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Mixed Outcome of Texas Textbook Vote
The Texas Board of Education — as discussed here last week — has voted on the guidelines for textbooks in that state, which represents a large enough market to have influence nationwide. The good news is that the board dropped a 20-year-old requirement that both "strengths and weaknesses" of all scientific theories be taught; score one for the teaching of evolution. The not-so-good news is that in a "compromise," the board also voted to require that students "in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations ... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Score one for the Discovery Institute. A Republican board member explained that the words "strengths and weaknesses" have become "code for creationism and [the similar theory of] intelligent design. So by being more clear in the language and using words that aren't seen as code words, we were able to get all of the 15 board members to agree that this is how we'll teach all sides of scientific explanation, using scientific evidence." Reporting on the Texas vote is all over the map, as a US Today blog summarizes. Some reports claim that an amendment was passed that preserves a
requirement that students study the "sufficiency or insufficiency" of common ancestry and natural selection. Other reports claim that the board also adopted language that would have students study the "different views on the existence of global warming."
I can almost hear the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn supporters in Texas gearing up for the campaigns to pressure the school systems into teaching their alternative "scientific" explanations of evolution, cosmology, etc. It should be fun to watch.
And how about the people who think that the mathematicians have make pi far too difficult for kids, and want their favorite alternative value taught in the schools. Wouldn't it be fun to contemplate a world in which engineers could build things using the exact (and rational!) value of pi that was taught to them when they were young ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Seriously, does he not notice how much he's effectively tabloidizing Slashdot?
Seriously, I was concerned I may have been missing something(since the summary's "bad thing" didn't sound all that bad) until I saw "by kdawson".
Let say our culture eliminates itself, and after 50000 years nearly no traces of us will be left. Still somebody looking at the Genes of the animals *will* find ID. He will find that certain genes were selected far beyond natural selection (actively bred), sometimes different from what you would expect in nature, and that new genes which do not belong to the pool of a species will appear (insulin in bacteria). What i want to say: there are scientific criteria for ID, but usually proposers of ID just want to justify their superstition and therefore hesitate to define these. Would i be in their place i would also hesitate, because this has the big risk of failing spectacularly.
BING BING BING -- we have a winner. The wording was changed just enough to stop argument and allow further plundering of science education by those who 'claim' to meet the criteria for course material via 'scientific evidence'....
I live in Texas and I have to tell you that the news that makes national and world headlines from this state is never good... outside that one press release on the invention of breast augmentation. When it comes to science and the law, most people here are not really in the slot of sharp knives in the flatware drawer.
Think about it clearly: the simple fact that this is an ongoing news-making argument means that they just don't get it and will have left a back door for ID and creationism to creep it's way into school curriculum, either directly or through the school's 'emphasis' on what is said in class.
I can tell you that I'm fully frustrated that this is even being discussed. Religion belongs in some other class, not science class. The bible is not evidence. If it was then clips like this would be banned, and not as funny as this really is.
The whole argument about creation in the science class is disgusting. Disgusting as anything I can think of. Fscking morons.
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Yes!!! We should not blindly accept gravity as a fact. Serious scientists now believe our understanding of what gravity may be either incomplete, or simply wrong.
http://www.physorg.com/news85310822.html
Yes I've read their jokes they (and YOU) think are science. They amount to proof by lack of example. They essentially boil down to "2 is not the square root of nine, therefore 9 has no square root". Some fool said some things cannot evolve because he can't think of a useful intermediate step. This is hilarious for two reasons. First, because basically all creationists are putting absolute faith in this persons godlike infallibility. And second, because nothing MAKES mutations that survive and propagate be beneficial. Consider Vitamin C. You may know it from orange juice. People can't make it. Primates in general can't make it! Cats can, those smug little bastards. But, people are more advanced, so we should have everything a cat does, right? Wrong! In general anyways, but not in this case, because humans, like all primates, DO have the gene to create vitmain C right here inside our very own bodies. But a random mutation broke that gene. You can see the gene sitting right there, just like it does in cats. But its all broked. It's weird, right? DIVINE EVOLUTION should not have allowed it to break, since its a beneficial gene to have! Only nothing makes stuff happen, it just happens. Primates eat fucking FRUIT all day. Not a single primate got sick when some weird mutant monkey started spreading his broken vitamin C gene around, because they all got plenty from Bananans and berries and such! In fact, maybe their kidneys were happy about it. A creationists favorite example is the mouse trap. They like to parrot their infallible and omnipotent leader (he must be since the whole argument is that since he can't think of a way, no way can exist). He says a modern mouse trap cannot have evolved from a more simple version. As I've said, no rule says that every evolutionary step must be an improvement. Steps backwards are even allowed, if they are not completely fatal prior to breeding age. Even using his stupid rules of only improvements allowed, you can in fact evolve a modern mouse trap from a primitive cartoon mousetrap consisting of a box with cheese in it, held up by a stick with a string tied to it. Step 1. Stick stick to cheese. No string needed anymore, and its now automated. Step 2, but it on a base with lips so the box can't move once closed (harder to escape now). Step 3, hinge the box and base, so the box always lands square. Step 4. Replace the stick directly holding the box up, with a stick holding a latch. That way the stick is more easily disturbed, since it doesn't have a weight on it. Step 5, replace the stick with a pressure plate, so the mouse is more likely to pull the latch free when eating. Step 6, put a spring in the hinge so the box closes much faster. Step 7, replace the box with a single plank that squishes the mouse dead. Step 7, replace the plank with a wire hammer, so all the force is applied to a much smaller surface area of the mouse. Ta da!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Cute, but nonsensical. The person you were responding to was right- fundamentalists are trying hard to convince everyone that evolutionary science and creationism are on the same level. They've invented talking points like "intelligent design" and "strengths and weaknesses" to confuse the general public into agreeing with your statement.
