As the mercury rose past 90 on this sunny Sunday, I biked over to see the Pagan Picnic in Tower Grove Park. I attend this event regularly, and it gets a bit bigger each year. There are many booths selling fair foods and drinks, and psychic readings, acupuncture, massage, crystals…
I was reading my daily dose of blood pressure spike (creationism news) when I found this tidbit on TheConservativeVoice.com: It is my strongly held belief as a conservative, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-family, pro-creationism vs Darwinian Evolution believer that there is no way in God's green earth that that old white…
I just found out why we English speakers use apostrophe-ess ( 's ) to indicate the Saxon Genitive Case. "Huh?" I can hear you gasp. I've been using it for 40 years to indicate the possessions of an object by a subject. It just always was this way, like mountains…
For three decades I've puzzled about the idea held by Christian Fundamentalists that the Bible must be proven absolutely and literally true in every way, or else Christianity is false. The latter clause being accepted as silly, therefore most science of the 19th and 20th century is patently on the…
I started thinking about the the “reductionist attitude” in presenting science when I read Erich’s Post To deal with “arrogant” scientists we need to move beyond reductionism and break the “Galilean Spell” (from May 7, 2008). Curricula seem to begin with biology, work through chemistry, and finally introduce physics. If English were taught categorically as science is now, students would go through phases in this order:
The alphabet of science is made up of basic natural “laws” as discovered by Newton, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Heisenberg, and so on. Sentences and paragraphs are like molecules and chemical syntheses. And finally you have enough structure to begin to see how biology works from cells (essays) through organisms (stories) and populations (novels).
One could be taught holistic science, building to the grand ideas from the simple ones. By constructing the ideas instead of breaking them down, the interrelationship and the interactions of the parts can be seen, as well as the nature and function of the parts themselves. A whole is never the sum of the parts; it is the sum of the interactions between the parts set on a foundation of the parts themselves. This becomes obvious when building, but is obscured when deconstructing.
No wonder Americans doubt the “theory of evolution”. Schools try to teach this advanced and universal concept without any foundation. By the …
