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Author Topic:   What they teach you about creationism + evolution in school??!
Chiroptera
Inactive Member


Message 16 of 24 (67730)
11-19-2003 12:38 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by edge
07-19-2003 1:05 PM


I was creationist through most of high school - into my junior year. I took the AP biology course, and the teacher seemed shocked that we all in the class either didn't believe in evolution or had doubts about it. But she said she was going to teach it, and we had to understand it whether we believed it or not. Not in a confrontational way - none of us had any problem with it.
I admit, though, my doubts about creationism actually began the year before in the regular high school biology class. It wasn't due to any explicit teaching about evolution - it was the heirarchical classification of life that simply amazed me. It was very hard for me to reconcile this with Genesis.

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 Message 3 by edge, posted 07-19-2003 1:05 PM edge has not replied

  
Dan Carroll
Inactive Member


Message 17 of 24 (67731)
11-19-2003 12:45 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by han
11-18-2003 1:52 AM


quote:
After serveral complaints from parents he rewigned himself to videos (eg. sister act)
Wait, what?
Like... the Whoopi Goldberg movie?
What is that, like as evidence that "design" doesn't always connote "intelligent design"?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 14 by han, posted 11-18-2003 1:52 AM han has not replied

  
Katie
Inactive Member


Message 18 of 24 (68812)
11-23-2003 6:19 PM


(Hey everyone, this BarlowGirl, under a different username because BarlowGirl well.. was dumb, anyways)
I'm currently in Biology right now as a tenth grader, and I have a pretty neat intelligent teacher, Mr. Peper. I asked him one day before class started if the class was going to cover Evolution, and he handed me the layout of the rest of the class. Sadly Evolution was close to the very bottom. I said, "So you don't think Evolution is very important for my class to learn?", and he said "I never said that! I've got to cover other topics that lead into it." So with the speed of my slow, dumb class, I'm thinking I'm going to have to learn on my own.
I can just remember last year I was determinded to talk to the Guidance Office and see if I could just possibly skip Biology and move onto Chemistry instead, but I'm glad I took the time to take Peper's class. Now I like Biology so much that I'm dropping band (heh heh) and I'm planning on taking AP Compartive Anatomy in Zoology and AP Genetics Growth and Development. That might be a bit of a load for my to accomplish as a sophmore, but I guess I have to try at least.
Anyways, back to the subject, I'm not sure what beliefs Mr. Peper has, but I do really hope I get to have the experience of being taught the public school version of what Evolution is about.

Replies to this message:
 Message 19 by crashfrog, posted 11-23-2003 7:24 PM Katie has replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 19 of 24 (68846)
11-23-2003 7:24 PM
Reply to: Message 18 by Katie
11-23-2003 6:19 PM


You know, for as much as people say "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", it's always surprised me that high school biology curricula start with cell biology and genetics and work up to evolution. Me, I'd start with speciation and population evolution, then delve into genetics - focusing on what genes do before what genes are. Then I'd get into specific cellular mechanisms.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 18 by Katie, posted 11-23-2003 6:19 PM Katie has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 20 by Katie, posted 11-23-2003 10:28 PM crashfrog has not replied
 Message 21 by Rrhain, posted 11-24-2003 1:54 AM crashfrog has replied

  
Katie
Inactive Member


Message 20 of 24 (68875)
11-23-2003 10:28 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by crashfrog
11-23-2003 7:24 PM


Well, actually I think the process they go about to lead up to Evolution is working quite efficently. If we didn't cover about Cell Biology, or even the basics about Macromolecules, it would be just some more ramblings and I would have no beginning of an idea of what they could be talking about.
Oh, so Evolution is about after genetics? Awesome, I'm getting closer than. We are actually learning about how cells divide (meiosis and mitosis) and than some genetics, and than hopefully Evolution.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 19 by crashfrog, posted 11-23-2003 7:24 PM crashfrog has not replied