But they're wrong. Evolution is falsifiable science, and has nothing to do with theology. For example, many Christians accept the theory of evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II said "Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis."
Evolution is theologically neutral. Anyone who feels that their faith is threatened by evolution either doesn't understand evolution, or doesn't understand that science is about verifying falsifiable, naturalistic models of reality. Science doesn't attempt to reveal "truth" in a religious sense, it's simply trying to describe the most phenomena with the fewest postulates.
Uh, yeah. So the "we have no evidence that life could have spontaneously arisen, so it must not have" crowd is somehow more right than the "we have no evidence for how it happened, but we think life spontaneous arose" crowd?
I'm not sure that argument really even is that relevant in the discussion of evolution. I never considered evolution to really define where the original cell came from, but more to define how that one cell became us. I find it absolutely astonishing that so much evidence of evolution exists, particularly in the fossil record.
I mean, think about how big the earth is, the constant turmoil from erosion, volcanism, plate tectonics, etc. that afflicts the earth's crust. Now imagine a squishy flesh-and-bone creature (let alone a bacteria or plankton, or whatever) dying, being preserved in whole or part, and being found hundreds of millions of years later, many times purely by chance by some construction worker or farmer digging a hole.
So, for some whiny creationist to come along and say there are holes in the fossil record really just pisses me off. If you want to believe in miracles, think about finding a preserved brain from a hundred+ million year old fossil. To me, that's a f*cking miracle. (Sorry, that's probably somewhat tangent in the context of this reply, but not in the context of the overall discussion.)
And please, the "God put it there to test us" argument is just an embarrassment.
It'd be great if a curriculum genuinely taught critical thinking and the scientific method, along with the reality check that real scientists have disputes, personal ambitions, and moments of stupidity. Unfortunately, this school decision and ones like it seem to be meant to single out evolution as "a theory in crisis." In reality, even "proven" "laws" like gravity are the subject of ongoing study and debate.
If you're looking at science only long enough to hear about evolution, you might get the mistaken impression that evolution is the only area where there's still any uncertainty. It does kids little good to imply that there's Solid Science and that evolution is on some lower tier of reliability. And even less good to write curriculum language like this, and then use it as an excuse to pick on the one theory that most directly contradicts your specific religious beliefs. Note from the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document" that those guys are gunning for evolution specifically because it's so central to the scientific, rational understanding of reality. Eliminate evolution as an accepted theory, and reality looks more like an incomprehensible chaos where reason is helpless and only mystical insight is trustworthy. Put out the brightest light, and there's more darkness to sneak around in.
Revive the Constitution.
It's not actually necessary to wait for fossil evidence of the origin. You can examine sequence similarity between the different proteins that are involved in photosensing in single celled organisms and multicellular organisms to point you on the way to seeing how at least the components of eyes would have originated. (The actual structure of organelles and proteins required to sense photons accurately is far more difficult than the physical structure of the eye.)
The very steps that were necessary in order for everything that exists to evolve are written in the hereditary material that everything schleps around, after all.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
Technically, those are quasi-experiments (approximately, relying on the experiments already done by nature rather than setting up your own experiment) and they are rightly seen as of somewhat lesser value than controlled experiments
You have to be careful here. Controlled experiments can also give unexpected results because of a conscious or unconscious bias somewhere. Confounding factors abound.
