Posted on 05/22/2006 8:14:10 AM PDT by RightWingAtheist
A high school science teacher vowed yesterday to continue telling his Inuit students about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, despite complaints from parents in the northern Quebec community of Salluit.
Science teacher Alexandre April was given a written reprimand last month by his principal at Ikusik High School for discussing evolution in class.
Parents in the village 1,860 kilometres north of Montreal complained their children had been told they came from apes.
"I am a biologist. ... This is what I'm passionate about," said April, who teaches Grades 7 and 8. "It interests the students. It gets them asking questions.
"They laugh and they call me 'ape,' but I don't mind. If I stopped, they would lose out."
April, who is leaving the town when his contract runs out at the end of the school year, said the principal first told teachers last fall not to talk about evolution.
Debate over the teaching of evolution in Salluit - a village of 1,150 located along the northern coast of Quebec, between Ungava and Hudson bays - is pitting an increasingly religious Inuit population against a Quebec education system that's becoming more and more secular.
Although April, 32, won't be punished, his reprimand has outraged Quebec's scientific community.
"What he's doing is right and it's best for the kids," said Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. "Science should not be de-emphasized for non-science."
Over the years, controversy over the teaching of evolution has erupted in Pennsylvania, along with U.S. states in the so-called Bible Belt. In November, the Kansas State Board of Education approved science standards that cast doubt on evolution.
But with heightened religious fervour among the Inuit and Cree in northern communities, some observers suggest Canada might have its own Bible North.
Molly Tayara, a member of the Salluit school's volunteer education committee, said she'd tell her four school-age children to walk out of a lesson on Darwin.
"The minister (of education) may have come from apes, but we're Inuit and we've always been human," she told The Gazette in a phone interview.
"Most of us rely on God's word. ... God made Adam and Eve and they weren't animals."
Legally, Inuit schools in Quebec's north must teach evolution, as it's part of the provincial curriculum. After April's story came out this week in the magazine Quebec Science, Education Department officials immediately called the school to ensure the curriculum was followed.
Topics like reproduction and diversity of species are part of Science and Technology, a course for Grades 7 and 8. Darwin's work, based on the premise that humans and other animals have evolved over time, is further covered in Grade 11 biology - an elective course.
"We want the curriculum to be applied. We're just saying the theory of evolution could be taught more delicately to students," said Gaston Pelletier, director of educational services for the Kativik School Board, which serves northern Quebec's 14 Inuit communities. "We have to respect their view."
One is the fall of Rome and the lawlessness that ensued.
There is also the factor of geography. Europe had some pretty rugged terrain that would prevent the quick spread of ANYTHING at a time of traveling by horseback, at best.
People had all they could do just to survive and until technology could provide some support in that area, people were pretty preoccupied with that survival.
The Dark Ages really only comprised about 500 years, which is a significant chunk of time but considering the other factors , is not unreasonable.
After that were the Crusades and the Plague.
I think they had more than enough on their plate to explain why it took so long for progress to be made and it certainly can't all be laid at the feet of Christianity.
That and the worst enemies of Christianity were "Christians". This has always been the case, and will be until the end. False Christs will come in Jesus' name.
There were times in the past when believers were persecuted by others claiming to be Christians in the same ways as Muslims and Hindus sometimes persecute believers today.
Trying to raise hyper-sensitivity to an art form? It's just an analogy apropos to which the nature of the handicap/peculiar belief is extraneous and irrelevant. Stop trying throw up flack.
Plus all those groups are minorities. This country is a representative republic that is supposed to reflect the will of the majority not bend to the demands of the minority. If the parents of the school district wish to have creation taught, they are not breaking the law or engaging in immoral behavior, it shouldn't be an issue.
I see. So if wikkans become a 51% majority in your neck of the woods, it shouldn't be an issue if they want science textbooks to explain, as a basic law of physics, that God arranged the universal constants and symmetries so as to maximize the amount of sustainable creature suffering in the world, because of God's basic evil nature.
...or, than again, maybe you think we should live in a constitutionally limited republic, rather than a democracy where 51% of the population can get together and legally rape&pillage the the other 49%?
No, I don't, any more than I think it's hypocritical to prevent recruiting whores from teaching high school hygiene classes, ...
And what does this have to do with one group of people determining course content for public schools for others and forcing it on them against their will?
If whore mothers want to recruit their daughters as whores, than teaching them standard hygiene classes, in schools they are mandated by law to attend, is subverting the will of the whore mothers by force. The only difference between the whore mother's objection and yours, significant to this argument, is that you don't happen to like her choices, whereas you do happen to like your own.
So omit the evolution part. There's plenty of other material in the biological sciences to fill that gap in with.
By the same token, we could eliminate all mention of galaxies other than our own from the astronomy curriculum, and we could omit Newton's laws from senior year physics, and we could omit plate tectonics from geology. According to biologists, evolutionary theory is a central organizing principle of modern taxonomy, chemistry, structure and function. If you want to drop science, that's a solution, but misteaching it to the young is majorly bogus.
Crops circles to be explained is not *explained*. This evidence is not scientific at all. It's simply one's opinion that makes sense to some.
