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Tennessee Bill Helps Teachers Challenge Evolution
sciencehabit writes "In a 70-28 vote yesterday, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed HB 368 (PDF), a bill that encourages science teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal. Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom. If the bill passes, Tennessee would join Louisiana as the second state to have specific 'protection' for the teaching of evolution in the classroom."
I pray that the day after this law passes, a biology teacher somewhere in the state walks into his classroom and spends the entire day showing how the fossil record contradicts the silly Genesis story in the Bible--knowing he's now protected by a law that says his principal and angry parents can't do jackshit to stop him.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now the students can write "God did it" on every question without the fear of getting a bad grade.
Requoting a sentence :
"...a bill that encourages science teachers to explore controversial topics without fear of reprisal."
So the article went straight from that wonderfully enlightened bill and went for creationism? Not partner preference, abortion, unsafe health conditions, or stem cells?
You could write 100 articles from that bill.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...and see how long it takes for this law gets amended.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Hey there are teachers at universities that teach that the 9/11 attacks where a plot by the US government and they get defended on the grounds of Academic freedom.
http://media.www.smithsophian.com/media/storage/paper587/news/2007/09/20/News/Umass.Professor.Supports.911.Conspiracy.Theory-2984244.shtml
Where do you draw the line? I agree that Creation science isn't but then I have heard teachers spout all sorts of tripe over the years. I know of one child that actually had a teacher that when she found out that she was a member of a certain religion start teaching a course about the history of the religion from a very negative view point and full of miss information. The school defended her teachers right to teach history how she saw fit and that was in high school.
So do you want the government to tell teachers what they can and can not teach?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
But it *has* been observed. You've heard of antibiotic resistant bacteria, right?
It is both observable and has been repeated in many experiments.
Some of them are not even experiments per se: see antibiotics and bacteria.
WHY, pray tell, does there have to be a conflict? And, by the way, evolution of simple organisms is observable and repeatable.
I am Spartacus
I pray that a teacher will actually question the so called science of evolution, as something not observable or repeatable.
Vaccine resistance.
OK, let's suppose you're not trolling and you're not unwilling to challenge your own views. Not unreasonable assumptions, so watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI
And that's based on objective machines (DNA sequencers and computers comparing the sequences). The link is highly recommended for schools and teachers.
That means no Adam, no garden of eden, no eternal sin, no Jesus dying for our sins.
Bert
Not observable?
I guess that depends on your definition of "observable", since it was Darwin's observations that species that had left the mainland had evolved into new species that were better adapted to their new environment. We have observed hundreds of human and pre-human skeletons showing an evolution over a period of a million years from chimpanzees to modern humans. Countless other observations have been made. We have even recently observed that bacteria, when selective pressure (antibiotics) is applied, they tend to evolve (ie, "superbugs").
Not repeatable?
Again, lab experiments have shown this time and again. Take two bacterial colonies, start turning up the heat over a number of generations and you'll eventually have two separate colonies of thermophiles. In the wild, convergent evolution has been seen a number of times. The textbook example are birds and bats. They belong to different classes (mammalian vs avian) and from the fossil record, we know that the wings developed after the species split off, but both creatures have very similar wing structure.
Simple organisms like flowers, dogs, horses, etc. Mankind has been running evolution experiments at least for all of recorded history.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The issue is that evolution isn't controversial. Hell, even the Catholic Church recognizes it. What you've got is a large number of ill-educated hicks that refuse to accept reality. Suggesting it's controversial is giving credence to all manner of silly beliefs which are demonstrably false. It's one thing to believe that God kicked off the progress, that at least isn't known to be false.
Same goes for climate change, there's a lot of idiots out there that don't believe it, but in terms of the people who actually study it, there's very little actual argument going on about it being real. The real controversy at present is over what to do about it, precisely how bad will it be and how long do we have to do something about it.
Of course it isn't.
But it IS "an either-or proposition" if you insist on a LITERAL interpretation of The Bible.
You can be religious and understand/accept evolution and understand that "The Garden of Eden" was a parable.
You CANNOT believe that The Garden of Eden was a physical location on Earth and understand/accept evolution.
Not without some serious mental gymnastics about a trickster god.
There are a few things that you need to understand about why this is an issue. Christianity collapses entirely without the Creation story. While under Judaism, it was just a parable to explain the creation of the world, Christianity gives this story teeth for the following reason: The basis for Jesus's sacrifice was that Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden. From the Instant that happened, with the exception of a few Jews that followed the laws of Moses, 99.999% of all Humans all born on Earth before or since were damned to Hell. Thats the only reason the evolution issue is an issue at all. If this myth isn't true (and it isn't.) Christianity collapses and Jesus died for absolutely no reason than being a cult leader the Romans wanted to execute. (make no mistake, Christianity IS a doomsday cult.)
