True…Although it seems to me that of those of make it into political power, the anti-science folks on the right are more prevalent than those on the left. Sure, you may have a few liberal senators like Tom Harkin throwing some funding at NIH’s Office of Alternative Medicine, some of which has apparently gone to some fairly poor science (from what I have read)…But, it seems to be fairly small potatoes by comparison.
There’s also been a real rise recently in antiscience activity on the Right as science has come into agreement on the reality of concerns such as global climate change.
Well, that sounds very noble of you but it begs the question of how one determines truth. The reason we teach science in science classrooms is because we as a society have come to respect science for its ability to provide us with some approximation of “truth”…at least in the sense that it has helped us to understand our world and to use that understanding to develop remarkable technologies (that admittedly find both good and sometimes not so good uses).
If you want to teach “truth” as defined by religion, you can teach it in Sunday School but keep it the hell out of the science classroom. The science classroom is for science and creationism and ID are not science and indeed have not stood the test in the scientific community.
I’ll agree that there are examples of such lefty New Age stereotypes, particularly in my geographical area. They are, however, in the words of Douglas Adams, “Mostly Harmless”. They have certain belief systems, some of which may even overlap with my own. As long as they don’t try to use political muscle to impose their beliefs in the public schools, I will celebrate the diversity and say more power to 'em.
However, can you cite one example, even in California (Santa Cruz or Arcata, perhaps?), where New Agers have tried to push public schools to teach astronomy and astrology equally? Or accredited Medical Schools to teach Crystals and Aromatherapy alongside Human Anatomy? I can find dozens of examples in which right-wingers are trying to force the equal teaching of creationism with evolution, or have already succeeded in doing so.
The correlation may not be 100%, but it’s statistically greater than 0%, and therefore “direct”. I’ll wager that the majority of people whom you consider intelligent have demonstrably good vocabularies, and pronunciation quirks that can be explained by regionalism or specific background (e.g. there’s a US Military pronunciation thread currently on one of the SDMBs). “Jimmy Carter said nukuler, too, so there” <> “no direct correlation”.
The teaching of science has changed a lot since I went to school. Back then the emphasis was on truth, and scientists would readily admit to the theory status of such things as Evolution. It was ok to not know everything about the world. Lately I find proponents of science becoming crusaders for “science,” as if it were a cure-all, know-all mechanism of absolute truth.
They have become holier-than-thou, self-righteous, blind believers in anything that is labeled science. They remind me of the fanatical religious folks that take the opposing side.
Why can’t we just teach truth, and the truth is we don’t know how this world came into being, or how we (mankind) began. What is so terrible about saying “I don’t know.”
If you teach children the truth, they are not as likely to become fanatics of science, religion or anything else, who knows, some day these things may become clearer, but not if we believe we already know everything.
Again Lekatt, gravity and relativity are every bit the theory that evolution is.
Yet things fall, and E continues to equal MC[sup]2[/sup].
The word theory has a very precise meaning in science. Your theory on who killed Colonel Mustard with the candlestick is NOT the same definition of theory used to describe evolution.
A theory is not a guess. It is not an educated guess. It is a hypothesis or group of hypotheses shown to be valid through repeated testing.
Scientists readily acknowledge that science never proves anything beyond ANY doubt – indeed, doubt is science’s very foundation. This does not mean we have no clue how we got here. What it means is that, given totally furshlugginer OVERWHELMING evidence that magical pixies created the world five minutes ago, implanted all of our memories, and fabricated all evidence of a past, scientists will change their theories. However, when you have innumerable mounds of evidence on one side of the argument, to the point where scientists are only working out the details, and pseudoscientific balderdash that relies on logical fallacies, obscure counterexamples (almost all of which are known to be fallacious), and blind dogma to “prove” that ancient folktales present a viable alternative to the theory with a buttload of evidence, I’ll take the scientific theory over an “even-handed discussion of competing theories” any day.
This has already been discussed ad nauseum on the Boards here. I personally know a man with a PhD in Nuclear Engineering, who was senior project manager of two highly successful nuclear power plant projects (non-US), who was also a college professor at one time, who pronounces it “nuke-u-ler”. If Bush is as “dumb” as this man is, we’re all in pretty good hands, I would say.
Invalidating a person’s points because of pronounciation and spelling would mean I shouldn’t pay attention to you, since you said “hasnt” in your OP.
Other than that, I don’t care to comment further in yet another thread on the SDMB where the same characters are allowed to trot out the “conservatives and the Right are anti-science” one-trick pony. I guarantee that for every single dumbass thing a conservative says on science I can trot out an equally dumbass one from a liberal, and one just as bad as the prior two from someone in the radical middle. The point is that Americans - nay, people - in general are in such a huge gap between what is “science” and what is their day-to-day lives, that there really is a multi-caste society developing here, and there seems to have been for some years.
I never said it should invalidate a persons point. Merely that it worried me that someone who couldn’t wielding and exercising that much power over scienitific research and education was troubling. I wouldnt feel qualified to do that job spelling, aside. Anyway that was never meant as a serious criticism just a pot shot.
