South Carolina: the state where the Official State Fossil is the wooly mammoth “that was created on the Sixth Day along with the other beasts of the field.” And now the state continues its abysmal record of opposing evolution in favor of the bogus Biblical accounts of the origin and diversity of life.
According to the Post and Courier paper from Charleston, legislators in South Carolina are now trying to pass a “teach-the-controversy” bill regarding evolution—a tactic that creationists have adopted since their failure to get any kind of creationism (including Intelligent Design) taught directly in the schools. Their last resort is to simply question evolution. I quote from the article:
COLUMBIA – New language for high school biology standards is headed for consideration to the State Board of Education that would have students learn “the controversy.”
The S.C. Education Oversight Committee on Monday sent proposed language to the board that would require biology students to construct scientific arguments that seem to support and seem to discredit Darwinism.
The decision comes more than two months after the subject became a divisive issue for many in the Palmetto State and nationally in February, when Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, voiced opposition during the review and approval of a new set of science standards for 2014.
At the time, Fair argued against teaching natural selection as fact, adding there are other theories students deserve to learn. He said the best way for students to learn was for the schools to teach “the controversy.” On Monday, he reiterated his stance.
“We must teach the controversy,” Fair said. “There’s another side. I’m not afraid of the controversy. … That’s the way most of us learn best.”
The oversight committee’s recommendation will go back to the state Board of Education, which must approve the language before it becomes policy.
If you’d like to contact the South Carolina Department of Education, you can find an easy email form here (go to “contact” under the bar at the top). A few short words could make a difference, especially if you’re a state resident. I’ve dropped them a line, though I’m a Yankee carpetbagger.
But what is the bloody controversy? It’s can’t be about whether evolution happened, or that there was common ancestry and lineage splitting, or about the fact that evolution happened over 3.5+ billion years, or that natural selection was an important component of the process. No, it simply can’t be about those fundamental tenets of neo-Darwinism, because they are uncontroversial. Insofar as we can regard anything in science as “true,” these things about evolution are true.
But in fact these things are precisely what the controversy is about: whether those tenets of evolution are true. And they’re controversial not because scientists doubt them, but because creationists doubt them. If there’s a controversy about evolution, then, there must be a controversy about medicine because of homeopathy and “alternative” medicine, so they should “teach the controversy” in health class. And perhaps psychology classes should teach the “controversy” about astrology versus conventional non-determination of our fate by the alignment of celestial bodies.
So if we’re talking just about evolution, there is no controversy—at least not one about the major aspects of evolutionary theory. Insofar as there are controversies, there are indeed aspects of evolution that we don’t understand, like the relative importance of selection versus drift, the way sexual selection works, and so on. Richard Dawkins and I once wrote a piece in the Guardian about these real controversies in evolution. But of course that’s not what ignoramuses like Senator Fair mean. When they say “controversy,” you can bet they don’t mean “the relative role of natural selection versus genetic drift in the evolution of DNA sequences.”
To show the polarization on this issue, as well as the fact that there are some voices of sanity in the state (and voices of ignorance as well), here are two successive comments from the posts following the article:
Meanwhile, columnist Brian Hicks at the paper, a brave man, has written a scathing editorial about this recommendation, calling its proponents “knuckleheads.” And his piece, while passionate, is quite sensible:
Trying to inject religious teaching into schools is not only unconstitutional but will do nothing except cost this state money in needless lawsuits. And we don’t have enough money to pave roads. Or maintain bridges.
But this is not all Fair’s fault – blame the General Assembly.
You see, allowing insurance salesmen and politicians to determine sound scientific curriculum for the classroom is not an intelligent design.
The Education Oversight Committee was created on the excuse that there was too much politics on the state Board of Education.
So they decided to double the politics.
The oversight committee voted, 7-4, Monday to recommend that the state board “teach the controversy.” Sound familiar? It should.
This “teach the controversy” battle cry is the same old creationism argument that’s been going on for decades. It’s just trying to adapt and survive – you have to love the irony.
Hicks makes only one misstep:
Frankly, the story that the science of natural selection tells is horrifying to fundamentalists. It calls into question their view of the world. But it doesn’t have to be that way – many people of faith have no problem with actual science. Or facts.