A few things about the Judeo-Christian God Yahweh:
- He started out as part of a War God along side two other gods, Ba'al, and Asherah. When their followers were eradicated Yahweh was given the title of 'Elohim'
- Jehovah is Yahweh in German
- He is a male God. Who advocates male supremacy and is VERY misogynistic
- He is very mean, cruel, and most Humans have a morality superior to Yahweh, in his original form. Yahweh has been watered down a whole bunch.
- Yahweh is often refered to as 'The Lord' due to Censorship in English copies of the Bible. It is considered a violation of the Ten commandments to call Yahweh, 'Yahweh'.
The issue is that for reasons of social control. US Christians do not believe their civilization will survive without Christianity. Yahweh is a tribal god that his followers keep extending and expanding his powers. Yahweh is not real, he is only as powerful as his followers say he is. As such, without an all powerful Yahweh to bind everyone, and keep the masses in line, A whole lot of people who make a whole lot of money, and have a whole lot of power stand to lose their power if belief in Yahweh fades.
Another thing is there are Humans in this world who believe the myth of Heaven and Hell. To those people, when the 'end' comes, they are supremely worried that Yahweh will let exactly zero Humans (or at least not them) into Heaven. The creation myth is a big part of the idea that Jesus died for the original sin of Man. The religion doesn't work if the Garden of Eden never happened.
That's been tried. The corporations started cheap schools that only educated people just enough to work in the corporation's factories. (At a wage where the people couldn't afford to send their children to a better school.)
Countries that had public education then out-innovated the non-public education countries, and were better competitors in the global marketplace.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The truth^W^WScience threatens the parents' faith.
Don't ask why their faith is so weak that it has to be protected by the government from conflicting ideas.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
This is a fallacy that keeps getting spouted off by ID proponents.
Genetic information CAN be gained... but even if it couldn't, it wouldn't matter. The amoeba... one of the "simplest" forms of life, has one of the largest observed genomes to date.
Simply through mutation of existing genetic information, the passing of it through sexual and non-sexual reproduction we can observe (yes OBSERVE) changes in genotype and phenotype.
Oh... and I don't need to cite an experiment. I can point to a real world example.
Down's syndrome is caused by the presence of an extra chromosome. THAT is additional genetic information right there.
Just because YOU can't figure out how an organism can gain information (and likely this is because you don't know enough about biology) doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
That is the basis of intelligent design. "I can't figure out how it could happen, that means that it doesn't - And no... I refuse to learn more so that I might be able to figure it out". That's fundamentally the basis of irreducible complexity - I can't figure it out the evolutionary mechanism, therefore it must have been designed. It's sad because others DO... and every example of irreducible complexity offered up by the ID community has plausible processes by which they could have evolved.
You can be religious and think ID is a bunch of hooey. This isn't an either-or proposition.
True.
But what happens when someone moves from absolutely believing that the Bible is an infallible document that is absolutely the correct un-tainted word of God, to discovering that it's full of errors, omissions, inconsistencies, and has been changed in thousands of places over time.
Changes that are both accidental and intentional. Changes made for reasons both innocent and manipulative.
It's a big deal to discover that something you thought was infallible has errors.
Then what? If it has one big error , how many more are there?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
And that is exactly why "Intelligent Design" or "Creationism" is NOT a science and should NEVER be taught in a science class.
Science requires that any hypothesis or theory be falsifiable. At least in theory. It may be impossible to perform the experiment to falsify it.
With non-science, there is no way to falsify it.
If the experiment shows A, then the creator wanted it to.
If the experiment shows B, then the creator wanted it to.
Since it is not science, it should not be taught (even as a "controversy") in a science class.
Leave it in the social sciences / philosophy classes.
No part of a story about the world being created some 6 thousand years ago by a magical sky wizard adds up to dinosaurs that were around millions and billions of years ago.
According to creationists, the large reptile/bird creatures we call "dinosaurs" were called taninim (sing. tanin) by the ancient Hebrews. Some dinosaurs, those too big to fit in a 450 by 75 by 45 foot barge built under the direction of Noah Lamechson, died in the great flood of 1656 Anno Mundi. Smaller ones, such as the velociraptor Deinonychus famous from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, may have been hunted to death before the flood. Still other creatures were aquatic, such as the plesiosaur (one of the possibilities for Heb. leviathan), but could not adapt to the post-flood composition of seawater. As for fossil records and radioisotope dating, young-Earth creationists have their own theories on how the flood interferes with those.
So you have stupid friends. All that tells me is that your friendships are unintelligently designed.
