Glenn Branch writes here about four states that introduced bills to prohibit teachers from “indoctrinating” their students: Arizona, Maine, South Dakota, and Virginia.
This is a solution in search of a problem, he says.
Despite efforts to pretend otherwise, the real targets here are evolution and climate change.
Any state that passes a law requiring teachers to present “both sides” would be compelling them to teach in defiance of the state’s science standards.
Among scientists, these are not controversial issues.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You don’t think that it’ important to teach both sides of the debate on human reproduction–the sex education theory and the storks are brought by babies theory?
LikeLike
“‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides.” Lol.
LikeLike
And, of course, it’s also important to teach both sides of the round Earth/flat Earth debate. I mean, what if the flat Earthers are right and our Navy’s ships were to sail off the edge of the world?
LikeLike
That’s great, Bob.
Let’s think of some other settled issues that might be debated.
LikeLike
I like your idea of debating whether storks bring babies. And I guffawed at the idea that a ship might sail so far that it would be in danger of falling off the earth because the earth is flat.
Debate topic: is the moon made of green cheese?
LikeLike
Well, there is the question of whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice versa. And whether the Big Bang occurred. And whether Jesus appears on people’s toast.
LikeLike
My favorite: When lunchroom workers found the face of the Virgin Mary on a pizza made in school.
LikeLike
I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for folks who do this kind of thing. Yeah, I know that it’s pareidolia, but . . . .
LikeLike
“Is the moon made of green cheese?”
If you watched the noted documentary “Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out” you would know what a dumb question that is. Of course not. It’s made of Wensleydale, Stilton, and other delectable cheeses! Jeesh! Or perhaps I should write, Cheesh!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Years ago, McDougal, Littell, then still a small, privately owned company, did a health textbook. They put a lot of money into developing this and stood to earn that back and make a decent profit if it were adopted in Texas. But Texas rejected the book. Why? Well, it contained the line “Humans and other mammals lactate.” The folks in Texas were quite disturbed by the reference to this bodily function of lactation, but what really, really bothered them was the suggestion that humans were mammals. Animals. LOL. I will never forget how Fred McDougal spoke to the assembled editors and told them (I am paraphrasing here), well, we can’t take too many hits like that, but as long as I am running this company, we are going to do what is right by teachers and students. And that includes telling the truth.
LikeLike
This is why we need Trump’s Space Force. To stake our sovereign right to those Wensleydale moon mountains.
LikeLike
Please don’t forget that Trump and Pence have agreed to spend hundreds of millions or billions on returning to the moon, a feat achieved 50 years ago. This is really “back to the past.”
LikeLike
Clearly, Diane, you haven’t tried Wensleydale, or you wouldn’t be so disparaging.
LikeLike
Maybe that’s why Pence wants to go back to the moon. He likes cheese.
LikeLike
Thanks, Bob I needed the laugh.
LikeLike
You mean, storks DON’T deliver babies? Is that really true???
LikeLike
Well, some babies grow in cabbage patches.
LikeLike
When I was a child, my parents taught me that storks deliver babies. As an adult, I gave birth to three children and I didn’t see any storks.
LikeLike
If the world were flat cats would have rolled everything off its edge by now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, that is proof positive. My cat would definitely have tossed everything off the edge of the flat earth. Thanks for the laugh!
