Another attempt to treat superstition as the equivalent of science has failed to pass a state legislature. This time, Colorado state Republicans tried, and failed, to pass a law that would teach creationism and deny global warming in public schools. Huffington Post reports:
Democrats on the House Committee on Education voted 7-6 rejecting House Bill 13-1089 and also voted 7-6 to indefinitely shelve future considerations of the bill.
“This victory in Colorado was too close,” Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education said. “People in Colorado and elsewhere need to understand that these bills would be nothing but trouble: scientifically misleading, pedagogically unnecessary, and likely to produce administrative, legal, and economic headaches.”
Last week, Claire Levy (D-Boulder), chair of the House Appropriations committee,called the bill “D.O.A.” on Denver’s AM 760 with host Geoff Berg. Levy told Berg that House Bill 13-1089 used the term “academic freedom” loosely allowing for creationism to be taught in classrooms:
I think it’s safe to say it’s not going to make it to the Governor’s desk. The bill looks innocuous enough when you read it, it purports to advocate objective scientific analysis and teaching all sides of issues and encouraging students to inquire but when you look beneath the surface it’s pretty obvious that it’s asking science teachers or allowing science teachers to teach creationism and deny global warming.
Bill Nye said it better than I can:
“The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old,” Nye said to the AP, citing scientific estimates that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. “It’s not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.”
Nye added: “If we raise a generation of students who don’t believe in the process of science, who think everything that we’ve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, you’re not going to continue to innovate.”
