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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)."
I suspect that this probably wouldn't have happened in the first place if people in that area had bothered to participate in their local elections before being humiliated on an international scale.
That's a problem when most people are scientifically illiterate. In this age of 2 second sound bites, saying 'goddidit' is easier than learning the facts.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Well, all's well that ends well. A group of fools sought to impose their foolish views on others, they were thrown out of office, and their handiwork was undone. I'm happy with the result and not really too concerned that the initial unrest was caused by *gasp* inattention to school board elections.
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
It's not really Church vs. State, it's State vs. Ignorance. Most people who are against the theory of evolution don't understand it all that well, and as a result find it unsatisfying. If you reason about evolution with a half-baked version of the theory it's only natural that you'll find some holes.
If we could manage a separation of State and Ignorance, that would be great...
Regarding the so-called "ultra-conservative Board members":
Conservative belief does not necessarily intersect much with religion.
These were _ultra-religious_ board members.
Let's at least get that part right.
BWilde.
I think it's telling that every time the public finds out that a school board tried to undermine science education via an attack on mainstream scientific theories, the public votes them out immediately. It happened at Dover, and now in Kansas. The ID crowd only get the chance to promote their "alternative theory" when they keep quiet about what they intend to do, but as soon as they do it, the cat is out of the bag and they get voted out of office. Somehow they still think that they have grassroots support, but the movement only survives as long as they lie about it. People love talk about being more Godly and all that, but they don't want their state to be the laughingstock of the country.
I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
Science is the endeavor to explain what can be oberved. It does this by creating models which explain current observations and predict future results. It then tests these models by setting up scenarios in which the predictions can be determined to be accurate. In short, from a Christian perspective it's an attempt to understand the universe God created and how it works. I can imagine no greater subject of study than that of the works of God.
Evolution is a scientific model. It looks at the current state of life, fossil records, and historical accounts and establishes a model of life which fits all thse observations. Each new finding tests the model, and it has several times been refined by new discoveries. The system of evolution is almost undeniably correct; it is difficult to argue that evolution can occur in the way it is described. The evolutionary history of various organisms is debateable, as there is always a chance that new findings will change the current version. That's how science works.
So many of my fellow Christians seem to think that evolution is an attack on us and our beliefs. It's not. It is simply the result of rational consideration of the facts at hand. Science is not (well, should not be) malicious and has (should have) no interest in attacking religion, as the existence of diety is currently outside the reach of science.
They also make the mistake of lumping everything they disagree with under the name "evolution". I've heard the Big Bang mentioned in discussions of evolution, even though it's part of a completely different field of science.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Faith is great. It might well be the best of all human qualities. It has helped people survive the worst moments of life, and to go on when hope should have been lost.
But, faith itself can be twisted and misused. When faith is used as a tool to prevent people from using their god given gifts, then it's become a weapon. I have seen people use their faith to ignore what they have seen with their own eyes. I have seen faith used to prevent normal healthy inquiry. It is my opinion that this is the path to pure insanity.
If you except that God created man, and you also except that you were not consulted on God's plan and work habits, then you should be open to explanations as to the details of his creation. Was evolution part of God's plan? Most people admit that they do not know how God works, but some of those same people claim to know exactly how he does not work.
Scientist are only looking for the truth, and sometimes to be published. But I think they are truthful. I imagine that someone with a greater observance of what God has created and it's inner workings is much closer to God than someone who twists faith to blind themselves to God's wonders.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to the question of why God could not have created man to evolve. He clearly created bacteria and virii to evolve. That we can witness on a daily basis as illnesses adapt to the drugs we use to treat them and become resistant. There is evidence that species have come and gone from this world, and that some have morphed into others (trying to use evolve here as much as possible). Why is it so inconceivable that man would have been made to adapt to his surroundings in similar ways?
You shouldn't believe a country's name as being a true description - "German Democratic Republic" (the former East Germany), "People's Republic of China", etc. Similarly, fields that feel a need to put the word "science" in their name often aren't - "Political Science", "Computer Science".
The citizens of Kansas should be allowed to determine what their children learn
By redefining "science" to believe in supernatural rubbish? Keep that stuff in Church.
Trolling is a art,
Actually I'm not happy with their definition of science. I'm sure there'll be crackpot around there to say that "God" is part of the "natural process that drives things" and therefor He's divine presence is needed to explain phenomenons.
