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."
Null hypothesis my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
We scientifically-minded people have had a perfectly reasonable naturalistic explanation for the origin of life for a long time. No sir, the ball is in YOUR court to show that there is evidence for your intelligent design theory.
Re:The earth is round, p .05 (Score:5, Interesting)
In a theology class, a respected Reverend said "Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Over the next several sessions, he covered various cultural and religious beliefs by groups from around the world.
I had known him for years, but it wasn't until that day that I realized, he wasn't a leading member of the church to preach the word of god. He was a leading member of the church to help people who couldn't grasp the fact that there are things we don't fully understand yet. He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who take these fairy tales that were intended to help them not be scared, and demand everyone understand it as the truth.
I'm no Richard Dawkins, so... (Score:5, Interesting)
More like the Samuel L Jackson version of Dawkins (although, I'll admit I'm not nearly as cool as either.) And yes, I'm just letting of some steam here.
What?!
What the fuck?!
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.
Since motherfucking when? I'll tell you, motherfucking never. How much more fucking evidence must scientists throw before your motherfucking ugly fucking face before you fucking get it?
Sample says the "null hypothesis" is such because the old experiments that attempted to produce "building blocks" of amino acids failed to do so. In addition later experiments that produced other precursor chemicals, such as DNA and RNA, required very specific conditions in a lab, and aren't he said. Necessarily reflective of what the early Earth was like. Therefore, he said, the odds of making life from non-life seem too small for a naturalistic hypothesis to work.
Well, what the fuck do you call this [wikipedia.org]? And very specific lab conditions? Well, guess what motherfucker, the early Earth have very specific conditions [wikipedia.org] that resemble nothing like what we have today, so yes, those conditions have to be specific in the laboratory. This doesn't even touch the fact that the early Earth was a much bigger fucking laboratory than some fucking room at a university.
Sample says it isn't stealth creationism - he says the intelligent agency might just as well be aliens. But he emphasizes that he wants students to learn to think critically, and that unlike the physical sciences, there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Firstly, observational evidence that can be repeatably confirmed is just as valid as repeatable experiments with observation in a laboratory. And this is yet another case of "What the fuck do you call this [talkorigins.org]?":
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Do you see what year is in there? 1905! Speciation was observed in nineteen o'fucking five. That's 23 fucking years after Darwin's death. Can't fucking demonstrate evolution in the lab my ass.
To paraphrase [youtube.com]:
Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you frighten you?
Does the idea that there might not be a supernatural so blow your Christian noodle that you'd rather stand there in the fog of your inability to Google?
Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
(Watch the rest, you won't regret it, promise.)
I get the idea that it's scary to think that this is all we have, but that's not an excuse to just start making things up to make yourself feel comfortable. If we truly want immortality, the only thing that can possibly deliver on that is science. And we can't continue to be held back by people whose only goal is to advance their favorite fairy tales in spite of the consequences. And yes, science can answer question [youtube.com]
Re:This is not ok (Score:5, Interesting)
Education has never worked particularly well. For example, there was a huge effort in the second half of the 20th century to educate people and wean them off superstitions in the Soviet bloc. Since religions were largely suppressed officially, and high-school education with emphasis on physics and math was compulsory, it should have worked reasonably well. However, public education could not overcome superstitions, and there has been a steady presence of various magicians in public life -- from people who would heal you with magic, to politicians who would solve political problems or build nanotech industry with magic. Currently most if not all ex-Eastern bloc experience some sort of revival of religion, especially as a badge to counter the "Islamic threat".
And I doubt if education has worked very well in the US in the past 50 years as well -- IMHO the advances of science in the US were mostly due to brain drain, when the best brains from all over the world moved there to enjoy the rich life post WWII, and by the bias towards making better killing machinery that gave the said brains a little more money than is customary in the typical human society.
