We have never seen anything like this before. It was only yesterday that we posted South Dakota’s 2017 Creationism Bill Progresses. because the bill had been approved by the Senate’s Education Committee.
Then we were alerted last night by our friends at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) that South Dakota’s antiscience bill passes the Senate.
How is that possible? Let’s find out what NCSE says, with our bold font:
South Dakota’s Senate Bill 55 passed the Senate on a 23-12 vote on January 25, 2017, “despite guidance from the State Department of Education, state school boards, school administrators, teachers and scientists,” according to the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (January 25, 2017)
This is the newspaper article they’re talking about: S.D. Senate OKs alternative teachings on scientific theories, which says — with bold font added by us for emphasis:
The South Dakota Senate advanced a bill Wednesday that would give teachers the ability to discuss strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including evolution and climate change.
Members of that chamber on a 23-12 vote advanced the bill despite guidance from the State Department of Education, state school boards, school administrators, teachers and scientists, who all said the change was unnecessary and could lead to the instruction of unauthorized theories. They also warned that the rule change could cause serious legal problems for school districts.
M’god! That’s SENATE BILL NO. 55, about which we said:
It’s a typical example of the Discovery Institute’s Academic Freedom bill. We’ve critiqued their model bill here: Curmudgeon’s Guide to “Academic Freedom” Laws.
The legislature is racing to authorize the teaching of nonsense in their state’s pubic schools. Another excerpt:
Sen. Jeff Monroe, R-Pierre, said he heard from teachers who didn’t feel comfortable speaking to the weaknesses of scientific theories like evolution and climate change. He said providing additional latitude for teachers to explain potential flaws in theories and allowing them to provide alternate scientific theories without fear of retribution would benefit students’ critical thinking skills.
That’s right out of the Discovery Institute’s playbook — see What Is “Critical Thinking”? Then the newspaper says:
Glenn Branch, deputy director for the National Center for Science Education, Inc., said the “unclear and flabby” language of the 36-word proposal could open up state science standards to alternate theories like Creationism, climate change denial and white supremacy. “They’ll be able to teach anything they please,” Branch said.
Indeed. Okay, back to NCSE for one last excerpt:
SB 55 now proceeds to the South Dakota House of Representatives, where Blaine Campbell (R-District 35), Julie Frye-Mueller (R-District 30), Tim Goodwin (R-District 30), Leslie J. Heinemann (R-District 8), and Taffy Howard (R-District 33) are its sponsors.
When will they vote on the bill? You can follow the progress of the bill here: Senate Bill 55. Going there now we learn that a vote in the House isn’t scheduled yet. That means nothing, because when we checked yesterday, a vote in the Senate hadn’t been scheduled — yet it happened.
This thing is moving fast! The South Dakota legislature convened on 10 January, so the current session is only two weeks old. There hasn’t been time for any serious opposition to get organized, and the bill is already only one step away from being passed by both legislative chambers. The creationists have obviously been preparing for this one, and now it’s almost a done deal.
If it passes in the House and gets signed by the Governor, this will be the action model for creationists to follow in other states. Those who prefer reason to idiocy can learn a lot from this. In the words attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Copyright © 2017. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Welcome to the Post-Truth World of “Alternative” Facts!
We all need to get used to this sort of thing, Curmy. It’s MAGAgeddon alright…
Why should they feel comfortable – given the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses?
Come Visit South Dakota – It’s Just like Louisiana!*
Po’ Boys, Jazz, and Gulf of Mexico not included
They have to do it very quickly, and quietly, before the public has a chance to react. It’s how republicans operate, and it’s in keeping with Trump’s censorship of the EPA as well.
I’m hoping the teachers can also discuss the weaknesses of religious beliefs as well, you know the part about most of it being inspired nonsense created by madmen and perpetuated by selfish old men.
How about the sport coaches discussing the rules of the games. They are only arbitrary. In golf and swimming, the smaller numbers are winners, why not in baseball and soccer?
What abour the ‘theory’ that HIV causes AIDS? We should question that as well. Give the flat earth theory a chance. Not to mention the theory that people went to the moon.
I just checked again on Amazon. Two editions of “1984” are on the best-seller list, number 1 & number 4. I mention this because of the passage in section III chapter III where O’Brien is telling Winston about the falsity of fossil bones and how the Earth is the center of the universe with the Sun and stars are going around it.
