Slashdot Mirror
Classroom Clashes Over Science Education
cheezitmike writes "In a two-part series, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science examines two hot-button topics that create clashes in the classroom between science teachers and conservative-leaning students, parents, school boards, and state legislatures. Part 1 looks at the struggle of teachers to cover evolution in the face of religious push-back from students and legislatures. Part 2 deals with teaching climate change, and how teachers increasingly have to deal with political pressure from those who insist that there must be two sides to the discussion."
The phrase "just a theory" means that you do not know what you are talking about. Educate yourself.
A mathematician can't pinpoint errors in reasoning about climate change because he/she is not a specialist in the field. You need the knowledge to properly analyze the evidence. Serge Lang was a great algebraist/number theorist, and yet he was an AIDS/HIV denialist. Clearly his superior intelligence and logical powers were able to deduce that the AIDS researchers were wrong all along about HIV.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
No, it should be a requirement that people who teach a scientific subject can explain the evidence for the prevailing theory, carry out experiments to test it, and use this to teach what science is all about. They should teach the scientific method and critical thinking. That is what science is about.
People who merely believe something without understanding the evidence for it have no business teaching science at all.
Try this experiment once: Try to convince someone that the sun goes around the earth that the earth actually goes around the sun. The chain of inference we had to use to deduce that is complex. That's why we didn't know until just hundreds of years ago. You can teach these things as science, even though you can't provide all the evidence from scratch.
Teaching climate change is easy. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When fossil fuels are burnt, they produce carbon dioxide. This will warm the planet. You can then show charts of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the global mean temperature. It's actually pretty easy to understand the chain of evidence.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
aha. "Ivar Giaever, an 82-year-old Norwegian who shared the 1973 Nobel Award for work related to quantum tunneling, left the 48,000 member organization earlier this month because of the APA’s position arguing that there is a scientific consensus on the global warming issue."
An expert on quantum tunnelling! Can i get his opinion on car maintenance, Dress making and 1980 pop music? I am sure he is just as qualified.
Doesn't it remind you of the "this doctor does not believe that smoking causes cancer"? Except that in this case he is not even in the field.
The "other" interpretation. You make it sound as if there are two and exactly two "sides". The problem is that when you open the discussions up to include the Judeo-Christian creation mythos, you have to welcome every other equally untestable explanation out there: Eurynome, the AEsir, the raven, Pangu, Enki, the Ogdoad, flying spaghetti monsters, pyramid building aliens, the machines from The Matrix, or any of a thousand other explanations that have arisen throughout the centuries. Since none can be proven or disproven, what is there to teach from a scientific perspective?
Religious ideas regarding creation could certainly be discussed in the schools - but in history, literature, or philosophy classes, not science.
John
My post was merely demonstrating that people must accept the word of experts because they can't know everything. I chose the example I did because it's kindergarten level stuff. If we all rely on the word of experts for even the most fundamental on concepts, how can anyone claim that trusting experts is a logical fallacy?
"Appeal to authority" is one of, if not the, most misapplied fallacy there is. Kids learn about it in Logic 101 in their freshman year, and then start throwing around the term all over the place, but they have no clue what it means. In actuality, appeals to authority can be entirely justified. Such appeals are only fallacious if the authority cited isn't an actual expert, or disagrees with the consensus, or has a motivation to lie. No one on this planet can live even a single day without trusting in authorities. From the commutative property, to the health effects of drinking bleach, to the stability of the bridge you drive over. Inductive, deductive, doesn't matter. Unless you've done all the work yourself, you're trusting in others.
Recall any great economists? Psychologists? Biologists? Philosophers?
Because those fields are run by incompetent hacks.
????
You're a lunatic.
Lang didn't deny AIDS...or so according to Wikipedia anyway...
...Lang's most controversial political stance was as an AIDS denialist...
Way to go!
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
The 77 cents on the dollar argument is based on adding up the incomes of all the working women in the country, dividing it by the number of women in the country, and doing the same for the men. The actual calculation ignores experience, ability, time on the job, nature of the work, etc.
True, however, there is still around a 5-7% gap that is unexplained, and is probably due to gender discrimination. Also, there is hard evidence of this discrimination taking place. from Wikipedia:
Other studies have found direct evidence of discrimination. For example, fewer replies to identical resumes with female names and more jobs for women when orchestras moved to blind auditions.
We are talking specifically about Christianity and it's zealotry.
No, we're talking about a tiny subset of Christianity. Most Christians accept evolution.
I could swear the most recent Gallop Poles on the matter said different.