LikeLiked by 1 person
The irony of this debate is that the fundamentalist position is based on an empirical approach to textual analysis. Protestant reactions to church dogma produced the reformation. Fundamentalist reaction to science in the early part of the twentieth century was based on the only logic of American Protestantism, the literal interpretation of the text. Interestingly, people can be pretty good scientists and still believe in a god-guided universe. They can function quite well as doctors and lawyers. What they cannot do is to look at the issue of human evolution from a point of view removed from themselves, a condition that precludes them from examining evolution dispassionately, from the standpoint of the true empiricist.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Beautifully observed, Roy. Certainly, it is possible for people to hold views traditionally described as religious or spiritual that are consistent with contemporary science. We’ve moved far beyond the Lucretian/ Laplacian view of a deterministic, billiard-ball universe of atoms and the void. Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford argues convincingly that we are living in a simulation. Alan Guth, one of the foremost cosmologists alive today, describes in his book The Inflationary Universe how beings with sufficiently advanced technologies might create a universe. The quantum physicist and expert on perception Donald Hoffman is just one of many leading scientists who has embraced an anti-materialist view of the universe. Here, a few pieces I’ve written on this subject:
LikeLike
Found the book on Amazon, Roy. It looks like a great read. https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Babel-Evidence-Creationism-Bradford/dp/0262661659#reader_0262661659
LikeLike
Wonderful comment, Roy, as usual. You always teach me something important. The book most influential on my thinking on this subject is Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Although I’ve posted this before, here is an excerpt of my notes on the book:
[T]he one thing that makes this book so special to me is Sagan’s connection of science to the civic education and engagement that is required of citizens in the modern world, which are essential if we are to be free. I think it worth quoting the final paragraph of this, the last book he wrote in his life, something he wrote when he knew had, at best, a few short months to live. These are quite literally the last public words of the greatest scientific communicator who has ever lived:
“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen—or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
LikeLike
I insert here that you guys are talking about theories, like Big-Bangish theoreies, while the roundness of the Earth and evolution are facts. Evolution theory is, like other scientific theories, debatable but there is enough proof to claim that the basic idea is correct. We see it working every day when we are worried about new strains of bacteria developing as a result of overuse of antibiotics.
LikeLike
I thought the Big Bang Theory was a TV show about an obnoxious know it all.
And now I learn it’s actually about science?
LikeLike
Mate: I cannot resist a comment on the idea of theory vs. fact. I was taught that theory is actually that part of a scientific process that makes mental analogies, often pictorial, to explain physically observed realities. The problem with calling evolution theory a theory is that it is not, nor was it ever, such a mental process. Rather, it is an attempt to describe a whole body of theoretical and hypothetical thought that arrives at a scientific description that would more resemble a law. It is not, however, like Boyle’s law and other famous laws that are able to be suggested in the form of an equation.
LikeLike
Darwinism has two parts, Evolution and Evolution theory. Evolution did happen, so it’s a fact, while Evolution theory is, well, a theory. Yeah, it is not as exact (or as rigorous) as physics, but it is as close to being as exact as, say, molecular biology, and so it predicts events successfully.
You are correct, while math formulas do occur in evulution theory (like probabilstic and statistical formulas), the conclusions of the theory are not arrived at just by plugging into formulas.
It’s also true, more generally, that many things which are called science, are not yet that. Like talking about the “science of education” I think is a mistake, and makes people take VAM and friends too seriously.
LikeLike
Evolution is a conspiracy theory: Apes conspiring to be humans
LikeLike
The Evolution Conspiracy
When monkeys did resolve
To humans to evolve
Conspiracy
Was born to be
And Alex Jones involve
LikeLike
I thought Alex Jones does prove the linkage to apes.
LikeLike
There is, ofc, no actual informed “debate” about whether humans evolved or whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring. And pretending that there is a debate is dangerous. One cannot understand much of modern biology and other fields without having a grasp of evolutionary principles, and climate change imperils us all. The bizarre thing about the climate change issue is that the mechanism causing climate change can be demonstrated with a fourth-grade science fair experiment. Climate change denial is willful ignorance.
LikeLike
Actually, there is plenty of debate on both; among scientists. Every time a new fossil is found the discover claims that they have found the direct link in the branches of hominids. So the debate is about which branches of the tree lead to which other branches. No debate exists as to the existence of the tree.
Similarly, Climate scientists have huge debates about how much carbon added to the atmosphere will cause catastrophic climate change for a planet billion humans 7.5 billion people. Some of which like the things in the White House it is generous to call man.
The debate among climate scientists is not that the IPCC has overestimated the threat but that it has underestimated it, with more and potentially irreversible damage being done sooner than thought.