Well, yes, it does have to be that way for people who are either literalists or so discomfited by the implications of naturalistic evolution that they simply can’t accept it. This kind of accommodationism is a bit patronizing, I think: telling people that they really don’t have to be so down on evolution even if it contradicts, literally, and emotionally, everything they believe. Let’s just accept the fact that for some people evolution isn’t palatable, and not try to tell them what kind of religious belief they should adopt!
But Hicks redeems himself at the end:
It’s about time people with so little interest in any other world view stop trying to foist theirs on everyone else.
After all, you don’t see science teachers out there raising a stink to teach Sunday school.
This isn’t a new bon mot, but it’s still apposite, and emphasizes the deep need the religious have to get their sticky fingers into the public sphere.
If South Carolina does enact this language, they’re in for a long and expensive series of lawsuits. Good luck to them! (Not really.)
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“After all, you don’t see science teachers out there raising a stink to teach Sunday school.”
Well, perhaps they should demand the right to teach the controversy in sunday schools, Christians wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to object would they… surely?
Science teachers? Hell, let’s skip evolution and go right to the nitty gritty. Let’s get atheists in their Sunday schools. Let’s explain in detail why “there very probably is no God.”
Hey, looks like this guy agrees with me! HE’S not afraid! Nope. I don’t live in Charleston SC, but my daughter does. Next time I visit her I’m signing up at his church. Happy times ahead…
Heh heh, I’d pay to see that – Scanners in reality
Let’s get moslems to teach in sunday school. And hindus, buddhists, satanists etc.
Yeah, it’s a shame there aren’t any existing establishments where folks like Mr. Fair can go to indoctri-…er, teach their children all those “other” facts and theories.
*rolleyes*
The problem that the hilariously misnamed “Fair” (this is a joke? Right?) has is that children are not required by law to attend one of those indoctrination farms, while they are required to attend the indoctrination farms that he’s targeting.
There needs to be a counter movement called, “There is no controversy to teach”. Bills can be passed about not teaching controversies where there are none.
Translation: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don’t have facts and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”
South Carolina: the state where the Official State Fossil is the wooly mammoth “that was created on the Sixth Day along with the other beasts of the field.” And now the state continues its abysmal record of opposing evolution in favor of the bogus Biblical accounts of the origin and diversity of life.
Olivia McConnell, the child who proposed the recognition of the woolly mammoth as SC’s state fossil, has just today put up a petition on Change.org about this. If anyone would be interested, I’ll go dig out the URL.
I took a shot at this tripe a while back. So much wasted time defending against nonsense.
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2013/07/we-now-join-program-already-in-progress.html
Creationists have my permission to use this disclaimer language at the from of science texts, free of charge
Good stuff.
We really need to start using the phrase “religious fanatics” a lot more.
A cautionary note from a registered (stealth) Republican out in Colorado (me).
The last local election, I had the occasion where I actually had to vote Republican. The other candidates were either overtly religious, or were “egalitarian” types of Democrats. The Dem candidates for the school board (one of the largest in the state) were ALL FOR teaching the controversy. It helps foster critical thinking skills, don’t you know… and is all a part of the cultural-relativistic hands-across-the-water, let’s find the middle ground and try to please everybody strategy so prevalent around these parts. Science is really just story-telling… a narrative like any other.
The Repub that I voted for happened to be an Air Force type, well-versed in science, adamantly opposed to religious incursions in the public sphere — and clearly saw no scientific controversy… and luckily (and by a tiny margin) won the election.
So this cautionary note goes out to us USAmericans to investigate your local candidates very carefully. Do not assume that they are competent by virtue of party affiliation. And good luck having at least one candidate worthy of your vote.
This attitude seems to go mainstream any time a deeply-held spiritual belief comes into play. It’s part of the Let’s-All-Support-Faith cheerleading of the Ecumenical Squad. It will also find ground when there’s a whiff of indigenous or minority culture involved. ‘Nobody is better than anyone else’ turns into ‘no idea is better than any other.’
“We both look at the same facts, but we conclude different things. Let’s celebrate this!”
Your point then is well taken. Investigate candidates and don’t assume.
Hmm, I was once party to some lawyers talking federal politics Canukistani Style. Their rationale for voting for Blue Clowns was the Red Clowns deserved punishment for recent scandals etc.
