Re: Scientist Studies Evolution Of Anti-Evolution Bills, Finds They Aren’t Intelligently Designed

[Gronk]

someone else wrote:
> For close to a century, conservative lawmakers have sought to undermine
> science that conflicted with their religious doctrine by legislating away
> the problem. In more recent decades, the battle over evolution has focused
> on public schools, where lawmakers have fought with educators, scientists,
> judges, and in some cases students themselves, to impose censorship on the
> teaching of evolution. In other cases, they insist that schools also teach
> biblical creation stories or the pseudoscience of “intelligent design.”
> Needless to say, the attempts bear many of the hallmarks of grasping at
> straws.
>
> From Science Daily:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151217151641.htm

> “Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another
> state and changed without thought,” said Dr Matzke, and evolutionary
> biologist from the ANU Research School of Biology.
>
> “They are not terribly intelligently designed.”

And having been copied from elsewhere is quite probable.

http://dssg.uchicago.edu/lid/

Journalists, researchers, and concerned citizens would like to know who’s
actually writing legislative bills. But trying to read those bills, let
alone trace their source, is tedious and time consuming. This is
especially true at the state level, where important policy decisions are
made every day. State legislatures consider roughly 70,000 bills each
year, covering taxes, education, healthcare, crime, transportation, and more.

To solve this problem, we have created a tool we call the “Legislative
Influence Detector” (LID, for short). LID helps watchdogs turn a mountain
of text into digestible insights about the origin and diffusion of policy
ideas and the real influence of various lobbying organizations. LID draws
on more than 500,000 state bills (collected by the Sunlight Foundation)
and 2,400 pieces of model legislation written by lobbyists (collected by
us, ALEC Exposed, and other groups), searches for similarities, and flags
them for review. LID users can then investigate the matches to look for
possible lobbyist and special interest influence.


http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/12/16/science.aad4057
The evolution of antievolution policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover
Nicholas J. Matzke