Responses to "Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher"

[lady lib]

Balloon-Juice http://www.balloon-juice.com/ has a good write up today. Scroll down to Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
(BTW, Balloon-Juice is the one conservative website that I read and often agree with.)

Responses to "Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher"
(These are the questions that fundies are being told to ask in order to disrupt classroom lessons on evolution.)

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/ten_questions_to_ask_your_biology_teacher/

[Justin54B20L]

1. What really bothers me is the fact that most people who challenge

evolutionary theory lack even a basic college level course in Biology.

They lack key concepts of evolutionary biology such as the passage of alleles and its relation to the Harvey-Weinberg theorem.

The construction of amino acids and proteins monomers which combine into polymers that then replicate and become RNA, the precursor to DNA.

The concept of "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," which basically states that our development reflects our ancestry.

The comparative contrasting of Darwin's ideas to Lamarck's.

The whole Miller-Urey experiment.

Darwin's 3 inferences based on his 5 observations.

The processes of heritibility, variation, and selection pressure and their importance to Evolution.

People really need to get out and read a damn book once and a while, and not man-coulter or hannity's crap-fest, and quit watching that frontal-lobotomy procedure called Faux-"news".

[Bandit]

2. Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.

:shrug: Sometimes the stupidity of mankind amazes me to no end.

[ComerPerro]

3. The link to the piece on Conservative Thermodynamics was interesting

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/creationism.html

[lady lib]

7. Or as John Cole calls it , "Voodoo" Thermodynamics.

"Creationists Claim: The second law of thermodynamics requires that all systems and individual parts of systems have a tendency to go from order to disorder. The second law will not permit order to spontaneously arise from disorder. To do so would violate the universal tendency of matter to decay or disintegrate."

I appreciated the response to this because I've wondered about it myself.

[lady lib]

4. Here's another excellent link with lots of information

and in depth and comprehensive responses:

Creationist Jonathan Wells, an intelligent-design advocate affiliated with the Discovery Institute, has written a book entitled Icons of Evolution, which states that some of the best-known evidences for evolution -- such as the peppered moths, the Miller-Urey abiogenesis experiment, and the finches of the Galápagos islands -- are false, fraudulent or misrepresented in college-level textbooks. Articles found here refute Wells' book and demonstrate that the traditional, mainstream-science-supporting interpretations of these "icons" are correct.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/
click on Icon of Obfuscation

And as I previously posted, the shorter and simpler explanations are found here:
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/ten_questions_to_ask_your_biology_teacher

[tjwash]

5. Well, telling a fundie wacko that he was decended from...

...an ape would be a grievious insult to the ape

[lady lib]

6. Big Smile! "Who's your daddy?!"

And the trick is to get either one of them to understand and accept our magnificent and complex and (I believe God-created) scientific REALITY.

[countryjake]

8. Just the facts, ma'am!

Here's a good think tank with suggestions and advice on how to respond to these neanderthals (not meant to insult any who may fit that description). Check out their "theory of Steve", it's hilarious!

National Center for Science Education
http://www.ncseweb.org/


This site has a section on the battles being waged in "letters to the editor" across the country and can help if anyone else has been trying to mount a winning strategy against those tactics (it's been going on in our little paper for years, now). This thing of taking over the school boards is disturbing, too, & the results can be seen with these hearings going on this week in Kansas.

Darwin on trial Evolution hearings open in Kansas

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=8402210

~snip~

Changes to the curriculum proposed by the conservatives would not require inclusion of Biblical beliefs in science classes, also called "creationism" - the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creationism could not be taught in public schools alongside evolution.

But they would involve questioning the principles of evolution as explanations for the origins of life, the universe and the genetic code. As well, teachers would be encouraged to discuss with students "alternative explanations."

Kansas has been struggling with the issue for years, capturing worldwide attention in 1999 when the state school board voted to downplay Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in science classes.

Subsequent elections altered the membership of the board and led to renewed backing for evolution instruction in 2001. But elections last year gave conservatives a 6-4 majority and the board is now producing new science teaching guidelines.



Edited to add: "Project Steve"
http://www.ncseweb.org/article.asp?category=18

[lady lib]

9. Wow, Steve has his own song and tee shirt!

NCSE's "Project Steve" is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of "scientists who doubt evolution" or "scientists who dissent from Darwinism." And why Steve? "In honor of the late Harvard zoologist and geologist Stephen Jay Gould...

Thanks countryjake for more GREAT resources.

To everyone else reading this:
There's a huge amount of information if you click on the links on the right side of the page.

http://www.ncseweb.org/article.asp?category=18


:thumbsup:

[tenshi816]

10. Creationists and the Unification Church

I wonder how the fundie creationists would react if they knew that Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution as well as those "Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher" is a long-time disciple of Rev. Sun Myung Moon (in fact, his education at Yale and Berkeley was funded by Moon).

More info at these links:

http://www.stcynic.com/blog/archives/2004/07/rev_moon_and_in.php
http://uti.dinggraphics.com/archives/000406.html
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/096875.htm
http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/JCCC/07%20Wellsv4.pdf
http://www.skepticreport.com/creationism/iconsofignorance.htm
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/Coyne-IconsReview.htm

[lady lib]

11. More GREAT links.

Welcome to DU, tenshi816!

:hi:

[tenshi816]

12. Thanks lady lib

for the welcome. I've been lurking for months but don't say a whole lot because there are many people who say things much better than I can on any given issue. In this particular instance I've been reading a fair bit on this issue and thought the links might be of interest.

[countryjake]

13. Kick