Whereas, for creation scientists to point to a few fossil gaps and declare, "and then a miracle occured" just oozes with scientific explanation.
It is elitism on the part of any group to think that they know better than others and can make better decision
Right. .... Like when religeous groups insist that their large numbers and morally superior understanding entitles them to substitute bogus science for science scientists believe in, and then shove it down the throats of innocent kids mandated by law to attend school.
What a load of pretentious philosophical malarky. Like those guys who try to claim you have to carefully define every word before you can have an argument. I understand that you'd prefer to dink around in a philosophical rat hole--given your propensity for orotund reasoning. Trying to recruit David Hume to your banner is, by the way, pretty laughable. David Hume wasn't claiming we were stonkered blind, and therefore any idea was as good as any other idea, by the fact that scientific reasoning is fallible. So you can dance with the philosophers til' the cows come home--the fact remains that creation science is a feeble idea in the minds of most scientists, for extremely good reasons (which don't have to pass muster with schools of rigorous formal philosophical schools of thought) having little to do with whether creation scientists are ultimately right or not.
Because mine are vetted by professional cynics, and cross-correlated across numerous scientific disciplines, and related to theses that have been articulated in such a thorough manner as to be published in technical journals in the full expectation that doubters can undertake the proposed tangible experiments and field studies appropriate thereto.
The world crawls along on intuition and half-baked understandings virtually all the time.
I agree. But we are debating which conclusions are true.
You are. I'm debating about the limits of scientist-contradicting balderdash that can be allowed in science textbooks which must be read by children mandated by the state to pay attention to it.
Sure, evolutionary theory as a whole (and in parts) may be useful. But is it correct as a whole? My religious views are useful too. Are you willing to accept these views on the basis of utility?
They are a basis for some sort of utility. They are not a viable basis for scientific utility, for specific reasons, some of which I have enumerated above.
To the skeptic, this may seem like pseudo science and be rejected because it appears that the believer is assuming the conclusion. However, from the believer's view, it is simply an axiomatic assumption no different than any other.
Ah, yes, you have stumbled on one of the many manifestations of the untrustworthiness of inductive reasoning. That is why the philosophically unmajestic, fragmented modern tools of scientific reasoning have been set up--to test the competing hypotheses where the rubber meets the road until it's clear which one carries the most freight at the moment--not which one is proved right or wrong.
You're kind of a rude twit, aren't you?
Many volumes have been written by countless authors, so to sum up epistemology in a few trite expressions is pointless, especially with someone who does not even know what is being referred to and doesn't even care.
I minored in philosophy at UC Berkeley under Michael Scriven, and my senior essay was on the nature of proof and certainty. I think I can probably keep up if you use really small words.
donh: You're kind of a rude twit, aren't you?
Not any more rude than all the evolutionists who say the same sort of thing to creationists whenever they get the chance.
This statement exactly proves my point. That is that just because you think you have what you consider *reputable* sources to back you up you think you are more right than others. Science is frequently wrong about what it discovers and proposes. After all, it's self-correcting and if it was corrected, then what was previously thought to be true, wasn't after all. So what makes this process so reliable? It's done by mere men who have their own vested interests in it.
Science is a great tool for use for the betterment of mankind. It becomes a problem when it becomes an end in itself and not a means to an end. There is so much more to life than science can observe, meausure or explain. Anyone who locks themselves into a world bounded strictly by only *natural* parameters that can be seen, measured and broken down into it's mechanical components, is shortchanging themselves and missing much of what life is really all about. Science cannot explain something like conscience or the appreciation of beauty when one sees a rainbow or stunning sunset.
"philosophy at UC Berkeley under Michael Scriven, and my senior essay was on the nature of proof and certainty"
One essay on Proof and certainty? Okay........that explains a lot. Was it a 10 page essay or a 100 page essay.....that could make a difference...:))
Sure it does.
That is that just because you think you have what you consider *reputable* sources to back you up you think you are more right than others.
Reputable has nothing to do with it, and indicates just how deaf you are to what's so obvious to scientists. Even if I am green slime from jupiter, I can still check by recreating what's published in a properly run scientific journal.
Science is frequently wrong about what it discovers and proposes. After all, it's self-correcting and if it was corrected, then what was previously thought to be true, wasn't after all. So what makes this process so reliable?
It's track record. Warts and all. How many vaccines against childhood diseases have the Popes produced?
It's done by mere men who have their own vested interests in it.
Right. Which is why it's done with so much redundant, cynical, methodical care. Unlike, say, the flawless, selfless and perfect way the Medici Popes conducted church business.
It was a preface to an automatic proof generating and hypothesis-seeking engine that could be genned up to work for any existing formal system of mathematics. What do you think qualifies one to talk about the certainty of proofs? A smart mouth?
This is irrelevant self-preening. The fact is that science is primarily reponsible for producing the fruits of science, and scientists is who we should properly consult about the nature of science. The church no doubt did its part in producing modern music. That does not make it the case that we should consult tone-deaf clerics on the curriculum of music classes.
Wow....who killed what? You spent about 60.00 per word on that post. I have to get my little ole dictionary and translate. :)
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