Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin

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Aimless
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09 Mar 2010, 4:33 pm

Lecks wrote:

Aimless wrote:

You'd be surprised. The daughter of a friend of my mother's has a Masters in Geology and she went fundamental. Emotion and reason are two different things. And yes, my mother's friend (who is a regular church goer herself) is mortified.

It's an unfortunate sight, to see bright minds be swept away by emotions down a path of irrationality.

Yeah, she wouldn't let her little girl play with " My Little Pony" because it had a star on it's forehead and was thus "of the Devil". :roll:

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09 Mar 2010, 4:47 pm

Aimless wrote:

Lecks wrote:

Aimless wrote:

It's an unfortunate sight, to see bright minds be swept away by emotions down a path of irrationality.

Yeah, she wouldn't let her little girl play with " My Little Pony" because it had a star on it's forehead and was thus "of the Devil". :roll:

That's the kind of person that makes me sad.

The fundamentalist Christians are often the ones who claim "If you don't believe exactly what I believe and exactly what the Bible literally says word for word, you're not a Christian!" I've been called Unchristian countless times, but I can only remember one time that the person was actually concerned for me and not taking the "I'll get the last laugh attitude."

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09 Mar 2010, 5:27 pm

Aimless wrote:

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

I knew by the age of 6 or 7 that a person would have to be effectively ret*d to believe the bible in a literal way.

My parents believed most of the bible literally. By that age, I figured there was something wrong with them. Maybe not retardation, but something.

There's no way you can convince me that what's written in the bible (much of which defies even the basic laws of physics known to 6 year old me) is not hearsay that's been passed and modified through possibly dozens of listeners and speakers. I don't care that the story is "2,000 years old", or that "billions of people believe it" which are arguments used in the past to justify it to me. It might as well have been written last February and be believed by half a dozen people. It's BS. And for equal opportunity, while I'm at it, so is the Koran, although both have pretty good stories if you regard them as the fiction they are.

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10 Mar 2010, 12:34 am

Aimless wrote:

Lecks wrote:

Aimless wrote:

It's an unfortunate sight, to see bright minds be swept away by emotions down a path of irrationality.

Yeah, she wouldn't let her little girl play with " My Little Pony" because it had a star on it's forehead and was thus "of the Devil". :roll:

I had some 'non religious' home schooler parents get angry at their dear friend who brought their daughter a sweet little rag doll for a birthday present. The parents were appalled that a 'surrogate' child was given to their daughter, that if a child was necessary the girl had her younger sisters, and it was materialistic and 'commercial!'

So I really don't think it has to just be 'religion' for people to get all excited about.

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10 Mar 2010, 4:58 am

ruveyn wrote:

Raptor wrote:

Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin.

A step in the right direction!
:cheers:

The latter day version of Darwinism is well supported by evidence. Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection was melded to modern genetics back in the 30's and 40's. Watson, Crick and Franklin pretty well nailed that down with the discovery of the double helix. Darwin was basically right even though he never did come up with a solid hypothesis to explain how characteristics are inherited.

The fundementalist supposition of a Young Earth is total nonsense.

ruveyn

It's an interesting insight that fundies try to characterise Darwin as some kind of prophet, presenting his unchanging, eternal gospel to the masses - in other words, they try to bring him into their own blinkered worldview, as a prophet of a rival religion which they can ignore in the same way that, for instance, a Christian does not believe that Muhammed had the word of God. Much easier than acknowledging that he was just a man who looked at the world around him and figured out, roughly and imperfectly, how a little bit of it works, and that - if they'd stop to use their supposedly God-given brains for a second instead of blindly following dogma - they could do the same for themselves.

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MyFutureSelfnMe
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10 Mar 2010, 11:55 am

sinsboldly wrote:

I would think if someone is that messed up, you can see it well in advance.

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10 Mar 2010, 11:59 am

Ambivalence wrote:

Yes. This is probably how Darwinism came to be taught "alongside" creationism in some schools in some backward middle American states. It could only have been done by people who can't mentally grasp the difference between science and dogma. Those people have no business being in a position of political power. That they are is the achilles heal of democracy, at least among a relatively uneducated population.

