Freedom of Information Requests Turn Up Creationist Materials In Schools

An anonymous reader writes: In 2008, Louisiana passed a law that was designed to let teachers introduce creationism into public classrooms alongside evolution. Zack Kopplin, a student at the time, decided to fight the law by sending Freedom Of Information Act requests to the schools, asking for anything mentioning creationism or the law itself. While most ignore him, he has received documents showing a clear anti-science stance from school officials. "In one, which appears to contain a set of PowerPoint slides, there's a page titled "Creationism (Intelligent Design)" that refers students to the Answers in Genesis website, along with two other sites that are critical of that group's position. In another, a parent's complaint about a teacher who presents evolution as a fact is met by a principal stating that 'I can assure you this will not happen again.'"

Comments

The Dark Age returns

[Anonymous Coward]

A generation or two of youth that are prejudiced against scientific understanding. Our future leaders.

Re:The Dark Age returns

[Anonymous Coward]

scientifically minded people, who believe in absolute, measurable truths

No, scientifically minded people don't believe in absolute measurable truths. Scientifically minded people believe in the scientific method. The scientific method doesn't measure "truths", just what is the closest thing to it using the method we have. Scientific method, and ergo scientifically minded people, are open to those measurable "truths" to be revised and improved as new discoveries come along.

You're free to now use the scientific method. You're free to try to find answers in other ways. That's not the issue.

The issue here is trying to teach your way, which is at best pseudoscience, in a SCIENCE class. How about we let them teach evolution in church and religion class?

But be honest with yourself and admit what you don't know.

That is closer to what a scientifically minded person would say. Science doesn't claim to know everything, for sure. Science is just saying that this theory [of evolution, big bang, etc] is the best theory we have come up with using what is observable and following the scientific method, and until/less something better comes along, we'll use that to continue our search for answers using the scientific method.

Again, you're free to believe in theories that don't follow the scientific method, and use that as your basis to search for truth. You might even succeed in finding answers that way. That's not the point. The point is to teach that outside of science class. Science class is about teaching people to find answers our through the scientific way.

Re:The Dark Age returns

[KingSkippus]

You don't need to directly observe something in order to prove that it exists. That notion is a load of hooey propagated by someone with no scientific knowledge or experience.

I have never been to New York City. There's a chance that I might never go. But I have seen ample evidence that it exists that I don't need to actually go there to accept as indisputable fact that it is real.

The key there is evidence. I don't reject the evidence of New York City's existence simply because I don't want to believe that it's not there. If, on the other hand, someone were try to believe that the city of Atlanta doesn't exist, I would take strong exception to that because I've been there and I know firsthand that it does exist.

The problem with Creationists--and the reason it has NO place in a science class--is that they expect people to reject all evidence for a universe billions of years old and all evidence that the Theory of Evolution is correct in favor of another idea for which ZERO evidence exists, an idea for which mountains of evidence in fact disproves. That is the antithesis of science.

Re:The Dark Age returns

[Anonymous Coward]

Attacking his every statement with an ad hominem only hurts your argument.

At what point do statements become so ridiculous that they should be ridiculed rather than people wasting time trying to refute them? Does someone who claims the Earth is flat deserve a (time consuming) detailed, rational argument with references to the science? Same goes with someone claiming evolution is not fact. I have no time trying to convince a crazy person that they have not been abducted by aliens - mainly because they are crazy and will never change their mind anyway. Nor do I have time trying to convince religious nuts that evolution is fact, for the same reason.

Re:The Dark Age returns

[jandersen]

There is an old joke, told by Dave Allen (can be found on Youtube):

The Pope is discussing with an atheist, and the Pope says: "You atheists are like a blind man, searching in a dark room for a black cat that isn't there!" - and the atheist replies: "Well, we are not so different, in fact - you Catholics too are like a blind man, search a dark room for a black cat that isn't there; but you believe you've found it!"

Re:The Dark Age returns

[gnasher719]

" yet it was never (and likely never will be) directly observed." -

That's totally untrue. There's a kind of butterfly which loves to sit on the trunks of birch trees, and has a colour that makes it practically invisible to predators on that background. There comes industrial pollution and birch trees are not white anymore but more or less gray, with the butterflies clearly visible. Within a few generations, very strong natural selection made them change their colour to a dirty gray. Then things get cleaned up, no unlimited emissions from power stations, birch trees get whiter, guess what: The butterflies got whiter.

