Now that Twitter and Facebook have been invented, I don’t usually put up blog posts that simply link to someone else’s posts. (Although I wonder if that policy is a mistake.) But this morning I put up a link to a post at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and it was almost immediately deleted from Facebook. (The Twitter entry was fine, of course.) I wouldn’t even have known, except that someone commented that it had been “flagged as inappropriate by Facebook users.”
Of course, Facebook being Facebook, I have no idea whether this is a nefarious conspiracy or simple incompetence. Probably both. In any event, you should go check out the post, which comments on this YouTube video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBmhM0R2A0
It’s a compilation of the answers given by contestants in the Miss USA contest to a simple question: “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella, who eventually won the contest, gave a strong pro-science answer that will bring a smile to your face. At least, if you are finished crying and throwing objects at your computer monitor after seeing some of the other answers. Due to the vagaries of alphabetical order, Miss Alabama comes first, and it’s not pretty.
For the most part, the contestants are interested in being good politicians and keeping everybody happy, not in staking out courageous stances in the science/religion debates. But that’s exactly what’s so depressing: here we are, in the most advanced country in the world (albeit in its waning years), and it’s considered controversial whether we should teach science to our children. The question wasn’t even “should we teach creationism,” which is actually a harder issue (although still very easy). It was just whether we should teach straightforward science at all. Very sad indeed.
I hate that phrase “I think it’s good to teach both sides of the question.”
So… I should teach them than when the world of fire and world of ice collided, the middle world was created and later the body of a giant was used to make the land that was later filled with people made out of tree trunks… and evolution.
God. There’s more than one reason I don’t even bother with watching those things.
I’d have to agree with you, though. Science being taught in schools should never really be a question at all in any respect. It is, indeed a sad thing to even know the question is being asked.
But…what else are you going to do? Questions are going to be asked, and there will always be a level of understanding on that basis.
The Miss USA contest should be replaced with Vincent Price movies. Yesssssss.
What’s interesting about many answers is that they assume evolution isn’t taught at the moment, and someone is about to decide about its introduction in schools.
I’m going to bet that no more than a couple contestants took AP biology (Miss Vermont actually seemed to actually know a bit about observed speciation – yay!).
Sad to see how many give the “two sides” answer and even conflate evolution with big bang cosmology.
Miss. California makes the fundamental mistake in using the word BELIEVE. Evolution, like other science, simply IS. The verb BELIEVE pretty well doesn’t belong in a science classroom.
If you trip and don’t put your hands out, you’re going to smash your face on the ground whether or not you BELIEVE in gravity.
Here’s the question for next year’s pageant: “Should we look to beauty contest entrants to inform us on educational policy?”
Evolution and creationism–I’m not going to dignify creationism by giving it a capital C–have nothing to do with the other. Evolution is a well-established scientific LAW–since so many numbnuts get away calling creationism a scientific theory, I should be able to declare Evolution a scientific law–that has the OBJECTIVE backing of over 100 years of scientific inquiry; creationism is a religious something-or-other, up there was Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
One has nothing to do with the other. Heck, I’m not even going to argue that they’re mutually exclusive since they’re not even in the same category of thought. To declare one exclusive to the other is to give permission for creationists to look for “flaws” in Evolution and use it to support their alternative “theory”, and I won’t buy into it.
Wow. Sad.
Still… of all the answers, I am with Jonathan.. Ms Vermont came across most knowledgeable, even if she did not “win” this contest.
@Michael. Re: Here’s the question for next year’s pageant: “Should we look to beauty contest entrants to inform us on educational policy?”
Honestly, would it be any worse than have Congress inform educational policy?
ohhh like Wow, that is sooo gnarly depressing… and I don’t mean that in a happy way.
I kind of liked Jillian Wunderlich’s response (Indiana). I guess I felt like she was saying, “Why the hell are you asking me?”
But on the whole, it seemed that the most common response was “Both Sides!” To which I was viscerally reminded of this SMBC video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ
There’s got to be a prize for Miss Indiana’s response.
Is it just me, or do these answers seem to relflect a (terrifying) amalgamation of religious idiocy and postmodernist idiocy? Along with the obvious religious idiocy, there seems to be a theme that “everybody gets to choose their own reality.” A few contestants also seemed to think the question is culture-specific, as if the laws of nature depend on cultural, religious, or ethnic background. On the other hand, even though this is rather depressing, I doubt the opinions of these fine young scholars make much practical difference.
Several interesting ideas here:
* Teach “both” — cosmological statements made by religion and by science are really just opinions on equal footing.
* “Let the children decide for themselves” — both religious doctrine and scientific theories are opinions to be held or discarded, sort of like fashion, AND children are equipped by our educational institutions to choose between a commitment to observation-driven skepticism or faith-driven dogma.
* “Religion should be taught in schools.” — religion is a single subject, like what you learn at church, and not an exclusively local custom with hundreds of variations.
It seems clear that intellect has not been a heavily favored attribute in selecting for beauty pageants.
@Katie — actually you can declare that evolution and creationism are mutually exclusive — in the sense that they cannot both be held as truthy(*) ideas simultaneously in the same sane mind — precisely because they occupy different and incompatible categories of thought.
* Science doesn’t really produce “truths”, only our best understandings to date; whereas ideas offered by religion(s) are presented exclusively as “the truth”. So we can’t even talk about the veracity of statements offered by science and religion in equivalent terms.