I think it'll be more meaningful to describes sciences as a series of models that humans have inventend that are designed to describe the world around us in a way that can be measured/checked (numerically, for exemple, in the case of physics), that can be proved/disproved (what ever your own deity say you should believe about the shape of the earth, that doesn't stop the newtonian physic to be rather good at predicting phenomenons happening on it's surface : object falling and being thrown around), and that can be used to predict the behaviour of some object (all the science used in engineering can be used to invent new technology by knowing in advance how they're supposed to work once build).
These models aren't necessarily perfectly exact, they are just good enough inside their scope (newtonian physic isn't good enough for very masses and high speeds. Einstein's physic is better and more precise in those cases).
In that perspective, when encountering complex phenomenons like evolution, scientific believes like Darwin's theory are a good interesting model for interpreting the facts that you discover (lots and lots of slightly different animals in archeologic discoveries, and if you put them together in chronological order, they seem to slowly transform from one specie to another. The monkey->ape->human evolution is a nice example) and that can make interesting prediction (you can't directly make an experiment to prove/disprove it. At least not as long as crackpots repeat that micro and macro evolutions are different. BUT you can predict that as we dig up more and more fossils, we'll fill the holes and get more steps that details in a better way the evolution).
Whereas if one's intellectually lazy and prefer to say "goddidit", one just stuck with this single explanation. Nothing useful can be made of it. To the question "What happens next", the only possible answer is "depend's on god's mood today" and that isn't very useful.
I think that these notions :
- science is descriptive of phenomenon,
- science puts quantities and classes on them,
- science can be proven and disproven (and mostly be proven to be accurate enough for some scope), and
- science may be useful to predict outcome of experiment and behaviour of inventions
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I never completely understand why people argue "God says it". Even if people want to believe that god wrote the books of the bible, the christian bible was put together by humans. No one argues that the chapters put into the bible were selected by people. So god may have said lots of other things, but these people have chosen not to listen. Maybe another text which wasn't included describes evolution.
And if these people believe the bible was written by humans, then everything "god says" is hearsay and could be misquoted.
And let's not even get started on the fact that the bible Americans read has been translated. There are many phrases which can be translated multiple ways. Plus with the old testiment the English language can't properly represent the multiple meanings of Hebrew words, and so much is lost in translation.
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I guess this guy is going all out with his conservatism.
I can understand how people can believe in intelligent design. Deal with an omnipotent, omniscient, future-seeing being, and I'm sure he can rig a random game of chance like evolution (or the lotto; I'm looking at you big guy).
What I don't understand is how anyone could believe it's not a religious belief, or that somehow its incongrous(sp?) with strict creationism. After all, IIRC all strict creationism does is shrink the timeline, not alter the order of operations. And didn't some frizzy-haired guy explain that time is relative?
When I was in school (in America, in the 90's, and yes, in the south) we had time set aside during the day for private prayers. I'm fairly religious, but I really don't want my government to interfere with my religion, nor my religion in my government. Apparently, I have discovered some secular concept of 24 hours in a day and believe that, aside from the 8 sleeping, I spent less than 8 in school and thus had plenty of time to pursue my religion (not your Southern Baptistism Principal X.) outside of the few hours a day when I'm trying to learn things that will help me seem knowledgeable latter in life.
Of course, even when it wasn't prayer time, the teachers were horrible, so I suppose it is not that big a loss.
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So you think those good conservatives in Dover ending up costing their school board a million bucks in their laughable attempt to get ID taught was an example of good management?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Fundamentalists don't want constructive dialog or understanding. They want their arbitrary beliefs to be the ultimate say-so on everything.
Technoli
"And I would also want the teacher to be able to present alternative theories"
Alternative theories are fine in science class, as long as they have a scientific basis and conform to scientific principles.
I dont see any demands that evolution or other theories with a scientific basis, be presented as an alternative in church, nor requirements that the vast host of philosophical theories around the concept and nature of creation and existence be presented as alternatives at any religious function, so why the desire to present non-scientific theories in science education?
There are any number of non-scientific theories about creation and evolution going all the way to philosophical possibilities like existence being layered simulations. They're perfectly fine for philosophy or religion classes, but they are simply incompatible with the very nature of a science class.
