Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Evolution education, Jindal and the election

There is an interesting piece on the "Science Education Act" in Louisiana in the New Scientist (see New legal threat to school science in the US ). by Amanda Gefter. This act seems to be designed to "lip ID in "through the back door" and is promoting itself as a bill for "Academic Freedom" Personally, I am all for academic freedom, including the ability to study and discuss all sorts of controversial things. However, it is clear this is not what the bill is really about. It is about teaching religion as science. The New Scientist reports
"Supporters of the new law clearly hope that teachers and administrators who wish to raise alternatives to evolution in science classes will feel protected if they do so. The law expressly permits the use of "supplemental" classroom materials in addition to state-approved textbooks. The LFF is now promoting the use of online "add-ons" that put a creationist spin on the contents of various science texts in use across the state, and the Discovery Institute has recently produced Explore Evolution, a glossy text that offers the standard ID critiques of evolution (see "The evolution of creationist literature"). Unlike its predecessor Of Pandas and People, which fared badly during the Dover trial, it does not use the term "intelligent design"."
All I can say is that if McCain picks Bobby Jindal (the governor of LA and supporter of this bill) as his running mate it will be the ultimate proof that McCain is no longer the independent thinker he used to be and is instead a complete tool of others.

It is worth reading this article if you care about science education.

3 comments:

  1. Did you catch the article in the New York Times Magazine last week about Rush Limbaugh? Apparently Jindal is his personal choice to lead the next generation of conservatives.

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  2. I just saw him on the cover and have not even opened the magazine. Not sure I want to go down that path

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's mostly a puff piece: little insight and mostly positive. I'll save you the trouble of reading the whole thing by sharing the scariest part: among the top six items on his agenda if he were running the country was "Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming."

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