@Johnathan Peterson — “Believe” actually does belong in science classrooms, if for no other reason than to frame a discussion about what it means to reject ideas produced by science. If one “believes” in the *process* of science, and one “believes” in the integrity of certain experiments and the logic of related arguments, than one must accept the conclusions thereby reached. This comes more easily to some of us than others, of course 🙂
Crushingly depressing. And ditto on “belief systems”, etc. “Belief” in evolution is inappropriate. No one who understands the meaning of theory “believes” anything taught in science class, and there isn’t a single contestant that I watched (I just couldn’t sit through it past Ms. Colorado) who gave a proper answer. Ms. California flunked as badly as the rest. Rather, I should say her teachers failed her as badly as any Ms. Wherever’s, because they clearly never taught any of these contestants what the hell science actually is.
Hi Sean,
Something different: You write “here we are, in the most advanced country in the world”. Do you really believe that? That is a pretty arrogant statement and, apart from that, also quite wrong. Just pick a few random indicators, say child mortality, life expectancy or the Math scores of pupils. According to the Human Development Index, the most advanced country in the world is Norway followed by Australia. In other respects, like the murder rate or the incarceration rate per capita, the US is indeed very ‘advanced’ compared to other industrialized countries, though this is probably not what you mean. I am somewhat disappointed to see someone as knowledgeable as you to buy (though probably unconsciously) into the ‘greatest country in the world’ fairy tale.
Ben
I think Miss New Mexico had the best response. She kept religion entirely out of her answer. Simply that it’s part of science so we should teach it.
Massachusetts, Vermont and New Mexico for the win!
Hard cold facts ? who could get anything done – you have to have faith. It is much easier to believe in Creationism then evolution. Anyway those girls all look/sound the same. No evolution there.
Arkansas:
“Personally, I was never taught evolution”
But wait. It gets worse:
Georgia:
“I mean, we’re smarter than ever these days, so we can make our own choices”
I just threw my computer out the window in frustration. Sean, I blame you…
i think it’s instructive to try a more positive and less “they’re all stupid” reading of all this. firstly — i found it very positive that there were a handful of informed and thoughtful replies. secondly — the conception of school as a place of development and debate rather than solely either indoctrination or fact- or skill-reproduction is not something to be taken for granted. it isn’t the case in much of the world now and it hasn’t been the case for much of history. i would take it as a very positive sign that this idea — against dogma (even if with misconceived notion of what counts as dogma) — is robustly in place and non-negotiable. thirdly — it’s not always easy to be articulate on the spot, even for us well-heeled scientific types. and i think it’s disingenuous to say that the women should have kept to science and not mentioned religion, because like it or not religion is the subtext of the question. my favorite comment therefore was from the woman who pointed out that many religious leaders have said (to various degrees) that there need not be a contradiction between religion and evolution. i felt that this is the sort of sensible statement that many of the other women were groping towards in a less articulate way.
I’m not sure if anyone thinks these women are innately stupid. I certainly don’t. My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that contestants in the Miss USA pageant need to be high academic achievers to be in the running at the state level. According to Ms. Campanella’s personal web site, she was a 4.0 high school student, graduated a year early, and received a scholarship to New York’s prestigious Conservatory for Dramatic Arts. She might even be physicist material, for all I know. It’s safe to assume all of these women are easily “smart enough to know better”. And I don’t hold them responsible for their performance.
But overall, the quality of the answers was appalling, and little less so from those who were quite open to teaching “belief” in evolution. I’m not one for harping on philosophy, but it’s quite clear that the great majority, if not all, of these women have not even a basic knowledge of the philosophy of science. A depressingly large number of them drew some kind of equivalency between evolution and the Judeo-Christian creation myth, as if they were simply alternate viewpoints rather than the products of completely different approaches to describing the natural world, and not comparable in any way. I’d love to think some percentage at least came off worse than they should have due to pressure to be “politically correct”. But they all seemed rather guileless to me, with answers too clumsy to have been rehearsed well.
Which tells me that our high schools nationwide, at the very least, have really blown it with science education. Even the brightest students are not being given a good sense of how science tells us what it does (i.e. what makes it completely distinct from faith), even if they’re being taught what it tells us. I actually have always thought that Ms. USA was supposed to be not only an outstanding beauty, but also (if only to give the contest some feminist legitimacy in its dotage) highly talented in other ways, and at least well above-average in scholastics. So depressing indeed.
The solution to this and similar problems is to eliminate the public schools altogether. Society has no business dictating curricula to my children–that’s my job as a parent. The choice to have public schools is the source of the problem.
First, I had to correct nearly everything my children were taught about evolution because the so-called science teachers didn’t understand evolutionary theory. Check out your local schools, they’re being run by morons who haven’t the least idea of their subjects. Worse yet, they have no curiousity about the world, being concerned only with benefits, their unions and what to do with their summer break.
Second, you might sway public opinion to teach evolution for a generation or two, but if that opinion swings back, then you lost the battle. Education should never be left to public opinion.
Third, along the lines of Sean’s thinking, we’ve lost all sense of teaching scientific or critical THINKING. Teachers today are the dictionaries from which all knowledge flows. They tell students they’re right because they are the teachers. How many times has your child come home with some alleged statement of fact, and you’ve asked, “How do you know that?” only to be told, “My teacher told me.”
Fourth, along the lines of my comments above, are you really sure you want public school teachers teaching evolution? These people refuse to teach reading, grammar, math, and composition. So they must be prepared to teach evolution?
The honest solution is to stop taxing everyone to pay for a public education system that has failed and to bury that system forever. Let’s see, how do American students rate within the world in their understanding of science or anything?