Houston charter schools use existence of Loch Ness Monster to disprove evolutionary theory

reply to post by bozzchem

Just because something is too complex for some people to understand does not mean God exists.

Transition fossils have been found but since I don't write down everything I read with references in case nonsense like your comes up I cannot post the info/link here....yet. I will hunt for it for the next time since it seems this nonsense keeps cropping up.

Not that it would matter anyway. Any transition fossil would be ignored by yourself with some fanciful alternate explanation as cognitive dissonance kicks (especially strong when God has made an appearance). After all , by definition, a transition fossil has characteristics that are different from the earlier and later fossils. My guess is you would argue it's a different distinct animal.......probably already have !

reply to post by tothetenthpower


I have to admit that survival of the fittest, Hitler's ideas and Evolution DO have some similarities. They are 100% spot on about that. Should they use that to demonize evolution? Probably not because although they do have some similarities they are playing fast and loose with the proper context.

Of course Nessie is not real nor ever proven to be more than a hoax. They did make a bad analogy on this.

The textbook writing was overseen by a religious fellow who allowed a Christian slant. This may not be the best textbook material but if the teacher wants to teach kids about God on my tax dime, i have no problem with it at all - kids need to learn about god just as they need to learn about science.

It's 100% fair because belief in God is only a theory as is belief in evolution ( as pertaining to Humans) is also only a theory. You will never be able to prove either of them so teach kids both and give them a choice of what they wish to believe.

tothetenthpower

ownbestenemy
reply to post by tothetenthpower

 

To get a starting point here with this discussion I have to ask: do you live in Texas and does your child go to a charter school? The answer to these will greatly dictate how I approach your view on this.

No, my opinion isn't any less valid if I'm not from Texas, or if my children don't go to that school.

Teaching children that Nessie is proof of intelligent design, or that evolution is rooted in Nazi social engineering theory is tantamount to intellectual child abuse.

IMO of course.

~Tenth

So, sorry to play Devil's Advocate....

But, while I *personally* agree with you, unless I am mistaken, the money that comes to the charter school is from the state. The state is largely determined (ahem, supposedly) by the will of the people as to what it funds, etc. Now, BEFORE ANYONE ATTACKS ME...I have not studied up on this, so I may very well be WRONG...I'm cool with that.

I *personally* believe that if you so desire to teach your children that Ronald McDonald lays big fat golden eggs of Euclid's Theorems and if you eat them you become like Euclid...well, guess what, I feel that you as a the single largest moron on the face of this planet have the right to do so.

I also believe, that if you are NOT the ONLY frakking moron who believes such an outright ludicrous belief such as this, and you happen to congregate with other like minded morons (conveniently close enough for a drone strike...oh, wouldn't that be nice ? , you and your like minded morons should be able to enact local laws and such that reflect your communal beliefs.

Just as much as I have the right to do as I personally see fit, and should others agree with me (sometimes I wonder if anyone actually agrees with me) and decided to congregate, we should be allowed to form our laws and codes based off of our communal ideas and beliefs.

Now, my feelings aside. If this money is indeed coming from the state, then I think it is a local issue, and is one to be decided on by the local constituents. If I am wrong on this, then everything I'm saying about the money aspect of this goes STRAIGHT out the window

I happen to live in Houston (oh dear lord, shoot me now), and I looked this accursed school up.

ischoolhigh.com...

What disturbed me the most about this website, was the fact that I scanned it fairly thoroughly. And scanned suggests I didn't really read, but I did actually read the information I found there. At no point and time do they go so far as to state that they were a "Christian" ideal based school. At best, I see this as being a bait and switch scenario. They even purport to be a "scientific" school. Their logo has "iSchool" surrounded by the orbital paths of electrons as if it were a Bohr model of an atom. They talk about "science" and "science projects" and on the same breath talk about allowing kids to "Fashion" their own path which apparently leads to some sort of degree in fashion. Wow. What a mixed bag.

If you're going to offer a religious bent to a school, fine, I'm ok with that. Obviously, some folks want this for their children. But, be PERFECTLY upfront and honest about what you're doing. Make it CLEAR what you are offering.

I definitely get what you are saying about parents' rights to teach their own personal beliefs to their children. After all, that is how most people come by their religious beliefs, cultural beliefs, and even superstitions in some cases. Regardless of what happens in a school setting, this is going to happen at home anyway.

But where do the child's rights come into play? Not being antagonistic here, just honestly wondering how the two could be balanced so that the kids don't get screwed out of basic knowledge.

reply to post by tothetenthpower


Why didn't they used the peacock to disprove the evolutionary principle? Darwin himself had a hard time explaining how come peacocks existed even though they had a flashy tail, and that's why he introduced a refinement to his theories.

