Articles tagged with "evolution"

In Wellington, we're hoping to take a trip to the Abundant Life church early next month. The church's pastor, Hamish Thomson, recently took over the running of the quarterly Prayers at Parliament meetings that myself and other skeptics have attended in the past, but this isn't why we'll be visiting. On May the 4th, in the evening, the church will be hosting guest speaker Mike Collins (no, not the astronaut who didn't land on the moon, this one's a speaker for Creation Ministries International (CMI)) giving a talk titled “How Evolution Hurts Science and People”. With a title like that, I think we'll be in for a real treat - a fairly major bending of the truth to fit a conservative religious narrative.

I recently watched a debate on YouTube between Dr. Zachery Ardern and Stephen Woodford.

It's 12th February as I write this. Happy Darwin Day! (And, a day before my birthday)

Yes, the pandemic is still with us, and alarmingly new strains are emerging. Evolution does what evolution does.

Rush Limbaugh, US radio talk show host, has used a conversation about Harambe the gorilla to argue that evolution does not work.

Antonin Scalia, a conservative Supreme Court judge in the US, died this week at age 79. Scalia took some strange legal views in his time, such as this one on evolution:

I went to see Creation Ministries International speaker Jonathan Sarfati give a couple of talks in Wellington last week. Jonathan was brought up in New Zealand, and was once the national chess champion.

Matthew Willey has a series of discussions about big questions.

On a recent visit to New Plymouth I was rather taken aback to see a billboard outside a central city church posing the question: "Evolution? How come we still have apes?" It wasn't so much surprise that someone could know so little about evolutionary theory that they would think this was a persuasive argument - versions of this are often to be seen in the less sophisticated creationist publications - it was more that they should feel the urge to display their ignorance on a busy street corner.

Evolution - What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. Donald R Prothero, Columbia University Press. Reviewed by Louette McInnes.

Mike Palin queries the judging criteria in a recent high school science video competition.

Ian Wishart is one of New Zealand's more prominent creationists. In a recent book he takes on evolutionary biology, a task for which he seems ill-equipped.

In NZ Skeptic 85 Alison Campbell discusses teaching evolution in the school curriculum with particular reference to the influence of local creationist pressures opposing this as a sole 'theory'. If New Zealand Skeptics are to be true to their cause they must also take a hard look at their own basic assumptions. My concern from an informed amateur perspective is that in teaching evolution it is important to be intellectually honest to students. The fact of the development of life forms over billions of years and their gradual divergence from earlier morphological templates is beyond question to any rational inquirer even if it cannot demonstrated in the traditional hypothesis/experimental test paradigm. Furthermore, Darwin's concept of natural selection is most obviously applicable to those life forms we are most familiar with and on which he based his inductive studies. At this level of macro development for instance, some morphological changes are clearly adaptive for predation or escape, and auditory or visual cues evolve to serve the attraction of mates or camouflage. However there is still substantial debate whether this paradigm can cover all stages in the evolution of life on Earth. It is when we get to the question of the origins of life or the complex operations within a single cell that questions arise. Such intricate developments are crucial to the central concept of Neo-Darwinism.

The teaching of evolution in New Zealand schools may seem secure, but it has faced many challenges, and these appear to be on the increase. This article is based on a presentation at the Evolution 2007 Conference, Christchurch.

The Plausibility of Life-resolving Darwin's dilemma, by Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart. Yale University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-300-10865-6. Reviewed by Louette McInnes.

Attacks on Darwinian evolutionary theory have come from within the scientific community as well as from creationists. Much of this is the normal process of scientific scrutiny, but some bear all the hallmarks of pseudoscience.

Jim Ring finds some material to pass the time on a recent flight.

