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Bill Allows Teachers to Contradict Evolution
Helical writes "In an attempt to defy the newly approved state science standards, Florida Senator Rhonda Storms has proposed a bill that would allow teachers to contradict the teaching of evolution. Her bill states that 'Every public school teacher in the state's K-12 school system shall have the affirmative right and freedom to objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution in connection with teaching any prescribed curriculum regarding chemical or biological origins.' The bill's main focus is on protecting teachers who want to adopt alternative teaching plans from sanction, and to allow teachers the freedom to teach whatever they wish, even if it is in opposition to current standards."
I only had to look at my teachers to see that they contradicted evolution.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
I want the state OUT of my bedroom
Uh...you consider K-12 classrooms your bedroom?
Maybe you shoulda posted that as AC...
How come every time I read some news like this I start to hear "Dueling Bangos" playing?
How about a law that says that if I don't believe pot causes health problems I can choose to smoke it legally?
Creationism wrapped up in the guise of scientific knowledge and academic freedom. This is an OBVIOUS effort by members of the FL legislature to pander to religious groups. It just happens to be couched in an "academic freedom" argument. Don't buy it. It isn't value neutral and it isn't fair.
Students already face an uphill battle in getting over unscientific hunches formed in childhood. Evolution, in its fullness, is a rejection of those hunches. This bill clouds the issue by allowing teachers to present a curriculum that plays to those hunches in order to serve as religious indoctrination. Think about some of the main "tenets" of ID: the notion that complexity cannot occur from iterated evaluations of simple rules--they claim things like the eye are "too complex" to have been formed via "random" mutation. This SOUNDS reasonable, until you realize that it is just a play on our intuition. It isn't true in the slightest. The same with the claim that animals or humans were elegantly designed. While there is what some scientists would call elegance in plenty of biological forms, their implementation shows signs of prior adaptations. It takes a lot of careful study to learn exactly how and why our endocrine system or our vascular system is imperfectly adapted let alone begin to think about how pregnancy is an imperfect adaptation. This is why ID is primed for the 8-12 crowd. Those critical thinking skill are just solidifying. There isn't a large movement to teach ID in colleges because the material would be rejected at greater rates.
This is religious nonsense packages as science. Nothing more.
Incorrect.
Apes, monkeys, and humans all evolved from a common primate ancestor. Due to differing environments and differing pressures and selection criteria for said differing environments, the populations of primate ancestor-species evolved in separate directions.
The 'missing' fossil evidence question is a red herring: every time a transitional fossil is found, the creationists say "OK, what came between that one and the next one?"--moving the goalposts, in other words. Archaeology is not geneology: you will not get a continual record of every generation back to when time began.
In addition, fossils are not the only evidence. There are patterns of genetic structures, there are cases of comparative anatomy, there are multiple other lines of evidence to choose from.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
As my ID pushing narrow minded coworker said:
"The Bible IS science."
I shit you not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Woah woah woah, don't throw those nutjobs into Utah, The Discovery institute (major proponent of ID) is out of Seattle, Washington. Most scientists here in Utah are just for the dino fossils, cancer research, or cold fusion :D
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Doctor: Before I give you this injection, I have to ask you an important question: do you believe in evolution?
Patient: Of course, not! Why do you ask?
Doctor: You see, I have this flu shot here. If you believe in evolution, you will accept that the flu bug is constantly changing and evolving, thus your immune system will not recognize it and you'll come down with the flu. With this shot, your immune system will be up to date on the latest strain.
Patient: And if I don't believe in evolution?
Doctor: You've already had the flu once, therefore you'll never catch it again.
Patient: But that's not...that's not...true?
Doctor: As a liberal and scientist, I would never want to force another person to accept my own views and beliefs, even if they happen to be manifestly correct.
Or to put it another way:
adventurer #1: I do not believe there is a bear in that cave.
[mauling, violence, blood]
adventurer #2: So you say. But your disbelief seems not to have dissuaded the bear.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
If you want to teach your kids that "God did it" is an acceptable answer to anything you don't personally understand, then fine, do that in your home or church or wherever... BUT don't pollute my children into believing that crap also. I'd like my kids to have a fair chance in the world economy, where in most 1st and 2nd world nations, they can manage to keep science to true scientific endeavors.
What I can't understand is how this is even a debate for public schools. I went to a Catholic school through junior high and there wasn't even a discussion about this. We were taught about evolution in science class, *and* in religion class we were taught that the creation stories were not meant to be taken literally.
It doesn't disprove intelligent design. It proves that intelligent design is unscientific. Unscientific beliefs could be correct, we have no way of knowing. But the point is, that since this bill would only allow teaching of the full range of scientific criticisms, that intelligent design is not included in that.
If a human foot print is found next to a fossilized dinosaur bone, would that not prove that Evolution is wrong?
Right, now come up with an example for intelligent design. You can't, no matter what you observe you can explain it by saying God designed it that way.
The thing is, you either BELIEVE that God created everything or you BELIEVE that evolution is the reason we are here or you BELIEVE something else. There is no way to truly scientifically prove how things began. Both intelligent design and evolution are religions.
As the great prophet Groucho Marx once said, "who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" Evolution is confirmed by masses of predictions that have turned out to be true (i.e. evidence), intelligent design has none.
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I can't tell you what a progressive move this is for supporters of the movement for the recognition of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a religion! And if this bill passes, it will open the door for its truth to be taught in schools!
Please write your representatives to THANK them for opening the door for this wonderful moment in history!
It doesn't -- ID isn't disprovable, precisely because it isn't scientific. ID says "God did it". That's not of much use in a science class, because there's nothing scientific you can learn from that statement.
No, evolution says nothing about dinosaurs and humans being unable to live at the same time. We're from two completely different evolutionary trees -- reptiles and mammals. Geologists and paleontologists would be pretty shocked if such a thing were to be found, but evolution wouldn't be affected in any significant way.
There are, indeed, numerous things that COULD be found or occur that would disprove evolution, yet none of those things ever has. The fact that such things are able to be spelled out ahead of time, and then tested, is precisely what makes evolution science, and ID not science.
Evolution has nothing to say about the reasons we are here or how things began. It is not a religion, and requires no faith. You can be a staunch creationist opposed to evolution and you will get the exact same experimental results with DNA manipulation, genome sequencing, carbon dating, and fruit fly reproduction, as a fervent believer in evolution. Predictable, repeatable results independent of the experimenter are the hallmark of real science -- evolution has many, and ID has none.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Here your conflating the concepts of biogenesis (how life started) with evolution (how speciation occurred). Evolution as a theory is as well supported as any in science, but it doesn't address the origin of life itself specifically.
Biogenesis itself is a historical event and thus hard to treat scientifically. Even if you could recreate life in a test tube, that's not proof that it happened that way. So you're right, biogenesis will always be somewhat a matter of faith.
Which isn't to say we don't have plausible explanations for it, it's just not possible to directly confirm them by experiment. Our understanding of statistical mechanics makes it clear that an evolution like process could act on large populations of random polymers to favor those who self replicate.
So to conclude, you can either choose to believe that biogenesis occurred through natural processes well modeled by statistical mechanics, or that an invisible sky wizard wished us all into existence. There's no real way to prove which happened, but the reasonable choice is clear.
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