Why did they used the bloody Loch Ness monster?!

katydidwonder
I definitely get what you are saying about parents rights to teach their own personal beliefs to their children. After all, that is how most people come by their religious beliefs, cultural beliefs, and even superstitions in some cases. Regardless of what happens in a school setting, this is going to happen at home anyway.

But where do the child's rights come into play? Not being antagonistic here, just honestly wondering how the two could be balanced so that the kids don't get screwed out of basic knowledge.

That is indeed a sticky issue.

I was raised that you don't stick your nose into another family's business, with the caveat of only if you know a child is being harmed.

Now, I know your immediate thought is "But isn't the child being harmed?", right ?

Well, the way I see it, people have been fed false information throughout the history of the world. Sometimes by the governments. Sometimes companies. Sometimes religions. Sometimes about family histories. It happens.

Once we become adult, we get the opportunity to think for ourselves, really, explore and evaluate. I've seen it in action before.

In the meanwhile, let's teach our kids right

reply to post by JohnPhoenix


You are right in saying that it is 100% true that God is a theory but evolution has evidence...tons of it all peer reviewed, still many bugs to iron but all the evidence points to it being true.

Also you are wrong religion and god should be kept out of the classroom...If you want to brainwash a child do it in church or your home NOT a public school.
I don't mind RE in schools to give a brief outline about ALL religions but to just pick one is wrong.

This is speculation, but, were a family, or commune of people to turn appreciation of old historical Sparta into a religion, or just a modernized revisioning and revival of that way of life, and start putting their children through the agoge, even if the Agoge were updated with observation of cutting edge modern standards of sports medicine, fitness, diet, psychology, teaching, and other such, many of the same homeschooling their children under other more contemporary mythologies would come unglued in protest.

In a way, I'm just a little bit surprised no one (to my knowledge) has attempted revival of that culture.

On a personal note, such statement in no way is an endorsement for putting children through such brutal physical rigors in goal of creating a society of the world's most (historically) effective warriors.

The point of the matter is these sorts think it's okay to abuse their children with neglectful education in taking advantage of political tolerance for their mythological belief, but, if anyone else were to start practicing something different ... oh, no.

tothetenthpower
No, my opinion isn't any less valid if I'm not from Texas, or if my children don't go to that school.

I never implied that it is any less; where do you get that from? I was finding the ground in which we can discuss this. If you were in the State of Texas, the conversation will go differently; but apparently you think I am saying your opinion doesn't matter? By merely asking if you lived there?! And ATS applauds that?!

Teaching children that Nessie is proof of intelligent design, or that evolution is rooted in Nazi social engineering theory is tantamount to intellectual child abuse.

"Intellectual child abuse" is highly subjective.

tothetenthpower
The problem really is that chartered schools still receive public funds as well as the private funds from parents.

So, if you're American, living in Texas, you are paying for other people's kids to believe that Nessy is real and proof that God exists.

~Tenth

And you have made the point that we should have the Government providing education as they will push the ideas they want; regardless of what the People of a certain region want.

ownbestenemy

tothetenthpower
The problem really is that chartered schools still receive public funds as well as the private funds from parents.

So, if you're American, living in Texas, you are paying for other people's kids to believe that Nessy is real and proof that God exists.

~Tenth

And you have made the point that we should have the Government providing education as they will push the ideas they want; regardless of what the People of a certain region want.

Sounds like how slavery was spun as a states rights issue.

bozzchem
Has ONE single transitional fossil been discovered and verified as accurate? (A fossil in transition of becoming a new species). The answer is NOPE.

There are many transitional fossils. The only way that the claim of their absence may be remotely justified, aside from ignoring the evidence completely, is to redefine "transitional" as referring to a fossil that is a direct ancestor of one organism and a direct descendant of another. However, direct lineages are not required; they could not be verified even if found. What a transitional fossil is, in keeping with what the theory of evolution predicts, is a fossil that shows a mosaic of features from an older and more recent organism.


2. Transitional fossils may coexist with gaps. We do not expect to find finely detailed sequences of fossils lasting for millions of years. Nevertheless, we do find several fine gradations of fossils between species and genera, and we find many other sequences between higher taxa that are still very well filled out.