But when the knowledge is so much and so advanced that it is too hard to even grasp the basics without spending 10 years in higher education doing hard work and producing nothing obviously "valuable", it is no surprise that most people will find a simplified model of reality that helps them go on with their lives. It is even less surprising when they choose a model that is, on the face, largely compatible with the world they see every day and their way of thinking is deeply rooted in their past.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Literal bible interpretation is a protestant thing, to varying degrees among the various groups (the American flavours seem to be the most extreme in this regard). The Catholic church interprets many parts of the Bible as metaphors and they don't consider Genesis to be how it really went down (who was there to write that down anyway?). The Catholic church sees evolution as a valid way for God to create the life on Earth and an omniscient and omnipotent deity could easily make sure the universe forms as it did just by configuring the big bang properly, never mind influencing the destinies of individual parts that may need a little prodding to get right.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're not of one of the faiths the school offers courses for (or you don't want to deal with what the documents say is your religion) you get what amounts to comparative theology class in that you compare how various faiths deal with the things covered in regular religion class. Again a useful thing to know since you're going to deal with people of various faiths later on even if you're areligious.
Does that mean the steeple has replaced the classroom? No, it just means that we can apply sociology to the Bible. It also means that there's little reason to mention any religious stance on anything in other classes. So it always astounds me that American schools apparently have no space for any studies regarding religion, leading both to idiot lawmakers trying to sneak in the Bible as a textbook elsewhere (hello, Intelligent Design) and to morons who don't even know how Christianity, Judaism and Islam are connected.
Yes, there is Sunday school. But I doubt that it's attended by most people, that each major faith has an equally-popular alternative and that Sunday school will teach comparative theology.
Good for me. Good for Europe. Good for China. (Score:5, Interesting)
The less scientists there are on the world, the higher my salary. Please go on teaching your students that scientific theories are stories about how it could be, without making any testable predictions.
That strategy and mind-set will be very helpful when doing fault-finding in semiconductors. In case the fault rate goes to high, please don't look for testable reasons, but invent a story how a higher intelligence planned out that a race condition or some glitch on the laptop sold to a specific customer is the will of god. The claim that it is very unlikely that a complex processor exists by coincidence and declare any working processor to be the work of a higher intelligence. Don't forget, you cant loose this argument - you cant be proven wrong, unless the stupid guy who tests one process gas after the other for purity - he is wrong all the time.
The fundamental difference between evolution and ID is that evolution tells me what should happen if i put bacteria in a nutrient and change the nutrient compostion slowly over 100000 generations of bacteria. ID doesn't.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because it would only be fair to teach all religions.
Why? There certainly isn't time for this in school, any more than there's time to teach all branches of mathematics in maths classes. At my school, religious studies classes covered:
None of them were taught as the truth, they were all examined in their social and historical context (e.g. looking at the various creation myths, comparing them to the culture in which they emerged). We also covered Norse, Greek, and Roman religious beliefs in other subjects at school.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
How long does it take to teach ID? (Score:3, Interesting)
How long does it take to teach Intelligent Design anyhow? Would not a lecture lasting more than ten minutes run out of material?
IMO what these people really want is not to teach evolution at all. Darn kids are smart enough see which concept holds water when placed side by side.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Atheists are between 8% and 16% of the US population, but just 0.2% of the prison population [holysmoke.org].
Tell that to people who question atheists' morality.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is true that a central part of protestantism was "Sola scriptura", that the Bible contains all knowledge necessary for salvation and holiness. This was a rebellion against the power of the Pope and the Holy See to interpret and issue doctrine as very many of the practices that gave the Church massive power and wealth were not founded in the Bible, particularly the selling of indulgences. Also that salvation comes through faith alone, while Catholicism required rites performed by the priest - without the Church, there was no salvation. A central part of Protestantism was that all would read the Bible in their local language, back then only the priests and other highborn that learned Latin would even be able to read it. How could a Catholic have a literal interpretation of something he couldn't read? The priests told you the road to salvation and you followed.
