Scientists in India Protest Move To Drop Darwinian Evolution From Textbooks (science.org) 96
Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material. From a report: The removal makes "a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education," says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials. The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India's 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a "content rationalization" process.
NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.
NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.
A victory ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists in India Protest Move To Drop Darwinian Evolution From Textbooks
A victory for morons world wide.
Re:A victory ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chandra Wickramasinghe (Score:1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Then Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was giving an interview to the British press and asked whether he had a Biblical Literalist interpretation on Evolution and the Origin of Life. His interviewer was casting for a sound bite from a "rube" from "the ignorant interior of the U.S."
Were I interviewed and questioned about rejecting Darwinian Evolution, I would have loved to reply, "That life emerged spontaneously in the conditions of the Early Earth is preposterous. My so
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> "That life emerged spontaneously in the conditions of the Early Earth is preposterous.
Bullshit definitively emerges spontaneously today.
(Actually I suspect life originated outside our solar system and seeded Earth. Spores can survive on asteroids for several millions of years. It takes just one lucky spore to survive the trip.)
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Spores can survive on asteroids for several millions of years. It takes just one lucky spore to survive the trip.
That hypothesis also neatly explains what's wrong with society today - inbreeding!
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And where did those spores come from? Is it spores all the way down?
Re: Chandra Wickramasinghe (Score:2)
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Well, even If the first cells were created by some supernatural being, we have several hundred million years of Darwinian evolution after that.
That would make much of monotheist religious texts pure myth, except for possibly the human wars and human history.
Re: Chandra Wickramasinghe (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, even If the first cells were created by some supernatural being, we have several hundred million years of Darwinian evolution after that.
That would make much of monotheist religious texts pure myth, except for possibly the human wars and human history.
Scientifically minded individuals ask, "Yes, and?"
Re: Chandra Wickramasinghe (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think that represetns a common view in mainstream Christianity. The problem is that the anti-science fundamentalists are much louder as well as politically connected.
Seems kind of silly (Score:2)
The problem isn't that we can't show life can come from non-life. It's that we have way, way too many different ways to choose from to know which one was it.
Hell, people say "how can life come from non-life?". Was that sandwich you ate alive? Are you alive? Well, there's life coming from non-life (before you pick this apart there's a whole lot more that goes with it).
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Regression occurs everywhere a far right governmen (Score:5, Insightful)
You would think Slashdot would have increased the width of its comment title database field since 1997.
Anyway, this is exactly the educational regression that occurs every time a far right wing government gets into power anywhere in the world. See Florida where books are being banned all over the place for not following a specific political viewpoint - so much for free speech!
It is hard to keep control of an educated workforce, you see. You need a pliant dumb workforce to keep in power, and to fill your enforcers (the police) with dumb cops to protect yourself.
OP is correct (Score:5, Insightful)
In Afghanistan a handful of religious extremists seized control because they had weapons and a willingness to use violence. American Extremists are no different, and you shouldn't kid yourself otherwise.
You're saying "It Can't Happen Here". We should have long since learned that's a lie.
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Lol yes the US is just like India where they burn women to death and rape them at will because you found two YouTuber nut heads.
Omg... lmao
That type of violence in the US against women usually is performed privately in homes and not in the open. Instead, lynching black people was the American thing to do in public. Now that times have changed, American violence against black people has reverted to private settings.
I wish what I just wrote were a joke.
This is something I've been wondering (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if we're seeing more random mass shootings because violent people who used to be able to take out their urges against black folk without anyone caring now get arrested.
I mean, if you're somebody in 1950s America and you wanna kill somebody and you're white, you pretty much could. If all else fails no jury would convict you so no prosecutor would bother charging you.
No
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The increase in young, angry, white guys shooting places up is largely down to incel culture. It validates their anger towards the people they blame for their loneliness and unhappiness, and encourages them to take violent revenge.
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If you'll look, the large rise in school shootings largely coincides with two things: America dismantling its mental asylum system, and the rise of instant internet communications. I'm not saying that there wasn't a lot of mistreatment that took place in those places or that its immediately clear that we should bring them back, but those people who were once locked up for being mentally "off"" now are free to roam amongst us.
Now mix in the Internet - lonely people who are never paid attention to. They wil
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There was a fairly substantial gap between the last lynchings, which would be late 1950s, early 1960s, and the sudden increase in school shootings, which seemed to start with Columbine in... 1999? .
You're correct that Columbine was in 1999.
Number of US school shootings by decade:
1940- 8
1950- 19
1960- 20
1970- 42
1980- 52
1990- 99
2000- 80
2010- 210
2020- 131 (to date)
Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] (goes back to 1840-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There was a federal ban on assault style weapons 1994-2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Keep your western concepts where they belong.
Ah yes, our "western concepts" like "Women are people who deserve their own rights and lives to live". Western concepts like "rape is bad". Western concepts like "The government shouldn't be able to unilaterally decide what's available online and in the media" or "religion in government destroys sanity and disenfranchises a huge population".
