Posted on 10/05/2007 6:26:08 AM PDT by SubGeniusX
The teaching of evolution is becoming increasingly difficult in UK schools because of the rise of creationism, a leading scientist is warning. Head of science at London's Institute of Education Professor Michael Reiss says some teachers, fearful of entering the debate, avoid the subject totally.
This could leave pupils with gaps in their scientific knowledge, he says.
Prof Reiss says the rise of creationism is partly down to the large increase in Muslim pupils in UK schools.
He said: "The number of Muslim students has grown considerably in the last 10 to 20 years and a higher proportion of Muslim families do not accept evolutionary theory compared with Christian families.
"That's one reason why it's more of an issue in schools."
Prof Reiss estimates that one in 10 people in the UK now believes in literal interpretations of religious creation stories - whether they are based on the Bible or the Koran.
Many more teachers he met at scientific meetings were telling him they encountered more pupils with creationist views, he said.
"The days have long gone when science teachers could ignore creationism when teaching about origins."
Instead, teachers should tackle the issue head-on, whilst trying not to alienate students, he argues in a new book.
'Not equally valid'
"By not dismissing their beliefs, we can ensure that these students learn what evolutionary theory really says - and give everyone the understanding to respect the views of others," he added.
His book; Teaching about Scientific Origins: Taking Account of Creationism, gives science teachers advice on how to deal with the "dilemma".
He supports new government guidelines which say creationism should not be discussed in science classes unless it is raised by pupils.
But Prof Reiss argues that there is an educational value in comparing creationist ideas with scientific theories like Darwin's theory of evolution because they demonstrate how science, unlike religious beliefs, can be tested.
The scientist, who is also a Church of England priest, adds that any teaching should not give the impression that creationism and the theory of evolution are equally valid scientifically.
Dr Hilary Leevers, of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said science teachers would be teaching evolution not creationism and so should not need a book to tell them how to "delicately handle controversy between a scientific theory and a belief".
"The author suggests that science teachers cannot ignore creationism when teaching origins, but the opposite is true," she said.
Teachers could discuss how creationism differed from scientific theory if a student brought up the subject, but any further discussion should occur in religious education lessons, she said.
A Department for Children, Schools and Families spokesman said it had recently published guidelines to teachers on the issue.
"Creationism and intelligent design are not scientific theories nor testable as scientific fact - and have no place in the science curriculum. "But we advise science teachers that when questions about creationism come up in lessons, it provides an opportunity to explain or explore what makes a scientific theory."
RE: “ID *is* falsifiable. ID is falsified in any system that contains no bias.”
Since ID is a No Theory /ID Theory has ‘no evidence’ = ‘ID evidence’ it is completely unfalsifiable. Since it was Designed/Created in an unspecified way by an unspecified process for an unspecified purpose (beyond what you would want it to be) it explains everything you see (as poof-magic), and explains nothing about it.
Because there is no theory or evidence ID is childs got-ya game where falsification arguments against evolution (which prove it is science) are re-cast as evidence for ID,
They’d already given up on teaching science. Articles in the past year said the standard curriculum was being updated to include “relevent applications” of science, such as environmentalism, global warming, anti-smoking and what-not-to-eat lectures, etc.
I’ll bet they’ll never mention the health risks of inbreeding to a class of Pakistani Moslems, though ...
How would one determine that all fish ‘dead or alive’ have lost this gene? Got the sequence of the fish population that gave rise to terrestrial mammals?
That's like saying that the fossil record of cars in an old junkyard prove that all cars share a common ancestor and therefor self-evolve.
In reality, a designer explains both of the above, instead. Not self-evolution.
Any astronomer who, from his work, contributes to advances in technology and exploration, will make his contributions by and from what he can observe and measure and test NOW. What works now is what can be tested and measured now.
Conjecture and assumptions about what took place 40 million years ago will not be the basis for current invention or innovation. What can be measured now, and tested now will be the science that matters.
More accurate to say that all fish tested do not have that functionality.
And that's a problem for Evolutionists. If you can't show that Fish had that functionality at some point, then you can't show that Fish passed it or anything else to Mammals...
Which means that you can't show evolution (not a good thing for Evolutionary Theory!).
