There is absolutely no reason students could not start learning about evolution in grade school. I started learning about evolution (on my own) when I was elementary school age.
At higher grade levels, conveniently after biology classes are compulsory, you mean?
Why do you think teaching evolution alongside all the “basic biology” is a worse way to learn it? It’s a simple enough concept to grasp, I see no reason why students’ understanding can’t develop over time, rather than wait until after “basic biology” to bring it up.
I’m still wondering Eddie why you referred to evolution education as “indoctrination”?
Young children love dinosaurs. I know of few better opportunities to capitalize on that interest to introduce students to evolution, paleontology and geology. My interests in the life sciences began as a very young child with an interest in evolution.
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The affinities of dogs with wolves, house cats with wild felines, and yes, humans and other primates - these are all obvious and intuitive concepts that very young children readily see. We do a disservice when we discourage the exploration of these (and many, many more) observations, just to salve the fragile beliefs of a small but vocal minority.
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You sound like you know a lot of “meth and chaw” conservatives. I don’t think those people are the slightest bit conservative in any useful sense of the word, though I confess that I’m not all that interested in hashing out the details of the various uses of the term.
But if we go back to Burke, what we find is that he very much distinguished between practical and stable declarations of rights, e.g., the American revolution, versus purely idealistic declarations of rights, e.g., the French revolution. Very little good ever comes from the latter.
Clearly we were. You brought up D’Souza, for crying out loud. I’m surprised you’re not familiar with Barton as he sounds like your sort.
Yeah, they do seem to be yours. You’re a creationist. You cite D’Souza, a man of consummate vileness whom no respectable person would ever cite except as a cautionary tale. When David Duke is mentioned, you reference Hillary Clinton as the “left” equivalent. Your references to public school funding, staffing, et cetera were not made with reference to universities, but to the proposition that creationists aren’t out to destroy my kid’s educational opportunities, so what you have implied is that the creationists are at least inoffensive, if not positively helpful, in relation to those subjects.
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This is partly true, but note that you are now not talking specifically about religious conservatives, but about rich and upper-middle-class people (many of whom aren’t Christian or religious in any way) who want to keep their wealthy school districts so that their children will have social and economic advantages. And there are two issues that need to be separated: equalizing funding and local control. It is possible to equalize funding by combining numerous smaller boards into bigger boards (which has an averaging effect when a wealthy board is combined with adjacent poorer boards), while still giving the taxpayers of the newer, larger, more equal board some local control over educational programs and policies.
I am far from believing that all “conservative” positions are always right. I don’t believe that a society with huge differences in wealth between the richest and the poorest is likely to be a healthy one, and to that extent I’m against a certain kind of “economic” conservative philosophy. My plea for more “conservative” ideas having a place in the university has nothing to do with any liking of filthy-rich people like Donald Trump. Nor does it have anything to do with any love of fundamentalism. I’m in favor of – regarding the Arts programs, anyway – a traditional “Great Books” and/or “Classical” educational model. But people who have those preferences are largely excluded from most university Arts departments, by professors who are convinced that the purpose of universities is to be engines of left-wing social activism. My view is that the Arts in the university setting should stand above the whole plane of left wing vs. right wing, and concentrate on cultivating the human mind to the highest level. What people do politically after they get their university education is entirely up to them; they can swing right or left, as they please. The job of the university professor is not to try to steer students in a leftward direction; it’s to make sure that, whatever political/social direction they finally adopt, they carry it out in their lives intelligently, rationally, with respect for evidence and fair play in argument, and so on. I resent university faculty who think their mission is to propagandize and recruit people for the left wing of the Democratic Party – which is where most of those faculty member’s political allegiance lies.
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Again. Why @Eddie did you characterize education in evolution as “indoctrination”?
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Science education in U.S. schools is already in need of serious improvement. Removing one of the core components just because religious Fundamentalists don’t like would only make the problem worse.
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He’s just regurgitating the DI’s standard anti-science propaganda. Anyone who refers to teaching of the evolutionary sciences as “indoctrination” automatically disqualifies himself from any serious discussion on the topic.
