First Russian Anti-Evolution Suit Enters Court Room 485
sdriver writes "If you thought it was only the US giving Darwin a hard time, Russia has its own problems starting with evolution. A student has 'sued the St. Petersburg city education committee, claiming the 10th-grade biology textbook used at the Cervantes Gymnasium was offensive to believers and that teachers should offer an alternative to Darwin's famous theory.' The suit, the first of its kind in Russia, is being dismissed out of hand by the principal and teachers. The teacher of the science class had apparently even taken the step of stating at the start of the school year that there were other theories on the origin of life."
Sure! Here's your alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Species and life aren't the same thing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Our magical overlords.... (Score:3, Informative)
Not that hard to do, as long as you're using ID style reasoning: pick some holes, or currently poorly understood areas (which, let's face it, every field of science has), rattle on about them for a while, then leap across the false dichotomy and claim that, since the current theory fails to explain things therefore your alternative must be the truth! Gravity is a lie! Teach the Controversy! [kuro5hin.org] (complete with entirely valid references to peer reviewed physics articles).
Re:The schools name is (Score:4, Informative)
I bet most Slashdotters don't know the following, which comes from http://www.dictionary.com/ [dictionary.com]
Gymnasium - An academic high school in some central European countries, especially Germany, that prepares students for the university.
The term is used a lot in the former Soviet Union. I've heard it used in Ukraine to describe what we in America would call "high school".
Re:Believer's Rights? (Score:4, Informative)
http://news.ntv.ru/99758/ [news.ntv.ru]
http://www.lawlinks.ru/view_news_spb.php?id=29775 [lawlinks.ru]
There's a small problem: you need to read Russian
Re:other theories (Score:5, Informative)
Evolutionists do not believe it started randomly.
They have seen evidence of natural selection.
They have fossil records that coordinate with geologic and other records showing a lack of human fossils fairly recently in history. Predictions made based on plate theory and other models of historical geology have been tested successfully.
The fossil record shows various waves of complex creatures but once you get back far enough, the creatures become simpler and more primitive.
Natural selection provides a reasonable explanation for how creatures can change from a mouse type creature to an elephant type creature in only about 10,000 years. We have observed new species to come into existence in our life time. We have strong evidence from dna that humans had severe pinch points in the very recent past and that we only existed as a species for a couple million years at most.
However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start.
Basically it only says that creatures who reproduce more have more children and so their children eventually become the population.
Given random mutations which have no affect in reproductive fitness, the random mutations will be carried.
Given random mutations that lower reproductive fitness, they will disappear (at a speed relative to how harmful they are).
Given beneficial mutations that increase reproductive fitness, those creatures with those mutations will rapidly come to dominate a population.
Looking at the record the best you can say is "it's likely that creatures were very simple before the earliest hard records.
However- it directly confronts religious text since it pretty much says man did not exist and "near men" did exist in pre-religious times. Just like a religion that says the earth is the center of the universe is provably WRONG, any religion that seriously says man only existed for under the last 10,000 years is provably wrong.
Re:other theories (Score:3, Informative)
"most of us just have a problem with it being taught as a fact instead of a theory."
Congratulations... you're officially the millionth person to misunderstand the use of the word "theory." Those who would like to read along can type "dict theory" into their Firefox URL bar:
The "theory" in "theory of evolution" refers to the first definition of the word:
A lot of people are tripped up by the second definition of the word:
When people are boggled by the apparent contradiction when it's explained "evolution is both a theory and a fact," it's because they're trying to apply the 2nd definition of the word "theory." If that's what were being used here, then yeah, it'd could be seen as contradictory. But it is vital to understand that the word "theory" is being used per the first definition, as in "theory of gravity" et al.
Yeah, the English language can be confusing at times; it would have been better if that word didn't have multiple definions, but it does. I hope this has cleared things up for you. Evolution is both a theory and a fact.
Re:other theories (Score:5, Informative)
Same thing with gravity. We know gravity is real. We can measure it, we can experience. However, the Theory of Gravity and the Theory of Relativity are not proven and will never be. All these theroies do, as the Wiki indicated, is lay out a testable, verifiable process which best explains how these facts come about.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Informative)
Mass starvation ensued. Ignore Mr. Darwin at your own peril, folks.
Obligatory karma whoring Wikipedia link. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Theory (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sure! Here's your alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Re:other theories (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that creationists and ID folk want not just their own opinion, but their own facts. They keep saying that evolution has never been witnessed, that there are no transitional fossils, that evolution is impossible because it violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, and so on. And if you read only creationist literature and have a general distrust of mainstream science, those arguments may seem tenable. But creationst thought only thrives when it's isolated--when you read mainstream literature about evolution, you find that these seemingly burning, portentious questions have been answered time and time again, usually decades ago. This would be like me reading only atheism books to learn about the Bible.
The whole point is moot (Score:1, Informative)
Evolution doesn't say anything about biogenesis, and really, I've never heard a half-decent scientific hypothesis to deal with it, either. It's all conjecture.
Natural selection happens, yes. Anyone with eyes can see it. But what was first? Where did it come from? How did it start? Nobody knows.
The Big Bang happened, yes. But what was before that? Where did the particles come from? Nobody knows.
That's the stuff of religion. Natural selection does nothing to disprove the creation; indeed, it has nothing to do with creation -- just with generational life processes. Oddly enough, the genesis story does coincide with the likely order that nature evolved. That it says 7 days instead of 10 eons or whatever is really just a red herring.
The real issue where religion and science meet is that science can only describe what it can observe and predict. The thought that something outside our observation, even outside our universe as we understand it, got the whole ball rolling and still influences it is incompatible with scientific theory because it's non-falsifiable (and also "non-provable"). That this something has a mind and free will also makes it unpredictable.
So we come to an impasse. Or do we? Maybe the creation story in Genesis exists to give us the basic idea of the creation, and to make us curious about it, or to satisfy our natural curiosity with a story that even a child can understand. Maybe science exists to fill in the blanks, to write the real story of the creation.
I personally don't think that the Biblical version and the Scientific version will end up very far apart after all. We just need to get past the hyperbole and the confusion of "biogenesis" with "evolution".