by JD Hancock
Happy New Year. Have an ID Bill Missouri!
[Via Angry Astronomer]
It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen any pro-Creationism bills introduced in my home state of Missouri. In general, it seems we learned from our neighbors in Kansas when they had their big kerfuffle and had their pro-ID standards struck down and were embarrassed nation wide (if you don’t remember, Kansas’ bill actually was put into law for some time and changed the definition of science to include the supernatural, whereas most bills die before ever becoming law).
But it seems Missouri has forgotten the lesson and a pro-Creationist bill introduced recently. And boy is it loaded with some stupid. Let’s take a look.
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Here is the bill. The legislators, all Republicans, have submitted a bill that I expect was not written by any of them. I’d expect to find out that it was written by a creationist organization, one whose religious views outweigh its own intelligence.
These members of the GOP demonstrate that they are actually for greater government intrusion into our lives, that the government now has to sit in every classroom in the state, including university ones, and make sure that only the correct science is taught.
The bill essentially defines science into something it is not , allowing them to now include the forced teaching of Intelligent Design (ID). It gives it the nice name of standard science, as if the state mandating what science does and does not include makes it standard.
Taught not only in K-12 but also at all public universities in the state. And not just in biology clases but in classes also teaching just about any science. From the bill: “Notwithstanding any other law, any introductory science course taught at any public institution of higher education in this state, including material concerning physics, chemistry, biology, health, physiology, genetics, astronomy, cosmology, geology, paleontology, anthropology, ecology, climatology, or other science topics, shall be standard science.”
We can tell just how stupid the authors are and how ignorant they are of the actual science because they conflate evolution with the origin of life. They define “biological evolution” as a “theory of the origin of life and its ascent by naturalistic means.”
Since the theory of evolution does not deal with life’s origin at all, only how things progressed since life originated, it only fits the second part of the clause. So, by my reading of the entire bill, evolution as we know it does not fall anywhere under bill as standard science as it only fulfills one side of the clause connected by an ‘and’. No one really teaches biological evolution as defined under this law.
And secondly, no one should be teaching evolution using the word ascent anyway. That is a very old and out-of-date view. Evolution implies life is directionless. Life can get more complex and it can get simpler, whichever helps it to survive.
So, anyone teaching evolution as it is practiced by scientists does not teach anything like this “biological evolution” the bill describes. The rest of the bill is full of nonsense like ths.
It just shows what IDiots these guys are. They define things without any real knowledge of just what is actually being taught. Intelligent design has been shown to simply be creationism.
I expect this bill to die but it certainly does little to dissuade people from the meme that many Republicans and most of their leaders are not very science friendly.
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