My example was, “What % of our DNA do we share with mice”. And the answer could be, “0% because I don’t believe in evolution as God created us from scratch”. The question posited was on one of my tests in college. So no, I don’t agree that teachers should have to change a test to try and trick a moron into not realizing he’s talking about evolutionary genetics.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with that question though, as simply saying how much of our generic structure is similar to that of mice doesn’t really depends on where you believe God created humans.
Saying zero to that question doesn’t get a bye from this law.
Oh but it does. Do you not have discussions with Aunts/Uncles/cousins who adamantly believe in Genesis, Ken Hamm, and refuse to believe any part of evolution including the fact we share any DNA with any other creatures? You sheltered soul LOL. Even better is cousin training to be an EMT and argued with her instructor over stuff like this then made the mistake of telling me. You grossly underestimate the kind of militant crap this is going to create.
The terrorists have won. It’s time to get out the burkas.
No it doesn’t.
Your religion can tell you that God created you, because that is an opinion. Belief that the theory of evolution is correct is, when it comes to the existence of humans, still an opinion, albeit one which i personally believe, as i believe it has a reasonably strong foundation. While there are still aspects of it which are not fully understood by evolutionary biology, I suspect the basis idea is correct.
But still, it is my opinion. I do not know, for a fact, that my belief structure there is correct. Indeed, there are certainly aspects which are incorrect.
But something like “how many base pairs are shared between humans and chimpanzees”, the answer is around 3 billion.
This is a factual answer, with no opinion involved.
That law will not allow you to give false answers to things which are observable, i would not believe.
I think that the other cases where the ACLU has defended students for their religious views are much more likely to be the focus of this law.
I think it’s too vague and a militant person could wend the words to have it be applied.
Well, then it’d go to court.
But usually, folks who win religious cases are backed by the ACLU, and i do not imagine the ACLU would support someone who was just trying to not have a question marked wrong on their test, for an answer which was provably false.
Ultimately though, it’s not the job of the school to make kids BELIEVE in evolution.
It’s their job to teach them the facts about it, and then those kids can decide what they believe.
I don’t think most schools would go to court to defend a teacher from a zealous religious student. Half of them can’t even afford textbooks.
This is basically how every question about it I ever received in at every level of school was worded.
Q: How old is the Earth?
A in Ohio: 6,000 years Correct!
A in sane states: 4.5 billion years Correct!
No more so than “we evolved from a common ancestor with other primates”. That is a well-verified fact. So is the age of the universe.
I agree with you that the questions should be worded more clearly in some cases, but I would simply get around the law by prefacing my tests with, “for each of the questions below, select the answer that best reflects current scientific consensus.”
Eh, I don’t think this is exactly a well verified fact. There’s certainly supporting evidence that such an evolution took place, but this is not something which is exactly verifiable. It’s a different kind of “fact” than an observable truth such as common base pairs in different species.
Eh, this too isn’t really an observable fact, at least not at this point. We currently have various ESTIMATES of the age of the universe, based on differing scientific models. Hell, our estimates of the age of the universe have actually changed fairly significantly in the past 20 years, while previously some stars were estimated to be as old as 25 billion years, which is significantly older than our current estimates of the age of the universe (generally around 13.7 billion, with different models differing by a few hundred million years).
So, a better question in this case would be something like, “What does the Plank Collaboration estimate the age of the universe to be?”
And again, this question is more valid anyway, because that estimate is going to be different from the WMAP’s estimate. Interestingly, I happened to read a story, I think it was in Scientific America, as recently as a few weeks ago, about how currently the oldest star is estimated to be 14.3 billion years old, which is older than the general estimates of the age of the universe, but it all works out because of the error bars.
This is the kind of thing that makes it imperative that we not have laws like this. Evolution is well-verified, it has been confirmed in many many ways. You can also check it using the DNA itself. If you can dispute the fact of evolution, you can dispute the fact of shared DNA. None of us can personally do that checking with our own eyes. If you want to lay out facts that are not disputable, you end up having to couch your statements in some really tortured language like, “A group of scientists take tissue from a mouse, perform process A (detailed below) to extract a chemical they call DNA, then use process B (detailed below), which studies X, Y, and Z have concluded is capable of replicating the DNA, then use process C (also detailed below), which outputs a string of letters that studies P, Q, and R have concluded faithfully represents the sequence of chemicals called amino acid bases in the chemical called DNA. If the same group of scientists uses this same series of steps on similar tissue from a human subject, and performs process D (detailed below), which studies M and N have concluded is effective at aligning functionally-equivalent DNA sequences (referred to as genes) from mice and humans, what percentage of the letters mouse sequence will match the corresponding letters in the human sequence?” That certainly is a more precise question, but it’s absurd to have to go into that level of detail any time you want to teach someone about DNA and evolution.
