Creationism in the Classroom: a pox on America

Posted on May 22nd, 2008 in Evolution, Science by Robert Miller

As we struggle in America to implement improvements in our teaching and classroom material, we constantly confront non-educational issues like religious indoctrination and teaching creationism as if it were a serious alternative to science. Evolution is at the core of understanding biology and the behavioral connections between non-human primates and humans and ants and termites and humans and just about everything else. How else can we study the detailed synaptic mechanisms of neurotransmitter release in a fruit fly and then turn around and directly apply those results, molecule for molecule, gene for gene, to a human? What creationism has created is one of the most scientifically illiterate countries in the Western World; we are next to last place among 44 Western democracies, only ahead of Turkey on simple questions about evolution; it is alarming to all of us that overcoming this non-blissful state of ignorance is one of the never-ending confrontations in America. We already have too many propaganda stories in our schools, such as American history, so, I suppose you might argue what’s one more, such as the Biblical interpretation of the creation of man and the earth on which we live? Thus, we have to give credit to creationism–it did create something.

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George: how Darwinian Natural Selection gave us Democrats and Republicans

Posted on March 22nd, 2008 in Culture, Environment, Evolution, Politics by Robert Miller

Social Darwinism argues that altruistic behavior among socialized animal groups arises through natural selection, favoring the development of a gene pool which promotes subordinate interactions among members of the same clan, to gain a survival niche for the larger group. In this evolving structure, the survival of the individual is achieved through their commitment to a role within the socialized unit. This may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who views evolution as the simplistic “survival of the fittest.” It is certainly true that a more socialized gene pool makes individuals within the clan more subordinate and less likely to survive on their own. But, as the adaptive success of the social group becomes increasingly established, it serves as the best and perhaps the only means by which the species can survive. Extreme examples are found among socialized insects where you could not imagine a bee or an ant going out and surviving on its own. They need the social unit fed by their submissive function, just as the social unit, which, in reality is a bunch of DNA, needs membership submission for its survival. Thus, counter-intuitive though it may be, it is the selfish gene pool that strives to survive and the individuals who carry the genes are only the temporary vassals of the DNA that is always striving for a better outcome. In a way, you might think of the words of Samuel Butler “a hen is only the egg’s way of making another egg.” In a more scientific light, the organism is DNA’s way of making more DNA, as Edward O. Wilson has stated in his book: “Sociobiology.” Victims of our DNA? Absolutely, but enjoy the ride!

So let’s take our newly emergent knowledge of Social Darwinism 101 and apply it to the evolutionary origin of modern Democrats and Republicans in America. Surely this kind of analysis is crying to be done. If we stretch our imaginations far back into an earlier, evolutionary stage of our ancestral development, at a time when we were a group of tree dwelling primates, we can appreciate some of the pressures that might exist for natural selection to favor one type of clan organization over another. Let’s imagine our distant ancestors in an environment where food was plentiful, with a vast carpet of fruit trees amidst a plush jungle of vegetation, rich enough to support a lavish lifestyle of eating at will and living continuously above the ground, safely removed from most predators. This environmental nirvana of abundance put little pressure on social unit formation and allowed for wide variance of individualistic behavior, even though early social units were also evolving into place, through a process known as genetic drift. Through this mechanism, multiple behavioral motifs were evolving simultaneously in the same species and developing in parallel and within the same general geographical area. It was as if nature was experimenting and probing in a variety of ways to optimize and specialize in the anticipation of future changes that could not be foreseen. But at this moment in time, these differences seemed to offer no obvious benefit and no identifiable clues for any survival value.

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How the brains of Republicans differ from those of Democrats

Posted on March 4th, 2008 in Culture, Evolution, Politics, Science by Robert Miller

We are making great progress. Progress that is, in understanding the peculiar nature of the Republican brain. In general, humans, both Democrats and Republicans have very large brains and a very long period of adolescence to engage in prolonged learning tasks before the reproductive years come into play. If you try to calculate our brain size, by predicting what it should be, based on mammalians of similar size, you conclude that the human brain is about seven times larger than that of a similar-sized non-human. Other primates have large brains as well. If you look further into the parcellation of our brain, you realize that one of the largest areas of growth over our other mammalian representatives has been dedicated to the growth of the cerebral cortex, but more specifically to the frontal lobes of the brain, where everyone agrees, some of our most complex processes take place, such as long-term planning and analytical strategy.

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