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Tennessee "Teaching the Controversy" Bill Becomes Law
MrKevvy writes "The Tennessee 'Teaching the Controversy' bill was passed into law today. 'A law to allow public school teachers to challenge the scientific consensus on issues like climate change and evolution will soon take effect in Tennessee. State governor Bill Haslam allowed the bill — passed by the state House and Senate — to become law without signing it, saying he did not believe the legislation "changes the scientific standards that are taught in our schools."'"
The governor adds: "However, I also don’t believe that it accomplishes anything that isn’t already acceptable in our schools."
I can't wait for the first lawsuit involving a teacher fired for teaching kids about gay sex in his sex-ed class, or the first atheist teacher who catches even a sideways glance for teaching about evolution openly in any way he/she wants to.
When I went to school in Georgia many years ago, biology teachers would have killed for a law like this. Not so they could preach about Jesus riding a dinosaur, mind you, but so they could teach *evolution* openly with absolutely no fear of retaliation for it.
Try firing Scopes now, you bible-thumping fucktards.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Politicians killing science in the American south. I wonder what they'll try to make controversial next. Gravity, perhaps?
Aliens built the Pyramids
Teach The Controversy
http://controversy.wearscience.com/
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So when can science teachers start to tell these cults what sort of nonsense to spew in their brainwashing sessions every Sunday?
Trolling is a art,
Not because the bill means anything - I agree that it probably has no effect relative to what is currently allowed - but because we, as a nation, need to get over this urge to make meaningless laws.
If the law has zero net effect, than DON'T MAKE IT LAW!
And if the legislature makes meaningless laws, veto it as a statement of principle. If they want to override, that's their privilege.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Throughout history, ideas have warred it out through the process of open discussion and debate. Right now, this issue is totally Balkanized and neither side is talking to the other. Opening it up to discussion might allow us to get farther than trying to pick on side or the other.
How can allowing teachers the ability to teach such utter bullshit help the U.S. stay competitive?
IMHO this sort of thing will only hinder the U.S. in the coming decades.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Well, if nothing else, Southerners will be so pig-ignorant in a few generations that they will make much more compliant domestics and pool cleaners for the Mexican-Americans when they take over.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A very appropriate name. Kids raised in TN are destined for failure. I'm sure there are some smart people there, but they moved in from out of state and/or are the exceptions.
I moved there in 2004, couldn't believe the ignorance, and ran out last year. That place is scary.
To be honest this is the kind of lawmaking I would expect from people there, a waste of time and further dragging the country down with more uneducated bible thumpers.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
I was against the idea at one time, but I'm thinking the time is come to make it a crime to pass legislation that blatantly violates the constitution. Obviously it will always boil down to intent, but the judge did manage to find intent in the Dover decision, that the school board had deliberately set out to teach a specific set of religious beliefs, thinly masked to be true. If they could be criminally prosecuted, say, for violating the constitution, as opposed to just escaping with a court loss, I'd wager this would disappear pretty fast, along with all sorts of other legislation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As Bill Bryson quipped, this is just "proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them."
Creationism (as in Biblical creationism) is spreading in China through missionary work:
http://www.skepticblog.org/2009/01/18/chinese-creationist/
But it's worse than that. US creationist organizations are actively translating their materials and working to disseminate them on a global scale:
http://nwcreation.net/international.html
See, something like this sort of happened before and when the University of CA systesm was sued, the judge dimissed it.
When TN students start getting rejection letters from accredited universities or at the very least colleges that understand that this is the 21st Century, maybe they'll change their tune.
This also happened with Kansas when one of their school boards banned teaching of evolution and California told their students to not even apply to their schools.
In the meantime, the rest of the World - even die hard theocratic countries - are pushing science educatoin. China is already on our heels when it comes scientifc progress.
Religious fundamentalism is destroying science education in this country - and giving everyone else of faith a bad name.
Theory and fact are two very different things.
Nonsense. To a Bayesian theory and fact are merely convenient labels for propositions of differing complexity and degree of inference.
