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South Carolina Education Committee Removes Evolution From Standards
Toe, The writes "The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee approved new science standards for students except for one clause: the one that involves the use of the phrase 'natural selection.' Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, argued against teaching natural selection as fact, when he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn. Fair argued South Carolina's students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy. Hopefully they're going to teach the controversy of gravity and valence bonds too. After all, they're just theories."
I honestly don't see the issue with presenting all sides of an issue. I think going all evolution and excluding creationism is as bad as forcing only creationism to the exclusion of evolution. That said, I can only hope they use the Darwin Awards as the best proof we have of natural selection.
Exactly. Move evolution to the religion classes because you can't test it. Now, of course, it requires that you define what you mean by "evolution". Macro-evolution, e.g. one kind of animal changing into another hasn't been demonstrated and can't be tested. But micro-evolution (i.e. change within a species) has clearly been shown to happen. The latter is science, the former is religion.
Good luck testing the theory of evolution. Part of the problem is that, barring Elvish researchers entering the arena, we've got precious few observers qualified to attest to evolution of divergent species. Fruit flies shifting to one end of the bell curve is nothing like Darwinian evolution, it's more like breeding shorter Daschunds.
By your definition of "testable predictions" Darwinian evolution, Creationism and Intelligent Design would all seem to be in the same category of pseudo-science.
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