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New Mexico Bill To Protect Anti-Science Education
An anonymous reader writes "From the Wired article: 'If educators in New Mexico want to teach evolution or climate change as a "controversial scientific topic," a new bill seeks to protect them from punishment. House Bill 302, as it's called, states that public school teachers who want to teach "scientific weaknesses" about "controversial scientific topics" including evolution, climate change, human cloning and — ambiguously — "other scientific topics" may do so without fear of reprimand. The legislation was introduced to the New Mexico House of Representatives on Feb. 1 by Republican Rep. Thomas A. Anderson. Supporters of science education say this and other bills are designed to spook teachers who want to teach legitimate science and protect other teachers who may already be customizing their curricula with anti-science lesson plans.'"
How is it anti-science to teach the weaknesses of a theory? Shouldn't we already be doing that? Seems to me that is exactly what we should do. Put all the facts on the table , describe the theories and teach the children to think through the problems that exist with all of theories instead of being mindless robots that simply regurgitate the flavor of the month.
I'm going to be downmodded to death, but isn't science about keeping an open mind? Here in my country school curricula are rigid, limited and biased government mandated crap. As long as the teacher doesn't lie/make things up, teaching the kids to question everything and see both sides of an issue will only do them good. The intelligent ones will eventually make their own decision about who's right or wrong, and the stupid ones will believe what they'll believe anyway...
educators aren't "scientists"
Pretty much everyone believes in evolution in general, but plenty of people believe the view of evolution taught in public schools tends to be oversimplistic. One one hand, you do have theists who believe that "irreducible complexity" necessitates a helping hand at stages instead of the blind process typically presented as Darwin's breakthrough discovery. Behe's Darwin's Black Box . Now, one can fairly view that as dressed-up Creationism, but it is written by an actual biochemist. Then there's the completely non-theistic views that oppose the simplistic account, such as Gould's punctuated equilibria.
The challenge in discussing evolution in public schools is presenting evolution as an uncertain field in a way that drives inquiry, contributing to a healthy development of scientific thinking among the populace, as opposed to closing minds which ID and Creationism advocates usually seek. It's a hard balance to get right.
As with climate change, the few real scientists who are skeptical seem to be from fields which have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand.
Even so, I would like to point out Project Steve to anyone who wants to claim there's a scientific controversy surrounding evolution.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
From TFA:
Rosenau said House Bill 302 will probably never see the light of day...
However, the fact that it's even being considered is worrying. It's another signpost on a road that seems to be heading for a generation of credulous morons. I don't see any significant barricades.
At least this means that teachers can't be threatened for completely slamming Intelligent Design.
This is just the outcome of public provided services and a government increasingly directed by the whims of the majority. I thought that was what everybody here was clamoring for? Freeing the people... ...if the people just happen to be dumb-shits or irrational? Well that's the bed you've made for yourself, why are you disappointed or put out?
While it is true that evolution at the k-12 level(and often at a decent slice of undergrad) is overly simplistic, I'm not sure that avoiding over-simplification in lower level science classes is even possible. The hairy details of the field are such that even PhD'ed full-time researchers in biology related fields tend to have specializations in subsets of the field. A full knowledge of the field, and its controversies, would require nearly superhuman effort, full time. Not Happening in 9th grade Bio.
This isn't evolution specific, of course. K-12 physics is usually Newtonian, which isn't just overly simplistic; but known to be false. However, when it comes down to teaching kids how to apply mathematical models to physical situations, albeit with imperfect accuracy, or wait until they finish tensor calculus to even broach the subject, Newtonian physics usually wins. Somehow, we don't have godbots battering down the doors and demanding that "Newtonism" be presented as a controversial theory... K-12 chemistry, while less overtly false than k-12 physics, is usually heavily simplified and pretty much applies (approximately) to idealized ionic compounds, some of the better behaved transition metals, and ideal gasses. Again, as bad or worse than k-12 bio; but uncontroversial.
Math, while more likely to be correct within its limited scope, also tends to be essentially dogmatic in its approach. You might get a few axioms and proofs in geometry; but you pretty much get to take all the properties of numbers on faith until you make it to number theory sometime in college.
