Pharyngula

A little more on the Bell debate

Posted by PZ Myers on September 30, 2007
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Now Matt Nisbet weighs in, and Mike Haubrich gives an amazing summary of not just what I said, but what I meant to say.

One thing I referred to I called the “science education extinction vortex”, and referred to this hastily drawn diagram:

i-3e894a4cea8d2f23692f0181074c9bb7-sci_ed_ext_vortex.gif

My point was that we have all these forces working together to amplify a problem, and slapping some nice words on it to make people feel good about it all isn’t going to change things unless we actually commit to making substantive corrections to those institutionalized problems.

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Comments

  1. #1 David Marjanovi?, OM
    September 30, 2007

    Nah, that will never happen.

    Unless China somehow gets a wacko boss who doesn’t care about consequences (think W) and calls the loans in.

  2. #2 David Marjanovi?
    September 30, 2007

    One wonders how America has made it all these years with so many religious lunatics running around????

    They just haven’t been in power for long enough. And they aren’t enough in the first place.

    But what exactly do you mean by “America has made it”? Do keep in mind that you’re talking about the country of the working poor — with 1, 2, or even 3 jobs, and no health insurance. “Made it” is something else.

    Church membership reached a high of 76 percent in both 1943 and 1947 and dropped to a low of 65 percent in 1988 and 1990. In 1939, when Gallup first began measuring church attendance, 41 percent of Americans claimed to attend weekly worship services. The high point for weekly observance of religious faith was reached in the midand late 1950s, when 49 percent of the population said that they attended church or synagogue once a week.

    Somewhere I’ve read that while half of all Americans claim to go to church every Sunday, only a quarter actually does. This hypocrisy is not found in, say, Europe, where people aren’t ashamed of not going to church. Do you think such hypocrisy is a healthy situation?

    (my high school biology teacher was a creationist and simply “skipped over that part”).

    That’s another thing you don’t get outside of the USA and Turkey, at least among countries that aren’t very poor.

    You shouldn’t have to go to college to get the foundations of genetics, cell biology, and evolution taught to you.

    And indeed, I was taught all this in the last (12th) year of school… of course, only those who want to go on to university ever get that far…