Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

@wandeljw,

wandeljw wrote:

LOUISIANA UPDATE

Quote:
BESE approves new biology textbooks
(Associated Press, December 9, 2010)

Opponents of the books say the texts fail to explain scientific disagreements over evolution and teach evolution without encouraging criticism or debate.

What scientific disagreements are they talking about? Professionals disagree about details of the theory and these are covered in great detail in higher level education (many people make whole careers out of this). But there is no disagreement (within science) about the basic premise of the theory. And it's disingenuous to imply to young students that there is any disagreement within the scientific community over the validity of biological evolution; there isn't.

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@rosborne979,

tick-tock, tick-tock

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What I find so astounding about anti-IDers is their gravitas. Some call it "bottom". So apparent in fm's avatu. So contradictory to Io's siggy line.

It is well known to all who have a decent interest in English literature, and even some who have an indecent interest in it, that gravitas is a scoundrel. And a very dangerous scoundrel to boot. It is so sly.

That is because, and it is equally well known to the same persons as mentioned above, that more honest and well meaning people are bubbled, diddled and fleeced out of the fruits of their sweat by gravitas in any one financial year as far back as records began than by pick-pocketing, shop lifting, highway robbery and phone-in scams.

The very essence of gravitas is deceit. It is a learned strategy, particularly in institutions of advanced excellence, by which credit is gained for sense and knowledge out of all proportion to the worth of the persons imbued with gravitas. (Such as Judge Jones). It has been characterised by a French wit as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind."

Which saying one might wish was carved in stone on the portals of our great buildings and other edifices of a monumental nature.

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@High Seas,

Quote:

it took much back-and-forth on this thread until Ionus was finally clear he didn't object to evolution per se

I have believed evolution to be a sound solid theory since I was 12. You are mistaken. I was arguing that it does have gaps, that it can never be considered a fact because our facts that support it are constantly being improved and this has a butterfly effect on the larger theory.

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@Ionus,

Since when have "Facts" been immutable? As you say, e constantly refine them but, at the time before these revisions, their "factness" was never in dispute until it failed to cover some more arcane area of information.

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@spendius,

Quote:

What I find so astounding about anti-IDers is their gravitas. Some call it "bottom". So apparent in fm's avatu. So contradictory to Io's siggy line

Ive never heard of a really good Fundamentalist comedian, have you?
As far as me, I only feign gravitas because my great great great uncle Mordeciah was an Orthodox Rabbi, and he was killed by the Czar. Thats when we all became CAtholic or Orthodox Christians cause e were all too cowardly to die for something as inconsequential as a religious belief.

I can imagine all the martyrs (if they could sustain some brief period of post dispatch consciousness). Id bet they would say "OY, and to think I gave up all that for this"

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@farmerman,

It's an empirically validated fact than anybody who knows anything about their great, great, great uncle has lots and lots of gravitas.

In my corner of the pub it has been unanimously agreed that we would convert to Zoroastrian voodoo if the public executioner threatened to put the snake bite on us.

I have never known a fundamentalist comedian of any sort. But for sheer unmitigated and stupifying duhing you can't beat scientific atheists who own certificates and titles proving they know what they are talking about.

At least the religious lot might be laying it on with a trowel. Enough actors have played hell-fire preachers to suggest that some hell-fire preachers are acting.

I think you have gravitas fm.

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@Ionus,

I think evolution is a fact Io. I think a number of other things we have traditionally agreed not to talk about are facts too.

What I have against evolutionists is that they have picked out just one of the facts we have traditionally agreed not to talk about and are content to put all the others on Ignore along with anybody who mentions them or even makes tangential allusions in their direction. That allows them to use evolution as an instrument of aggression so long as they confine their social contacts to thick people or those pulling the same stunt.

I think Monty Python was a team of very serious and aggressive people.

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@spendius,

http://www.webpulp.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/5414660_8716bf615a.jpg

HAVENT USED THAT ONE IN A LONNNNG TIME. THINGS HAVE BEEN GOING PRETTY WELL UP TILL NOW

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@farmerman,

Obviously fm. If you have an unspoken agreement not to talk about certain matters then it follows you won't know what I'm talking about. That you have this agreement, which I support in social settings, does not mean that everybody has it. It means you have been protected from such matters or are in denial about them. i.e. you are naive.

Look how you steered carefully around the Texas senator's reference to "controversial issues" despite the mention of them being in one of wande's posts. You just don't want to know what he was referring to and you blithely assume nobody else does for your own comfort and solace.

Do you think there would be any opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools if those "controversial issues" didn't exist. They have implications extending far beyond such things as gravity.

Science transcends social settings. The presumption that social consequences are of no importance is infantile or disingenuous.

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@spendius,

Quote:

Look how you steered carefully around the Texas senator's reference to "controversial issues" despite the mention of them being in one of wande's posts.

ASince you are as dense as Osmium, you didnt notice how well both wande and ros dismissed the entire "controversy" issue. It is only a clapper for your side, You insist that controversies exist yet you want to accept evolution. Pick one and go with it, dont try to sit on a fence with a picket up yer ass.
or "Ye shall be spat like salt brine from our mouths"

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

HAVENT USED THAT ONE IN A LONNNNG TIME. THINGS HAVE BEEN GOING PRETTY WELL UP TILL NOW

Thanks, Farmerman. That photo was originally a gift from Timberlandko (whom I still miss very much).

1 Reply

Quote:

BESE makes the right call
(Editorial, Shreveport Times, December 10, 2010)

Only in these strange times is it news that Louisiana's education board has approved a science textbook based on, well, science.

