State Considers Banning ‘Evolution’

The correct expression is “descent with modification”. This has the dual advantage of a/ having been the preferred terminology of Charles Darwin, and b/ being unfamiliar to eedjits like the Georgia school supervisor.

More than a little tragic. The whole coercive god-bothering irrationalist mindset is highly tragic – it makes said country a laughing-stock, as Richard Dawkins said on B&W about mandatory religiosity in the presidential campaign a couple of weeks ago.

The organization I work for, the Texas Freedom Network, just defeated these attempts down here in Texas.

Onward to teaching more than abstinence-only sex education!

Well done Texas Freedom Network! Floreat et percrebescat.

Right. And many do think in a rational way, and some don’t. And the point is…?

I wanna agree with Matt, but I gotta go with Ophelia. I’m not sure how philosophers et al would define “rational”, but the impetuses behind efforts to ban the teaching of evolution seem little more rational than those behind the adding of the Stars & Bars to the Georgia state flag during the civil rights movement. Hugely different issues, of course, but in both cases it’s about some people thinking they’re right no matter what the evidence to the contrary, and then enforcing their will on everyone else.

Well, I’m for rationality, but that means, implicitly, that there are people who aren’t. That’s the way of the world. Isn’t it better to have the argument over this out in public?

Matt

I think it’s better to have leaders and a public who have progressed enough not to be positing creationism as a valid explanation for the universe’s existence. It really seems that in some ways the US is sliding back in time. A good lesson, I suppose, for those of us who grew up assuming that progress is inevitable.

mr spectator says the “correct term is ‘descent with modification'”

i’m not quite sure what he means by “correct”. certainly “biological changes over time” describes evolution (although also development). so does “changes in allele frequencies over time” (dobzhansky’s phrase), although that perhaps is incomplete.

one sad thing about this whole objection to the word “evolution” is that the people who object to it probably couldn’t define it or describe it to save their lives (or those of their offspring ;) i suspect they wouldn’t know to have a problem with a teacher talking about the rise of antibiotic resistance like they have a problem with the fact that we’re primates.

as far as the issues being clear enough for a large-scale participatory gould v. dawkins debate as brian says – i seriously doubt most people know enough biology to make informed contributions or to seriously weigh the arguments, although he may be right in that lots of aspects of the debate can be analogized to slightly more familiar (and therefore also more susceptible to being misconstrued due to preconceptions) terrain.

There is a good reason to dislike this: Georgia is dead last in SAT scores in this country, and basically have an educational system that sucks big time. Now their education commissioner has decided one small step to correct this major problem is to pander to religious nutcases who dislike evolution? It’s a distraction from what she really ought to be doing, and is doing further damage to Georgia’s reputation, which can ill afford it.

The story is: Silly Georgia school superintendent tries do something really dumb and gets the heck slapped out of him by just about everyone.

Or: Silly religious zealots end up not getting their way, again.

A bit of context for Georgia’s low SAT scores: Georgia does have the highest perceentage of students taking the SAT in the country. Because all students with a B average take the test, a lot of students who are less prepared for college still take teh test.

That doesn’t mean that Georgia’s education system is that good, but SAT scores aren’t necessarily the best measure.

…the impetuses behind efforts to ban the teaching of evolution seem little more rational than those behind the adding of the Stars & Bars to the Georgia state flag…

No species as powerful and successful as this one does things this energy-consuming without its having a rational base.
What that base is may seem obscure, but it’s going to be there.
It could be something along the lines of:
“Evolution” means you don’t qualify for sustained existence merely by being born. Therefore you might be disqualified even if you’re already here.
Christianity’s tenets and dogma are complex, its intent and effects are often not consistently parallel, but it does have a fundamental characteristic: The non-Darwinian, non-evolutionary, full acceptance of ALL human descent with ALL modifications. This is in principle. In practice obviously the selection process continues.
So “evolution” is threatening, directly and not for irrational and easily dismissed reasons. Because it says there are going to be winners and losers in the gene contest.
People who owe their genetic success to not playing are going to react first, and more strongly, to the suggestion of a resumption of the game, than those whose interest lies in unbiased scientific truth.
This may be what’s at the heart of the rabid “pro-life” movement, abortion involving as it does the intentional weeding out of what adherents term human lives. That weeding-out being the easily recognized, by the most threatened, beginning of the re-acceptance of the selection process.
An argument could be made that civilization itself is a sabotage of evolutionary process, though my own opinion is it’s a redirection toward gain by a minority, which after a certain amount of success has become a majority, etc…

dsquared wrote “There are(were) no “issues” in the Dawkins versus Gould debate; just questions of the originality of Gould’s thesis, pus whether or not Dawkins was clear enough about his regular shifts of referent from “genes” in an abstract sense to DNA/RNA sequences.”

I guess it depends on which “issue” Brian was referring to, but I would have thought there were several issues in the debate of Gould vs. Dawkins – many of which seem subtantial. Think about their disagreements over the units of selection, adapationism, the relationship between science and religion, etc…. Punc. Equil. was hardly the only “issue” between them… See Kim Sterelny’s book _Dawkins vs. Gould_ for a popularized overview of this debate…

Despite D2’s good work, that flame war isn’t flaming. Come on! Dawkins is a silly little man! Gould was a sloppy pseudo scientific napoleon! Get on it.

Apropriately enough, Carl Zimmer just related viral evolution to the sorry situation in Georgia, too.

smokey wrote “It’s not like they are talking about replacing “evolution” with a more or less equivalent term, such as “natural selection”.

