While not directly related to astronomy, I thought this article would be amusing to some. It, perhaps, speaks to the way in which we deal with the "against the mainstream" folks. We realize these people are outside the realm of science when they espouse creationism or Big Bang denial, so how do we deal with them?

All i have to say is. Come on!!! its a recomendation folks! He was not failing the kid for not beiliving in evolution. He just declined for a reccomendation.

I have a professor who only reccomends a student who has taken more than one of his classes and has gotten a A in at least one of them. Discriminatory, heck yes. Am i complaining no. It is his right. It is a persoanl opinion about a student and a personal reccomendation from the teacher. I am not going to go to the dean and the press and demand that the professor gives me a recomendtion because i made a B in his class. That is just stupid. While the specific professor might be influential. There are hundreds of other teachers who you can ask.

^Ditto g99. I also agree with what the Professor said: How can you be a biologist but not believe in evolution? At least us astronomically inclined folk do not have people running around screaming "Space was created only 45 years ago!" (no offense to any of you that might be religious. [rant]I am taking "Bible as in Literature" at school right now and I am tired of this girl on the other side of the room complaining about general scientific principles..[/rant])

Anyway, I really don't want to start an argument on anything here. Just posting what I though. Good'ay. -Colt

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Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

While I agree totally with the professor in question--my spouse is continually asked for letters of recommendation to a particular professional school and makes decisions about whether to make those recommendations based on things as subjective as "work ethic" and "abililty to relate to clients"--I must also admit that one of said spouse's professional partners (in a medical field)while being an outstanding practitioner, makes a large distinction between "macro" and "micro" evolution. Thus, that person's inability to accept what I consider to be the fact of human evolution does not seem to have affected his ability to practice first quality medicine. And it's really killing me to admit that.

As an up-and-coming astrobiologist (as anyone in the field must be since it is so new), I find the claim that there is a difference between micro- and macro- evolution to be laughable. Evolution tracked through the tree of life is done with a strict "micro"evolutionary tracer... that is we use tRNA base-pairs to establish the relationships between various species and kingdoms. This is the way we have figured out the majority of the evolutionary story which, in fact, occurred at the microlevel. Two random microbes are more likely to be more evolutionary disparate than yourself and a sponge mold, but for some reason "creation scientists" can accept the evolution of microbes but not eucharyotic macroorganisms? Huh?

The biochemical evidence for evolution in this way is astounding, but no more overwhelming than the evolution we witness in laboratory bacteria. When looked in the larger picture it becomes clear how ridiculously trivial evolution between the first multicellar hydra-like eucharyotes and giant sequoias, rodents, and humans is in the grand scheme. As a "macroevolution" denier, you might as well say that you believe in microatomic theory but not macroatomic theory. That is, you might as well say that large things are not composed of atoms but small things are. It's that cock-eyed.

Color me mystified... I guess people just aren't up on their molecular biology.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JS Princeton on 2003-02-10 20:10 ]</font>

I'm pulling this from memory, but I seem to recall that the doctor who transplanted the baboon heart into the baby (Baby Fay?), chose the baboon over a more related species because he didn't believe in evolution, thus felt that all species were equally related. So, instead of finding a close match, (one might think Pan troglodytes would be best), he goes with "Eh, that looks about right."

Of course the heart was rejected.

I think you can be a good physician w/o accepting evolution, but only to a point. I think the doctor in the Baby Fay case went past that point.

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Jeff Schwarz
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Argh!! They booby-trapped their sun!!****--Invader ZIM

Good memory, Geo3gh... here's a link I found. Apparently, her name was "Fae" and not "Fay", but other than that, dead on.

I think that most physicians need to be particularly quick-thinking, critical evaluators of scientific evidence. Isn't that what medical diagnosis is?

In offering or refusing a personal recommendation to a medical school, I suppose one bases one's opinion on examples of a person's track record in making critical evaluations of scientific evidence. Response to the scientific evidence for evolution should be one such example.

