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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I up-voted you, but there is nothing political about evolution or climate change outside the US. If you want a world class science education you need to actually you know teach science. And science is based on two and only two ideas, everything is on the table AND reality dictates your views though experimentation. Sacrifice either of them to political grandstanding and you are doing something else.

PS: Biology is so closely tied to evolution at this point that I can't help but wonder what's left once you discard it. Global warming is less important, but it's rather hard to avoid that topic for 12 years.

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But were not talking about ourside the US were talking about the US, and unfortuinitly it is political. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that roughly half the population won't disregard everything your working on to get two bullet points off your list is just stupid.

Also this idea that science is underpinned by evolution and cliement science is laughable. I guess chemestry and physics don't count ?

Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that roughly half the population won't disregard everything your working on to get two bullet points off your list is just stupid.

Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending important topics like evolution and climate change don't exist seems worse.

Climate science IS chemistry and physics. More specifically Climate science is mostly Spectroscopy and Thermodynamics and if it's off the table you can't really talk about them. Nor can you can't talk about convection currents which means you can talk about the gas laws which means you can talk about heat engines.

PS: And no I am not kidding, if you actually understand why a mass spectrometer works then climate change is obvious.

You may not be able to teach climate science without Spectroscopy and Thermodynamics but the converse isn't true. We aren't going to produce better engineers and physicists because we threw in a few weeks on thermohaline circulation.

if you actually understand why a mass spectrometer works then climate change is obvious

Please elaborate.

You're overestimating the anti-science critics. You can teach all the spectroscopy and thermodynamics you want and they won't care, because they don't know what that stuff is.

It's purely the words "climate change" that they'll attack. And picking that fight is not a winning solution.

The winning solution is to show children how awesome science is, give them the fundamental tools to participate in it, and let them see for themselves the validity of conclusions like climate change.

We're in the mess we're in because too many people's science education was purely focussed on the conclusions of science without the methods of science. When "science class" means memorizing facts it's no different than catechism, and truth becomes a question of one authority vs another.

The conclusions of science are of secondary importance to the process of science.

How can we expect to be competitive globally if we ignore two important pieces of science that every other globally competitive nation teaches?

The theory of evolution has pretty much zero value in competing globally, the way I see it (although it's good to know). Global competition is a major contributor to climate change.

The theory of evolution has pretty much zero value in competing globally, the way I see it

This is absurdly myopic. Evolution affects not just all the life-sciences, but also the mathematics of evolution is finding new applications in software and engineering all the time.

I've done genetic algorithms. Yes they employ the concept of evolution but it's something that can be understood in under an hour, purely from a programming perspective. Knowing the theory of evolution isn't required for someone to be skilled at machine learning algorithms. That's not to say schools shouldn't teach the theory of evolution; they should, alongside relativity and other things that can open one's mind but have virtually zero value for competing globally.

Global competition - currently - is a major contributor to climate change.

The societies that learn how to be competitive without contributing to climate change will leapfrog every single other society in technology and wellbeing.

I get your point and agree. By politicizing the standard (even if that's laughable in other countries) it virtually guarantees that half the population will be against it. It becomes a waste of time.

But except for the wastage I'm not concerned. I don't want my kids focusing too much on chemistry or physics in school anyway. There are few jobs in those types of science and plenty of competition for those jobs, so it's only entertainment value for my kids. I'd like the schools to focus on Python and web development first. That's not going to happen, of course, so it's Codecademy and similar sites to fill the gap.

Accepting "education is for a job" in the first place: you're lining your kids up to chase the biggest growth area of the last 20 years, when biotech is likely to be the most successful area in the next 20?

I'd probably be disappointed if a kid of mine was in the biotech field. I don't support genetic modification of food, for example.

What about biological production of plastics?

Or bioinfomatics or computational biology, where they're understanding current biology, not engineering new stuff?

You've discarded all of fundamental science, in favour of teaching your kids programming. Programming's important, but a physics degree _definitely_ teaches programming along with _how the universe works_. And stats. Lots and lots of stats. ",)

I'm just saying; you come across as a little short sighted, here.