A state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education committee this week signed off on the first new high school life sciences textbook for public school students in eight years. The panel rejected arguments that the book doesn't include enough challenges to evolution.

Instead, the majority of the panel accepted the arguments of people such as retired biology teacher Patsye Peebles, who said: "The opponents to these biology books have an unfortunate misunderstanding of what is and isn't in the realm of science. By opening the door for their 'both sides' of any issue, you allow non-science and pseudo-science into the science classroom." Added a Presbyterian pastor, "The Bible is not a science book."

On the other side was John Yeats, of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, who argued that the new textbooks try to indoctrinate students.

It's curious how many of those who advocate approaches such as intelligent design apparently survived the "indoctrination" of old-timey science classes. Clearly, they evolved into adults who were able to make up their own minds about the origins of the universe and the methods of the creator.

We are reminded of an often kind, sometimes curmudgeonly teacher who taught 10th-grade biology when double knit first roamed the earth. He prefaced one discussion related to evolution by acknowledging that, in terms of personal faith, some folks explain the world in a different way. What students took from his statement: In his room, the discussion would be about scientific principles and theories that had survived rigorous scrutiny. Meanwhile, matters of faith — like the time it took for creation — should be discussed with the students' parents, pastors and Sunday school teachers.

If students survived that separation of science and religious doctrine, can't today's students also emerge to make their own choices, perhaps finding a path where science isn't the enemy but maybe a gift from God.

As that Presbyterian pastor told the BESE panel, "Let the science teachers of Louisiana teach science and let churches and families teach religion."

To that, let us add, Amen.

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@farmerman,

Quote:

you didnt notice how well both wande and ros dismissed the entire "controversy" issue.

Show me. But don't bother if they dismissed it by simply saying it was a pile of evil-smelling bullshite. Being dismissed by wande and ros is a feather in the cap to me. I'd be worried if they agreed with me. Neither even know how to conduct a civilised conversation and neither do you. And what they did dismiss was not only me. The existence of the debate is proof that the controversies exist and are real.

Quote:

You insist that controversies exist yet you want to accept evolution. Pick one and go with it, dont try to sit on a fence with a picket up yer ass.

You know very well, or you ought to by now, that the controversies exist in areas of life that are not talked about in polite company. That is why the senator from Texas left it at what he said. He was appealing to grown up people not to take advantage of his discretion. Don't come the innocent prude in order to try to save your face.

But one controversy, not the senator's, an added one, is that concerning the familiar divisions and groupings into insulated compartments of genres such as science, literature, religion, philosophy, economics, law, history, geography, anthropology and art etc etc. Can these divisions be justified when the individualities of the students are created by the blend of them. The teaching profession itself and the bureaucracies supporting it are full of people whose consciousness has been created by that blend.

Are you even sure of the perimeters of those distinctions yourself?

In the last analysis they might all be reduced to science or even to just physics. Will science take over the schools? We do want some consistency in teaching rather than stand up fights in the staff rooms and with the parents and representatives of the community. Where are your teachers to come from?

The simple and obvious fact that I am discreet about the senator's controversies, as he was, is sufficient to show that the anti-ID position here and in other discourses such as Dover and in media is conditioned by Christian morality. You called an amusing little episode taken from nature "porn". Ye Gods!!

In what way is one of those books you read for comfort and self-validation isolated from the wider culture it was written in, passed for publication and disseminated? In what way is it isolated from the writer's, and reader's, culture and life as a discreet object? Surely not just because it is an object in your hands? That's like switching the light on without knowing electricty has to be generated and distributed.

In what way does science justify the mass incarceration of 50 million kids in mandatory education? People pay to go on courses to learn all sorts of things. Where is the motivation for making the learning experience attractive when the audience has been rounded up by law and parental ambition which seeks to distort a proper, scientific assessment of talent by influence and shoehorn fuckwits into responsible positions?

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@wandeljw,

I never knew that Big Bird started that one. I just kept it in a file from a long ago post by Ros (I think). Good to know how these thing begin.

I felt that its use was appropriate in the circumstances previous.

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@wandeljw,

The Shreveport Times is owned by the Gannett Company of Virginia. Annual revenue $5.61 billion.

We can't expect any scientific disinterest from such a source. Not a chance. It makes its living from the seven deadly sins.

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@wandeljw,

wandeljw wrote:

Quote:
BESE makes the right call
(Editorial, Shreveport Times, December 10, 2010)

On the other side was John Yeats, of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, who argued that the new textbooks try to indoctrinate students.

It's a subtle distinction he draws because education is indoctrination by some definitions. But I think he misses the point that science functions by understanding things within a framework that challenges ideas against empirical evidence.

The process of educating students in the existing knowledge of science is not the same as the process of doing science itself.

Also, the end result of science class isn't that the student "believe" evolution, but that the student "understands" evolution; a world of difference.

1 Reply

@rosborne979,

The boundaries between education, indoctrination, propaganda and conditioning are not easy to define and even less easy to see.

In general, as I find it, the more grandiose the eloquence on behalf of education the more likely is it that what is being spoken of is a combination of the other three. In conjunction with recourse to the Ignore function it is a certainty.

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@farmerman,

Quote:

at the time before these revisions, their "factness" was never in dispute

How many times does this have to happen before a wise man would recommend caution ?

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@spendius,

Quote:

What I have against evolutionists

What I have against evolutionists is their hysterical screaming it must ba a fact or the world will end. No scientists them. What is wrong with religion in schools ? It works everywhere in the world but apparently not in the USA. By allowing religion into schools, providing it does not mention science and science does not mention religion, they would at least put moral behaviour on the same level as our chemical value to the nazis.

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