Ken Ham is ... EXPELLED

I take a different view on these things. What I always wonder about is all of the great future biologists that were scared away from science by homeschooling. I will agree that one does not need to understand evolution that well in order to score well on high school standardized tests. I think this speaks more to the awful state of standardized tests and high school education as a whole, but that is a topic for another day. So even if kids are not taught evolution and pass tests with high marks it still does not change the fact that parents have told their kids that the evolution boogey man is lurking out there in biology classes. This boogey man can lead you to atheism and a rejection of God if you let him get his fingers into you. What else is a kid supposed to think other than to stay away from further education in the biological sciences? How many great future scientists have been scared away from a great and rewarding career because their parents threatened their everlasting soul with damnation if they did so?Also, one of the philosophical tenets of science is that there are no sacred cows. There are no questions that should not be asked, or hypotheses that should not be considered. From the time of Galileo science has given the religious aristocracy the middle finger time after time. IMHO, science should have an air of being crass, anti-establshment, and daring. This shouldn't be taken too far, don't get me wrong. However, science doesn't work if it is kowtowing to unsupported religious beliefs. Learning science should be a slap in the face. It should open your eyes and tell you that whatever you believe is wrong, and this is why.I'll leave it there, but there is plenty more to the rant if you want to hear it.

For some of the families I grew up around, yes. This is exactly how they presented it. By the age of 10 they were being taught the most famous PRATT's in the book and being told that evolution was a tool used by atheists to make people hate God. I remember sitting in one time during "biology" class at one of my friends house. The first topic was Nebraska man and how atheists were using a tooth to tell lies to children. I don't view medical doctors as biologists. I have had to completely retrain medical doctors so that they wouldn't start the lab on fire. From my own experience, doctors and biologists think quite differently.As to neurobiology, I wonder what your friend has to say about the human accelerated regions (HAR's) that are related to human brain evolution.

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Nature 443, 167-172 (14 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05113; Received 27 June 2006; Accepted 25 July 2006; Published online 16 August 2006

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An RNA gene expressed during cortical development evolved rapidly in humans
Katherine S. Pollard1,8,9, Sofie R. Salama1,2,9, Nelle Lambert4,5, Marie-Alexandra Lambot4, Sandra Coppens4, Jakob S. Pedersen1, Sol Katzman1, Bryan King1,2, Courtney Onodera1, Adam Siepel1,7, Andrew D. Kern1, Colette Dehay6,7, Haller Igel3, Manuel Ares, Jr3, Pierre Vanderhaeghen4 and David Haussler1,2

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Top of pageAbstractThe developmental and evolutionary mechanisms behind the emergence of human-specific brain features remain largely unknown. However, the recent ability to compare our genome to that of our closest relative, the chimpanzee, provides new avenues to link genetic and phenotypic changes in the evolution of the human brain. We devised a ranking of regions in the human genome that show significant evolutionary acceleration. Here we report that the most dramatic of these 'human accelerated regions', HAR1, is part of a novel RNA gene (HAR1F) that is expressed specifically in Cajal—Retzius neurons in the developing human neocortex from 7 to 19 gestational weeks, a crucial period for cortical neuron specification and migration. HAR1F is co-expressed with reelin, a product of Cajal—Retzius neurons that is of fundamental importance in specifying the six-layer structure of the human cortex. HAR1 and the other human accelerated regions provide new candidates in the search for uniquely human biology.

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There was a case like this a few years back. My memory is a bit hazy, but I believe there was a technician that agreed to work in a lab. At the time the PI was working off of a grant that was looking that the evolutionary history of a certain fish. The technician refused to use evolution in the work, and was summarily fired. When the tech filed suit for wrongful termination it was quickly thrown out of court. It was obvious to all that one should not enter a workplace that requires the use of evolution if you refuse to use it.Hypothetically, let's say that your boss wants you to take some of the currently unannotated genes from a recently sequenced genome and try to figure out their function. As it turns out, one of the best tools currently is SIFTER. This is an algorithm that uses evolutionary distances and history to infer protein function, and the results it kicks back are 96% accurate. If you reject evolution what will you tell your boss? Sorry, I know that it works but I refuse to use it on religious grounds?