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What a coincidence. I resent conservative windbags who falsely claim most college educators are far leftists with a mission to propagandize and recruit people for the left wing of the Democratic Party. 
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There’s nothing the slightest bit impractical about supporting that view that everyone in a society should respect the right of everyone else in a society to dissent from the majority or from the ruling elite on theoretical, scientific, moral, political, etc. matters, even to the point of believing and saying things that the majority finds offensive. It is perfectly workable to bake such a right into, if not the written constitution, at least the laws, and the working life, of a nation. It has nothing to do at all with French vs. American. Your attempt to use Burke on this point is a distraction, and you’re confusing yourself with it.
I did not bring up D’Souza regarding any point except his claim that universities had become ideologically slanted – which is empirically, demonstrably true. I did not endorse any other view that he holds. I even said that I disagreed with him on many things. I do not think you are carefully reading what I write before reacting. And I think I know the cause of this. I think you have me “pigeonholed”, and thus, instead of reading the actual words I write, and taking them to express my meaning, you are are trying to read “between the lines” and ferret out some concealed agenda which you think I have. Needless to say, this is poor dialogical procedure, and can only lead to misunderstandings. I’m a fairly articulate person, I think you will concede, and I generally mean what I say, and say what I mean. Try reading me in that light, rather than with some imaginary agenda in mind.
You’re wrong. And also, to be blunt, you are way out of line, mister! We have had a discussion about labels here before, and one of the principles that has emerged, supported by Joshua and the moderators, is that one should not call someone by a label that the person in question has clearly disavowed. I am not a creationist, as that term is normally used, and have said so many times here and on BioLogos. A creationist reads the early chapters of Genesis more or less literally, and uses those chapters to dictate what science can and cannot teach. I do not read the early chapters of Genesis at all literally, and I do not believe that the religious beliefs of Genesis literalists should have any control over what scientists do or teach.
I did not say that David Duke and Hillary Clinton were mirror images or equivalents. If you thought I meant that, you misread me. I agree that the first person is more offensive than the other, but both persons are offensive to me, and I would not go to hear a talk by either of them, since I consider both of them to be irremediably wrong.
Since you don’t yet know nearly enough about me to know what “my sort” is, your judgment here is of little value. But I’ve never heard of Barton, and since you have not deigned to answer my questions about him, I still know nothing about him. Nor do I have any reason to find out more about him, based on what you’ve said. Why is he important? Why should I care what he thinks or does? If you are going to introduce a name and then not explain why you have introduced it, you are not conversing very constructively.
Please give me a list of the educational opportunities “your kid” has lost, or is perhaps imminently about to lose, in your school district due to the activities or attitudes of creationists. I’m not a creationist and have no sympathy with much of what they do or say, but I also have a natural sympathy for the underdog, and since creationists are everybody’s whipping boy on these websites about origins, I like to see hard, non-vague, empirical examples of the evils they are supposed to have wrought.
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Why Eddie are you characterizing education in evolution as “indoctrination”?
Have no sympathy for anyone peddling a bunch of falsehoods, mischaracterizations, bigotry and just BS disguised as science whether they are an “underdog” of not.
Explaining the reasons for belief in evolution is not in itself indoctrination. There are many good reasons to believe in evolution. But when evolution is taught to children at very young ages – which is what you are recommending with the term “grade school” – it is necessarily taught in a very simplified way, and often that can amount to indoctrination, since the young have no critical faculties yet by which to spot the simplifications, gaps in evidence, etc. When I grew up, I started reading popular books on evolution before I started kindergarten, and was completely convinced that every word of those books had been demonstrated by some scientist somewhere with inexorable rigor. Later I learned that many of those popular simplifications were misleading. For example, the “horse series” is much more complicated than the typical diagrams in popular books on evolution present, and quite often the popular books don’t indicate how scanty the fossil evidence is for some of the finds, e.g., some species of early hominids are known on the basis of only one tooth or finger bone or the like. I also later learned that the Haeckel diagrams were erroneous in part and even faked in part – and even Stephen Jay Gould has conceded that, as has Ken Miller who eventually removed them from his textbook. Quite often the trees of life presented in popular works are oversimplified and fail to distinguish established versus hypothetical connections. Quite often the reader is left with the impression that the capacity of blind search (filtered by selection) to produce eyes and cardiovascular systems has been demonstrated somewhere, when in fact this is asserted by theory but has never been demonstrated. It is when evolution is presented in this way that it is indoctrination rather than rigorous, cautious, qualified science.