The following are fossil transitions between species and genera:

a.Human ancestry. There are many fossils of human ancestors, and the differences between species are so gradual that it is not always clear where to draw the lines between them.


b. The horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) appear in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence. Other head and neck features also evolved. These features are adaptations for head-on ramming analogous to sheep behavior (Stanley 1974).


c. A gradual transitional fossil sequence connects the foraminifera Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (Pearson et al. 1997). O. universa, the later fossil, features a spherical test surrounding a "Globigerinoides-like" shell, showing that a feature was added, not lost. The evidence is seen in all major tropical ocean basins. Several intermediate morphospecies connect the two species, as may be seen in the figure included in Lindsay (1997).


d. The fossil record shows transitions between species of Phacops (a trilobite; Phacops rana is the Pennsylvania state fossil; Eldredge 1972; 1974; Strapple 1978).


e. Planktonic forminifera (Malmgren et al. 1984). This is an example of punctuated gradualism. A ten-million-year foraminifera fossil record shows long periods of stasis and other periods of relatively rapid but still gradual morphologic change.


f. Fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia are very common (they are mined as diatomaceous earth), and they show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a record of a speciation event (Miller 1999, 44-45).


g. Lake Turkana mollusc species (Lewin 1981).


h. Cenozoic marine ostracodes (Cronin 1985).


i. The Eocene primate genus Cantius (Gingerich 1976, 1980, 1983).


j. Scallops of the genus Chesapecten show gradual change in one "ear" of their hinge over about 13 million years. The ribs also change (Pojeta and Springer 2001; Ward and Blackwelder 1975).


k.Gryphaea (coiled oysters) become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic (Hallam 1968).

The following are fossil transitionals between families, orders, and classes:

a. Human ancestry. Australopithecus, though its leg and pelvis bones show it walked upright, had a bony ridge on the forearm, probably vestigial, indicative of knuckle walking (Richmond and Strait 2000).


b.Dinosaur-bird transitions.


c.Haasiophis terrasanctus is a primitive marine snake with well-developed hind limbs. Although other limbless snakes might be more ancestral, this fossil shows a relationship of snakes with limbed ancestors (Tchernov et al. 2000). Pachyrhachis is another snake with legs that is related to Haasiophis (Caldwell and Lee 1997).


d. The jaws of mososaurs are also intermediate between snakes and lizards. Like the snake's stretchable jaws, they have highly flexible lower jaws, but unlike snakes, they do not have highly flexible upper jaws. Some other skull features of mososaurs are intermediate between snakes and primitive lizards (Caldwell and Lee 1997; Lee et al. 1999; Tchernov et al. 2000).


e.Transitions between mesonychids and whales.


f.Transitions between fish and tetrapods.


g. Transitions from condylarths (a kind of land mammal) to fully aquatic modern manatees. In particular, Pezosiren portelli is clearly a sirenian, but its hind limbs and pelvis are unreduced (Domning 2001a, 2001b).


h.Runcaria, a Middle Devonian plant, was a precursor to seed plants. It had all the qualities of seeds except a solid seed coat and a system to guide pollen to the seed (Gerrienne et al. 2004).


i. A bee, Melittosphex burmensis, from Early Cretaceous amber, has primitive characteristics expected from a transition between crabronid wasps and extant bees (Poinar and Danforth 2006).

The following are fossil transitionals between kingdoms and phyla:

a. The Cambrian fossils Halkiera and Wiwaxia have features that connect them with each other and with the modern phyla of Mollusca, Brachiopoda, and Annelida. In particular, one species of halkieriid has brachiopod-like shells on the dorsal side at each end. This is seen also in an immature stage of the living brachiopod species Neocrania. It has setae identical in structure to polychaetes, a group of annelids. Wiwaxia and Halkiera have the same basic arrangement of hollow sclerites, an arrangement that is similar to the chaetae arrangement of polychaetes. The undersurface of Wiwaxia has a soft sole like a mollusk's foot, and its jaw looks like a mollusk's mouth. Aplacophorans, which are a group of primitive mollusks, have a soft body covered with spicules similar to the sclerites of Wiwaxia (Conway Morris 1998, 185-195).


b. Cambrian and Precambrain fossils Anomalocaris and Opabinia are transitional between arthropods and lobopods.


c. An ancestral echinoderm has been found that is intermediate between modern echinoderms and other deuterostomes (Shu et al. 2004).



citations-
Hunt, Kathleen. 1994-1997. Transitional vertebrate fossils FAQ. www.talkorigins.org...

Miller, Keith B. n.d. Taxonomy, transitional forms, and the fossil record. www.asa3.org...

Patterson, Bob. 2002. Transitional fossil species and modes of speciation. www.origins.tv...

