Ok, this made my day--Should we teach Math in schools?
A wonderful parody of the questions posed to Miss USA contestants about teaching evolution in schools. For all the people who use the word "believe" in conjunction with "evolution."
I am sort of amazed at all those fools who say: "Evolution is just a theory"
True, it is a just a theory with an enormous amount of biological and archeological evidence behind it. How much evidence backs up your theory of creationism?
Now I see that the creationists are moving from “intelligent design” to attacking macro evolution, while supporting (believing in) micro evolution.
Because micro is observable I guess they must support its existence. Still, creationism is not observable, yet it must be true?
What a bunch of ignorant asses. Yes, evolution should be taught in schools. Parents who send their kids to schools that teach creationism are really promoting ignorance.
Maybe we should not teach math in schools...to girls. Why fill their pretty little heads with all those silly little, troubling numbers when they really just need to run a household. Leave the tough subjects to the men who need it.
I love Skepchick, and am on that site a few times a day. They do a grand job of bringing the skeptical heat. That's where I first saw that vid.
That notion of "just a theory" makes my head spin. I have seen other conservative cult websites listing the same for gravity (just a theory) and geocentrism (meaning they believe we area geocentric universe).
Yes, gravity and evolution and physics are indeed just theories. But these people, largely due to their own ignorance, treat "theory" as "hypothesis" as in "I have a theory about why my kids scream at dinner time." No, you have a hypothesis. Gravity and evolution are WAY past the hypothesis stage, and in fact each cover a range of hypotheses.
But that would mean they'd have to learn science, and everybody knows that book learnin leads to atheism.
Also, it's not like "theory" as used in the sciences is meant to refer to a single claim whose verification status is midway between hypothesis and fact. It refers to a collection of models and heuristics that make claims about the world, some with greater confidence and some with less; but usually we're very confident about the broad strokes.
Graduate-level abstract algebra has "ring theory" and "field theory," which refer to bodies of knowledge about which we are as certain as we can be about anything.
"Just a theory" is one more symptom the conservative habit of willfully misinterpreting language. Afraid someone will believe something if they understand it? Gotta lie about it to make it seem really absurd.
I have said for a while that conservatives either purposefully or honestly don't understand the meaning of either "theory" or "myth." For some, it is clearly, as Leighton says, intellectual dishonesty.
Thanks, Streak. I had forgotten about it myself and scheduled a dentist appointment for today. Oops!
I was talking with a friend last week about the two kinds of "agree to disagree." It seems that with my liberal friends, we have to stop debating when we disagree on priorities, or on goals, or on tactics to achieve those goals, and just aren't making any more progress convincing each other. Whereas I have to "agree to disagree" with my conservative friends because they can't or won't understand my actual views.
I was trying to explain my views on immigration to one such friend, which to be fair don't compress well. I think we're too hard on people who are trying to make a living for their families, and not hard enough on organized crime. Part of the problem is that federal cops are wasting so much money chasing down nonviolent marijuana offenders that they don't have enough resources to pursue interstate drugrunners and gun-smugglers, which obviously the individual states can't do effectively either because of jurisdictional issues. So my suggestion is to change the enforcement landscape so that federal cops will be instructed to make nonviolent recreational drug users less of a priority, so they can put more resources into chasing down violent criminals who aren't legally in the country.
I said as much to Friend X, and his response was, "So you want to give citizenship right now to everyone in the country and legalize every drug?" I was aghast; surely nobody could hear what I had just said and think it meant that. If we were emailing, I would call him functionally illiterate, but we were talking.
So, I don't know. For some people, conservatism is more like a partially debilitating brain cancer than anything that resembles a set of principles.
6 comments:
I am sort of amazed at all those fools who say: "Evolution is just a theory"
True, it is a just a theory with an enormous amount of biological and archeological evidence behind it. How much evidence backs up your theory of creationism?
Now I see that the creationists are moving from “intelligent design” to attacking macro evolution, while supporting (believing in) micro evolution.
Because micro is observable I guess they must support its existence. Still, creationism is not observable, yet it must be true?
What a bunch of ignorant asses.
Yes, evolution should be taught in schools. Parents who send their kids to schools that teach creationism are really promoting ignorance.
Maybe we should not teach math in schools...to girls. Why fill their pretty little heads with all those silly little, troubling numbers when they really just need to run a household. Leave the tough subjects to the men who need it.
/snark.
I love Skepchick, and am on that site a few times a day. They do a grand job of bringing the skeptical heat. That's where I first saw that vid.
That notion of "just a theory" makes my head spin. I have seen other conservative cult websites listing the same for gravity (just a theory) and geocentrism (meaning they believe we area geocentric universe).
Yes, gravity and evolution and physics are indeed just theories. But these people, largely due to their own ignorance, treat "theory" as "hypothesis" as in "I have a theory about why my kids scream at dinner time." No, you have a hypothesis. Gravity and evolution are WAY past the hypothesis stage, and in fact each cover a range of hypotheses.
But that would mean they'd have to learn science, and everybody knows that book learnin leads to atheism.
Or at least that's my theory. Wait...
Also, it's not like "theory" as used in the sciences is meant to refer to a single claim whose verification status is midway between hypothesis and fact. It refers to a collection of models and heuristics that make claims about the world, some with greater confidence and some with less; but usually we're very confident about the broad strokes.
Graduate-level abstract algebra has "ring theory" and "field theory," which refer to bodies of knowledge about which we are as certain as we can be about anything.
"Just a theory" is one more symptom the conservative habit of willfully misinterpreting language. Afraid someone will believe something if they understand it? Gotta lie about it to make it seem really absurd.
I have said for a while that conservatives either purposefully or honestly don't understand the meaning of either "theory" or "myth." For some, it is clearly, as Leighton says, intellectual dishonesty.
Hey, Happy Birthday, Leighton!
Thanks, Streak. I had forgotten about it myself and scheduled a dentist appointment for today. Oops!
I was talking with a friend last week about the two kinds of "agree to disagree." It seems that with my liberal friends, we have to stop debating when we disagree on priorities, or on goals, or on tactics to achieve those goals, and just aren't making any more progress convincing each other. Whereas I have to "agree to disagree" with my conservative friends because they can't or won't understand my actual views.
I was trying to explain my views on immigration to one such friend, which to be fair don't compress well. I think we're too hard on people who are trying to make a living for their families, and not hard enough on organized crime. Part of the problem is that federal cops are wasting so much money chasing down nonviolent marijuana offenders that they don't have enough resources to pursue interstate drugrunners and gun-smugglers, which obviously the individual states can't do effectively either because of jurisdictional issues. So my suggestion is to change the enforcement landscape so that federal cops will be instructed to make nonviolent recreational drug users less of a priority, so they can put more resources into chasing down violent criminals who aren't legally in the country.
I said as much to Friend X, and his response was, "So you want to give citizenship right now to everyone in the country and legalize every drug?" I was aghast; surely nobody could hear what I had just said and think it meant that. If we were emailing, I would call him functionally illiterate, but we were talking.
So, I don't know. For some people, conservatism is more like a partially debilitating brain cancer than anything that resembles a set of principles.
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