Several years back, I took an evolutionary biology class as part of getting in an ecology phd. I had some very serious issues with the class. Now, understand, I believe in evolution explicitly and have no use for creationism.
My issue was how the culture of the science is taking on religious traits, like the Darwin Messiah bit. I did a little analysis on the required reading - it mentioned Darwin more often than the Old Testament mentions God. I took three semesters of calculus and never once was Newton mentioned, because Newton is irrelevant to the science of calculus. So why did the final have a question about Darwin's exercise habits? "If you see the Buddha walking down the road, hit him with a stick" = hero worship only interferes with learning a subject.
I believe that the explanation of the origin of life on earth will always be speculation. My prof dismissed panspermia with creationism, but I don't see that. We've been testing it for decades, throwing lumps of metal covered with bacteria at dead worlds. No dice yet, but we're not dealing with good candidates either. He also used the fact that rabbits eat their feces as an argument against the existence of God, meaning I had to argue it, as the proposition is mindless (so, are nice smelling flowers an argument for God?), and was henceforth labelled a creationist (because, apparently, there are only Rational Scientists and Bible Thumpers in the world). In any case, that doesn't belong in the class. It's like taking embryology and getting pro-abortion lectures. The only way to describe the lectures is 'dogmatic'. If fact, I answered an exam question correctly and got no credit because it wasn't the answer mentioned in the lecture.
The whole experience bothered me a lot. I consider science to be a method for forming and testing hypotheses, and, secondarily, the body of data so collected. There seems to be a process whereby people who are persecuted become like their tormentors (copying a prosurvival trait), and I think it's happening to evo bio. Or maybe it was just one nut case.
My issue was how the culture of the science is taking on religious traits, like the Darwin Messiah bit. I did a little analysis on the required reading - it mentioned Darwin more often than the Old Testament mentions God. I took three semesters of calculus and never once was Newton mentioned, because Newton is irrelevant to the science of calculus. So why did the final have a question about Darwin's exercise habits? "If you see the Buddha walking down the road, hit him with a stick" = hero worship only interferes with learning a subject.
I believe that the explanation of the origin of life on earth will always be speculation. My prof dismissed panspermia with creationism, but I don't see that. We've been testing it for decades, throwing lumps of metal covered with bacteria at dead worlds. No dice yet, but we're not dealing with good candidates either. He also used the fact that rabbits eat their feces as an argument against the existence of God, meaning I had to argue it, as the proposition is mindless (so, are nice smelling flowers an argument for God?), and was henceforth labelled a creationist (because, apparently, there are only Rational Scientists and Bible Thumpers in the world). In any case, that doesn't belong in the class. It's like taking embryology and getting pro-abortion lectures. The only way to describe the lectures is 'dogmatic'. If fact, I answered an exam question correctly and got no credit because it wasn't the answer mentioned in the lecture.
The whole experience bothered me a lot. I consider science to be a method for forming and testing hypotheses, and, secondarily, the body of data so collected. There seems to be a process whereby people who are persecuted become like their tormentors (copying a prosurvival trait), and I think it's happening to evo bio. Or maybe it was just one nut case.