No one with a mature understanding of the logic of science uses "theory" and "fact" as anything other than convenience markers. All propositional knowledge is subject to the same rules (Bayesian logic) regardless of how near (fact) or far (theory) it is from sense experience.
To argue otherwise is to declare oneself ignorant of almost everything regarding our knowledge of the world, which is never certain. The difference between someone who has faith the Bible is inerrant and someone who knows that evolution is responsible for the diversity of life is that the latter can revise their knowledge in the face of new evidence whereas the former will not change their belief regardless of the evidence. Faith, like all forms of certainty, is an epistemic error.
And no, I am not "100% certain" of that, in the sense that I am open to counter-arguments, although the Jayne/Cox derivation of Bayesian logic as the only consistent rules for updating our beliefs is compelling enough that I don't lose any sleep over the possibility it will be proven wrong, any more than I lose sleep over any other uncertain proposition, like the answers to "What is my name?" and "Where are my socks?" We get along with knowledge--which is inherently uncertain--just fine in all walks of life, and only an idiot insists on certainty as some kind of virtue when it is actually just a mistake.
Likewise, to use the uncertainty of all knowledge as an excuse to believe just anything is also a failure to grasp Bayesian logic, which says that we should accept the most plausible propositions, not just any old things we happen to want to believe.
People with an archaic, pre-modern notion of knowledge find all this mind-boggling, and I guess people in the southern US are going to be a lot slower than the rest of the world to learn any of it.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
In my experience, the best and most enlightening learning has come through study of both the arguments for and against a specific topic, theory, solution, etc. I feel more confident in my opinions when I have heard all arguments and seen all evidence. If any of the evidence or arguments are hokey, let me be the judge of that. If I judge that argument A is a joke and B is correct, my conviction regarding B will be stronger than if a counter argument to B were never presented to me.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
If you've ever had the misfortune of interviewing anyone from that area of the country for a job ... it's quite depressing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
According to Wikipedia, Tennessee is 41st in median household income in the US. How long are they going to hold on to even that position when all of the educated people in the state (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) start moving elsewhere so that their children will get a proper education? I think we can write off Tennessee for the near future.
Maybe the AMA and various other professional bodies should start reviewing the status of education in Tennessee to see if a child educated in such a system will ever qualify for med school. I'm pretty sure that I don't want a doctor who doesn't understand basic biology
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
We could go back to teaching/presenting the old theories that were held by the theologians and that infallibility of the Pope, with the Flat Earth and after that was shown to be hokum, the Earth the center of the universe. That is the problem with theologians making pronouncements about the real world, they haven't a clue. That is the realm of the sciences, and they are jealous that there is a whole area of existence that they are not the authorities on, which is how they control their flock and the pocket books of their flock.
But we are seeing a new trend of marketing going on. In one case with the religious "wrong" controlling their flocks to vote in ridiculous laws that impose their wrong headed and provably incorrect idea's onto the public and worse yet into the impressionable minds of our children. The other arm of that effort is to convince the electorate to vote for people who will vote in laws that will put them out of jobs, reduce their wages and allow them to have their money siphoned off but the upper 1%. Marketing has gotten much too effective in the world of low information voters, and blind faith believers.
Its a good time to re-read 1984. We are getting the infrastructure in place with the intelligence community and the lack of controls and oversight with our law enforcement arms and military. Now all we need is a "wrong" wing nut job elected and the Jack boot will descend with a vengeance.
Vote carefully, but vote.
but from a spiritual point of view all religious communities agree that we lack the inner resources to guide ourselves for the better.
This is not remotely true. But even if it were, how can you fashion "an argument they understand," when they have fundamentally rejected logic? In such cases, it cannot be said that you are advancing an argument, merely regurgitating something that religious adherents have already assumed to be true, that is also consistent with global warming. That's not an argument, but mere rhetoric.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
The matter of what is and isn't science isn't so cut and dry as people think. There are scientists and philosophers who do nothing by try to answer the question of what is and is not science. According to some who study this question, creation theory is a scientific theory, it's just a debunked scientific theory like luminiferous aether. According to them, creation theory is science because it is falsifiable and in fact has already been falsified.