/sci/ - Science & Math

also

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SaAIta0DG0

>>6657786
Gf's sister is one of these and she's a history teacher. Says she doesn't like science while her husband is getting his phd in geology,

Education system is shit

>>6657789
Holy shit, she must be fucking bomb in the sack.

Also:
>>6657790
Pretty much this. Critical thinking is really, really underdeveloped in our current system. The education system is massively underfunded and under appreciated, so anyone with half a brain goes into a real field, leavings nothing but idiots and masochists to become teachers. My girlfriend is a high school English teacher, but she's taught in many different countries. Americas system is so shit that we're pretty much going to have to emigrate in order for her to not be fighting an uphill battle against mouth breathers for her whole career.

>>6657786
what these guys said
>>6657798
>>6657790


The problem is exacerbated by the no child left behind policy. My landlord is a high school teacher and he CAN'T fail students. As in he will lose his job if he fails more than a few students a year.

This combined with a general laziness among younger Americans. They feel entitled to everything, with minimal effort on their part. As such they are stupid and impressionable, easy targets for pseudo-christian brainwashing.

>>6657786
That origin theories are useless without actualization

>>6657798

>in order for her to not be fighting an uphill battle against mouth breathers for her whole career.

I laughed, then I cried...

>>6657805
>The problem is exacerbated by

...then I died inside.

>>6657813
said the graduate math student who couldn't write an essay to save his life.

>>6657818
...

Really? Ah, I'm so glad someone that posts on 4chan has such things to say. It's so wonderful that you are fitting in around here so well.

Do the people why spout creationist things really believe in this stuff, or are they willingly deceiving the people to push agenda?

>>6657834
>Do the people why spout creationist things really believe in this stuff, or are they willingly deceiving the people to push agenda?

believe it or don't anon most actually believe it.

if ignorance had mass murika would have several black holes in the bible belt

I should've gone to Europe when I had the chance. It's never going to get any better in the United States is it?

Is there really a large disparity between science and anti-science sentiment in the US? I've personally only met one person who believed in a young Earth, and that was because she was in high school and didn't really know any better. I know my personal experiences don't speak for the nation, I was just wondering how many people really have problems with science.

>>6657853
Oh, anon. My dear anon.

It's only going to get worse, and America is willing to drag others down with it.

How do you guys feel about the flat earth theorists?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc0trwHSRIA

>>6657853
>>6657861
>hurr durr America is dead cuz we have religious people

>>6657878
No, America is dead because everyone can downvote teachers.

You're choosing teachers by their ability to survive by appearing victimized, not their ability to educate.

>>6657872
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-eF4HmE7L8

meanwhile in murica..

>>6657917
As a prospective rocket scientist, this actually makes me mad. 10/10.

>>6657933
> prospective rocket scientist
> choosing a career with literally only 3 potential employers
That's a smart career choice. Not.

>>6657950
It could be. America is a religious nutjob shithole.

> creationist scientific evidence

>>6657786
Murrkan here. I think about this literally EVERY day. When I go to the gym at night, I listen to lectures and debates by Dawkins, Hitchens, Krauss and the like and try to figure out what they are doing wrong (i.e. why people aren't dumping the church en masse)

It has a LOT to do with indoctrination. Even as a rigid atheist (read: atheist with a boner) I still find myself occasionally asking dead relatives for lottery advice and feeling like I am being watched. I know I am not being watched but you just can't unteach that sensation which is mercilessly beaten into you as a child.

>>6658537
I think it has more to do with religious shame.
Much like how Germans nowadays are probably one of the most politically social countries, most of Europe remembers religious fanaticism as a personal history.
With exceptions like the Spanish and Italians, who aren't the most rational.

Maybe also because the Lutheran Protestants eased everybody out of the church as institution.
Also pretty much all secular philosophy comes from here. Being irrational was equivalent to being an idiot.
Yeh...

>>6657878
I would say it is because of the systematic destruction of scientific literacy and pursuit by people pushing a pseudoscience through political and popular manipulation in order to make bank off of their creationist museum and textbooks.