You know, I could replace that statement with "Most people are stupid. The ones who aren't are intellectually dishonest, perfectly willing to believe contradictory statements and lie to themselves and their children." It would be just as true.
The Christians that make the news (as Christians) are usually the ones that are crazy psychotics trying to enforce their own morality on other people- The Jerry Fawells, Jack Thompsons, and Clinic bombers. The Christians who don't make idiotic statements, don't try to legislate morality, understand the history of their faith, are honest about the limitations of their knowledge, and continue being Christians have my respect. Yes, they are the minority of Christians- but intelligent people are in the minority of almost any group. Even on Slashdot they are hard to find.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Honestly - what that shows is that five years of philosophy has not equipped you to recognize arguments that are empty.
The first statement is some kind of religious confusion. Evolution is not a process driven by "random chance", any more than your selection of a mate is "random chance." Evolution chooses results by an extremely powerful filtering process colloquially described as "survival of the fittest", with regard to which genes make it through various generations of interacting with the real world, as expressed in the organism of interest. The way it works is this: As genes for the eye change, the individuals with better vision do better in the world during their lives, and so those genes continue down the path of heredity. Poorer gene expressions fail to remain in the path for the obvious reasons (in humans: could not learn a craft or useful role, didn't see the bear coming, "Oh no, Martha, you don't want to marry the blind guy... he can't support himself!") This process continues until further improvement does not confer an advantage, or further improvement isn't possible because the expression of the gene is close to optimum and cannot make a radical change to an entirely new kind of vision because it is in a local minima that doesn't describe in any way, for instance, a multi-lensed system or one that can change to sense RF (which is a very good description of the eye, by the way.) But you can see myriad variations of how gene expression for the eye has changed simply by looking at the many types of eyes and their capabilities all across the set of organisms that (a) have eyes [many of them] and (b) use genes [all of them, so far.] Some animals do see in the ultraviolet, some use multiple lenses, some have more than binocular vision, some don't have a lot of use for vision, etc, ad infinitum. The process isn't random; Even reading Darwin, who had a very unhealthy respect for the supernatural not uncommon in his time, the process is obviously not random. The root cause of this inadequate line of thinking is probably the idea that the original DNA-based organism was a random product of the so-called primordial soup; whether that is true or not, once DNA was involved, the word "random" isn't anything you'd want to use to describe the process.
This doesn't even follow. Perhaps one might say that if you believe such a thing, then you presume that chemical reactions are complicit in your existence; slavery doesn't enter into it... there is no damage to the idea of free will in this simplistic statement.
Leaving the (already disproved) "slave" idea alone for a moment, regardless of the number, and nature, of systems that work together to implement the multi-system that allows us to think, the question of trusting our perceptions and subsequent thoughts is almost trivially answered by how well our model of the world allows us to interact with it both over time and with regard to challenges to our understanding. If your interaction is superficial and primarily depends on systems, social and technological, that others have set up for you, then you're not going to be able to make as good an evaluation of how accurate your model is. However, for those who actually understand science, this relatively simple method, by design, is excellent at exposing the error in both perception and presumption, and serves as an external, consensual check on just how well we understand the world around us, and hence, how well we can trust our thoughts and memories of that world, for the set of people who can understand these issues. It doesn't hinge upon wh
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The people most interested in home schooling are those that actually give a shit about their child's education and the experiences they'll have growing up and the values they'll be indoctrinated with from a young age.
How many home schooled children do you know on any real basis? How many home schooled children of ultra-conservative christians do you know on any real basis? What makes you think your opinion is accurate or representative?
There are a large variety of reasons to be utterly and completely dissatisfied with public schools. Private schools go part way to addressing these problems, but not far enough for some people.
I'm good friends with a large family (6 kids!) of ultra-conservative christian homeschooled kids. They're the most wonderful people i've ever met. The older kids openly disagree with aspects of their parents viewpoints on religious and societal issues -- they're certainly not brainwashed. And arguing about contemporary issues with them is engaging and rewarding - the kids are smart and have well considered opinions. they have to because all of society attacks everything about their very existinace at every turn. (how they're educated, their religious beleifs, their family structure, etc).
These kids are learning how to be adults and have their own identities, just like normal kids. They're rebelling, they get in fights, the older ones have jobs, etc.
The amount of anti-religious and anti-conservative christian prejudice on slashdot is sickening.
