Teaching Biology Evolution

Inspirado repasso essas preciosas informações e crio um novo marcador:

Science is also undemocratic in the social sense that those who do not have the scientist’s special knowledge, skills and experience cannot have equal voice in achieving a scientific consensus concerning a class of phenomena. The public school has no authority to impose opinions on its students, but it has the duty to explain to them the consensus of scientists on any particular issue, and the methodology by which scientists proceed to discover new knowledge and merge it into that consensus.

Biological evolution is one of the most important of many broad issues on which almost all working scientists agree. There may be a few people with scientific credentials who disagree, but they do not contribute to the progress that is the hallmark of science. Analogously, there are a few scientists who do not believe that HIV is the cause of AIDS, but they have contributed nothing to the development of the antiviral drugs that have so greatly improved the prognosis for patients over the past decade or so. It is not simply that these dissenters are wrong, because wrong answers can sometimes stimulate controversy that helps lead to correct answers. Rather, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli liked to say, they are “not even wrong”. That is, their arguments are useless and even detrimental to the pursuit of further knowledge.

Lerner, L. S. 2000. Good and bad science in US schools. Nature, 407 (287-290).

Compartilho com vocês esse trecho que achei de suma importância sobre o ato de sensibilização dos terráqueos quanto às origens da biodiversidade, da vida e do cosmos. Onde não tenhamos noções limitadas temporais, onde nós achamos nosso ciclo de vida mediano, muito tempo de vida. Uma noção ilógica após tantas técnicas, experimentos e visualização de processos in situ.

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