Your right there are left-wingers who would wrongly interfere with science if they could but none of them have the power to currently do so. I assure you I will be just as offended if Mrs. Clinton’s admintistration proposes to start funding astrology or aromatherapy.
lekatt, I believe that there are approximately seventy-two billion threads on the SDMB and elsewhere discussing the evolution vs creationism thing. It might be a good idea, before you tangent off onto this, to have a read through some of them.
If you can find me one person who holds a PhD in a biological science who doubts the validity of the theory, I’ll listen to any objections to it he may have. As it is, I have to point out that ignorance is not a point of view.
Oh, and on “Noo koo ler”, it has been pointed out so many times, and Bush has enough advisors, that there must be a political reason of some sort he will not change the pronunciation. Be it stubbornness, pride in the “Americans pronounce it differently” syndrome (see “Azores” for more details), or a desire to appeal to the “common man” (which I’m going for, as it seems to be Bush’s MO, and I don’t believe the man is stupid), he hasn’t corrected his pronunciation for some reason.
Is this an important issue in the grand scheme of things? No, but it can provide a sliver of psychological insight.
When I teach evolution, I present the facts (evolution as a historical fact) and the theoretical framework which scientists have constructed to explain it.
That’s all a science teacher should be required to do.
Actually, we have a very good idea about how this world came into being and how mankind began. We teach what our best ideas are and make sure that students also learn to question the status quo. If we teach “I don’t know” we might as well send the kids home and have them work on the farm. We may not know every detail about evolution, but we have a VERY good idea of the general outline.
Teaching the varioius theories about Neanderthals would be a great way to show students how a theory evolves (pardon the pun) over time as more evidence becomes available. Human evolution is one of the most exciting fields of science right now, with new discoveries happening all the time. Add in what we’re learning from molecular biology, and you’ve got the unwinding of one of the greatest detective stories around.
Possibly not in the U.S., this month. However, we certainly have the fine examples of the Alar scare and the diminished funding for the Human Genome Diversity Project that we can lay at the feet of the Left in the U.S. (And, if Rifkin ever gets popular again, we’ll have the same problems that Europe and Asia are suffering regarding genetically engineered and irradiated foods–not that there cannot be scientific arguments opposing them, but the political decisions are generally made separate from the science.)
Why did you put “theory” in scare quotes as you did? Evolution is a theory as much as Relativity is a theory. It is a theory as much as Pasteur’s Germ Theory of Disease is a theory. So why put it in scare quotes when referring to evolution?
Or perhaps that the issue is completely irrelevant to that person’s life. I haven’t made my mind up on the status of superstring theory. It just doesn’t come up as far as I’m concerned.
Can I take the non-selective duplication and degenerative mutation thereupon as a fundamental source of variation upon which selection operates, making selection a secondary force of evolution rather than the primary force side?
There is a growing antiscience and anti-evolution movement among the Left that the press has very CONVENIENTLY ignored, of course. It grudgingly allows for the possibility of evolution among non-human organisms, but when we come to humans, it essentially demands a “special creation” premise in the extent to which humans must never be thought of in “reductionist” or “biological determinative” ways. I have yet to hear somebody claim that DNA is nothing but a “cultural construct” conspiratorially hatched by “DWMs”, but I would not be at all surprised were the idea to become trendy in “serious” social science journals.
We must never forget the amazing ease with which Alan Sokal thoroughly hornswaggled the social science establishment. The kind of thinking he took advantage of seems to still be very heavily entrenched in that establishment.
In other words, the dogma of leftist social sciences is used to dictate a priori what life sciences are permitted to say about human behavior. This “New Creationism” is remarkably heavily entrenched in some sectors of the social sciences, especially among social scientists who follow the premises of Marxism.
The last time that Marxism was applied as an a priori guide to science, the USSR ended up with Lysenkoism, which set them back enormously.
I’m all for competing theories, but Intelligent Design is not a theory, it’s a hypothesis, and it’s not really even competing with evolution as it’s a biogenesis hypothesis, not an explanation of how life evolved. It could be proven true (we could find evidence that aliens created DNA) or it could be proven untrue (scientists observe primitive life spontaneously arise under controlled conditions). Neither has happened yet, so it’s just as valid a hypothesis for biogenesis as the idea that life started because of energetic chemical reactions near underwater vents, or fell from the sky in spores from another world.
I think just about everyone who would come to SDMB would agree that science should not be politicized, but the plain fact is even if the left did want to interefere with science to the same extant the right does it has considerably less power with witch to do so. Right now the conservatives hold power in the legislative and executive branches of government the only thing keeping the US back from a pre-scopes trial era is a reltivly balanced supreme court.
BTW, here’s how I think they should teach the biology classes about the evolution of life on earth.
State that there are many competing hypotheses regarding how the first primitive life came to be on the Earth, spend a day or two going over all of them, including the idea that life was created here by some intelligence. Make it clear that we do not know yet but we may find out one day.
Then start teaching what we DO know from the fossil record, that life evolved from primitive single cellular life into more complex forms through natural selection.
This allows the teaching of Intelligent Design without interfering with the teaching of actual scientific theory, and also demonstrates the difference between hypotheses and theory. A good exercise would be for the students to come up with an experiment that would make one of these hypotheses into a theory.