It is a perfectly valid and oft heard criticism of christianity that "the biggest problem with christianity is the christians". However, my opinion is that the notion of government indoctrinating all children is a far scarier, uglier world than a family "indoctrinating" its own children. Indeed, it is only when people assemble in groups, so that some may weild power over others, that societies ugliest traits are brought to bear.
You need only to look at all of the criticisms of public education here on slashdot, by prominent educators, by historical politicians, by people like Mark Twain... and perhaps your own experiences to understand that public education is fundamentally flawed. Yet when people are successfully engaging in alternatives, you criticize or seek to eliminate that opportunity. Why?
I hope that I am able to homeschool my upcoming child. I've had the amazing opportunity to meet a family that has made it work. It opened my eyes to the possibility of unthinkable things.. like a middle school girl that you don't want to choke to death after 4 minutes. That's saying something.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
While I *almost* agree with your post, you forgot a few:
Faith, helps a POW survive his situation even though his body has "given out". Faith, gives hope to a poor person, who through education, believes they can work their way out of poverty. Faith helps anyone, in a dire situation, deal with it in a way that they can handle. It may be feeble compared to your way but for some, its the only way they can make it through that situation.
Faith is a tool. And like ANY tool, it can be used for good and bad.
"Lying" and "using metaphors, analogies, and allegories" are also not synonymous.
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Unless I'm misunderstanding ID, it simply attempts to explain why evolution occurs. It's not science, it's religion. I have no issue with people believing in ID. I think if there was a god, it would be much cooler for him to have set the initial conditions and laws and let it go unmanaged. It'd certainly be a lot tougher than doing everything manually and having to constantly tweak things.
To put it into more geekish terms: ID with evolution is like a linux server where you set it up using a script, thought of everything and wrote scripts to handle everything that could go wrong and it has 15 billion years of uptime. If you're a deist, then it's like that Novell server that people forgot in the closet that's still running, which is even more impressive. Young Earth Creationism however, is like a sysadmin working with a Windows server running buggy software. It's been running for 10,000 years, but it's going to have to be rebooted soon, so watch out the end of the world is nigh.
ID is scientific. It is a theory, and it explains data.
The problem is that it explains any data. Not only the world we live in, but any other possible world, is just as likely. A theory with so many free parameters is extremely weak: it makes all predictions, so the probability of any one of them (ie. the world we actually live in) is negligible. A theory with fewer free parameters, that only predicts what we actually see and shows alternatives to be very unlikely, is far stronger.
So yes, ID is scientific. And provably useless.
For more, see Jeffreys and Berger, Sharpening Ockham's Razor on a Bayesian Strop.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
If you've made contact with a larger intelligence it's your duty to your species to provide evidence of this intelligence.
Otherwise, your "larger intelligence" is no more real than my imaginary friend, Larry, except that other people don't look at you weird when you talk to him.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Just to be clear... there is a big difference between tolerating people and their right to express their ideas, and tolerating them in the sense that we don't criticize their bad ideas. The former IS laudable, the latter is not.
Well, on that abortion thing, to be fair to you I probably did over generalize. I guess it's really the anti-stem cell people that I'd be able to nail best. Anyhow, I'm still not sure that your abortion stance makes sense. I mean, fewer than 25% of zygotes become people due to entirely natural causes. I'm pretty sure that doesn't keep you awake at night. But if abortion is wrong, then we have a terrible tragedy on our hands, and more people are dying (children even) all the time than the nazis ever killed, or whoever's killing all those people in Darfur, etc. So at the very least, it's not a well thought out stance. And even ignoring my previous point, don't the zygotes die sinless, and therefore go to heaven? I'm not trying to be rude, particularly because I appreciate intelligent debate on this type of stuff. So what's your answer?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Then, like my imaginary friend Larry and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the invisible purple dinosaur in my basement and the celestial teapot, this "larger intelligence" is of no consequence to my existence.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Many people would argue that mathematics is not a science, since it's a man-made system.
Biology, chemistry and phyiscs are man-made systems to describe the world around us. That's what math does. How does a physicist solve a problem without using math? Physics is applied math. Chemistry is applied physics. Biology is applied chemistry. They are all linked. They are all science. Some are more "pure" than others, but they are all just descriptions of the universe.
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The word "New" here is unnecessary. "Kansas Adopts Science Standards" is more concise and accurate.