Florida's new Board of Education chairman: “I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”

Since this is really only the latest in a string of southern states to do this, you’re gonna need a bigger saw.

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Oh, I know. I’m a Texan. Our main defense against being Bugs’d is our long border with Mexico.

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Just remember, the North’s shit stinks too. Regionalism is a fool’s errand.

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i have a theory

it must be bunnies.

or dishonesty. i think it’s a particular sort of dishonesty in that they don’t care they’re lying because they don’t take the science to be true. it’s like, well you said mumbo jumbo so then i can too

i figure once we get lead out of the soil, this kind of thing will go away

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Or maybe just don’t teach any religious principles in publicly funded schools? Hmm…

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I can’t help but to wonder what this guy thinks of gravitational theory…

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It’s assuming a lot to suppose that he thinks about much at all.

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Sorry to nitpick, but citrus is usually grafted, so the fruiting part is a clone. Checkmate, atheist!

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Well, let’s hope he learned something over the last 11 years …?

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Had to google it. I thought it was something like “Fracking Fools Relocate to Florida”.

Grew up in FL, and got the hell out as soon as I was out of HS (didn’t even spend my post-senior summer there by coming to MA early for a college program). I’m soooo glad my kiddos aren’t going to school down there now.

Won’t matter much in ~20 years when half the state is under water.

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Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes.

Update: Belatedy noticed bobstreo’s earlier comment.

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To be fair and to use up a good amount of my goodwill for today, I’d say that a lot of people are genuinely not familiar with scientific lingo enough to be able to tell the difference. And I wouldn’t necessarily fault them for this. I’m well-educated, I’m interested in science, I have a decent amount of faith in my knowledge of English (it’s not my first language but I completed my university studies in English and use it almost as much, or more, as my first language), and yet I had no idea about this usage of “theory” until a few years ago - it’s not that I thought evolution was “just one theory”, but it simply never occurred to me that the word “theory” might have a different nuance in this context. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everyday people, who are not particularly interested in science and/or don’t have the necessary education, to be aware and/or to remember that commonly used words sometimes have different meanings in certain contexts that they rarely ever come across. See also: people not understanding that just because scientists can’t declare with a 100% certainty that vaccines don’t cause autism doesn’t mean they’re unsure.

(That said, there are also a lot of creationists out there who are being disingenuous…)

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It’s extremely frightening. People are just closing their mind, holing up in their little bubbles, trying to find refuge from all the changes going on in the world, rejecting anything that makes them feel confused and alarmed, desperately hanging on to the “good old times” and “good old traditional values” hoping that this would make the world all right again. And this is bad enough, but I think what is worse is all those amoral grifters who don’t particularly give a shit about any values, and are just using this situation to further their own purposes.

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'tis the endarkenment, and I’ve been observing its creep for far too long now.

Sadly no antidote yet…

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Hope is probably the most we can hope for.

(In retrospect, that’s almost certainly the silliest sentence I’ve ever uttered.)

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Thanks for that. I didn’t have a word for what’s going on.

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Bugs is working overtime!

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Of course, I probably should have known that. Still, grafting depends on cellular biology, and there must be some selective breeding/genetic engineering that occurs to produce different varieties, better scions and rootstock?

Probably, but don’t expect any rational argument to sway the opinions of these sorts of folk. Next up: Bible used to justify cloning

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Omg, yes. This is what needs to be taught! Scientific understanding of what “theory” means is just different enough from popular understanding to completely befuddled the conversation. Sort of a linguistic uncanny valley.

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