Should we teach both evolution and religion in school?

Sometimes that's where the blame falls. In your poorly educated world, everyone gets a social promotion. You will never understand stochastic processes (such as DNA evolution) until you understand introductory probability theory, you are either too lazy or too stupid to master that mathematics and most likely both. Oh my, a Bible scholar as well as an expert in the mathematics of evolution in our midst. We definitely know where the seed fell on the rocky ground in your household.

But you're blaming ALL of your students. Not ONE of the students in this class has learned your lesson. Not ONE of them is bright enough to learn. That seems *ahem* improbable.My Grade 10 math teacher had trouble right from day one - and once he lost control of the class there was no getting it back. On the Christmas exam there was only one passing grade - 52% - in a class of 30ish. I got 26% - the only exam I have ever failed, incidentally.They fired the teacher, not the students. We finished the year with the school pricipal - 6 foot 6 and pretty scary. I passed his exam with no trouble. I have never claimed to know anything about the "mathematics of evolution". I do have a rudimentary understanding of the mechanics of evolution, which doesn't seem to agree with YOUR mathematics.My main problem with you is your immature attitude.I have never claimed to be a Bible scholar either. There are plenty of people on this forum who know more about the Bible than I do. You're welcome to demonstrate that you are one of them.

So these things (minus the malaria resistance) have evolved in the last 10,000 years or so in a relatively small population. But with population growth nearly all the people that have ever existed did so well after the mesolithic era.What is the probability, according to your model, of this combination of traits evolving when they did? (I.e when only a few billion people had ever existed)

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So you want to replace evolution as the mechanism by which species originate with....what?

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Why would a belief need replacement? The evolving we see is here today. In the past, you don't really know how evolution worked or what evolved from what or where it started.

Aren't you the arrogant one. Not all my students have difficulty with the mathematics of evolution. It's only the fish-to-mammals aficionados that are having a problem with this math. The problem is that this mathematics which describes the empirical evidence doesn't fit with your delusions. It is you and your fellow fish-to-mammals aficionados that won't accept these mathematical and empirical facts of life. So you blame the teacher for your inability to learn mathematics? It is a poor student that blames the teacher when they can't pass an examination. So you blame me because you can't learn introductory probability theory. You haven't matured much since your high school days and you haven't learned much either. Why don't you watch the Kahn Academy lectures on probability theory? They are on YouTube, they are aimed at high school students. Then, you might be able to carry on an intelligent debate on the mathematics of evolution. That's your cue to start up your excuse machine. I've taught engineering at the university level, both undergraduate and graduate levels courses and always got high student evaluations. It's really not hard, just present the subject in a straight-forward logical manner and as long as the student has the prerequisite course work, my lectures were always easy to understand. Your problem is that you don't have the prerequisite course work. I've told you where you can watch the lectures and learn introductory probability theory, they are easy to understand. Once you do that, it will be easy to teach you the mathematics of evolution. Otherwise, just continue to be stupid and lazy. You are the one that quoted the "beam in your own eye". Do you really think that Jesus is telling us never to judge? If so, that is a very foolish interpretation of that verse. If you think my problem is that I don't understand probability theory, study the subject and tell me where I am wrong. You see, there is a big difference between you and me. When I first started looking at the subject of evolution 20 years ago, I studied the work of the fish-to-mammals aficionados and I did it with an open mind. I studied the works of Haldane, Kimura, and in particular the work of Snyder at the National Cancer Institute who wrote a computer simulation of random mutation and natural selection. I then tried to correlate this mathematics with real examples of evolution and it became apparent what was correct and what wasn't correct. It takes a lot of work and critical thinking to do this kind of analysis and my engineering training in the analysis of complex systems certainly helps. I try to distill this down to the simplest terms for people like you but when you refuse to put in the slightest effort to try to understand this subject, don't blame me. I would much rather debate this subject with someone who understands introductory probability theory because this math, while not trivial, is really not much more difficult than a coin-tossing problem. If you know how to compute the probability of getting at least a single head outcome with the tossing of a coin five times, you will understand the fundamental mathematics of evolution. So, do your homework and try to carry on an intelligent conversation.