But I don't know that it should be a make-or-break criterion. That smacks of a shallow, litmus-test approach--precisely the kind of approach I abhor when it is applied by fundamentalists to people or programs.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: DStahl on 2003-02-10 21:41 ]</font>

Regardless of whether or not one likes Dini's approach, there is no obligation to provide letters of recommendation. The very idea that one can sue, just because somebody won't write one, has to be about as obnoxious as anything can get.

Creationism does involve astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, and related disciplines, when it includes the idea that Earth and the universe are on the order of 10,000 years old. As already mentioned eleswhere, there are creationists who deny the reality of stellar evolution. While I can understand a desire not to accept Big Bang cosmology, stellar evolution is just plain physics. To deny that is to deny just about everything we know about anything, and strikes me a pretty extreme.

I have written numerous web articles opposed to young earth creationism, as it is called, mostly in my own webpages, and in the Talk.Origins Archive.

It's one thing to insist on believing silly ideas, but quite another to try to use the laws & courts to force the rest of the world to believe too. My freedom not to believe in those silly ideas is worth fighting for.

But these students weren't trying to use the laws and courts to force the rest of the world to believe their "silly ideas." They were using the laws and courts to fight for their first amendment right to freedom of religion. Seems to me they were the ones who felt like they were being forced to believe something else (you want to go to med school, you have to deny your religious faith in this area - that's how they are taking it).

Do you believe in taking away their freedom to believe what they hold fast to - whether silly or not?

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

Interesting point, nebularian, but as a society we have to make a decision between when what you believe and how that influences your actions become detrimental to our purpose. The case of the baboon heart transplant is the worst-case scenario, really. If a Christian Scientist tried to become a doctor but declared that they would not endorse innoculations would that be okay to recommend such a candidate for medical school?

So sad it all happens in the USA, the most advanced scientific society in the world.

We swallowed unquestioningly at school phrases like "wonders of nature", "it
is here that nature exercises her art", "nature plans ahead", "nature does
nothing without purpose", "nature maintains a balance", "nature foresees emergencies", "nature economises" etc.
Nature is one of two things: Intelligence or accident. There
is no third alternative. They actually are saying: "accident plans ahead", "accident does nothing without purpose"!

Yet despite the incontrovertible facts of plan and
purpose in all phenomena of the universe, the utter
insanity of its theses, and lack of even a shred of
evidence, evolution is virtually universally accepted as a
sine qua non, and a flood of frenzied invective is poured on
anyone who even dares query it: "The success of Darwinism
has been accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity"
(Professor W.R.Thompson, FRS).
The immoral;ity of evolution has brought on a general
immorality: abortion, VD, AIDS, divorce, adultery, unwed
mothers, drug-addiction, rioting, insanity, suicide,
disloyalty to the nation etc. etc. All are the poison fruits
of the doctrine that Man is an accidental development from a
slime cell: "Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups.
This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science.
It is useless" (Professor Louis Bounoure, Director of
Research , French National Centre of Scientific Research),

I still believe g99 has it right. As I said, letters of recommendation are routinely written on the basis of very subjective criteria. We're not talking about a grade here, or a member of the medical selection board's using that same criteria to make choices. If you do not expect a good letter of recommendation from a given source, you do not ask that source for the letter in the first place.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: gethen on 2003-02-11 08:27 ]</font>

Evolutionary reasoning leads to far worse medical errors than the purported baboon heart surgeon. For example that back pain is because "humankind has not yet adapted to walking upright". The Williams Flexion Excercises rely on this evolutionary premise, and by attempting to correct the Creator's "mistakes", cause even more pain. On the other hand, the McKenzie Extension Excercises are remarkably succesful, because they start with the premise that the human spine is not an imperfect adaptation from
some mythical "missing-link" walking on all fours, but is an efficient design, created ab initio for the unique erect human bipedal posture.

Recurrent backpain is not the result of inherent strain acquired from some supposed past evolutionary development, but is due to the modern tendency for prolonged and unbalanced flexion activities when stooping, curling up, bending, and standing slouched. The postures that our spines assume today, in weariness, discouragement and sloth, are
not the postures that Adam and Eve enjoyed when they first walked proud and upright!



