Evolution Battle Brews In Texas 916
oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."
sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
that we have to spend time and effort keeping creationism from being taught as "science" in the
21st century.
Do people in this country really understand that the right wing religious nut-cases are out to make this
country a theocracy ? American taliban indeed.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I went to a religious school which had no problem teaching the theory of evolution in science class AND teaching the Adam and Eve/Genesis thing in religious classes (of course we spend most of our time in religious classes colouring stuff in and generally mucking around, while we go to do experiments and other fun stuff in science lass). Why cant they just do this in Texas?
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh. Maybe we should just give up and welcome the middle ages back. We live in a feudal system anyway.
This is not ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy can only work with good education. The people voting are supposed to be able to make intelligent decisions.
This kind of thing is going to undermine our ability to govern ourselves and I cannot imagine something more insidious than corrupting children toward that end.
This must be stopped.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to fail to see the real problem.
The majority of citizens have taken the word of their respective cults as reality, and fail to recognize anything factual. Factual evidence is passed off as garbage, and ancient fairy tales are the truth. Worse, they don't even cite their own fairy tales properly, and continue to spew more recent urban legends that have been adopted by the cult majority as fact.
It is an amazingly sad state of affairs, that the majority of the population have become so complacent in following the lies, that they no longer think for themselves.
I am now a resident of the certifiably most insane nation in the world, which unfortunately also possesses the largest quantity and most dangerous weapons in the world.
Fucking Luddites (Score:3, Insightful)
As far back as I can remember, I couldn't wait for the future to arrive and dreamed every night that I would wake up in the 23rd century. So here I am decades later, living in the 19th.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's bizarre that the US is trying to fight off the middle ages and loopy religious fundamentalism in Afghanistan, but is so eagerly rushing to it at home!
Thank [insert name of imaginary friend] we don't have that sort of barking mad fundamenatlism in Australia!
Re:Null hypothesis my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact there's currently no credible evidence for those conjectures isn't what makes them non-scientific, it's that there can't ever be.
Even if the conjectures were true, there's no way to test them. THAT's what makes them non-scientific.
Re:You Gotta Be Kidding Me (Score:5, Insightful)
That would imply that all theories, regardless of any evidence or factual basis, should be taught.
Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
If it's truly necessary to discuss every unsubstantiated creation theory, all sides of the story should be taught. Not just all 190 versions from the "bible", but all creation legends according to all religions and cultures.
Or we could stick with teaching substantiated facts. Nah, that would make way too much sense.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Insightful)
>>We haven't given up, but more than 75% of the population are such cultists.
Don't confuse fundamentalists (your cultists) with mainstream religions. There's no contradiction between being a Christian and a scientist, though there certainly are problems when fundies try to become scientists.
Don't confuse cults with religions either - atheist bigotry aside, they're two very different things.
Re:Null hypothesis my ass (Score:5, Insightful)
No, omnipotence is entirely illogical. For example, can God create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it? If He can, then He's not omnipotent because there's a rock He can't lift. If He cannot, then He's not omnipotent because there's a rock He can't create.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The sad truth is that most Americans aren't opposed to what the Taliban are doing, but the religion the Taliban represent. Don't believe for a second that given the chance American Christians wouldn't have their own version of sharia.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:2, Insightful)
The difference between cult and religion lies in the number of followers. Don't forget that Christianity began as a crazy doomsday cult.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking tax money meant for public education and using it to proselytize? No. Absolutely not. Taxes should not be used for religious purposes. Believe what you want, but pay for it yourself and keep it to yourself.
Teaching Adam and Eve along side of Darwin, implying they're equally credible or even the same subject? No. Absolutely not. That's absurd. Creationism and intelligent design are fundamentally anti-scientific. "The only way to understand any of this is to believe what we tell you" is as far from science as you can get. You may as well teach "intelligent math" in math class and teach kids that 2+2=4, but some people believe that addition is not true, and 2 and 2 will always be 2 and 2, never 4.
Already most students will never consider the evidence for and against evolution on their own, so for them, evolution is already more faith than science. There are a variety of reasons for that. I sincerely think that teaching science and religion in the same breath will confuse them even further. We'll take a giant step back from being a scientific culture, and a giant step toward ignorance.
