Page from proposed new South Dakota public high school science textbook.
Apparently, according to the South Dakota House of Representatives, through legislation (and maybe clapping your hands and saying “I do believe, I do believe, I do I do I do believe!”), you can make any damn foolish thing you want into the truth. They’re trying to legislate away climate change not by demanding greater fuel efficiency standards for cars or creating incentives for innovation in the field of renewable energy, but by making sure that – as with another issue that is divided along similar lines – science need not necessarily be taught in South Dakotan science classrooms.
I, for one, applaud this effort, and think there’s so much more we could accomplish through such means. To this end, I’ve taken the liberty of preparing another resolution for your perusal. Someone out there in South Dakota, call up your legislators and point them to this blog entry! They’ll want to see this:
A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for the balanced teaching of models of the Earth and its place in the “Solar” System in the public schools of South Dakota
WHEREAS, it really, really, really looks like the Sun and the planets are orbiting the Earth when you look up in the sky; and
WHEREAS, this viewpoint is enhanced if you willfully and purposefully ignore the evidence presented by men and women who have devoted their lives to studying such things, using tools designed and intended for the purpose; and
WHEREAS, the concept that there’s something called “gravity” that is a fundamental force of the universe and which governs the way that bodies of mass interact with one another is, after all, only a theory; and
WHEREAS, nobody’s even ever actually been to the Sun and it therefore remains entirely unproven that the Sun isn’t actually a chariot driven by the god Helios; and
WHEREAS, Aristotle and Ptolemy were perfectly cromulent scientists, every bit as much as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Isaac Newton; and
WHEREAS, you can probably find lots and lots of people who call themselves scientists who would be willing to make the claim that the Earth is the center of the universe and probably even believe they have lots of facts to back up this idea; and
WHEREAS, the idea that humanity is entirely incidental to the existence of the universe rather than the very purpose for the existence of the universe is weird, scary and unsettling to many people:
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to cosmology include the following:
(1) That the so-called “Heliocentric/Copernican” model of the so-called “Solar” System is only a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2) That there are a variety of theories based on the idea that the Earth is, in fact, the center of the universe and that what forces cause the Sun and the planets to orbit the Earth are entirely speculative;
(3) That the debate on cosmological models has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of Helio- and/or Geocentric models of the universe; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of gravity be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.
Tip o’ the cap to the Bad Astronomer, without whom I would have gone through life blissfully unaware of the outrageous stupidity of the South Dakota state legislature.