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Prince on 2003-02-11 08:40 ]</font>

cyreks reply:
To all above: The main issue here is a 'legal opinion'. Our Constitution is the highest law in the land (the Natural God made no laws), therefore, it overides any and all religious doctrine in public institutions when it dictates the 'seperation of church and state' in the First Amendment. The above instituton is a state supported institution. People have a right to worship in silence in a public institution but not a right to demand it from others in that same institution. Therefore the professor is right in denying the student his request.
An added thought: Creationism is a myth.

Dini's posting of the criteria was fairly obnoxious of itself--I figure he was just itching for this furor. Should we deny him his fun?

Yes, inadequate analogies for complex systems.

Incorrect. There is a third alternative. Nature is very well adapted. To even exist the organisms needed to successfully compete through thousands, perhaps millions, of generations. To get this far they all had to develop way to cope with drought, fire, flood, UV rays, disappearing or migrating food sources, temperature changes etc. What looks like a planning is just adaptation.

See my note above. Evolution describes and predicts exactly the kind of complexity we see around us, and exactly the level of adaptation in the natural world that others would attribute to controlling intelligence. The appearance of order, balance, and adaptability do not refute evolution... indeed they support it.

Yes, non of those immoralities existed before the theory of evolution. :laugh:

Really, this demonstrates such a poor knowledge of human history as to be contemptible. Abortion was quite common before evolution and the modern era. Venereal diseases were among the greatest killers and sterilizers in the pre-Enlightenment world, in the days before antibiotics. Drug addiction caused by the theory of evolution? Please! I suppose opiates haven't been used for millennia? People have been always eating or drinking things to alter their brain chemistry, this isn't even "unnatural" per-se. Animal planet just educated me to the many animals that intentionally imbibe dangerous natural psychotropic substances. Rioting... seriously... you're killing me. Insanity... oh boy... come on, this is too easy. You're saying mental illness didn't exist before the theory of evolution? Suicide? Well, Japan (for one) during the Shoganates didn't believe in evolution, yet practiced ritual suicide... how to explain that?

Man's disloyalty to man. Now this I really take issue with. Yes, we should definitely toss out the millennia of bad behavior and violence we practiced prior to the last 150 years. Before we even started settling into villages we were using weapons to steal from each other. Most of Europe's "Christian" history is made-up entirely of war, on outsiders, on invaders, on each other. These wars were characterized by brutality and inhumanity is is hard for most of us to imagine.(I'm not complaining because it put the culture I am apart of dominant in the world.)

Strangely, it's after we started to discover we are all cut from the same piece of cloth that we all started treating each other much more humanely. Even notable exceptions (such as Hitler's Nazi Germany) prove the point as "bad" behavior has much more often been challenged by the greater portion of humanity.

Here's my general litmus test: I always ask myself whether, from a purely socio-economic standpoint, I'd be better off then or now. I have to remember to take into account the distribution of wealth and power in any particular age and under any particular form of gov't and sets of belief systems. You know, the present always wins.

The chances of being poor and powerless being disproportionately greater in the past, the likelihood of having capricious rulers literally owning me, and the arbitrary nature of the power of the organized religions of virtually every era preceding ours would be extreme enough. But, I'll also mention the great probability of neighboring groups even more brutal than those who rule over my life. These all would have combined to assure me a short, brutal, uncertain life lived with the knowledge that at any moment any one of the above could swoop down, burn my hovel, steal my wife, enslave my children, and if I'm lucky they'll kill me quickly... if I'm not so lucky I might end-up in the hands of the church.

Living in today's Western world, so full of the evils of science and the corrupt morality of evolutionary theory I'm disproportionately less likely to be crushingly poor, won't be enslaved, might still have capricious and even bad rulers but at least they are elected and have to follow the letter (if not the spirit) of the law if they want to arrest me for anything. The gov't can't legally burn me out of my house, the church can't really do anything to me at all, and I honestly can't remember the last time I worried about the Canadian Air Force bombing my house or the Mexican navy raping my wife and stealing my children.

But, hey I'm an optimist...

No, we shouldn't, but then again, he's definitely out to make a point. At least he's standing his ground under fire.