Soup line. (I don't know whether it's primordial).
Posted on 06/07/2006 6:46:41 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Kansas Citizens for Science is urging local school districts not to use the set of state science standards adopted by the Kansas board of education in 2005.
In a letter to the superintendents of the 300 or so local school districts in the state, KCFS's president Jack Krebs warned that the board "changed the definition of science in order to include supernatural causes as acceptable scientific explanations, inserted numerous statements into the biology standards that have been rejected by mainstream science and are only found in Intelligent Design creationist literature, and cast unwarranted doubt upon the methodology and validity of science," and noted that the standards have been condemned by numerous scientific and educational organizations -- including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Teachers Association, and the Kansas Association of Teachers of Science.
Noting that the members of the board who voted to adopt the standards, as well as their appointees and spokespeople, have "all made clear their motivations for these changes," in part by rejecting "the religious beliefs of those Christians who accept the mainstream theory of evolution, calling them 'confused' and 'illogical' for believing that Christianity and evolution are compatible," Krebs warns that the board's version of the standards "are so flawed that they may be unconstitutional, and if endorsed by a local school district could lead to serious legal difficulties."
The solution, he suggests, is for local school districts either to retain their old standards, based on the 2001 state science standards, or to adopt the Science Standards Writing Committee's Recommended Standards, the completed product of the writing committee originally empowered by the board to revise the 2001 standards.
A Harris News Service story published in the Hutchinson News (June 6, 2006) about KCFS's letter noted that the Manhattan-Ogden school district (USD 383), acting on a proposal from faculty and staff at Kansas State University, was the first local school district in Kansas to reject the board's version of the standards, in February 2006. USD 383 board president Randy Martin told the Hutchinson News, "we concluded that the state's science standards before the recent change were in the best interest of our students."
While taking no position on the science standards as such, the superintendents of the Chanute and Hutchinson school districts both indicated that their districts are not constrained to follow the state's guidelines, with Hutchinson's superintendent saying, "good science teachers are going to teach what they believe children ought to learn" regardless of what the state says.
Gentle reminder: Now hear this: No personal attacks (title of thread posted 15 March 2006 by Jim Robinson).
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In some ways I wish the fundamentalists on the board had stuck with screwing with the sex ed classes (no pun intended) and left science alone. But that wouldn't have fit their agenda I guess.
What is it about the life of the mind, that MUST exclude
any type of creator from scientific inquiry about origins?
Isn't that type of thinking biased also?
Isn't it considered scientific when one proposes that
newly discovered "arrowheads" or "cave writings", or
sequential electronic patterns is due to the work of
an intelligent "creator" of those phenomena? (i.e. in
the above cases, native habitants of the land, cave dwellers,
or "space" aliens.)
Why would anyone be surprised if the notion that a very
complicated physio-bio-chemical system was created, and
is researched and used a foundation for inquiry?
Why does everyone get excited about the discovery of "nano"
chemistry, and it's potential when that has been going on
for as long as we know in the tiniest of (can I say it?)...
creatures? OH, my goodness, I've said a word that can
implicate my biased viewpoint...creatures....oh, let me change
that...organism...yeah that's better. Now, I'm scientific.
What is it about the need for a creator that makes people entitled to misrepresent the evidence for mechanisms in nature? People want to force false statements into science classes in Kansas.
... the board "changed the definition of science in order to include supernatural causes as acceptable scientific explanations, inserted numerous statements into the biology standards that have been rejected by mainstream science and are only found in Intelligent Design creationist literature, and cast unwarranted doubt upon the methodology and validity of science..."Tolerance of other people's beliefs is one thing, but science goes in science class. Cult literature misstatements about science do not.
How do you prove or disprove the existence of a creator?
Can you design a testable hypothesis to show there is or is not a creator?
Can you design a testable hypothesis to show there is or is not a primordial soup?
<< Can you design a testable hypothesis to show there is or is not a primordial soup? >>
Maybe if we can detect a primordial soup line?
Nothing. But should the answer to why roses are read only be allowed to be, "To represent the blood of Christ shed on the cross?" This was the answer in the middle ages.
Should all English classes require the Bible as the book that can be read?
Should general science allow only the the book of Genesis as textbook?
Should political science only allow the Gospels to be read?
Should accounting and finance be limited to economies where usury is outlawed?
Should social studies allow only the New Testament as a text?
Should all discussions of Christ's divinity include the Jehovah Witness' interpretation?
Should the Da Vinci Code be the required alternative text in all Sunday schools?
Biology studies should be about biology. If you want to have religious instruction to inform the kids, have religion classes. Then we can spend all of our time arguing about what should be included in that class. ;)
There are scientists who are working on that. Here and here and here are some articles you might be interested in about that.
Thanks for the ping!
"There is no bias in excluding non-scientific claims from scientific discussion."
Well, technically there is. There is a bias toward including only those things which can be examined scientifically. Of course, that's a good thing.
Not all bias is bad.
Micro-soup is a fact. Macro-soup is a farce.
Soup line. (I don't know whether it's primordial).
Do you suppose the folks in the religious forum have to issue similar "disclaimers" about a religious thread "devolving" into a science debate? What if a group of renegade FReeper science zealots started trolling over there? Would the thread be banished to this forum, or some smokey back room?
And what if oranges were purple?
That kind of behavior flows in one direction. They come here to tell us how wrong we are. We don't go there to criticize them.
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