Well, remember this was a while ago, before John Paul II. I don’t know when the church accepted evolution. In any case, whether or not they were espousing official dogma, the teacher (who was not a nun) seemed to be more of a young-earther, as I remember it.
No, I think that was Clotha, in one of his two recent incidents of accidental triple postings - after which you called him snarkily on his typo of absolute as, IIRC, ‘abolute’.
However, if you say ‘all dogs are black’ and I have a white dog, I am one hundred percent correct to tell you that you are wrong, even if it is an absolute statement.
Similarly, you saying knowledge of this or that subject is essential is an absolute statement - one which I can disprove, absolutely, with a single counter example.
Well, I’m defining it as “basic or indispensible, necessary”. Even if one uses the other definitions at dictionary.com, I fail to see how a shop class is essential to life.
And go back to my original post in the other thread where I outlined my view of necessity of subjects - and I noted that while one could eke out an existence while illiterate or innumerate, one would be at a substantial disadvantage.
So, if I understand your point, discussion of this subject needs to be supressed so as not to give aid and comfort to the (creationist) enemies. We need to accept a logical fallacy in order to preseve the orthodoxy. Got it.
As a matter of fact, that is what this thread is about. But you have to prove it, not just assert it. So far, that hasn’t been done either by anyone in this thread, or by the 1 1/2 sentences of supporting argument you just offered.
That’s not quite accurate. The Church does not technically take a position on the truth of evolution but only says that it does not conflict with Catholic doctrine as long as God is acknowledged as the Creator of the universe and the creator of human souls. Practically speaking, if you’re Catholic you can be either a YEC or a theistic evolutionist without being a heretic.
JPII’s statement on evolution (which was really just a reaffirmation of a previous statement made by Pious XII) was popularly taken as a tacit acknowledgement of the truth of evolution but it was not explicit. He did say that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” but that’s about as close as he came to calling it a fact.
I went to Catholic schools too and got essentially a similar disclaimer (“this is only a theory”) but that was well before John Paul II’s 1996 statement.
Couple things about these statements:
- No student with a high school education (or lower) is going to (or even be expected to) “speak authoritatively about taxonomy”.
- Linnaean taxonomy has little do with evolutionary connections; indeed, Linnaeus was a creationist and strove to categorize living things in order to glorify God.
Taxonomy in itself need have nothing whatever to do with evolution; it is simply the process of grouping things with similar things. A nested taxonomic scheme, such as Linnaeus’s or even cladistics, merely operates by subdividing the similar characteristics. Linnaean taxonomy would work even if Special Creation were, in fact, true.
As for the OP, as much as it pains me to say it, much of general biology can be learned (even if not fully understood) without evolution. When I learned biology in high school, we went through various groups, learned about assorted systems (e.g., nervous, digestive, circulatory, etc. for animals), talked about similarities and diferences, then moved ion to the next group. I could explain how a mammal’s circulatory system worked, and how it differed from an annelid’s, even if I didn’t really understand at the time why they were different, or even why they were the way they were. I could explain the structure and function of the vertebrate eye, without knowing how that eye came to be. And really, unless one is going to pursue study in biology, that’s “good enough” to get by in the real world.
Really, one could expand upon the OP’s question in any number of ways: is an understanding of biology possible without an understanding of chemistry? Is an understanding of chemistry possible without an understanding of physics? If one truly wishes to understand, then yes, one must understand the foundations. If one just needs to “get by” (which is the reality, regardless how one feels about it), then no, a full understanding of the foundations is not necessary.
Ok sorry, I was wrong, I thought you had agreed with Clotha, as far as snarky, we were in the pit and snarky was lighter than most of the blasting going on.
I don’t see this as fair, I did not comment on something that is so obvious, Essential in this case is opinion and not fact. I believe I started my most with I think and used OMHO in other posts. So not really an absolute just my opinion.
You are probably correct about the shop class. Learning tool use basic would be good, more than essential so I have to concede this one.
Aren’t you asking a lot for me to look up a post in the other thread, I am glad you have now restated your view, it makes it easier for other posted. Thank you.
I still define essential different from you. I would probably legislate for a more well rounded essential curriculum if I had the chance. Again, my opinion and I will never be a legislator so no need to worry.
I hope it’s not a faux pas to repeat myself here, but otherwise it would seem to require someone to wade through the referenced pit thread, and the following material not only represents my own view but provides what I think is good authority to support the specific issue of whether teaching biology, at the high school level (how does that relate to “public schools” in the OP?), can disregard the fact of evolution (irregardless of whether the theory of natural selection is taught, which should be taught anyway).