LikeLike
Well said, Joel. But ofc the debates are not about whether evolution occurs or whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring.
LikeLike
Edit: for a planet billion of 7.5 billion people.
LikeLike
There is, for example, the debate about where, exactly, Orange Lacquer Man, aka Homo ignorans, fits on this tree. This is why Trump’s DNA needs to be made public.
LikeLike
Here’s what I wrote, Joel: “There is, ofc, no actual informed ‘debate’ about whether humans evolved or whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring. “
LikeLike
This is all an attempt by the wacko religious right to get rid of the line between church and state. Brought to you be the same people that want “In God We Trust” on the door of every public school.
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/the-plot-against-america-inside-the-christian-right-plan-to-remodel-the-nation/
LikeLike
The right wing Christians should climb into a time capsule and go back to the Scopes Trial. Science is real!
LikeLike
I’d say, reality is what’s real, not what’s in the Biblical one.
Preachers are often excellent speakers, and if you listen to them every Sunday, your view of reality might change.
Smart (and honest) preachers know where the boundary of science and religion is, and they do not cross over: about the workings of the world, the what and how questions are answered by science, and the why questions are open to religion to answer. As far as science goes, the universe has no purpose while religion cannot accept that.
LikeLike
I’d say, reality is what’s real, not what’s described in the Bible.
LikeLike
Many worlds
Who’s to say what’s real?
And who’s to say what’s fake?
The Many Worlds appeal
Is “everything’s at stake”
LikeLike
I really wish physicists would stop interpreting their comclusions in everyday language. They are all false equivalences, but outsiders don’t know that, so they make up fairy tales.
LikeLike
Sean Carroll on Many Worlds interpretation of QM
Starts at 1:33
Very strange
LikeLike
LikeLike
Great acting! 🙂
LikeLike
I may have shared this story before, so please forgive me if I did. A few years ago I had a conversation with a good friend who is also one of the world’s top cancer researchers, very apolitical, diplomatic, and careful in his choice of words when making pronouncements or recommendations. I asked him if he would ever accept a research fellow who graduated from Liberty (Jerry Falwell) or Regent (Pat Robertson) universities. After much hemming and hawing, he said no. When I asked him why, he answered, “because they fundamentally don’t understand the scientific method.” The concept of evolution is grounded in the scientific method. If you don’t understand that, you can’t be taken seriously in any scientific endeavor.
For example, the hard part of cancer research is to defeat the “smart” cells; the “dumber” ones are fairly easy to eradicate with today’s treatments. And as cells are exposed longer to treatments, they figure out ways to get around it. A little more than a decade ago, the first genetically targeted drug treatment, commercially known as Gleevec, pretty much changed the landscape when it was shown to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). It could treat CML with the poison of chemotherapy, which is the next frontier of cancer treatment. CML was pretty much a sure death sentence for those diagnosed with it. But it is also, in theory, the easiest cancer to treat because it is caused by one easily identified genetic mutation, known as the Philadelphia chromosome. Gleevec stops the mechanism of that mutation. So people with CML started living without any symptoms, but they had to keep taking Gleevec. There is no way to sustain its action once one stops taking it. Now that the drug has been around for awhile, in many patients it is becoming less effective because the genetic mutation is learning how to “get around” the drug. There is now a great deal of research to figure out how to stop these reactions. This is a great example of how evolution works in cancer.
It all came home to me at a cancer patient meeting last year. One of the presenters, a disciple of my friend, noted how cancer cells evolved to resist treatment. The stronger strains survive and thrive, the weaker ones are affected by chemotherapy and other treatments. At the end of the meeting, one of the attendees stated that the meeting was wonderful, but didn’t understand why we had to bring evolution into the conversation. If these bills are successful, I expect we’ll get more comments like this in the future. Unfortunately, they won’t understand that the mechanisms and conditions that allow cancer cells to evolve are not politically oriented.
LikeLike
Thank you, Greg, for that perfect example of the dangerousness of this anti-intellectualism!!!
