Evolution under attack in Texas

This is truly disturbing. Some group should start handing out Gallileo Awards to those scientists and science educators who get squashed by the likes of Don McLeroy.

Perhaps people will wake up when USA falls even further behind in technological innovation and discovery.

man, how can you deny evolution, when there is so much evidence, compared to creationism where there is no credible evidence, i guess there is the bible but how are we not to know that it was maybe just some story written by an ancient culture, i think the bible is more far fetched than evolution is.

Texas will soon be even further ass-backwards than Kansas in its scientific curriculum.

Completly ridiculous...this story really just makes me sad. We need to move forward, not back!

Thank God that I was able to get out of Texas:)

Bad Theological training and bad scientific training!

Funny that NASA is headquartered in Houston isn't it?

Shame, shame and more shame...the home of GWB!

Education shouldn't be used to indoctrinate students in religion. I'm fine with people believing in creationism, but there should be a line between church and education.

Every time Creationism is brought up I feel compelled to make this observation about how the super-duper religious prioritize their To-Do List:

Creationism = moral outrage demanding swift action! Take it all the way to the Supreme Court if need be!

GitMo abuse and torture = indifferent shurg and no action whatsoever. Pick up remote and see who got booted off American Idol this week.

These guys are so obsessed and so concerned about the "corrupting influence" of that Satan worshipper Darwin and his crazy theory of evolution on our children that -- my god! -- they have to taken action. Have to! To do nothing in the face of genetics being taught to children is unacceptable!

Arabs being illegally kidnapped by the CIA and sent to Syria to be tortured? They don't give a shit.

US soliders collecting "terrorists" who are turned over to them for cash by their (starving) neighbors and shipped off to GitMo with no other incriminating evidence whatsoever? They do give a shit.

Our government using GitMo to illegally hold hundreds of foreign nationals -- without criminal charges -- and torture them? They don't give a shit.

Apparently there is a new Christian cult in America. One wherein gay marriage and evolution are the greatest sins on earth -- but torturing a brown skinned Arab is perfectly okay.

Move over Scientology and Heaven's Gate cult. There's a new contender stepping into the ring.

This is ridiculous. How can they call themselves educators? Some Right-wingers would love to turn this country into some Christian Fundamentalist Disneyland. I'm sure these are the same people who Hate Iranians and think Saddam planned 9/11 with Osama.

i have one piece of advice for anyone of intelligence in America. FLEE! get out. move to Europe or Asia and do it before they shut us out! Heck even canada would be good. America is headed for a huuuuge fall barring some miracle and it's all self-inflicted by the maniacs like these.

I'm really not joking, I'm going to norway if I can

i have one piece of advice for anyone of intelligence in America. FLEE! get out. move to Europe or Asia and do it before they shut us out! Heck even canada would be good. America is headed for a huuuuge fall barring some miracle and it's all self-inflicted by the maniacs like these.

I'm really not joking, I'm going to norway if I can

The theories of Evolution and Creationism aren't opposite ends of the same spectrum. Creationism should be offered as a course in religious studies or maybe social sciences and leave Evolution to the science majors.

What I've never understood is how those that believe in Evolution can accommodate Creationism in some fashion, as mention previously, but Creationist have to burn Evolutionist at the nearest stake. I'm ok with you believing whatever helps you get out of bed each day but why is it so important for ME to fall for the same madness?

(bangs head against the wall)

True, true, eldamon. Public education cannot be subject to the dogma of one religion. If you want your kid to subscribe to your religion, send them to a secondary religious school. Do not deny every other child in the public system the right to a true unbiased education.

No, intellectuals, don't flee, we need you here to combat this ignorance!

This is just embarrassing for the state of Texas and for this country.

Welcome back to the Middle Ages! The capacity of mans ability and willingness to inflict himself with ignorance never ceases to amaze me. While they're at it why not force the public schools to preach the earth is flat and that the sun rotates around the earth. Religion is the bane of mankind because many of the people that ascribe to one have immunized themselves against all forms of logic and reason. Its a sad critique of life in America when the inmates are allowed to run the asylum.

