Kansas is at it again...
Jan. 25th, 2005 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearfrom a Usenet posting in talk.origins:
to summarize, basically, they've decided that since Science doesn't acknowledge their beliefs, then they'll just redefine the word science itself. their new definition of science now allows for non-causal conclusions, meaning intelligent design and other non-provable (more importantly, non-falsifiable) explanations can be included.
on top of that, there's a whole bunch more BS about how the "evidence against evolution" (there is none, but the students will have no clue how to know that) and "teaching the controversy" (there is none, except at the sociology level, which is out of scope of ANY high school biology class) will become required learning.
i give it 5 years when not a single university in this country will accept a Kansas student for ANY science-related degree program.
i feel extremely sorry for those students of Kansas who actually thought they might have become doctors or such, 'cause they'll never get into a program as long as their view of science is so totally screwed up by the ignorant bastards responsible for their welfare.
still, these are the same people so ruled by their unchanging *beliefs* that they still believe Wal-Marts haven't destroyed their communities yet.
naturally, the documents overstress the "theory, not fact" crap, which so far has held up as unconstitutional in the south, but we'll have to wait on the appeals for how wide-spread that judgement goes.
update: Kansas hasn't actually voted on these; these documents are just proposed recomendations to try to sneak intelligent design, creationism, and bogus anti-evolutionary "evidence" into the system. of course, with the current kansas board, its just possible that they might be listening...
In case anybody is interested, there is a website at http://www.kansasscience2005.com/ that has an early draft of proposed revisions to the Kansas state science standards.
In particular see http://www.kansasscience2005.com/ProposedRevisions_KSstandards.pdf which deals with evolution, ID, and the definitions of science and methodological naturalism starting on page 3.
to summarize, basically, they've decided that since Science doesn't acknowledge their beliefs, then they'll just redefine the word science itself. their new definition of science now allows for non-causal conclusions, meaning intelligent design and other non-provable (more importantly, non-falsifiable) explanations can be included.
on top of that, there's a whole bunch more BS about how the "evidence against evolution" (there is none, but the students will have no clue how to know that) and "teaching the controversy" (there is none, except at the sociology level, which is out of scope of ANY high school biology class) will become required learning.
i give it 5 years when not a single university in this country will accept a Kansas student for ANY science-related degree program.
i feel extremely sorry for those students of Kansas who actually thought they might have become doctors or such, 'cause they'll never get into a program as long as their view of science is so totally screwed up by the ignorant bastards responsible for their welfare.
still, these are the same people so ruled by their unchanging *beliefs* that they still believe Wal-Marts haven't destroyed their communities yet.
naturally, the documents overstress the "theory, not fact" crap, which so far has held up as unconstitutional in the south, but we'll have to wait on the appeals for how wide-spread that judgement goes.
update: Kansas hasn't actually voted on these; these documents are just proposed recomendations to try to sneak intelligent design, creationism, and bogus anti-evolutionary "evidence" into the system. of course, with the current kansas board, its just possible that they might be listening...
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Re: you asked for it 3...
Date: 2005-01-27 07:11 pm (UTC)the document *singles out evolution* -- that has already been established by multiple courts (the cobb county case being only the latest) as being a point of view of a specific religion and as such, singling out evolution from all other theories of science including mechanics, chemistry, electricity and magnatism, continental drift and plate techtonics, spectroscopy, etc etc, IS promoting a religion's particular views and as such is a violation of church and state.
and BAD science.
as for the charisma? well, there's some truth to that, but that's where the scientific process gets to be self-correcting. maybe an american might be pushing some rediculous study that nicely supports the current right-wing view that global warming is garbage. but scientists in PLENTY of other countries can post the opposite.
in that global-ice-age story, the scientists involved in supporting particular sets of data to counter the conventional wisdom each came from different countries, and even different universities within the same country. there was no conspiracy, no colusion, just each one addressing an argument and showing that the data makes the alternative possible -- when each of the alternatives became possible, the theory became good science and not just a whim.
but if at any point the data said the whim was impossible, the true scientist would, like Hawking himself did, shrug his shoulders, admit the mistake, and move on.
that's science. full of humans, yes, but with a methodology that helps take account for that.
when politics gets involved, its no longer science, and true scientists recognize that for what it is even though the general public doesn't.
there's reasons that science publishes through peer-reviewed journals first, and not straight to book (as the ID'ers do) or straight to mainstream periodicals (the way over-anxious, stock-market-dependent drug companies do). its to filter out the junk before it gets public and misleads people into doing the wrong thing.