[During my decades of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright undergraduates turned away from the possibility of a scientific career, fearing that, without strong math skills, they would fail. This mistaken assumption has deprived science of an immeasurable amount of sorely needed talent. It has created a hemorrhage of brain power we need to stanch.]
One wonders if it is conceivable that the real reason Wilson wants less intelligent students studying biology is because that is the only way evolutionists will be able to continue indoctrinating undergraduates with the Neo-Darwinian theory in the future without it raising too many awkward questions in their minds.
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No.... No, I don't really think that's the policy of Harvard. Perhaps it is just barely possible that Vox is confusing Harvard with AiG? Or the Junior Backwater Nether Fundistan Campus of AiG South, night school?
Edited: I notice a discussion about the need for mathematics in biology. You could probably get through at the undergraduate level without discussions of the more esoteric branches of trigonometry, Boolean algebra, Fourier Transforms, non-linear partial differential equations, or string theory, but you damn well better understand the use (the PROPER use) of statistics. That's just easy math to do, but you need to know when someone is lying to you in that cycle of "lies, damned lies, and statistics". It'll come in handy in politics, too.
That is not what Wilson said in any way, shape or form. There's a reason you would never get into Harvard, Vox, and it ain't a nebulous SJW conspiracy.
One wonders if it is conceivable
Nope. And once again the pundits forget that biology is studied all over the world, including many places where nobody gives a rat's ass about the biblical creation myth.
One wonders if it is conceivable that the real reason Vox Day wants less intelligent students studying biology is because that is the only way creationists will be able to continue indoctrinating undergraduates with the Young-Earth myth* in the future without it raising too many awkward questions in their minds.
Fixed that for you.
* or replace that with whatever even more stupid nonsense the Avatar of the Dunning-Kruger Effect might believe.
PS:
Yup, because biology has so much to do with math.
The only awkward questions are "were you home-schooled by your less than educated parents, you cretinist?" and "haven't you grasped the scientific method yet, you imbecilic cretinist?".
Wait, in what universe is it possible to be a scientist without math skills? I understand being worried about people *underestimating* their math aptitude, but do we want folks who *lack* it joining science or engineering? Would you cross a bridge or fly in a jet or use medicine designed by folks without math skills? STEM is backwards to put M at the end.
A certain someone went to Harvard; the same time as the now Leader of the Free World. He graduated, and went to Intel. He worked on the earliest form of flash memory, the forerunner of what is commonplace in flash drives & SSDs, media players, smartphones & the SD/Micro-SD enhancements of such.
He now spends his time trying to create less intelligent pre-college students via his 'Hoemskuling' courses online: denying the facts of Evolution, and even equating Relativity with Moral Relativism ; quite hypocritical for someone who - whilst at Intel - dealt with quantum processes that involved Relativity.
His name is Andy Schaftafly. You'd like him, VD. He thinks Richard Lenski is wrong about Evolution, despite him proving that it not only works, but in a repeatable way.
You can join him in that rusty old U-Boat - in a certain river in Egypt - named HMS Hypocrisy.
According to your Wikipedia entry, you graduated from Bucknell University in 1990, so I don't see how you could have spend "decades of teaching biology" at Harvard or anywhere else. During the 1980s and early 1990s you were playing music and developing computer games in Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota. Were you commuting between MSP and BOS airports to keep up with your teaching schedule?
Even as an instructor with only a Bachelor's degree, it's inconceivable that anyone could teach biology at the college level while denying the reality of evolution. Were you also writing your science fiction between classes or while you commuting?
I more or less aced all my high school and university math and stats courses. And yet, somehow, I still went on to finish my degree in evolutionary biology specifically without any contradictions between my math background and my bio courses. What does that say about your idiotic hypothesis, Pox Day?
Unlike myself, I strongly suspect your knowledge of both math and biology amounts to almost nothing.
Also, there's the implicit assumption that you're only intelligent if you're really good at math. As if there are no other forms of intelligence.
You're just chock full of stupid today, aren't you, Pox?
@Pharaoh Bastethotep
To be fair to Swede, pretty much everything you mentioned is specialized, applied math that's taught in the bio classes to which they're relevant (at least in my university they were). I learned almost none of those things from the general math courses in high school and university (with the exception of statistics, but even with that, the stats I learned in high school and earlier were fairly different from that stats used in biology that I was taught in university).
I think the first bit is a quote, and Vox is trying to argue against the idea that you can be a good biologist without being a calculus whiz.
You don't really need a lot of advanced math to grasp the principles of evolution. Failure to be interested in math doesn't make one "less intelligent," either.
That said, the biologists who are adept at statistics, etc., can certainly mop the floor with any creationist.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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