Since as you suggest “language matters” I have to say that this is the kind of thing that makes lots of foiks cringe. Natural selection is ONE possible cause of evolutionary change – random genetic drift is another (migration is usually considered another, etc..) This matters – esp. if e.g., one wants to understand debates about adapationism (about the “strength” of natural selection compared to drift, developmental contraints, etc…)

I realize that in popular lingo “evolution” = “evolution by natural selection” but the claim that all life on earth is related or that we all evolved from common ancestors is a separate claim from that claim that natural selection is the primary or most important mechanism of such change….

Why does this matter? In say, a debate between Gould and Dawkins, they would both agree that all (or almost all) life on earth is related but (depending on various exegetical issues) disagree about how powerful a force natural selection is compared to say, constraints, drift, etc…

This part is quite interesting –

“”If teachers across this state, parents across this state say, ‘This is not what we want,’ then we’ll change it,” said Cox, a Republican elected in 2002.”

Oh. So if parents ‘don’t want’ 2 + 2=4, or gravity, or the structure of the atom – we’ll change it? As if it’s the menu at MacDonald’s? As if this is all about consumer choice? Why bother to get an education at all then? Why not just learn any old crap?

I just read (fairly quickly) over the draft of the new curriculum proposal (for biology) for the state of Georgia. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been (e.g., it didn’t strike me as bad as some of the changes Kansas tried to make a few years back), but I haven’t looked at the current curriculum proposal to know how it compares.

I was bothered by a lack of importance given to the idea of macro-evolution (and the evidence for thinking that all life on earth was related and descended from a common ancestor). I’d also be troubled if, as atlantan suggests above, the current proposal is better in this regard….

OK, Ok, I know this probably moot since I hope they’ll have enough sense not to follow through on this… but one more issue:

“Biological changes over time” seems like a really bad alternative for ‘evolution’. It would be one thing if they just wanted to use a synonym, as some commentators above suggested, like “change in gene frequencies over time”. But “biological changes” is horribly vague, and includes all kinds of stuff that we don’t normally think are evolutionary changes:

example: I’m getting fatter. Isn’t that a biological change? Indeed, whole populations of people can get fatter or taller because of changes in diet without there being changes in gene frequencies (computed per capita). Seems like it might be useful to keep these changes distinct from evolutionary ones, where there is actually change in gene frequency…

Hi Smokey,

Oh, I didn’t mean to sound offended. I’m not. It is just common to confuse two different claims (claims that creationists, for instance, sometimes mix up), and I thought it was worth emphasizing why they’re different.

At any rate, let me try again. It is one thing to say that all (or almost all, we don’t have to quibble about that for the moment) life on earth is related – and that we all evolved from a common ancestor. Notice, right away, that is something that (many? most?) creationists will object to. They don’t think we have a common evolutionary ancestor with say, chimps or dogs. But the evidence indicates we do. Notice, I haven’t yet mentioned the primary mechanism of such change (natural selection).

I’m saying that it is important to understand the difference between natural selection and evolution. That seems to me something people should be able to get in high school biology.

Creationists often confuse disagreement amongst biologists (e.g., Gould v. Dawkins) about natural selection as evidence that there’s disagreement about the tree of life hypothesis – that all life on earth is related. That is why I think it is important in this context.

So again, if you had said that the primary mechanism of evolution (change in gene frequencies) is natural selection, that would be fine.

But you seem to be saying something else.. Once again, in your reply, you seem to be saying (near the end) that evolution is a mechanism of selection – but that gets things backwards, though maybe we’re just having a terminological dispute here…. If so, fine.

The “Texas Freedom Network” – and anyone who believe in freedom – should be against curriculums imposed by the state, not for it.

There is certainly value in having a recommended curriculum drawn up by educational experts. But parents – and, when they are old enough, students – should together have the ultimate say in what is taught, and should be able to exercise this right by moving between schools and by voting on school curricula (the libertarian way and the democratic way, respectively). As neither myself nor my parents saw any point in me studying woodwork or metalwork at school, I should not have had to study it.

You might say that it is child abuse to restrain a child from knowing about certain topics, and thus a state-imposed curriculum is warranted to protect children from ignorance and the resulting likelihood of poverty. But this is misperceiving the issue. Refraining from imposing learning on a child does not equate to denying that child information. The child is still free to seek out that information themselves, and not-for-profit organisations and television companies, for example, are still free to put out educational materials if they feel children are lacking knowledge or understanding of certain subjects.

In this respect, I find myself far more libertarian than most people, even, I suspect, most so-called “libertarians”. (Hardline capitalist libertarians think that, like with everything else, those with the most money should have the most choice in education. I think that that freedom should be available equally to all families.)

That’s odd. That is not my webpage in the link thingy up there. Hmm.

Chris Stephens wrote, I’m saying that it is important to understand the difference between natural selection and evolution. That seems to me something people should be able to get in high school biology.

Amen! The conflation of evolution with natural selection is extremely annoying.

And you’re absolutely right — a lot of the evangelical nutters think evolution per se is objectionable — “I’m not descended from an ape.”

Delphis,

Sorry, mild irony. I’ll get me coat.

The proposed guidelines don’t merely substitute a weasel word for “evolution”. The central concepts of evolution are omitted. See http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/0104/31evolution.html

“Georgia copied almost all the biology standards developed by the American Association for the Advancement for Science. These sections related to evolution were left out of the state’s proposed curriculum: …”

Robin is right. We have a First Amendment that bars the government from controlling the flow of information through the press to the public at large. Allowing said government to control the flow of information through the schools goes against the philosophy undergirding press freedoms. The State must not be allowed to arbitrate science.