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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.'"
"It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out."
— Carl Sagan
First of all, no one is saying that a theory's weaknesses can't be discussed, but these kinds of laws are not designed to do that, they are designed to give weight to Creationism and ID. It has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with giving a false sense of weakness in scientific theories. Evolutionary theory has issues, but then again so does gravity, or any other theory.
A second point is that there are not enough hours in the day to give kids more than a brief survey of, say, evolution. You're notion that teachers are equipped to take children through a theory like evolution in that detail, or that children who are even less well equipped can hope to comprehend. What you want is absurd, but seems fairly standard for Creationists who try to make the unreasonable sound reasonable.
Beyond all of that, of course, is that this law is on the face of it unconstitutional. This was all dealt with a few decades ago, and much of it was reiterated and expanded on by the Dover Trial.
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Well there's "open mind" and then there's "absurd". You wouldn't sanction another instructor walking into the room and trying to offer the students "alternate options" like a flat earth or the moon made of cheese.
"Open Mind" is for topics that have not been thoroughly figured out. It's good for things that we don't fully understand yet, to encourage different opinions and explore ways to get closer to the truth.
Once all reasonable doubt has been settled, it's time to accept reality and stop placing any credibility in what's written in some 2000 yr old book.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Seeing both sides of an issue is a easier to do when there are two sides to an issue. We are as confident in the presence of evolution as we are in the presence of gravity, but we don't have our science teachers expressing weaknesses with that particular phenomenon despite the fact that birds are regularly seen flying. I'm confident that one could come up with any number of theories as to why we are pulled towards the ground (the Earth sucks, Jesus has his hand on all of our shoulders, et cetera) but there is one scientifically valid explanation for gravity, and that is the explanation we give in science class. Likewise, I'm sure there are other explanations for the variety of life on the planet other than evolution: scientifically invalid ones. By all means, teach them that Christianity disagrees with scientific thought... in a social studies or religion class, where it's appropriate.
I agree with you that skepticism is important in science (and critical thinking in general). However, I think the big problem with this bill is that it explicitly calls evolution a "controversial scientific topic". Evolution is not controversial. Biologists may argue about the details of how evolution happens, but they don't dispute that evolution does happen. Just as bad, this bill lists "human cloning" along with evolution and climate change, which is very misleading. Human cloning is a technology, not a line of scientific inquiry like evolution and climate change are. And it is controversial for ethical and moral reasons, entirely unlike evolution and climate change. So yes, skepticism is good, but the language and assumptions used in this bill seem to me to be rather bad.
Because teaching that evolution is wrong is lying and "making things up", no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Teaching kids to see both sides of an issue is all fine and good, but teaching them that anti-intellectual dogma deserves to be placed on the same plane as established scientific fact is not, and the reason this is so important is because children don't have the innate ability to tell the difference- that's why we have education in the first place.
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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.
Because this has nothing to do with keeping an open mind, and is in fact intended to do the exact opposite - to keep minds closed. Now, the chances of this bill becoming law are pretty small, but it is pernicious and will have a chilling effect. Representative Anderson should be ashamed of himself, but I suspect that he is nothing more than a conman without that ability.
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?
Both sides of the issue? What issue? There are no issues to teach! The only possible "controversy" comes from people who are not scientists and have something to lose by believing the prevailing theory. Nobody wants to teach the "controversy" that surrounds gravity; it's only when you contradict what people already believe that you end up with this kind of irrational resistance. What are these "open-minded" teachers supposed to do? Read from a Bible, so that kids are exposed to the fundamentalist Christian doctrine of creationism? That's for religion or philosophy class, not science class. Have the CEO of a multinational corporation come in and deny man-made climate change? That's for a politics class, not a science class. Have some crank who doesn't believe in the moon landings preach his conspiracy theory, as an equal opportunity to teaching physics?
This is bullshit, and the supporters know it. They just want to indoctrinate the kids with their message, rather than allowing only what they see as their opponents being able to indoctrinate the kids. If this were politics, philosophy, or religion class, I'd say, "Yes, that's a very good idea. All viewpoints should be heard." But it's not. It's science class, and science class doesn't lend itself to this kind of "all viewpoints are equally valid" philosophy. Just because you have an opinion doesn't mean that you should be able to teach it along side an actual theory.
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.
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