re: #403 Salamantis

The central tenets of evolutionary theory - random genetic mutastion and nonrandom environmental mutation - are as settled as empirical science gets. For 150 years, experimental researchers have been investigating and interrogating these tenets, and ALL of the empirical evidence they have derived has supported evolution, while NONE of the empirical evidence has contradicted it.

As to your suggestion that we should teach bioscience without teaching evolutionary theory? That makes about as much sense as teaching geology without teaching plate tectonics, or teaching about the solar system without teaching heliocentrism, or teaching physics without teaching relativity theory or quantum mechanics. As Theodore Dobzhanslky correctly and consisely stated: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”

[Link: www.pbs.org…]

You’re just going to have to accept that, because most of the people I know who are conservatives but are moving away from thinking from a church perspective think pretty much the same about evolution as I do. There are, again speaking as a layperson who probably won’t go researching as much as you have, too many holes in the fossil record for me to just accept it as proven fact. Judging from the reaction, I’m sure I’ll be considered just as looney as someone waning to force ID to be taught.