Message to the Texas State Board of Education: You are insane.

Ya' know, it's not just Texas that's uber religious -- it's the nation as a whole. (Jesus camp anyone?!) Did anyone see that NOVA special on the Pennsylvania case "Of Pandas & People"?.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/programs/ht/wm/3416_03_056...

Members of a Pennsylvania school board lied under oath about personally purchasing the creationism textbook & "donating" it to the public high schools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_S...
This happened two years ago in a state that is considered to be "liberal".

I think it's unfair to point fingers at a particular region, country, state, race, etc. What's happening is that some people in power are pushing their religious & political beliefs onto other people.

On the education side, this is one of the many reasons why I left teaching. I realized that education is closely tied to politics and the individual teacher (and even school district) does not always have the power to change policy. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with education is that it's being run by business people & politicians who have never set foot in a public classroom as a teacher.

....sound familiar...someone in power who has no clue what they're doing? ;)

...ramen!

96:

Yeah, when i was looking for another job, i avoided that company like the plague. Anything associated with the Bush family is a no-no.

I've also turned down offers from companies who do such schemes just to make money off of schools. One of the reasons why funds are limited -- districts & principals don't ask teachers what they want or will actually use.

What's sickening is the former teacher who pushed that stuff.

Great. (sarcastic) Yet another school opting to teach kids mythologies and superstitions of yester year instead of modern science. No wonder this nation is falling behind in graduating scientists and engineers. There goes the future of our nation. *sigh*

When will educators learn that only science should be taught in science classrooms? The bible (and its derivative, intelligent design) is a cultural document. It is best taught in a comparative religion or comparative literature class. Not science. Science is for the discovery of new things.

Someone very wise once told me, once you stop learning new things, you stop being great.

I am of the opinion that the purpose of science is to explain how and the purpose of religion is to try to make sense of the why. Science oversteps its limits when it attempts to explain things like the meaning of life, and religion oversteps its limits when it tries to explain the way the physical world works.

Anyhow, I think that it is a sign of either bad science or weak religion when either cross into another's territory. This is obviously a sign of a weak religion that cannot accept change and adapt itself to the world around it. Like the persecution faced by Galileo, this religious creed will fight kicking and screaming until it either wins or fades away. At the very least I'm thankful that religion does not have the power to dictate what people can learn or not learn as it did hundreds of years ago.

Creationism could taught in maybe a creative writing class but beyond that leave it for church or for the home if you are into mythical stories like that. Do the people in texas believe that all the oil that they are pumping out of the ground was made in the last few thousand years?

Creationism can just be deleted. Even Christendom finds it to be an offensive way to teach the Book of Genesis. We believers in the Bible have been content to teach Genesis as a matter of faith since the birth of Christendom. For us, this folly of creationism is blasphemous and anathema.

Metaphysical naturalism (the philosophy that informs most neo-darwinian stripes of evolutionary theory) is as much a religious commitment as theism.

The metaphysical naturalist assumes only physical things exists and as an extension, the practice of science must only appeal to material causes. That's fine and dandy, as long as you can prove your philosophical commitment, and here I'm asking all you enlightened darwinists to defend the philosophical assuption that only physical things exist...or, to put it differently, everything that can be said to exist can be said to be material.

Defend this claim and then we can get some real conversations going. I suspect most people dont have a clear and working definition for neither science nor religion.

Today's Challenge: In 2 minutes, list as many scientific facts in Creationism as you can think of.
Ready? Go!

This is an important story - from last December. The ongoing discussion is valuable, though.

huntre,
familiar with the anthropic principle, or should I list the hundred or so finely tuned preconditions for life's development on earth?

Usually, the policies in Texas spread throughout the nation...look out america!

why force one idea on kids. there is more than one you know. thats why i don't believe in one over the other should be taught but both

I honestly do not understand why evolution and creation should just be shown neutrally with the student and there parents deciding what they should believe in.

Both view points should be explored for its Pluses and minuses and the student should be directed to draw there own conclusion.

I wish the aliens would land already so the Creationist would stop talking about how life on earth is a miracle so fantastic that surely only God could have done it!

