Does your local schoolboard look like this?
(I know — it’s slandering the other primates to compare them to creationists.)
Look familiar?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Does your local schoolboard look like this?
(I know — it’s slandering the other primates to compare them to creationists.)
Please bear with me a moment – I’ve only been reading/lurking for a few weeks and haven’t seen this idea mentioned before. Certainly there’s a good reason why this shouldn’t be done but it struck me as funny anyway.
Let them teach ‘the other theories’. But insist they teach them all. It might take more than a year to get through one lecture but hey. Teach every cockamamie story: pink unicorn did it, bearded sky fairy did it, FSM did it, flocks of purple-winged one-eyed three-legged flying donkeys did it, et al. If they want to ‘teach the controversy’ then give them more controversies than they ever imagined. Start at the beginning of human history – go through shamans, witch doctors, ancient cults, ancient religions, modern cults, modern crackpots, modern religions, then saving the best for last: ID proponents.
P.S. The purple-winged three-legged flying donkey thing was just a joke – there is no actual mention of them in any religious writings and no intact fossil remains have been located. Yet.
;)
LOL@ “devolve”, as though evolution was progressive, or had a necessary “direction”…Humans evolving into apelike creatures would still be evolution, since evolution is just change, in whatever “direction”
Is that the Texas SBOE?
WRMartin:
When my county toyed with “teaching the controversy” my rather public response was “bring it on. I’ll send ’em home crying.” If they had made the rantings of cdesign proponentsists part of the curriculum, I would have given them all of the respect they deserve. IOW, I would have analyzed the evidence and pointed out the logical and factual problems with the Goddidit hypothesis.
The problem is, most high school biology teachers aren’t really very well equipped to do that. Some are creationists, some don’t really understand the philosophical and scientific issues, and many if not most would just skip it entirely.
Bear in mind, I had a chemistry teacher next door to me who told his students that a photon is an electron that gives off light; that they were working on an electric car that used hydrogen fuel cells, and then used the electricity to hydrolyze the water back to hydrogen (no, really. I couldn’t convince him that a perpetual motion machine can’t work!); that a theory is something you think is true, but a law is something you know is true……
I had the same reaction as PeteK #2 — oh no, not another Great Chain of Being view of evolution!
Yes, the cartoon’s amusing, makes an excellent point, and isn’t meant to be taken seriously or — good grief — literally, but years of following the creation-evolution debate is starting to make me twitch funny, and spin around when I walk.
In some places, that would get you fired, and quickly at that. The toll so far is 2 university professors fired or forced out, 1 under the gun, and 1 Texas State Education Association employees (Comer).
At the secondary school level nobody is keeping track. There are many stories of science teachers who just got tired of the hassles or saw the firing squad coming and quit.
I’m constantly reading federal and state reports about a lack of science and math teachers and how many of those didn’t even have a minor in the subject they are supposed to teach. OTOH, the school boards and the creos make it so miserable for science teachers that many or most would rather teach something else somewhere else.
HOW DARE YOU! I am so!! OFFENDED! WAAAAH! I HAVE been DISCRIMINATED AGAINST alonNG WITH all THE other members OF the ONE true CHURCH OF purple-winged three-legged flying donkey thing-ians!! WAAAHHHHH WAAAAAHHHH. HOW INTOLERANT!!!! WAAAAAA WAAAAAA. etc. ad nauseum (Was that enough random capitalization?)
Alan WCan,
A little too literate but very close. An excellent try.
Alan WCan – congratulations on your excellent simulation. I agree with Natasha that you might need to reverse-tweak the literacy a bit.
With regard to #1:
Start at the beginning of human history – go through shamans, witch doctors
Perhaps we can cut the shamans and witch doctors a little slack. At least they have some actual chemistry (the physical science kind) going for them in some of their rituals.
I know — it’s slandering the other primates to compare them to creationists.
Also what’s with the lamarkian style evolution? Individuals don’t evolve (or devolve), populations do.
At Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the biology department required secondary education majors to take a course in evolution and to maintain a higher minimum average grade point in science courses than we required of premeds. I taught the evolution course a number of times and always spent a couple of lectures on creationism (ID wasn’t around at the time.) When I retired I donated a big box of creationist literature to the department, which I hope is being put to good use.
Alas, it’s the Sunshine State(tm).
If I were a biology teacher, pressured to “teach the controversy,” I’d say, “Sure!” and spend the semester teaching evolution, squeezing in IDiocy on the Friday before semester break.
That’s more time than it deserves, true, but, hey.
— CV
We, the non-human primates,have sent
our messenger,astrolieber to warn you
to remove the offensive cartoon. We
have been compared to someone so below us !
We intend to sue
Damn, I was educated in Florida, and it was top-notch, but I lived in a wealthy district full of transplanted Yankees. I was actually given a three week chapter in my seventh-grade Language Arts class on spotting logical fallacies. Essentially, all of us learned that everyone involved in marketing is a lying bag of crap—before those in marketing attack me, that is the only logical conclusion one can draw after examining the whole of the marketing world; that is very off topic.
Florida used to have at least a few good districts, but one-by-one, politicians (Frank Brogan, ex-leiutenant governor, became the head of my school district, and quickly ran it into the ground) and crazy fuckwits (seemingly every other school district) gained acceptance, and in doing so, are now destroying the future of every child in the state.
Aaaanyway. What I actually wanted to point out is that if I were a teacher being presured to teach “the controversy”, I would gladly say that I would, provided I had a month to prepare. I would spend that month doing nothing except teaching basic logic and argument to my students. If I was half as good a teacher as I assume that I would be, the fact that my students had not had the evoloution force-fed to them would make no difference (remember, in most districts teaching evoloution means teaching the meanings of a few terms, and is not a very good overview of the importance or centrality of the fact of evoloution). Given a good debate, teen-agers with a nose for the whiff of odiferous fallacy would simply laugh at ID, or DC, or Marvel, or stupididioticshitethatijustmadeupbecauseimathirtyyearoldvirgin.
They would also, hopefully, take me to task for my above rank generalization.
Well, strictly speaking it **is** a population, the population of creationists, that is evolving into howling morons every time the word is brought up, so… lol
WRMartin: I suspect that if you really tried to do that you’d be teaching nothing else.
I believe this is insensitive and condescending. Our colorful, airborne savior is to great to be confined to written word. To do so would cheapen him. (Yes it is a him. Actually, after his first marriage ended, he has remarried and the Pink Unicorn is now the Step-Mother of all creation).
You only say the things you do because you are confused. It is easy to be afraid of such a level of True Love that the Winged Messiah has for you. But you need not be afraid. Just accept his love and you will have eternal life in the great Back Yard in the Sky, where there is cotton candy, and a clown, and birthday cake, and you can ride on his Holy Purpleness, and feed him a carrot.
Oh, and can you send us your money. He has kind of hit a rough spot and needs some help. You can send it to us. We’ll be sure he gets it. Oh, and he’ll …uh… Bless You with…..uh, Super High-Speed Broadband Access for all of eternity. Promise!!