Hey Texas! Look what our State Board of Education (SBOE) is up to! From the WSJ:
The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.
The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a huge textbook market that many publishers write to the state’s standards, then market those books nationwide.
How special. I owe an apology to Kansas.
FWIW, they started all this in January — but I doubt very many people were paying attention. (Full disclosure: I definitely didn’t notice.) Today’s news is just the next installment in a bizarre tale that’s been spinning along for quite awhile.
Crazy, eh? So crazy, in fact, that I decided to make some calls and try to see who the heck these people are — and discovered that my district seems to be responsible for one of the loopiest of them all: Cynthia Dunbar.
Somebody wanna explain how we managed to elect someone who home schools her children because she doesn’t believe in public education??? And who thinks government needs a Biblical litmus test?
Embarrassing — and worse yet, she won with roughly 70% of the vote! Ack! Talk about asleep at the wheel, folks!
If the SBOE moves any further off the rails, the voting public (like me) will have to stumble out of our group lethargy and push (shove!!) back. Hard.
Recall, anybody?
Marc, I’m going to treat your post/pingback as a comment and respond directly.
I’m hardly a “Darwinist”. As I told someone else today on this very subject., I fully agree that the study of science should explore and test theories, via hypotheses, tests, and vigorous research.
What I’m not okay with is disguising religious doctrine as scientific theory. It bothers me a great deal when proponents of these ideologies wave away any inconvenient findings with mystical answers. That ain’t science. And it doesn’t belong in a science textbook. It belongs in a theology class.
Polimom,
Black Shards is doing a strange thing here. He apparently had a theme he wanted to rant on, i.e. that “Darwinists” are trying to stifle all criticism of evolution and squelch all competing theories. He went looking for someone of this militaristic mindset to link, but the closest he could find was you. Even so, he had to quote you out of context to make it work. The paragraph he quoted looks much more militant without the context of the paragraph (two paragraphs) above it.
A reasonable reader would infer that you were objecting to the substitution of bible reading and bible derived dogmas (sorry, can’t bring myself to call them ‘theories’) for actual teaching of science, and not declaring your intent to ‘defend Darwin’s theory to the death’.
The Master concludes that either 1) BS is creating a strawman in order to knock it down, i.e. there aren’t any “Darwinists” ranting the way he intends to decry, or 2) BS is just lazy today, and couldn’t be bothered to find one that actually believes what he would like his readers to think “Darwinists” believe.
The Master is betting on #2.
How sad. How sloppy.
My understanding that this “raise doubts about the ‘theory’ of “Darwinism” is the latest way to try to sneak ID/Creationism in through the back door. From what I remember, they are counting on people mis-understanding the relationship between “theories” and “facts” as they relate to science (in that “facts” are evidence, used to bolster or disprove “theories”, and “theories” are themselves never elevated to the rank of “facts” – quite different than most lay people tend to think.)
OTOH, what I would really like to see them teach in science class is the scientific method, instead of having the kids memorize a bunch of scientific trivia for regurgitation on the next TAKS. Any chance of that ever happening?
I suspect not 🙁
~EdT.
Hmmm….. this seems to be a mixed outcome.
Link
Maybe mixed – but I don’t think ID/Creationism advocates will really claim this as a victory.
~EdT.