Thursday, September 25, 2008

Apparently Texas Can't Handle the Truth

Free Market alerted me to the fact that Texas may be changing the laws that requires textbooks to cover both the strengths and weaknesses of any theory. I think the only reason for changing this law is so that Darwin's theory can be bolstered despite weaknesses. The Dallas Morning News seems to agree. If you don't think that there is any weakness in the neo-Darwin theory, I encourage you to read this quote from an evolutionist.

We have no acceptable theory of evolution at the present time. There is none; and I cannot accept the theory that I teach to my students each year. Let me explain. I teach the synthetic theory known as the neo-Darwinian one, for one reason only; not because it’s good, we know it is bad, but because there isn’t any other. Whilst waiting to find something better you are taught something which is known to be inexact, which is a first approximation…’
Professor Jerome Lejeune (French geneticist in 1985)


There are more such quotes, but I didn't have time to find them all today.

If you don't think that that there is active censorship of teachers, professors, and researchers in the origins field of science, I encourage you to watch Expelled.

5 comments:

Jerremiah said...

If we can't understand a subject, why do we need to teach nonsense as factual? Wouldn't it be better to teach nothing about the subject? Students might learn better if they can trust their teachers.

Anonymous said...

Can they handle the truth in anything? Though I don't agree with the religious views of the FLDS by any stretch of the imagination, what the government did to them was horrific - still no apologies, in spite of the fact that almost all of the cases have been overturned now.
I agree that it's messed up to teach a topic so without evidence. Then again, you get what you pay for... wait, no... you don't in the school system. (At $4000 per child you'd expect to get a lot more!)

Anonymous said...

"Free Market alerted me to the fact that Texas may be changing the laws that requires textbooks to cover both the strengths and weaknesses of any theory"

Err, like gravity?

"If we can't understand a subject, why do we need to teach nonsense as factual?"

That's not exactly how it works. When we teach kids about the atom, we start with the dalton model, then progress up to the Rutherford model, etc, mimicking the natural progression of human knowledge towards our current understanding. That way they learn the good and bad of each theory along the way, and we don't have to start out teaching about atoms by explaining atom clouds and the Heisenberg uncertaintly principle. It's like building a castle out of toy blocks, you can't start at the top.

We know that Darwin's theory as proposed isn't exactly right, but it is a good starting point, and simple enough to explain. From there, we can go into all the discoveries we've made since Darwin's time, and which parts of his theory have changed since.

Frances Clements said...

Amber,
Technically gravity is not a theory. It is a natural law. So the reality of gravity would not be called into question.

The current laws do not ban teaching of Darwinism or neo-Darwinism. They simply state that the stregths and weaknesses must be addressed. Most textbooks do little (if anything) to address the weaknesses of molecules-to-man evolutionary theory.

Jerremiah said...

Amber,

I agree that the state-of-the-art in some areas is very primitive. My point is that there should be something useful about a subject to bother teaching it. Speculation should be identified as such--not taught as fact. What is the most convincing evidence for Darwinism? What is its use other than to deny that God exists?