The Clown Award, given weekly for acts of meritorious stupidity. This week we have a tie! I couldn't decide which of these was more clownish.The first big red nose goes to Missouri state representative Rick Brattin, a self-proclaimed "huge science buff," who recently introduced a bill to require that the bogus notion of "intelligent design" and what the bill calls "destiny" get the same educational treatment and textbook space in Missouri schools as does the theory of evolution.
Now, that's not enough for the Clown Award; lots of bozos - or, in this case, Bozo-wanna-bes - have done much the same thing. Indeed, there is another bill in the Missouri House which tries to do the now-standard end run around the Constitutional ban on introducing religion into public school classrooms by requiring "exploration of strengths and weaknesses of various theories." And there's one in Oklahoma that even says teachers would not be allowed to penalize students who turn in work insisting that some other explanation - that is, other than evolution - is the true one.
No, Brattin's claim to the big red nose rests on two points: The first is that he argues that there are "numerous college professors within biology, school science teachers" who are "banned from the science community" because they want to teach creationism instead of evolution. To which I say, good.
That, however, is a single. This is a home run:
First, you have to understand that in science, a hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an effect or process which is based on observation and can be tested by further observation and experiment. It can be thought of as an educated, or better yet well-informed, guess.
In Brattin's bill, a hypothesis is defined as something that reflects a "minority of scientific opinion and is philosophically unpopular."
A scientific theory, on the other hand, is an explanation for scientific data that has been well-established through repeated observation and experiment and which usually unites different effects or processes under a single explanation.
But in Brattin's bill, a scientific theory is "an inferred explanation...whose components are data, logic and faith-based philosophy."
Finally, the bill refers to what it calls "the events and processes that define the future of the universe, galaxies, stars, our solar system, earth, plant life, animal life, and the human race." You know, all those things that scientists would call chemical, biological, and physical processes. Oh no, according to our "huge science buff"'s bill. No, all that, it says, is "destiny."
Rick Brattin's destiny is to be a clown.
Sources:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/intelligent-design-missouri-evolution
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