Comments Posted By rbb
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THE DEMONS ARE STIRRING...THE CANDLE IS GUTTERING
Interesting post, but scary comments. *sigh* The problems faced by educators (and science educators) are clearly in evidence in the comments to this post. Science education received a big boost in the US after the USSR launched Sputnik (the first human-made sattelite). Do we need another similar wake up call before we get serious?
Science is a method of inquiry. It has biases (as do all forms of inquiry into the world), but it has been extremely successful at helping humans to understand the natural world. Teacher training, better standards, and (most importantly) parental enthusiasm about school, learning, and inquiry, all go a long way towards building a more scientifically literate society.
Most people don't understand the difference between a scientific theory or concept - built on thousands of observations or experiments, and validated from many different scientific angles - and an opinion or idea based on armchair theorizing or quaint analogies (like the one about a clock in a field). Children in school very rarely _do_ science, they are merely told about its results and asked to accept them. So the skepticism of the public to those results isn't all that surprising.
For the commenter in #6 - there are several mathematical formula that do just what you day they don't do - measure evolution. There are measures of genetic drift, selective pressure, mitochondrial DNA change, etc. that have all been put down on paper, tested and argued about, confirmed or revised based on experiments and new findings. But none of this is really very interesting to you is it. Evolution is a theory about change of living organisms over time. It is not a theory of how living organisms first came to be, it is not a theory of how people should behave towards one another, and it is not a religious doctrine. It's just science. And until
Comment Posted By rbb On 12.08.2006 @ 18:45
US citizens understand what science is and how evolution is NOT a threat to Christianity or any other religion, they probably deserve to be ranked just above Turkey in surveys like this.
