India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks • Hacker News Board

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#191

Post by 29athrowaway » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

mythrwy wrote: post #98

29athrowaway wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution is not an opinion, it is a fact based on reproducible and falsifiable experiments. You can even simulate evolution and see it at work. https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/ You can also see evolution taking place within our lifetime (nylonase evolved to eat nylon, a man-made substance from the 20th century). I do not mean to be rude or start a flamewar, but we have to stand our ground when it comes to scienti…

Evolution is not a fact. It's a theory. This is not to say evolution doesn't occur, of course it does, and most rational people without an overzealous religious bent recognize this. It's an obvious explanation and it fits, it predicts successfully and it explains satisfactorily. But it's important to differentiate between a fact and a theory. A fact is simple observable phenomena without explanation. An apple fell to…

Use whatever terminology you prefer, however, you cannot ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence around us in the fossil record.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#192

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

waterheater wrote: post #171

Indians predominantly subscribe to the Hindu belief system, which is quite foreign from the Western ideologies imposed on them by the British. Consider the concepts of atman (essentially, meaning Self) and avatars (essentially, deities coming down to earth to take on human form). Darwinian evolution acts as a simplified, analogous representation of the grander evolution of Self as told in Hindu mythology. According t…

> Darwinian evolution and an overarching reincarnative process cannot coexist because the former requires that the physical world is the totality of reality

What? No it doesn't. In fact, evolution comports rather nicely with reincarnation–there is a finite number of souls reincarnating through ever-evolving bodies, working together across time to press life as a whole forward.

> Humans are either the descendants of monkeys via a completely-observable evolutionary process

Humans are not descendants of monkeys. That is not, and has never been science. Humans and monkey share a common ancestor, as do all mammals.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#193

Post by wly_cdgr » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

Prepping the serfs for war with China

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#194

Post by killjoywashere » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

The only way I can see this making rational sense is if the senior leaders in the government are in possession of secret, solid evidence that population growth is about to become lethal in the extreme, and this is a radical move by the government to precipitate their own depopulation through mass starvation.

But I seriously doubt that's the case and the mechanism of action seems weak.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#195

Post by kepler1 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

Does anyone else get the feeling that the "great filter" to our continued global civilization advance is how you manage, after reaching a certain size, the millions of competing motivations and concerns that branch out and cause confusion when there are no longer just a few clear problems to solve?

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#196

Post by Timon3 » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:45 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #101

hayst4ck wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question of where your core axioms come from. The core axiom from which a person builds a belief system can be that contradictions are wrong or that authority (the bible/priest/parent) is right. This is why conservatives frequently fail to respond to pointing out their contradictions. Their core axiom is one of authority, contradictions have little bearing on their analysis of what is true or not. New informat…

I'm not sure veneration of authority is a central aspect of conservatism. As I understand it, conservatism is about returning to a previous state of affairs that is perceived as favorable compared to the present, or about maintaining the status quo. It seems to me that two people who were raised in different contexts could be considered conservative with respect to their own contexts, while at the same time one being…

As far as I have seen the conservative ideas of

> returning to a previous state of affairs that is perceived as favorable compared to the present

and

> maintaining the status quo

are primarily directed at hierarchy. The exact ideas of any conservative might differ between them (e.g. they might prefer different time periods to "return to", or focus on different areas of society and politics as important right now), but at their core they are directed at building and maintaining strict social/political/economical hierarchies. Often times it's about perceived "natural hierarchies" (e.g. meritocracy in the labor market, or competition in the free market), often times about traditional ones, and sometimes about preventing "unnatural ones", but I honestly can't think of any current or recent conservative legislation (internationally) that doesn't follow this pattern.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#197

Post by neilk » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

anticodon wrote: post #119

neilk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea exactly how much this particular curriculum change is influenced by religion. But your assertion that science is depoliticized in India is very wrong. In 2018, the education minister declared Darwin was wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/23/indian-educati... This is just one of many such troubling incidents, including apparent indifference to the murder of pro-rationalism academics. Anec…

> but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India. Isn't this part actually true, because Britain pillaged India for centuries?

It’s absolutely true, and even in the sense of losing technology.

The effect of British rule on India is sometimes called “de-industrialization”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India?...

The British had a deliberate policy of extracting raw materials and flooding the market with machine-manufactured goods. The British markets were not open to Indian manufacturers. So not only was India de-industrialized, but many rare skills and techniques were lost during this period. I can’t find a reference, but I remember reading an early British East India Conpany account of encountering silk of such fine quality that yards of it could be folded into a tiny box. Those workers would have been put out of business by the British, and their skills lost for generations. Might be a legend but I’m sure many things like that happened.

It’s just not things like rockets or nuclear weapons.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#198

Post by simonh » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

anticodon wrote: post #119

neilk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea exactly how much this particular curriculum change is influenced by religion. But your assertion that science is depoliticized in India is very wrong. In 2018, the education minister declared Darwin was wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/23/indian-educati... This is just one of many such troubling incidents, including apparent indifference to the murder of pro-rationalism academics. Anec…

> but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India. Isn't this part actually true, because Britain pillaged India for centuries?

The British Raj is why Hindus lost nuclear technology 10,000 years ago?

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#199

Post by davchana » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:48 PM UTC

screye wrote: post #23

This makes no sense to me. This highly unlikely to be a political move. Science education is not political in India. Evolution, abortion, chemistry are not debated at all. This is more likely for the reasons to be innocuous. > In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the conte…

> like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.

Nobody responsible or involved with this process is gonna give a written statement that they did to please the evergrowing hindutva or modi bhakti or whatsapp university.

Re: India cuts periodic table and evolution from school textbooks

#200

Post by duskwuff » Wed, May 31, 2023, 9:49 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #186

duskwuff wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corollary story that usually shows up is that Westerners "stole" scientific discoveries from India and suppressed them while the country was under occupation. There's a fairly standard example of this at: https://pparihar.com/2017/05/22/modern-inventions-stolen-fro... And the BBC reported on some instances of this sort of thought at the Indian Science Congress in 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46…

But how is knowledge "stolen"? I understand in the context of piracy, but like piracy you can't really remove it from the originator. Sure, you can take and destroy all books you can find, but it is also pretty easy to make new books (and hide them) or pass knowledge through word of mouth (or hidden in stories). Wouldn't a highly intelligent society be able to accomplish such a simple feat that's been demonstrated by…

I didn't say the narrative made sense! But I think the implication was that there was some sort of systematic campaign to erase Indian records of that knowledge after "stealing" it, i.e. by destroying artifacts and written records, preventing word-of-mouth transmission of history, etc. Of course this is all nonsense, but it's nonsense which plays well to an audience which is open to nationalist, anti-imperialist messages.