Quoting from the Preface to Biology, 4th ed. (1983) by Helena Curtis, page xxii (bolding mine):
Quoting from Biology (1987) by Neil A. Campbell, page 11 (bolding mine):
Why is “biology without evolution is disparate collection of facts, not a unifying and predictive science guided by sound theory” so difficult to appreciate? What about that statement is not patently obvious or needs further proving? Biology without evolution is not even as well off as physics was before Newton first formulated the laws of gravity. At best, at that time, you had Galileo over here watching objects accelerate to the earth, Kepler over there tracing ellipses around the Sun, and neither guy really aware of the connection, nor that they were essentially describing the same phenomenon. Prior to Darwin, biology was a complete muddle, just a bunch of people looking at stuff with absolutely no sound idea of how any of it is connected, where any of it might have come from, or what any connection between any living thing might could reasonably imply about all life. It was pure cataloguing, anatomy, and guesswork. Evolution took that entire mess and turned it into a science.
Think about it: Evolution allowed Darwin to accurately predict the fundamental nature of genes, more than a hundred years before anyone had any idea what they really were. That’s science. It’s an astonishingly straight theoretical and investigative line from the Origin of Species to Watson and Crick, and nobody, ever, prior to Darwin’s insight, could claim an intellectual accomplishment that comes even close in the field of the study of life. Again, I say, biology without Evolution is no more than a library full of books without a catalogue. It’s a grand exercise in menagerie-building and guesswork, where everyone is a sort of lepidopterist fumbling in the conceptual dark.
That biology is fundamental to biology isn’t something that can be “proven” the way you prove that Mr. Smith lives in the green house and has a pet parakeet. The best people can do is what they’ve done. They argue that there is no more fundamental questions in biology than the ones about the origin of life and the diversity of species. They argue that a theoretical basis for studying nature gives meaning and context to the whole experience. I find these arguments strong and unrefuted.
So, everyone on the ‘yes’ side of this question would assert that no one understood biology before Darwin formulated his theory?
I have little knowledge of the history of biology, but the theory of evolution explains a lot about how organisms relate to each other, and why they are what they are. I personally have a hard time simply learning things by rote, and learn any subject much better if there is an overall “framework” (even if it’s simplified). So in that sense, I think evolution is as essential to understanding biology as newton’s laws of motion are to learning physics.
Science Evolves just like Life Evolves.
Biology has changed a lot since Darwin’s time.
In Darwin’s time there was no definite knowledge of cellular and sub cellular biology.
There was no understanding of Virus & Bacteria.
So in many ways, Yes there was no understanding of Biology before Darwin.
Not in any meaningful scientific way, no. In a purely investigative and observational way, sure, they may have known lots of “stuff”, but being able, for instance, to name all the mountains, map their locations and elevations, and describe their mineral content, doesn’t really tell you much about how or why you get a mountain, or what you can rationally assert, based on all this fact-finding, about the nature of hills, mesas, canyons and plains. It’s just compendium of interesting and potentially useful trivia. Science, by definition, is about more than collecting information or taking a census. Those are part of the job, but just a fraction of it.
Not really, no. They didn’t know about cells or DNA either.
As I have said and others have said, evolution is a basic part of modern biology. Teaching biology without it is just like teaching it without mentioning cells or DNA; it can be done, but it’s a politically crippled version of biology you’re teaching.
Can we take a step back for a second for a little perspective? Prior to the publication of The Origin of Species, did anyone have “an understanding of biology”(I’m using the quote marks not because I question the phrase, but to avoid having to define it)? Prior to the publication of the work there were still doctors, animal breeders, farmers, dentists, etc. Did none of them posess “an understanding of biology” because they didn’t know evolutionary theory? The book took a while to become widely read(and it still isn’t widely read, just often quoted, summarized, and misquoted in various other texts). During this transition period did anyone unlucky enough to have not read the book or been exposed to its ideas have “an understanding of biology”?
Stepping forward into the present, we get to the question of if “an understanding of biology” is necessary, or even important. Clearly it isn’t necessary or the human race would not have survived to Darwin’s time without it. Worldwide, including developing nations, what percentage of people would you suppose have “an understanding of biology”? I’d guess that 50% would be extremely optimistic.
I’d agree that an education wouldn’t be “complete” without covering the topic of evolution, but a “complete” education is something virtually no one has. Everyone slept through or was sick during some classes in their lives. There’s a good chance every one of us missed something someone else would consider “essential”. I’m sure I did. There’s also the possibility that something was missed in class. Maybe someone had a disinterested moron for a teacher, it happens(it happened to me a couple of times).
A well-rounded education is a noble goal. But in the real world we don’t care all that much about the eccentricities in someone’s educational background. If someone doesn’t know jack about evolution then it won’t make them a social pariah or anything, and it isn’t as if they can’t learn about it as an adult if they need to for some reason.
Enjoy,
Steven
Not really, no.
I submit based on the answers from the “yes” camp that we cannot ever know if we have an understanding of biology, then, whether we know of evolution or not. There may be some similarly revolutionary concept introduced twenty years from now that will cause the intellectuals of that time to look back on us as completely naive in the subject.
