Friday, July 30, 2010

Why Lying to Children About Evolution is Dangerous

In Russia, a super strain of Tuberculosis is slowly creeping across the world. Russian prisoners are crammed into prison cells under unsanitary conditions. When a prisoner contracts TB, he rarely completes his medication due to funding, thus the formation of a super TB strain results. And this super strain requires even more aggressive (and more expensive) treatment. This makes proper treatment of the prisoner even less likely. And sometimes, the TB strain is so highly evolved that no medication known to humankind will fight the uniquely formed strain of TB.

For some prisoners, contracting TB is a death sentence. Either the funding will not be provided to treat these prisoners, or they've contracted a terminal variant of TB. These prisoners die in their jail cells.

But sometimes a prisoner with a super TB strain completes his prison sentence and is released directly into the general population-- hacking and coughing as he walks out of the facility and into the public.

Then someone in the general population contracts the super strain of TB after unwittingly spending time in the presence of the infectious, coughing ex-convict. This poor person departs from his presence to make his or her way to the airport. This person plans to make an extended visit to New York City, for example, where he or she will eventually start hacking and coughing.

Why does this happen? Where will this stop?


Some studies have shown that a small percentage of people are immune to the HIV virus. In each person found so far, a mutation was noted. They don't have any receptors on their white blood cells like most other people. As a result, the HIV virus has no way to invade their immune system. Interestingly, this same trait is traced back genetically to survivors of the Bubonic Plague hundreds of years ago.

How can this be? Could this be a clue to a cure for AIDS? How can we better understand this?


As predators change over time, those who are most successful live to pass their traits on to their offspring. The prey who allude capture are awarded that same opportunity to pass on their genes to their offspring. Thus, you have a constant honing of predatory skills and evasive tactics between predator and prey. One sharpens the other over time. This is one of the components that drives the engine of evolution.

Real problems are happening and will need to be solved by understanding evolution.

If members of our society succeed in cranking out armies of young people who think evolution is science fiction, then we will dilute the upcoming scientific community. We will stop producing the necessary minds for solving these real, growing problems. We will produce doctors, scientists, and chemists who will fail the public when the next big biological problem come to visit humankind.

So many people hate the idea of evolution because the implications threaten their Fundamentalist beliefs in God. With clouded minds they lie to as many children as they can within our school systems for the express purpose of preserving their so called "American Values".

What good will come of preserving "American Values" if we are all wiped out by a super virus because nobody took into account the phenomena of evolution and how it drives the changes we see in biological life-- not just from millions of years ago, but for today as well?

OK, so you insist all day long that life was designed.

Fine. Sure. OK.

I don't care. Whatever.

You win.

But just know that even if you insist that life was designed by a creator, you cannot escape the fact that our world was then designed with evolution as part of the plan.

To overlook the fact of evolution is irresponsible. To ignore the fact of evolution is delusional.

And to insist that evolution is science fiction to millions of school kids across the nation is down right dangerous for our survival in the future.

And that's regardless of whether you believe in any particular god, or not.

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