Q: What's the matter with Kansas?
A: This.
It's not just legislators pressuring teachers not to teach evolution--it's students. Students being used by religious organizations, that is. Students being given copies of "The ten questions to ask your biology teacher" and told to have at it. (It sounds pretty solid, yes? No, it takes a lot more than the old Archaeopteryx argument to impress this biology nerd. A good refutation of the ten questions can be found here, if you are interested.)
This is a good example of why it's so ridiculous for the religious right to whine about being "persecuted". I am not so far removed from high school, so believe me when I say that nobody is *required* to learn about evolution: you can get a parents' note and "opt out", just as you might opt out of sex education. But that's not good enough for them. It's not only that they don't want their children learning about evolution--they don't want your children to learn about it either.
posted by Marie Antoinette at 7:30 PM
3 Comments:
Isn't that the problem with conservatives, narrow-minded people all over the world - they want to establish their ideas over everybody!!
Jah, and not even sensible ideas.
Talkorigins covered it waaaaay better than I ever could. My main beefs with the 10 questions are
1. They're lumping abiogenesis in with ordinary evolution. This is like equating a partial birth abortion done at eight months with the Plan B pill.
2. He thinks that gaps in the fossil record completely debunk the entire theory of evolution and
3. Evolution is not taught as a fact, it's taught as a theory. My gawd, this probably results in 2/3rds of all homicides carried out by biologists.
I don't care that they're asking questions about evolution. I think that's great. My problem is that they're being *lazy* about it. They're asking some other guy's pre-printed questions instead of reading the material and coming up with their own questions.
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