One would think that more than most subjects our children are learning in school, the physical sciences would be immune from the pressures of outside interest groups intent on imposing cultural relativism and multicultural “sensitivity” on the curricula. After all, unlike history or literature, science relies on empiricism and objective observation to resolve the mysteries of the universe. And the kind of interference associated with the multiculturalists would seem to be irrelevant when it comes to learning about universal laws like gravity or thermodynamics.
I am very sorry to disappoint you:
Several centuries ago, some “very light-skinned” people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After “many years under the tropical sun,” this light-skinned population became “dark-skinned,” says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of Pearson Education.“Downright bizarre,” says Nina Jablonski, who holds the Irvine chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. Jablonski, an expert in the evolution of skin color, says it takes at least 15,000 years for skin color to evolve from black to white or vice versa. That sure is “many years.” The suggestion that skin color can change in a few generations has no basis in science.
Pearson Education spokesperson Wendy Spiegel admits the error in describing the evolution of skin color, but says the teacher’s manual explains the phenomenon correctly. Just why teachers are given accurate information while students are misled remains unclear.
An isolated example? Hardly. And if it were only the moonbat left, it would be easy to dismiss as one more example of political correctness run rampant. Unfortunately, Christian idiotarians want to get in the act too:
A six-day courtroom-style debate opened on Thursday in Kansas over what children should be taught in schools about the origin of life—was it natural evolution or did God create the world?The hearings, complete with opposing attorneys and a long list of witnesses, were arranged amid efforts by some Christian groups in Kansas and nationally to reverse the domination of evolutionary theory in the nation’s schools.
William Harris, a medical researcher and co-founder of a Kansas group called the Intelligent Design Network, posed the core question about life’s beginnings before mapping out why he and other Christians want changes in school curriculum.
School science classes are teaching children that life evolved naturally and randomly, Harris said, arguing that this was in conflict with Biblical teachings that God created life
What is going on here? While the goals of the moonbats and idiotarians are different, the motivations behind the meddling in science curricula are similar; to bend science to fit a specific worldview. While it’s pretty easy to make fun of “monkey trials” and attempts to equate tribal shamans with medical doctors, the sad fact is that by fiddling with the way science is taught, our children are the ones who suffer the consequences.
And those consequences could be devastating to both the country and the schoolchildren. When our kids grow up they must compete in a world where more than any other time in history, science will play a large part in the world’s economy:
In a field long dominated by the United States (with more than 1,300 U.S. biotech firms, compared with about 700 in all of Europe), the global competition is increasingly intense.Britain, of course, was first out of the gate in starting its own biotech industry back in the mid-1980s when the outbreak of brain rotting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a form of bovine spongiform encephalopathies (BSE, or “mad cow disease”), first gathered public attention. 3 Britain now has 560 biotech companies. Of 70 or so publicly traded biotech concerns in Europe, half are British. This includes the grandfather of British biotech firms, Celtech, which pioneered drugs that exploit the body’s own antibodies to combat disease, and who posted a profit this year for the first time. Britain has approved its first three biotech products this year: a new anesthetic and treatments for migraines and Alzheimer’s disease.
The Netherlands-based firm Qiagen is the leading manufacturer of products for purifying genetic material such as proteins and nucleic acids; its products are now being used in most labs around the world.
The Swedish firm Prosequencing has become a technological leader in making systems for automated DNA sequence analysis, which is essential for mining the rich vein of data in the human genome.
It’s clear that biotechnology is a growth industry whose products promise to change our world in ways that are unfathomable to us today. The question is are our children going to run those bio tech factories? Or are they going to be sweeping the floors of factories owned by the Brits or Swedes?
It doesn’t help when pressure groups try and influence textbook publishers to put out stuff like this:
Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin’s fifth-grade textbooks won’t get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn’t mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill’s Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren’t named.
No Einstein? The man whose theories revolutionized the world isn’t even mentioned? And the three men – Waston, Crick and Wilkins – who unlocked the secrets of the structure of DNA, the biological basis for all life on earth are similarly ignored?
