Teaching of Evolution

There are still places in the country that ban this. Cobb County in Georgia has made it so creation is taught, not evolution. In fact, in the biology books given to the students there is a WARNING: Evolution is just a THEORY and should be critically considered. Right, and creation is a hard science. Dwayne, a major creationism supporter has tried in Kansas, Iowa, and Mississippi to get evolution banned. But when he failed there, he moved on to Georgia, and won! Yes Evolution is a theory, but do people know what theory is? NO! Theory to most people mean guess, when it doesn't, it means a idea. Also, a Scientific Theory, like Evolution, would mean an idea with scienetific facts or experiments supporting a certain idea.

Earth going around the sun is a Theory. Earth being round is a Theroy. Both are correct, and by definition are Theories! The creation being TAUGHT BY TEACHERS IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL is that Earth is 6,000 years old, created in six days, and that NOAH and his Ark happened. How else do you explain the Grand Canyon? Yes, Dwayne beleives the Grand Canyon and any other "hole in the ground" as he calls it was created by a mass flood, not by millions of years of erosion. This is being taught in a public school in Georgia. Not a private school, but a public school!

I know it is against the law, but the local church and it's members decided that creation had to be taught in school. Yes, they voted democratically to teach creation. Well, how about I vote on the sex of say, Shadow? I know he is a male, but if 50 people vote female, then democratically Shadow is female. But in reality, it doesn't matter what you vote, Shadow is male and no amount of voting or faith will change that. Science can change that, but don't think he is going to do that.

Anyways, that is all, goodbye!

But there is one thing that is totally IGNORED when discussing evolution. That is that it IS NOT proven.It is taught as FACT , solid truth and taken as science but it is not proven! Its is not even true SCIENCE! It is a THEORY, still as of yet UNPROVEN. So what do you call something that is NOT PROVEN that you believe ?? Is that not RELIGION?? Is evolution not just the religion of humanism?? There is no God...we all evolved from omeba millions of years ago even though we are yet to see any mammal change from one mammal to another, and the laws of thermal dynamics make this impossible etc. Actually true SCIENCE disproves evolution more than any belief in God

Originally posted by TruthStrgnrThanFiction
...even though we are yet to see any mammal change from one mammal to another, and the laws of thermal dynamics make this impossible etc.

I found this article that directly addresses your arguments regarding these two points.

I am genuinely curious about your take on the authors statements and hope that you will post a rebuttal argument to them here.

i can understanding people have doubts in evolution, but blindly believe in creationlism is just plain wrong. we have solid hard evidence that date archeology find to way more then 6,000 years. then people would argue that carbon dating is wrong, but heres my question to them, can every test be wrong!? what about the ancient civilization that pre-date written record by a few thousand years? for me, i do believe in creationlism, but definitly not 6,000 years, try billions of years.

Hmm
Funny that
my philosophy teacher who is very heavily Christian, and also a physict, tells me, no matter how much he disbelieves evolution, it is a self-evident truth.
Evolution is as proven as pretty much any other theory.
We have seen plenty of mammal change. Rats in New York have evolved to 30% larger than normal rats, as part of the process of natural selection.
I do not see how the laws of themal dynamics have anything to do with this in any sense?
I am trying to find this certain speices of bird, which people have seen evolve over it's journey around Britian -> America -> Britian to such a degree that once the 'flock' has made the journey it will be unable to breed with the original flock.. I cant rememebr what it is though, so still looking.

Evolution is a very logical and self-evident process. It's just that people were so god-fearing they chose to ignore the obvious

I just want to produce this view;
Evolution is God's Mechanism FOR creation.

I agree with Browha. I think that someday evolution will be proven, and when it is, the Church will accept it like it has always been true (still having Evolution being God's doing, of course).

The same thing has happened throughout history. The world being round(i think this is one), the worl revolving around the sun, as are many other well accepted ideas. The church said it was proven in the bible those scientist were wrong. However, now that it is proven, it is a well accepted fact it is true, and i think this will just be a repeat of history.

---pineapple

All we're hearing is the death rattle of creationism. It took centuries for the church to climb down from it's ridiculous assertion that the Earth was the centre of the universe - this desperate, fanatical denial of evidence is merely the last gasp of the ignorant.

