This post is about specific lies a specific teacher taught me. I'm talking about my Biology Teacher in junior high. What a dick. He screwed me up.
Yesterday, I stumbled across this: 5 Major Misconceptions about Evolution.
I quote that part, because the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of those bullets were specifically taught to me, presented as truths, by the biology teacher in question. Said teacher made a point of repeatedly mentioning to the class that he was required by the state to teach evolution, but he personally didn't believe in it, for those 4 reasons. He polled the class at the start and end of the semester to see who believed in evolution - I'm pretty sure I was the only person who raised their hands both times. Just the same, I swallowed most of what he said without question, and it never really occurred to me that he could have been lying.The five propositions below seem to be the most common misconceptions based on a Creationist straw-man version of evolution. If you hear anyone making any of them, chances are excellent that they don't know enough about the real theory of evolution to make informed opinions about it.
- Evolution has never been observed.
- Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
- There are no transitional fossils.
- The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance.
- Evolution is only a theory; it hasn't been proved.
This was eye-opening to me. I read the site (linked above) hungrily. I followed that by a rebuttal site which I could see did some heavy-handed manipulative twisting (and, to be fair, some significant honest rebuttal that was nearly lost amidst the bullshit). Now I need to do a lot more reading to learn what other crap I'd been told.
In the course of telling me those lies, the teacher told some other whoppers. For example, to buttress up his claim that evolution and speciation had never been observed in nature, he claimed nonsensically that it's extremely rare (he may have even said impossible) for 2 different species to share the same number of chromosomes. Considering that there are millions of species on the planet, that'd be an incredibly stupid claim, since such variety would require some species to have hundreds of thousands of chromosomes. But I'd never really thought it through to realize that, because I'd never had any reason to doubt what I'd been taught in school.
Anyhow, it was from the context of having believed the lies that teacher told me, that I totally didn't get the whole black squirrel thing 4 months ago. My personal definition of "species" was flawed. The new species had the same number of chromosomes as the old species, and was morphologically similar, so according to the ridiculous lies I'd been spoon-fed by my biology teacher, it "wasn't really" a new species. My apologies for sounding, and being, so freakin' dense and obviously wrong.
Anyone got recommendations for good books on biology and evolution that are readily accessible to a block-headed layman such as myself?
7 comments:
Weird. Jake's previous post remains above my newest post. Why does mine claim to have been published at 10:11? That's the exact same time it claims my previous post was published at, too.
No recommendations. It sounds like you now "get" it.
If you're just plain interested in the subject, though, I'd be happy to mail you my copy of a Biology textbook. ...Sounds daunting, but actually it's very well-written, and you can skip around without missing too much. I actually loved the book (and read it 2-plus times).
I also recommend "Naturalist" by E.O.Wilson as a good biology-minded book. He's Christian, too, if that matters. (In fact, these days he spends much of his time trying to unite religion and biol-preservation.) In any case, it's a good book.
My wife recommends Stephen Jay Gould's "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", but that comes with two caveats. First, the book is big and heavy... look for it used. Second, the best writings on the subject are not in books, but in journals... so it's hard to get a comprehensive lesson.
...Just as I was hitting send, she also pointed me to "Sudden Origins", by Jeffrey H. Schwartz. It's lighter and cheaper.
...And, this post made me happy. ;)
I love Dawkins, so, "The Blind Watchmaker."
That's really weird. Synchronicity. Here's a little story:
I've been a bit of an evolution/ anti-IDiocy nut for a while now, and this summer I read three books about it. Two were about the Dover trial (Monkey Girl is an amazing book), and the third was "Only a Theory," a book by a biologist named Ken Miller, which basically explains why the ID people are stupid.
I loaned that book to a friend and just got it back last week. I was thinking that I should give it to somebody, but I didn't want to give it away on Bookmooch -- it's too excellent for that.
And then you posted this. Perfect! Email me your mailing address and I'll send it your way next week.
Also, if you dont read pharyngula, you should. It's caustic, but in a good way.
Sorry, I strongly disagree that Rolfe should be reading PZ's blog. That man goes way, way beyond abrasive.
Too much, too soon. Bad suggestion.
Don't feel bad about your biology teacher giving you bad information, I had a teacher or teachers do the same thing to me. When I was in early grade school, we were living in central Florida. To say the schools there were backwards would be a massive understatement.
It wasn't until at least high school (and a midwestern school system) that I finally got stuck on the question of why people were having so much trouble identifying some intact skeletons that were found. I mean you can tell male from female by counting the ribs as men have one less, an odd number; right?
A trip to the library followed by an examination of an actual medical text book made me realize that something I had always thought was biology was in fact just religious crap. For whatever reason, I just never thought about it enough to realize I'd been fed something blatantly false.
I'm nearly done with Blind Watchmaker.
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