The Yorkshire Atheist

Creationists and Biology Classes

There has been something troubling me for quite some time now, you keep hearing these stories about school boards being petitioned to include ID in science classes as an alternative to evolution; my question is, why are the school boards even listening to these people? Let me explain why I ask this question with an example:

I can speak about 6 words in Spanish, should I be allowed to influence the curriculum in Spanish lessons? Of course I shouldn’t be allowed, do you know who should be allowed to influence the curriculum? The people who actually know something about the damn subject. All these school board panels need to do is ask several professionals in the field of biology if there is or is not a debate regarding the validity of ID in science…then quickly proceed to tell these ID petitioners to go fuck themselves. 

Unless you are a biologist, you have no right to influence what is taught in a biology class regardless of if your children learn the subject or not. While you’re at it do you want to petition the school board to alter the maths curriculum to teach that 2 + 2 = 5?

Evolution Denial…

In the UK the theory of evolution seems to be fairly well accepted by most, however in the US there seems to be a very different story. I subscribe to many American news feeds and blogs and am constantly seeing stories regarding the acceptance of evolution, for example, a study published in the journal “Science” showed that over the last 20 years acceptance of the validity of evolution fell from 45% to 40%. Of 34 nations in the developed world only Turkey showed a higher level of disbelief.

It is an extremely worrying idea that the worlds biggest super-power has such misgivings regarding the validity of science, and apparently, that this vast nation has such poor education standards. You may think that the statement regarding education standards is jumping to conclusions however I would say any nation that cannot demonstrate, through its educational system, the validity of one of the most studied, tested and evidence backed theories in existence does not have a good education system.

Aside from the worrying prospect of a global super-power not teaching proper science to its youth, why is this an issue; in day to day life evolution doesn’t effect us much (other than the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria/virus’), so why do I care, and more importantly why should you care?

The main reason I care is simple…I care about what is true, I don’t believe it is a good idea to just accept and dismiss facts as we please to try and fit our pre-existing world view, and surely this is something we should all care about.

Unfortunately it seems to me that in the US much education policy is driven around what people want to believe as opposed to what science has shown to be true (I will address the validity of evolution in later posts), I am primarily referring to the whole “teach the debate” concept where several school boards in America have come to the conclusion that Intelligent Design (ID) should be taught in science classes as an alternative to evolution. For those of you who are unaware; there is no debate in the scientific community regarding this, no genuine scientific bodies spend time studying the validity of ID, why? because there is no reason to, ID is not a scientific theory but a religious concept that has no place in a classroom, teaching the theory evolution and ID as if they were on an equal footing is dishonest and potentially harmful in terms of science education.

Some may ask, how is allowing children to decide which concept they believe is more valid harmful? the reason this could be harmful in terms of science education is because science doesn’t work like that, in science you do not listen to two possible theories* and then arbitrarily pick the one you prefer; in science you examine the evidence, you develop experiments to provide further evidence for and against each theory, experiments are replicated to ensure all results are consistent, results are reviewed to ensure that experimenter bias and data manipulation has not occurred; ID has not undergone this process and therefore should not be taught as an equivalent to evolution, to do so is to give an incorrect view as to how the scientific method works, in science education this is extremely harmful.

*ID is not actually a scientific theory, so when I mention “two theories” I am not necessarily referring to evolution and ID.