Go rationality!

Originally posted by browha
I do not see how the laws of themal dynamics have anything to do with this in any sense?

Neither do I. Which is why I asked TSTF to look at a evolutionist's rebuttal to the creationists argument regarding thermal dynamic.

From the article:

"Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics."

This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.

However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?

The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws.

Do you not realize that the Church is always wrong?
It is based upon a doctrine created four thousand years ago using a feeble, and frankly, outdated and unscientific method to explain our universe. The thought that God even gives a damn about us will very soon be outdated with the proof of existance of perhaps significantly more intelligent life forms than ourselves in neighbouring stars. Yet, very few people seem to be able to come to terms with the fact that we are but just another little molecule of SiO2 on a very large beach. Human existance will perhaps last for a million years, with a stroke of luck, and that is nothing in the grand scheme of things. The age of our planet is 6 billion years, we have existed (in a civilized sense), for.. 1.66 x 10 ^ -3 percent of our Earth's life span.
The universe is 12 billion years old, according to some people's guesses, therefore we have only been alive for 8.33 x 10 ^ -5 percent of it.
If you compare this to 24 hours, that is 0.002 of a day, or 7.2 seconds. We are nothing.

Hinduism in fact ( the fondation for many eastern doctrines ), can date the creation of Bhrama ( the creator ) at about 8.6 billion years, if memory serves me right. The actual age of the Universe according to Hinduism, this is going to be a totaly vauge guess, around 17, 005, 050, 050 years old. I remember the number looking something like that !!!!!! lol

I dont understand why Christians still hold thier beliefs so stern after being ridiculed for ages...


Hinduism in fact ( the fondation for many eastern doctrines ), can date the creation of Bhrama ( the creator ) at about 8.6 billion years, if memory serves me right.


Dr. Sagan said, "As far as I know, India is the only ancient religious tradition on the Earth which talks about the right time scale. In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that it is billions of years is mind-reeling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about billions of years."

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still."

There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who, after a Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream.

Carl Sagan further says: " The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed."

These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas."


Deep

Originally posted by browha
Hmm
Funny that
my philosophy teacher who is very heavily Christian, and also a physict, tells me, no matter how much he disbelieves evolution, it is a self-evident truth.
Evolution is as proven as pretty much any other theory.
We have seen plenty of mammal change. Rats in New York have evolved to 30% larger than normal rats, as part of the process of natural selection.
I do not see how the laws of themal dynamics have anything to do with this in any sense?
I am trying to find this certain speices of bird, which people have seen evolve over it's journey around Britian -> America -> Britian to such a degree that once the 'flock' has made the journey it will be unable to breed with the original flock.. I cant rememebr what it is though, so still looking.

Evolution is a very logical and self-evident process. It's just that people were so god-fearing they chose to ignore the obvious

I'm sorry, but evolution has not been proven and will NEVER be TRUE science no matter how many people want to think it is science. Do you know what science is? In order for something or a field of study to become science, one must be able to experiment with it in controlled lab environments. If one cannot run tests and experiments and simulate the subject in question, then, by definition, it doesn't fall into the realm of science. The problem with the theory of evolution is the fact that it needs millions upon millions of years to work. Therefore, no one can confine something of evolution to a lab and simulate it to obtain data and to isolate variables and come to conclusions. Sorry, evolution is not science. It is closer to religion than anything else. Therefore, since it's being taught in our schools as fact, it's a big problem, and it's irresponsible education. It's deceiving when we have never proved evolution to actually exist, yet we teach it as absolute fact. There's no, "by the way children, what we are learning about this week is only theory, so keep that in mind when we go through this.....", but it's more like, "this is the way it is." I'm sorry, but that's VERY irresponsible.

Also, rats getting larger does not prove anything in consideration to evolution. So what? Natural selection is responsible. Evolution needs to have new species coming from previous ones, and older species eventually changing and maybe branching off into newer types and so on. We see variety in animals all over the place, true, but only variety WITHIN the species. There is NO hard evidence of a horse and dog being related, or an octopus and a turtle or anything of that sort. Instead, variety in species may occur due to let's say if a certain bird happens to be born with an anomalous color on the wing that helps it blend in to the surroundings better, and therefore can catch it's prey more often. Well, it will probably be the one to survive to pass down it's genes to make more birds with this new mark on it. This is why Darwin noticed all the different types of finches, but they were ALL finches, weren't they?

