Evolutionary biology adopting religious traits

[Esquilax]

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.

Agreeing with the factually correct position isn't going to save you, if you say stupid things.

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.

The novel I'm currently working on uses the word "the" more times than the Old Testament mentions god too, I'm sure. Does that mean, therefore, that my kinky romance novel is religious toward the word "the"? Or can we all just acknowledge that word usage is not a reliable indicator of the contents of the book, over... the contents of the book?

I took three semesters of calculus and never once was Newton mentioned, because Newton is irrelevant to the science of calculus.

Newton may be, but Newton's ideas might not be. And if the book happened to use Newton's name a lot in reference to his ideas, would that too mean religious fervor to you? Or would you use Occam's Razor and just conclude that, perhaps, the writer was kinda bad at his job?

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.

Would a question on Darwin's exercise habits exclusively lead you to the conclusion of hero worship, or would you allow yourself to think other, perhaps less intellectually vapid thoughts on the subject? Based on the information I have now I agree that it's weird, but could it be, maybe, a tongue in cheek question to lighten the mood? Did it have some relevance to the subject at hand?

More broadly, do you always think "hero worship" when you see a single mention of a person in a test?

I believe that the explanation of the origin of life on earth will always be speculation.

The origin of life is an entirely unconnected field of study to what you came here to discuss. Did you pay much attention, in your class?

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.

Or possibly with the correct environments, or time scales...

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).

You may have had a lousy teacher, there.

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.

So... you claim to know how the scientific method works, but you're gonna draw the conclusions you do from a sample size of one? Not only that, one college course?

Okay...