That India and the US right both vehemently embrace rape culture, disenfranchisement and removal of autonomy for women, and have a piss-poor understanding of science
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As you've pointed out, "western" concepts isn't really a good description. Enlightenment, liberal, egalitarian, humanist, or just modern would be better.
Provincialism preventing accurate analysis (Score:1)
Okay, time for a bit of advocating for the devil because you're getting a little too self-satisfied you have all the answers but are nonetheless stuck in your western worldview. (Mine is western also, but I at least can see that elsewhere they look at things... differently.)
Ah yes, our "western concepts" like "Women are people who deserve their own rights and lives to live".
Where women aren't outright property, they do have rights. Just sometimes wildly different rights than men. Meaning that the concept "one set of rights for all" doesn't hold there.
Which it doesn't even in the western sphere, witness spe
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I am on the "right".
I think rapists should be executed.
I think abortion should govt funded and available on demand to any woman who wants one, any time, for any reason.
I think anyone with a legal right to vote should be able to do so.
My first university degree is in geology and I am a recreational quantum mechanic.
I think religion is bullshit.
You tropes about the right are about as good as the person you responded to.
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It's the qualifiers that set you apart from humanists, egalitarians, and the like.
Rapists should be executed. Most developed countries do not execute criminals, because there is too much risk of mistakes being made, and because not being killed is a human right.
"Anyone with the legal right to vote" simply means that anyone can be excluded with a law, not that there should be some universal right to participate in democracy.
I'm not attacking you, just saying that your views don't quite match what many people
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Well, to be fair, why should people without the legal right to vote be permitted to do so? Why should some dude in, say, Columbia, be allowed to mail in a vote for U.S. President?
You're right though. I don't have what people in Europe would consider "modern, liberal, Western, values". I wouldn't want to have such values, nor was that my claim. My claim is that not everyone on the right is a pro-rape, anti-woman, disenfranchising, anti-science asshole.
I may very well be an asshole, but I'm hardly any of
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My point was more that who has the legal right to vote is arbitrary. You can make a law taking it away from or granting it to any group you like. I'd suggest that such an important part of any democracy should be codified at constitutional level, and if it is limited to citizens then it should be very easy to obtain citizenship and that should be constitutionally protected as well.
I'd rather a few people got to vote who shouldn't, than people who should be allowed to vote get blocked from doing so.
No Taxation Without Representation (Score:1)
Patrick Henry (among many others) stated it plainly in his "Virginia Resolves".
The criteria for who should be allowed to vote?
Anyone residing on US territory and pays any form of taxes, directly or indirectly, regardless of citizenship status.
Anyone who has any federal or state taxes taken from their paycheck.
Anyone who buys (most) things in states with sales taxes.
Anyone who owns OR RENTS property in property tax states.
Since any tax exemption regime would be exploited by the usual suspects in ways that we
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Why on Earth should citizenship be easy to get?!?!
Besides all that, I think voting for people in office is silly and should be eliminated anyway.
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> Bullshit. We don't have to tolerate their ass-backward rapist woman-slave fantasy perpetuated by ancient bullshit religions, overpopulation, massive poverty, and evil right-wing government. India or the republicans.
It used to be that the right in the US wouldn't tolerate other cultures for their religions and the left in the US wouldn't tolerate them for their social values, which is called the "barbarian" stage of society -- the rules of my village are the best and everyone else must obey them. Judgin
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> It was only a few years ago they passed laws banning sati
If by few years you mean 200 years ago, before the time Indian Removal Act was written into law.
Re:Regression occurs everywhere a far right govern (Score:5, Insightful)
The Lysenkoism is what fucked it up (Score:3)
Everyone knew it was wrong but nobody wanted to tell Stalin (or Mao) that. That's what happens when you put violent dictators in charge. They're good a violence, not running a country.
Re: Regression occurs everywhere a far right gover (Score:2)
So your argument is democrats are just as stupid as republicans because they don't believe in science either.
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Yes. Exactly. They either don't know or don't care that those masks can't filter anything as small as a virus out of the air. What they can do is filter out virus-carrying droplets from sneezing or coughing, meaning that if you're contagious it makes it much less likely that you'll be spreading COVID around, which is better than nothing. And, they don't understand that avoiding physical contac
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To answer the question in your sig, because they have read what their god does to people who act like they do.
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Spin-N-Lies
> refused to believe covid would mutate and were shocked,
Estimates were initially that such viruses were *slow* mutatators, not zero mutators. Yes, their estimation was wrong. It happens. Doesn't mean it's a sinister conspiracy. And they were not "shocked", but merely surprised. You exaggerate. Repent.
> Boost up 5 times.
Very early on they said boosters may be needed. Even if mutations don't happen, a given vaccine may only offer temporary protection.
> No cross species virus has ever been
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If Democrats are the anti-reality party, then why is the republican party still trying to claim the election was stolen which was repeatedly proven false?
Why do they still claim vaccines don't work despite the fact that the vaccinated either don't catc
Re:Regression occurs everywhere a far right govern (Score:5, Informative)
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You would think Slashdot would have increased the width of its comment title database field since 1997.
Why would they? If they did, then people might mistakenly believe that titles should be used for comment content.
