Texas Board of Education Supports Evolution

somanyrobots writes with this excerpt from the Dallas News: "In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be 'weaknesses' in the theory of evolution. Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life. Texas is particularly influential to textbook publishers because of the size of its market, so this could have a ripple effect on textbooks used in other states as well."

Comments

Fracking Halleluja

[Killjoy_NL]

Things are turning around for the better :)
Finally Intelligent Design is getting the boot it deserves.

Re:Fracking Halleluja

[knutkracker]

Surprised to find you're reduced to using Slashdot to spread your message. What happened to the clearly more efficient (for you) method of direct revelation?

Still wondering about why you don't prevent bad things from happening if you are in fact the loving god you claim to be. - Heathens

Re:Fracking Halleluja

[AmberBlackCat]

I understand that you believe in evolution and you don't believe in God, and maybe you think the two are mutually exclusive. But would you agree that, if there are weaknesses in the theory, discussion of the weaknesses should be swept under the rug because it's your favorite theory?

Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[Szentigrade]

I'm all for teaching evolution but would someone please explain to me what the issue was with teaching the strengths and weaknesses? If science teaches us anything it is that we should always continue to question and refine our studies, not idly stand by and accept them as fact. No one is saying we have to introduce creationism or try to make evolution appear only as a theory (which some might argue it still is), but there is no reason we need to teach our students to blindly accept it as fact, without doubt or admission of weakness. This is not the spirit of science and frankly not in the best interest for those who probably already don't care that much about it. Whats gives?

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[meringuoid]

I'm all for teaching evolution but would someone please explain to me what the issue was with teaching the strengths and weaknesses?

I would guess that they singled out evolution for this. They didn't demand that they teach the strengths and weaknesses of Newton's theory of gravity, or Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Dalton's atomic theory of matter. Yet for some reason Darwin's theory of evolution gets picked out so that teachers must highlight its weaknesses. Why might this be?

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[goodmanj]

You're absolutely right in principle, but in practice, the specific "weaknesses" that are used by opponents to evolution have been shown to be absolutely wrong. Usually 150 years ago.

If there are significant weaknesses in Darwin's theory, they should be presented through peer-reviewed mainstream science, not shoved down students' throats by official decree.

(And before one argues that scientists aren't willing to hear objections to their beloved theory, it's worth pointing out that there *are* some well-accepted biological oddities that add wrinkles to Darwin's theory, such as horizontal gene transfer. But nobody outside the sciences talks about them, because they don't require a supreme being.)

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[znu]

The subject of certainty in science is best covered by teaching about the scientific method, not by pausing during lectures about one particular bit of science that some people don't like to remind students that science can't say for certain that it's true.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[jrothwell97]

...but any alternative theory to gravity doesn't involve a shiny, beardy sadist living on a cloud creating a massive, yet deeply flawed universe in 144 hours.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[Jens Egon]

I hope they do teach the strengths and weaknesses of Newton's theory of gravity. It is after all:

1. wrong
2. useful

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[pe1rxq]

That would be fine... if they said that at the beginning of every science related subject. It would be even better if they also explained the scientific method so students would also understand why 'facts' provided by science can change.
But this was no such thing... Evolution was singled out very specificly, and that is just wrong.
This had only one purpose, and that is to sneak in 'god did it' into a science class.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[RichardJenkins]

I'm surprised that post hasn't been modded insightful. Newton is 'incorrect' in the sense that using general relativity can make more accurate predictions. It's a wonderful example of how an imperfect model can be a useful.

At the end of the day I don't care if high school students graduate without knowing their fermions from their bosons. The most valuable thing kids can take from it is that they develop rationality, critical thinking skills and the ability to understand how to reason objectively.

If someone can do those three things well it won't matter if people try to poison them with religious rhetoric.

Hmm, apologies - this post turned into something of a rant.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[hey!]