This kind of selective cultural memory is eerily reminiscent of tactics used by the Nazis when they purged their physical sciences of the names and even the achievements of Jewish scientists creating what they called “German” Physics and “German” Biology.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Hans Bethe believed that this kind of nonsense set the German atomic bomb program back significantly. He argued that when you throw out the theories of Einstein, Neils Bohr and others based solely on the fact that they were Jewish, there was no way the complexities involved in constructing an atomic bomb would be uncovered.
So there are extraordinary dangers when science education is subverted to serve some social engineering scheme. Not only does it do an injustice to history, it also poses a danger to the way that textbooks are written:
A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001 found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85 percent of the students in the country. One
misstates Newton’s first law of motion. Another says humans can’t hear elephants. Another confuses “gravity” with “gravitational acceleration.” Another shows the equator running through the United States. Individual scientists draft segments of these books, but reviewing the final product is sometimes left to multicultural committees who have no expertise in science.“Thousands of teachers are saddled with error-filled physical science textbooks,” wrote John Hubisz, a physics professor at North Carolina State University at Raleigh and the author of the report. “Political correctness is often more important than scientific accuracy. Middle-school text publishers now employ more people to censor books than they do to check facts.”
United States students are currently ranked 19th out of 21 leading industrialized countries when it comes to science. With attacks on objective scientific education by both the left and the right, the question must be asked: Why can’t Johnny dream? More than any other subject, science opens our minds to the staggering possibilities for acquiring knowledge about both the biggest and the smallest parts of our universe. And if that knowledge is dependent on being taught in such a way as to take into account the cultural sensitivities of students rather than the objective truths discovered through the ages, then Johnny will be left behind by those who don’t pay any attention to such nonsense.
Cross Posted at Blogger News Network
Lean Left blogs the Kansas Idiotarians and makes a plaintive cry for sanity:
This is not about science – it is about using science classes to indoctrinate children in one particular version of religion. Nothing more. That needs to be said. loudly and often.
Agreed. But will the left make equally loud noises about about the multiculturalists and their fanatic attempts to destroy science education by making it more important to take into account a student’s cultural background than get the facts right?
10:31 am
Hey, Superhawk –
I agree that science shouldn’t be used for indoctrination. However, I think you glossed over some of the difficulties “Christian idiotarians” have with today’s “science” as taught in schools. Quite probably, I am assuming, you did this because it wasn’t the main focus of your post.
As a “Christian idiotarian” myself (well, to a certain extent), science should be taught according to reality, which includes discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of theories. The ID movement, while certainly having problems of its own, brings challenges to the near-monolithic evolution caucus which are usually dismissed flippantly.
Now, for me, in a perfect world, everyone would believe in the Bible and be saved. As a Christian, that’s pretty natural. However, I live here in reality, and a perfect world won’t happen here on this earth. So what would make me absolutely ecstatic? Something like:
“The theory of Evolution goes like this… Scientists who support this theory give a) b) c) d) as evidence. Here are some strengths of this theory, and here are some weaknesses that opponants cite. The theory of Intelligent Design says this… Scintists who support this theory give a) b) c) d) as evidence. Here are the strengths of this theory, and here are weaknesses discussed by the theory’s opponants. Some well-known scientists on each side are/their qualifications and published, peer-reviewed articles are…. Here are several deceptions that each side has used to promote their theory, and here are scientists who have worked hard to keep their “side” honest.”
Etc., etc., etc.
I admit, I’m em a Scientist. But I have been exposed to points on both sides which make me long for a dispassionate discussion of the pros and cons of both sides, without descending into the rhetorical extremes. Is that so wrong? And, I think that most of the “mainstream” Christian idiotarians would be happy with that, too.
Anyway. I don’t mean to rant at you – you have always been fair and willing to encourage civil discussion. It’s just a very sore spot for many right now. I hope that I didn’t step on any toes. (Shutting up, now….)
