Could I get one of those kooky dictionaries as a souvenir from Dio-Land?
Or are we playing ‘1984-Style Slogans Game’? Freedom is Slavery!
You’ll have to do a little better than a bold, unsupported assertion that two not-synonyms are, in fact, synonyms.
Since I was the one who made that statement, I guess I should define “basic.” I meant in the sense of understanding anything about the most fundamental questions of how life sustains itself, how new speces arise, and how human beings came to exist. As I said in the other thread, the key word is understanding.
Reproduction is the fundamental mechanism by which evolution occurs. Every incident of reproduction is a tiny incident of evolution.
It’s the best theory we have at the moment. Ofcourse its possible that we get a better theory. That’s true of any scientific theory - are you suggesting we shouldn’t teach any theory at all?
It is possible for something to be alive and not evolve. I’m alive, and I don’t evolve in Darwins sense of the word. Evolution is about how groups of organisms change over time. Seems pretty essential to me.
I agree that I was off the center point, but your entire post is likewise off the point, talking about what we should and shouldn’t do for science education.
You make reference to a car analogy - do I need to know Ford’s assembly line process to fully understand how my car works? Do I need to know that process to fully understand how to repair my car? I only care about Ford’s process if I go into the field of car manufacturing.
And the key words in how you’ve just defined basic are ‘circular argument’. “To have an understanding of how life evolved on this planet, we must learn evolution.” Well, duh. And to understand how a Ford car is assembled, I need to learn about Ford’s assembly process. But that’s entirely tangential to my understanding of cars.
Good first sentence, but then you lost it with the second. Reproduction = breeding; a subset of breeding is selective breeding (used here broadly - any selective force acting on the population) - and selective breeding is the mechanism by which evolution occurs.
However - things can reproduce without selective force. Some creatures reproduce again and again, asexually, without changing to adapt to their environment. All evolution requires reproduction, but the reverse isn’t true.
You are assuming that before Darwin there was no guiding principal behind the study of biology, this is not true. It was usually some form of ‘God did it’, but it was always there until the theory of evolution removed God from the picture.
Wel, I learned how to kill a man with my thumb.
Admittedly, I’ve not (yet) applied this knowledge.
Nope. You missed the point. If one considers the pre-Darwin biology specialists completely lacking in understanding of biology, simply because “we know better” - then one must allow for the possibility that we don’t understand biology at all, and thus this entire argument is moot. That is not my position, that is a consequence of the opposition’s position.
Did I not just say that bolded part? I could’ve sworn I did.
Wait… you’re saying you consider the ‘God did it’ guys to have an understanding of biology?
I think he was saying that they had a bogus understanding of biology. “A wizard did it” is not an understanding.
Sexual selection is only one of the guiding mechanisms in evolution. Simply being more adept at some crucial task (i.e. having a slightly better eye-sight or being stronger) also enhances the potential for successful reproduction. Even for asexually reproducing organisms.
Evolution is the guiding principal behind biology. I have inferred from what you have said that you belive before the theory of evolution you could teach biology without a guiding principal behind it. I am pointing out that there has always been some underlying theory behind biology, that theory may have been wrong, but it has been there.
Even asexual creatures undergo genetic variation via mutation, among other things. You are confusing reproduction with replication. Replication is what copying a file on a computer does; there is no change, therefore there is no evolution. Living things reproduce themselves; they create imperfect copies of themselves at most. When variation occurs, evolution is inevitable. Even if a creature is perfectly adapted to the environment, it will evolve to outcompete/outbreed it’s own kind.
All living things either evolve or are descended from something that evolved. That’s the way life works. I’ll say it again; evolution is basic to the understanding of life; not mentioning it in a biology class renders the class a poor imitation of the real thing.
To use an analolgy: the people that plotted the movements of the heavenly bodies based on Ptolemy’s circles within circles did have an “understanding” of astronomy. They could make predictions about where the planets would be at some time in the future with a fair degree of accuracy. Was that “understanding” correct? We would say no, based on the subsequent work of Kepler and Newton. We now understand celestial mechanics at a deeper level. The same is true of biology. Before Darwin we hand an “understanding” of biology, but since we have a deeper understanding.
Right. It’s just that they had no understanding of the most fundamental mechanism in biology. It’s nice to look at animals and see they’re all different, but understanding why does make a huge difference.
That was me pointing out that biology is more than “studing things that are alive”. Biology is about how life works. Evolution is crucial to that.
Just in reference to how evolution is taught in CA schools, here’s the CA Dept of Education’s web page for Science academic standards.
Some very limited evolutionary concepts are introduced in the lower grades, although it’s not really until the 7th grade that evolution itself is actually taught (sneaky, huh? :)):
It looks like middle school science classes focus on different subjects at different grade levels, and Grade 7 is where Life Science (Biology) gets a focus.
In High School, the req’t is 2 years of science, but you could conceivably take chemestry and physics if you wanted to avoid the dreaded evolution part of H.S. Biology.
So there you have it. Note that the curriculum does NOT cover human evolution, although there doesn’t appear to be any restriction **against **teaching it.
Yes, asexual reproducers change via mutation. But not with every reproduction.
All living things either evolve or are descended from something that evolved. That’s the way life works. I’ll say it again; evolution is basic to the understanding of life; not mentioning it in a biology class renders the class a poor imitation of the real thing.
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Not quite. There’s a two-way dichotomy - adapt or die. Some living things at the beginning of the chain did not evolve. They died.
So we do achieve an understanding of biology without teaching evolution, we just have a deeper understanding when we do teach it.
Thank you, you’ve conceded the point.
I would like to propose a change from referring to evolution as the “guiding principle of biology” to it being the “unifying principle of biology.” “Guiding” anthropomorpises the topic too much IMHO. Darwin himself stressed that we should not apply any sense of active “guidance” to the force of evolution.
If we agree that no one had a “understanding of biology” without the unifying principle of evolution, then what impact does this have for other sciences? Physicists still don’t have a unifying theory for their field. Does this mean no one has a “understanding of physics”? Stephen Hawking doesn’t have “an understanding of physics”?
Enjoy,
Steven