Posted on 07/21/2008 5:59:31 PM PDT by Soliton
In the State Board of Education races, simple math could start another round in the long-running fight in Kansas about evolution.
Five seats on the 10-member board are up for election this year, and of those, three are held by moderates who are not seeking re-election.
Moderates now hold a 6-4 advantage over social conservatives on the board, so flipping one of those moderate seats to a conservative would create a 5-5 tie.
Flipping two moderate seats would produce a conservative majority and could renew the battle against evolution that has brought attention to Kansas several times during the past decade.
Of course, moderates could hold on to their current seats and maybe gain one or both of the two conservative seats up for grabs. But advocates for the pro-evolution science standards and more easily accessible sex education don’t think that’s probable.
“I’m a little nervous about whether we will keep a moderate majority on the board,” said Kathy Cook, executive director of Kansas Families for Education.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.ljworld.com ...
August 1999 — State Board of Education votes 6-4 to adopt science standards that eliminate most references to evolution.
August 2000 — Republican Party primary voters oust three anti-evolution board members.
February 2001 — New board votes 7-3 for science standards that include evolution.
August 2002 — Conservatives Connie Morris of St. Francis and Iris Van Meter of Thayer defeat two moderate Republican incumbents. This produces a 5-5 split on the board.
August 2004 — Conservative Kathy Martin of Clay Center defeats moderate Bruce Wyatt of Salina in the GOP primary.
January 2005 — Martin sworn into office, giving conservatives a 6-4 majority.
November 2005 — In a 6-4 vote, board approves science standards critical of evolution.
August 2006 — Morris defeated by moderate Republican Sally Cauble of Liberal and Van Meter, who did not seek re-election, replaced by moderate Republican Jana Shaver of Independence, giving moderates a 6-4 advantage.
February 2007 — Board votes 6-4 to reverse anti-evolution science standards. State Board of Education elections Advance voting for primary begins (07-17-08) Statehouse Briefing: Teachers group backs candidates (07-16-08)
Moderates -- reasonable, middle-of-the-road people who care about your children.
Social Conservatives -- knuckle-dragging throwbacks to a dark age when witches were burned at the stake.
Seriously: In my experiences, the "moderates" are more likely to be screaming harridans who try to foist their views on others.
Nobody needs any “new” challenges to evolutionism; the old ones are perfectly adequate.
And those challenges would be...?
The proven incompatibilities of evolutionism with the basic laws of mathematics and probability for starters...
Now, I’m sure you can provide evidence of this that don’t come from creationist propaganda sites, right?
Easiest way to visualize it is to consider the case of flying birds and what it might actually take for a reptile or coleurosaur to evolve into one. He'd need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems including wings, flight feathers which have load-bearing structure and are totally unlike down feathers or any other sort of insulation, highly efficient hearts and actual flow-through lungs, specialized tails and general balance parameters, specialized light bones....
Not only would each item be anti-functional until the day the whole thing came together, but the odds of evolving any one of them would amount to an infinitessimal and the laws of probability being what they are, the likelihood of evolving all of them would be a tenth or twelth order infinitessimal, i.e. the odds stacked against it are so great that the history of the universe isn't long enough for it to happen.
But the killer is the logical problem which is this: Suppose that somehow or other your bird wannabe were to magically evolve the first of those features; by the time another 10,000 generations were to roll around and he magically evolved the second, the first having been anti-functional all the while would have de-evolved, become vestigial, or evolved into something else.
Evolution is a fairytale for grown people and it's a fairytale with something like 200,000,000 dead bodies lying around on account of it.
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