But Newtonian physics is not wrong. It's limited in its useful scope. However, that useful scope happens to be vast. Indeed usefulness within a limited, well-defined scope might well serve as a definition of a scientific theory. Here "scope" means a set of phenomena, and "usefulness" means the ability to draw inferences from a set of facts in the scope that will correctly predict other facts within that scope.

Newton's theory of gravitation's usefulness doesn't extend to the range of phenomena that the modern theories of quantum physics and relativity cover. It should be noted of relativity and quantum physics that as yet, neither works where the other works. So by any definition of the word "wrong" that includes Newtonian physics, all of modern physics would have to be called "wrong" as well.

Imagine that there was a religious sect based on the propositions of quantum physics. It adherents would surely regard relativity as heresy, and point to many ways that relativity was "false". In fact, they'd have solid, empirical proof that relativity was "wrong".

What's broken here is the notion that science somehow deals with the truth of theories. This notion is so far off track that it isn't even "wrong"; it's just confused. The very concept of an absolute truth is inherently unscientific. How could you possibly know you had absolute truth? You could unify all the known branches off physics, but that wouldn't prove you know everything there is to know about the subject. In Galileo's time, physics was synonymous with mechanics. Any unified theory of physics in that time would miss entire branches of physics that have been discovered since then.

We've lost sight of this, but what Newton essentially did was to unify the physics of his day. His three laws of motion summarize a vast amount of that physics, in that the predict phenomena as apparently different as the trajectory of a cannon ball and Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Newton's laws remain "true" for every area of application that existed in his day. That they don't work for things like modern solid state physics or cosmology is undeniable, but thinking this matters misses the point.

Some years ago, there was a popular recording of humpback whale "songs". It's marvelous, and surprising that humans have an artistic response to whale communication. It's wonderful that that response leads people to be interested in whales, to appreciate their beauty and majesty. But if we lose sight of the fact that the whales communicate for their own reasons, not to entertain us, then the whole human cultural phenomenon becomes a farce.

So, it is fine and good to find religious inspiration in science, as Baruch Spinoza did. But imposing religious ideas like absolute truth on science misses the thing which makes science science: a focus on empirical usefulness rather than "truth".

  Perhaps we should talk less of a theory's "truth" as a theory's "scope". Completely untrue theories would have an empty scope. All other theories have different scopes of utility.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[TapeCutter]

"Yet for some reason Darwin's theory of evolution gets picked out so that teachers must highlight its weaknesses. Why might this be?"

I agree with the GP's point: Pointing out weakness' in a theory is how it becomes stronger.
I agree with your caveate: All disagreements must be intellectually honest.

Evolution is nowhere near as contraversial as when I went to school in the 60's, a time when tectonic plates and black holes were also contraversial, science has convincingly won all three very public arguments over the last 40yrs (150yrs in the case of evolution). Of more immediate concern is the current FUD from global warming psudeo-skeptics (coinidentally they are also particularly strong in Texas). Not that I have anything against Texas but the reason these people make (subtle) anti-science and greenie bashing a political platform could be due to either power/money/ignorance, regardless of which one it is, ignorance amoungst their followers is the sole reason they get away with it.

IMHO Dawkins and Sagan are correct in that science is taught as a "dictonary of facts", the philosophy of science is largely ignored by the education system and consequently misunderstood/ignored by the public at large. Evidence for this is not hard to find, just count the number of "climate fools" here on slashdot, they espouse all manner of nerdy sounding but thougoughly debunked scientific red-herrings, not because they are stupid but becuase their lack of understanding as to what "scientific skepticisim" means makes them easy prey for intellectually dishonest politicians and their sponsors.

Due to the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence I can no longer belive a politician can (legitimately) keep using ignorance as an excuse to poo-poo global warming and/or evolution. Therefore the root cause of the cherry-picked "science" found in the opinion columns of the mass-media and subsequently regurgitated by a million ignorant bloggers - must be money and/or power.

