Creationism and evolution in school: Religious students can’t learn natural selection.

Education researchers have studied how well religious students are able to learn about evolution. Some researchers suggest that creationist beliefs prevent students from understanding evolution, since creationism teaches that a supernatural being created the world and all its life forms. But others claim students can understand evolution even if they don’t accept that it happened. What does this conflict over how students learn about evolution mean for Wortman and science teachers like him? And what does it mean for the students, like that younger, creationist version of me, who sit in biology classrooms? Can they cope with evolution?

One point of consensus exits among science education researchers: Religion affects how people understand evolution. “The role of religion is really robust,” said Josh Rosenau, a programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education. “I have no question that a person’s view of their own religion shapes how that person is prepared to respond to questions about evolution.”

Leslie Rissler is an evolutionary ecologist and biogeographer who taught an upper-level evolution course for biology majors for more than 10 years at the University of Alabama. Some of her students said their high school science teachers—even in public schools—skipped the evolution unit altogether or taught creationism alongside evolution as an alternative scientific theory. A 2007 Penn State study involving 926 science educators found that about 13 percent of biology teachers are openly sympathetic to creationism in their classroom. The comments about those creationist science teachers that Rissler overheard in her class prompted her research addressing evolution education, published online last fall in Evolution: Education and Outreach.

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Rissler concluded that deeply religious students are less likely to either understand or accept evolution than are their less religious peers. “The more religious are less scientifically literate,” she said. “The data are clear on this. It’s just that people don’t like to hear it.”

Creationism and evolution in school: Religious students can’t learn natural selection.

1/31/2015::In other news,,,

Walker touts unconventional 'master's degree'

In a radio interview earlier this week, Walker unveiled a slightly different response when asked about his lack of a college degree. The governor, who left Marquette University in his senior year to take a full-time job, could be in a presidential field that includes lawyers, doctors and business people with bachelor's and advanced degrees.

"I'm like the majority of people in America," Walker told Hugh Hewitt. "I'm someone who went to college, had the opportunity in my senior year to go and take a job full-time, which was not the only reason I went to college, but one of the biggest reasons was to get a job."

Then he got married and started a family. "Like a lot of folks in America, you know, your family and your job take the time away from you finishing it up," Walker continued. "I've got a master's degree in taking on the big government special interests, and I think that is worth more than anything else that anybody can point to."

Governor unveils budget cuts, limits school suit costs

"Actions speak louder than words, and today we've seen that the words Gov. Ducey spoke at the State of the State were hollow," Senate Minority Leader Katie Hobbs, D-Phoenix, said in a statement. "The budget he revealed (Friday) cuts funding for neighborhood schools, universities and economic development efforts, all of which we know give taxpayers a return on their investment.

"And while his budget takes from our schools and universities, forcing tuition raises on Arizona's middle class, it gives away more than $100 million to private prisons," she said. "Is this what Gov. Ducey meant when he closed his State of the State address by saying, 'Let's give our best for Arizona'?"

 More on the debacle that is Kansas and Texas,,,

Republican Economic Failure and Idiocy are on Full Display in Kansas

It’s like I’ve said numerous times before, you cannot build an economic ideology solely off the notion of cutting taxes. At some point you’re going to cut taxes to such a low level that governments cannot function properly. And since Republicans have done just about everything they possibly can to vilify any hint at a tax increase, suggesting one would almost certainly be political suicide for any member of the GOP.

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This is a similar (though not exact) issue Texas is about to deal with as well. When you base an economy on horrifically flawed ideologies, it’s eventually going to catch up with you. While pushing for tax cuts makes for great politics, reality proves time and time again that it makes for terrible policy. And while not all tax cuts are bad, they’re certainly not this economic savior Republicans often make them out to be.

Over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA”

The Oklahoma State survey result is probably an example of the intersection between scientific ignorance and political ignorance, both of which are widespread.The most obvious explanation for the data is that most of these people don’t really understand what DNA is, and don’t realize that it is contained in almost all food. When they read that a strange substance called “DNA” might be included in their food, they might suspect that this is some dangerous chemical inserted by greedy corporations for their own nefarious purposes.

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The same is true of much scientific ignorance. For many people, there is little benefit to understanding much about genetics or DNA. Most Americans can even go about their daily business perfectly well without knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun. Even the smartest people are inevitably ignorant of the vast majority of information out there. We all have to focus our time and energy on learning that information which is most likely to be instrumentally useful, or at least provide entertainment value. For large numbers of people, much basic political and scientific information doesn’t make the cut.

Kentucky Republican says 1891 law lets him drive drunk while he’s in office

Kentucky state Sen. Brandon Smith’s (R) lawyer argued in court on Wednesday that he should not be charged with driving under the influence because of a provision in the state constitution, WKYT-TV reported.

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Smith was arrested on Jan. 6, the opening day of the legislature, and charged with speeding and a DUI after allegedly blowing a .088 on a preliminary breath test. He was also reportedly caught driving at 65 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone.

“The members of the General Assembly shall, in all cases except treason, felony, breach or surety of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance on the sessions of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House they shall not be questioned in any other place,” the section reads.

Johnson told the Associated Press that the provision was added to state law in 1891 to “keep legislators from being bothered by people who would arrest them during sessions.”

America dumbs down: a rising tide of anti-intellectual thinking

The digital revolution, which has brought boundless access to information and entertainment choices, has somehow only enhanced the lowest common denominators,,,[i]t creates an online environment where Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model with a high school education, can become a worldwide leader of the anti-vaccination movement, naysaying the advice of medical professionals.
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If the rise in uninformed opinion was limited to impenetrable subjects that would be one thing, but the scourge seems to be spreading. Everywhere you look these days, America is in a rush to embrace the stupid. Hell-bent on a path that’s not just irrational, but often self-destructive. Common-sense solutions to pressing problems are eschewed in favour of bumper-sticker simplicities and blind faith.

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The cost of a simple appendectomy in the United States averages $33,000 and it’s not uncommon for such bills to top six figures. More than 15 per cent of the population has no health insurance whatsoever. Yet efforts to fill that gaping hole via the Affordable Health Care Act—a.k.a. Obamacare—remain distinctly unpopular. Nonsensical myths about the government’s “real” intentions have found so much traction that 30 per cent still believe that there will be official “death panels” to make decisions on end-of-life care.

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The advance of ignorance and irrationalism in the U.S. has hardly gone unnoticed. The late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter won the Pulitzer prize back in 1964 for his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which cast the nation’s tendency to embrace stupidity as a periodic by-product of its founding urge to democratize everything. By 2008, journalist Susan Jacoby was warning that the denseness—“a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations”—was more of a permanent state. In her book, The Age of American Unreason, she posited that it trickled down from the top, fuelled by faux-populist politicians striving to make themselves sound approachable rather than smart. Their creeping tendency to refer to everyone—voters, experts, government officials—as “folks” is “symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards,” she wrote. “Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls.”

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“There’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization,” says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique and a film and media studies professor at University of California at Irvine. Both ends of the political spectrum have come to reject the conspicuously clever, she says, if for very different reasons; the left because of worries about inclusiveness, the right because they equate objections with obstruction. As a result, the very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.” (Boomers, she says, deserve most of the blame. “They were so triumphalist in promoting pop culture and demoting the canon.”)




America dumbs down: a rising tide of anti-intellectual thinking