No policy, no historical context, no Orange or Green Clowns mentioned.
Far too many don’t take your sage advice seriously.
Ya know, I’m all for teaching all the theories about the origin of life and the origin of species. The only problem is that there’s only ONE THEORY. I don’t know what these creationists and ID people mean when they say they want all theories taught. Well, I do, but they’re wrong. Neither of them even *have* an actual theory.
So maybe the smartest thing to do is to allow these laws but put language in that defines “theory” in the scientific sense. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the creationists and ID’ists. “Sorry, can’t talk about Creation in here. Only scientific theories can be discussed in class.”
Using “theory” incorrectly, at any time, but particularly in matters academe, isn’t exactly the same as signing a petition in support of harmful educational policy. Not quite. It certainly does nothing to aid useful discourse, though, especially when trying to make the distinction between reality and superstition-based doctrine clear to voters who decide whom to elect to fund and shape educational policy. Or persuade voters not to elect ALEC indoctrinated anti-science candidates interested in ending existing US public education.
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The sad thing about a commenter like Michael Rodgers is he thinks things are true because they are in the Bible, when in reality the true things in the Bible are only there because humans made observations about the natural world and recorded them. The earth was probably known(even in biblical times) to be a sphere not because a supernatural being told someone that it was, but because individuals made observations of eclipses and shadows, noted patterns, and made predictions.
“We are rocks!”
… what’s that, you say!? It is my newly adopted slogan in the face of creationists.*
SETI institute leader Seth Shostak published an apologist article in HuffPo today. One commenter tried to point out the apparently magical state of us ‘not being rocks’, and I realized after checking that the english term allows the original mineral aggregates of such pathways as submarine alkaline hydrothermal emergence. Their chemical gardens, to be precise. And, as I never tire to point out, Lane and Martin got their claim of “homologies” published.
Ergo: we are rocks. Just very changed such, after 4 billion years of evolution …
* I feel like this time in the life of commander Picard every time this topic comes up.
Shall we call everyone ‘Peter’ (and ‘Petra’) just to keep things clear?
Good one!
Well, it’s obvious that at least some politicians in South Carolina are full of schist…
As a “mad scientist”, you could take “Pyotr” as it has that “Igor” feel to it.
(When I was science advisor for the trade union’s magazine, I kept a pewter beer tankard in the bar below the office, engraved as “Resident Mad Scientist”. It made it easier for people who didn’t know me to find me.
I should still have that somewhere. I can use it as an owl-holder!
I like your new gravatar.
But I thought at first that wol was holding a small mallet, which would make you gavelinspector …
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It’s an (empty) honey jar.
Vinni Pukh isn’t the Disney Winnie-the-Pooh, but he’s not so different as to leave a honey jar un-emptied.
Which reminds me … honey in fridge, but no bread. This is a problem that can be fixed!
Ha ha! I thought of that exact episode of TNG when I was reading this post!
To support your argument form a geological perspective, I’ll point out that many geologists are happy to consider ice to be a mineral (well-defined composition ; well defined crystalline structure ; well understood paragenesis and metamorphic behaviours). By extension, that would make water a magma (when it’s underground) and a lava (when it’s on the surface).
Further consideration would show that most ice is a “hot rock” ; it’s temperature is quite close to its melting point, which affects the style of movement it undergoes in metamorphosis (ductile rather than brittle deformation). This has informed both glaciology and structural geology – good levels of feedback. And it makes experimentation on analogues of the deep crust decidedly cheaper.
As the chemists have long said … we’re bags of dirty water held together by sheets of fats and lumps of mineral.
*ugly bags of mostly water*!
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“Meatbag”
(Blender, or even “Bender”, times too frequently to mention ; )
Every day I read the Daily News, my local tabloid, and pay special attention to the Voice of the People (letters to the editor). The majority of “the People,” are not very bright and I sit on my couch thinking about pulling my hair out.
But I’ve learned to wait a day or two because someone rational and smart will reply. The other day a woman named Joan Brandon wrote the usual creationist stuff (asking how could something originate out of nothingness) and today two guys responded. Here’s part of what Matt Buoncuore, from Morristown, NJ, said:
“Voicer Joan Brandon seems to have lost some bouts with the stupid branch … If you are a creationist, then you believe there is a big magician in the sky who threw things into the air and made them planets and took it from there. All your proof is from a book that was written by a bunch of guys who said God told them to write it…One more thing: I was raised Catholic and was an altar boy for years. Then I started thinking for myself…”
I really love the Daily News.