But why doesn't this same principle work in terms of more dramatic change, like a species transforming into a new? Well aside from the fact that we lack any evidence for it, I'm going to address the argument that has to do with how the eye was first formed. First of all, the eye (not just human eye, but in general) is one of the most complex organs, if not THE most complex in biology. THere's the eye itself, but then there's all the complex system behind the eye, like the part that connects to the brain, and the part where the image reflects on behind the eye and all that stuff. (Sorry, I don't have the technical names, but you probably understand what I'm getting at) Ok, now just keep that in mind while I move on. For evolution to work, it calls for a species to change slowly over time due to random changes in an animal's biology due to a mutation of some sort, that happen to benefit that animal to a degree that it enhances it's survivablilty in its environment. This enhancement gives it an edge over the rest of its kind, so that, it has a higher chance of living until reproduction age, and then does so, making a new generation of offspring with the same benefit. Then in the long run, this new type will eventually take over because the old will just eventually be filtered out. Kind of like I described above with the birds. Ok, fine so far. So, in short, a bunch of small changes over time like this will eventually see the species in question become very different from its original state. But here is where this system fails. If you want to try and explain how the first eyes came about, this small incremental change pattern can't account for it. Why? Because, for the eye to actually work, all three or four complex parts of the whole sight system have to be present.

So let's trace back all the way, millions of years ago, as evolution likes to do, to a time when life was starting. According to theory of evolution life began with simple cells, and went from there. So fast forward millions and now we have simple organisms like ameobas, worms, jellyfish type things, etc. Now let's just jump to the point where we think life first obtained sight. (The actual organism and specific time isn't important.) Let's say it was a spongy worm type creature that, through mutation first evolved eyes. Well, in order for this to happen, this creature would have had to given birth to an offspring that all the sudden had eyes, BAM, just like that and out of the blue! It has all the components working in harmony and just had these sudden eyes and now it can see. Why couldn't it have been a gradual change as evolution claims? Because if this new offspring was, instead born with just one component of the eye, (let's say the lense, but you could pick any you want) randomly from mutation, guess what? This lense by itself is obsolete and would do crap for this wormy thing. Therefore, its survivability would not be improved, therefore it wouldn't become the new standard of its kind to give way to more mutations and change.

So my point is, is that the first eye could not have come into being through small little parts, simply because for any benefit to exist, the whole system woiuld have to be all the sudden present and functioning. And remember, evolution calls for minute changes over vast time, and each change is beneficial, which is why those new animals survive more to replace the older. And so, a mutation that causes sight would have to be immediate and all at once, which is in direct contradiction to evolution.

This is only one argument out of many good ones. I can give more if you want. I hope I stated it clearly. I realize that I could have made it confusing. Bottom line, is that arguments like these discredit evolution, plus we don't have any evidence of interspecies transformation, plus the fact that we cannot simulate evolution in controlled environments for tests makes this a study that IS NOT SCIENCE. And therefore James, you're argument and complaint about creationism being taught instead is now picked apart because evolution is just as non scientific as creation. Two theological views my friend.

Plus when I walk down the street, I'm sorry, but I don't look at an ant and see my long lost relative, or observe a wilted plant and get sad because I'm related to it. It's really ridiculous. What really gets me, is critics of the bible always are like, "you mean we all came from two people? HA! Yeah right!" Yeah, well look at your own little belief. "You mean we, and every bug, fungus, animal, and plant came from one or a couple of spontaneous cells?!" I know which one makes more sense to me.

Here's an easy way to think of what evolution claims:

From the goo, to me and you, by way of the zoo!

