The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Topic started by: Machiavelli on March 28, 2015, 01:53:22 am
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James J. Krupa
Orion Magazine
February 26, 2015
I'M OFTEN ASKED what I do for a living. My answer, that I am a professor at the University of Kentucky, inevitably prompts a second question: "What do you teach?" Responding to such a question should be easy and invite polite conversation, but I usually brace for a negative reaction. At least half the time the person flinches with disapproval when I answer "evolution," and often the conversation simply terminates once the "e-word" has been spoken. Occasionally, someone will retort: "But there is no evidence for evolution." Or insist: "It's just a theory, so why teach it?"
At this point I should walk away, but the educator in me can't. I generally take the bait, explaining that evolution is an established fact and the foundation of all biology. If in a feisty mood, I'll leave them with this caution: the fewer who understand evolution, the more who will die. Sometimes, when a person is still keen to prove me wrong, I'm more than happy to share with him an avalanche of evidence demonstrating I'm not ...
During one lecture, a student asked a question I've heard many times: "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" My response was and is always the same: we didn't evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor. One ancestral population evolved in one direction toward modern-day monkeys, while another evolved toward humans ...
Full article (https://orionmagazine.org/article/defending-darwin/)
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Amongst those who see thugs like ISIS/ISIL as the barbarians they are, there should be no need to defend Darwin. That such a defense is still called for in even the more civilized nations of the world speaks very ill of human beings and human nature.
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Amongst those who see thugs like ISIS/ISIL as the barbarians they are, there should be no need to defend Darwin. That such a defense is still called for in even the more civilized nations of the world speaks very ill of human beings and human nature.
Evolving is going forward, devolving is going backward. Certainly in a moral sense, the Islamic culture is devolving.
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Evolving is going forward, devolving is going backward. Certainly in a moral sense, the Islamic culture is devolving.
Not really. Evolution, biologically speaking, is merely change - the development of one form from an earlier form - it doesn't connote any sort of direction or "improvement".
That being said, ISIS/ISIL make blue-green algae look like the epitome of Solomonic wisdom and intelligence by comparison.