LikeLike
“without the poison of chemotherapy”
LikeLike
Now you can feel my pain. The only advantage of Facebook is unlimited edits. Which after 2 attempts usually corrects my errors.
But back to the topic at hand. A Pew survey reveals that the majority of Americans for the first time now identify as nonbelievers vs Evangelicals or Catholics. From my standpoint as an unrepentant atheist, not a bad thing. Yet I have my doubts about whether it is necessarily a good thing.
LikeLike
As one who is like-minded, albeit not unrepentant—I just keep it quiet—I agree with your conclusion. If believers and atheists could live by the ethics espoused in the New Testament, we could definitely all get along.
LikeLike
“At the end of the meeting, one of the attendees stated that the meeting was wonderful, but didn’t understand why we had to bring evolution into the conversation.” I’m hoping that was a fluke & not the type of comment we can “expect to see more of”! Fits right into the flat earth and green cheese thread above. Makes as much sense as complaining that multiplication was brought into a discussion of division. Wait—perhaps division is controversial too! The Bible said “Go forth and multiply.”
LikeLike
I always interpreted “Go fourth and multiply” as 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24…
LikeLike
““Go forth and multiply.””
That’s such a typical Biblical advice: no specificity. What is the factor of multiplication, what should be multiplied, should perhaps everything multiply? And why go forth, and where? Can’t we just multiply right here or back there?
LikeLike
Go forth and multiply”
“Please go forth and multiply”
Said God the mathematician
“And figure out the end of Pi
A transcendental mission”
LikeLike
Which brings up the important question: Is Pi flat or round? The Bible seems silent on this problem. Another important question: can a mathematician circumnavigate Pi or is she doomed to see new vistas till the end of times?
LikeLike
Pi
It’s top is flat
But edge is round
Like topper hat
And Puget sound
And Pi is best
If eaten hot
Although the rest
Will hit the spot
LikeLike
Maybe you have done this with your students, but when I taught high school (mainly Euclidean) geometry, I used to spend a couple days having the students making circles and triangles on volleyballs with string. One of the things I asked them to do was determine the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter with different radius circles.
The students were always quite surprised to learn that it did not come out equal to Pi for the curved surface and that it actually varied depending on the radius of the circle (getting closer to pi as the size of the circle shrunk down)
As I am sure you are well aware, Einstein appreciated early on that this relationship could be used (in principle, at least) to determine whether our universe is flat or curved.
LikeLike
“Which brings up the important question: Is Pi flat or round?” NY-style is both, thanks to thin crust.
LikeLike
Weaponizing disinformation in the schools.
LikeLike
Here is a review of legal cases since 1968, all dealing with the teaching of evolution, “intelligent design theory,” creationism. https://ncse.com/library-resource/ten-major-court-cases-evolution-creationism
Pushers of “intelligent design” are still active and they are working hard to challenge schools that fail to forward religious belief as if science or “teach the controversy.”. http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org
Across the river in Kentucky we have the Ark Encounter and a Creation Museum. This link takes you to a fairly comprehensive review of the intersection of politics, money and religion enabling this “tourist attraction” which also sent free tickets to many school districts. Last I heard, Ken Ham, the point person for the ARK project was suing the National Park Service officials in charge of the Grand Canyon. Someone had denied him the right to collect some samples of earth intended to help him support the “young earth” theory promoted at the ARK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_Encounter
LikeLike
What makes the design intelligent? We should call it fake news and move on. The right wing seeks to impose fake news on young people. If this is their goal, they should keep it in their church, not in anything to do with the government. We would be the laughing stock of the world as a nation.
LikeLike
Would be?
LikeLike
I feel confident that the answer to that test question is: IS!!!
My friends in Europe have given up on us and we have no moral (or any word you want to choose) anymore. American exceptionalism is purely a mythical delusion among delusional Americans.
LikeLike
“American exceptionalism is purely a mythical delusion among delusional Americans.”
It always was.