Actually, if you read Richard Dorkin's the Blind Watchmaker (I havent read it myself, but I have been told), he makes very convincing arguments for evolution of the eye.
The eye doesnt have to be as we consider it... The first organism may have had a little light-sensitive patch, (e.g. close your eyelids and you will be able to tell when you are looking at a light source or not), to shy away or not from the sun. Plants have it at the moment (heliotropism).
Eventually it develops colour-sensitive parts, or focusing abilities, and slowly it produces what we have now.
Evolution has actually been practicsed in laboratories... Look at bacteria that are now resistant to whatever drugs we administer them, they are basically a new speices upon themselves.. Or the common cold, that is continually mutating and evolving to such a degree that it is not even comparable with the original.
We share something like 80% of our DNA with a horse, infact.

You ridicule the theory of evolution with your last line,

Plus when I walk down the street, I'm sorry, but I don't look at an ant and see my long lost relative, or observe a wilted plant and get sad because I'm related to it. It's really ridiculous. What really gets me, is critics of the bible always are like, "you mean we all came from two people? HA! Yeah right!" Yeah, well look at your own little belief. "You mean we, and every bug, fungus, animal, and plant came from one or a couple of spontaneous cells?!" I know which one makes more sense to me.

here, apply Ockham's Razor..
You want me to look at them and think 'An infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent being who we have never had any direct experience of, and no reason to presuppose exists, created these out of his own will'?

I live in GA, and the chapter on evolution is by pass in schools, bringing me to remind you how the church is involved on what our children learn in school, people beware.

I always tell my children that they need to approach everything around them with open mind and to learn to make their own conclusions listening to both side, (I always tell them that just because somebody believe in something they do not have to agree with it, even me) without anybody influencing them, but how can you do that when everything around you is bias and control?

Which ever theory you choose to believe in - evolution or creation or alien transplant, whatever - they are all just theories and until scientifically proven should not be tought in school unless they are presented as just that - theories. In fact, teaching evolution as a "theory" and not a fact would actually serve to encourage students to think and investigate and maybe one day prove it or come up with a new theory. But the bottom line is schools should stick to teaching facts, not deceiving children into believing a theory just because it is the only one they can come up with at the time.

By the way - rats getting bigger is a result of adaptation not evolution. Now if rats grew antennas or wings that might serve as evidence of evolution.

Even a light sensitive patch would be very complex to all the sudden just appear in one generation. Just think about it. The patch would have to be present, plus the connection to the brain, plus the brain all the sudden would have to interpret light, where before, it never did, or didn't have any parts devoted to dealing with light on the simplest scale. Plus, again, there is no evidence of what you described. These are just people saying, "this could've happened this way" or " i bet this was possible." Coming up with ideas of what may have happened isn't science. Very nice for people to exercise their imaginations though. But you can't deny that evolution can't fall in the science category for reasons I stated above. I'd be interested in hearing you argue how it could. I dare you actually.

Sure viruses change rapidly, but are you actually claiming that they have crossed into a completely new species? Hmm? Are viruses even comparable to other life anyway? It's not universally accepted whether viruses are even life.

Horses share 80% of the same DNA as us. So what? Well, they have blood, many of the same types of organs, are mammals and so do share characteristics with us. So, to you, we are blood and generationally related? Very interesting, especially since the human genome project isn't even done mapping out all our DNA. Where do you get your facts? Do we even have horses DNA all the way mapped out yet?

By the way. Many people have experienced God including me. All of creation is evidence of a creator. You're living in it.

We have all the reason to presuppose God exists. From a spiritual, historical, logical, and scientific standpoint. Not to mention personal.

Originally posted by badkitty
Which ever theory you choose to believe in - evolution or creation or alien transplant, whatever - they are all just theories and until scientifically proven should not be tought in school unless they are presented as just that - theories. In fact, teaching evolution as a "theory" and not a fact would actually serve to encourage students to think and investigate and maybe one day prove it or come up with a new theory. But the bottom line is schools should stick to teaching facts, not deceiving children into believing a theory just because it is the only one they can come up with at the time.

By the way - rats getting bigger is a result of adaptation not evolution. Now if rats grew antennas or wings that might serve as evidence of evolution.

BadKitty, very good points. I was going to stress that first point, but never really did. Thanks for clarifying on the difference between adaptation and evolution.

Originally posted by SimpleTruth
I'm sorry, but evolution has not been proven and will NEVER be TRUE science no matter how many people want to think it is science. Do you know what science is? In order for something or a field of study to become science, one must be able to experiment with it in controlled lab environments.

