A friend writes, regarding the Spring 2012 University of Texas Bioscience newsletter, a friend notices the refreshing absence of Darwin cant:
Do y’all notice a significant lack of dogmatic Darwinism in this newsletter? Reading “The Epigenetic Landscape”, words like “Darwin” and “evolution” are used a total of zero times. But they do say things like “Epigenetics tends to be multidimensional in nature”, “Epigenetics, by definition, is when there’s no DNA change, but the phenotype is different”, “Our research has to do with what we call non-coding mutations. People used to call this junk DNA”, and “Is this some kind of inheritance of an acquired character in a Lamarckian sense?”
On p. 4 and 5, they discuss a Course Transformation Project (CTP) for intro biology courses. The new BIO 311C course has “3 Big Ideas”. Amazingly, evolution was not one of the three big ideas. Big Idea 1 is “Structure Relates to Function”, which is broken down into 5 subtopics, and #3 states “The structure of cells has evolved to perform a variety of essential functions”. If they would just replace “has evolved” with “was designed”, this would be a great course!
Maybe the newsletter staff will hereafter be harassed to Darwin pieties in order to prove their submission, and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
We’re not as concerned about it as some because – at this point – those who refuse to spout the pieties join a growing number of refuseniks. Those who submit, knowing the truth, can estimate their own worth best.
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