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10 Mar 2010, 5:26 pm

Science and religion should not mix.

But then there's the other side to it. Look in all the other science textbooks taught in school right now. They all say "This is what happened millions (or billions) of years ago." The text says it with absolute certainty, as if the writers were there when it happened. They're stacking the deck against any other ideas. Text books should preface sections dealing with theory as theory, not as "what happened."

PS: I'm staying neutral here. I'm not arguing for the literal interpretation of the bible, or the teaching of religion in school. I'm just arguing a point.

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pat2rome
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10 Mar 2010, 5:50 pm

Moony wrote:

This is a point brought up by creationists often. There is a HUGE difference. The difference: scientists have actually gathered evidence and tested hypotheses and discarded the ones the evidence didn't support. Creationists say "is" without any physical evidence.

Textbooks do treat theory as theory. This is what theory means in a scientific context:

Quote:

Calling the theory of evolution "only a theory" is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can't be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.)

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10 Mar 2010, 5:51 pm

Textbooks do identify theory as theory, as far as I'm aware. If they don't there's a technical issue with the textbook. However I seem to recall long ago and far away, my science textbooks actually used color codes to identify hypotheses, theories, and laws.

Evolution is technically a theory and not a law, but it's damn close to a law.

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10 Mar 2010, 6:06 pm

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

Sadly, in common usage in English, most people use "theory" to mean "a wild guess that I like" (conspiracy theories, for instance, or "theories" about how the Moon landings were faked). So, when someone with a grounding in the sciences uses the word "theory" appropriately, as for instance discussing evolutionary theory, their opponents can seize on that word, dismissing it as "just a theory" and thus of no more value than their own guesswork.

If only there were some way to give everyone a better grounding in how the sciences work, and how our language is supposed to be used...

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10 Mar 2010, 11:31 pm

MyFutureSelfnMe wrote:

Ambivalence wrote:

They have no concept of what a dogma is, either. They just know where they stand in their power structure, they were born into it. If there is another power structure they don't know where they stand. That is too much anxiety for them to bear, hence they resist strenuously.

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11 Mar 2010, 12:10 am

I don't see the problem here, a parent is allowed to teach their child whatever they want. We have standards that must be met by home schooled children in the form of progress testing for various subjects, and so long as the child meets those standards no one has any right to tell a parent what belief system they choose to instill in their child. I intend to at least partially home school any children of my own because I feel that traditional schooling is geared towards teaching children to follow and work for others, while I'd rather imbue my offspring with an entrepreneurial spirit and independent attitude. I also feel that educator bias is a real problem, and I don't want my kid coming home after having their head filled with DARE garbage or any of the other borderline propaganda that is often taught in public schools that I'll then have to reverse. Don't even get me started on some of the things taught in countries outside the US, namely the inform on your neighbor values that seem to be all the rage in the UK.

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11 Mar 2010, 1:35 am

They are both wrong. That is based on a study of history, everybody in the past was wrong, so it is a scientific principal.

Still, that is a basic freedom today.

I know a lot of Geology, and the field is rigged. The two early schools, gradual change, or periods of catastropic change. The issue came up right after the French Revolution, and was settled by The Queen of England, who said only gradual change leading to an ever improving world would be allowed.

Hence Darwin wrote of gradual change over long periods reaching higher states.

The geologic record shows catastropic change. It does not show a gradual anything, species last, then die, then something related develops. It looks like ten survivors bred family traits. Forms stay the same over hundreds of millions of years, no change, then they are gone, and something else comes up, it is the same line, but very different in form.

Gradual change made it needed that billions of years passed, but it could have been a lot less. For one, nothing has been found on the ocean floors that is older than 65,000,000 years. Also, some dinosaurs continued for several hundred thousand years after that. They are found above the KT Boundry.

Even with more recent events, the Mammoth has been killed off 20,000 years ago, except for the ones that were still around 8,000 years ago. Science is just a religion that uses numbers. Science fudges the numbers just as much as religion.

