Dwight A. Loftis (R-District 19) and James Mikell "Mike" Burns (R-District 17) sponsored House Bill 3826 in South Carolina's legislature on January 31st, 2019. The bill, among other things would "require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science as part of the course content." That's not a science with which I am familiar. And lest we get too smug with ourselves North of the 49th parallel, I would direct your attention to this story in the Globe and Mail last week that predicts we are likely to see a large measles outbreak in Canada in the very near future (similar to the one that has spread throughout Europe over the past year). There have been two reported cases in Canada thus far in 2019 and more will follow due to declining immunization rates. While many view the disease as pretty harmless, it killed 110,000 people in 2017- the last year for which the World Health Organization has published statistics. That’s good enough for 1st place on the list of vaccine preventable deaths. Now to put these stories in a broader context, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” was published by Charles Darwin in November of 1859. That’s almost 160 rotations around the sun ago (assuming you subscribe to the heliocentric theory of the solar-system). Darwin’s theory of evolution that has since been confirmed by archaeologists and geneticists the world over. Likewise, John Enders and his colleagues created a measles vaccine in 1963 that should have eradicated the disease. Instead, a growing number of people are voluntarily choosing to put their children and their neighbours at risk because a) it’s God’s wish, b) diseases are good for kids or c) vaccines cause autism or ADHD or <insert absurdity here>. How is this possible? First off, I can tell you with great certainty that educators are doing their best, but clearly there are a lot of people coming through the school system that fundamentally don’t understand the process that is science. Despite our best efforts, if people are reaching adulthood thinking that Science is something akin to “Nerd’s opinions” about things we have failed. Science is not something that you believe or you don’t. Belief is only required for articles of faith. Science is something that you understand, or you don’t. It exists independent of your thoughts about it. Case in point- whether you believe in Newton’s theory of gravity or not, if you walk of the roof of a building you will find yourself accelerating towards the most massive body nearby: the oblate spheroid we call Earth. Now my colleges and I may be partially at fault in all this. We may have inadvertently undermined children’s’ understanding of science through the careless application of relativism. When we teach children that there is no one way to understand poetry or to a lesser extent, history, we have to distinguish this from the study of Science and Mathematics because children are prone to over-generalizations. You see this with very young children when they are learning the language and they make mistakes with irregular verbs- “Yesterday we swimmed in the pool”. This is over-generalization. Last year after a lesson on Body Safety, Ms. M got the idea that she didn’t have to eat vegetables she didn’t like because, “My body, my choice”. Also, over-generalization. This tendency allows children to learn quickly but it can lead to a lot of confusion if the exceptions to the rules aren’t taught. And teaching these distinctions is difficult. We have to walk a very fine line between cultivating a healthy skepticism that is essential for critical thinking while nurturing a respect for the results of evidence-based inquiry. We have done a good job with the former, but we have been less successful at the latter. Of course it doesn’t help that we have other organizations working against us. Much of the misinformation about the role Science plays in our lives can be laid at the feet of organized religions and corporate industries. They have done their absolute best to muddy the waters of scientific inquiry and to undermine the results produced. Religions should have bowed out of teaching metaphysics 500 years ago when Galileo set the record straight. They could have thrown in the towel after Darwin and just focused instead on the moral teachings of Jesus, which- it should be said, are the absolute standard for what it means to be good. As for corporate industries, they are absolutely diabolical when it comes to misinformation. My favourite (or least favourite) example of corporate corruption comes from General Motors who added tetraethyl lead to gasoline knowing full well that it was poisoning everyone. Beginning in 1922, it was only finally phased out in North America in 1995 (though it is still used in other parts of the world). Phillip Morris Tobacco had their 3rd best year ever in 2017 with 7.8 billion dollars in revenue worldwide in large part because the harmful effects of tobacco use are still “just a theory” in the third world. In much the same way that effects of man-made climate change remains “just a theory” for approximately a third of the people in the United States and Canada thanks in no small part to the good work of the Saudi Royal family, Sinopec and Exxon-Mobil. I don’t want to end on a note of doom and gloom. In fact, I’m not very pessimistic about our future. For all the people who are refusing to get their kids vaccinated, there are many, many more who do. Mr. Loftis and Mr. Burns from South Carolina may want to confuse creationism with science in schools, but there are thousands upon thousands of archaeologists scouring the globe at this moment adding to our collective understanding of the past. (There is also a Supreme Court that settled this matter 40 years ago.) In short, I’m not pessimistic about the future because I know that science is progress and I have faith in the future.
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