Since I wrote my piece (NZ Skeptic 75) based on Bruce Flamm's article in Skeptical Inquirer concerning a research paper on the efficacy of prayer, Dr Flamm has reported 'significant development'. Lest you jump to the conclusion that the authors, journal and university have acknowledged their serious error and have retracted the paper, be at once disabused. The significance of these developments, to my mind, is their minuscule and peripheral nature; nothing has really changed. One could reasonably grant a significant development to Wirth; he pleaded guilty to a 46-page indictment and is in jail for five years. Concerning the 'lead' author, Lobo, the journal later printed, at the bottom of the back page, an Erratum, that this name had been included 'in error'. Young researchers often complain that senior colleagues insist on their names appearing on papers unjustifiably. In the topsy-turvy world of this journal, people find their names put unknowingly on papers they have had nothing to do with!

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A Waikato University website on evolution has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from teachers, says biological sciences lecturer Alison Campbell.

A critique of "Walking with Beasts", by Ian Wishart, Investigate Magazine, June 2002

Netsurfer Science is a website every skeptic should bookmark. It provides a good lead-in to many science and skeptic-related sites and issues on the web. Here are a couple of recent items.

I didn't wish to begin a debate about the issues surrounding religion in the 16th and 17th-century, nor would I ever wish to stop anyone from taking in interest in history. All I wanted to do was to point out that history is an academic discipline the same as any other, and it is dangerous to make pronouncements of such a dogmatic nature in the subject in which one has not been trained.

If you're a fan of oddities such as those showcased in Ripley's Believe It or Not, you'll love the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. This home of quackery features some amazing fraudulent gadgets. Learn, for example, about prostate cures like the light-bulbed prostate gland warmer or the frighteningly named recto rotor. These delights and more await you at http://www.mtn.org/quack/

NZCSIOP does not take a stand against religious belief, per se, and many Christians are committed Skeptics. While Mr van der Lingen's essay may appear to contradict this stance, he is not arguing that religious belief is incompatible with being a Skeptic; he is only challenging some claims and methodologies adopted by those who take a particular set of positions regarding the relationship between evolutionary science and contemporary Christian belief.

RIVER OUT OF EDEN: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF LIFE by Richard Dawkins.

We need to immunise ourselves against this virus too.

Fundamentalists suffer contortions in trying to make their assumptions fit Biblical accounts.

by D R Selkirk & F J Burrows; NSW University Press, 1987; 158 pp

Warwick Don was elected at the AGM to succeed Prof. Tony Vignaux as Chairman of the New Zealand Skeptics. Mr Don, a senior lecturer in Zoology at the University of Otago, was a founding member of the society. However his experience as an advocate for science and the scientific approach goes back much further. My personal collection of clippings contains two articles he had published in Otago University's student newspaper in 1966 and 1967 responding to attempts to recast evolution in a religious mould. He is also a formidable debater against creationism—as was evident from the letters in The Nelson Evening Mail (27/5/87 to 30/7/87) in which he and Jim Ring presented the skeptical viewpoint. Mr Don's special concern at the moment is the draft Form I-V science syllabus—in particular its inclusion of non-scientific elements.

"Do you believe in science or religion?" is a not uncommon question amongst layfolk caught in the crossfire between, for example, biological and cosmological evolution, and creationism. Creationism has made one largely unrecognised major inroad: it has managed to create a broad dichotomy in the public mind, which has on the whole responded according to the "two sides to every argument" sense of fair play and concomitantly cocked an ear to proponents of the "other view". It is my assertion, however, that the very issue of "'science vs religion" is as mythical as the charming creation-stories of many a mythology in that creationists are not at all representative of "religion" in its global sense.

To secure a place in American schools creationists now claim their doctrines are scientific, while evolution, on the other hand, is a 'religion'.

On Sunday, 24 May, there was broadcast on the Commercial programmes a debate on Evolution-Creationism. The host was George Balani and our member, Gordon Hewitt, spoke for evolution and Dr Arthur Wilder-Smith defended creationism. This debate provided the perfect example of creationist technique in action. How do creationists do it?

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruling striking down Louisiana's creationism law signals trouble for fundamentalist parents in Alabama who have challenged public school textbooks on religious grounds, attorneys and educators are saying.

Stephen Jay Gould, the world's best known palaeontologist, was approached by a creationist in Auckland after a lecture.