It is definitely true that low-level science education is, from a factual/current state of the discipline perspective, reductive, false, or both(and this is why they should really spend more time instilling inquiry, experimentation, hypothesis, testing, conclusions, etc. rather than rote "facts" that are mostly known to be wrong); but that isn't why K-12 evolutionary biology is controversial. Virtually no part of a K-12 curriculum is immune to the charges of excessive simplicity; but only in the cases where the curriculum is also ideologically inconvenient does that become a major issue(mostly evolution, occasionally American history or the English class reading list)...
Quite the contrary! Creation and Intelligent Design would, in New Mexico, arguably fall under the umbrella of "other scientific topics," which means no teacher could be reprimanded for teaching the serious scientific weaknesses in those "theories." Sounds like they'll open the door for the real teachers to talk freely about how absurd arguments against evolution are.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Clap. Clap. This all is just a smokescreen for religious indoctrination, nothing more.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This means a teacher can discuss examples of creationism from other religions (like from Islam) without fear of reprimand. With, of course, supporting text from the Koran.
It will not happen overnight (hell, I have been watching it for 30+ years), but economic prosperity was the US' to lose, and the Religious Right is destroying it, bit by bit.
Once upon a time, I thought that open communication would help empiricism win out over magical thought, but after watching a couple of decades of religious right mumbo jumbo flowing out over the Internet, unperterbed by anything resembling empirical scepticism, I think nothing will penetrate their confirmation bias.
By pandering to our population's basest fears, they are systematically destroying the ability of one generation to teach the next how to think critically, and disrupting our ability to maintain science and math competence. We're toast, and it is time to acknowledge that, as the primitives dance around celebrating the 100th birthday of their harbinger, Ronald Reagan.
I am so glad my SOs do not want children.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Tell me of a test that would falsify AGW theory?
If there was a consistent downwards trend in typical global temperature despite increasing CO2 concentration (if other factors, such as solar irradiance, stayed constant). There, that wasn't too hard. Alternatively, if atmospheric CO2 concentrations didn't increase despite our emissions (i.e. there were feedbacks). Or, rather less likely, if someone did a new measurement and determined that CO2 didn't absorb IR after all.
while ONE test that turns up FALSIFIED is usually fatal to a theory. (If it won't kill a theory it isn't a proper test.)
Meanwhile, outside an "introduction to Karl Popper" book, pieces of scientific evidence are often not 100% in favour of one theory or another, especially in a system with many different things interacting. At most, they merely have a "most likely interpretation". There was no one piece of evidence that singly led to AGW theory, and there's to unlikely to be one that singly disproves it.
The sceptics find flaws and outright fraud in the models and datasets and they are attacked and suppressed
No they didn't, and if you think they did you weren't looking closely. And suppressed? Last I checked Watts was still publishing his website, and sceptics still get disproportionately large coverage in the mainstream press.
Modern Islam is not exactly a hotbed for scientific exploration and discovery, the reverse is true. This has not always been the case however as you'll probably know. While Europe was ravaged by norsemen and later held by the leash by restrictive and vindictive Christian churches in the early middle ages, the Islamic world was a place where scientific curiosity was not only allowed but even encouraged. Standing on the shoulders of earlier scientists from eg. Greece, India and China, scholars in the Islamic world produced many works which are still held in high regard. This was the Islamic golden age.
And then, something happened. Religious intolerance was probably one of the factors in the decline of scientific discovery in the Islamic world, led by theologists like Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059-1111) who used the tools of the philosophers to undermine philosophical and scientific inquiry.
Of course these developments happened in a span of centuries, not decades. It would not surprise me though if the decline of scientific learning in the Islamic world started just like it seems to happen in the United States of America, by religious zealots trying to undermine and discredit science and scientists and subverting science teaching to their own purposes.
--frank[at]unternet.org
If parents have little or no choice about what and how their children are taught, are they "just fine"? If people have little or no choice of how and what doctors treat them, are they "just fine"? Generally, how much freedom and personal choice can be taken away from how many for the people to stop being "just fine"? These are no idle questions. For example, in Germany there is no option for home schooling available to common folks for whatever reason they might want it - is that "just fine"?
Not sure if you meant to be sarcastic regarding totalitarian regimes keeping people "straight", but it is actually true to an extent. Say, Soviet children would get reasonable science education almost in any corner of the huge country -- and those of the very same children who grew up to be engineers and moved to the US are horrified with how their children are taught in public schools. Only a few of them can afford private schooling on their engineering salaries, and their efforts to bootstrap charter schools are viciously attacked by the US educational establishment such as teacher's unions etc. They do not feel "just fine" about this situation.
