Not nearly enough intelligence in central Florida

November 24, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

I really feel sorry for the children in Polk County, Fla., where the elected school board consists largely of idiots.

The state of Florida, in an admirable attempt to stagger into the 21st Century, is attempting to approve new science standards that name evolution as one of several “big ideas” that students must learn about. (The current standards refer only obliquely to “biological changes over time.”)

A majority of the Polk board has publicly stated that if these standards pass, they will not back them.

Here’s your all-star moron line-up, as quoted in the Lakeland Ledger:

Margaret Lofton: “If it ever comes to the board for a vote, I will vote against the teaching of evolution as part of the science curriculum. If [evolution] is taught, I would want to balance it with the fact that we may live in a universe created by a supreme being as well.”

Tim Harris: “My tendency would be to have both sides shared with students since neither side can be proven.”

Hazel Sellers: “I don’t have a conflict with intelligent design versus evolution. The two go together.”

Kay Fields: She is not quoted directly but told the paper she supports teaching intelligent design taught as well as evolution.

They’re not the only ones.

I give a semi-moron award to Frank O’Reilly, who seems to dimly understand that there could be a legal problem in teaching ID but still accepts the concept. “I believe in intelligent design personally, but the court has ruled against it. We cannot break the law if it is set down before us,” he said.

Another board member, Lori Cunningham, declined to offer an opinion on the matter. It appears that the only member with any sense is Brenda Reddout, who said, “The standards seem to be supported by many of our science teachers. It doesn’t make any difference what our personal opinions are.”

One federal court has already declared intelligent design a violation of the separation of church and state. Adopting ID in Polk County would almost certainly spark another legal challenge. In Dover, Pa., the school board spent a cool million in its losing case. Does Polk County really want to divert that cash from the classroom to the courtroom? If so, they are even dumber than I thought.

One federal court has already declared intelligent design a violation of the separation of church and state.

So?

Massive Resistance. It’s not just for racist bigot anymore.

  • What do you expect from a bunch of peckerwoods who are the result of ten generations of Southern inbreeding? Face it, with rare exception (like the folks who post here), the South is proof that evolution works in reverse just as it does in forward gear.

  • ID is like the impish teenaged twit who thinks it’s cool to run around the tinder-dry countryside in the midst of a drought and play with a big box of matches. We wind up with brush fires, one after another, and simply putting out one fire does not stop the impish little arsonist.

    ID isn’t about people professing their belief; rather, it is about people who think it’s cool to run about a countryside grown tired of the xenophobic hatred that Xianity has become—and ramming their personal belief into everyone else’s faces.

    ID is about using tax monies to promote religion, plain and simple. It’s not about “parity with evolution;” it’s about openly teaching that evolution is false. The ninnyhammers who dreamt it up knew this from the get-go….

  • And people wonder why this country is falling behind in science…and the South still wonders why the rest of the country is embarrassed by its inhabitants…

    For years and years and years, kids have gone to both the public school and to Sunday school, and even though one was teaching evolution as the explanation for the development of life, and the other was teaching the God-created-everything explanation, our heads managed not to explode. We managed to either reconcile what some considered to be conflicting theories, or we didn’t – but the Sunday school crowd wasn’t overcome with spitting outrage that “their” theory wasn’t accorded equal footing in the public school classroom, and the public schools respected the right of religious entities to teach something different in that venue, and held true to keeping the wall between the public and the private good and strong – just the way it was supposed to be.

    Somewhere along the line, moving religion into the public arena became a mission for a lot of people who couldn’t seem to live peacefully knowing that their beliefs were not being taught in the public schools, that their symbols were not being given proper attention in government, and those not given the benefit of their beliefs were standing on the precipice of hell and eternal damnation because they were failing to heed the Bible’s teachings on their own.

    So, there’s been a steady infiltration of public office by people who are determined to tear down the wall between religion and government. Since this is supposed to be a government of, by and for the people, we cannot exclude those who are legitimately elected to their positions, but what happened to playing by the rules? What do you think the chances would be that a few people who were elected to a position within, say, the Baptist Church, would be allowed to fundamentally change the religion by insisting that elements of the non-sectarian world were entitled to equal footing? Not bloody likely, right? So, how come people have to stop and think about whether it’s fair or not to allow the proselytizers to change the rules in the public arena?

    The Polk County School Board may end up being the reason the children in that district will not be contributing much to the advancement of science if someone doesn’t wake up and remember which rules are in force in the public arena – a lesson that needs to be learned by a lot of other school boards and public officials.

