Grim,
You say discussing Karl Marx is emotive. Then what about evolution? There aren’t many topics stirring the emotions more. Look at the emotive responses so far from the evolutionist corner:

Maracas calls creationists desperate.
Sir Vivor says they lobby to promote confusion.
Wing says creationists have a ‘vicious’ mindset, and actively misrepresent others.
Pericles refers to their insanity.
Adam says creationists deliberately lie and are not all there upstairs.
Kenny and Sancho use the words ‘creationist’ and ‘born again Christian’ as if they were insults by definition. Sancho threatening a return to the ‘Dark Ages’ (whenever that period was).
Even Davidf, who objects to loose ideological terms, throws around ‘Biblical literalist’ as if that meant something.

All this in a few days from one thread, following an article that hardly mentioned creationism.

Yet I can understand why. This issue touches the core of our being in how we view ourselves, our identity. Are we distinctly and carefully created in the image of the Almighty, or inherently one in essence with the animal kingdom? (I have little time for the middle ground, the view that says God chose a method of creating mankind that was so self redundant that he didn’t actually create anything.)

The issue also challenges our view of science, this wonderful tool that brought wonders and technologies unimaginable in other eras. Though magnificent in examining present day processes, at the moment of our identity crisis, is it capable of retracing our natural history? Has it found, or can ever possibly find the evidence to confirm our link to that past ancestor?

Natural history will always be debated and, unfortunately for certain empiricists, will always be philosophically rather than empirically driven.

As for Mendel, Darwin saw descent with modification as giving rise to butterflies, bananas and B Sc graduates, all from bacteria. Mendel demonstrated that variations within offspring were the result of genes, perhaps latent, but already present in the parents. Darwin was duly trumped by the discovery of genetics. So much that the Darwinist view had to be rearranged into what was newly dubbed Neo-Darwinism.

Damn, Dan. I scrolled down slowly through your post and thought: I like this guy(person), I like this guy(person)....and then you hit Mendel.
Please, read Darwin again. Read Mendel again. His original work with green peas and yellow peas was so basic, even a dummy like me could understand it.
Darwin would have loved Mendel's work. I'm absolutely certain of it.
We are not enemies. Cheers, Grim.

"Natural history will always be debated and, unfortunately for certain empiricists, will always be philosophically rather than empirically driven." -Dan

Only in blogs Dan, only in blogs. The rest of science is busy, far busier than you can believe, testing hypotheses with empirical studies, and evolution is guiding that research and quite fruitfully I might add.

As for the 'discovery of genetics' "trumping" Darwin, that's the funniest thing I have heard in a long time. Genetics, and especially modern genetics (i.e. after the discovery of the structure of DNA), has validated Darwin's core hypothesis. It's the mechanism that produces the variation that natural selection acts upon. He did hypothesise an erroneous mechanism (pangenes) that was fairly quickly refuted as it didn't fit observation), as here was very little understanding of the genetics of heredity at the time, but that doesn't/didn't invalidate the theory of natural selection.

A funny thing is that we now understand that there is some reason to believe that Mendel actually may have fudged his results (I say fudged, but more likely it was a selecting a 'clean' set of data that supported his hypothesis and ignoring those traits that didn't conform) just a little bit even though his basic hypothesis on the heredity of genes was mostly (but certainly not entirely) correct.

Dear Michael,

I totally agree with Grim when he says: “Darwin would have loved Mendel's work.” Mendel’s work would have helped Darwin to understand more about how his theory was at work. I’m not sure you understand what the study of genetics is, but as Bugsy mentioned, modern genetics and DNA help validate evolution. DNA even helps us to understand how life may have first arose.

Your list of posters in this thread (including myself) have made well-founded remarks/arguments (particularly the first three). If you have an issue with anything said in this thread, then please provide us with a response as to why anything that has been said is wrong. Describing the responses as “emotive” does not necessarily mean they are wrong. If that is what you were alluding to, then it’s a limp rebuttal at best, and a non sequitur at worst.

But if there is any emotion in my posts on this topic, then it comes from the concern I have for the children - who at no fault of their own - are being taught stupidity and are having an ignorant mindset ingrained into them when they are at their most vulnerable in life.

That, Michael, is child abuse - no matter how sincere the beliefs of the parents are.

Put it this way! If god made us all, then its fair to say that we are all( the human race ) aliens.

That would make sense with what man-kind has done to this planet.

Its true, No other living thing is like us, so where do we come from?

EVO

AdamD
>> ... children ... are being taught stupidity and are having an ignorant mindset ingrained into them when they are at their most vulnerable in life. That ... is child abuse - no matter how sincere the beliefs of the parents are.<<

Child abuse is morally abhorrent and illegal in Australia. So I presume you would want to not only outlaw RE - in public schools as well as private schools or churches - but prosecute and jail parents who dare to teach their children Christian (or of other religion) tenets, placing those children in institutions where they would be introduced into only officially accepted world views, deemed not to arrive at through indoctrination.

Well, I do not know how you would want to achieve this. Since I myself grew up in a Stalinist country, I can well imagine a situation where introducing children to any world view that contravenes the official one would be called indoctrination (then the official one was “dialectical materialism”, the one they could be indoctrinated into by parents was given a rather vague name “idealism”). However, even Stalinists would not have attempted to criminalise religious instructions provided privately by parents by calling it child abuse, because, presumably, they themselves were horrified of the consequences, (or perhaps just did not find it practicable).

One of my favourite Christians is a priest born in such a country, the son of a member of the Party Central Committee. He came accross Christianity as a teenager, was baptised at the age of 17, later secretly ordained a priest, earning his living as a teacher of, I think, biology and physics. He “outed himself” as a priest after 1989.

There are tolerant Christians, and there are intolerant ones, the same as there are tolerant adherents of an atheist world view and intolerant adherents of the same world view. Maybe indoctrination is somehow relevant here, I do not know; I am not that cock-sure of my own world view to use this term to denigrate those who arrived at a world view I disagree with or simply do not understand.