Joey’s Crappy Day

For those of you who don’t “believe” in evolution I suggest you check out this blog entry about Podarcis sicula. It’s no Crocoduck, but it’s a great illustration of what evolution is really all about. Take a population, isolate it, change the environment, et voila, something new and different. I wonder what will happen if they introduce some of the new lizard variants back into their original environment. Will they interbreed with the old population? Will they change back to their insect eating ways? Will they revert back to their original configuration? An interesting scenario no matter how you look at it.

Now it comes down to finding out if this is “true” evolution, meaning actual genetic variation. That’s the next step. Hopefully there will be a followup article to let us know the results of that research. Here’s a link to the original article.

After reading this article, I decided it was time to let everyone know exactly what Science really is. Science is merely a method for solving problems. Many of you might remember studying the Scientific Method in school. For those that don’t, it has its own website.

Now I’m not saying that Evolution is the be-all end-all of scientific theories, but it has been arrived at logically and in a wholly scientific kind of way through observation, hypothesizing, and experimentation. My beef is with these religious zealots who insist on teaching school children the “Theory of Creationism” in a science class. Creationism is not a scientific theory. As far as I know there is not one shred of evidence that even comes close to proving that creationism is a valid theory. There are plenty of Creationism websites out there, but don’t bother reading them. Let me just say that proving Evolution wrong does not make Creationism right.

The big point I’m trying to make here is that we should look at what we are teaching and why we are teaching it. The purpose of science in K-12 education should not be the teaching of theories as fact. On that point I actually do agree with the creationists. What we should be teaching children is a reasonable and critical way of thinking about problems, i.e. the scientific method.

And this applies not only to science, but to every field of scholastic endeavour. Too often we teach children a mass of facts and theories, and completely miss the concepts. It amazes me how many people do things and have no idea why they are doing it. It is because they don’t know the concepts. If we teach concepts then children can apply them to every situation and it would improve their life many more times than a bunch of random trivia.