LikeLike
speduktr, to put it in my best New Orleanian, “We tight, babe!”
LikeLike
TWIST the TRUTH. Good grief.
If any of you read my last comment to Diane’s previous post, you will get what I mean.
I was asked to be DECEITFUL. What I didn’t write is that because I refuse to be DECEITFUL, I am being blamed by the person who asked me to be DECEITFUL. HUH? MORE DRAMA and so Trump-like, too.
LikeLike
Several years ago there was a book published called Tower of Babel in which the author discussed the disagreement among the people who questioned evolutionary science. It is still a good read.
It is also worth noting that fundamentalist Islam questions evolution theory as well as fundamentalist Christianity.
LikeLike
Here’s the thing about science, as opposed to dogma. Science evolves. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) put forward absolutes. It puts forward falsifiable propositions. A set of related falsifiable propositions becomes a theory. And that theory is always susceptible to revision in light of the discovery of anomalies not consistent with the theory and the development of new ideas that incorporate, with modifications, the older ones, subsuming them. Religion gives us unchanging law. Science gives us evolving understandings. For example, epigenetics is now revolutionizing the grand synthesis that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when Darwinian natural selection theory was wedded to Mendelian genetics. It turns out that some acquired characteristics are inherited. That’s pretty big news!!! Ofc, science is also subject to periods of dogmatism (e.g., Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, Eurgenics and Behaviorism in the US), but those are aberrations, and it’s not supposed to work that way. Even as great a scientist as Albert Einstein had to await to potential falsification, based on observations of light bending around the sun during an eclipse, of his theory that matter warps the space/time around it. Humility is baked into the process.
LikeLike
“Religion gives us unchanging law.” Not so sure about that. Perhaps religion seeks to establish beliefs about spiritual matters, something poetic as opposed to logical. I will chew on it a bit.
LikeLike
I was referring to religious dogma, which by definition is supposed to be unchanging–expressions of eternal truths. I was trying, perhaps unsuccessfully, to contrast the two approaches to making sense of the world.
LikeLike
But the fact that species evolve is settled science, based on several convergent, mutually reinforcing lines of evidence–breeding experiments, comparative morphological studies of living and extinct creatures, and comparison of genetic sequences. What exactly that means–how it works–is continually being refined by new studies, some of which–those epigenetics studies, for example–require revolutionary modifications in the theory. In his autobiography Naturalist, E.O. Wilson describes going off to college from a fundamentalist Christian background and then actually learning the sciences involved in evolutionary theory and recognizing that there simply isn’t a question, any more, about whether species evolve. Even the Catholic church has finally caved to the overwhelming evidence of this.
LikeLike
Fundamentalist Jews (ultra Orthodox) have extreme views as well. At present, certain of their communities are at the center of the measles epidemic because they think vaccines are a government plot against them.
LikeLike
I think theses are simply revivals of an older, more generic ALEC bill that was originally designed for higher ed.
https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Academic_Bill_of_Rights_for_Public_Higher_Education_Exposed
My faculty senate about 2 years ago passed such a resolution at the request of our univ president. So it wasn’t even required by the legislation.
These antiindocrination “Academic Bill of Rights” making their way everywhere.
LikeLike
It’s very simple why we prefer the scientific method over the religious one when it comes to explain the world: the scientific method is much more successful. If it says when something will happen, it does happen then, when it says, it will work this way, it does work that way. The Bible doesn’t have such precise power to predict.
This is why it’s curious why ultrapragmatist billionaires, always in search of success, attack science. Even the nonreligious Kochs are strange: they should know from long history that in the long run, their money is better invested climate-friendly businesses. Every single fight against the results of science lost. No exceptions. The Koch industries will fall apart, if they insist on not evolving, but sticking with relying on the old fossil fuel business.
LikeLike
The second law of thermodynamics:
No free Koch (or Pepsi, either)
LikeLike
Lemme calculate the entropy of the Kochs… yes, the prediction was correct, they are getting colder by the minute, and they will soon disappear in a black hole.
LikeLike