This is part of the fish-to-mammals aficionados' compulsion. Many of these people are atheists and they think they have found the scientific justification for their beliefs. Instead, what they have done is given a grossly over-extrapolated view of evolution. Evolution should be taught in schools, naive children need to be prepared to understand how drug-resistance evolve and why cancer treatments fail. Instead, they are indoctrinated into this mythological belief system and have no real understanding of the physics and mathematics of evolution.

The arrogant one is you, who thinks you're right and everybody else is wrong. You've made it pretty clear that you think everybody in THIS class is stupid. That would be everybody. You're not paying attention. I DID learn mathematics - the same material, in the same year, but with a different teacher. It was only that one teacher who failed to teach it. ONE examination in sixteen years? You seem to be the one having problems with probability here. He told us not to judge with a beam in our eye. That includes not blaming your students before you've looked at your own shortcomings. You're welcome to discuss the Bible in an appropriate topic. I started more than fifty years ago. I started by trying to prove that the Flood really happened. Then why don't you go and do that? Why come here at all?

Right, so evolution is real and happens. But the process of evolution itself is not responsible for life on earth. That is just a belief.

No, you dumb cluck. Not everybody, just the fish-to-mammals aficionados. Not everyone you dumb cluck. At least Taq was able to figure out that it takes 3e9 replications for each possible substitution to occur. And one or more of those substitutions can be beneficial. You can't even do that simple calculation. So fish evolving into mammals isn't your only delusion. What a surprise, a fish-to-mammals aficionado who has to be spoon-fed mathematics in order to learn the subject. Didn't your teacher teach you how to read? Things haven't changed much for you since your high school days. Your problem is that you have to be spoon-fed to learn anything. And you don't have the intellect to examine this instruction for its veracity. Your indoctrination has made you a zealot. You are the one with the beam in your eye, you don't understand introductory probability theory yet you judge my math is wrong. Even Straggler acknowledges that this math is correct for explaining the evolution of drug-resistance Message 1849: Straggler's problem is that he can't present any real, measurable, and repeatable example of evolution that doesn't obey this math. It didn't take me that long to figure out the physics and mathematics of evolution. The evidence is clear and repeatable on that subject. It served a purpose, I figured out how to write the conclusion for my next paper.

Small population? You need to do a better job with your homework:
How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?
99% of people that have ever lived have lived in the last 10,000 years. And instead of trying to figure out how each trait somehow evolved, you should try to do the accounting for the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees in less than a million generations with much smaller populations. That's true! That doesn't leave you with very many replications for adaptive mutations before that period. You have just made my argument that there is no rational way that humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor. You simply don't have the population sizes necessary for these kinds of evolutionary transformations. Clearly, this is not nearly a large enough population for the transformation to occur due to selection. Perhaps you want to claim that humans and chimps simply drifted from a common ancestor. That's an awful lot of fixations by drift you need to account for. Do you care to show us the math for that?

According to your own link only 0.4% of the humans that have ever lived had existed by the point that the traits in question evolved. And we are talking about a geographically separate subset of that population.I am asking you what the probability of those traits in that combination evolving in that population is according to your model.I know you don't accept common descent. We have established that. So I am not sure why you are talking about chimpanzees. I am trying to establish whether your probability model is even consistent with the forms of evolution you presumably do accept. Namely the traits associated with Europeans that evolved in the mesolithic.Forget chimpanzees for a moment and try to focus...