The classic recent example is HRT. Controlled experiments showed that HRT reduced heart disease. It's now accepted that HRT has a net negative health benefit in the population at large (but that doesn't mean that it's not a benefit for some). There was a selectional bias in the controlled studies even though the researchers took every care to try to avoid any bias.
Another example: cycling helmets. There's an infamous paper by TRT showing that cycle helmets prevent 88% of head injuries. (You'll find that figure quoted all over the place). Unfortunately, using _exactly_ the same data you find that cycle helmets also prevent >80% of knee injuries. The fundamental problem with the paper was that it was really considering the injury risk between white middle class children riding in parks (who predominantly wore helmets) against black poor children riding in the street (who didn't wear helmets).
Every single country that has brought in a mandatory cycle helmet law (and enforced it) has seen the head injury risk _increase_ (most saw a net decrease in injuries but a much larger decrease in the numbers of cyclists post law) and head injury rates are _positively_ correlated with helmet wearing rates.
There's been no good research (to my knowledge) to explain why helmeted cyclists are more at risk. There are numerous hypotheses, from increased risk of rotational injury due to the increased size of the head to risk compensation. I only know of one tiny study (researcher in Bath, UK) who has attempted any measurements at all. His study is much too small (and he was the primary subject) to draw any robust conclusions but he found that cars passed a helmeted cyclist several inches closer than an unhelmeted one. That would imply that if it is risk compensation then it's not all down to the cyclist taking more risks with a helmet and so cannot be (completely) allowed for by the cyclist regardless of what a cyclist might claim.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
I went to the Darwin exhibition in the natural history museum in London the other week. There was a small section with a timeline on the history of the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution and the only country past the 50s that really seemed to have much trouble with it is the US where it has been repeatedly fought over for the last 30 years or so.
How can arguably the world's number 1 science and technology leader simultaneously be so utterly backwards when it comes to teaching science compared to much of the rest of the world? It makes me wonder how much further ahead the US might be in science and technology if you didn't have these idiots holding your education system back.
I've always found the US quite a paradox in this respect, full of so many of the worlds most intelligent people producing some of the most groundbreaking science and technology research, yet someone as dumb as Sarah Palin can make it all the way to VP nomination and GWB all the way to the whitehouse. What the hell is up with that? I mean here in the UK we had the likes of princess Jade Goody as everyone's little angel but at least there was no hope of her ever running the country.
Why is it the more advanced Western countries seem to get, the more idiocy seems to be celebrated and rewarded?
[[ How can arguably the world's number 1 science and technology leader simultaneously be so utterly backwards when it comes to teaching science compared to much of the rest of the world? ]]
Well, the US is also a very religious country so this part is quite easy to understand..
One area where the US "leads" the way also is the belief in 'little green men', I've read that 50% of the US population believe in those..
Now, each country has its 'stupidity': as you're English I would point out that having a Queen/King is a *very* stupid system!
I'm French and among our many stupidities, there are:
- we treat our elected president like a King (still much better than having a monarchy but hardly ideal)
- many believe in 'graphologie': in many case you have to take a graphologie test before being hired!!
You're damned right evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life! It's not supposed to, though.
As for the rest of it, why do I care what Darwin himself said? If Darwin had never been born, we'd just talk about Alfred Russel Wallace. And so on. His specific ideas were a slight variation on similar ones. He focused heavily on natural selection (a notion pioneered by Malthus), for instance. The modern theory of evolution is not word-for-word what Darwin wrote. And just as he differed somewhat from his contemporaries' take on common descent, so we have upgraded and amended what he gave us.
As far as his morality...it wouldn't matter if the guy was responsible for the Third Reich, it's the *model* that we're concerned with. Specifically, how well what we observe in the natural world is explained and predicted by that model. This is something that often doesn't click with non-scientists right away—the ideally watertight barrier between what was said and who said it. Things like double-blind tests are designed to eliminate the link between the observed and the observer. This is just one way that good science strives to eliminate bias.
Oh yeah...it's a complete lie anyway. Darwin was an abolitionist. Evolution actually stands in stark contrast to the "scientific racism" of the 1800s which sought to find scientific proof for the superiority of one race over another. (Common descent does away with that idea quite cleanly.) Please check your sources next time.
I am happy for schools to teach creationism. But I want equal time given to the wiccan beliefs. And I want witches to oversee the wiccan corriculum.
I'd like to see a question like this on a religious studies exam:
"Compare the attitudes towards the creation of the universe and the origin of life from the point of view of followers of two major religions."
