Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

[9th Engineer]

You need to know genetics to understand the mechanism or the details, but all you need to know to understand the principle is that children are similar, but not identical, to their parents.

That's like saying that someone who knows that magnets stick together understands the EM force, or that a student who can tell you that plants produce energy from the sun understands photosynthesis. Parroting back the end result of a process is not understanding it, without knowing the underlying principles you are preforming the same function as a tape recorder. Something my physics prof told us springs to mind:

Numbers?? Why in the world would I give you numbers to plug into an equation and ask you to solve it? Are you a computer or a student? No, the only thing that matters is manipulating the equations in order to find the relationship between the stuff you know and the stuff you don't know.

He's right you know, a person who can only punch numbers into a calculator has the same level of math proficiency as a trained monkey. And a student who understands nothing beyond "organisms evolve in response to environmental pressures" really doesn't understand anything at all. You cannot understand any principle without knowledge of the mechanism behind it.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

That's like saying that someone who knows that magnets stick together understands the EM force, or that a student who can tell you that plants produce energy from the sun understands photosynthesis. Parroting back the end result of a process is not understanding it, without knowing the underlying principles you are preforming the same function as a tape recorder.

No, because similar-but-not-identical-children isn't the end result of evolution, it is the assumption going in. You can have a reasonable understanding of evolution just taking that as a given, and working from there.

Not that I'd advocate skipping basic genetics.