However. My point of view is that biology is the study of life. To be defined as alive, a thing must possess certain properties. There is, as I recall, a traditional list. While reproduction is on that list, evolution is not. Evolution, then, is secondary to the study of life.
Reproduction is evolution.
You’ve made a strong case for the idea that good biological research cannot be done without a solid grounding in evolutionary theory. Or more precisely, evolutionary theory greatly facilitates and guides most research in the field of biology. But, alas, you’ve come up far shy of demostrating that the answer to the OP is “no”. Certainly not at the elemetary school level.
Remember, we’re not asking if it is more difficult to teach basic biology w/o evolution, or if it’s undesireable to do so. We’re only asking if it’s possible. And we’re only asking that because someone made a declarative statement that it was **impossible **to teach basic biology w/o also teaching evolution.
So, reframe your argument to address this debate topic:
and take particular note of the word “basic”. I don’t think we’ve defined excatly what that word encompasses in the context of thiis debate, but I’m using it to mean biology as it is taught at the elemtary school level. If you go back to the original discussion in the pit thread that generated this statement, that was the context out of which it arose. One might say that I consider it to be the “original intent of the framers” of that statement. 
It seems to me that the debate is being skewed the wrong way round. As many have said, Darwin’s Finch most recently above, it is possible to learn a few general principles about biological functions in order to “get by” in the real world, and that there’s no real practical reason evolution has to be part of it.
In my first post to the thread, however, I said that this sort of scattered detail isn’t “useful,” which was a poor choice of word: I was thinking that it wasn’t helpful to have these discrete facts without a framework to hang them all together and organize them, that without such a framework one couldn’t have a meaningful understanding of the field. Others have said as much.
Even so, how practically useful is this knowledge? It’s certainly interesting to know, for example, that mitochondria appear to be an odd separate-but-joined organism living within our cells, and it’s helpful to know something about evolution to get a sense of how this arrangement might have come about, but do you need to know this to drive your car to work and fill in columns of numbers and order lunch from McGreasy’s? Of course not.
But—
*BUT—
It is critically important that we all have a general foundation for this and all other sciences so that we understand how the discipline works and where all this information comes from.*
Evolution is not something you need to know to get by in the world, unless your actual job requires it. Same goes for astrophysics and plate tectonics and quantum mechanics and organic chemistry and everything else the big-brained folks do in their labs and publish in their journals.
But if you don’t understand how they do what they do, if you cannot distinguish responsible science from rubbish, then you are intellectually crippled. Period.
Teaching evolution, it seems to me, is critical because of its place as one of the primary underpinnings for the field of biology: not because Jane Average actually needs to calculate the bacterial load and increase of resistance that will occur if she fails to finish off her bottle of antibiotics, but because she needs to recognize that her doctor’s ordering her to do so makes sense.
But more significantly, from a more general point of view, this knowledge is of a piece with the other scientific disciplines, as a unifying principle behind the various fields: the methodology by which our understanding has been derived.
“We had an idea. We checked the evidence. The idea didn’t really hold together. Based on the available evidence, we came up with a different idea. We accumulated additional evidence and looked at the new idea. It still wasn’t quite right, but it was closer. We re-evaluated the evidence and revised the idea, and collected further evidence. We have increased our confidence in the current idea to the point that we can actually base practical work upon it, but we reserve the right to further refine the idea as additional evidence comes to light.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And that’s the overall intellectual structure we should be driving at. From this perspective, you must teach evolution, because you must reinforce for students how we know what we know, and how we know it’s valid. We teach a little bit about the structure of the atom, because the way the protons and neutrons clump and the electrons surround and combine provides a fundamental basis for why physics and chemistry are as solid as they are. We teach a little bit about the size and gravitational framework of the cosmos, and how we figured it out, for similar reasons. Ditto geology, and linguistics, and history, and economics, insofar as these disciplines have a hard, measurable center.
Science education, in short, should be less about what we know, and more about how we know what we know.
Now, admittedly, we do a pretty poor job of this. There may be many reasons for our failure, from the political (dishonest intelligent-designers want to exclude the methodology because otherwise it’s painfully clear how scientifically bankrupt their position is) to the psychological (short-sightedness and impatience tends to make us favor immediately practical information over abstract principles, so we design our classes to deliver that). There are more; we could spend all day arguing about why this is. I tend to think it’s a combination of factors.
The point is, we need to do better, but we cannot do it if we start throwing out the underlying principles that unify the disciplines.
Again: Science, to me, is as much about the how as about the what. “An objective evaluation of the available evidence suggests such-and-such.” The first part of that sentence is just as important as the second half: how we arrived at the information.
Evolution is a critical component of biology, for reasons that have been explained repeatedly in the thread. What those reasons are is immaterial. That they exist at all, that countless years of accumulated work has arrived at a profound truth, is the significant thing.
Throw that out, and you cripple science education in general.