Posted on 11/07/2005 5:19:33 PM PST by gobucks
Evolution's fate in Kansas schools has been an ongoing controversy for six years.
Tomorrow Kansas Board of Education members will vote on new science standards that would allow for criticisms of evolution including the teaching of intelligent design.
The standards are expected to pass and that worries science teacher Lisa Volland, who says this could change the way she teaches science in the future, "For one thing the proposals that they're talking about are not scientific theories, they haven't been scientifically tested and for me as a teacher to just lean back on that and say well this is what people feel like is the explanation leaves me in a really strange and weird place."
Volland says she uses evolution in her biology class almost everyday and she hopes the standards are overturned before they make an impact.
The Board of Education is scheduled to vote around three tomorrow. There will be an open forum, for citizens to express their opinions at 10:30.
Agenda for Nov 8, 2005 meeting of Kansas State Board of Education (see item 13 b.).
ping ... looks like we should see stories of ACLU invasions into Kansas in about 48 hours....
Indiana is crafting legislation at the state level to incorporate ID into public schools as well. Evolution scooting toward the ash heap bump!
ACLU be damned. I would like them to go to court over this. Thsi time I willd emand they PROVE evolution and that based on PROVING it not just being theory it can stand alone to be taught. If they can not...then other theories should be allowed for that have some basis or merit.
And I can very well believe she does talk about it that much. I can't count the times I've come across some discourse on some biological subject that can stand perfectly well independent of evolution and come across one or more gratuitous statements to the effect "...which evolved the XXX feature whose function is under discussion..." right in the middle of it. It's almost like the Darwinian equivalent of "Hail Mary full of grace."
Evolution is the cental tenet of biology. Get used to it.
Revised Science Standards for Kansas Public Schools (Aug 2005).
So central it has to be hung on to stuff, such as, say, a documentary of the feeding habits of the canary, like an ornament? Nothing, mind you, to say how this evolution got the canary there, just the Ommmmmmmmm that it did. That sounds like a mantra to me.
Smug, to be sure. But hey...lets do what you imply and say no other allowed then. You know, just like the flat earth types long ago. No other theories allowed except our conventional wisdom, un proven to its conclusion, but what we claim is best. We will explore NO other alternatives because as Lothar of the Hill People rightly said..."Son, thats a great idea...but it is a new idea, therefore it must be feared and rejected."
See post 7, page 75/76. The comments about DNA are interesting.
I think these folks have been reading your documents AG. Furthermore, 'evolution' as a word is mentioned several times.
Interestingly, 'Intellignet Design' is not seen coupled together in this document, but it is covered generically.
Being a KSBE member appears to be a tough job, but the head of Learning Services deserves a big Kudos for this document.
Wow. Equating islamic murderers w/ I.D. scientists. Nifty and powerfully persuasive.
Or you could continue as you are, and behave like the religious luddites of the middle ages, unable and unwilling to stretch outside of your comfortable ideology.
"I can't count the times I've come across some discourse on some biological subject that can stand perfectly well independent of evolution and come across one or more gratuitous statements to the effect "...which evolved the XXX feature whose function is under discussion..." right in the middle of it. It's almost like the Darwinian equivalent of 'Hail Mary full of grace.'"
Well said. Extremely well said. That has been my observation also. Many times I think print is wasted on token speculation on how something "came to be" rather than on how it functions. Which, in my opinion, is the more important issue...usually.
The net result would be a disaster for ID. But their proponents would just go back to the voters and public opinion and get the rules of science changed (again) so there would be no honest section on ID. Just the usual nonsense we see on the websites and on these threads.
Does anyone anywhere believe that the CS/ID folks are going to all this trouble to promote science, or because they think aliens or panspermia or some such is the cause of life on Earth?
Or are they doing this just as the Wedge Strategy suggested sometime in the late 1990s.
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