OK. So you threw ID out of science class, creationism also?
The jury is still out and the final evidence is not in.
There's no such math. And yes, that's a challenge to you.
You'll fail.
Protein is overrated as DNA's purpose.
Do animals come off an assembly line? Are their changes year to year a result of a design committee or random changes as a result of mutation and natural selection? Do you think that a junkyard analysis could tell you which cars were made by the same manufacturer or from the same nation, or based upon the same design? Do you think that a junkyard analysis could reassemble the sequence of changes year to year?
If you came across a car in the woods would you think it was born from two other cars? That it was assembled de-novo by natural forces?
If a car saw a deer in Manhattan would it think that it was created off an assembly line in Detroit?
Natural Selection exists, but explains nothing new to the world. Natural Selection merely culls a population. Ergo, Natural Selection limits the abundance of differences.
Evolution WITHOUT natural selection fails to explain modern transgenic animals...fails to explain DNA code skipping...and explains the observable abundance of differences no better for animals than for automobiles stacked in a century-old junkyard.
Rose MR, Vu LN, Park SU, Graves JL Jr.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine 92717.
Tests for the causal involvement of specific physiological mechanisms in the control of aging require evidence that these mechanisms can be used to increase longevity or reproductive lifespan. Selection for later reproduction in Drosophila has been shown to lead to increased longevity, as well as increased resistance to starvation and desiccation stresses. Selection for increased resistance to starvation and desiccation in Drosophila melanogaster is here shown to lead to increased longevity, indicating that alleles that increase stress resistance also may increase longevity. The responses of desiccation and starvation resistance to selection are partly independent of each other, indicating a multiplicity of physiological mechanisms involved in selectively postponed aging, and thus aging in general.
PMID: 1521597 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
"What are you talking about?, ID doesnt explain anything. It says that life appeared in some unspecified way, you are not proposing how."
Incorrect.
Intelligent Design explains, scientifically, all modern transgenic animals such as pigs that have their DNA modified such that they grow human hormones in our labs. Evolutionary Theory fails to explain those sorts of transgenic animals, by the way...
No maybe ID explains that ‘pigs have DNA such that they grow human hormones in our labs’. It is you that claims that ‘it was modified’ to be that way, details unspecified. But since you neglect to explain:
1) How was it modified to be that way?
2) When was it modified to be that way?
3) By whom was it modified to be that way?
4) What was it modified from?
It explains nothing and cannot be falsified, and it tells us nothing.
Are you familiar with inferential statistics and the concept of the null hypothesis? The routine use of these in science publications refute your unwarranted claim.
Overrated? It is the only function known for DNA.
Please, where is the documentation that Hitler did not believe in evolution. I was under the assumption that he did, and that a belief in Darwin’s theory was what allowed his conscience to be undisturbed at his atrocities.
Why do any of your questions in post #131 have scientific relevance to either ID or Evolution?
Angelov S, Harb B, Kannan S, Khanna S, Kim J.
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. angelov@cis.upenn.edu
We study the problem of enumerating substrings that are common amongst genomes that share evolutionary descent. For example, one might want to enumerate all identical (therefore conserved) substrings that are shared between all mammals and not found in non-mammals. Such collection of substrings may be used to identify conserved subsequences or to construct sets of identifying substrings for branches of a phylogenetic tree. For two disjoint sets of genomes on a phylogenetic tree, a substring is called a tag if it is found in all of the genomes of one set and none of the genomes of the other set. We present a near-linear time algorithm that finds all tags in a given phylogeny; and a sublinear space algorithm (at the expense of running time) that is more suited for very large data sets. Under a stochastic model of evolution, we show that a simple process of tag-generation essentially captures all possible ways of generating tags. We use this insight to develop a faster tag discovery algorithm with a small chance of error. However, since tags are not guaranteed to exist in a given data set, we generalize the notion of a tag from a single substring to a set of substrings. We present a linear programming-based approach for finding approximate generalized tag sets. Finally, we use our tag enumeration algorithm to analyze a phylogeny containing 57 whole microbial genomes. We find tags for all nodes in the phylogeny except the root for which we find generalized tag sets.
PMID: 17691889 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Nonsense. Evolutionary Theory falsification criteria are *not* published.
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