Anti-science Xtians strike again! (Score:2, Funny)
They're even destroying science in India!
Re:Anti-science Xtians strike again! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah, this is good ol' home spun Hindi Nationalism. Modi is just another dictator with no clue. But I'm sure the Christian Right in the U.S. will be taking note on how its done.
They're not taking notes (Score:2)
For religious extremists science is a major threat to them. They need a monopoly on absolute truth.
Evolution is a problem for all ancient religions. (Score:2)
Worse, it also answers the question "Where does morality come from" with "We evolved as a social species".
From day one religious extremists have been after it. Every mega preacher and right wing hack politician who can't run a country has been after it.
The take away is that they never stop. Every time you beat them back they come right back at you.
We need more education, and education that focuses on crit
Re:Evolution is a problem for all ancient religion (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to Catholic elementary school starting in the mid 1960s. They had no trouble teaching us about evolution, along with "God did it."
"But of this one thing be not ignorant, my beloved, that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." 2 Peter 3:8.
(On the other hand, they never had us read very much of the Bible. They were too smart for that.)
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Fundamentalists only believe in metaphor when it suits them. Catholics, otoh, have occasionally been at the forefront of science. After fighting it for a while back in the past, ofc.
That verse is a useful thing to bring up with creationists, et. al.
It occurs to me that Gutenberg created Fundies. The illiterate and illogical became literate but still illogical. This is a bit of a snark because we know the real reasons for all of this. Power.
Catholics have never had a problem with science (Score:3)
But they're also not the only or even the most politically important denomination.
The problem is Protestant Evangelicals. The ones Goldwater Warned us about.
They are deeply opposed to teaching evolution. Go look up Ken Ham & Kent Hovind. They're both extremely influential and politically powerful and the
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I and perhaps others who consider themselves bible-studying christians find scoffing at good-hearted, earnest people who have, in some cases devoted their whole lives, or even suffered, but in modernity mostly put money, sweat and time to the revealing of the workings of the universe, some of these humans also being believers in Christ are labelled as "evil" for exploring god's fine work and offering sensible explanations of the mechanics of the universe, to be the real offense. As if their god is Loki, dec
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Yes - people who don't understand their own religion don't understand a lot of other things, too.
I have no particular religious beliefs, but I was brought up in a classic Christian protestant environment in the South. Very few people had any issue with "church" vs "science", they are two different things as a very basic level - intangible vs tangible worlds. I managed to grasp that concept at about 5 years old, everyone else around me seemed to understand it perfectly well. The very fe
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that's not the way it works...
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Sigh... monkeys and humans are exactly as evolved as one another.
Ironic that they stopped teach evolution (Score:2)
Perhaps these stupidities take care of themselves, by evolution.
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I hope the replacement is something useful. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Let them be. (Score:2)
The great thing about shitty thinking is that it can't be confined to just a narrow slice of the mind. Let them be. They'll compartmentalize themselves.
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Astonishingly bad excuse... (Score:2)
It's honestly hard to think of a place where evolutionary theory would be more relevant than in relatively introductory bio. There are certainly some interesting pieces of stamp collecting to go over as well; nucleotide base pairs, the Krebs cycle, food webs, etc. but evolution is the one that's simultaneously fairly simple(if you keep to broad strokes) and
Absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." — M. de Voltaire
India is kinda behind the curve (Score:2)
It's like it was back when I was a kid, everyone was trying to copy the US.
The difference is, back then, the US was ahead, not behind.
RTFM - another media post w/o research (Score:1)
Deniers of Darwinism are proof of it. (Score:2)
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I can't tell if this is tongue in cheek or not. Well done.
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If the poster is serious, they don't understand a lot of things... including how to look for counter-arguments. Use google. "is (Insert example here) actually irreducible complexity". But based on the statement, they're not looking for information, so... never mind.
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I guess they had already removed evolution from the curriculum where and when you went to school hey?
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Whenever it feels like science doesn't get it, but you do, actually pick up a book on the said science. Its obvious you haven't.
Science and nature do not care for your standards of plausibility. If "common sense" derived from common experience always worked, there would be no need for science.
Relativity and Quantum Mechanics operate outside the scales of space that are within day to day human capacity for observation and experience.
Same goes for evolution, which operates on scales of time outside your obser
It takes constant effort... (Score:2)
India is an economy on the rise, pro
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Bullshit (Score:2)
When you let religious bullshit fester at the government level, so it effects all citizens, then you know you have a serious problem in a society! Dump religion and stupid/unproven ideas from being taught as fact.
A counterpoint (Score:2)
Evolution was used to support slavery and racism in the United States. Perhaps India doesn't want to given the caste system a veneer of scientific authority. It is a very small jump from, "survival of the fittest" to those people are genetically inferior, therefore, they deserve to be on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder.
Even though we might like to believe otherwise, the average person is not an intellectual, and will more than likely use knowledge of evolution to justify discrimination on t
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No, I'm saying we shouldn't teach theories in schools which lead to racism and civil war.
We have the historical record of racism, and it includes evolution.