Premptive Al Gore reply: I'm not from the US, I haven't seen his film. I had already read the IPCC reports and didn't see the point, from the reviews of Gore's film by IPCC scientists, (and later their answers to critics), I would have to conclude his slide show was an accurate representation of the reports. OTOH: Just because the doco is accurate does not mean Gore's motivations for presenting it are intellectually honest.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[EdIII]

I think that we maybe have a stronger case for gravity than for evolution...

The "Hell" we do. We most certainly do not.

Gravity is something we can "touch and feel". We cannot explain why it exists or how it operates. At all. We can observe that two objects will eventually be drawn together and we can clearly prove that a hammer will fall 1,000,000,000,000,000 times out of 1,000,000,000,000,000. That nobody has ever dropped a hammer and had it "fall" upwards or hang in space and been able to reproduce it. The best we can do is come up with some plausible theories of how gravity is actually created.

Gravity has been constant as long as human beings have been relating their experiences to one another. We have no records in our environment that indicate Gravity was missing for 2 years approx. 1,324,435 years ago.

However, Gravity may not be a law. That's right. Might not be. What if gravity fluctuated like an off/on switch?

Think about a fluorescent light. It is turned "off" and "on" about 60 times per second. Our visual processes fool us into thinking it is a solid light just as we are fooled by 30 images a second being movement.

Human beings which live about 75 years would see this light source as being constant. You could reasonably create the "Law of Light" not understanding how this light source works at all.
A fly can actually see this light source turn off and on and does not live even a year. A fly might reasonably create the "Law of Oscillation".
Now imagine a life form that only exists within a single 1/60th slice of time. These life forms could also create "Law of Light" and the "Law of Darkness".

You could create any number of lifeforms that experience reality at different rates and maintain that information over time with different degrees of success. All of their conclusions would be just as reasonable as the next life form, yet none of the life forms involved may ever be correct.

Evolution is more similar to Gravity than you think. Evolution, like Gravity, is an observable property of biological life on this planet. We cannot prove that Evolution (as a biological property) was ever ultimately responsible for humanity, or any other life form on this planet. If Evolution is going to solve our origins question then we must also solve the "chicken and the egg" problem. We have to trace Evolution back all the way to very moment a life form was created on that planet. Then explain why the life form was created. Go ahead I'll wait :) Of course you can say that an unbroken chain of species going back all the way to the master life form is unreasonable, but we can't even do it with an inordinate number of breaks in the chain.

We also cannot prove that Gravity always existed (always being a very long time of course) and that it will continue to exist. Note I said, PROVE. In order to prove that you would need a fundamental understanding of Gravity we just don't possess.

All of our theories about Evolution explaining our origins are just as "strong" as our theories about how Gravity may actually operate and what creates it.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[squiggleslash]

Perhaps because the theory of evolution has had a profound impact on Western thought, far more so than any other scientific theory I can think of.

In what way? And how does this relate to the question?

And because although scientists can explain how they think evolution might have occurred, the scientific method can't be used to actually directly test the "origin of the species" - it isn't repeatable.

The scientific method can be used in a variety of ways, from demonstrating the process, to making predictions about evidence that would have to exist, or could not exist, and then looking for that evidence. There are very few scientific theories that require you repeat the entire process that the theory explains in order to know it works. Relativity, for example, can be proven to work in principle, but when you use it to determine why Mercury rotates around the Sun faster than Newtonian physics suggests you're generally not required to build a huge frickin' ball of fire in the middle of space and a giant, Mercury-sized ball of rock to go with it.

That one's interesting too, actually. The theory of relativity is generally not considered that controversial, but actually it doesn't fully explain why Mercury's orbit around the Sun isn't Newtonian, 'cos it's not entirely consistent with Relativistic physics either. Evolution seems, by and large, to be less controversial within the scientific community than most modern laws of physics, and yet it's the one that's picked on by school boards. Why is that?

And perhaps also because the theory of evolution depends on the pre-existence of DNA, and there is currently no satisfactory explanation for how it originated.

