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Alabama Will Require Students To Learn About Evolution, Climate Change
An anonymous reader writes: For the first time, public school students in Alabama will be required to understand evolution, thanks to new curriculum rules behind implemented next year. Teachers in the state will also be required to discuss climate change. Not only did the 40-person, Republican-controlled Board of Education pass the standards unanimously, but nobody even spoke out against them at a board meeting. The new rules say, "The theory of evolution has a role in explaining unity and diversity of life on earth. This theory is substantiated with much direct and indirect evidence. Therefore, this course of study requires our students to understand the principles of the theory of evolution from the perspective of established scientific knowledge. The committee recognizes and appreciates the diverse views associated with the theory of evolution."
I don't believe the origin of life is part of public education anywhere, since we have no real idea how life got started. It's what came after that creationists latched on to and let's face it - even they must know the science is solid. This whole episode has been an extended period of trolling on the part of these religious factions, hoping to raise their profiles and gain membership.
I grew up in the South, and I don't think I ever heard "evolution" or "natural selection" ever even mentioned in school by a teacher. The closest thing I remember to it was another student asking my middle school biology teacher about evolution once. She basically told us she wouldn't talk about it because she didn't want to lose her job. And that was that. I had no idea how these process even worked until I read about them later and started to understand their importance and implications.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The board of education is taking a middle course. Their statement says, " "The theory of evolution has a role in explaining unity and diversity of life on earth. This theory is substantiated with much direct and indirect evidence."
By saying the theory has a role, they are saying it is true, but implying that there may also be other factors involved, in particular divine intervention. From what what I understand, this is the position of the Catholic church.
There is another controversy involved here, namely about the age of the universe and the Earth. A significant proportion of Americans hold the Biblical-literalist view that it is only 6,600 years old, with humans and animals created in their present form from the beginning. By supporting Darwin's theory of evolution, they are by implication affirming the conventional view the universe and the Earth were created billions of years ago.
As I said, drop the origin of life topic. Avoid the religious and scientific controversy all together. When I took biology in HS, my biology teacher skipped the topic altogether. Didn't even mention the controversy. Just skipped the chapter altogether. One student asked why she skipped it. Her response, "I will teach what can be reproduced in a lab or examined first-hand."
FWIW, I went to public school in Alabama and learned about evolution. It wasn't taught as in "but remember kids, this is only a theory" nor did they say "and evolution is fact and I'm failing you if you don't admit that God doesn't exist".
It was just taught. Like things of this nature should be.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I went to school in Georgia, and while I was in high school my county made national news when they put stickers saying "Evolution is only a theory, blah blah blah" inside the front covers of our science textbooks. My AP Bio class (which included one student who's father is the pastor at a large, prominent Baptist church and was even president of the Southern Baptist Convention) got a pretty good laugh in about it and then 5 minutes later completely forgot about it. Not all of the South is full of ignorant hicks without the capacity for cogent thought and reasoning. Although guns and pickups are both actually pretty awesome.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There is a narrative that gets pushed that only conservatives are anti-science, yet if there is a discussion of nuclear power or even acknowledging the nature aspect of the nature vs. nurture debate, GMO foods, etc. suddenly the focus is shifted, refusing that dogma can take many forms.
And in a real sense the liberals claiming the mantle of science has been rather anti-science, patting themselves on the back for merely being able to regurgitate factoids, with no real understanding of the principles involved.
And since your educators did not teach you these topics, it very clearly shows through your failure to understand the distinction between "the origin of life" (as you put it) and "the origin of species" (as Darwin put it). The origin of life is, to a large extent, still a scientific unknown, in the sense that science has not yet been able to determine how life on Earth originated. That is not to say that we can never know how life on Earth originated, or that we cannot eventually discover and execute a plausible mechanism for the origin of life. We simply don't know YET.
But the origin of species--that is to say, the theory that explains how living organisms on this planet have adapted and changed in response to changes in their environment, thus leading to the differentiation and EVOLUTION of different forms of life--is by contrast to the former, very much a scientific known. The evidence is so abundant as to be utterly compelling to anyone who has not been blinded by religious dogma. The entire field of genetics was not known before evolution as a theory was proposed, yet those findings have reinforced evolutionary theory countless times.
And then, for your science teach to have said such a thing: "I will teach what can be reproduced in a lab or examined first-hand"--betrays her ignorance of scientific thought and discourse. First-hand examination or reproducible experiments are of course a foundation of good science, but these are not the only means by which science can be done. We cannot, for example, obtain first-hand evidence of the temperature of the core of the Sun. We cannot at this time create an experiment to directly measure the temperature of a coronal mass ejection. Yet we can, through indirect means, infer these things from other information we know about nuclear physics and thermodynamics. That does not mean we know with great precision what those temperatures are, but we can obtain useful models based on scientific reasoning. Insistence on directly observable phenomena as the only form of scientific evidence is such an egregious ignorance of science that I wouldn't consider your "science" teacher worthy of her credential.
Do you even know what a "theory" means? A theory means a proven hypothesis.
Too many stupid people walking this planet.
Wow, where do you come up with this stuff? Do you actually think that's rational thought? The sole task of the DoD is to protect the price of oil?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I am a Christian Socialist and I am perfectly comfortable with evolution being taught in school as the one theory which best fits all of the evidence. My copy of scripture does not say G-d did not use evolution to create Life. My copy of scripture is completely silent on the "How?" portion of the origin of Life, as well it should be since religion is often an attempt instead to answer "Why?".
Darwin's biggest contribution to evolution was the scientific evidence he produced. Though he was ridiculed (and continues to be) by clergy it wasn't his theory that made the biggest history, it was the meticulous documentation he did that eventually won. In other words it was the facts he discovered, not his supposition of the cause that has had the biggest effect. One item of note, Alfred Russel Wallace had collected an equal amount of data using completely different methods and species (based more on fossils than living creatures) and Darwin beat him to publication. The collected data between the two works was so compelling that it laid the foundation for entire branches of science. The evidence they both collected was voluminous and irrefutable. This data laid the foundation and other scientists quickly built on that foundation, we have a dozen branches of biological science that wouldn't exist without the discovery of the fact of evolution. One of those is molecular biology.
At this point in time the amount of data backing the fact of evolution is essentially irrefutable at this point, it would be like trying to prove thermodynamics wrong. The theory of how it works is still being fought over but not the fact that it exists.