>>6657790
As a teacher, I could go on for hours about this. Honestly though, the biggest problem is how parents aren't active in their children's education anymore. I don't mean joining PTA, I mean sitting down, studying with your kid and giving a good example of a healthy work ethic. Stepping off my soapbox now.

>There was nothing
>Then it exploded, into everything
>BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF YEARS
>Somehow hydrogen forms things like uranium
>Solar system forms from multiple re-exploded super novas with light elements at center???
>Dinosaurs or something for like 200 million years that don't become intelligent
>Humans come into existence and go to the moon in about 250,000 years

>Clearly the obvious explanation

Keep believing the lies /sci/

>>6657798
It makes me so mad that football takes more precedence than a good music program. The reason behind it is understandable, they earn more money through a good football game than they do a band concert. Schools feel the strain of underfunding and need to get money from somewhere and they see football as an investment. The strain comes from federal government offering their funding in exchange for the federal government imposing shit rules and tests that don't mean anything. Since education is SUPPOSED to be a state matter and the feds took it over, each state starts to slack off on their own funding and involvement in education to cut spending and keep it for other not-nearly-as-important crap.

>>6657786
Because it's true.

Take anything. Literally anything. The moon. Note how much the moon is pulling away from the earth. Backdate that billions of years; there is no moon, and no earth, only debris. The sun. The sun consumes so much energy per year. Backdate that billions of years and the sun would be so huge as to scorch the earth beyond habitability. Take the river deltas. None of them display any more than 4,500 years of accumulated silt. Take the oldest known reliable living thing, a Bristlecone pine tree, that is about 4,500 years old. Look at spiral galaxies. Why are they still in spiral shape, if they have been around for billions of years? One would expect them to be featureless by now. Take comets. If an ice ball is disintegrating around a ball of fire, it hasn't been doing that for billions of years. Take the hypothetical Oort cloud. Hubble hasn't seen it. It doesn't exist. Take known population growth rates for humans. Known rates by six mating pairs 4,500 years ago produces 7 billion people. If people have been around for 40,000 years, at known population growth rates, there would be infinite people.

No, you see what you believe. You see rock layers as millions of years of earth's crusts if you want to; or you see them as the result of the Flood 4,500 years if you want to.

What you believe dictates what you can see.

>>6658559
Being the lowest rung on the education ladder yourself, an Education major, I am surprised that you could actually step up onto a soap box. I note that you only did so in order to pass blame from yourself for your pitiful attempts at educating today's youth, and blaming their parents.

It's your job. Maybe do your job better. Oh, wait, you don't have to, because you're union, will get tenured, and then can rape the children without fear of being incarcerated or laid off.

Literally.

>>6658584
being a teacher is better than being unemployed

>>6658585
For the teacher it is. Not for society. For the teacher, it's virtually 5x unemployment for very few more hours of work.

>>6658586
>Somebody's still mad he got C's in high school.

>>6658610
Slept through High School. Maybe caught a B in Physics. Hate Physics.

>>6658610

Got all As all the way up through 3 years of uni. From what I've seen out of teachers, the vast majority left me unimpressed at best, and the few I felt were actually hard working and knowledgeable were stuck unrewarded due to their union rules, the same union rules that keep child molesters employed with promotions for 3 decades sitting around doing literally nothing, google rubber rooms.

And I was on a magnet track for most of my education as well, so it came as a real shock when I now interact with teachers out in the "standard" education system, and it's beyond appalling, from Pre-K through Community College, if any of these people is putting more than 3 hours of work in outside the classroom, I would strongly be skeptical of what on. They are across the board unknowledgeable, uncaring, disinterested, unmotivated, and honestly, mostly hostile and antisocial. They circle the wagons when you criticize anything about any of them.

There's no work involved sitting around and "teaching" 5th graders, I'm sorry there isn't. Not any that merits 70k+ a year when you're on vacation for literally half of it, and the half you do work, involves 22 hour work weeks (about).

Evolution is a working model for current biological, medical and pharmaceutical research. Creation does not have a working counter model. Based on that fact alone only a fool would prefer using the non working model. It isn't even about what someone believes, it isn't even about religion per sé; you use the working model regardless of any bias and when a better model comes along, you transition to that one. Wanting people to transition from a working model to a bad model is just plain stupid.

