re: #974 bobbuck

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Is there some kind of cash prize for slaying the most strawmen? Public schools ARE dropping driver’s ed and dumbing down physics. I believe we should teach MORE physics, math, and economics because those are USEFUL subjects. Go count the number of nuclear engineers we graduated in this country last year. It won’t take long. Now count up the class-hours wasted on evolution. There is an economic cost for everything that the schools teach. The learned material has worth that cost.

Bioscience is slated to be the principlal science of the 21st century, as physics was considered to be the principal science of the 20th. With the recent breakthroughs in cloning, stem cell research, genetic engineering and genome sequencing, nothing less than a revolution is in the offing.

Genes for bioluminescence obtained from jellyfish have been spliced into the mouse genome, allowing the function and structure of induced glowing tumors to be studied in a fine-grained manner that may lad to treatments and cures. The genetic sequence for Vitamin A production obtained from daffodils has been spliced into the rice genome, producing a Vitamin A rich grain that prevents millions of poor sputheast asian children from contracting rickets. Genetic modifications to food crops are allowing us to grow hardier crops in areas where they could not grow before due to moisture and temperature, rendering them blight and insect resistant so pesticides are not as necessary, and permitting higher yields. And we are working on genetically engineering viruses whose sole purpose will be to replace the defective genetic sequences possessed by those who suffer from congenitally inherited diseases with the healthy sequences, thus eliminating hereditary illnesses not only for the person, but for all of their descendents, and upon viruses that will splice sequences into our genomes that will render ourselves and all of our descendents immune to some of the most lethal viral diseases out there. And these are only a few of many examples. Evolution instruction wasted and useless? Clearly, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. And you apparently wanna keep the coming generation just as willfully ignorant as you are yourself.

It appears that you just don’t want US public high school students to be taught evolution, and would rather keep them ignorant of such empirical facts. I can not think of any nonreligious reason for you to assume such a stance.