To me it sounds like you are placing all of the Protestant groups on the "more literal" side of things. That is really not true at all, we are just far more diverse. That comes from that there is no one supreme commander of the Protestant churches, while if you're Catholic then you either yield to the Pope's authority or you're not a Catholic. And to be honest, the US seems to have far more issues with Catholic beliefs such as regarding contraception and abortion because the Pope is opposed to it while most protestant churches - at least around here - have accepted it. I think I can speak for most of Northern Europe when I say we consider the Bible to be just as much allegories as the Catholic church - perhaps even more so - and that teaching evolution here is not an issue at all. As far as I understand the main issue in the US are Baptists, which make up most of the Bible Belt. But they are something like 100 out of 800 million protestants.
"Eminent scientists" rejected big bang theory ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest.
FWIW, the vatican observatory does real academic research: Planetary Sciences, Stellar Astronomy, Extragalactic Astronomy, Cosmology.
"With support from the Vatican government, the scientists at the Vatican Observatory have a freedom to choose research topics not constrained by three-year proposal cycles or passing scientific fashions. As a result, our research topics, reflecting the wide range of interests in our staff, can focus on long-term survey programs and sometimes risky cutting-edge topics."
http://www.vaticanobservatory.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=38&Itemid=145 [vaticanobservatory.org]
Also, the current theory for the origin of the universe, the big bang theory, was developed by a priest and it was rejected by the "open minded" eminent scientists of the day because it was developed by a priest and "smelled of creationism". The term "big bang" was used by these eminent scientists as a pejorative.
"Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a priest from the Catholic University of Louvain, proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, he called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom". The framework for the model relies on Albert Einstein's general relativity and on simplifying assumptions (such as homogeneity and isotropy of space). The governing equations had been formulated by Alexander Friedmann. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the distances to far away galaxies were generally proportional to their redshifts — an idea originally suggested by Lemaître in 1927. Hubble's observation was taken to indicate that all very distant galaxies and clusters have an apparent velocity directly away from our vantage point: the farther away, the higher the apparent velocity."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_Theory [wikipedia.org]
Re:Null hypothesis my ass (Score:4, Interesting)
Problem is that logic is based on axioms. And logic itself is not provably consistent. Reference: Godel's incompleteness theorem
Here is something I don't understand (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, so as a school district you want to teach about creationism alongside evolution. To some that may be fine. The issue I have is who's version of creationism? Why do all these nut jobs always insist on teaching Judeo-Christian creationism stories? What about all the other creationist accounts in other religions? Shouldn't we teach ALL creation stories to be fair and balanced?
Then there is the issue of who should be qualified to teach Judeo-Christian creationism. We're forcing this teaching onto science teachers. Regardless of whether or not they want to teach, they simply are not qualified. In my opinion, the only person really qualified to teach the Judeo-Christian creation story is someone from the religion that created the story. We need a rabbi. Christians just inherited the story from the Jews. Funny part is, most of the rabbis I have spoken to do not take the 7 day creation story literally.
Re:sad isn't it ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
I live in Texas and I can tell you that it's a bit complex. First of all, the state has a big inferiority complex. They used to be the biggest state, until Alaska came along. Now they're the second biggest. Believe it or not, that seriously galls a lot of Texans. Next, they picked the wrong side in the Civil War, er... excuse me, "the War of Northern Aggression", only a few years after kicking Mexico's ass and gaining their own independence. Going 1 and 1 in the two biggest events in your states history may seem, well, acceptably average for most states but not the one that likes to think that it has some special place in the world. So, as is often the case with folks with over-inflated egos, Texans are insecure and scared, and scared people often turn to religion for answers. Cramming their religious views down the throats of children makes them feel like they are at least morally superior to "all them states with all them states with all them intellectual elites in 'em." Smart people, even people who are confident enough to led God fend for himself in spreading "the truth", are threatening to your average Texan.