Evolution No Longer Worth Learning, Says Government

Davemania writes "New York Times reports that the Evolution biology subject has disappeared from a list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The Education department has described this as a Clerical Mistake but others are skeptical about this. 'Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. "It's just awfully coincidental," said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.'" As someone who made use of one of those grants to study Evolutionary Biology, I find this more than a little galling.

Comments

Milking it...

[tempest69]

The evolution debate is the greatest page-view generator since abortion. Slashdot is just milking it for all it's worth.

Ok, the topic is milkable. No question. But the thing is that we're drifting into neo-theocracy. Which scares the pants of quite a few of us. Science is a process of putting peices of a puzzle together in a way that seems to make the most sense, assuming a total lack of divine intervention. Science doesnt make something true, it just shows how the picture seems to fit together. Once something fits well enough it gets moved from hypothesis to theory.. and from there becomes a well founded theory, assuming that it holds up to scrutiny.

Countering Evolution Theory is a total short circuit of scientific method. Even assuming that evolution is untrue, there needs to be a new scientific theory that can better explain the diversity of life on earth, and the extreme coincidences that point to common ancestry. The very tightly linked genome information is really hard to just explain away with some alternate scientific theory..

Evolution is a theory that is brutally hard to poke any real holes in.. Most people try to counter with statistical arguments that skip some of the in between steps.

Anyway, the point is that rational people are afraid of whats happening, and arent going to simply look away when they see neo-theocracy coming closer.

Storm

Re:Perspectives

[Lijemo]

Nothing gaurentees that the voucher by itself will be sufficient to cover the tuition at a good private school. In fact, it probably won't-- And that's before considering it would be in any good private school's best interest to raise their tuition considerably if a widespread voucher program went into effect.

If you can cough up the extra on top of the voucher to send your kids to the good public school, it works well for you. If you can't, then you are forced to send your kid to the (now horribly underfunded) public school. Thus, those who had the least oppertunities to start with have even fewer oppertunities than they do in the current system. It gets even harder to pull yourself out of poverty. The and the distribution of wealth grows even more uneven.

For those of you who don't care about the spread of poverty (as long as you're not poor) and maldistribution of wealth that increases over time (as long as you're OK), you should-- crime and quality of life issues are the primary reason. But at the extreme end, history shows that the greater the maldistribution of wealth is in a civilization the more likely it is to collapse, and the more violent that collapse is likely to be. I don't think that's an immediate danger, but education is an area that requires multi-generational thinking.

The purpose of public education is the public good. It's in the public's best interest that there be as easy a road for people to better themselves as possible, and a decent education is a key part of that. It is also in the publics best interest that the general populace be educated.

There are substantial problems with our current educational system, most definitely. And they need to be addressed. My thoughts on the best way to address them are beyond the scope of this post. But I think that "moving them to the private sector" (as many suggest) is not an effective strategy, because while the market is excellent at determining some things (and more things than people might expect) it's not a magic wand that can fix everything. Long-term, public-good, infastructure issues often fly contrary to, rather than in alignment with, the private profit of those providing the services. So trying to use the market to inject accountability is using the wrong tool for the job.

Most of this post has been general, not all of it a direct response to Parent. But from Parent's post:

I'm pretty libertarian, but I think taxes to fund education are a fundamentally Good Thing. There's not much I think government should do in the way of social programs, but that's one of them. However, I also think it would do both public and private schools, not to mention students, a world of good, to introduce some real competition between them.

I would agree, if this could be done in such a matter that those with the fewest oppertunities to begin with didn't end up in the schools too lousy to compete.

What are people's thoughts on a modification of the voucher program, where in order to participate, a private school would be required to charge a tuition no higher than (regional?) voucher amount?

Re:Perspectives

[Mr. Slippery]

If parents who are offended by evolution could send their kids to a private school, the conflict over what's taught in public schools would largely disappear

Should parents who are offended by the idea that people of different skin colors are legally and ethically equal, be allowed to send their kids at taxpayer expense to a school that teaches racism?

Adults can believe whatever crap they want, but children have an ethical right to be presented with good information. There is a certain educational baseline, things that you are obligated to see that your children have the opportunity to learn. These things include basic safety (fire burns you, drinking bleach is a bad idea), basic ethics (skin color is irrelevant, bullying and cruelty are wrong), basic health (regular bathing promotes health, masturbation will not make you go blind, proper condom use reduces but does not eliminate the risk of pregnancy and STDs).

This basic orientation to life also includes the fundamentals of the best human knowledge about our place in the universe: that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, that the stars are distant suns, and that all life on Earth is related through a common chain of descent and diversified through natural selection.

The fact that some ignorant or superstitious parents may find some of these ideas uncomfortable does not relive them of their obligation to see that their children's right to good information is respected. Teaching children only creationism is no more acceptable than teaching them racism or the geocentric model of the universe.