This beautiful creature was on the wall of our house this morning.
I don’t know why this sweet guy was hanging out on the wall when he could have been in the woods, or even the pond.
Note the webbed toes, and the wonderful coloration.
So – what do you think? Frog or toad?
This is a very good introduction to evolution, intended to help teachers navigate through the current minefield.
“Do you believe in evolution?†is a question often asked of biology teachers by their puzzled students. The answer is, “No, I accept the fact that the Earth is very old and life has changed over billions of years because that is what the evidence tells us.†Science is not about belief—it is about making inferences based on evidence.
The alleged incompatibility of religion and evolution has been used as a way of persuading people to deny the history of the Earth. The following misconception is dependent on a misunderstanding of the functions of both science and religion.
Religion and science (evolution) are very different things. In science (as in science class), only natural causes are used to explain natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world.
The misconception that one has to choose between science and religion is divisive. Most Christian and Jewish religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution.
The National Center for Science Education has statements of support from several religious organizations, who affirm the constitutional separation of church and state as supportive of religious freedom, and who support the teaching of evolutionary theories knowing that it doesn’t threaten faith.
In a roundtable interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers President Bush said yesterday that he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.
No problem. Just don’t ask science teachers to teach it. Teach it in religion classes, not alongside evolutionary theories in biology class. The principle of selection: what lives to reproduce passes on its genes. There are discussions about different theories within the science of evolution – debate about catastrophic events, punctuated and gradual evolution, the big bang. Much of science has latent mysterious content – read up on string theory or strange attractors, for example. However, renaming “creationism” as “intelligent design” doesn’t make it science. What are you going to teach? Bible verses? In any case, there are lots of creation stories – you’d then have to teach them all, not just the Genesis account. Wouldn’t it be better to leave that to families and the worship centers of the different religions? Why would the public school system be teaching Judeo-Christianity?
Intelligent design refers to the theory that “unspecified intelligent causes” (i.e. God the Father) are responsible for the origin of the universe and of life in all its diversity – well anyway, the life we know, which is based on carbon.
Don’t laugh – these pseudochristics are serious! They are already anti-intellectual, anti-science. They want followers, not thinkers.
The House Subcommittee on Basic Education in Pennsylvania heard testimony Monday on a bill that would allow local school boards to mandate that science lessons include intelligent design. The legislation is sponsored by only a dozen lawmakers. A federal judge will consider the issue this fall, when a lawsuit against the Dover Area School District is scheduled to go to trial. The suit alleges that the school board violated the constitutional separation of church and state when it voted in October to require ninth-grade students to hear about intelligent design during biology class.
Of course, here in Georgia, the infamous Cobb Country had big stickers in all the science textbooks proclaiming that evolution is just a theory until a federal judge in Atlanta finally put the nix on it in January saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The stickers were added after more than 2,000 parents complained that the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life, such as the biblical story of creation. Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect. The judge ruled that “While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.†“By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof.†Last year, Georgia’s education chief proposed a science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution†in favor of “changes over time.†The idea was dropped amid protests from teachers.
This focus on the new creationism is very clever. If they get religion taught as science they gain more control over the children (get ’em while they’re young). Such children will be unable to distinguish between science and religion, but as Bush himself shows, many of our kids are impervious to the very best education. We may lose out in the science and technology wars of the future, but hey, we’re going down anyway with the gradual destruction of the public school system that helped us rise. If the fight fails, they still motivate their fearful, hateful base -energizing them with that ole God is on our side bull at a time when people are getting less enthused about Iraq, oil/gas prices, and so on. Now that’s strategic politics.
One question, though – if you believe in creationism (and that’s what this is), then you probably also believe that God placed humans in the position of the stewards of the earth. How is it that the same group of people who advocate for creationism are first in line to let corporations pollute? Where are their environmental concerns? Some stewards.
What possible joint interest could a real Christian have with the death and power policies of this administration? Believers are so easily manipulated – don’t you remember that warning about false prophets?
I’m a Phd today! Woo-hoo!!!!! Here’s the abstract.
Imagining the Virus: A Discourse Analysis of Contemporary Fiction
This study seeks to apply the insights of discourse analysis to the epidemic of signification surrounding the virus, marking out the traits and terrain of an emerging discourse. The confluence of biological and technological viral language interacts with articulations of health and sickness, literal or metaphorical, already active in other discourses. The virus has rhetorically metastasized across referential domains. The study takes as its starting point concrete examples of viral figuration, and is structured around contemporary novels concerning HIV/AIDS, vampires, the villains and plots of suspense thrillers, and science-fictional transformations of the human.
Imagining the Virus traces the terrain of the virus along two basic strands: the virus as a figure of the other and the virus as a postmodern placeholder for ambiguity. A comparison of their relative weight and functioning attempts to discern the kinds of relationships that occur between these two strands as they play out in different fictions. An examination along such lines unearths dominant cultural tropes and their attendant anxieties. Particular kinds of metaphors influence our attitudes and judgments by selectively focusing on certain aspects of a concept while suppressing other aspects. This study finds examples of reframings of the virus that resist the more destructive of these, either by refusing to be complicit with them, or simply as a function of imagining new constructions and possibilities. As a mutating viral terminology circulates through a diverse American culture, it draws models of horizontal structures and networks, maps clusters of referential associations, and speculates on newly-emergent adaptations and ecologies.