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Mississippi is dah loser!

Sweet! (added in edit: Because it’s not Kansas this time!)

According to the National Center for Science Education the state of Mississippi has become the first state legislature of 2010 to file an anti-evolution bill.

But check this out:

“The lesson provided to students … shall have proportionately equal instruction from educational materials that present scientifically sound arguments by protagonists and antagonists of the theory of evolution.”

“proportionally equal” ????

Hmmm.

If the time devoted to the evidence supporting evolution is “proportionately equal” to the amount of evidence supporting evolution, and the time devoted to the evidence against evolution is “proportionately equal” to the amount of evidence against it, then the lesson becomes easy to plan:

99.99% of the time would be devoted to the evidence supporting evolution, while 0.01% of the class time would be devoted to . . . well, since there’s no credible evidence against evolution, that time could be used to discuss the anti-evolution movement in the US.

That 0.01% of class time could be used to point out the uniformly religious motivations of the anti-science movement, like the quote from the bill’s sponsor:

“Either you believe in the Genesis story, or you believe that a fish walked on the ground,” and adding, “All these molecules didn’t come into existence by themselves.” – Gary Chism (R-District 37), to the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (January 24, 2009)

Somehow, I doubt Chism recognizes what the word “proportionately” means.


Posted by Cheryl Shepherd-Adams

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 7:26 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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