Science misrepresented in textbooks

I don't know who "Russ" is but would hazzard to say that his problem with the textbooks demonstrates a biased oversensitivity flowing from a ultra-conservative Christian worldview.

As an undergraduate you learn that evolution is a change in the inherited genetic characteristics over successive generations.
The short generational time of drosophila (fruit flies) make them an excellent tool for genetics research and education.

The term “Darwinian macro-evolution” is not one that would generally be used in secular textbooks.

Rob

 

No, he is not correct. It is a straw man argument.

>Flies bringing forth a fly with a longer wing is a micro-change

If the longer-winged fly can still mate with the short winged fly then the long winged fly might be a new breed if the trait carries to some of the next generation. If the long winged flies can not mate and be fertile with the short winged flies then it is a new species of fly.

Dogs, wolves, and coyotes are all canines but different breeds.

Pragmatically, domesticated critters seem to come under different rules.

 

I just finished taking a general biology class at my local community college. I'm by the way 54 years old and in school for personal enrichment.

In fairness, when speaking about the fruit fly (drosophila), it was not to teach darwinian evolution but rather to illustrate the effect of dominant and recessive alliles (genes) between sucessive generations.

It appears to me that there is a move away from classic darwinism as we understand it. For sure the void is not being filled by a Biblical account and there are opportunities for us believers to get our feathers ruffled but in my personal experience darwin doen't get as much press as we are led to believe. I would have to say that overall, my experience last semester exposed me to far less darwin than I expected. On the few times when the professor brought up the conflict between "science" and "religion", the general mood of the class gave me ithe impression that I wasn't the only person in the class who took a more christian rather than darwinian approach to the workings of the universe.

One thing my bio text book did mention is that when speaking about genetics, the father of modern genetics (Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk) published his findings in the 1860s, just after darwin and that made that decade a "banner decade for the advancement of modern biology". Keep in mind though, while darwin gets a few pages of print, Mendel gets several chapters.