Archive for January 9th, 2009

This kind of crap gets my blood boiling. Here is the text of what these creatards in Mississippi are trying to get put into textbooks, courtesy of House Bill 25:

The word ‘theory’ has many meanings, including: systematically organized knowledge; abstract reasoning; a speculative idea or plan; or a systematic statement of principles. Scientific theories are based on both observations of the natural world and assumptions about the natural world. They are always subject to change in view of new and confirmed observations.

This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things. No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered a theory.

Evolution refers to the unproven belief that random, undirected forces produced living things. There are many topics with unanswered questions about the origin of life which are not mentioned in your textbook, including: the sudden appearance of the major groups of animals in the fossil record (known as the Cambrian Explosion); the lack of new major groups of other living things appearing in the fossil record; the lack of transitional forms of major groups of plants and animals in the fossil record; and the complete and complex set of instructions for building a living body possessed by all living things.

Study hard and keep an open mind.

I’m all for keeping an open mind, just don’t open it so much that your brain falls out. The creationists just won’t quit trying to shove their mythology-based life views on the rest of us. They just love to try to twist the meanings of words and ideas to fit their narrow viewpoint. Take their explanation of theory; makes it sound all nebulous and up in the air doesn’t it? However, according to the United States National Academy of Sciences,

Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena.

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not “guesses” but reliable accounts of the real world. The theory of biological evolution is more than “just a theory.” It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact.

Now this is a little closer to reality than their interpretation.

If all this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. They tried the same thing in Cobb County, GA and Dover, PA. They got smacked down both times. Let’s work to make sure this attempt gets the attention it deserves. vjack has posted information on who to contact to make your voice heard before this kind of insanity gets pushed into law. We can’t let even our backward brothers in Mississippi fall through the cracks