[asa] Ditch Darwin To Advance Theory of Evolution, says Professor of Evolutionary Biology

The theory of biological evolution as it is presented today is dogmatic ideology? This professor has called for scientists to de-emphasize Darwin. It is significant that he made this call at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in San Francisco.This news article is for subscriber. But you can read it from the "cache" of Google search result.The Chronicle of Higher EducationMonday, February 19, 2007

De-emphasizing Darwin Might Advance the Argument for Evolution, Biologist Says at Scientists' Meeting In his controversial book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins insisted that scientists should work to dispel the idea that God exists. Without religion, Mr. Dawkins has said, the conflict between scientists' beliefs about evolution and the fundamentalist religious belief that a supernatural intelligence created all life would vanish. Now an evolutionary biologist has proposed a different tack. In a meeting last weekend in San Francisco, he suggested scientists might win the argument by ditching Darwin.

...
  Mr. Kutschera, a professor of plant physiology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kassel in Germany, said scientists should emphasize that evolution is a fully formed field of biological study "built up by generations of non-dogmatic scientists." Terms like Darwinism can make evolutionary biology seem like an ideology, rather than a focus of empirical work, he said.
 Few think that Darwin himself is such a divisive figure. But at a session on growing anti-evolutionary sentiment in Europe, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic agreed that scientists should change the way they present their views.
Pressure from religious groups to teach alternatives to evolution, such as intelligent design, in science classes once seemed mostly an American problem, but that is no longer true.

 
---------------------------------
Don't get soaked. Take a quick peak at the forecast
 with theYahoo! Search weather shortcut.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Mar 1 12:16:56 2007