This comes up all the time, and has been disproved decades ago.
I don't know what the official term for it is, but I call the solution to these "irreducible complexity" arguments the "A B C evolution sequence":
Lets say a scientist looks at a modern organism and sees that the organism has a complex organ or chemical system, or whatever, made of two parts, B and C. Neither B, nor C will work individually. How did this evolve?
The explanation is that the organism originally had a much simpler organ, or chemical, or whatever. Call it 'A'. At some point, a variant evolved that had an enhancement added to A, call it B. Now, B doesn't work by itself, but A does. Together, A & B are better than A alone. At some later point, A gets a mutation, and becomes 'C', which doesn't work by itself, but works together with B. So now you have B & C, neither of which work together, yet it was possible for evolution to take "baby steps" to get to that point.
Practical examples have been investigated by scientists. I believe the canonical example of such a complex inter-dependent system are the proteins involved in blood clotting. A significant number are required, and the whole process fails without any one of them. Obviously, at some point, blood clotting was achieved with just one protein, which then become two, then three, and then the original protein was lost, etc... The evolutionary steps involved can be investigated by looking at the blood clotting proteins in related species, looking for the patterns and commonalities up the evolutionary tree.
No God required.
How does evolution explain a four chambered heart? ... Why would we form all the necessary components to be able to form words without the brain power necessary to process speech? ... What possible evolutionary advantage has writing given man? We are the only creature ever on the planet to be able to read and write, so it obviously has never had an evolutionary advantage... why are we able to do it. What is the evolutionary point.
At best, even if there were no current explanations for those things, you've merely listed some interesting avenues for future research.
Whole organs systems can not be formed by random mutation, and they don't work without the entire system. ...but some changes have to come in sets or they never work. Evolution will never explain that.
Now you're just asserting things. I know your intuition is strongly telling you "That can't happen!", but if you're going to deal with modern science you have to learn to deal with things being counter-intuitive.
I have never heard an adequate explanation as to how complex systems can evolve. ... Just because it's not a controversy to you doesn't mean it's not controversial to some very bright and stupid people, alike.
Among people who don't really know a lot about evolution, sure, it's controversial. Among people who actually know what they're talking about there is no controversy.
Politicians who wonder why the US is losing its competitiveness in science and technology need look no further than these sorts of moves.
The hypothesis of global warming is in a similar stage to the Theory of Evolution as it existed 150 years ago. When you equate them, you discard 150 years of investigation, learning, prediction, verification, experimentation, understanding and opportunities for falsification.
Global warming should stand on it's own, without the need to bring unrelated science fact to justify itself.
Right now, there is a consensus that while there are a few outliers, the evidence as a whole points to the warming of the planet by a fraction of a degree in recent history. This is good. What I would like to see now is the very serious separation of global warming from 'man made' global warming in public discussions.
They are separable variables and should be very clearly treated as such. In every single discussion.
Oh, let's also drop the new fad of calling the hypothesis "climate change". The climate ALWAYS changes. Global warming is the only of the two descriptions that actually describes the hypothesis.
Liberty.
For one thing, science is hard.
I think the term "relentlessly tedious" might be a better description.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Evolution started as a hypothesis, some testable predictions were formed, evidence was gathered that supported it and the process refined into the formal scientific theory we see today.
Creationism is a faith driven belief, documented in a storybook. Science doesnt even come into it.
No God required.
\
Why would you bring God into this. I never mentioned God. It's no wonder why religious people get offended when an evolutionary discussion is brought up. Assholes like you try to use evolution to disprove their religion, even though many people, scientists included believe in both God and evolution. It is possible to support two points of view.
Lets say a scientist looks at a modern organism and sees that the organism has a complex organ or chemical system, or whatever, made of two parts, B and C. Neither B, nor C will work individually. How did this evolve?
The explanation is that the organism originally had a much simpler organ, or chemical, or whatever. Call it 'A'. At some point, a variant evolved that had an enhancement added to A, call it B. Now, B doesn't work by itself, but A does. Together, A & B are better than A alone. At some later point, A gets a mutation, and becomes 'C', which doesn't work by itself, but works together with B. So now you have B & C, neither of which work together, yet it was possible for evolution to take "baby steps" to get to that point.
