I really hope you just worded this poorly - you do mean that it shouldn’t form part of the curriculum, don’t you? (as opposed to some bizarre kind of thought-police).
bob: Perhaps you should have put a link in with your post, but no matter:
My Cite. Not on the up and up for sure.
Bob, it is no trick to find a bunch of fundies with impressive sounding credentials who believe in creationism. The PhD , in itself, means nothing. The fact that a creationist is a medical doctor means nothing. What counts is whether they have actually submitted a scientific argument or objection for peer review.
There is, in fact, no “growing consensus” in any of the relevant disciplines that evolutionary theory is in any sort of danger whatsoever.
Also, the fact that you personally can’t understand something is hardly an argument against it. Just ask somebody to explain it to you.
I just opened this one, at random. The author makes his case on the basis of 5 arguments (in bold, blue, characters). All five are blatantly false. I didn’t even read further. Like everybody else says, these arguments aren’t holes, they don’t even need to be discussed.
They’re just false . Evolution has been observed, it doesn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, there are transitional fossils, the theory of evolution doesn’t say that life originated and evolution proceeds by random chance, and it isn’t “just a theory that hasn’t been proven”. All the author’s premises being completely wrong, there’s no point in reading the demonstration made on this basis.
It’s just like discussing astronomy with someone beginning with : “since the sun rises in the north…”
100 Scientists, National Poll Challenge Darwinism
Yes, there are a few. Of course, not as many as the deceptive statement implies (and the list should be further reduced by those who have already retired (or died) and those in irrelevant disciplines who have not demonstrated an actual knowledge of the required biology and those who were willing to sign that particular statement (for whatever reason) who do not actually dispute neo-Darwinism, but only encourage sceptical thinking).
I think that leaves Behe. Anyone else? (And still no holes in the Theory.)
Agreed. I meant curriculum.
r~
bob: Please tell me what you see as the biggest hole. One of us has been lied to.
r~
P.S. Do you know the prophesy of the anti-Christ?
I seem to have used the wrong word. My bad. I should have used the word “challenge” in my original post. I don’t know why I thought “poke hole in” was synonymous with “challenge”.
This is the only one that makes me wonder, since, you know, evolution doesn’t happen overnight, and people don’t usually live for hundreds of years. 
You should probably do a little reading before you start posting statements like this here. Start with this:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html
If I object to an assertion that the earth is round by averring that, “it don’t look round to me,” I will have challenged the assertion but I will not have come close to “poking a hole” in it.
There are no serious, scientific challenges to evolutionary theory. There are are religious objections which are rooted in a desire to preserve an a priori belief in the “inerrancy” of scripture. These objections are not scientific and are not proffered in scientific arenas or formulated as formal theories or arguments in peer reviewed journals and the like. They are purely religious teachings aimed at a naive and largely ill-informed audience of self-selected true believers.
Genetic variation is a common phenomenon, perpetually manifesting itself as extant dominant and recessive genetic traits “appear” and “vanish” in successive generations within a population of organisms. A population’s adaptation through genetic variation is as much a fact of biological life as are genes themselves. Though some evolutionists like to call this phenomenon “micro-evolution,” the variations dictated by any gene pool are neither “new” traits, nor qualitative “changes” in the gene pool (as required for “macro-evolution”); their potential is already well-defined within the DNA of the population’s gene pool, and all possible changes (i.e., variations) within that population are limited specifically to those inherent traits.
perhaps you should do some more reading before you post.
We really need an irony smiley.
“New traits” are called “mutations.” Do you deny that mutation exists?
Also, you should click on one of those “observed speciation” links. You might find them helpful and informative.
anonymousbob, If your going to copy and paste others words, it is customary here to post the link of the site you got them from or post the author’s name. Here is one possible site you could’ve gotten your last post from, but I doubt it. I think you should take a look.
that will teach me not to preview posts…
the non-quoted text is from Newsweek
I hate irony
My disagreement is with the general idea that organisms adapting to specific niches has anything at all do to with why primitive forms continue to exist (i.e., the answer is not “simply that those niches still exist and there is no better solution to utilize that niche”). And the mention of “lower forms” and ladders was a response to the original example given about “if evolution happened, why are there still lower forms of life”. The question, as often phrased by creationists, is flawed as there is no such thing as a “lower form” because the course of evolution is not analogous to a ladder.