Let me introduce you to my academic field: anthropology.

If one cannot run tests and experiments and simulate the subject in question, then, by definition, it doesn't fall into the realm of science.

So you're going to start calling psychology, sociology, anthropology non-sciences? This will surprise all of the scientists in these fields.

The problem with the theory of evolution is the fact that it neds millions upon millions of years to work. Therefore, no one can confine something of evolution to a lab and simulate it to obtain data and to isolate variables and come to conclusions.

You haven't read any of the links provided you? We have seen it in action. In fact, Creationists like Kent Hovind (who seems to be your source, though I could be wrong) have now had to reluctantly agree that "micro-evolution" is real. They pretend that this doesn't verify evolution... only microevolution.

Evolution is evolution.

But why doesn't this same principle work in terms of more dramatic change, like a species transforming into a new?

Would you know the difference between two species? The Siberian tiger and the Bengal tiger are two different species -- do you know the difference between them? The differences in species often are not that apparent to people who don't study them.

Do you know the difference?

[/quote[I'm going to address the argument that has to do with how the eye was first formed... (snippage) ... If you want to try and explain how the first eyes came about, this small incremental change pattern can't account for it. Why? Because, for the eye to actually work, all three or four complex parts of the whole sight system have to be present.
Hovind and others (who aren't biologists) have used this argument. They quickly ignore the number of different types of eyes (from light-sensing patches to the human eye) and how they work and how they are alike and how they are different.

So my point is, is that the first eye could not have come into being through small little parts, simply because for any benefit to exist, the whole system woiuld have to be all the sudden present and functioning.

Really, Hovind shows his unfamiliarity with comparative anatomy and vertebrate and nonvertebrate anatomy. You don't need to develop the whole eye all of a sudden. We see a nice spectrum of eyes; each changed and altered in significant ways.

This is only one argument out of many good ones.

I think you'll find that most of the folks here are familiar with www.talkoOrigins.org...

...plus we don't have any evidence of interspecies transformation[/qupte]
Sure we do. See the other messages.

plus the fact that we cannot simulate evolution in controlled environments

We are constantly creating new species and for years we have bred new species. Most of your food has been bred from older strains into new species.

What really gets me, is critics of the bible always are like, "you mean we all came from two people? HA! Yeah right!"

Actually, we do believe that there was a first creature that was clearly identified as homo sapiens. We just don't believe it suddenly emerged from dust.

Originally posted by browha
here, apply Ockham's Razor..
You want me to look at them and think 'An infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent being who we have never had any direct experience of, and no reason to presuppose exists, created these out of his own will'?

Before you apply Ockham's razor perhaps you should consider exactly what you are applying.

Ockham's Razor:

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
or
Plurality should not be posited without necessity

Usually stated as:
Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.

Now to apply Ockham's Razor to the question "Where did we come from?":

Creationist: God was here. He created everything.

This covers everything. The creation of the universe, the earth, the sun, the animals, and humans.

Now I ask you, is any scientific explaination simpler?

If not, then Ockham's Razor would not support the scientific theory.

Catholic religion is simply a door to knowledge, but they don't have a key to open it... Sorry for those who believe (I don't intend to be rude, whatsoever, and I respect people's opinions) but to me it is simply evident that no god exist, has never existed, and never will.

The gods were only necessary to people at a time when they couldn't understand most of things, and had to give them source. That source was a god. All the way through history, and all over the earth.

About catholicism, I must laugh. It is the world's biggest fraud. Those who were promoting a vow of poverty were the ones who had all the money. The people were so scared to sin that they were slaves to the church. The priests and other religious were the true masters of everything. They killed in the name of god, they refused evolutions, they name heretics those who didn't believe, they wanted wars and slaughter for purely spiritual reasons. This is the most incredible intolerance, and in the name of god!! God is supposed to be good... Look at that mess he's doing now then?!?

No. I don't buy any religion. Not a single part of any of them. I am absolutely amazed at how America (and others also, but...), supposed to be the land of freedoms is still screwed by religion...

Slightly off topic, the muslim religion is also a real threat. Not as such, but the way it is interpreted by numerous fanatics...