quote: ATLANTA, Jan. 13 -- A federal judge on Thursday ordered the immediate removal of stickers placed in high school biology textbooks by school officials in suburban Cobb County that call evolution "a theory, not a fact," saying they were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.
"Adopted by the school board, funded by the money of taxpayers, and inserted by school personnel, the sticker conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others they are political insiders," U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said in his 44-page ruling.
Some parents of students and the American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the stickers in court, arguing that they violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
"This is a great day for Cobb County students," said attorney Michael Manely, who represented the parents who brought the lawsuit. "They're going to be permitted to learn science unadulterated by religious dogma."
School board members said in a written statement that they the stickers are an "evenhanded guide to science instruction" and encourage students to be "critical thinkers." They had not decided whether to appeal. A board spokesman said no decision had been made on when, or if, the stickers that were placed on the books in 2002 will be removed.
I'm wondering if the school board actually cares about this - I bet at least some of them voted for the stickers merely to appease some voters. Now, with a court loss, they can please their voters and not worry about it any more.
My prediction: If this is appealed to SCOTUS, and they take it, the decision will be overturned.
posted
after seeing the text of the stickers, I don't quite understand why it was not allowed. They didn't say that evolution was not true, just that it is a theory (which every book I have read called it "the theory of evolution") and that people should think critically...which is what school should always encourage.
Posts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
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posted
The stickers singled out evolution of all scientific theories, and were rather deceptive as to what a theory was.
The sticker forgot to mention that Germ Theory, Atomic Theory, and Gravity were theories, too, and should be approached with an open mind and critically considered.
The sticker also neglected to mention that there was a Law of Evolution, too.
The sticker allowed many people to say, "Well, evolution is just a theory" and point to the sticker as evidence, without actually understanding what a theory was.
It didn't lie, perse...in the same way that Moore never actually lied.
[ January 13, 2005, 11:33 PM: Message edited by: HRE ]
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posted
I think the stickers were ridiculous. Every good science book for high schoolers and below should have an introduction that defines "theory," and the content should contain frank discussions of which part of the theory is generally firm and which is still speculative. Singling out one portion of the book is silly.
But, I don't think this is a job for the courts, because it's more about bad science than religion.
posted
I'm generally among the most fanatic seperation of church and state advocates, but the removal of the sticker seems to say that if you believe in religion you are wrong. I certainly don't think that creationism should be taught in schools alongside of evolution, but evolution is just a theory that happens to be supported by facts.
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posted
Part of what he relied on was the stickers saying evolution was a theory, but not a fact. Saying evolution is not a fact is a falsehood, there are instances of evolution that are observed, whether or not you agree with the theory as a whole (not that there is a single theory of evolution, there are several competing ones).
Also, intent does matter, particularly when determining church/state separation. The intent (and effect, as at least one science teacher testified to) was to undermine the teaching of evolution, understanding of which is laid down as part of the curriculum, in favor of a religious perspective.
edit to make clear: that is, evolution is a theory, but it is also a fact.
posted
That evolution occurs is a fact. It has been observed in laboratory conditions. The theories involve such things as its mechanism and how it began. That's what is meant by "theory of evolution". That it happens at all is not a theory.
So the bumper sticker is stupid. But then, so are most bumper stickers. That doesn't mean the Supreme Court should have any say here.
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posted
Oh, and the phrase "regarding the origin of living things" at best is misleading, and based on what I've read about the trial seems to be intended in the sense that is false.
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posted
Evolution isn't even the only non-religious theory (non-scientific definition). We think that's how humans arose, but it can't be proved and just like humans were wrong about the shape and motion of the earth we could be wrong about evolution as well. I don't think the "evolution is theory, not a fact" stickers need to be there if this sentiment is at least explained when the textbook explains what theories are. I just think its not the purpose of schools to say that religious beliefs are just plain wrong.
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posted
The likelihood of being wrong about the basics of evolution is along the lines of the likelihood of being wrong about the basics of quantum mechanics.
Unlike the flat earth "theory" (which hasn't been considered reasonably possible by the scientific community since the ancient greeks, several thousand years ago, and as science didn't really exist before then, has never really been even a vague approximation of a scientific theory), evolution has millions of data points which are in agreement with it.
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posted
I am glad more attention is being paid to what's actually been proven, though. My biology textbooks presented the "lightning striking the primordial soup" theory of life's beginning as something that had been proven.
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posted
Because religion is all in the mind! I don't mean to be insulting here, I'm saying faith is a mental or spiritual phenomenon. So stickers intended to attack a perceived competitor to religion are different from stickers intended to encourage critical thinking.
Edit : Jeesh, ninjamatic typing! This was to mph.
[ January 13, 2005, 11:51 PM: Message edited by: King of Men ]
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posted
Verily, these were not bumper stickers, although I still agree with you. I misread the title at first too.