Thompson, Tim. 1999. On creation science and transitional fossils. www.tim-thompson.com...
References:

1. Caldwell, M. W. and M. S. Y. Lee, 1997. A snake with legs from the marine Cretaceous of the Middle East. Nature 386: 705-709.
2. Conway Morris, Simon, 1998. The Crucible of Creation, Oxford University Press.
3. Cronin, T. M., 1985. Speciation and stasis in marine ostracoda: climatic modulation of evolution. Science 227: 60-63.
4. Domning, Daryl P., 2001a. The earliest known fully quadupedal sirenian. Nature 413: 625-627.
5. Domning, Daryl P., 2001b. New "intermediate form" ties seacows firmly to land. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 21(5-6): 38-42.
6. Eldredge, Niles, 1972. Systematics and evolution of Phacops rana (Green, 1832) and Phacops iowensis Delo, 1935 (Trilobita) from the Middle Devonian of North America. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 147(2): 45-114.
7. Eldredge, Niles, 1974. Stability, diversity, and speciation in Paleozoic epeiric seas. Journal of Paleontology 48(3): 540-548.
8. Gerrienne, P. et al. 2004. Runcaria, a Middle Devonian seed plant precursor. Science 306: 856-858.
9. Gingerich, P. D., 1976. Paleontology and phylogeny: Patterns of evolution of the species level in early Tertiary mammals. American Journal of Science 276(1): 1-28.
10. Gingerich, P. D., 1980. Evolutionary patterns in early Cenozoic mammals. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 8: 407-424.
11. Gingerich, P. D., 1983. Evidence for evolution from the vertebrate fossil record. Journal of Geological Education 31: 140-144.
12. Hallam, A., 1968. Morphology, palaeoecology and evolution of the genus Gryphaea in the British Lias. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 254: 91-128.
13. Lee, Michael S. Y., Gorden L. Bell Jr. and Michael W. Caldwell, 1999. The origin of snake feeding. Nature 400: 655-659.
14. Lewin, R., 1981. No gap here in the fossil record. Science 214: 645-646.
15. Lindsay, Don, 1997. A smooth fossil transition: Orbulina, a foram. www.don-lindsay-archive.org...
16. Malmgren, B. A., W. A. Berggren and G. P. Lohmann, 1984. Species formation through punctuated gradualism in planktonic foraminifera. Science 225: 317-319.
17. Miller, Kenneth R., 1999. Finding Darwin's God. New York: HarperCollins.
18. Pearson, P. N., N. J. Shackleton and M. A. Hall. 1997. Stable isotopic evidence for the sympatric divergence of Globigerinoides trilobus and Orbulina universa (planktonic foraminifera). Journal of the Geological Society, London 154: 295-302.
19. Poinar, G. O. Jr. and B. N. Danforth. 2006. A fossil bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese amber. Science 314: 614.
20. Richmond B. G. and D. S. Strait, 2000. Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. Nature 404: 382-385. See also Collard, M. and L. C. Aiello, 2000. From forelimbs to two legs. Nature 404: 339-340.
21. Shu, D.-G. et al., 2004. Ancestral echinoderms from the Chengjiang deposits of China. Nature 430: 422-428.
22. Stanley, Steven M., 1974. Relative growth of the titanothere horn: A new approach to an old problem. Evolution 28: 447-457.
23. Strapple, R. R., 1978. Tracing three trilobites. Earth Science 31(4): 149-152.
24. Tchernov, E. et al., 2000. A fossil snake with limbs. Science 287: 2010-2012. See also Greene, H. W. and D. Cundall, 2000. Limbless tetrapods and snakes with legs. Science 287: 1939-1941.
25. Ward, L. W. and B. W. Blackwelder, 1975. Chesapecten, A new genus of Pectinidae (Mollusca: Bivalvia) from the Miocene and Pliocene of eastern North America. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 861

reply to post by ownbestenemy

I never implied that it is any less; where do you get that from? I was finding the ground in which we can discuss this. If you were in the State of Texas, the conversation will go differently; but apparently you think I am saying your opinion doesn't matter? By merely asking if you lived there?! And ATS applauds that?!

Forgive me, I jumped to conclusions.

"Intellectual child abuse" is highly subjective.

But how does it compare I wonder? Is teaching children that the earth is a certain way, based on a 3000 year old religious theory as valid? What I mean to say is, evolution and 'science' as they would put this, is a set of theories yes, based on our scientific knowledge as of right now.

I find it far more damaging that they are being taught to disregard modern scientific theory, in favor of something that they cannot explain.

I think Neil Degrass Tyson said it best but I can't find the exact quote, so here's one from Steven Jay Gould:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven

I can't fathom why scientific ignorance is so embraced within the religious community. I don't mean ignorance in an insulting way either, because they've chosen to not educate themselves on these things.

They already have the answers. This is one of my major problems with mixing religion in school. It stiffles scientific progress, because there's no need to know more about how the things work or where they came from.

~Tenth

Using its fins to walk, rather than swim, along the ocean floor in an undated picture, the pink handfish is one of nine newly named species described in a recent scientific review of the handfish family.

Link

Walking fish ?!

Blasphemy !!

reply to post by CranialSponge


As an ex Fishmonger I would have difficulty filleting that one
Great find btw.

reply to post by bozzchem


8% of the current human genetic make up comes from viral infections, viruses that have attached to our cells and then became part of 'us'.

There's proof of evolution for you right there.