Only a mind rotted by religion could imagine there’s any controversy. With the exception of the creationists who study biology just so that they can say “see, there are biologists who don’t believe in evilution”, no honest biologist have any doubts about the reality of evolution. In fact I’d expect a large fraction of biologists to not believe the Jesus and god stories.
A useful term I ran into I-don’t-remember-where is “manufactroversy”.
I continue to be amazed and puzzled at the extent to which portions of US population wish to expend monies to ensure that their education system is ineffective. At a minimum this appears to be conscious incompetence. At its worst, it would seem to fall under the type of religious fervor the founding fathers most feared. In either case, this battle does USA children nothing but harm from an learning perspective.
It’s a shame that there isn’t a law in the US that ensures that any politician who passes an unconstitutional law is:
1. booted out of office immediately
2. liable for the money wasted while enacting the law, and the time wasted reversing it afterwards.
Calls for ‘teach the controversy’, and statements that there are ‘other theories besides Darwinism’ sound instinctively reasonable to the American ear b/c it appeals to our highest democratic ideals. That is why this newly evolved strategy of the creationists will continue for quite a while. The ‘evidence’ the other side has is nicely summarized in the 2nd comment that was posted above from the article. Again, to the average American those arguments can seem persuasive. But when one places those against the actual evidence from science, then their falseness becomes clear for all to see. I have toyed with the idea of ‘teaching the controversy’ in just that way — showing the best of what each side has to offer. One should think that that would settle the matter, like the ending of Bambi vs Godzilla.
Yes, it runs contrary to the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle or that everyone should get the chance to express their opinion. This is perpetuated by journalists who have no idea about how science works – that it isn’t democratic. There is fact and fiction; truth and lies. Truths do not have to be discovered through the murkiness of discussion but through the rigour of the scientific process. This, above all else, needs to be understood by the population.
Of course, it doesn’t help when charlatans lie about science, and it’s especially bad when those charlatans are scientists (Wakefield, climate change deniers, big tobacco flunkies). People default to a general distrust. This is why educating people not only about how science works but how to be critical thinkers and spot pseudo science is important.
Should we even refer to those types as scientists? There are scientists and then there are people with advanced degrees.
Well scientists are subject to a biases, influences and emotions like all humans. That’s why there is the scientific method. The method doesn’t always guarantee the person who uses it won’t warp results with dishonesty. Other scientists and journalists (as with the Wakefield case) need to call them out.
Well said. It gets frustrating at times when it seems there always people putting roadblocks in the way of the actual advancement of knowledge.
Science is our ongoing best effort to discover and explain what is REALLY real in the universe. It’s not a shelter where any and all ideas can huddle safely from the storm. It’s a spotlight continuously searching to illuminate the truth.
What a twisted bait and switch! Of course he’s not afraid of the controversy, he and his ilk created it! What he is afraid of, as Jerry spelled out in knocking down the accomodationalism, is facts.
Poor Mammoth, poofed into existence on the sixth Earth-day of the Universe, only to be annihilated in an instant by the unfathomably dense quantum soup of subatomic particles and near-pure photonic energy. He’s martyr to Mammoths and Mastodons everywhere.
Unless they meant the sixth actual rotational *day* of the Earth, in which case… yow. I’d hate to be one of the beasts dunked into that field.
Poor Mammoth.
They meant the sixth day of The Controversy™.
so, can we have opposing theists who believe in different version of creationism now teach the “controversy”? I want to see YEC twits go against OEC twits in a court of law. We also need the declaration of when the magical flood happened, Adam and Eve existed, etc, so we can see just how much theists don’t agree on their “truth”.
Setting aside the constitutional issues, I wonder whether it wouldn’t be quite salutary to “teach the controversy”. Science is quite complicated, and it is often easier to understand and appreciate a well reasoned position when it is contrasted with a bad one. You could, for example, juxtapose a plant geneticist’s account of the evolution and selective breeding of the banana, with Ray Comfort’s “Atheist’s Nightmare” version of the divinely designed banana…Science is full of examples of ways in which human reason has gradually replaced mythical descriptions of the world. Since the actual content of intelligent design theory is zero, it wouldn’t take much time…
Just on a sideline …
… what is it about the American States that they seem to feel this need to label themselves with state flowers and state fossils and state flags and state … what is a plametto anyway? Some sort of spice or flavouring?
