Posted on 02/28/2006 4:05:45 AM PST by PatrickHenry
House lawmakers scuttled a bill that would have required public school students to be told that evolution is not empirically proven - the latest setback for critics of evolution.
The bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars, had said it was time to rein in teachers who were teaching that man descended from apes and rattling the faith of students. The Senate earlier passed the measure 16-12.
But the bill failed in the House on a 28-46 vote Monday. The bill would have required teachers to tell students that evolution is not a fact and the state doesn't endorse the theory.
Rep. Scott Wyatt, a Republican, said he feared passing the bill would force the state to then address hundreds of other scientific theories - "from Quantum physics to Freud" - in the same manner.
"I would leave you with two questions," Wyatt said. "If we decide to weigh in on this part, are we going to begin weighing in on all the others and are we the correct body to do that?"
Buttars said he didn't believe the defeat means that most House members think Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.
"I don't believe that anybody in there really wants their kids to be taught that their great-grandfather was an ape," Buttars said.
The vote represents the latest loss for critics of evolution. In December, a federal judge barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes.
Also last year, a federal judge ordered the school system in suburban Atlanta's Cobb County to remove from biology textbooks stickers that called evolution a theory, not a fact.
Earlier this year, a rural California school district canceled an elective philosophy course on intelligent design and agreed never to promote the topic in class again.
But critics of evolution got a boost in Kansas in November when the state Board of Education adopted new science teaching standards that treat evolution as a flawed theory, defying the view of science groups.
PCspeak comes to FR; finally!!
Can the revealing of Mormon temple rites be far behind?
Spam alert
Or soon will be!
Yep. All those undergrads are just wasting their time with Drosophila melanogaster in Biology Lab.
"Evolution" is like looking at the outcome of a coin toss and saying, "That coin was predisposed to turn up heads because, look, it did."
The bird has wings because nature killed those previous mutations that did not. Fine. That's a paradigm, a lens through which the results can be viewed.
I didn't say that (although they are, the little mushheads should be training their minds learning calculus, if they can handle it -- most of them can't, BTW, that's why they're in biology).
The point is that they are studying mutation, not evolution. It's amazing that biologists don't know what they don't know and that their paradigm is just economics, with a few words scratched out and others scribbled in the margins.
I suspect we agree about much; my point (not particularly well put) was that ToE is indeed empirical, though some seem to demand that ToE produce direct observation of results which in fact require hundreds of millions of years--which is a demand as unreasonable as demanding an empirical proof of God. Neither demand is appropriate, IMHO. It is clear that some folk find a conflict here; I happen to find none. But I do respect views from scientists and laymen alike that are (1) cogently argued and (2) civilly presented, as indeed yours are.
Time should NOT be the errant element of proving a chemical DNA process of evolution.
If evolution is indeed a innate scientific process, its formula should be definable and demonstrable in everyday experiments.
But -- it's not. Because -- it's bunk.
I'm positive that some people are ionized.
The problem is not so much that evolution is "unproven" but rather that all scientific explanations are "unproven" and evolution is being singled out as though it is somehow unique in that regard.
I am curious. Are you serious in your belief that all who accept evolution are "fools", or are you merely lampooning common creationist talking points by parodying their practice of avoiding factual statements and falling back on irrelevant religious preaching?
"If evolution is indeed a innate scientific process, its formula should be definable and demonstrable in everyday experiments. "
No, as has been told to you before, science does not have to be reduced to a formula. No matter how much you wish it did.
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