  • Why don’t secondary schools just offer a course in philosophy/religion? I know there is the danger of indoctrination in some of these backward/superstitious communities, but if done right it’s something that people really should know about. ID would fit perfectly into such a course, and students could learn about the major religions of the world, too. Give them a better rounded view, teach them some tolerance. Which might encourage them to think critically about their own beliefs, rather than just blindly accepting them.

  • The entire school board needs be removed from office and re-enrolled in kindergarden. I don’t know if going through K-12 all over again will help or not. But, it clearly didn’t take the first time.

  • I attended public school in the bible belt, right along the Mason-Dixon line in the 60s and 70s and we learned about evolution in our science classes. There was no discussion of creationism in my grade school or high school science classes and of course “Intelligent” Design wasn’t even a gleam in a pseudo-scientist’s eye yet. Almost everyone I knew went to church on Sunday but reasonable people accepted then that genesis was mythology or metaphor. I can’t recall ever hearing anyone even propose teaching the judeo-christian myth of creation as “science.”

    What I’m saying is, it isn’t the 21st century that Florida is apparently still trying to stagger into, it’s the 20th.

  • First, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards. –Mark Twain

    These idiots seem to think that a theory is merely something we dream up after drinking Citron and Red Bull until 4:30 a.m.! 9Of course, I need not define scientific theory for the intelligent, astute and good-looking people who read the Carpetbagger…:)

  • Maybe human stupidity comes from living in mostly flat lands: Oklahoma, Kansas and Florida. If folks can’t climb up a hill, they will often think that the earth is really flat and thus it was easily rolled out in a few years by an old white man with a large rolling pin…

  • As long as Florida teaches about an infinite regress of turtles standing upon turtles, I’m okay with that. Oh, and they must agree to let the rest of us harvest their organs and embryonic stem cells (I don’t think utter ignorance can be acquired biologically, can it?).

  • What I don’t understand about these ID and creationist nuts is that if it’s so important to teach that stuff, then teach it in the churches where it belongs. No ones telling them that they can’t have their beliefs, we’re just saying that we don’t want them forcing their crap down our throats. Mind you, these people still refuse to believe 200 years of scientific evidence that’s presented to them, so I guess I’m talking to the figurative wall.

  • There is no scientific evidence for ID so how can it be taught in science classes. Unless HSs are going to start teaching religion and philosophy along with mythology, ID has no place in public education. It is pushing a religious agenda and violates the the separation of Church/State. Otherwise, Anne is right…will they start teaching and lecturing evolution side by side in the churches with ID?

    Stop using fossil fuels since they were created far beyond your time limits for ID. ID doesn’t believe in oil cause it goes against ID. Funny, Jesus never mentions Adam and Eve or Genesis for that matter. Narrow minded bigots and hypocrits, cherry picking what fits and pretending the rest was never there.
    Evolution is science, not a theory. It is provable and doesn’t address 1st causes as proven fact. Only an uneducated idiot thinks evolution disproves God, and only the same kind of idiot could believe in ID.

  • ***btw*** the wording of the bible was written for the people of its time. It is easy to take the wording of Genesis as metaphor and symbolism for evolution. People of that period would not be able to understand evolution unless it was worded by symbolism to fit their ability to understand. The “big bang” translates to “and God said let there be light”..boom… and there was light boys and girls (keep in mind these stories are being told around the campfires which is where the children gathered to hear the stories). And finally after apes had finally evolved into our first humans god breathed life or intelligence into them, what we call the spirit and called 2 of them Adam and Eve, boys and girls…that way we could start tracing our tribes. Sorry, 600 years of campfire storytelling and things get left out. Fanatics are incapable of critical thinking. That’s why they are fanatics.

  • Margaret Lofton: “If [evolution] is taught, I would want to balance it with the fact that we may live in a universe created by a supreme being as well.”

    Gahh! The IDiot writing that sentence doesn’t understand that evolution says nothing about the origins of the universe, or even the origins of primitive life on Earth — evolution only describes how complex life forms evolve from primitive ones. That false dichotomy of evolution = anti-religion is totally played out.

    I also love how she uses the word ‘fact’ to describe that we may live in a universe created by, yadda yadda yadda. If it’s only a possibility, the word fact doesn’t apply. Why is this person on a school board if they don’t know what words mean?

    Tim Harris: “My tendency would be to have both sides shared with students since neither side can be proven.”

    An even stupider statement. First, again it’s not an ‘us vs. them’ argument of ‘evolution versus God’; evolution doesn’t speculate on the existence of a creator (though it definitely puts a helluva lotta holes in the fundamentalist view). Second, science is never about ‘proving’ things, at least not in a mathematical sense. Science comes up with models and explanations for natural phenomena, and those explanations are never fully ‘complete’. That’s the beauty of science, it evolves and grows as the experimental evidence is filled in. The IDiot making that statement demonstrates that he doesn’t understand science at all.