Re:Null hypothesis my ass (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, God cannot create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it, because no such rock could logically exist. So God's inability to create such a rock does not diminish His omnipotence. It's as if you asked: "Can God create a white sheet of paper that is also completely black?" Either the sheet is white or it is black. Similarly, either God can lift the rock, or the rock's existence is logically impossible.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many American's already live under a Christian Sharia.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:3, Insightful)
> Pretty much any belief in any part of the bible
I think you are confusing belief with "literal belief" --- the difference is sometimes used as the distinguishing feature between religion and fundamentalist religion. E.g., one Christian when reading creation story believes in it as a parable for the current physical understanding of the Big Bang and its aftermath, while a fundamentalist Christian reads it and believes that the whole deal took 7 days as we know them.
I have the distinct impression that many of the atheists who attempt to aggressively debunk religion actually have little understanding of what exactly they are debunking, never having done actual research into what the majority of moderately religious people actually believe and how it affects how they behave.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. That's why an atheist being elected as US President would be one of the most noteworthy events in history.
Re:The earth is round, p .05 (Score:5, Insightful)
How the world *should be* should be based on the way it is.
Codes of Ethics are best based on psychology and empiricism. If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
Worship is based on an expression again of what elicits the maximum spiritual experience in the believer within the historical/metaphystical claims of the religion. The historical claims are subject to historical sciences and the metaphysical claims are subject to the logical/philosophical fields. Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.
At its core Religion is history. It's a claim about the history of the world. Without that history it has no special authority. The authority that religion derives is directly tied to its emperical claims about the world.
If Jesus didn't exist then the words of Christ might be valid but Christianity had to defend their code-of-ethics based on the same criteria everyone else does: empirical studies on the cultural and personal efficacies of those rules. The only reason Religion believes it can circumvent that regular oversight is because it's been ordained by God and God is perfect therefore his commandments require no double checking.
Science is perfectly capable of saying how the world should be. In fact it's better than speculation by bronze age goat herders.
Religion: You should treat women like property and second class citizens.
Science: Women are usually equally capable of making as good of decisions as men and should be equals.
Religion bases its belief on divine ordination. Science performs tests and determines that "God" is a sexist bigot.
Religion: The world should be perfect and some day God will fix it if you sign this metaphysical document here agreeing to agree with everything contained in this book.
Science: The world should be perfect and here are some ways that have a good chance of making it better.
When atheists reduce Religion to God of the Gaps they're being generous. Because Religion not only tries to fill in Gaps, it also tries to fill in things that we're confident about--but are quite different from the religious claims. Atheists try to give the original authors the benefit of the doubt that knowing what we know now they wouldn't have written such foolish things and attributed it to God.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Adam and Eve/Genesis creation account does have a place in the classroom. It's called mythology.
Re:Derp. (Score:5, Insightful)
there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Holy crap, of course there are experiments that demonstrate evolutionary theory. FFS just buy in some fruitflies or mice or feeder fish some other fast reproducing species and selectively breed them according to some observable trait. e.g. white and black mice, large & small fish etc. Split the animals into 3 groups - one where you select FOR the trait, one where you select AGAINST the trait, and a control group where you randomly select with no bias. After a few generations observe the results.
Evolution is eminently demonstrable in the lab, and in the wild, and in the fossil and in DNA. Suggesting that some "god/aliens/magic pixies did it" hypothesis is utterly ridiculous.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have the distinct impression that many of the atheists who attempt to aggressively debunk religion actually have little understanding of what exactly they are debunking, never having done actual research into what the majority of moderately religious people actually believe and how it affects how they behave.
Oh, please, get off the cross. We need the wood.
There isn't an atheist in America who hasn't been soaked in Christian idiocy their entire lives - moderate, fundamentalist, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, the whole whacked out ball 'o wax. We know exactly what you tools believe in. You NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT. You even have 24/7 television networks spewing the stupidity 365 days a year.
Well, I shouldn't say you NEVER shut up about it, because whenever the fundies attempt to do something pig ignorant, like this latest example of stupidity in Texas, the "moderate" Christians who supposedly represent a "majority" go completely silent. In spite of their alleged "majority" status, they seldom if ever seem to be capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages.
Funny how that works out.
The fact that half of you believe in shit which directly contradicts what the other half believes makes it even more ludicrous. And all of it is based on, of course, no evidence what-so-ever. Just the idiot ramblings of some ignorant goat fuckers who lived 5,000 years ago.
