Oklahoma: Where people co-existed with dinosaurs

[DemPGH]

Madness. The entire enterprise of science is built upon people challenging each other's work and each other's theories. That's what scientists do. If something makes it into a high school text book, it's on solid ground.

These people will stop at nothing; they've been beaten back before, they'll be beaten back again.

No teacher would flunk a well-reasoned paper that contrasts evolution and creationism and comes out in favor of the latter, anyway.

Depends upon the class. And whether or not you can even make a "well-reasoned" argument for creationism against evolution. If it's a class or a field where people just get to make up stuff, maybe, but if it's science where things are based on evidence, I have to disagree.

[DemPGH]

But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.

Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."

But this is only the subject of science. What about Math and English? Can a student have the freedom to write that Abraham Lincoln discovered electricity and invented the telephone while defeating Hitler? And the freedom to write in their tests that 1 + 1 = fish?

That's precisely it. If you're a teacher or a professor, don't you assess work? Isn't that a big part of your job? Last time I checked. Now you can get away with this sort of thing in Creative Writing, which is fun: "Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or whatever. But outside of that, it doesn't fly.

If a person goes to Biology and rejects the founding principles of the subject in favor of whatever strikes their fancy, that doesn't pass. Sorry. Try again.

Besides, I don't remember writing essays in any high school science - we ran rudimentary experiments and learned lots and lots of material through memorization and application.

[DemPGH]

Madness. The entire enterprise of science is built upon people challenging each other's work and each other's theories. That's what scientists do. If something makes it into a high school text book, it's on solid ground.

These people will stop at nothing; they've been beaten back before, they'll be beaten back again.

One small quibble: Making it into a textbook does not mean it is on solid ground. My high school physics textbook taught string theory with the same confidence my biology book taught evolution even though string theory is still a contentious issue. Another example is what you read in some 1930's biology textbooks about differences between races.

Making it into the school books is no guarantor of truth.

Yes, you're right with that last remark, and let me just say that pbrower's explanations are really stellar. Here's what I'll say / add in response:

What you mentioned are singular issues that are controversial or erroneous within science. Sooner or later people work those out or correct them altogether. This joke of a piece of legislation is much broader than that. What the sponsor wants is to get high school students from a position of ignorance to claim that the entire founding framework of Biology (and by extension other subjects) is wrong, to discard the scientific method in favor of the "privately enlightened conscience." That's both dangerous and bogus.

He does not realize or appreciate how well the scientific method works. It weeds out errors, and only in science do you get that. In politics, in religion, in business, in peoples' personal lives you often see such bad effort to weed out errors. You just see people keeping on making the same mistakes and subscribing to the same ideas and the same choices for the sake of continuity, pride, and tradition. It's really astounding.   

[DemPGH]

But that could soon change for kids in Oklahoma: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories such as biological evolution and anthropogenic (human-driven) climate change.

Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."

But this is only the subject of science. What about Math and English? Can a student have the freedom to write that Abraham Lincoln discovered electricity and invented the telephone while defeating Hitler? And the freedom to write in their tests that 1 + 1 = fish?

That's precisely it. If you're a teacher or a professor, don't you assess work? Isn't that a big part of your job? Last time I checked. Now you can get away with this sort of thing in Creative Writing, which is fun: "Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or whatever. But outside of that, it doesn't fly.

If a person goes to Biology and rejects the founding principles of the subject in favor of whatever strikes their fancy, that doesn't pass. Sorry. Try again.

Besides, I don't remember writing essays in any high school science - we ran rudimentary experiments and learned lots and lots of material through memorization and application.

presumably, if they're learning about evolution, they're not conducting experiments.

Artificial selection and crossing of plants, which could go on and on and would be easy and would yield results relatively quickly, or test how algae responds to an altered environment, or investigate / hypothesize plant distribution and diversity in a given area. And for a more learned level, like college, there are literally tons of evolutionary experiments to be done. They did a 40-year experiment in Russia, I believe, where they brought in wild silver foxes, domesticated the offspring completely, and noticed really substantial physical changes from behavior to appearance in only a few generations. Or, one can reproduce the early atmosphere of Earth in a lab, throw in ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water, then generate lightning with electricity, and see if amino acids form. Incidentally, they do, about half of them almost immediately, and a percentage of the carbon will turn to various organic compounds very quickly. Change the composition of the atmosphere and run the experiment again.  Or, test various solutions to see if they will produce organic compounds or amino acids.