>>6658561
>cannot comprehend billions of years

>>6658699

>Time is a magic fix for everything!

Yep, just more components to this clearly obvious and best explanation

>>6657786
People in the US are less likely to pay attention to experts, and more likely to form their own opinions. This has some downsides.

Literally nobody believes in a young earth. I have never in my entire life met someone who doesn't believe the earth is millions of years old. And I live in Texas, go to college at Ole Miss (deep South, bible belt).

Sure theres a lot of people who believe in God, but at least their not too stupid.

>>6658762
I have. We went to high school together. Weird thing was, he was actually pretty smart and (in all other areas) a pretty rational thinker, which made it even stranger.

>>6658677
>there are people that think like this

The thing I think people with that sort of view miss is that, having a model for the sake of -having- one isn't the point. A model developed through careful investigation will be built on demonstrable evidence and have useful predictive power, from which to further investigate and refine the hypothesis.

If you just make up a model (for example, assert creation in order to account for the universe) you've bypassed doing any of the actual work necessary to create a model that's worth something. There's no reason to adopt models like that unless you really need something to grab onto to feel like you know stuff.

>>6657917
>I have 3 reasons for believing 80,000 feet is the max... each reason is sufficient in itself.... 1) a balloon will pop at 80,000 feet... 2) 70,000 feet is the military fly zone, which means you have to get permission from the military to fly that high... and 3) examination of all photos claiming to be higher then 80,000 feet have the same observational height as the 80,000 foot balloon pop... now this is not a debatable topic until NASA puts on board the ISS a 24/7 live cam showing constant zero gravity... until then.... this case is closed

>>6658770
I knew a guy like that in HS, too. He was actually a member of our science bowl team that got to nationals, and wore a YEC shirt the whole time. I wonder what the other teams thought of that.

>>6657950
>> choosing a career with literally only 3 potential employers

In the US alone there's: 6 Defense contractors, the US Military, NASA, SpaceX as huge employers...

Noticed you didn't mention your terrible career choice either

>>6658584
wow
bitter, party of one.

>People from the USA, why do a significant portion of your population believe in a young earth and think that evolution is a lie?

They're not trained to think properly about the world in school. Logic is not taught. Reason is not taught.

>What can be done about this?

Keep on teaching Logic and reason, ridicule the religious.

>>6658586
lowest quality bait

>>6658849
He was a member of our Science Bowl team that got to nationals, too.

Do we know each other? Are we both talking about Aaron?

>>6657786
Stay strong, 'Merifriends.

Shit I herd in the US:
>Bio-Tech student: "But the earth is flat! Just... Just LOOK at it!"
>School principle showing me a smart projector: "You have that kind of technology in Europe?"
>Random woman hears I have a neurology test coming up: "Oh dear. Is it true that you people know what I am thinking?"
>Mother of a friend: "It was a really hot summer and my garden, so I prayed everyday for a month and then one day it rained! Where's your science now?"
>From when I was 3 and forgot the word "cloud" for a minute and explained it as steam in the sky: "Wait, do you mean clouds? Haha, clouds aren't made of water!" This was a judge.

And the other usual "I'm not a monkey"-stuff.
The next trip I might just not talk about anything related at all. It was impossible to mention anything remotely related to science most of the time.

>>6657786
>People from the USA, why do a significant portion of your population believe in a young earth and think that evolution is a lie?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

>>6657786

Real no-joke answer: Because the US of A doesn't have a state religion.

Educated countries with a state religion (British, Scandinavian) has a "solved problem" approach to religion - they're not competing for customers because there's a... not a state monopoly as such, but a single company with a heavy competitive advantage from state subsidies.

In the US, without a state endorsement, there's a lot more competition between companies. Those that couldn't hack it, those with bad PR or shitty retention died out while the rest grew more competitive and better at getting their product marketshare and brand-awareness out there. Unfortunately, this means that when McDonalds says that the world is only 6000 years old, a lot of people just hear a jingle and "I'm loving it" without considering the issue, because they're used to McDonalds.

