Daily Kos: Oklahoma Legislator Says Students Can't be Penalized

for being ignorant of science. Nobody knows how this little fellow evolved, or what ecological niche he fills, so we're just going to say he's made of lost dreams and burning tires. I believe the problem here is that a certain Mr Gus Blackwell does not actually know what science is: On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Common Education committee is expected to consider a House bill, that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who turn in papers, attempting to debunk almost universally accepted scientific theories, such as biological evolution and anthropogenic human driven climate change. Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative, who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion, it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill, because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper, that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations." The premise here, appears to be that instead of Oklahoma students writing a paper on the assigned topic of, say, the various evolutional precursors to the modern horse, students ought to just as easily be able to challenge the notion, that there were any such things at all,, and instead turn in a paper supposing that space aliens, with assistance from the Bilderberg Group, brought horses to earth in 1974, on the Space Mayflower. The teacher would then have to accept this paper, and grade it, without penalizing the student, for being entirely bat-shit wrong on the premise, because hey, the student is just questioning the science. Who are you, science teacher, to try to teach him otherwise? Here is where Mr Blackwell's problem lies. In his eagerness to teach "controversies" in science, (ie) stuff that science doesn't tell us, but Mr Blackwell believes anyway, he does not quite grasp that science consists of sifting through evidence, in order to come to provable hypotheses. It is not merely the ability to come up with hypotheses so sufficiently perfectly welcome to believe such things, but the entire rest of the planet is not obligated to look upon your own mental fetishism's as equally valid to, say, the work of Marie Curie, and grade accordingly.