"But how do you know it's random?"

According to Dawkins, natural selection isn't random at all.

Of course, then we'd have to figure out a way to get public schools to afford the snazzy new evolution-based textbook, but that's a whole nother thing.

It ain't going to fly here in the intelligence-free zone of Texas public school policy.

If someone offered to paint my fingernails, I'd probably accept because I can't do it for shit myself. Cutting/clipping, I can do by myself and can't imagine someone not being able to barring illness/injury/age related problems.

But I'd never ask someone who wasn't related to me by blood to paint my nails unless I was paying them.

According to Dawkins, natural selection isn't random at all.

I think the "random" that the teacher was referring to there was either random mutations or randomness in which genes in an individual get passed on.

Did you read the interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon today?

Am I the only one who wondered what the host of Family Feud knows about evolution?

eta: oh, wait, I think that it's Richard Dawson, not Dawkins. but it was funny when it was true.

Am I the only one who wondered what the host of Family Feud knows about evolution?

Everything he learned while a prisoner in Stalag 13.

bwah. The nail thing: definite Lyndon-Johnson-having-meetings-in-his-toilet vibe(And I say that as somebody who cannot paint her own nails.)

A guy here who describes himself as real techsavvy/cool just mistook a Shuffle for an iPod remote control.

Does he not have billboards where he lives?

Most high school biology textbooks have a chapter on evolution, and no mention of it outside that chapter, making it easy to skip. His view, which I'd agree with, was that evolution is the basis of just about everything else in the book, and that almost every section (on anatomy, cell biology, etc.) should explain that the things are that way because they evolved that way, and go into an explanation of why.

No doubt. I hate biology. Am not interested in it at all because it seems so random. Physics and chemistry were fine- they had rules that made sense. Hil's hypothetical biology book is much more in keeping with my sense of order and the way I understand things.

My high school biology class was hideous, and i went to school in what was then a very coonservative area, and we learned evolution anyhow, and no one's head exploded.