Is it some … I don’t know, IANA-Shrink … some sort of mutually self-reinforcing inferiority complex ; a war of omnes against omnes? “Divide and Conquer?” (Divide who from whom, and conquer who?)
We have administrative subdivisions in Britain (I guess the rest of Europe too ; it’s not something that people waste time talking about), and labelling a town by it being within a particular county is a popular type of general knowledge question. But other than that, well, [shrug]. It’s just not considered important enough to waste any effort upon. Hell, I even occasionally make mistakes over which of Lancashire and Yorkshire are the white rose county versus the red rose county, and that’s a relic of a war that lasted for a century, devastated the whole country, and led to the exchange of one set of robber baron monarchs for a different set of robber baron monarchs (closely related to the first robbers).
What is it that makes people think this sort of thing is in the slightest bit important? Worth wasting ink and paper on?
The palmetto or fan palm is the state tree of Florida as well!
And it was the Houses of York and Lancaster that had white and red rose badges, not the counties; that was just a later affectation. And, in any case, neither House used the rose badge very much at the time, it was something that was just highlighted in retrospect, and became the basis of the composite rose (small white rose over large red rose) that was later used as a royal badge.
Now, of course, we have counties adopting *famous* writers and the like to boost tourism; e.g., South Tyneside is *Catherine Cookson Country*.
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I have a number of (intermittent) colleagues who come from either side of the Pennines divide, and wear their white rose (or red rose) lapel badges with pride. They’re amused (but not exactly pleased) when I wrongly deduce which side of the line they come from by getting the rose colour wrong.
The Red Rose Pothole Club and White Rose Pothole Club have a mutual non-aggression pact, which they need since they keep meeting in the dark and clarted with mud. If you’ve ever seen them playing sofa rugby, you’ll see why the non-aggression pact is necessary.
I’m a white-rose man, myself, of course …
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You’re all on the Plains of Englandshire, as seen from this side of the border.
The Sassenachs don’t seem to realize that England’s just a peninsula to the south of Scotland, do they?
PS. *white on the right*
That would be in the west, as seen from this side of the border.
I do get the point of the Aussies having maps with North at the bottom.
Ha!
We should go back to the medieval convention of having Jerusalem towards the top of the map … then Yorkshire would be on top of Lancashire!!
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Implying that the white-rosies need artificial conventions to overcome the pink-rosies?
I’m trying to remember who were the original targets of “a plague on both your houses!”
Romeo and Juliet ; not surprising. Then again, I’m sure that many of the populace during the War of the Roses thought pretty much the same thing.
A plague on both your roses!
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Aphids, or white-fly?
Thrips!
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There’s not a controversy. There’s simply a scientific consensus that some people refuse to accept because it contradicts their religious beliefs. That’s not a controversy. That’s just people being contrary.
How about introducing legislation to “teach the controversy” on which religion is the “true” one? (Oh, wait, that would lead to actual war, blood on the streets, car bombs, assassinations, etc., etc., etc. – which history shows doesn’t bother the religiots, but is destructive of the rest of us.)
I’m sure this has been quoted before on this site but Judge Petigru’s observation may be worth recalling: “South Carolina is too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum.”
“We must teach the controversy,” Fair said. “There’s another side. I’m not afraid of the controversy. … That’s the way most of us learn best.”
Well I dare say we teach the “controversy”… as an introductory lesson about how we arrived to modern day scientific theories. It would be incredibly difficult for any student to not embrace the beauty of the scientific theory of biological evolution after they are exposed to the long list of archaic predecessors that humanity believed during our dark and uneducated past (And that some persist to believe…). A short discussion on alchemy or creation myths (The Egyptian god Atum creating the world through masturbation could be quite an interesting topic…) might not be deemed useful for exam purposes but it does provide general knowledge and sets the background for the origins of the modern day scientific approach.
Until I read this, I thought that, educationally, Georgia, Oklahoma and Kansas were the most backward states.