HRE, Who cares about being deceptive? If I remember my high school history textbooks with reasonable accuracy, the US never committed a single immoral act outside its borders. These are only stickers. All the teacher has to do is state who made the stickers, without inserting any opinion, and explain the scientific definition of theory with perhaps a little more emphasis than before. If the kids cannot figure out the rest for themselves, they will probably just take whichever belief that feels right anyway. As far as Christianity based on the Bible (without Apocrypha) and an omnipotent God goes, I heard the thousand years/one day explanation quite early, and not too long after that figured out the "God back-dated the stars, dinosaurs, etc." on my own.
I thought biology was generally taught by itself over a year, so no reason to mention Atomic or Gravity theories. Evolutionists should be allowed to place their own stickers that say, "So is Germ Theory".
nfl, I do not think it states that, although it could easily be said to imply it, and highly suspect that played a part in why it was brought there. I am making the hopefully correct assumption that the court did not use this reasoning in its decision. Still, it is no worse than the people who put it there, just the opposite side. They should have made their own factually correct sticker that did not technically endorse a religious belief or lack thereof.
mph, neither do I. Facts, no matter how misleading, should not be suppressed in this manner, although the special interest group should have to pay for all costs related to the stickers. Nor should the teachers be required to mention them.
posted
This decision isn't going to help the persecution complex of the people who pushed for the stickers.
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quote: As far as Christianity based on the Bible (without Apocrypha) and an omnipotent God goes, I heard the thousand years/one day explanation quite early, and not too long after that figured out the "God back-dated the stars, dinosaurs, etc." on my own.
Are you saying that you believe that God created the Earth in a certain time period, but then for some reason made it appear that the "stars, dinosaurs, etc." were older than they actually are? If so, doesn't this belief make God a liar? Would that not mean that he created beings with intelligence and then put them in a world he specifically designed to deceive them?
Or have I misunderstood what you meant entirely?
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posted
I think the removal of the stickers is an outrage that cannot be borne. Our students deserve to have these warnings to alert them that the contents of their textbooks, books they would otherwise trust as infallible sources of knowledge, may have been written with an anti-religious agenda.
Also, I had already started designing the "Yeah, but Intelligent Design is just silly" textbook stickers I was going to sell and make millions.
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posted
If evolution wasn’t presented as fact the stickers wouldn’t be needed. Since evolution is a theory and can not be proven the stickers are needed. Why and how the stickers violate the separation of church and state is pure insanity.
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quote: If evolution wasn’t presented as fact the stickers wouldn’t be needed. Since evolution is a theory and can not be proven the stickers are needed.
Jay, I'm afraid you're speaking from ignorance, here.
The stickers are "needed" because some Christians feel useless unless they can grandstand about persecution.
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quote: Jay, I'm afraid you're speaking from ignorance, here.
The stickers are "needed" because some Christians feel useless unless they can grandstand about persecution.
No Tom, you would be the ignorant one here. The idea that “Christians” want these so they can grandstand shows your bias. The religion of evolution has prevailed in the courts and has become the religion of the state. For them to be able to teach evolution as fact to undermine people of faith is horrible. I doubt many Jews, Muslims, or any other faiths (other the humanism) would like idea of facts being presented that we descended from apes. Especially since it is just a theory. So Tom, as you point your ignorant finger at me, enjoy the three others points back at you.
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posted
I suggest to burn all this scientists who wrote many and many books on this satan idea of... berk ! "evolution" and clam have evidences. What a joke. And we may burn all this evil books !
posted
Actually, didn't the "Evolutionists" lose the Scopes Monkey trial? I guess that would mean that technically the evolutionists did not prevail.
There are plenty of folks self-identifying from all those faiths that have no problem believing that evolution is a real mechanism. After all, evolution is an answer to a "How?" question, not a "Why?" question.
And certain sub-groups of Christianity (and Judaism, and Islam, and New Age/Wicca, and Buddhism, etc.) have been known to grandstand quite a bit.
quote: The sticker forgot to mention that Germ Theory, Atomic Theory, and Gravity were theories, too, and should be approached with an open mind and critically considered.
I thought gravity was a law.
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posted
If evolution has only been observed in the laboratory, that actually suggests intelligent design. Also anti-biotic resistance is the direct result of man's interference. One could even say it about those moths that are caused by industrial soot.
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posted
"The idea that 'Christians' want these so they can grandstand shows your bias. The religion of evolution has prevailed in the courts and has become the religion of the state."
I'm afraid that your use of lines like "the religion of evolution...has become the religion of the state" puts you firmly in the frothing grandstander category, Jay.
If you want to have a serious conversation about evolution with me, you're welcome to do it; let's start another thread on that topic, since the sticker thing is silly enough on its own.
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Trisha, is it your position that only man is capable of making environmental changes that force evolution? Me, I personally think that man has made a number of unusually severe environmental changes, and consequently most instances of drift and selection we've seen in the century we've been looking for them have been a consequence of those severe man-made adjustments -- but also suspect that more subtle "natural" adjustments are likely to have a similar effect, only not one that's as easy to observe over a short period of time.
posted
Did anyone else read the article on Avida in this month's Discover? It's a digital life simulator that creates basic programs that randomly evolve until one can add two numbers together. The program rewards programs that can perform some of the steps necessary to add (accept numbers, store numbers, output numbers, etc.) with slightly faster reproduction rates. The types of mutations are randomly selected by the program.