I remember my religion teacher doing this when I was 15/16, and IMO it made a complete mockery of any "facts" religions claimed. Great, Judeo-Christians believe the world was made by their god etc, but I have a whole book of creation stories and some of them are much cooler.
I can't remember if there were questions like that on my exam. The sample exams I can find online don't seem to have questions like that, they're a lot easier, like "Pick one from 'Describe Christian attitudes to war', 'Describe Jewish attitudes to war'" etc.
I would LOVE to see any scientific evidence that supports creationism/ID b/c I havent seen anything except: "The world cannot be 6 billion years old because Adam and Eve weren't made that many years ago!" all they can do is "discredit" the theories of today's science. (for all you knuckleheads out there: A theory is a hypothesis (a proposed idea as to how something work) that has supporting evidence and has no substantial evidence against it)
So, where do you suppose the "Earth as a solid surfaced planet covered with water" came from?
There is no scientific explanation for the origin of matter.
Notice that the field of science you are fundamentally attacking there is chemistry, not biology.
Most people accept God and science.
This anti-evolution nonsense is fundamentally anti-science. It's impossible to "just" deny evolution and/or the age of the earth. Virtually every field of science from geology to chemistry to radioactivity to physics to genetics and on and on, it all ties in and they all confirm that the earth is billions of years old and that evolution is accurate. They "just" want to deny evolution, and oh by the way they have to deny carbon dating, and deny all radioactive dating, and oh by the way ALL of geology is completely wrong, and oh gee erosion is all wrong, and oh yeah lets toss chemistry on the trash heap too because chemical weathering and other slow chemistry doesn't work either, and the global record of billions of years of meteor impacts, and the geomagnetic record, and hell all of astronomy is wrong too because there's all sorts of 10,000+ year and 100,000+ year astronomical cycles recorded in the earth, just throw out Relativity and Quantum Mechanics when they too show a billions-year old earth and they confirm the sequence and timeline of biological evolution.
It's really simple. The activists on one side is deceiving people with misinformation.
The National Academy of Science for virtually every major nation on earth has a public position statement affirming evolution and that there is indeed overwhelming evidence conclusively supporting it. Every national or international science body with a public statement on evolution says the same thing. Out of about a half million degreed biologists, 100% agree evolution is established by the evidence. If you want to go to decimal points, it's 99.9%. Out of a half million biologists, there are about 700 denialists. 99.9% vs 0.1%. In absolutely any field, you can find at least 0.1% who are just plain crackpots.
Most people accept God and accept science.
This whole thing is just a replay of the Church-vs-Galileo fiasco. Some people decided they knew how God did things, and they had the dogmatic hubris to tell God how He was and was not permitted to run His universe. Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, 1 Chronicles 16:30, and more all say "He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved" and more, and in their presumption of self-perfection in religion and in their understanding of the Bible and their knowledge of God, they forbid God to have made a moving earth. They declared Galileo equal to atheism. They declared Darwin equal to atheism.
Psalm 19
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
The heavens and the earth uttereth speech and sheweth knowledge. All the earth is writ old, and all the evidence testifies to evolution. Galileo was right, the earth moves. Darwin was right, life evolved.
A spinning moving earth is the "how" for creating day and night and the seasons. The science of optics is the "how" for creating rainbows. And evolution is the how" for the diversity of life. God does not need to manually insert rainbows, He does not need to hand-craft each snowflake.
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Fine by me. I mean, it's only been in the last few years that the age of the universe has had a decimal point (I remember being absolutely amazed when WMAP returned a figure of 13.7 billion, when previous estimates had been of the '12 to 15 billion, ish' character). We still don't know what most of the dark matter is, we haven't a clue what the dark energy is. There's no reason that we shouldn't at least explain about the three different Friedmann models, the history of the cosmological constant (from Einstein's greatest mistake, to its current central importance in the accelerating universe), and the history of Big Bang versus Steady State. As for the age of the earth, one could mention the late nineteenth-century quarrel between astronomers and geologists, between those who said the Sun could be no older than a few tens of millions of years and those who said life on Earth had existed for orders of magnitude longer than that.
Similarly there's no reason why the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives to Darwinian evolution should not be discussed. There's Lamarckianism, for instance. And Lysenkoism, and a cautionary tale of its dire practical consequences for the Soviet Union.
Even the fundamental Newtonian physics could be handled in this way. Newton's theories contradict our instinctive ideas of how things work, which are closer to Aristotelian mechanics - or physics according to Wile E. Coyote. The point of it all is to develop an understanding of how science is actually done, how theories compete and how we judge between them, and why we now think this to be true, when once many people reasonably thought this instead: an understanding of science as a process by which we improve our understanding of the universe, not a list of facts that must be memorised.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
there are some bits [of the Bible] where current vs. older meanings of words and similar linguistic developments call into question specific meanings and interruptions occasionally.