That does not make evolution false, and I do not say it is false. But it should not be presented to young children without critical capacities in a way parallel, pedagogically, to the way fundamentalists teach their kids about Noah and the Ark, as a straightforward past narrative about the way things were. A “most scientists now think” approach would be more honest and accurate.
But even that is probably the wrong way to go. I would defer the study of evolution until high school. It is far better to teach kids about evolution after they have a good, solid founding in basic empirical biology. In elementary school they should be taught how to identify and classify (in rough ways) leaves, trees, nuts, frogs, toads, mammals, birds, fungi, etc. They should learn basic facts about the natural environment – rainfall, rivers, mountains, seasons, etc. And before they can understand the genetic basis of evolution, they have to know what genes are and how they work, and this is impossible until they know some chemistry. So it would be better for students in elementary schools to learn basic natural history (in the old sense of that term), and in intermediate grades and early high school to learn basic chemistry, how to diagram plant and animal cells, how meiosis and mitosis work, how the water, nitrogen, carbon etc. cycles work, food chains, etc. – and then learn evolutionary theory. At that point they would be getting not indoctrination but a set of reasons for accepting evolution, reasons which they now would have enough critical capacity to handle without either undue credulity or undue skepticism.
And as I pointed out, something like this is done in at least one other country where the belief in evolution in the general populace is much higher than in the USA, and where high school science graduates are, if anything, better prepared to start university science than their counterparts in the USA. Your view of what should be done goes well beyond what is necessary for your ends.
Right, which is why I didn’t say that. What I did say is that when such values are expressed by people whose moral cowardice precludes their acting upon them, those values are rendered meaningless in practical terms. “Rights” are not something in the air. Rights are where rubber meets road. I don’t think you understand that. I spent my legal career trying to unwrap the fingers of the state from my clients’ necks. Rights are not a matter of poetry but of push and shove.
I think you forget yourself. You certainly have supplied ample material in this thread for someone to form a pretty good idea of what you’re about. There was, for example, this nugget:
That actually sounds very D’Souza. It certainly doesn’t sound very reality-based.
I’m not a fan of ID Creationists constructing narrow definitions of “creationist” in order to opt out. I think that doing that is quite dishonest. And since you have, on this very board, thanked me for the way my reviews allegedly call attention to the writings and ideas of cdesign proponentsists, your position as an ID Creationist is certainly clear.
I didn’t say that had succeeded in her particular case. But that’s because I live in Seattle. While the DI’s efforts to destroy public education are headquartered here, the City itself is not particularly fertile ground for those efforts. But ID Creationists have been on the march from state to state with what is, actually, a very clever and well-crafted strategy: enact statutes which nominally defend “critical thinking” and “academic freedom,” but which are actually intended as litigation-cover for individual teacher to violate their students’ constitutional rights by smuggling creationism into the classroom.
The lesson of Kitzmiller was that the federal bench has not yet been compromised to the point that explicit policies affirming creationism, like the one in Kitzmiller, are likely to survive a Section 1983 challenge. But when there is no explicit policy affirming it, and is only a policy which gives a teacher who despises the First Amendment some cover against termination or litigation, individual teachers WILL violate students’ rights and litigation against them is incredibly tricky, not least because students pretty much need to record all of the lessons to avoid simple deniability. And nobody has the litigation resources to mount all the as-applied challenges against this mosquito fleet of anti-constitutional action.
But the ID Creationists DO get their way in any number of places. Evolution is de-emphasized or omitted, or replaced with the sort of vile pseudoscientific drivel peddled by the charlatans at the DI. With that sort of thing going on, ruining other children’s education elsewhere, I am actually prepared to fight for liberty – actually to fight (which, being as I am retired, now consists mostly in funding litigation by others), not just to declare my willingness to die and then hope nobody notices that I don’t lift a finger.