10:59 am
First of all…for someone as gorgeous and intelligent as you, you can come and rant against me anytime!
Second, I have to take issue with a few of your points.
1. There has been no serious peer review of any article or theory published by an ID scientist. Not one article in any recognized, respected scientific journal. The reason is simple:
There’s no way to evaluate a theory that posits the notion that ID and ID ONLY is responsible for evolutionary changes. There’s just no way to evaluate evidence based on faith.
Having said that, a survey I saw showed that something like 75% of biologists who support evolutionary theory believe in God. They may believe in ID as a matter of FAITH…but evolution as a matter of science.
There’s no need to teach ID in schools any more than it’s necessary to teach that the Steady State theory instead of the Big Bang is responsible for the birth of the Cosmos.
I’ve had this argument with Cao and her dad and have stopped trying to explain because there’s just no way you can “prove” that a supreme being is behind anything…the reason is there are alternative explanations for everything the Id’ers believe. And theories with alternative explanations based on faith are as useless as the Hindu belief that the world is flat and rests on the backs of elephants.
(Also shutting up before ‘cat’s claws make an appearance!)
10:16 pm
“Having said that, a survey I saw showed that something like 75% of biologists who support evolutionary theory believe in God. They may believe in ID as a matter of FAITH…but evolution as a matter of science.”
As a Christian and a geologist (BS, MS) (I consider myself to be an Old Earth Creationist), I will cast my lot with the biologists you cited. There is ample evidence of evolution in the fossil record, but evolution by itself seems to be unable to answer the question “How did it start?” (or at least in my mind).
Whatever was first, whether it be single-celled plants, photosynthetic cyanobacteria or something else, where did the energy come from to drive respiration/photosynthesis? How did the ability to convert inorganic molecules into living, growing biomass happen by accident?
When you consider that, among “higher” creatures and plants, one half of the genetic material comes from the male and one half from the female, for the purpose of “stirring the gene pool”, how did that happen by accident?
Please don’t lump me with the “Young Earth” Creationists.
As for the supporters of evolution, they shouldn’t have boycotted the hearings. Regardless of what you believe, if you believe strongly enough, you should be able to withstand a few questions or challenges. Just because some want to raise some questions about evolution, that doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is ready to be tossed, or at least it won’t be tossed if some sensible people are involved.
I blogged on the subject of the “three sides to this argument” on April 12, 2005.
We are not going back to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing of either side.
3:32 pm
1. There has been no serious peer review of any article or theory published by an ID scientist. Not one article in any recognized, respected scientific journal. The reason is simple:
There’s no way to evaluate a theory that posits the notion that ID and ID ONLY is responsible for evolutionary changes. There’s just no way to evaluate evidence based on faith.
In a few seconds of Googling, I found this about ID peer review.
Also, if I understand it correctly, ID doesn’t definitively state that there is a supreme being, so your statement about “evidence based on faith” is incorrect. Among other things, ID posits that the probabilities of morphological changes exceed the observed time frame of their appearance. The evidence is the study of these probabilities; mathematics is not faith.
Stephen Jay Gould said himself that this was a proper way to evaluate neo-Darwinism, though he was too weak in mathematics to defend it well.
When the probabilities for an event exceed the limits of random occurrence, the only other force we have observed as causing such an event is an entity with intelligence.
There may be a third sort of force or agent, but we have not observed it.
4:32 pm
Sue:
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
As for peer reviewed ID theories, well…if you can show me an article in
“Nature” or some other recognized journal and not whatever standards used by Cambridge Press to publish the book you linked to, I’ll gladly change that statement.
And I’m afraid your argument that ID doesn’t necessarily mention God so it’s not faith but scientific inquiry doesn’t fly very far. Who or what is the “I” in Intelligent Design but a Supreme Being? Simply not mentioning God isn’t good enough.
Now your Gould quote is interesting and provacative…but I think Stephen was trying to say there’s just so much we don’t know about origins yet that anything is possible.
