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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."
So long as they're aware that it is only a theory.
Oh my GOD, hell has finally frozen over.
Intelligent and far seeing Republicans. Wow they're going to torn to shreds by the Bible Belt Brigade.
Did Hell freeze over?
Lived in Alabama for four years. This represents major progress. However, there's still a long way to go.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
there's a god after all?
This is about the town of Alabama, Massachusetts.
...for something that not only should have been in place already, but is tepid in comparison to how science is taught almost everywhere else around the world.
That's how much the religious zealots have been able to twist the narrative in their favor, to the point where every civilized person breathes a sigh a relief when they AREN'T shoving their creationist mythologies in students' faces and indoctrinating them with dogma. Are we supposed to congratulate Alabama for not being backwards fundamentalists? That's the intellectual equivalent of giving them a medal for promising not to lynch any more black people.
Agenda? To catch up with the rest of civilization.
The topic of whether it's human-caused or not is so controversial that even mentioning this will probably get my post modded down.
It's controversial to those with an agenda. The rest of us can still maintain a rational discussion about it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I knew stepping though that portal was risky but I kind of like this Alabama filled with science education and NASA engineers.
Back in my dimension, we are mainly focused on where to put our 10 commandment monument and the evils of an education lottery.
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.
.
Of course, there's still this from TFA:
...Textbooks used in Alabama science classes have carried a disclaimer sticker for years stating that evolution is a "controversial theory," not fact, and the new course of study doesn't change the warnings, which were advocated by Christian conservatives....
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.
Indeed. Let's make sure to encourage people to think that the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, and about the theory of phlogiston as a viable physical theory. For diversity of ideas' sake.
According to who? Blanket statements that go against a consensus of scientific opinion should really be supported by some citations if you want to be taken remotely seriously.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I say drop the origin of life topic all together from public education.
Evolution is about the diversity of life, not it's origin. Evolution is what happens after you have life (which I think of as almost, but not quite, perfect replicators.) Abiogenesis is the term used for the process of life arising from non-living matter. Last I checked, there are some nascent theories regarding abiogenesis, but nothing solid yet. I'm not sure why you would want to drop mentioning that in public education.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
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 public school in the northeast and not once was the bible used in school. Nor did any religious topics come up in any of my classes, beyond your standard Greek and Roman mythology. I wish they had dug deeper into other mythologies from around the world. I don't recall prayers in school, but at events it definitely came up which is inevitable given that the Hispanics comprised the majority of the student body.
If you don't think these topics aren't debated overseas then you clearly haven't traveled enough. I've seen both Europeans and Asians question evolution and not necessarily on religious grounds. While living in Asia one guy went on a tirade about it and how dissenting views should be taught in schools; similar to the crap we see here in the US. I disagree completely, but it's just not worth arguing with some people. I take it you've never met a born again Buddhist, because they're not all that different than your average fundamentalist Christian.
You're an idiot. Evolution has been proven if you would only read a little)
FTFY
Also, that could be considered a dangling modifer. What little thing should be read? A little rock? A little prince?
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.
I've spent time in the South as well, and I never heard the phrase "natural selection" uttered either. I DID see it play out, however...usually preceded by a "Hey, y'all...WATCH THIS!"
But all kidding aside, you make an excellent point by illustrating exactly how the various forces at work come into play here. This law is a good move, and a step in the right direction for a state that consistently ends up being the butt of jokes because of a stereotypically uneducated (outside of Huntsville) populace. As soon as an idea, concept, or theory is banned...either explicitly as used to be the situation that led up to the Scopes Monkey Trial or implicity, as in the situation you encountered...knowledge slides backwards. Truth is never served by censorship.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
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.
No.. the chapter will be titled "Evolution and Global warming, the Democratic plot to have homosexuals take over America."
Silence is a state of mime.
The problem with this is that when you break it down, there are many possible positions on taxation.
For example, I consider myself mostly conservative when it comes to taxation - I believe that the budget needs to be balanced(on average), taxes simplified, etc... I support a 'flat' tax with a large deductible. As such, I found the long-term capital gains tax reduction without limits to be horrible - amounting to a regressive tax system. I feel better now that it's 20%, but it's still half of what it should be(39.6% for the highest tax bracket).
I'd prefer something like you getting a $10k/year deduction for investment income, long term or not, in order to encourage savings, emergency funds, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
This is what an agenda looks like. I don't know why, but whenever countries meet over AGW, the topic always turns to giving billions of dollars from one group to another.
The fact that you don't like some of the proposed solutions does not mean there is not a problem. Go look at the list of the top 100 companies, the largest political donors, etc. and then try to make a cogent argument as to how big bad environmental and/or poverty lobby has some how convinced 1000s of scientists to participate in whatever strange and huge conspiracy you appear to be proposing.
We are releasing millions of years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere and we are doing it on the time scale of decades. To pretend that will not have consequences because all the solutions are ideologically distasteful is appalling.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
O.K., show me what DOD has done IN BATTLE in the last 20 years that was not about, as Dick Cheney said in his Open Letter to Bill Clinton in 1999 "....protect the soldiers we will place in the area...and a significant portion of the world's oil". i.e. kill Saddam to make the price of oil more compatable with maximum income for the owners of oil stocks such as Dick Cheney
Lots of luck
Nobody is talking about "kill all the zygotes" except you, you logic-impaired . The same chain of so-called "logic" you use there could equally be applied to men's sperm or women's ova; destroy all of them and you won't have any more children either. Yet, mysteriously enough, nobody seems to be calling denunciations down on every girl who ever has her period (wasting an ovum, unfertilized) or every boy who ever has a nocturnal emission (or "wet dream").
Yeah, try again. This time, consider actually thinking a little bit first.
Oh, and yes, we would continue to have oak trees; they live a long time, and they produce acorns many, many times. You'd have to destroy them all *continuously* for the entire fertile lifetime of all the currently-living trees. You could, of course, kill off all the oak trees *much* faster by eliminating all the *water* in the world... but that doesn't mean that water is an oak tree either.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Abiogenesis is very difficult to study. It left no evidence, and all early forms of life have long since been consumed by their more-adapted descendants. There are hints here and there in the biochemistry, like ribosomes being composed largely of RNA, but not enough to reach any firm conclusions.
I wouldn't say "not enough to reach any firm conclusions", though it is difficult. The problem is that there may be a lot of clues in biochemistry that we don't yet know enough to recognize as clues, and won't know until we have some thoroughly-detailed and workable hypotheses for the process. It's possible that there really isn't enough evidence, but we just can't know yet.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The reason I think being authoritarian is the best approach in certain times is because it objectively is. Let me explain:
I have a close family member who's a cancer survivor. She is a child. She received treatment and she is fine now (more or less).
There are sizable numbers of people who would have not treated her and instead prayed to God. She would have died. That is a fact. What ever else you believe or don't believe that is a fact.
This is not hypothetical. There have been cases where folks with strong religion had their children taken away from them because they choose to "Trust in the Lord".
I know you've got a dozen things to say to my story above about how/why it was OK to be authoritarian in the cases above. But the fact is you're being authoritarian. There is such a thing as an authority. It's possible to be right and it's possible to be wrong.
Then again you might just wash your hands. Sorting out right and wrong is _hard_. It requires real work and real compromises. It's much, much easier to just wash your hands and say "Oh fuck it, I don't want to impose my beliefs". It's especially seductive because it lets you ignore all the real world suffering by telling yourself you'd only make things worse. But that's a half assed cop out that doesn't save any lives.
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