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Brutally Honest

Critical thinking for dummies

by BroKen

Years ago I saw a Doonesbury cartoon in which a college professor, concerned about the gullibility of his students, proclaimed loudly during his lecture, “BLACK IS WHITE! GOOD IS BAD!” attempting to shock them into thinking for themselves. The students are furiously taking notes. One whispers to another, “Did you get that?” “Yeah, I didn’t know any of this stuff!” comes the reply. The last frame has the professor pounding his head on the podium lamenting, “Teaching is dead!”

I was reminded of that after a conversation with my son, Karl, as I was taking him to his college level zoology class. He was struggling with some of the pontification in the class surrounding the theory of evolution. Personally, I don’t share all his frustration with evolutionary theory, but I am proud of his unwillingness to accept such pontification of the party line without more evidence.

I vividly remember hearing Stephen Jay Gould on a Nova program in the 1980s describe how his undergraduate classes told him that the fossil record demonstrated a gradual change from one species to another. But when he got access to that record in graduate school, he found that gradual change was not demonstrated. The fossil record does NOT show gradual change. On a geological time scale, the changes in living things occur almost instantaneously. Gould was no creationist, but as a good scientist he was willing to follow the evidence regardless of what he had been told.....

It is high time for some intellectual honesty in academia, life, and politics.

Thanks BroKen.

xtnyoda, shalomed