Jonathan Wells, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, presented at
Whitworth College on his new book, Icons of Evolution, last night. I thought
it was a polished presentation, and he did not go into the ID argument at
all. His point was that the majority of evolutionary biology textbooks used
discredited examples to support the Darwinian claims of common descent and
modification. For example, the widely used peppered moths example to
illustrate natural selection is based on doctored photos and the mistaken
understanding that those moths actually rested on the tree trunks. The
so-called Darwin's finches used as examples of speciation was based on
extrapolation of data, and in actual fact, the data showed no net
evolutionary changes, but rather, minor variations. He also talked about the
well-known (among biologists but apparently still in textbooks) Haeckel
drawings of embryos in different stages of development. Archaeopteryx was
another example of misinformation. Wells made the claim that many
professional biologists are not even aware of these problems because they
have been trained with these textbook examples as well and never thought to
question them. I am wondering if these perceptions of Wells are accurate,
and if so, this is a major problem. Can ASA do something about this? Should
publishers be persuaded to be more careful with what they put out?
One parent asked a very good question of what she could do, given that the
school district spent thousands of dollars on these textbooks and that some
science teachers have been quite reluctant to admit nor see the errors in
these books (applies to physics texts as well). Wells did not really have an
answer for her.
Adrian.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 10 2001 - 14:31:12 EDT