Wait, shit, what were we talking about again?

>>6657950
actually rocket scientist may find job in military so there are more options for them

Being a math teacher in a high school, I can safely assume that it is the parents's fault. They don't care about their childs to a level that they don't know what's needed for their life at all.

>>6660363
How is belief in an old earth "needed for life?"

>>6660364
Wanted to quote that it's the educational system's fault.

>>6658580
Underrated post

>>6657798
I'm from the UK. They taught me evolution in school. I accepted it and got good grades as usual. It's only after I developed "critical thinking" that I challenged evolution and later rejected it. Took me a while to reject it, my initial problems with it was the ambiguity of the theory itself - not that species transform, but all the mechanisms used to explain why are really unsatisfactory.

>>6657872
I do not reject flat earth theory. I don't accept it, but I do not reject it. I'm a sceptic when it comes to the shape of the earth.
(I'm serious btw)

As someone who graduated from high school two years ago, I can say a lot of it is because of the school system. I took some interesting classes in high school, but my biology teacher, who was remarkably smart and educated on the topic, was afraid to teach anything close to evolution because it could get him fired. The mythology teacher was in a similar position, so I went in on my own sometimes and he taught me the parallels between current religions and old ones.

>>6660423
Did your mythology teacher tell you how the ancient Hindus taught evolution in a way very similar to the modern? They even had the concept of the Big Bang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_state

>>6657883

That's actually getting scrapped in the US, slowly.

>>6658962
>Europe in charge of understanding humor

Evolution is a fairytale for grown-ups. It is useless.

-Prof. Louis Bounoure

I'm not American and I'm quite proud of Americans for sticking up against State brainwashing better than we Europeans.
People here act as though they believe (though they naturally dread the word believe) in evolution due to "reason", and not just because it is dogma taught by an authority, but if you asked them to explain the theory they would do a very poor job of it.

>>6660517
>but if you asked them to explain the theory they would do a very poor job of it.

They'd be very poor at explaining most scientific theories to an acceptable standard simply because they have not studied them to an appropriate standard, that doesn't mean the general scientific consensus is incorrect

>>6660517
>People here act as though they believe (though they naturally dread the word believe) in evolution due to "reason",

And they would be correct. It is reasonable to believe in scientific findings. It is not reasonable to believe in the literal truth of ancient myths.

Explain this to me, evolutionists:

why would an aquatic animal ever begin to develop organs suited to land? Why would a fish begin to develop legs? Supposedly the first mutant fish would have very poorly developed legs and so straight away it becomes an ugly failure of animal that would probably die off right away, but say for some reason that this ugly mutant spread its shifty leg gene that no fish needs and after a million years you have decent legs (even though they've not yet made any use of these legs so there's no fucking reason why they should have them). OK, so now the fish walks on land with its new legs (and hopefully its been developing lungs along side its gills in order to breath on land, lmao). So now this hybrid animal that is not very adapted to the water, and not very adapted to land, has to compete on land with animals that have been evolving on land for eons: how is it supposed to compete?

What the hell compels an animal to develop new organs in the first place.
If my baby had a few sprouts on its back that could in a million years develop into wings, am I supposed to think, "yeah, you know what, who knows. Maybe by then humanity will need wings." ???????

>>6660545
Evolution is an ancient myth. The Hindus believed in it and the Enlightenment philosophers first got the idea of evolution from ancient texts.

>>6660553
they're structurally very similar and their functions are easily interchangeable

>>6660569
Yeah, there's a similarity between fins and legs. I also think there's an aesthetic similitude between human arms and bird wings (they both come in pairs arranged symmetrically around the upper body). Does this mean that wings might be growing in my arms waiting to burst out and enable flight one day?

That diagram is witchcraft. You should know that even though those structures look similar the genetic difference between them is massive.

>>6660578
>That diagram is witchcraft

>>6660553
There is nothing on land. If you can go on land, you're king even if your land-going ability is really really shitty.

Niche invasion, yo.

>>6660578
>genetic difference between them is massive
Nope, it's still that one sonic hedgehog pathway.

