Exaggerated Claims

An article at the referenced URL contains comments that are typical of exaggerated claims for evolution. A part of the article appears below along with my comments.

http://tinyurl.com/m82cq

"This is like teaching chemistry and skipping (the) periodic table," she said. "Evolution is the idea that living things had common ancestors, and common ancestry of living things is what explains why biological phenomena are the way they are."

[Bradford]: Is that so? What is really amazing is how little is explained by evolution. How does evolution explain metabolic pathways? How does evolution explain how the transcription and translation functions evolved? How does evolution account for an initial replicating genome? Error detection and correction mechanisms that maintain genomic integrity? The evolution of a mechanism designed to cope with supercoiling?

"I go to church every Sunday," said panelist Joseph Travis, dean of FSU's College of Arts and Sciences and a biology professor who's taught evolution. Believing in evolution and God is not contradictory for many people, Travis said. Whether Darwin's theory of evolution explains everything already is questioned in science classes, he said. What concerns Travis is the view that understanding evolution is optional for students.

"The classic example are things like pathogens," he said. "They use methods from evolutionary biology to discern what strain of influenza to use to develop next year's vaccine. That affects a lot of people."

[Bradford]: Evolutionists like to hijack credit from disciplines like virology, molecular biology and more where the real action takes place.

Evolution "determines how we teach critical thinking, how we go about thinking what science is and how science is to be taught," said Frank Stephenson, editor of FSU's Research and Review magazine that is sponsoring the forum.

[Bradford]: Critical thinking is restricted to outcomes favorable to Darwinism.

Said Michigan State University philosophy of science professor Robert Pennock, who will be on the panel: "The Dover trial really was the test case for intelligent design. Creationists had lost in the courts in the 1980s and had to retool their position. Hopefully this will help teachers who want to teach good science to do that without worrying."

[Bradford]: Good science entails teaching students that the most basic biological systems and biochemical pathways are unexplained by Darwinian paradigms.