Life can arise without a deity specifically "overseeing" the whole thing, can't it?

If I knock over a glass of milk then over time some bacteria will grow inside the mess -- I'm sure from the bacteria's point of view the whole situation "had to be" perfectly orchestrated by a higher power!

"So it's just an accident that everything we need to exist just happens to be all around us?" one bacteria says to a unbeliever. "How naive!"

Even if a hypothetical super-deity did exist and actually DID create the universe (or literally was the universe) that doesn't necessarily mean that our existence was planned, that the super-deity is even aware of us or even has emotion enough to care.

The entire concept of Creationism rests on the assumption that God has human emotions and human psychology....but just also happens to have supernatural powers.

If such a creature as "God" exists I'm pretty sure it wouldn't get bored, angry or even have anything resembling a human psychology. If you were billions of years old, had a consciousness that spanned the known universe and were able to control all atomic matter in this reality -- I'm fairly certain your concepts of "good" and "evil" wouldn't quite match up with ours. And that's being really generous and assuming that being omniscient is actually possible! Sounds great on paper, but is such a condition as omniscience even possible from a pragmatic sense?

But the Creationists argue that the "Intelligent Designer" doesn't have to be God. They never specify that it's God. The hypothetical "Designer" could just be super-powerful aliens (they argue)

Um...I'm not sure going the Scientology route really stregthens their case of trying to pass this off as a science.

If I were a true believer I'd want to keep Intelligent Design far, far away from schools because once you start putting faith under the microscope, it's hard to keep it.

I agree with most of the people above me. Schools are run by biased politicians that have never been teachers. Church and public school should be separate. Religious education is why we have catechism classes. Did anyone catch that speech where Bush admitted that we went to war on terrorism because God told him to? What a shame...

crob,

re: your milk hypothesis, where did you get that milk? Was it always there? If so, its unlike our universe as the Big Bang suggests our universe had a beginning. If it (both milk and universe) had a beginning, it had to be caused bc it couldn't have caused itself. Ultimately, you'll NEED an uncaused cause to avoid an infinite regress of causes. Ya dig?

re: whether or not we have reason to think that God is a person (and hence, has a personality). Jews and Christians have reason to think God is rational as their Holy Book speaks of God as creating us in his image (with a rational capacity) and that God has a will, desire, intentions. You might argue this is anthropomorphizing, but I don't see a reason to think this given the abundance of Scriptures that speak of God as not having some human characteristics (that is to say, there is a difference btw being a human and being a person, such that there are non-human persons [God, angels, souls]).

The reason ID proponents dont name God as the Designer has to do with the important distinction between a theory and the philosophical and theological consequences of a theory.

ID, as a scientific enterprise, answers the question of whether there is Order, Intent, Information and Purpose in the Universe in the affirmative and some stripes of neo-darwinianism answers the question negatively. To answer the question in the negative is to espouse a religious worldview no different from theism. Surprise, neo-darwinians, You are the religous wackos!

If I want to hear about religion, I will go to church.

If I want to learn about science, I will go to my science class.

Although some people may not belive in evolution, it is how SCIENCE says we got here. I don't march into churchs and preach about evolution, so I would greatly appreciate it if religion wasn't preached in my classes.

Great points all, Crob. And, you're absolutely right, KevintheDude. Church and state are twains that need never ever meet in the classroom. Academia and faith are not the different sides of the same coin the creationists would have us all believe. These are two different coins of two totally unequivolent currencies for which there exists no mutual rate of exchange in the civil economies of either currency.

Here's an interesting thought. Every decision you make causes a 'branch' in time. If you do something, theoretically, in another branch universe, you didn't. Don't you think that the random decisions made in the past 14 or so billion years created branches that were right for life?

And we have to live in a world with life, since there is no way to OBSERVE a universe that has no OBSERVERS.

I personally believe the aliens created us have been raising us in a controlled environment and that they will be coming to slaughter us in 2012 for alien McDonalds, why isn't my theory of creation being taught in schools?

96th,
What of the notion that 'science's' atheistic