretch out and hit a lot of different points.

Not fare for Three Stooges type of slapstick.

[PatrickHenry]

I just finished reading it. I still can't make up my mind. Guys, shall I ping the list?

[Coyoteman]

===> Placemarker <===

[VadeRetro]

What unites these advocates is not religion but the belief that supernatural forces are active in everyday life.

That's backwards from what I think. Supernatural forces are what is not acting. Religion, a set of beliefs that supernatural forces control reality, does act, often leading people to do bad things.

[MRMEAN]

I think it's an interesting, wide-ranging article. The real debate is not about science anyway, this article gets covers the actual battlefield far more than the usual scientific report, which will be filtered out by anti-evolutionists Reality-Distortion Shield anyway.

[VadeRetro]

Crocker said that subsequent research had shown that chemicals used in the [Miller-Urey] experiment did not exist on Earth 4 billion years ago. "The experiment is irrelevant, but you still find it in your books," she said.

This too is wrong.

[planetesimal]

True enough, but the creationist standards are wheeled out by the brave heroine - argument from incredulity, straw moths etc. The power of denial is literally awesome - this girl has an advanced degree which presumably entails frequent visits to large libraries with shelf after shelf bearing books and journals that contain no evidence.

[andysandmikesmom]

PH...I already got pinged by mlc9852, so I am here...need to read the whole article, its a long one, and dont know if I have time enough this evening or not...and will be busy all day tomorrow...but I look forward, hopefully, to some good discussion...or not...whatever...

[VadeRetro]

Before the class, Crocker had told me that she was going to teach "the strengths and weaknesses of evolution." Afterward, I asked her whether she was going to discuss the evidence for evolution in another class. She said no.

The gimmick here is she "sincerely" in her nutcase way thinks there aren't any strenghts of evolution. Still, she feels allowed to bait and switch the reporter who does not know up front what she intends.

They're allowed to lie as needed. The Lord understands.

[nothingnew]

...Crocker, who wore a light brown sweater and slacks,...

This is key to the entire story.........isn't it?

FMCDH(BITS)

[narby]

I'd ping this one. The WaPo needs an education.

[narby]

When Lowe finally spoke, it seemed as if the lecture had lifted a load from her shoulders. "I believe in creationism, I believe in intelligent design," she declared to the class. Humans have souls, which make them different from other animals, she told me later. To believe in evolution meant that "after you are dead, you are done."

The close association of her belief that evolution nullifies her God means that she has a hopeless conflict of interest on the science. There's no way she could be trusted to be open minded on the facts.

[CobaltBlue]

There's no way she could be trusted to be open minded on the facts.

I do shudder to think that she's teaching right down the street from me in Fairfax, VA -- admittedly Nova Community College is only a two-year college, but it's supposed to be pretty good as these things go.

My guess is she loses this job but gets a job teaching at a religious institution.

[Ken H]

Hopefully this won't violate any coyright rules, but I've selected two partial sentences to quote.

"Nazi Germany had taken Darwin's ideas..." [snip] "What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science,"

___________________________________

Would Ms. Crocker be as willing to link Hitler and the death camps to Christianity? I'd like to see her response to this:

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter."

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

http://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm

(for the record, I think it's downright nonsense, if not deliberate deceit, to link Hitler's crimes to either Darwin or Christianity. )