As the concerned father of two young daughters just beginning to make the long journey through our educational system, I have very strong opinions about religion and politics getting mixed up with a good strong secular education. The whole creationist / ID fad has luckily stayed far away from our home here in eastern Massachusetts, but it has me worried more generally about the future of the US.
One thing that drives me most crazy is idiots who can't enjoy the beauty of how nature evolves to solve specific problems. The latest doofus to express uneducated blather about evolution is the PBS snake oil salesman, Deepak Chopra. Once again, he falls back on the hoary old "If we can't currently explain it, it must be God" "theory" of ID. One of his main talking points is the very specific evolution of flowers and bugs to pollinate them, and how there can be one single moth capable of pollinating one single type of flower. Somehow, this is "proof" for ID, rather than an amazing case of natural evolution.
Here's a great article explaining the simply stunning symbiotic relationship between a fly and an orchid. It is called "Coevolution", and is simply beautiful:
Also, be sure to check out the book The Botany of Desire, by Michael Polan. It is an amazing book examining the interactions between people and plants, and how each species adjusts to make itself more enticing to the other. The chapter on apples is most amazing. Did you know that apple seeds do not grow up to be the same kind of tree as the apple originally came from? I forget what it is called, but if you take a bunch of seeds from a single apple, and plant them, you will get many different kinds of plants, from bushes to trees. Everywhere that you see an apple tree in an orchard has come from one single ancestor tree, grafted onto a growing apple tree. Strangely beautiful, wouldn't you say?
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