The programs actually evolve and actually develop into being able to add numbers. Even more interesting is that they arrive at some wildly different algorithms to do so.
There's some hint that this method may be able to develop algorithms that are better than what we can develop for extremely complex tasks. Except, we would be the ones developing them because we would be the ones who set the parameters for success and who develped the virtual world in which they developed.
posted
Oh, I didn't think you'd sent out a memo. I just wondered if it's possible someone didn't respond. Some people have reservations about sharing their opinion in situations like that. It might also be that a single person would not want to admit that they didn't believe we evolved from apes if everyone else in the work area had just claimed that they did.
But I'll believe you if you say everyone voted, I was just wondering if someone could have felt alienated by the poll.
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posted
That humans could cause evolution is not evidence for intelligent design at all; it would only be evidence for intelligent design if there were some good reason the human-caused processes could not occur in nature.
Of course, considering that most of our early antibiotic discoveries were natural antibiotics, and that we've observed mildly similar phenomenon to the moth changes in species living around volcanoes, that's not true at all.
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posted
Considering that humans are actually a part of nature, it makes sense to me that we could take part in causing evolution, in the same way that creatures around us affect what occurs. The only difference is that those creatures don't know they have an affect on the world around them, and we do, so we can, to some extent, control how we affect our environment.
The thing that really creeps me out is the idea that evolution could take millions of years to create a creature that can undo all of its work in a couple of decades.
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posted
The fact that a large number of people (religious or not) believe that we descended from apes only shows that large numbers of people do not know much about evolution. We did not "descend from apes". No one who studies evolution claims this. What is theorized is that apes and humans have a common ancestor that was neither "ape" nor "human". "Ape" and "human" are two separate evolutionary paths diverging from that theoretical common ancestor.
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posted
Maybe god sent the astroid that wiped out the dinosaurs knowing we would evolve? Maybe like in Xenocide/CotM by Mr. Card the whole universe was created in that one microscopic point and then the big bang happened with everything happening from those blueprints..? Also, I'm of the persuation that I can't help but laugh at the monk/bishop who decided by adding up all the ages of the people in the bible and came up with 5000 years when THAT is easily disproven by the historical writings of civilizations that already existed. Plus theres that 1 out of two books that survived the burning of Alexandria that said that there was a civilization that was about 200,000 years old.
And one more peace of evidence is that they found a cave in south america that easily predates 5000 years that intestingly enough has certain materials/plants that were at that time period only available in Japan, china and europe.
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posted
So, then, the "missing link" is not a creature between ape and man, but rather the common ancestor?
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posted
I don't want to sound picky about this, but I think that some people DO know we don't actually descend from apes and use the term instead of "common ancestor" just to be shorter. And while that's certainly not something to be taught or said in a scientific document, it has become so usual in current speech that it can be considered acceptable. Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
PSI - Yes. That would be the "missing link".
Corwin - I understand your point. However, in a debate such as this precision of language should really be paramount. While it might be acceptable to some in common speech, I think it does a disservice to intelligent conversation to perpetuate a misrepresentation of what, exactly, is being asserted.
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posted
On the subject of apes : Granted, we are not descended from the modern species of chimpanzee or gorilla. Still, if you grabbed our ancestors from, say, five million years ago (that's the split with the chimpanzees) and put them on today's savannah, the guy who discovered them would go "Hey, a new species of ape!" And going back twenty-five million years and putting them in the jungle, it would be "Cool, a new species of monkey!" Just because they're not modern apes doesn't mean they're not pretty ape-like.
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posted
For the record, many instances of evolution have been noted in the wild (Darwin's Finches, many others). It may not prove macroevolution to everyone, but it proves it is certainly a mechanism of organism change, at some level.
I also remember 2 types of the same bird that no longer breed, because they were separated by a mountain range so long that the mating song had changed, and they don't recognize each other.
posted
Well, you could say that humans themselves are "pretty ape like". You could also go back even farther and find a common ancestor that looks a lot like a shrew. That doesn't mean that it is a shrew and saying that "man descended from the shrew" would be just as incorrect as saying he descended from the ape.
Your arguement smacks of "well, by 'ape' I mean that thing humans descended from." If we're going to play semantic "mad-libs" we could just as correctly say "humans descended from dinosaurs". Or you could say "humans descended from their ancestors" which, while correct, adds nothing useful to the conversation.
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I would like to notice you that "Apes" is a generic term for a part of species. So, i think we can use it to speak about our common ancestor with the "current apes".
*joking*
But all of that are the Devil !! Nobody must trust this bad talks on our ancestors. Adam and Eve aren't monkeys !! Burn this thread ! Fire this communauty of Païens !!!
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posted
KarlEd, you're absolutely right. What I should have said was "No, we're not descended from apes, we are apes." I'm with Pratchett on this one : If it weren't for vanity, our species would be named Pan narrans. Sapiens, bah, humbug.
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"evolution" and clam have evidences. What a joke. And we may burn all this evil books !![[Dont Know]](graemlins/dontknow.gif)
