Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
Published online 16 April 2008 | 452, 796 (2008) | doi:10.1038/452796c
News in Brief
Evolution supporters unhappy with Florida bill
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
If this bill passes, I would like to see science teachers in Florida teach about evolution, then spend just a little time on the Flying Spaghetti Monster as an alternative view. Students complain to parents, parents complain to principals and school boards, teacher shows them the law.
After 2,000 years here we are. Now that people can't remember the horrors of the dark-ages they think religion is all about feeding hungry people and "educating" the youth. Let me let you in on something really obvious: religion thrives on ignorance, without stupidity it would become obsolete. If this is the future (i.e., the past) of humanity, I want no part of it. Hopefully before I die I can sit on the roof of my house and watch intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads pass each other like two ships in the night. I would be willing to die for that. Oh yea, and in case this isn't equally obvious, it is only what we can't explain YET that is attributed to god. But let's just forget it. Anything we can't figure out right now we'll just come up with some B.S. reason for. To hell with cause and effect. To hell with reality. Instead of gravity, I vote for little invisible pink elves that hold us to the earth.
I think it is counter-productive to call people of faith stupid. When you do, you cement the elitist attitude fundamentalists claim you possess. A more productive avenue is to make people opposed to the theory of evolution present peer reviewed proof for their alternate opinions. The fact is, no such evidence exist. A common misconception in this discussion fundamentalists cling to, is that disproving evolution somehow proves their opinion correct. Fortunately (or unfortunately in their case) science does not work like that. Each new theory has to stand on its own merits. Simply saying that God did it, proves and explains nothing. Furthermore, teachers seeking to present alternate views to the scientific theory of evolution should be required to show evidence for their alternate views. These views should not be allowed until said teacher has presented his/her alternate view before an approved board of scientists for peer review and has been approved. Let's see if the Florida legislature has the integrity to require evidence for any alternative opinions teachers so fervently want to present. This is a bad bill and I suspect that it will eventually be struck down by the courts, after all, a precedent exists in the Dover v. Fitzmiller case, PA 2005.
While ID and other creationists use a rhetorical approach to debunk evolution and advocate divine intervention in the physical process of evolution and the origin of life, their fundamental assumption is that the Old Testament is accurate in a literal sense (irrespective of its inconsistencies) or that because an airtight explanation for the origin of life does not exist, God must be the causative agent. No amount of scientific peer-review can be of any use to anyone here. Based on my interaction with students and teachers in Texas, I do not think the approaches taken by Dawkins or Sagan or others does science much good in this politico-religious argument. Since it is a political argument, American scientists must be much more actively engaged in grassroots politics where this “war†is being waged. Akif Uzman, Ph.D. University of Houston-Downtown
I would like to congratulate John Coffee for his moderate, fact-based line of argumentation, and Akif Uzman (or Amy Slater - whoever posted this comment) for his/her sense of reality. Keeping an open-minded approach, I would at first tolerate that ID/creationism be taught in religion classes. However, this would obviously lead to confusion in the minds of young students, and would reinforce the long-standing conflict between biology and faith. Can't we just teach our students that who we are, where we are from, and where we are heading to, are fundamental philosophical questions that humankind have been struggling with for the past thousand years, and that humans invented faith to answer these burning questions so as to reassure tehmselves (without making any judgements)? Would that be acceptable to creationists/ID proponents? To my fellow who have faith: please stay away from science classes, whose knowledge is based on facts, demonstrations, and proofs. In this respect, the theory of evolution has solidly stood the test of time. Unfortunately for creationists/ID proponents, their theories (or, rather, hypotheses) do not live up to the experimental challenge. Jean-Francois Leblanc