Missouri state legislator tries to redefine science

Ars Technica : State legislatures in the US are responsible for defining the educational curricula of the state school systems. It is not unusual for legislators to introduce bills that would promote criticism of established science such as climate change or evolution. However, a bill presented in the Missouri House of Representatives by Rick Brattin takes science education legislation to a new level. Brattin’s bill begins by redefining several terms: Scientific theory is described as “an inferred explanation of incompletely understood phenomena about the physical universe based on limited knowledge, whose components are data, logic, and faith-based philosophy"; hypothesis is defined as “a scientific theory reflecting a minority of scientific opinion which may lack acceptance because it is a new idea, contains faulty logic, lacks supporting data, has significant amounts of conflicting data, or is philosophically unpopular.” Using those definitions, the bill then explicitly equates the legitimacy of evolution with intelligent design, says that both topics must be given equal time in classrooms, and even mandates that textbooks have an approximately equal number of pages devoted to each. The bill isn’t likely to make much progress in the legislature, but it is an interesting development in the attempt to legislate scientific principles.