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Kansas Adopts New Science Standards
porcupine8 writes "The Kansas State Board of Education has changed the state science standards once again, this time to take out language questioning evolution. This turnaround comes fast on the heels of the ouster given this past election to the ultra-conservative Board members who originally introduced the language. 'Science' has also been re-redefined as 'a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations' (the word 'natural' had been previously stricken from the definition). If you'd like to see the new standards, a version showing all additions and deletions is available from the KS DOE's website (PDF)."
Maybe we should go back to calling ourselves "natural philosophers" rather than "scientists".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Scientific illiteracy is something a lot of people in the US seem to be putting a lot of effort into.
n gelicals_make_war_on_evolution/
This video is really disturbing: http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20070206_eva
Especially the poster which says "God Says it. I believe it. That settles it."
If we evolved, then it was a matter of random chance.
Well, with such an incredibly incorrect first premise, I'm sure you can prove about anything.
Natural selection is not random.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
For those unenlightened individuals wondering about the "buttsexwithfishsquirrels" tag, you may want to refer to the South Park episode dealing with evolution. You can watch the clip right here.
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
I think it works like this (I'm a Kansas Christian evolutionist). Most Kansas Christians (which are a majority here) that are conservatives care about 2 issues, good education for a low cost, and sex education (abstinence). A few radical fundamentalists, who believe that creationism vs. evolutionist is an important topic, run for positions with a platform that agrees with the majority of Kansas Christians, not advertising their support for creationism. When they got in a few years ago, they got a majority of the board, and got their way with the standards. We the voters just got our chance to vote these bums out, but now have to worry that we'll have to be concerned that the sex education standards will go to far the other way. Fortunately for me and my wife, we'll be sending our kids to Catholic schools, where things like evolution were taught, and creationism never was.
I'm sick of people with this semantical misunderstanding of the word 'theory.'
There is less evidence in support of Newton's Theory of Gravity (or even Einstein's Theory of Relativity) than there is in support of the Theory of Evolution. The term 'law' has not been used in science for a very, very long time. The word theory should not be confused with the word 'hypothesis'. In science, a hypothesis is closer to how the common vernacular uses the term 'theory'. A hypothesis is just an idea based on observation. A theory is what grows from a hypothesis: Scientists continue additional observations and experiments over the course of time and use those results and observations to refine or refute the hypothesis. Eventually the hypothesis becomes sound enough to become a theory. A theory must be supported by multiple sources of available evidence; it must be repeatable, consistent, empirically testable, and falsifiable. It must be multiply reproducible. Yes, theories must admit that they might be wrong. But there are no absolutes in this world -- just as they must admit that they might be wrong, theories are also the soundest explanations for natural occurence that science has available.
No matter how you slice it, Intelligent Design is not science. It doesn't hold up to the rigorous scientific scrutiny that scientific theories must hold up against. Evolution does. Intelligent Design is nothing more than religious dogma; it is not now, never will be, nor can it ever be by definition, a scientific theory.
I have nothing against people having their children taught Creationism. But not in a science classroom. The time and place for studying Creationism is in a religious setting, not a science classroom.
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Some examples: (1) there is anywhere between 1 character in 20 and 1 in 2000 difference between the dead sea scrolls fragments and the current text; (2) truly identical copies of the Torah are found only from the 16th century on, and those are not handwritten; (3) even today there are slightly-different versions of the Torah in use, e.g. the Yemenite version differs in 3 characters from the Koren (which is perhaps the 'standard').
So, by no means has the text been copied without error, at least not according to the people researching this topic.