Ragnazork should be (in the manditory sense) tought in schools

Thank you for posting your argument, and thank you for teaching some new terms to me, ontological, metephysical, and methodological reduction. I will respectfully comply with TheSkeptic's wishes and use RA and QU in place of Ragnazork and Quibblevome for spelling ease. ===== There is no fundamental difference between RA (Macro-evolution) and QU (Micro-evolution) ===== My opponent claims there are no differences between RA and QU, making my clarifying words rather pointless. The claim is based on the notion that RA is in fact the effect of multiple QU's. His source claims that things that make up QU, Mutation, genitic drift, genitic flow, and natural selection, added with a hexatillion years is what makes up RA. the source seems to anticipate this claim coming off as rather extrodinary and because of such, unbeliveable when it stated 'A process like mutation might seem too small-scale to influence a pattern as amazing as the beetle radiation, or as large as the difference between dogs and pine trees, but it's not. Life on Earth has been accumulating mutations and passing them through the filter of natural selection for 3.8 billion years — more than enough time for evolutionary processes to produce its grand history.' My question for this statement is why? If I cant learn to beat my cousin at chess in 20 years, what would make me think that 100 would make a difference? The expression 'time heals all' may apply to your emotional issues, but in practical science it should not be considered an all problem solving sceince. When we see that the time we do have to observe RA is not enough, and claim it just takes more time than we can ever have to observe, is not unlike total absence of explination, witch as Richard Dawkins say's is saying the same as 'it was a mirical'. And sceince is not about accapting the miraculessness of occurances, its about explaining them. As I pointed out its obvious the claim is extrodinary so it should be backed by extrodinary evidence. The part of the extrodinary claim that should cause on to pause is certain assumtions about the versitility of the mutation. genitic flow, drift, and natural selection are fine in explaining and studying a varity of bettles (QU). but they do not come close to demonstrating how you achive there differences from various snails (RA). The distinction between QU and RA that is important is that through QU we could expect a horse that defers from known horses by having six legs rather than four http://www.youtube.com.... Through RA we could belive one day their could be a horse with wings.http://www.youtube.com... the information required to make wings is not in Horses. legs are. though mutations we have seen creatures lose information by getting shorter legs, or have excess dublicates of preexisting information, like an extra head or extra legs or arms. we have even seen the information for legs located in incorect places. But the concept of something new like wings has never occured as far as observable recoded data has ever heard. The data of what we observe is kind of an important step in the scientific method http://www.biologycorner.com... Yes, we would use the same term for your walk to the store as your walk to the kitchen, but if you sprinted to the store, than I would say to convey the truth a different term is needed. ===== RA (Macro-evolution) should be taught in schools ===== I do contend the premise that RA is true, though thats likely obvious by now. If you wish to use your next round to hold the 'creation vs evalution' debate, I of course cant stop you, but I belive if you do such it will drive the focuse of this debates resulotion out of sight. We have only 8,000 characters to argue with, and its more than enough to hold one debate, but to hold two, one of witch being a very encompassing debate that divides many, I fear will take away from the focus on the schools. Even if I pretrend I consider that RA is true, the world outside of this debate continues to be quite divided and that is more relevant to the school descision than the actual truth of RA. The political tension caused by the arguing over whether or not to include things like I.D. in the classroom would go away because there are no grounds for arguing equell representation when RA is not even represented in the first place in the classroom. If arguing over this as a pollitical issue is whats holding up progress in any resprect, elliminating that conflict is ofcourse a good thing. As for your criticism of my source, I do not really care if the Website as a whole is credited, what is credited is the idividual who typed the artical http://www.stonybrookphysicians.com.... Michael Egnor, M.D. is a nerosurgen, and as such his perspective on how important RA is to his field is quite important. Now, if a nerosurgen had told you that understanding of child birth was important to his field, you could explain that away as exagerated because he may hold a paticualar facination with it. But when he would claim its important this shows he gets by in his field without needing to turn his thoughts to that study at all. Its not so easy to explain his underaprecation away. As for Pigliucci praise of evolution, I could find nowhere on that site where a distinction was made between RA and QU, but all the examples given related QU as far as I could tell. Please point out the RA examples, because we are not arguing QU. Some of what was on that site was not even relevent to RA or QU when the term evolution was used rather the concept of improvement in general. If that concept whitch as existed long before darwin or anaximander is part of what we mean by evolution than I suggest we make a third word, XG. thats short for Xigarf. The fact that XG has been a understood concept since before anaximander, the first to propose the therory of RA, shows that teaching RA is not necisarry for students to know XG. For those of you to lazy to read his whole sorce to know what I am refering skip to the first paragraph of the section titled; How is evolution important to disciplines other than biology? Your 5th source is statements given by the NSTA, and I must say, they hardly escape the logic fallacy of athoritarien argument, being greatly affected by politics as they are. In your argement you mention a 6th sorce 'must be taught in public school science classes[6]."' but I could not find it at the bottem of your post. But from the context I see it holds the same flaws as numer 5. Do you realise, that these people of the NSTA and National Academy of Science never get more attention than they do when speaking about the evolution argument. the public would never know Bruce Alberts name if he never took sides in the evolution debate. 'There is overwhelming evidence pointing out that evolution is a integral aspect of biology, because it makes SENSE out of biology. If we review many biological issues within the lens of evolution, much of it becomes incredibly coherent (study of germs, medicine, animals, etc.). Evolution supplies biology with immense explanatory power, a necessary tool for any valid scientific discipline.' In the above statement you made, I might agree when Evolution means QU, but not RA, for I have seen no application of that theory as of yet. 'The primary reason why people even think they have cogent arguments against evolution is because of an incredible lack of scientific knowledge concerning evolution. Almost always there is a critical element of evolutionary theory they have either no knowledge of or a twisted misunderstanding of.' I hope you will tell me something I dont know about. Useing more words is not terminonalogy misuse, its the only means of preventing it. If QU and RA are the same, than taking RA out and leaving QU should be no problem even if RA is a nessicary understandin