That statement is not equivalent to your claim that “there is a very long and growing list of respectable scientists that question the possibility of evolution” (my emphasis). As I have already pointed out, there is, in fact, debate as to whether microevolutionary processes are sufficient to explain the complexity of life.
But, let’s look at a few of the indivudals on your list:
Henry F. Schaefer: a respected scientist, indeed. However, let’s look at his actual objections (.pdf doc):
First off, there is no scientific evidence that God created the universe. There is evidence, indeed, that the universe is 13-15 billion years old. But there is not, and cannot be, scientific evidence for God having anything to do with its creation. Second, he invokes the common fallacy of equating abiogenesis with evolution. Thirdly, he appears ignorant of punctuated equilibrium, which is a theory aimed specifically at the observation of long periods of stasis followed by rapid periods of change and speciation within the fossil record. Finally, he resorts to exactly the confusion I mentioned earlier, where he essentially resorts to changes in “kind” as an argument against macroevolution. Yet, the fossil record is pretty claer regarding his very wexample of the dinosaur-bird transition (and yes, it involvee more than just Archaeopteryx).
So, respectable chemist, sure. But, unfortunately, a stereotypical creationist (albeit an “old earther”) as regards his undersatnding of evoltuion.
Next up, is Fred Sigworth. Again, a respectable biochemist. However:
Again, he draws the distinction between macroevolution and microevolution, again based on an incomplete understanding of the the two processes. He is, in essence, a Behe-clone, and Behe has been shown to be incorrect and mistaken numerous times here and elsewhere.
Philip S. Skell (near the bottom). Not much from him lately, other than anti-evolution screeds. There, he simply argues that becasue eovlutionary biology makes no directive predictions for general biological study (particularly in medical fields), that it is utterly unimportant to study at all. Sorry, but I just can’t take this one seriously.
And so on… I would suspect that a continued examination would yield no new information regarding the source of dissent from those individuals. Common themes presented are simply typical creationist dogma: evolution cannot explain abiogenesis; microevolutionary processes cannot account fro macroevolutionary changes; life is too complex to for “mere” random variation and natural selection to account for it, and so on.
Talk about “reading more before you post”…you are doing nothing more than rehashing a 19th century argument put forth by Fleeming Jenkins, and revised in the early 20th century by Hugo De Vries. Of course, De Vries was a saltationist (and a Darwinian), rather than gradualist - or even creationist, in terms of his views on evolutionary biology.
You are essentially arguing that because stasis is apparent in established populations, macro-level changes cannot occur. To an extent, you are correct. However, one of the keys to understanding speciation (and the orgins of subsequent higher-level taxa) is the fact that large, established populations aren’t doing the speciating. Splinter populations - those subpopulations which fragment off of the parent population, pushing the boundaries of that species into new environments - are where the action is. Smaller populations in a new(er) environment are subjected to selection pressures different from those of the main population. While this does not alter their variability as such, it does alter which variations prove beneficial, thus diverting the direction in which that population evolves. And, of course, once altered, the modifed genome acts as a new “center”, or mean, from which further variation occurs. It is not the case that Jenkins’ “rigid spheres” of variation only allow a genome to vary around a single mean for all time.
It’s hard to overemphasize how wrong this is. First of all, many many 'new" traits that we see arise in organisms are actually slight modifications of “old” traits that slowl take on novel functions when expressed (that’s why anthropod blood clotting is so similar to their egg shell proteins: it’s just a slightly modified set of protein systems used in a novel way to create a “new” feature).
But second of all, there is no such thing as “well-defined” in a gene pool: no barrier to any particular direction of change. Gene pools are simply ever widening gradients of slight variation: and yet there is no “true” central genome of which all the variations are “straying” from and can be called back. And, get this: not only do the mophological changes which are the result of this widening variatoin occur as a matter of course, but they occur litterally ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster than is needed to explain even the fastest transitions in the fossil record.