Unfortunately, one of the many negative outcomes of Donald Trump’s election is that overconfident triumphalists will assume that they have a green light from Washington for pursuing every crazy conservative agenda item. I expect to see retries on a lot of failed legislation, court appeals, and ballot initiatives. Many ecstatically speak of “the hand of God” being in the election and that “a new Reformation” is underway, according to Ken Ham.
Meanwhile, an insider with AIG tells me that prospects for funding the Ark Encounter looked extremely bleak until that same divine hand moved Bill Nye to agree to the debate with Ken Ham—and the publicity of that ill-advised event quickly brought in the many millions of dollar AIG needed from donors large and small. So I’m prone to put Bill Nye and James Comey in the same category of people making unfortunate decisions which brought very serious long-term consequences which will harm our nation for decades.
So here is the language of the Bill 55:
The minute any ID/creationist garbage came up in a physics or chemistry course, I would start with Morris and Gish’s mangling of the second law of thermodynamics. Then I would procede to Granville Sewell’s inability to get units correct when plugging his bogus “X-entropies” into is diffusion equation.
We can then move on to Jason Lisle’s bogus calculation of the orbital recession of the Moon and his “theory” that light travels at infinite speed toward every point in space and at c/2 away from every point in space. Both of these violate well-established laws of physics and every known phenomena we observe in the universe.
Then there is Dembski who claims that the expected number of occurrences of a specified molecular assembly is Np less than one, and how he uses bogus calculations that have absolutely nothing to do with the probabilities of molecular assemblies.
I would move on down the list of every ID/creationist leader and expose in detail every bogus calculation, misrepresentation of science, and all their self-citations that puff up their “literature” and cargo cult science.
There is something like fifty years of junk material we can work with; all of it already shown to be bogus and all of it full of misconceptions, quote-mines, misrepresentations of science, and pure puffery designed to make nothing look like something.
The biologists and chemists can do likewise with all of the material that is now available to them. By the time knowledgeable instructors got done with this brutal exposure, the legislature would be trying to pass laws forbidding the exposure of bogus science being pushed into the public school curriculum by ID/creationists. Then we can sue them and charge them with blatant corruption (corruption which, by the way, is what South Dakota politics is full of these days. They even eliminated their ethics panel.).
And if they did that, one can set up private Twitter accounts and have students go there.
The Trump era is upon us; and it’s time to kick some ID/creationist’s political butts “bigly.” They asked for it; and we can make them wish they hadn’t.
While there are indeed mobs of religious crazies in Minnesota, I’ve never thought of South Dakota as a fundamentalist state.
But we already do this! When I taught ideal gas theory, I mentioned its strengths in explaining Boyle’s law and Charles’s law, but also mention its weaknesses in neglecting molecular volumes and interactions. When I taught about climate change, I mentioned that we are did not have very good estimates of the feedback factor, and that there was a real risk that anthropogenic effects might be grossly underestimated, because of feedbacks not included in the models, such as the release of methane from melted tundra. And when I write about evolution, I emphasise the great importance of random drift.
But somehow, I don’t think that’s what the legislators had in mind.
The gameplan is scary. It is a construct a rerun of Kitzmiller, and then appeal it up to a Supreme Court which will by then be packed with Tr*mp’s stooges
@ Paul Braterman, Exactly right! I start my lessons on Darwin and Evolution on Monday. I take my kids on the journey that Darwin did and go with him as he collected the evidence. I show the strengths of his Theory and why it is correct solution and also show how every bit of additional evidence that Darwin never had access to helps further strengthen the Theory not weaken it. Yes, this isn’t what those people want!
And when I taught about global warming, I pointed out the main weakness of the theory; that it does not take into account postive feedback loops, such as the removal of ice cover from oceans, and the reduction in CO2 uptake as deserts spread, so that the model may, by an inknown amount, underestimate the problem
Now where have I heard this sort of BS about God intervening to overrule the voters in a presidential election.
Oh, yeah: it was in 2000 and 2004, the last time we had a Republican president who had come to the white House in defiance of the voters. (Though to be fair, most Republicans cringed at such claims of partisan divine intervention.)