The same thing is true of the age of the universe - at any given point in time, there is a consensus about reasonable values for that number, which is based on well-verified scientific theories. It would be silly to ask a question about the precise value if models disagree, but if the choices are 20 billion years, 14 billion years, 1.4 billion years, and 20 million years, there’s clearly only one good answer. If the answers are the exact values of three different models, then there needs to be a fourth one that says, “all of the above are possible”.
Which brings up another point here that is essential - the predictions of theories can conflict, they can change as the theory is updated or as new evidence is discovered. That doesn’t make them wishy-washy or speculative. General relativity and quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, yet are each the basis of significant pieces of modern technology. So even when we know a model is “wrong” in some fundamental way, we know it can still make useful predictions, and tell us true facts. For almost any statement to be true, you have to have some shared epistemological basis that you can use to derive truth, and you almost certainly need a complex set of axioms, already proven theorems, and well-established models to draw on. You don’t start every history lesson with “historians claim”, with “while it may change if we find other records, our current understanding is”, or with a full explanation of the theoretical and empirical basis of each claim. You don’t start each arithmetic lesson by deriving the number line from set theory. Full derivations are good to see at some point, and language highlighting uncertainty is important when the range of uncertainty affects the conclusions being drawn, but it doesn’t make sense to include the full details of how an answer is derived within every test question.
It’s important for people to understand the basis of these ideas and hopefully that is being taught, but sometimes the thing you are trying to teach needs to start by asserting some things that have previously been proven, without deriving them again. Making sure students remember these important assertions is important to testing their understanding. No one should be asking whether Caterina Sforza was born in 1463, 1465, or 1456 - that’s a trivial detail best left to google. Same is true of whether mice and humans share 80%, 85%, or 90% of protein-coding regions of DNA. But those same questions can be useful tests of knowledge if the possible answers are 1215, 1463, or 1644 for Caterina Sforza, and 5%, 45%, or 85% for the DNA. Knowing the important idea, that the Sforzas were in power in the early Renaissance period, or that mice and humans have nearly-identical genes, is how you can understand the ideas that build from that (e.g. what was going in England and France at the time of the Sforzas and Medicis or how small changes in protein coding can lead to big changes in morphology).
I wrote a post saying the same thing — that evolution is among the most-verified things in science and is a fact in science terms — but I like yours better.
Also, am I the only one who finds the insistence on calling it the theory of evolution in this conversation grating? Shall we talk about the round-earth theory next?
The Dean of Biology at my university made every student graduating under him meet him 1 on 1 and admit whether or not they believed in evolution; if they did not, he would refuse to graduate them under his department.
I appreciate the concern shown to religious believers but they cannot be allowed to answer “1 + 1 = 3, in my religion” and expect this answer to be accepted. Secular society shouldn’t be asked to do the heavy lifting for believers to fit objective reality into their subjective interpretation of it.
The problem, as is amply shown above, is the distinction between what is demonstrable vs what is certain is apparently hard for scientifically illiterate persons to understand, because science never makes claims to absolute certainty. Saying we don’t know everything is not equivalent to saying we know nothing, and saying there is disagreement or that things can change doesn’t suddenly give license to any interpretation regardless of the evidence.
It’s literally a theory. A scientific theory.
That people are stupid and think that means “hypothesis” isn’t the fault of science.
I mean a round earth is just a fact. It’s an observable phenomenon. There is no attempt to explain it, you can see it simply is. The Earth is round. The sun is bright. The moon orbits the Earth. These are all facts.
Gravity, however, is a theory.
We should induce these people to refute that theory personally. From the 34th floor.
Of course, but we don’t often trot out theory when we talk about other scientific theories that rise to the level of fact. Again, do we talk about the theory of heliocentrism? Round-earthism?
This is the case with evolution. There is no doubt that it accounts for the variation of life we see.
Only if you are in space.
Ha! Try to prove that one with just your eyes.
What about at night, or when it’s cloudy?
No it’s a law.
I mean… people do it about basically everything science related. Theory of Relativity. Law of Gravity.
This is just ignorant. Scientific facts are things that just are. Facts can be observed or measured.
The mass of a baseball is a fact.