It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe people don't get this. Science isn't where you go "we have no fucking clue how _____ happened, so we're going to say God did it", it's "we have no fucking clue how _____ happened, so let's apply the scientific method to this phenomenon and see if we can come up with an explanation for it". The theory of evolution crosses over into biology, paleontology, and many other bona fide scientific fields. Intelligent design challenges you to watch a sunrise and claim with a straight face that some force other than God could have made that possible.
Whether you're religious or not - intelligent design has no business being in a science classroom.
Re:Null hypothesis my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"? As in, not bound by physical laws, but still bound by logical laws?
In this case, God cannot create a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it, because no such rock could logically exist. So God's inability to create such a rock does not diminish His omnipotence. It's as if you asked: "Can God create a white sheet of paper that is also completely black?" Either the sheet is white or it is black. Similarly, either God can lift the rock, or the rock's existence is logically impossible.
So, let's cut out the middle man and worship whoever made the rules that God can't break.
Great news for China & India (Score:3, Insightful)
If I were Chinese or Indian, I would be loving this. Imagine, my biggest competitor, ensuring their next generation is superstitious and ignorant. Perfect!
Re:Null hypothesis my ass (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not? Because you are not allowed to redefine terms just because the definition doesn't suit your needs.
Definitions of omnipotence on the Web:
* the state of being omnipotent; having unlimited power
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Unlimited power. That means anything, there is no limit due to logic. This is fitting because you have to suspend logic to believe a lot of the bible. (Or most if not all religions.)
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest."
You shouldn't. A basis of all (thocratic) religions is that it explains a lot of things but demonstrates nothing.
Now, a "clever" religion (and the Catholic one has evolutioned itself in this regard as a mean to survive -as a civil corporation) can explain everything while still demostrating nothing.
Some examples:
* Some religion guru comes with the idea that his god woke up some day and decided that his almigtyness would create life, intelligence and everything; so the guru writes the Genesis and so be it.
* After a lot of years the modern gurus of that religion see that they are losing ground because science made obvious the Genesis can't be nothing but a child's tale. No problem.
What do evidences support? Well, it seems that there were a big bang. What can't science demonstrate, at least today? How it was that the big bang happened. No problem: there were a big bang and God made it happen.
What do evidences support? Well, it seems that living beings evolution by means of selective pressure on random mutations. No problem: living beings evolution by means of pressure on mutations but there are not really random but directed by God almightiness so they only seem to be random but working in accord to His plan.
What can't science demonstrate? That there's a soul that survives after death. No problem: that's God's realm: there *is* an indetectable soul that lifes eternally.
You see, if you are intelligent enough and work on a hypothese unfalsable and that doesn't demonstrate anything you can rework your model without resigning to your main tenets all you want.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you notice, when people talk about atheism, they always bring up this question of morals. As if someone couldnt understand them without religion.
Yet what percentage of people in prison are religious, what percentage of mass murderers were/are religious, and what percentage of serial killers are religious?
True, playing the percentage in a mostly religious world is a safe bet, but the point here is that morals arent given automatically with or without religion.
Re:Evolution is no more proven than Creationism. (Score:5, Insightful)
>UNKNOWN REASON,
It's not unknown. It's errors. DNA does not copy exactly every time. And sex is merely a way of being able to get more variation in DNA. More variation = more chances to survive (up to a point).
And if you want to get down to the actual reason why DNA copies are not always true, it's because of physics. Physics and probability. Nothing more and nothing less. We've been testing the probability part of the physics for nearly 100 years.
And since your argument fails on its premise - that we don't know where the randomness comes from, all that shit you typed was for naught. The attempt to pull science down to "we just don't know" failed. Indeed, your entire argument is "Argument from incredulity" which isn't an argument at all, but simply a lack of imagination on your part.
Your argument is typical of creationst screeds. It tries to paint scientific arguments as "we just don't know either" when in fact that's not true. Science has done a pretty good job of explaining how the universe operates and we've created some nifty technology based on those rules, which in itself is a test of those rules.
Creationist arguments are not testable. They are not science. Evolution is testable. In fact, we run experiments on evolution all the time with antibiotics. Such experimentation by society nearly killed me with MRSA.
Keep religion out of the classroom unless you want to teach it as a cultural studies course. But then you have to teach other cultures to put things in perspective, and I don't think that the christian taliban behind this bullshit are quite prepared to have the Quran, Mahabharata, Tibetan book of the dead, the writings of Zoroaster, et alia to young minds. They might find their kids might learn something.
