Evolution Battle Brews In Texas

oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."

Comments

The earth is round, p .05

[Palmsie]

Really? It sounds like someone from the board of education had a sit down with a statistician and thought it would sound cool to throw in the null because, for some reason, ID is the default explanation for the origin of species. I mean, this isn't a bad thing considering the vast amount of evidence in support of natural selection, ultimately suggesting that we can confidently reject the null.

They also may want to take a look at Jacob Cohen's classic paper, 'the world is round, p .05' for more information about the current Fisherian statistical paradigm we currently exist in and what it means to establish a null (and ultimately reject or fail to reject it).

Reminder

[Legion303]

Evolutionary theory has fuck-all to do with abiogenisis.

Re:Reminder

[im_thatoneguy]

In short - once you get back to the amoeba most of the religious objections to evolution are there regardless. So a God which created an amoeba is as unChristian as a God which doesn't exist.

They aren't wrong on this point. Once you eliminate the Adam and Eve story you no longer can place the blame for our fall on humanity. And when humanity isn't at fault for our suffering then the only person who can be blamed is God.

Once God is responsible our imperfection and exact design (through evolution) then he's evil since he designed us to evidently suffer.

If you assume that he evolved (through death and suffering) the human body but it was then (unlike the rest of the species on this planet) perfect and then corrupted by a Satan figure then again it's Satan's fault and not our own and once again we're not responsible for our defects.

You need literalism to maintain the viewpoint that we're responsible for our own suffering and God really really would like to help us but can't since it's our own fault--not his.

Essentially Christianity says that Humanity voided its warranty when it ate the apple. If you say that God started Abiogenesis then he's still responsible and we're all still under warranty. That doesn't fit within the saved/condemned view of the Christian church.

It must be falsifiable

[Kjellander]

A null hypothesis must be falsifiable, and therefor "it must be a wizard that did it" cannot be the null hypothesis.

Q.E.D.

Re:sad isn't it ?

[KDR_11k]

My father loves to complain how the US has no standard for what it takes to be a priest. The Lutheran and Catholic church both have schools that one has to have gone through to be qualified for priesthood so the preachers actually know what the religion is about and how to present it properly, the TV preachers in the US are free to make up any nonsense they want without being stripped of their title.

Re:Each theory?

[antifoidulus]

There is sort of a chicken and egg thing going on, but they do tend to feed into each other. The huge religious revival in the United States occurred just as the factories were starting to close en masse. This is not a coincidence, people lives literally turned from a certainty of relative comfort and ease in exchange for a bit of hard work into a massive pile of uncertainty. To counteract the uncertainty they turned to those who promised certainty, ie the church. The rich noticed this trend and immediately set out to use it to their own advantage. To make sure the people they were fucking over didn't rise up against them, they cajoled the Republican party into adopting a lot of the hard core religious beliefs(the ones who are "certain" about everything) and combine them with pro-rich policies. That way you could actually convince people to vote against their own economic interests.