One of the popular examples is in the Adam & Eve story, where people who know Hebrew will tell you that "adam" just means "mankind", and "eva" (or "evah") is a similar word for females. So Genesis really just says that God created mankind and womankind. There's no upper/lower-case distinction in Hebrew, so you can't usually tell common nouns from proper names. I've mentioned this to a few Jewish friends, who usually react with "Well, yeah; everyone knows that". But of course most Christian fundamentalists don't, because they can't be bothered to learn the Bible's original languages. They read it in their own language, because that's the way that God wanted it.
And there are always irreconcilable differences in word meanings when you're translating. In this case, the aleph-daleth-mem radical inside "adam" is also inside the Hebrew words for "dirt, soil" and "red". I had a (Jewish) friend once who liked to claim that the Adam/Eve story was really about a guy who was called "Red", because he had red hair, which was something unusual in that part of the world 6000 years ago. I don't know enough Hebrew to know if that's actually a valid reading of those passages, but it's a fun claim to toss out to the biblical literalists.
No one currently speaks Aramaic as a primary language, and modern Greek is not all that similar.
Actually, there are some Aramaic-speaking communities scattered around the Middle East, though many of them have been destroyed by the Iraq war. Of course, their Aramaic has evolved a bit from the biblical Aramaic of 2000 years ago. Similarly for Greek, which has a much larger population of native speakers. With both languages, the education systems have kept alive knowledge of the classical language, and there are at least a few thousand people who can read biblical Aramaic and Greek quite well.
But language problems remain. Thus, classical Hebrew (and probably Aramaic) had a word transliterated as "shoshan", which various bibles translate as "rose" or "lily". We don't have any classical Hebrew botanical reference texts, and we can't actually determine what species "shoshan" referred to. All we can say for sure is that it was a common flowering plant in the area. But this isn't really of any great theological import. If you replace "Consider the lilies of the field ..." with "Consider the wild roses in the field ...", it doesn't change the meaning of that passage at all. It's too bad that the writer didn't mention thorns or tubers, so we could narrow it down a bit. But unless we get a working time machine, we'll probably never know the correct translation of that word.
(And yes, I'm aware that there are lilies with thorns. We have two hanging pots of Asparagus plumosus, and their weak little thorns do nick us occasionally. This usually happens when we're picking one of their red berries for our conure, who loves them but can't pick them herself because she can't easily climb around in a plant with such thin stems. Her feet were designed for much thicker tree branches. Maybe God did this to prevent conures from devastating asparagus crops. ;-)
Theology can be a great thing for people who like picky discussions of the detailed meanings of words in long-dead languages or dialects.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So because it has withstood scientific skepticism for as long as it has, there's no point in teaching children how to apply scientific skepticism to it today?
Evolution is just another field of science, and should be treated no differently.
Are you suggesting CHEMISTRY teachers should stop and teach students all sorts of scientifically refuted garbage attacking chemistry?
indoctrination
I'm opposed to indoctrination.
The purpose of grade school science class is to present the basics of the scientific method, and to present an ACCURATE overview of each major field of science as understood and practiced by professionals of that field.
Rounded to the nearest percentage point, 100% of biologists consider evolution to be absolutely established by the evidence and to be the very foundation of their field. Even if you believe evolution is wrong, that is an undeniable fact. Students should be taught that fact. Students should have an ACCURATE understanding that 100% of professional biologists consider evolution conclusively established by mountains of evidence. Students should have an ACCURATE understanding of how and why 100% of biologists consider evolution foundational to the entire field of biology. Students should have an ACCURATE basic familiarity with the modern scientific field of biology as understood and practiced by professionals in that field, and that means a basic understanding of evolution. Even if you think evolution is wrong, it is still and irrefutable ACCURATE description of modern biologists understood and practiced by biologists.
In biology class, or any of the other sciences, it would be outright fraud to present anything different than that.
And a point that all too often gets neglected in high school science classes, it really would be good if students were presented with some of the evidence establishing each field, some understanding of why the professionals in that field are convinced the science is right. And for evolution that evidence is abundant and conclusive. It's a shame so many people graduate high school without having learned any of the proof that evolution is true. Science shouldn't just be about memorization. Science should be about understanding, and evidence. And evolution can offer both in abundance, if you've got a well informed and quality science teacher.
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