But I'm kind of cheating because "that one sonic hedgehog pathway" can stand for like half of the developmental processes out there. Master key genes are jerks like that.

>>6660553
Why are there aquatic mammals (i.e. breathe air but live in the ocean)?

Why do you think the first terrestrial animals had legs? Couldn't they have been, you know, snakes? Or insects?

>>6660588
Aquatic mammals evolved from terrestrial mammals anyway so they're not relevant to the topic. And first terrestrial animals weren't mammals but they sure as fuck weren't snakes either, and insects do have legs.

But insects bring a good point, you know what else has legs? Fucking crabs. Which as you know are mainly marine but can go on land and some are almost fully terrestrial. So legs are useful underwater and you can piggyback on your existing water-legs to walk on land, as crabs do, and eventually you get worse at water-walking and better at land-walking, as some crabs do, and ta-da! Terrestrial animal.

>>6660592
My point about aquatic mammals was that it is certainly possible for gills to become replaced by lungs.

>>6657786
A large reason why creationism is prevalent in United States is because of homeschooling. Here in Texas, there are homeschooling schools (lol) where parents send their children to be "homeschooled" while being taught about Jesus. This is mostly middle to middle-upper class white people who do not want their kids to go to a school littered with minorities and secular education. The homeschooling schools are a clever way of having private schools run by people who do not require certifications or are under regulations.

Anyway, in these schools, kids are taught that the planet earth was surrounded by a hovering sheet of ice in the past, and it melted, which caused Noah's flood. Students are also taught that atoms are held together by Jesus' love.

I wish I was making this shit up.

If we want to fix the problem, we have to ensure children are properly educated.

>>6660634
>Students are also taught that atoms are held together by Jesus' love.
Classic.

>>6660634
>which caused Noah's flood
and then it evaporated into space and was banished from the water cycle forever?

>>6660658
It provides a protective layer between the Earth and the fires of Hell. What the Greeks knew as the River Lethe.

Because of the gays, the barrier is thinning, thus Global Warming.

Duh.

>>6660658
star gates sucked up all the extra water, since there was rainforest's that would have all died due to changes and ancient fungi they had to be all strategically replanted and respawned even the plants that make drugs that religion complains about(some one was pro drug plants) even bacteria, all the boat people couldn't bring all the insects so they had to go to godly special mother ship, all the crew of the ss ark had to wear ninja masks for breathing better and battle other peoples ships the Egyptian and Sumerian ones,they would hold ark jousting matches to settle disrupted claimed over dividing the lands with long 500ft lances..By the way im jk for those who can't distinguish that..

>>6657786

Because people confused Pagan Gods and YHWH. I'm assuming one is an E.T. and the latter is a higher dimensional creator of freewill. Now that I say that it sounds crazy, but that's actually what I think and it seems to fit.

/thread

>>6660397
why

>>6660397
>I'm a sceptic when it comes to the shape of the earth.
>(I'm serious btw)

Its spelled "Skeptic" you retard.

>>6660791
>Its spelled "Sceptic" in civilised countries, you Ameretard.
FTFY

>>6660658

>>6660578
About genetic difference... Most living things have a near identical genetic structure, and we share nearly half the genetic pairs with flie. It's impossible to find two creatures that aren't related by some degree.

>>6657805
> My landlord is a high school teacher and he CAN'T fail students. As in he will lose his job if he fails more than a few students a year.

I went to an utter shithole of a high school, you'd have thought you were in Compton if you walked the halls with no other knowledge. They actually instituted a policy where the lowest grade you could get on something was a 60.

When I say "lowest grade" I mean that if the teacher assigned homework, and you didn't do it, you got a 60. If you didn't show up for a test, you got a 60 on it unless you wanted to retake it. If you enrolled in a class, straight up didn't attend one lesson or turn in one assignment and didn't sit for a single exam... you got a 60.

It's just a shame that that is how lost we are in this country, that a school considers faking success ("success" for my high school meaning the graduation rate was above 50%, we had a whopping 52% my year, for the first time in over a decade) easier than teaching kids how to write a sentence or do some fucking introductory geometry.