  
Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 21 of 24 (68903)
11-24-2003 1:54 AM
Reply to: Message 19 by crashfrog
11-23-2003 7:24 PM


crashfrog writes:
quote:
You know, for as much as people say "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", it's always surprised me that high school biology curricula start with cell biology and genetics and work up to evolution.
Because it's so much easier to talk about cellular biology than it is to talk about evolution. You don't get parents yelling at you about how you're doing the work of Satan when you talk about blood-type and assign the kids homework to ask their parents what their blood types are and then have them make a statistical table as to what their possible blood type is and then test that prediction by actually testing the kids' type.
It's a lot easier to go on and on about photosynthesis and the Kreb's Cycle and the citric acid cycle and make the students memorize things like "Golgi apparatus" and "endoplasmic reticulum" because none of those things are "controversial." It's a lot easier to deal with the occasional student who finds dissection "barbaric" than it is to play politics with someone's religion.
That said, there is something to be said about learning about how something functions on a day-to-day basis and then expanding out to see how it changes over time. While evolutionary theory does lead one to examine the innards of the cell and how it functions, we don't really have any information about how evolution created the specific things that we see. We can certainly see evolutionary effects in the chromosomes and can see how speciative transitions happen, but how did the Golgi apparatus evolve? Good question, but not exactly one for the high school set. In some sense, it's better to start with the aspects of biological investigation we do know about that can be completely and succinctly summarized than it is to hit an overarching paradigm that is hard to demonstrate beyond the chromosome.
------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 19 by crashfrog, posted 11-23-2003 7:24 PM crashfrog has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 22 by crashfrog, posted 11-24-2003 2:59 PM Rrhain has not replied

  
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1467 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


Message 22 of 24 (68999)
11-24-2003 2:59 PM
Reply to: Message 21 by Rrhain
11-24-2003 1:54 AM


Well, I do see your point. Personally evolution, especially speciation, didn't really make sense to me until I started looking at it - or was shown, actually - from the perspective of population genetics. Maybe that's not the same for other people, though.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 21 by Rrhain, posted 11-24-2003 1:54 AM Rrhain has not replied

  
Katie
Inactive Member


Message 23 of 24 (69578)
11-27-2003 9:28 AM


Over the past two days I started to read the college level Biology books my High School Biology teacher had laying around the room, and I guess I can see what Crashfrog is saying. At the beginning of this book it starts out explaining "The Science of Biology" and the very first thing it talks about is Darwin's journey on the H.M.S. Beagle. It goes on talking about his books, and his theory, ect. Than hidden in a paragraph it says "the theory of evolution will form the backbone of your study in biological science, just as the theory of the covalent bonds is the backbone in chemistry, or the theory of quantum mechanics is that of physics. Evolution by natural selection is a thread that runs through everything you will learn in this book." (Biology 4th Edition, Raven & Johnson)
What I find extremely interesting is the book my class is reading is called "The Living World" and it's written by the same Johnson as the college book. Maybe my class Biology book (The Living World) doesn't start out with that information because maybe because of the chance of chaos in starting out about talking about evolution right away will offend tons of us "younger biology" students (we are 10th graders). Its kinda like in Band and Choir, we are allowed to have Christmas songs and religious songs because the class isn't required (whereas Biology is pretty much required). Therefore they don't want to start out with Evolution right away because it could offend people that are required to take that class. Do you get what I'm trying to say here? Personally this past year has made me open to learning more about Evolution than blowing it off much like my sister attending a Christian college. I'm so excited to take my AP class in "Comparative Anatomy In Zoology"! Yeah!

Replies to this message:
 Message 24 by nator, posted 11-30-2003 7:45 AM Katie has not replied

  
nator
Member (Idle past 2170 days)
Posts: 12961
From: Ann Arbor
Joined: 12-09-2001


Message 24 of 24 (70042)
11-30-2003 7:45 AM
Reply to: Message 23 by Katie
11-27-2003 9:28 AM


quote:
Therefore they don't want to start out with Evolution right away because it could offend people that are required to take that class.
It is a little-known fact that Texas, having a huge textbook budget, basically sets the standard for the rest of the country when it comes to textbooks.
Since Texas politics is filled with Radical Right fundamentalist Christians, the approval board has a great chilling effect upon the inclusion of Evolution in science textbooks, the inclusion of the truth about segregation, slavery, and racism in history textbooks, the inclusion of the truth about sustainable environmental practices in environmental science textbooks, etc.
It is, indeed, politics and the radical religious views of a small group of powerful conservative Christians, not the consensus of centuries of study by experts in the relevant fields, which decides what will go into our nation's public school textbooks.
Read more here:
Texas wrangles over bias in school textbooks - CSMonitor.com

This message is a reply to:
 Message 23 by Katie, posted 11-27-2003 9:28 AM Katie has not replied

  
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