I might add that a similar debate occurred Rutherford first began to unlock the secrets of atomic structure. At that time, we didn’t know about the existence of neutrons so it was difficult to extend the atomic model beyond hydrogen and helium. Once our knowledge increased, the theory was proven all over again.
That’s part of the attraction of evolution as a theory. So much of what we learn lines up and verifies that theory that the bits and pieces we can’t yet give a home within the theory are open to differing interpretations, one of which are evolutionary processes currently unknown to us.
My own belief is that we should look to the micro-biologists for the next breakthroughs in evolutionary science. Only by examining the very small will we be able to decipher the very big changes that happen to species.
10:29 pm
I lied. Sorry, my bad. It was Richard Dawkins who said in The Blind Watchmaker:
That’s what I get for typing stuff from memory.
And I’m afraid your argument that ID doesn’t necessarily mention God so it’s not faith but scientific inquiry doesn’t fly very far. Who or what is the “I” in Intelligent Design but a Supreme Being? Simply not mentioning God isn’t good enough.
Why does there need to be a “who”? It’s possible that we simply do not fully understand the true nature of what we call intelligence.
There are many instances of “organic” systems, such as lassiez-faire capitalism, that are formed from intelligent component entities working together in an uncentralized, undirected fashion, but with simple rules that were in and of themselves designed to benefit the system as a whole.
Even entities at the sub-atomic level seem to “decide” things.
So there’s not necessarily a big bearded guy in the sky who does everything. Like Spinoza thought, it may be that the sky itself is smart and does it all.
8:10 am
As for peer reviewed ID theories, well…if you can show me an article in
“Nature” or some other recognized journal and not whatever standards used by Cambridge Press to publish the book you linked to, I’ll gladly change that statement.
From a link on the page I linked to originally:
Like I said earlier, about 60 seconds of Googling. I’m sure better stuff could be found if one spent more time on it.
Here’s a nice little FAQ entry from an ID advocacy website that hits on most of the arguments you’ve used against ID. Once again, a click from the first page of a Google search.
Please don’t let prejudices get in the way of learning. Things like a heliocentric solar system and a cure for common stomach ulcers go undiscovered if we allow that to happen.
12:44 pm
Unfortunately the idiocy is not limited to this side of the pond. Check out the new “Science Lite” guidelines in the UK. Granted, that article doesn’t specifically mention multiculturalism, but give them time. If it’s soon to become more important for UK kids to know how they feel about science than what they know about it, the multicultural aspect will creep in for sure.
1:03 pm
The dumbing down of science
The RightWingNuthouse has a lovely round-up of links relating to the dumbing down of science education in the name of multiculturalism and fundamentalism: What is going on here? While the goals of the moonbats and idiotarians are different, the motivat…
6:16 pm
Also, SH, in addition to some of the thoughtful comments above (sorry – still getting the houses in order for the move grf!), I might also suggest Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe.
And I’m not sure Nature is a peer-reviewed journal? I don’t read it, but is it similar to something like the Journal of the American Medical Association? I’m assuming that we have the same definition of a peer-reviewed journal.
Secondly, my whole point was that the whole issue has been clouded by an unwillingness to admit to mistakes, frauds, and poor evidence. There is so much dogmatic ideology running rampant, that neither side is willing or able to hear what the other side is saying.
Finally (and I suppose this is where you and I go in opposite directions), I can’t see how you get solar systems and people and animals and oceand and literature and air and physics and atoms etc., etc., without some sort of Original Cause, which must be intelligent (otherwise where do order and intelligence come from? Nothing plus nothing times nothing equals…. nothing) and therefore must also….
No. I’ll stop there. I’m not going to dive into the endless circle and insult my friend and his courtesy in permitting me to comment here.
So. We’ll have to agree to disagree, and remain friends, and perhaps help each other sharpen up our respective arguments LOL
And I would never dream of sharpening my claws in your house. That would be rude. Unless, of course, there are some moonbat trolls hanging around…? [peering into the corners….]
1:27 pm
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