As for your inability to realize what a "theory is", please test your god by jumping off a goddam cliff. That'll show that theory of gravity (or, more exactly, *theories* of gravity. Be sure to deny all of them on your way down.) Oh, and be sure to take your Bible, so it can go thump one last time.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Who mod'ed that up?
It makes the same old mistake that we see every time this topic comes up.
A scientific theory is NOT the same as a "theory".
A scientific theory is NEVER "proven".
A scientific theory can only be shown to be flawed.
You are 100% wrong.
The guy you're responding to is wrong, but nowhere near as wrong as you. If you're stupid enough to say things like "evolution is a theory which has yet to be proven", you're probably not worth wasting time on, but what the hell:
First of all, evolution and intelligent design aren't mutually exclusive. It's quite possible that some type of "creator" - whether it be a guy with a beard, or a black monolith - created life on earth. However, that in no way contradicts the fact that all life on earth is related, and that both the geological and genetic record prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all present-day species are descended from common ancestors. As long as your idea of "intelligent design" doesn't posit a magic-man who's constantly tweaking things, there's nothing contradictory between intelligent design and evolution.
Where intelligent design fails is a whole different issue. For starters, it posits no testable hypothesis. It offers no evidence. It attempts to put an end to further discussion and discovery, rather than opening new avenues of exploration. The phrase "god dun it" is not an answer - it's an appeal to ignorance. The same 'answer' has been used for tens of thousands of years to explain anything that we as a species couldn't understand. Why do we have lightning? God dun it. Why does the earth shake? God dun it. Why is there a flood? God dun it. In EVERY SINGLE PAST CASE, it was scientific scrutiny and the curiosity of man which eventually gave us a real answer, while the religious troglodytes continued to pound their holy books and point at their invisible dude in the sky. In every single case, the religious 'answer' was wrong. What possible combination of neural misfiring could convince you that, in this case, your answer happens to be right? And why would you EVER be satisfied with an answer that doesn't lead you to new questions?
The trouble is that those who believe in creationism greatly fear their kids hearing the other side of the story, because they might start believing in evolution.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of a fundamentalist Christian parent:
1. My son/daughter believes in creationism now, they've accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior and have been saved, so they're going to Heaven when they die.
2. I have a few friends whose children heard of this evolution stuff from some fancy-pants schoolteacher, and no longer believes in creationism or even Jesus, and is thus a sinner doomed to Hell. My other friend's kids were fine, and still don't believe in evolution, but a few did, so that could be my kid.
3. Thus I should do everything in my power to prevent my kid from hearing about evolution, because the salvation of my child's soul, which to a True Believer is more important than their life, depends on it.
If you believe in that sort of Christianity, but don't believe that your child's faith is strong enough that they might get so easily tempted away, then this is a real fear. This is especially true if you also believe that the theory of evolution was created by Satan in order to tempt the faithful away from God. And if you can't afford a private school, and the kid in question is under the legal dropout age, then from your perspective the law is requiring your little saved child to be tempted by Satan.
I don't believe any of this, but if you try to get into that mindset where these ideas are accepted as the most fundamental truths of existence, it makes perfect sense.
I am officially gone from
I can not *prove* God exists any more than you can *prove* that God does not exist.
Actually, no, I don't have to prove he doesn't exist. He simply doesn't until you prove he does. There's no impasse here other than your (or anyone's) inability to prove what they believe.
If you don't see the connection between blind faith in something that can't be proven in any fashion, and Charles Manson's delusional followers, well I think we're done here. You can't have one without the other no matter how much you protest.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
if I'm wrong and have deluded myself into belief in a lie for my life, there's no consequence to my belief other than I've followed a lie. I am doing no harm to my fellow man.
You may not be, but plenty of other 'religious' folk seem quite hell bent on imposing their views on the rest of the world. So yes I attribute that to anyone who supports that idea. You can't have one without the other.
TO you it is the same as believing in Santa...to me it is a part of who I am.
I assert that to a 5 yr old it is quite definitely part of who they are as well.
I'm willing to revise my opinions based on evidence, and to date I have found no evidence that God does not exist.
This is the very definition of 'science' that I am in favor of. Having 'evidence' drive things, not fantastical belief systems with no supporting evidence. You seem to agree with me on this point.
And I stand by the concept that as a general rule, athiests seem to have a serious problem accepting that religious people have their beliefs, and feel the need to mock and belittle those with faith for their faith.
I heartily disagree with you. The whole point of the article was about the religious pushing their views onto others. Religious history is literally rife with them pushing their beliefs onto others. Atheists and my ilk object heartily to being forced to accommodate in our lives the beliefs of others that are clearly not based on factual evidence. Again something you say you agree with.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people