DALE McFEATTERS: Scientific mumbo-jumboCopyright © 1999 Nando Media
Copyright © 1999 Scripps Howard News Service(September 12, 1999 12:10 p/m/ EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - News item: The Kansas state Board of Education votes to discourage the teaching of evolution to high school students. Science teachers are urged to offer students "alternative explanations to scientific hypotheses or theories." The goal is to restore to the curriculum such traditional explanations as creationism.
Subsequently:
- The Kansas Board of Education insists that teachers offer alternatives to the Copernican theory of the universe because "any fool can see that the sun, moon and the stars revolve around the Earth."
The board sends a telegram to the Vatican congratulating Pope Urban VIII for treating the astronomical theories of Galileo and Copernicus as the heresies they are.
The Vatican e-mails back that the Church has long since apologized for its treatment of Galileo and that it fully supports and encourages the findings of modern astronomy. Moreover, the Vatican replies, Urban VIII has been dead 355 years.
The Kansas Board votes to drop any mention of the Vatican from the world history curriculum.
- Under a new Board of Education ruling, Kansas teachers are permitted to teach the theory that dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago but only if they give equal weight to an alternative hypothesis: that dinosaurs were invented by Steven Spielberg in 1993
- The Kansas Board of Education asks the state's health and biology teachers to to easy on "this nonsense about disease being caused by bacteria and microbes."
The teachers ar urged to fully inform students about the four bodily humours (phlegm, choler, blood and black bile) and importance to good health of keeping the four in balance. The importance of noxious vapors and miasmas in spreading disease should also be stressed.
Once both theories are explained, the students should be allowed to choose the one they find most satisfactory.
- The Kansas Board of Education postpones its fall meeting until Virgo and Libra are in a more favorable ascendance.
- The board raises questions about the conventional explanation for fire being taught the state's students. If fire were really a form of oxidation, the board reasons, then rust would be hot to the touch.
Teachers are urged to give equal weight to fire being due to the rapid escape of the substance phlogiston, an explanation the board said was too quickly dismissed by the scientific community in 1680.
- The Kansas board votes to include the lost and sunken civilization of Atlantis in the state's geography curriculum because "it's got to be down there somewhere."
- Kansas high school students are now studying phrenology as part of their advanced placement psychology classes.
Phrenology teachers that a person's temperament and mental capacity can be determined by feeling the bumps and hollows of the skull. The state's Board of Education says the phrenology requirement will save on the cost of textbooks "because all you need for your homework is a head and every student has one."
The board also pointed to the abundance of job opportunities for trained phrenologists with traveling carnivals.
- The Kansas board warns the state's high school physics teachers to "go slow" with all this talk of electrons, protons, neutrons, mesons. All this particle physics is pure speculation and, the board said, "one of the scientists' own kind came right out and said so. If Heisenberg was so sure he was right, why did he call it the Uncertainty Principle?"
The board urged physics teachers to teach an alternative theory that fits all the known facts about cause and effect: evil spirits.
- In attempting to prove that gravity is a theory, not a law, the Kansas Board of Education fell to its death from its 10th-floor headquarters.
Dale McFeatters writes this column weekly for Scripps Howard News Service