Freedom for both sides
Apr 16th 2008Wallabynerd alert
“Critics say that if the bill is passed administrators will not be able to discipline teachers who deviate from the recently approved state education standards supporting the teaching of evolution.” – Nature News
The bill, of course, is the recently-passed “Academic Freedom Act”, which, fiendishly enough, “Prohibits a teacher from being discriminated against for presenting” “scientific information relevant to the full range of views on biological and chemical evolution.” (Isn’t that insane? Students might actually hear that there’s more than one answer to complex questions. That’s no way to prepare them to be citizens!)
“Any teacher who wants to can slip in a religious idea, intelligent design or the flying spaghetti monster, and they can’t be fired.” — Joe Wolf, Florida Citizens “for Science” (quoted in the Nature bit)
(That’s right, he claims to be seriously worried that teachers might teach students to believe in the deity of a parody religion specifically intended to mock ID — or that, if they do, students won’t be able to tell the difference between that and the Gospel of Darwin.)
Meanwhile, the recent movie Expelled features an interview with Richard Dawkins, in which he suggests that the origin of life on Earth might reasonably be credited to aliens. Very advanced aliens, mind, who evolved “probably by some kind of Darwinian means”. Which sounds an awful lot like a last-ditch effort to say that “y’know, there’s all kinds of proof for this, we’ll find out exactly how life originally evolved - as soon as we can find the benevolent beings who brought it here.”
In other words - “my proof? oh yes, I left it in… hmm… yes, must be in my other jacket. I’ll just run home and get it, shall I? In the meantime - don’t stop believing!”