Now Adam had a clone made from his rib, and had sex, produced children who had sex with someone, for the line continued, and that is why all people have identical DNA, because they are all clones and cannot change. As all people come from this creation, the DNA of all people is identical.

Creation was that recent, 4004BC on a Tuesday afternoon. I forget the day and month.

I favor home schooling, self education, and while standard tests have a place, all education should carry the disclaimer, "Everyone in the past thought they were right, we have proven otherwise, and your views are next."

We cannot know, we can only build a thought model in a human brain, science, god, you are guessing.

I have strong doubts about physics. Math, may be the Word of God.

Still, no matter which club you join, we do need jobs, places to meet the other sex, places to get married, buried, and the church suppers put out better food than the universities.

I have my unshakable faith, there is a god who created the universe, and 5,000.000.000 years ago seeded it with DNA, and has not been back since.

Living by logic makes you unpopular every where.

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11 Mar 2010, 6:46 am

Inventor wrote:

They are both wrong. That is based on a study of history, everybody in the past was wrong, so it is a scientific principal.

Still, that is a basic freedom today.

I know a lot of Geology, and the field is rigged. The two early schools, gradual change, or periods of catastropic change. The issue came up right after the French Revolution, and was settled by The Queen of England, who said only gradual change leading to an ever improving world would be allowed.

Hence Darwin wrote of gradual change over long periods reaching higher states.

The geologic record shows catastropic change. It does not show a gradual anything, species last, then die, then something related develops. It looks like ten survivors bred family traits. Forms stay the same over hundreds of millions of years, no change, then they are gone, and something else comes up, it is the same line, but very different in form.

Gradual change made it needed that billions of years passed, but it could have been a lot less. For one, nothing has been found on the ocean floors that is older than 65,000,000 years. Also, some dinosaurs continued for several hundred thousand years after that. They are found above the KT Boundry.

Even with more recent events, the Mammoth has been killed off 20,000 years ago, except for the ones that were still around 8,000 years ago. Science is just a religion that uses numbers. Science fudges the numbers just as much as religion.

Now Adam had a clone made from his rib, and had sex, produced children who had sex with someone, for the line continued, and that is why all people have identical DNA, because they are all clones and cannot change. As all people come from this creation, the DNA of all people is identical.
Creation was that recent, 4004BC on a Tuesday afternoon. I forget the day and month.

I favor home schooling, self education, and while standard tests have a place, all education should carry the disclaimer, "Everyone in the past thought they were right, we have proven otherwise, and your views are next."

We cannot know, we can only build a thought model in a human brain, science, god, you are guessing.

I have strong doubts about physics. Math, may be the Word of God.

Still, no matter which club you join, we do need jobs, places to meet the other sex, places to get married, buried, and the church suppers put out better food than the universities.

I have my unshakable faith, there is a god who created the universe, and 5,000.000.000 years ago seeded it with DNA, and has not been back since.

Living by logic makes you unpopular every where.

The truth of the statement in bold would not even be technically possible without magical intervention. It goes against every relevant observation on even my personal empirical level.

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11 Mar 2010, 9:38 am

Dox47 wrote:

See, this is where we differ. I don't care what the parent wants to teach their child, their child will be taught the curriculum agreed to by whatever passes as professional educators. This may fall short, but it's not even in the same ballpark as how far short the typical parent would fall in trying to fill this role. If you want to instill your belief system in your child, you may do it after business hours, but during business hours your child will be taught business matters, such as algebra and the theory of evolution. I see absolutely no need whatsoever to provide a degree of tolerance for things like creationism to be taught in place of evolution, because creationism is not science. It's religion, which should be taught *after* *business* *hours*, if at all.

It's a big shame about the political climate in the UK, I don't like it any more than you do. I'm not so familiar with DARE but agree a lot of politically inspired trash makes it into US education as well. So fight it or move to a less backward jurisdiction if you feel you need to. 97% of what your child will be taught in any public school I've ever seen is based on research, and that's the best anyone can do.

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