S4: Athiests are our friends act (failed)

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Actually, Speaker Fhtagn has to survive her motion of non-confidence now.

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Don't break the rules then. How difficult is that? Wait a day and S3 would have been voted on again. No muss no fuss.

Why the rush Mr. Cuber?

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Yes, the rules were broken. The motion to extended debate was successfully seconded.

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Single? I believe you've forgotten that my motion had a seconder.

[Wisconsin+17]

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That's how motions work Mr. Cuber. You stated, incorrectly that it is just one person opposed. Why is that?

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How so? S2 was a bad bill, and needed much work to bring it up to standard. I offered my analysis as to how the bill ought to have been improved.

Do you consider debate and discussion to be 'gridlock'? Mr Cuber?

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You should probably answer the question, Mr. Cuber.

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If by debate you mean simply dismissing my amendments, then sure.

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Really? Could have sworn that you felt otherwise.

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Right now the non-confidence motion is up. We'll have to wait for that to finish.

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Christ guys. We've had exactly zero discussion on the bill.

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You've not yet survived your vote yet, fhtagn.

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Well, tough titties. I'm here discussing it now.

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Sez who? Speaker fhtagn, who's still got her confidence motion against her? I suggest you vote in the confidence motion thread.

[Wisconsin+17]

What, didn't you know that seconders no longer matter since fhtagn will just overrule anyways?

Anyways, let's get back to the actual business of discussing this bill here.

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I don't see how teaching the theory of evolution is something that is a part of the constitution. Personally, I'd be in favor of modifying the bills to provide for local choice, so that municipalities and school districts would be able to decide if they wanted evolution to be a part of the Biology curriculum.

With your approval, I'd like to submit the bill with this amendment.

As for me personally, as a teacher, I don't think evolution should be taught in high school. There's nothing in high school biology that would require it to be taught (and I have taken biology, chemistry and physics). At the college level in first year, absolutely. High school biology should be teaching anatomy, how all the parts of the body work, how all the systems of the body work and why. That's plenty for a high school student to study.

[Wisconsin+17]

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If I'm studying gravitation in physics classes, I learn how the theory was proven and what the theory is good at proving. Evolution has a couple of problems.

One, evolution isn't testable in a high school environment. How would I prove to students that it is actually true? You can do the proofs with gravitation, as gravitation makes specific predictions regarding the acceleration of a falling object. We can measure the force of the earth acting on the ground, and with an object that we know the mass, we can actually measure the weight of the earth.

Two, the testability issues are well beyond what a high school student would understand. We can't have them work with the actual fossils that would be used. Mostly because those fossils would deteriorate over time. Nor can we send them out to an archaeological dig, etc. Nor do they study the history behind it, the discoveries in archaeology, nor do they actually study archaeology in order to understand evolution.

In short, we sit them down and tell them what to believe and expect them to obey. This isn't teaching. This is indoctrination. If we're going to be teaching students we should be able to show them why it is the way that it is.

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I'm fine with that and would like to amend the bill.

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Personally I don't think Creationism belongs in a science class because it's not a testable scientific theory.

[Wisconsin+17]

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Take it to the other thread, please.

And again, sorry for not being here earlier. I'd like to discuss the bill for a bit and then we can have a vote on it.

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School curricula is actually not protected by the first amendment. Schools are permitted to set a course for teachers to follow and to fire teachers for not following a curricula. Schools ban all kinds of topics that are considered to be inappropriate for their classroom setting.

You're right though, to ban evolution from all universities and school would be unconstitutional. But pushing it to college level biology classes would not fall afoul of the first amendment.

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I think we can have a very good high school biology curricula without it. Evolution is never the core part of a high school biology curricula. Anatomy, however, is. Learning about all the parts of the bodies and the systems within the body and how they all function together is very useful knowledge for quite a few careers, especially within human kinetics and the medical sciences.

If you're not studying archaeology, how do you understand evolution?

[Wisconsin+17]

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You could teach the speed of light in a high school environment. We did the Michelson/Morely experiment.

We were able to show within the limits of our equipment that there was no deviation.

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Seeing as history teaches about reliable sources, there are no issues with using primary sources in historical research in our history classes. Now, granted, we didn't use many (as we had a lot of ground to cover), but we did use a few. We learned about why primary sources are always preferred to secondary sources and how any historian worth his salt is going to start from the archives and work out there rather than the opposite.

Start with the evidence that you do have, and keep an open mind to reading what your source actually does say.

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I'm enjoying the discussion, actually.

Just wish you had better arguments...

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And I'm being thoroughly rebutted here..

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As an educator, the question becomes, "what should our children be learning in biology class?"

Anatomy and physiology is a very broad, detailed and extensive class. It would also benefit students to spend more time on it, particularly those interested in pursuing a field in medical sciences.

If we take evolution out of the curriculum we can put more time in here. It's not about taking things away but using time effectively.

[Wisconsin+17]

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What, you don't like atheists?

Atheists are our friends.

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Who's trolling?

Sheesh, Cuber. You're paranoid. Here I put out a bill that explicitly says "Atheists are our friends", and you call it trolling.

Couldn't I just be expressing that yes, I believe Atheists to be my friends??

[Wisconsin+17]

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The problem is we don't have the facts as to how we got to now. We have theories, we have conjectures. But we also have some quite broad gaps. There are quite a few sections of the theory that we simply don't have an concrete evidence to prove that these things happened in this way.

We also don't even know the full structure of human evolution, let alone the evolution of other species. How do all the pieces fit together? We don't know. We make the hypothesis that there was a straight line from A to B to C, but again - we cannot prove that this is the path that things took.

It used to be that every dig was it's own species. Don't believe me? Look it up. We had a 'man' for every dig. It suggests to me that what we don't know about what actually happened with evolution is greater than the knowledge we do have.

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Who is arguing for creationism to be taught in schools? It's not a scientific theory and does not belong in a biology class.

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Again, there is very little in biology that requires the acceptance of the theory of evolution in order to understand. Much of the conjecture that certain features of our anatomy can be explained in this fashion have been quite laughably wrong. The problem is we don't have the evidence to support these conjectures, whereas we do have pretty good understanding of anatomy and physiology, how the body actually works. 

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Does evolution make testable predictions? Using math, I can make all sorts of predictions and have them be exactly correct.

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Diptheriadan, what would you conclude are the core concepts behind evolution that must be taught in a biology class?

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Then it's not a scientific theory. Empirical theories are required to be falsifiable, and they must make testable predictions. Evolution does neither.