That's essentially the same as your claim "But with population growth nearly all the people that have ever existed did so well after the mesolithic era." Why don't you do the math yourself? Count the number of mutations required for each trait and determine the number of replications necessary for all these mutations to accumulate on some lineage. The math really isn't that hard. If you are having trouble doing this more complex case, start with the computation of the number of replications necessary for just a single trait occurring such as the mutation for malaria resistance. Isn't it about time that you fish-to-mammals aficionados start quantifying DNA evolution yourselves? I don't accept common descent as you accept this notion, i.e., simple replicator in the primordial soup + time = Straggler. What I do accept as common descent as what can be measured. Here is a video of common descent and a phylogenetic tree that I do accept, from the Kishony experiment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8&t=1s
At about 1:45 in the video, they draw in the phylogenetic tree from this DNA evolutionary process and the accumulation of the mutations necessary for adaptation. Each node where the adaptation mutation occurs is a colony of about a billion members.The flaw in your argument is that you think these phenotypic variations somehow must have evolved after humans first appeared on earth and that the only way that they could appear is by mutation. There have been more than enough replications of humans over time for there to be lots of diversity in the population gene pool. Some of those mutations are beneficial in some environments, others are detrimental, and others are neutral. Not everyone has a mutation that gives resistance to malaria, not everyone has the correct alleles for blue eyes, or for fair skin, lactase persistence or alcohol tolerance. The environment will select for particular traits, Darwin's finch example demonstrates that and the same principles are demonstrated with subpopulations of humans in different environments. Web sites such as ancestry.com demonstrate that DNA analysis can determine what subset of the ancestral population you descended from because of the unique genetic characteristics of those subsets. But why can't this be done with human and chimpanzee DNA? The answer is quite simple. There are far too many genetic differences between the two species and not nearly enough replications to do the accounting for these differences, especially when you look at how similar the DNA is within each member of the same species. Surely, since 99% of the human population lived in the last 10,000 years, you would have to expect that most of the evolutionary change occurred in the same time period. You have a major accounting problem with your notion of common descent. My mathematical microscope has more than one lens. I've shown you how the high magnification mathematical lens works for a single mutation. The math doesn't get better for your view as you go to a lower magnification.

That is everybody, except you. I was pointing out that you were wrong when you said I couldn't learn mathematics. It was only ONE teacher who failed to teach me. You, on the other hand, have failed to teach ANYBODY on this forum. My brother taught me how to read before I started school. On the contrary, I have no trouble learning from a teacher who knows what he/she is doing. You're not paying attention. I haven't judged that your math is wrong. We've been talking about your inability to teach. The evidence shows that you haven't been able to teach ANYBODY on this forum. We also have to wonder why you're vainly trying to teach people on this forum when you could be saving lives with your wonderful breakthrough.

You live in a very small frozen wasteland. Is this your way of claiming that you understand introductory probability theory? Because you certainly haven't demonstrated that. And just because you have been indoctrinated into the fish-to-mammals clique, do you really think you understand anything about evolution? If so, explain the mathematics of the Kishony evolutionary experiment. Have your distant cousins, the bananas taught you anything? So what did learn from your teachers that indoctrinated you that you are a distant cousin to bananas? Did they explain to you how drug-resistance evolves or why cancer treatments fail? You are making an incorrect assumption here. I did not start this debate because I wanted to teach the fish-to-mammals aficionados how evolution works. I started this debate because I had writer's block on how to write the conclusion for my next paper. The strategy worked perfectly and I actually learned a little more detail on the Markov chain models of DNA evolution. It's too bad you haven't learned anything from this discussion and if it makes you feel better to blame me, that's all right. Maybe my problem is that I'm only 6'4" and not 6'6".

But we're connected to the rest of the world by something called the Internet. I was indoctrinated into the God-created-the-heavens-and-the-earth clique. I can trust a banana not to talk bullshit. YOU could learn a lot from a banana if only you were willing to learn. I haven't taken a biology class since high school and they didn't teach much about evolution then. What little I do know about evolution I learned from the stupidity of creationists. They explained to me that when somebody has a great scientific breakthrough (like you claim to have), he should talk to SCIENTISTS about it, not blather to a bunch of laymen where he can't possibly do any good. I'm not "blaming" you for being a bad teacher. I'm just saying that a good teacher doesn't blame his students.