Satisfactory to whom? There are a variety of theories as to how RNA and DNA came into being. Nor does the theory of evolution depend upon the "pre-existence" of DNA, on a wider level, DNA is just another successful development, with other proto-"genetic storage systems" failing to survive in the same chemical soup. Had a different genetic storage system developed in the soup, that was developed earlier and was as effective as DNA, some other living being would be having this discussion right now, but that living being would also have evolved and would recognize the theory of evolution as a theory.

And finally, because many proponents of evolution are every bit as religious about their beliefs as the ID'ers.

Even if this were true, it's also entirely irrelevant. ID is, regardless of its supporters, not a scientific theory. Evolution, regardless of its supporters, most certainly is.

Re:Science includes BOTH strengths and weaknesses

[Walkingshark]

Well the whole point is that they don't understand it, they don't want to understand it, and they don't want anyone else to understand it. They want their religion to have the same universal credability as science, but that can't happen as long as science is standing in the way. Many of these people, 600 years ago, would have been standing with a sword in their hand ready to plunge it into your chest cavity if you answered "Convert or die" incorrectly. Ultimately, religion is based on arbitrary bullshit that was invented by someone, and without total consensus agreement it quickly falls apart. When you base your cultural stability on everyone buying into the same bullshit, and people start to question, it creates danger for the power structure and for those who depend on that structure. These days, we have a working secular replacement that can hold together just fine without Religion, but the memetic momentum has carried the very idea of supernaturalist pap right into the current day, and will probably continue to carry it for a while to come. The coming worldwide disasters due to global warming will push many people back into religion's embrace, despite the fact that the whole reason they feel threatened (global warming) is yet another piece of evidence that their interventionist God does not exist.

I find there are a multitude of these already. My favorite is this: If an interventionist God exists and designed humans from the genetic level up, why do some babies self destruct when they get sick?

Re:Won't someone please think of the children?

[Raynor]

Children are impressionable. They are (usually) unable to weigh the pros and cons of arguments and instead defer to authority figures. There are some theories which are not legitimately challenged in today's scientific world.

Should we teach alternative theories to the reason why things fall down? (Intelligent falling perhaps) After all, the Theory of Gravity is only a theory, not a fact.
Or perhaps that "the weight of a body on the surface of a heavenly body is the reaction force caused by the acceleration of the surface of the heavenly body away from its centre."
http://www.copples.clara.net/gravity.htm

This is an alternative theory of Gravity. It may even be true, however, no one seems to be trying to teach kids the controversy... because there isn't one. The science taught in high schools is well supported and, as mentioned above, not challenged by academia in any real way.

We have an obligation to our children to shield them from ideas which masquerade as science because they lack the skills needed for proper scientific inquiry. I can go to an average high school class and, assuming they don't have any smart asses, teach them about the horrible problems associated with dihydrogen monoxide. Chances are I can convince every one of them to firmly assert that they would be willing to ban water.

http://www.snopes.com/science/dhmo.asp
86% of freshman supported a ban on water,
12% were undecided
2% correctly identified it as water.

It's not that difficult to dupe the public as a whole, let alone children in an authoritative setting. You teach the best science available and continue to teach it until a better theory presents itself. It may take years for this "better theory" to get from not accepted to partially accepted to almost universally accepted, however, IMHO we shouldn't be teaching it until it gains the support of the majority of the scientific community.

Leave the debate on alternative theories of gravity to the Ph.D's who (probably) know what they are talking about. Teach it in the schools when you've convinced a gross majority of them. Convincing a gross majority of the general public does not make it a scientific theory.

Weaknesses?

[tgibbs]

As a biologist, I'm not aware of any "weaknesses," in terms of inconsistency with the evidence. I've read those promoted by ID/creationists, and all are false or downright fraudulent.

But there are certainly areas of evolutionary theory where unresolved questions remain. These are appropriate for discussion in classes at the appropriate educational level--graduate courses, or high-level undergraduate college courses--where students have the educational background to understand the issues.