To: neolib who wrote (183836 ) 3/22/2006 9:09:55 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Okay am back now - reply continued.Haeckel's drawings of embryonic similarities were not correct. British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleages published an important paper in the August 1997 issue of Anatomy & Embryology showing that Haeckel had fudged his drawings to make the early stages of embryos appear more alike than they actually are! As it turns out, Haeckel's contemporaries had spotted the fraud during his lifetime, and got him to admit it. However, his drawings nonetheless became the source material for diagrams of comparative embryology in nearly every biology textbook, including ours! millerandlevine.com You can ignore everything but genetics from now on IMO. There are millions of genes, and people are busy crunching the numbers on how the genes relate between species. If you handed DNA samples of life on earth to some intelligent agent who had not a clue what it was from, said agent would eventually tell you how they were related, without ever knowing that the DNA formed bodies with related morphology. The Cambrian explosion is being stretched all the time. New fossils keep pushing back the time of the earliest phyla. Genetics will have much to add to this BTW. Its exciting times for evolutionary theory because of this. For creationist, all this knowledge is just wasted, since they are content with "God made it that way". Why bother looking for why? Its the norm in "Creation Science" If any of them tried to force their views to be taught in religious courses, I would also object. Read what they say themselves. Only if you are ignorant. You might want to think bird flu and immune systems. You might want to think bird flu and immune systems. Immunology is one field in which evolutionary theory is very important. In fact, your immune system is basically a fast evolver, that’s how it works. That’s why you get sick when a pathogen first invades. It takes awhile for you body to evolve an effective antigen. Once it has evolved an effective one, production takes off, and you get better. Science started doing well when scientists practiced philosophical materialism whether they realized it or not. It will continue to do well as long as we continue down that path. It will nosedive if we don't. Thats why I will not vote for McCain or any clown who advocates ID. Evolution has nothing to say about atheism. The bulk of Americans who accept evolution are Christian. Major American religions which accept evolution are: 1) Catholic, 2) most main stream Protestants, 3)many Jews, 4)Mormons(??). Most of these would be surprised to consider themselves atheist. It is fundamentalist Protestant groups (like Baptists) which are the creationist supporters. The frequently made assertion that modern biology and the assumptions of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are fully compatible is false. ..... I suspect there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty on this issue. Consider the following fantasy: the National Academy of Sciences publishes a position paper on science and religion stating that modern science leads directly to atheism. What would happen to its funding? To any federal funding of science? Every member of the Congress of the United States of America, even the two current members who are unaffiliated with any organized religion, profess to be deeply religious. I suspect that scientific leaders tread very warily on the issue of the religious implications of science for fear of jeopardizing the funding for scientific research. And I think that many scientists feel some sympathy with the need for moral education and recognize the role that religion plays in this endeavor. These rationalizations are politic but intellectually dishonest. "
