i had some serious conflict with my evo-bio prof. the only word for his stance is 'reactionary'. i honestly expected to learn about dinosaurs......not darwin's personal life. he did an intro lecture about theories that can't be tested, meaning most things involving the bible, then tacked panspermia on the list. i objected, 'we've been throwing bacteria laden meteorites at dead worlds for decades....give it a few million years'. i thought that was funny - hell no. after that i could not convince the man i'm not a creationist, and as the class progressed it came to me that he was sanctifying darwin. in my religion, we have a saying: if you see the buddha come walking down the road, hit him with a stick. meaning that when you want to learn a body of knowledge, the last thing you need is hero worship. i thought i was imagining it, so i did random word sampling from our required reading, then the bible and yes, our reading mentioned darwin more than the bible did god. wtf? i had three semesters of calculus, and no one every mentioned newton, because he's irrelevant. when i finally got to talk to him, trying to explain that i thought the science stood for itself, he said he was trying to make the class more politically relevant.
now i read this, and i understand why he taught the class as he did, and why he was feeling a might persecuted. but i don't think his response was the right way - science is science and it's never been dull to me. but i was 30something taking the class as post-bac, not a 20yo junior. would this bother anyone else? there was this day when he spoke about inbreeding, and showed picture of famous men who'd married their cousin. i ID'd all but one, just a generic greek looking work....which he said was mohammed. now, i'm not about catering to people's weird religious ideas, but wow....to show an image of mohammed, clearing not a real image, which is just why you're not supposed to show him, and throw around incest? that's just rude. then again, i feel that way when i see TV commercials showing buddhist monks selling tic-tacs, so maybe i'm over sensitive.