Re:The Dark Age returns

[dave420]

That is not "essentially happening". Let's fleshen out your example:

You are tasked with recording the temperature of every day of 1962, at noon (apparent solar time). Every day you take a temperature measurement, and describe when and how it was taken. You release the data and the description of your method. Good work! You've just given some data to the science community, which is a lovely thing to do, and everyone rightly thinks you're a real hoopy frood.

Now, the years pass and someone wants to use your data, as they are very interested in the temperatures in your part of the world in 1962. They take your numbers, and look at how they were collected. They notice that you used a "Blogg's Perfect Thermometer", which a year after you made your measurements were shown to be poorly calibrated. The researcher then finds the likely amount the thermometer is off by (by whatever method they can - testing lots of those thermometers, etc.), and then uses that to correct your data. Now your data is even more accurate! You should be very happy.

Then, someone else looks at this data, and notices that you took the temperature at mid-day, not apparent solar time. To fix this, they use another source of temperatures to work out the difference on each day apply it to your data. Your data is now even more accurate! Yay! Happy times!

At no point did anyone simply look at your data and go "fuck it I don't like this let's change it" - they saw errors in the measurement methodology, quantified them, and corrected each point. The end result is more accurate data. The most recent climate-related data correction you are probably referring to was the buoy measurements, which showed a difference between ship-born measurements and the buoys' measurements. They're both measuring the same thing, so clearly there is some calibration issue or another problem in the methodology, as they should be returning the same values. They identified the problem and calculated the difference, and could then choose to apply it to the shipping temperatures, or to the buoy temperatures. Either is fine, as they are interested in the change of temperature rather than the actual temperature itself. They chose to change the buoy temperatures as the data set is less. That's it. At no point was anything dodgy done, though I can imagine to someone who doesn't want their findings to be believed would see something shady in it. That speaks more of you than of the scientists :)

Re:The people

[Jason Levine]

I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools. When people say "teach religion in schools" (outside of some comparative religion/philosophy class), what they really mean is "teach Christianity in schools." Try teaching Islam in a public school and you'll see all of those "we need to put religion back into public school" advocates go crazy.

I might be religious, but I try not to force my religion on others. I'm willing to discuss it with others if they ask questions, but I don't discuss it in a "my religion is so great, you need to convert now or else" manner. To me, religion is a personal matter and definitely not something for public schools to cover in a science class. You want to believe that the Earth was created 10,000 years ago when God sneezed it into his cosmic hanky? Go right ahead. You can even tell your kids that at home. Just don't try teaching MY kids that in public school because you can't deal with your kids learning about evolution.

"Several thousand years ago..."

[Dr. Manhattan]

"Several thousand years ago, a tribe of ignorant near-savages wrote various collections of myths, wild tales, lies, and gibberish. Over the centuries, these stories wore embroidered, garbled, mutilated, and torn into small pieces that were then repeatedly shuffled. Finally, this material was badly translated into several languages successively. The resultant text, creationists feel, is the best guide to this complex and technical subject [of origins]." - Tom Weller, Science Made Stupid

Ah, evidence.

[Dr. Manhattan]

It has nothing to do with evolution.

Ah, but it does indeed. It shows that variation does in fact respond to environment. It's only one piece of the puzzle, though. No one claims that the peppered moths, by themselves, prove evolution. There's a lot more to it than that.

Take that variation, for example, and you can link it to speciation - which we can observe today. Heard of 'ring species'? The Larus gulls are several subspecies where variants live in a ring around the Arctic. The Herring Gull in the U.K. can interbreed with the American Herring Gull, and the American can interbreed with the Vega Gull in Russia. And so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull in the Netherlands. It basically can’t breed with the Herring Gull. Hybrids are extremely rare and don't seem to be fertile, like mules.

So, is it a separate species? You could breed it with its relative to the East, and so on. But what if, say, the Vega Gull went extinct? Would you have separate species then?

Now, imagine such variations happening across time instead of (or as well as) space, and you’ve got an idea how species actually do form, instead of the ’saltationist’ strawman that many try to imply.

We have a theory how we think this works but we haven't gotten conclusive evidence.

The thing is, we have so gotten conclusive evidence. Here's one you can partially check on your own body. Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise?

It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Fossils representing over a dozen separate stages have been found. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.

(Note that some have even cited the ossicles as 'irreducibly complex'. The more central figures of the ID 'movement', like Behe and Shermer, haven't done so... but I suspect that's because they know enough of the detailed fossil record to dissuade them.)

Or, my absolute favorite - the twin nested hierarchies! Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.

Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thin