>>6661054
Jesus H. White Christ. Did you go to school in an East L.A. diaper processing plant or something?

>>6657786
If ignorance had mass, murika would doom the planet by collapsing into a black hole

>>6658755
looking at you 4chan amirite?

In short? It's a religious majority country and people are raised to believe it. You can make someone believe anything when they're a tiny squishy vegetable dependent on you for survival.

>>6660392

gr8 b8 m8, but ill bite

there is no fucking 'why' to natural selection and evolution.

>>6657872
A part time guy at my work said he thought the earth looked flat, and he also thought the astronauts are on mushrooms or something.

I'm in the midwest.

>>6658537
They aren't being logical enough in my opinion. All of the debates with William Lane Craig, the atheists have appealed to the horrors of the Bible instead of debunking the logical fallacies in Craig's arguments.

>>6657786
Murincunt ignorance is big business. Simple religious folk are easy to control.

I don't know, anon. It's fucking retarded. Even to a child, the fact that we are genetically related to the other apes isn't exactly a difficult concept when you look in the fucking mirror.

If I had to say, I guess I'd go with the fact that most people are not free thinkers or logical in the way they come to believe what they believe. They believe what they believe because of of the social credit of the other people who believe it. And Jesus freaks have a lot of social credit over here.

Seriously, if the moral majority of the United States believed that people should be eating roadapples, the idea and practice would become mainstream.

>>6658580
if this isint pasta it should be

Science education in public schools is terrible here.

>work in the seafood department of a grocery store to pay for school
>we carry mahi-mahi, aka "dolphin fish"
>overhear manager tell a customer that it's related to dolphins
>point out that it isn't even a mammal
>say that the beef and pork we sell is more closely related to dolphin than any fish
>everyone in the department laughs
>days of jokes about how I must be wasting my time at school, what an idiot, etc.
Glad I'm quitting soon.

>>6658762
I also live in Tejas and second this.

>>6660397

so the NASA is involved in a cover up of the earths actual size ?

>>6660435

as Hindu i am not aware of any Big Bang like incident being taught in our mythology

The evolution part perhaps is the Vishnu part of hindu mythology, where he is supposed to take 10 different avatars/forms first one starting as fish then turning into more complex animals and later humans as each new avatar is told in the mythology

Could just be a coincidence imo, the author(s) may just have been building on to create larger and larger stuff with each new avatar so it looks like an allegory to evolution but is not necessarily one

>>6657818
I can't really speak for the anon you're commenting on, but I always did much better in my English, History, etc. classes than I did in math and science. I just went into physics because I liked it more.

>>6658762
I have... She was a fedora wearing conservative who invited a whole bunch of pro-lifers to rally at my campus. I tried to argue with her, and she tried to disprove all dating methods with a shitty example of seashells.

They are lying for political purposes. If they keep non-Christians arguing against obvious insanity, then they won't have time to uncover the corruption and scandals inside their community.

Learn you some Sociology 101.

>>6662199
>sociology 101
kek

>>6660517
To me faith and religion is just a theory on how we got here in a magical way. Evolution is a theory on how we got here in a slow, logical, lucky way. We've proven that micro evolution is fact but macro evolution... Gonna take a bit longer unless we get something like the guy in Time Machine invented.

>>6662246
>We've proven that micro evolution is fact but macro evolution

they are both the same damn thing

retards try to classify it into two different things to fit their argument

>>6662287
That's like saying that all growth is fibonnaci because plants are.

>>6662316
That's a terrible analogy.
It's more like saying a tree is a plant and a forest is a whole lot of plants. A forest isn't "because tree," it's the aggregate of many trees. Macroevolution isn't "because of" microevolution, it's just aggregate change.

>>6662327
Thus micro and macro are the same idea.

Thereas, where it's truly possible that all growth is most efficiently fibonacci; a forest can exist because of a tree.

So, points standing; micro and macro ideas as the same thing improves the topic little or none - it's still only as probable as it seems exploratory.

>>6662316

No, thats like saying biologists are stupid for not properly classifying a field they know a lot about

>>6661834
Wtf is a roadapple?