For someone who says they aren’t a creationist you really sound exactly like a creationist
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Here’s how, according to the ID Creationists, that works:
“Creationism” is defined as the belief that God created all living things.
“ID” is the view that all living things were created by something which could only be God.
As the word “God” appears much later in the definition of ID than in the definition of creationism, ID isn’t about religion.
You mean the same way children are “indoctrinated” about chemistry and physics, for example that atoms are the smallest unit of matter and solids, liquids, and gases are the 3 forms of matter? All education starts basic and simplified, and then progresses. That’s not misleading, it’s tried and tested pedagogy.
I don’t see you arguing that students shouldn’t learn about the states of matter until 11th grade, until they’ve learnt enough “basic” chemistry and physics to be able to grasp Bose-Einstein condensates.
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Which does not describe everyone, even if it describes many. It does not describe me.
I agree that rights only exist where people are willing to defend them. I have never said or implied otherwise. The whole point of the famous quotation I used is that for the rights to be securely possessed, everyone in society must be committed to them. If I want the right to say something that offends the Church, I must defend – not lamely or partially, but fully – the right of the Church to say something that offends me. And if Herman here wants to defend the right of Marxists, socialists, feminists, leftists, etc. to say things that offend conservatives, he has to be willing to defend the rights of conservatives to say things that offend Marxists, socialists, feminists, etc. If he is going to deny conservatives a social platform because he finds their views offensive, then I have every right to deny leftists a platform, on the very same grounds. But he thinks he can have it all his way, providing social platforms for views I find offensive, while denying them to views he finds offensive. And that’s a complete non-starter, but he hasn’t yet reached the point of intellectual clarity where he can see this.
I understand it perfectly well. In addition to many years of studying the history of political philosophy, including the idea of “natural right”, I have long been active in practical politics in a number of ways. I do understand that theory without practice, when it comes to rights, is empty.
I was reading and writing essays on dystopian literature long before I ever heard of D’Souza. And it is reality-based. Western civilization is headed that way. The US is a bit of an outlier, and because of the presence of its extreme right, the 1984 option is a definite possibility. Also I think that this is possible for Russia. But in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, etc., where people have grown more and more dependent on government and more and more willing to give up certain freedoms for security of health and income, the Brave New World scenario is more likely. At least, that was true up to a few years ago; how the culturally suicidal recent actions of the European Union will play out remains to be seen.
I’m not an “ID creationist” but an “ID evolutionist”; indeed, as the term you are using was first used by people like Eugenie Scott (with transparently demagogical intent), it was deliberately misleading and dishonest, and intellectually honest people would not employ it, except in the very narrow and specific sense of “ID proponents who also happen to be creationists” (e.g., Paul Nelson, as opposed to Mike Behe).
I have done no such thing. I made a survey of the use of the term “creationist” in 20th-century popular discussion about origins, and my usage of the term follows mainstream usage. In mainstream usage, a “creationist” is what I have said. I have put up the survey on this site; if you can’t find it, let me know.
I won’t respond to the rest of your note, because it’s mere anti-ID blather, a rehearsal of cliches and talking points, many of them outright false, many distortions. I’ve discussed this with you before. You are smarter than this, better than this. You can be fair, intelligent, and balanced. Your diatribe with which you end your note is none of those.
And your daughter is not in any danger of losing any scientific or educational opportunities, no matter what happens to three petty weeks of ninth-grade biology in her school district or any other. I am sure that if she inherits your brains she will end up getting top grades and going to a good university regardless of what is taught or not taught in that one class, and after that she will be able to become a scientist or whatever she wants in life. Neither you nor she has anything to fear from anything creationists may do. Your paranoid reaction to a non-threat is puzzling, given your overall intellectual ability to arrive at sound judgments. Something about ID puts a bee in your bonnet, and you become less rational than you otherwise would be. I’m sorry to see that.