    So in conclusion, we have a school board making judgments about the scientific curriculum that clearly has no understanding of what science even is. If the parents in that district think their kids are poorly educated now, wait until they lose all their funds in the inevitable legal battle to come.

  • Intelligent design creationism is supported primarily by right-wing fundamentalists. Essentially every scientific organization in the country has issued a position paper explaining that intelligent design creationism is not science.

    Everybody interested in learning more about the Dover trial should start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_trial

    Everbody interested in learning more should read Barbara Forrest’s paper, “Understanding the intelligent design creationist movement: Its true nature and goals,” available at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/intelligent-design.pdf

  • Thanks to Blue Girl for quoting Twain on school boards. I’m sixty-five years old. I spent the first 17 years of my life in my small hometown in northern Indiana, finishing high school there in 1959. I could hardly wait to go to New England to college. I thought it was Indiana and small-town life I was eager to escape. I now realize it was the 1950s I was trying to get out of. The GOP has plunged us back into the 1950s with a vengeance (or maybe it’s the 1650s). We’re on a greased chute to colossal ignorance and barbarity. If we don’t keep them from rigging elections, more horrors are coming our way.

  • I wonder what the literacy rate is in Florida. According to a demographics map in a recent issue of National Geographic, the South still lags way behind the rest of the country in percentage of population graduating from high school. It also has the highest obesity and heart attack rates. After seeing this latest development, I realize why.

    If these sub-morons are the best the school district can dredge up, Florida’s kids are doomed.

  • Per a back issue in Skeptic Magazine, here’s the questions on the science final exam when evolution meets ID:

    1 – Describe the theory of punctuated equilibrium and argue whether or not it represents a paradigm shift in evolutionary theory.
    2 – What did God create on the third day?
    3 – Name and describe at least three different mechanisms for genetic mutation.
    4 – Who named all the animals?
    5 – Explain the significance of “ring species” in evolutionary theory.
    6 – True or False? Adam was a monkey.
    7 – Describe the role of natural selection in evolution.
    8 – Fill in the blank. “God saw that the light was ____.”
    9 – Define: Allopatric speciation.
    10 – Whom did God create first? A. Adam b. Eve c. Steve

  • Given our second-rate (at best) educational system, it should not be surprising when products of that system become its policy makers, and demonstrate their ignorance or disdain not only of science, but the philosophical foundations of our country. The anti-evolution, ID crowd is essentially anti-intellecual, anti-pluralism, and probably racist, and homophobic to boot.

    We have, in this country, never had a true separation between church and state, but with half the Congress now occupied by scientific know-nothings of the stripe on this Florida school board, and believing we are a Christian nation – others get out – this democratic republic is in great jeopardy.

    Darwin wrote his findings and ideas down in 1859 to great screams of horror from the clerics of his day (he had a bishop in his family, and himself attended seminary briefly as a young man). By 1880, with Darwin already dead, the robust scientific community of that day had accepted “Descent by Natural Selection”, as a bonifide biological mechanism in nature, and embraced his broader ideas of evolution. Many of these notables were quite religious men, and had no problem adjusting or adapting their belief systems to reflect this infusion of new knowledge.

    Therein lies part of the problem among that element of the population that in each generation cannot embrace change, and for its own sense of security must belong to a highly structured homogeneous group which looks, thinks and behaves alike. That is a tribal impulse, but not necessarily dangerous. These groups are not a problem in a pluralistic society provided they keep mostly to themselves, but as we know the evangelical, or prostilitizing, impulse among many of them is extremely strong. Needing to convert others to your absolutist belief system may indeed be a pathology, and if it is then we have currently an epidemic of it in parts of this country. Mostly it is ruining an already sub-standard public educational system with demands for more and more expressions of fundamentalist Christianity in the classroom, and training the next generation to be a bunch of scientific morons like this Florida school board already is.

  • I’ve got no problem with people who don’t believe in science, but they need to understand that evolution goes hand in hand with the same “science” which also gave them:

    Electricity – lights, TV, PCs, batteries, you name it.
    Internal combustion – cars , trucks, NASCAR, motorcross, lawn mowers
    Medicine – vaccines, drugs, surgery, hospitals,
    Communications – Phones, the Internet, etc

    So they really need to cut all that “other stuff” out of their lives too.

  • The Cincinnati newspaper had a headline this weekend, “Creation museum bigger draw than thought” where the following story is about the attendance at the “museum” exceeding expectations.

    I read the headline differently, imagining a family scene as follows:
    “Honey, what do you want to do today? Visit the Creation Museum, or think?”

    – Scott

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