Great! Now if you could just provide an example of an creature who has an organ necessary for the creature to survive, that is obviously adequate or the creature would have gone extinct, evolving two more organs independently of eachother, neither of which form any function on their own, hanging on to these two separate, worthless organs, they both combine to perform the already adequate function of another organ, AND, the original organ slowly being evolved out of existance.
Wow! What a mouthful. Seeing as how nearly all of the systems in any organism's body are depending on eachother, a single example should be fairly easy to find.
Just like you said. Animal has organ A that is adequate. Animal evolves organs B and C, which are worthless without eachother, and B and C combine out of random chance to perform the job of organ A, better than A, and the animal loses organ A.
One example.
And, no. You may not ask God for help again.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
If there were no flying squirrels/bats, etc. you'd probably also be arguing that wings are irreducibly complex. After all, why would evolution cause an animal to lose a perfectly good set of limbs, just to spend thousands of years developing wings capable of actually flying. Fortunately, we can see dozens of examples in nature of rudimentary wings at different stages of development that make it very obvious how it happens. Despite all this, people, including respected scientists, still once upon a time tried to insist that the feathers on Archeopteryx were fake, even though it obviously has wings (if not wings, then it has a ridiculously long finger). The respected scientist in that case was curmudgeon Fred Hoyle, who coined the term 'big bang' (although he disagreed and originated the competing steady state theory), and did the important early work on stellar nucleosynthesis. Notably lacking among his credentials are paleontology and geology, and his debunking of Archeopteryx has since been thoroughly debunked (everything he claimed about the fossil was a misconception, not to mention that too many other Archeopteryx and other feathered dinosaur fossils have been found since then). For some reason, people with an agenda to push can always find these supposedly logical impossible puzzles in development.
To address the points you made in your discussion, I'd like to start by correcting your misconception that an important part of evolution is that "the strong survive while the weak die off". It's not survival of the strongest, it's survival of the _fittest_. Evolution isn't some path to godlike perfection. Evolution is just a way of describing a system of trial and error that reacts to the environment (an environment that, by the way, is made up of other organisms that are always evolving). Any genetic change that makes an individual stronger (such as 25% larger muscles), doesn't necessarily make the individual fitter because there could be a drought and a sudden lack of food and the individual with more mass to support isn't going to be able to get enough food to survive and is therefore less fit (or, in some conditions it will be able to get more food and will be more fit - a lot depends on random circumstance). Not to mention the other important fact that the individual with the bloated muscles or increased size due to a mutation may find itself without the skeletal structure to support its muscles or with a circulatory system the design of which doesn't scale up with the demands of its increased size. Heart problems are very common in human giants, even though bipedal creatures massively larger than them have existed. It's obvious then that most "beneficial" mutations are not actually beneficial to start with. Instead, most of them are survived rather than increasing survivability. Other mutations, or genetic combinations with existing mutations, can later combine to actually confer genetic advantage and then the bearers of the beneficial genetic legacy can go on to supplant the rest of the population, or use their newfound ability to spread out into a new environmental niche. Obviously evolution isn't just one process, simply illustrated in a textbook, it's a blanket term for an entire set of feedback processes.
On to four chambered hearts. You ask how evolution explains it, then go on to claim that "nowhere is there any type of record, fossil or otherwise that explains how a four chambered mammalian heard evolved from a three chambered reptilian heart". If you'd open your eyes, you'd see that there are plenty of examples of birth defects in which even human infants are born with extra heart chambers. They usually are not functional, and usually lead to early death. If there's a genetic predisposition to such defects, and conditions are right, entire populations can exist with the same defect. They don't have to be fittest, they just have to be viable. Then, eventually, other mutations may occur that improve the functionality of the mutation, up to the point where it actually provides an advantage over
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. If you can't cut it doing work in your field, I believe you have no business teaching it.
They're largely different skill sets. Those who "can't" might not be able to design experiments to save their lives, or are terrible at keeping track of their experiments, but do great with understanding the background, or theories.
Global warming switched to climate change when they realized that the warming would stop the NW current, which would actually cause the climate to cool in places where the ocean currents normally provide temperate climates (like Britain). See, they discovered that the name as it was was actually deceptive, so they changed it.