Tag: Evolution

Free schools that teach ‘intelligent design’ as science will lose funding.

A growing number of biology and medical students are rejecting the very basis of their chosen subject in favour of creationism.

Does the Texas governor believe his idiotic religious rhetoric, or is he just pandering for votes?

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

With less fanfare and more tact than the new atheists, “secular humanists” have attempted to provide an all-encompassing public philosophy based on science, as an alternative to moralities and political programs justified by supernatural religion.

Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.

Now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

The wishy-washy teachers, like the governor of Louisiana, are not uneducated. Some of them simply refuse to accept settled science because of their religious beliefs.

An elusive evolutionary “missing link” bridging the bones of the mammalian middle ear with the reptilian jawbones is discovered in a fossil of an early squirrel-like mammal.

Florida state senator pushes a law to force Florida science teachers to offer a “thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution” and to include “intelligent design” in the classroom.

Despite 80 years of court battles ousting creationism from public classrooms, most public high school biology teachers are not strong advocates for evolution.

Evolution may have delivered tendencies to believe certain things but that does not tell us whether those beliefs are true. There are risks in making up evolutionary “just-so” stories to explain the origins of complex human beliefs, such as religious ones.  Evolutionary biology will be of little help in “explaining” human beliefs in either quantum mechanics or the finer points of theology.

A 2005 court battle over intelligent design led scientists to seek better ways to improve students’ understanding of evolution.

Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for the similarities between religions. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question…

What Christine O’Donnell, the Republican nominee for Delaware’s senate seat said about evolution in 1996.

Religious leaders should be held accountable when their irrational ideas turn harmful

“All science teachers, whatever their specialism, have to deal with questions about God. We should be prepared”

Palca and scientist Neil Shubin discuss the genetic commonalities between humans and ancient fossil species including yeast, fish, and Australopithecus.  Link to the page and listen to the audio.

Sperm whale fossil has the biggest whale bite ever seen.

A study has shed light on a key genetic step in the evolution of animals’ limbs from the fins of fish, scientists say.