Tuesday, February 10, 2009

"Strengths and Weaknesses" Bill in New Mexico

Not the sort of place that I expected this to happen, but according to the NCSE, a bill has been introduced into the New Mexico state legislature asking that school teachers be allowed to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of biological evolution.

The phrase "academic freedom" is not present in the bill, but it is clearly in the mold of the recent spate of antievolution "academic freedom" bills. As NCSE's Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott recently wrote in Scientific American, "'Academic freedom' was the creationist catchphrase of choice in 2008: the Louisiana Science Education Act was in fact born as the Louisiana Academic Freedom Act, and bills invoking the idea were introduced in Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina." Oklahoma, with its Senate Bill 320, joined the list in 2009.

Why doesn't someone promote a bill addressing the strengths and weaknesses of gravitational theory once in awhile? There is nothing in evolutionary theory that is not as well supported as gravity. How about a bill addresses the problems in germ theory? I have to agree with the NCSE that this is stealth creationism and that these bills don't appear in a vacuum. There is a guiding force behind them, which appears to be the Discovery Institute.

No comments:

Post a Comment