--
BMO
Re:Each theory? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder why there's this big issue with creationism in the US. Even the Roman Catholic church (ya know, the guys in old women's dresses with the inquisition and all) have no beef with the idea of a big bang and evolution. I guess they learned from their Gallileo fiasco. And even back then there were voices that said that the Bible only tells you how to get into heaven, not how heaven works, and that's pretty much their stance today: Are there parts in the Bible that seem to contradict how the world works? Yes. Does it matter? No, because it's God's word and if we understand it wrong, it's us that fail, we're mere men, we can't understand the plan and word of God. Ever. Case closed.
Why do Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science? What's the gain? I see mostly a dangerous side effect: That pupils will see that they're being taught bullshit and extrapolate that if you get to hear bull in one class, it won't be much better for the others.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet what percentage of people in prison are religious, what percentage of mass murderers were/are religious, and what percentage of serial killers are religious?
A more useful figure would be "what percentage of people in prison were religious before they went to prison". The numbers might say more about the parole system than about religion.
Re:Each theory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it plays well to the yokels and brings comeuppance to those high and mighty professors with their useless book-learning and fancy education. And it makes them liberals mad, which is a bonus.
And one wonders how we've gotten so royally fucked as a nation...
Actually, the serious answer to your question is "Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science because replacing science and reason with magical thinking and superstition is a necessary part of destroying a middle-class and creating a new feudal state. You have to attack all of the empowering institutions to make that happen: science, education, a reliable news media, social security programs etc. and replace them with fear, superstition, divided communities, regionalism, ignorance. And the final step for the entities pushing this agenda, as always, is...Profit!"
Re:Derp. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are a creationist trying to appear reasonable, demonstrated by your ignorance about evolution. The hereditary nature of genetics is evolution. Wikipedia, our friend, has a great example of exactly what you are looking for, "documented proof of a reproducible experiment showing the evolution of a species into a new and unique species." The bacteria E. coli cannot metabolize citric acid. Except after 12 generations, this E. coli did [wikipedia.org].
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why cant they just do this in Texas
Because in Texas religious belief is part of the "social government" and economy. People that go to church are not just "church goers", they are members of a church with all of its hierarchy included in their socioeconomic lives. The church member's status in the church is related to the respect and job opportunities they are given by other members. People not of the church have no predetermined respect for them. In order to gather respect, and underlings, people have to be made into members. This is perpetuated like a pyramid scheme. That isn't to say there isn't a benefit to this. Once a person becomes a member they are granted certain opportunities, job, job status (manager vs. grunt), etc... depending on where they fall in the hierarchy of the church. For example, a Deacon in a church is not likely to be working fast food. Children taught things like evolution, free thinking, black/gray/white vs. black/white are not as easily made into members.
Re:Derp. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, and the ID folks know this. If you point to this fantastically amazing, observable phenomenon, they simply move the goalposts so that 'evolution' is defined as something you can't easily demonstrate in a lab. Speciation, for example, or the development of the eyeball in a complex species.
Even if you somehow figure out how to demonstrate those things, they'll find a way to re-define it into something even harder: like "demonstrate that modern humans can be produced from single-cell bacteria".
Point is, you can't argue with these folks, and you can't expect intellectual honesty out of a school of thought which posits the fundamental existence of some Intelligent Designer but then fails to express the slightest curiosity about who they are or how they operate.
This has actually damaged public discourse. My father recently took a guided tour of a major national park. The ranger pointed our a species of small lizard, and told the group how this species had observably changed its colors and foodsource over the past few decades, in response to some changing environmental condition. One of the group innocently used the term 'evolution' to ask a question about this, and the ranger immediately stopped him and pointed out that this is an example of 'adaptation', not evolution. His correction had an 'I'm only correcting you to cover my ass' wink to it, but it's a shame that we live in a country where Federal employees have to be so careful and explicit.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to see you explain evolution to humans 4000 years ago when they have no idea about genes.
Darwin didn't have any idea about genes. Well, he knew there was some method of inheritance, but not the chemistry. Evolution can be described, as he did, very simply, using the observations of existing animals, and how their qualities are inherited from one generation to the next, as farmers have observed, and used for breeding plants and animals for millennia. Dig up a few fossils too, and you could have made a case in ancient Greece in 500 BC. 4000 years ago? Maybe in Sumeria. They were pretty advanced then already.