It's certainly possible that biotech can be employed for the greater good. But I'm confident there will be a ton of competition for that relative sliver of jobs. I know several people with physics degrees. None of them do physics for a living. None could find a decent job doing it. Whereas programming is a very safe bet over the next 20 years, and is better taught by Python courses than physics.

I'd like schools to favor programming over physics and chemistry, but not ignore physics and chemistry altogether.

So you think schools should teach programming over fundamental science? As a very learned person said, "[physics] runs the shit that runs the shit that runs the shit that runs your shit!"

If you don't know physics, you don't know why there are fundamental limits to Moore's Law that we are rapidly approaching, for an example.

I took two years of physics classes. Virtually none of it applied to life. For example what good did it do me to calculate the trajectory of a projectile (multiple times, for homework, pop quiz, test, semi-final, and final)? We could've spent a fraction of the time on the concept and then been shown the equation for possible future reference, never to actually do a calculation. It would've served me much better to spend most of that time learning programming. I could've grasped fundamental limits to Moore's Law without ever doing a calculation of a projectile.

Nowadays physics is a hobby of mine, having entertainment value only. I can fully appreciate that "[physics] runs the shit..." but that doesn't pay the bills or get me to retirement.

Ballistics is occasionally interestingly counterintuitive, but perhaps that was overkill.

Bully for you. But it's the idea of prioritizing what is essentially a technician's job (yes, we call ourselves engineers; in reality, most of us are craftsmen) over knowing how the world works, and having some of the mental tools to figure stuff out that's confusing me.

Also, physics really rubbed in abstraction as a concept: "here's the atom, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it. Then this discovery was made. Here's the nucleus, it's a black box, but externally scientists at this point in history could tell this about it..."

I do want schools to teach physics at a high level. As long as they'll get bogged down in minutia (as was my experience, and from what I've seen it's still the case) I'd rather they teach programming. Better they do Python functions than ballistics calculations. It's highly likely my kids will exit high school without having heard about relativity or quantum mechanics, except from me or info elsewhere.

Well in that case, you've got big issues with the science curriculum, and that might be a better place to start...

I don't support genetic modification of food, for example.

Then you will be really annoyed when you work out what viruses get up to all on their own. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

How are we going to feed an ever-growing population?

How are we going to treat debilitating diseases that plague much of the world, in a cost-effective manner?

How are we going to improve the quality of life for all the people who are living longer lives?

How might we address unforeseen medical and nutritional crises?

You have a very short-sighted attitude. Which is not to even mention the impact that tying your approval of your children to the field in which they choose to work will have on them.

Simple: don't have an ever-growing population. It can't ever grow in any case, so it's better to work toward stabilizing and then reducing it. Through attrition of course.

With a population significantly less than today's level, biotech isn't really needed. Without modern biotech people can live to be 80+ on average. That's good enough in my book. I support death (even my own, at 80+!), to keep the population fresh and keep the dictators dying. Overall, I'm confident the benefits of no biotech outweigh the negatives.

I don't think I could help being disappointed if a kid of mine chose to work in a job that did great harm to others, be it cigarettes or GMO food. That's kind of natural to feel that way.

I support death

Death doesn't really need your support, although it might appreciate the fanbase as it is usually not that popular on the whole, apart from with goths, although it tends to find them a bit embarrassing.

Point of information: the world population is currently predicted to peak at 11 billion, due to the rest of the world going through demographic transition. So not ever-growing - though 11 billion is definitely enough to cause problems...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation#Projections_of_...)

Pretty much only taxonomy, anatomy and cellular biology remain once you take away evolution from a biology class (before university level at least). All of them are important and insightful, but of those 3 I think only anatomy is on par in importance with evolution as far as someone who's not going to study science for a living is concerned.

Recent updates to Taxonomy have used DNA testing along with genetic drift to move things around a fair bit. So, in the modern context it's really more a map of evolutionary change than a list of animals with their traits.

Which leaves Anatomy and Cellular biology, but again only when looking at individual species. Even just showing the 'fish' like stage of a human embryo brings up rather difficult questions without evolutionary context. As is a lot of the stranger parts of Anatomy and Cellular biology.

PS: By 'fish' I mean when you basically have head + spine and before leg's show up.

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