Okay, Texas, we get it. You ain’t much of a fan of book learnin’. So, as the rest of America bemoans how Texas is stupiding-up our textbook standards with their tremendous buying power, I can’t help wondering…why are they so powerful?
Texas Caught in Time?
The answer, of course, is about money. The beauty of free-market capitalism is that money walks, even if it means that the only ones walking are the ones dragging their knuckles on the ground. Texas, it seems, has tremendous buying power in the textbook world. Due to their high population, their standards drive publishers to pander to their every whim in order to get their business. So, when they dumb down their own textbooks, they also dumb down the textbooks of other districts in the US who don’t have the “purchasing power” (read “money”) to get custom-made texts.
It’s not as bad as it seems. As someone working in the educational publishing industry, I can tell you that both New York City School Districts and Los Angeles School Districts also have a major influence in the textbook market. Still, if Texas pushes standards to (what shall we call it?) the intellectual right, it can affect many other districts that aren’t looking for content that’s geared toward NYC and LA’s urban populations.Continue reading »
Some time ago, I recall studying evolution in my Archaeology classes in college. Certainly a fascinating subject, but one that brought on more speculation from me. If natural selection is really the process by which a species changes and adapts, then how is natural selection still at work today? Of course, I think in most populations, it still plays its role. That is to say that plants and animals are doubtless still subject to the course of natural selection. This is evidenced by bacterial strains that adapt to be resistant to antibiotics and such. Naturally, the species with the shortest life cycles will exhibit selection for mutations the fastest.
What I wondered about then, and indeed now, is about the slow influence of natural selection on species with longer life cycles…namely humanity itself. Is it possible… that natural selection would be brought to a standstill by modern science? I mean, if we no longer die (or, more accurately, cease to reproduce) because of mutations, how would humanity ever select for those without certain traits? Being nearsighted brings this to mind. Much of human kind is nearsighted, and given true natural evolutionary pressures, a species would not have this problem, because subjects with such a disadvantage in the wild would doubtless die before reaching reproductive maturity. Of course, with modern science and healthcare, there is nothing life threatening about nearsightedness, so many go on to reproduce. The result is that nearly 30% of the population is nearsighted.
These were simple, vague wonderings from years ago, and nothing I took very seriously. Of course, bringing us to the “On Cinema” portion of this post, now I wonder if maybe natural selection could have a more sinister course in mind for humanity after seeing the film Idiocracy, by (ironically) Beavis & Butthead creator Mike Judge.
The film is a comedy, ostensibly, but watches more like a horror film to me, depicting what happens when an “average” human specimen from 2005 is frozen and awakes in the year 2505 to find he is the smartest man alive. The world is overrun with stupid reality TV, corporate consumerism, and an over-sexed, dumbed-down populace. Nothing works, the infrastructure is rotting, and the president is a former American Gladiator-type TV star. There is a new “dust bowl” scale crop failure, since the Brawndo Corporation has decreed that it’s Gatoradesque drink should be used to water the nations crops (“it has the electrolytes that plants crave”), and has purchased the FDA in order to rewrite the food pyramid. Hospitals have stoner doctors, that prescribe treatments using an oversimplified push button screen with pictures of people vomiting and giving birth to select from. People seen trying to read words are labeled “fags,” and anyone speaking with any sense of eloquence is seen as femmy. Everyone loves the sight of someone being kicked in the balls (the most popular TV show is entitled “Ow! My Balls!!”), and the winner for Best Screenplay is a movie that simply shows an ass farting on the screen.
Yes, it’s silly. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s hyperbole. But I’ll be damned if the depiction, at the start of the film, of how natural selection could lead to just such an occurrence didn’t bring shivers to my spine. The flow chart, comparing the reproductive rates of two intelligent persons with the rates and subsequent genetic spread of the trailer trash couple, was one of the most horrifying calculations I have ever seen depicted on the silver screen! Soylent Green? Ha! If only the future was such a rosey picture!
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