of fact.Posted on 11/16/2010 9:23:54 AM PST by Sopater
When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pa., school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction.
Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research centers are starting to bear fruit.
The National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and other groups have increased research investment on identifying essential concepts for teaching evolution, including creating the Evolution Education Research Centre, a partnership of Harvard, McGill, and Chapman universities, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject, Journal of Evolution: Education and Outreach.
Though only one of a long series of skirmishes in a conflict that goes back almost as far as public education in America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which took place five years ago this month, engaged the professional science community because it put on trial for the first time the scientific validity of intelligent design. The concept posits that the development of humans and other living things was designed by an unnamed guiding force, rather than being the result of natural selection based on random variations.
The school board in Dover argued that there were weaknesses in the theory of evolution, and that students should be exposed to the idea of intelligent design. Judge John E. Jones III of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania flatly rejected that argument, noting that evolution is one of the most strongly supported theories in all of science, backed by broad evidence from across the field. By contrast, he concluded that “the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID [intelligent design] is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” in his 139-page finding of fact.
The district chose not to appeal the ruling, limiting its legal jurisdiction. But, along with the rejection of efforts in Arkansas and Georgia to undermine evolution’s validity through disclaimer labels on textbooks and fights over state science standards in Kansas around the same time, the ruling ignited an unprecedented push by scientists and education researchers to become more directly involved in integrating evolution concepts in science classes.
“What it has done is made it clearer to the scientific community that they have to come out and make a stand; they can’t wait in the wings and hope it all blows over,” said E. Margaret Evans, an assistant research scientist in education at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
One of the instructional-improvement projects is Evolution Readiness, a program devised by a team of researchers from the Concord, Mass.-based Concord Consortium and Boston College. It pairs computer modeling of natural selection with classroom activities and readings on evolution concepts. In the process of developing the program, the researchers have crafted the first evolution-content assessment for elementary students, based on 11 standards-based learning goals for Massachusetts, according to Camelia Rosca, a senior research associate at the Center for the Study of Testing Evaluation and Education Policy at Boston College.
At Elizabeth G. Lyons Elementary School in Randolph, Mass., one of a handful of states where the program is being tested, 4th graders have finished a unit on plant adaptation, in which they watched the changes to a water-sensitive-plant population as the amount of water available was altered. The class is now extending the computer model to include rabbits and will soon add hawks to illustrate a basic food chain, said lead researcher Paul Horwitz, a senior scientist at Concord.
“We thought deeply about how to teach concepts to kids this young,” Mr. Horwitz said. “I didn’t want children to ‘believe’ in science; I wanted them to understand it as an explanation for the natural world.”
In addition to using the computer program, the children study a 25-foot-long timeline of species development, play games about food webs, and experiment with Fast Plants®, which germinate and flower within a month.
Now in the last year of a three-year study sponsored by the NSF, the project’s initial results with 200 students and 10 teachers in Massachusetts; San Juan, Texas; and North Kansas City, Mo., suggest that students who participate in the program show significantly better understanding than those in a control group of evolution concepts, such as the idea that changes in the environment will prompt changes in a population over time.
The team submitted a proposal for the next phase of the study, dealing with professional development, after finding the students of teachers in Texas and Missouri—where preprogram teacher training lasted longer—performed better than those of teachers in Massachusetts, who had just three days of summer training and 30 hours online.
The findings echo the sense of researchers and evolution experts generally that teacher education and training, rather than school board policy or state standards, will be the key to better teaching of evolution in science courses.
“There are people who are actively trying to undermine [evolution], but a big part of the challenge is we teach the way we were taught,” said Joshua Rosenau, the programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif. “In college and teacher-training programs, it’s important that evolution be taught not just in science education but in basic biology courses that all teachers are required to take.”
In their 2010 book Evolution, Creationism and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms, Pennsylvania State University political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer report finding in a 2007 survey that, among a nationally representative sample of 926 high school biology teachers, only 35 percent spent 16 or more hours teaching human and general evolution during the course of the school year. Seventeen percent never covered human evolution at all. Moreover, teachers’ instruction strongly correlated to their own understanding of evolution concepts as well as their belief in creationism or intelligent design as a reasonable alternative to evolution.
Such beliefs lead to an “avoidance and a kind of distancing of the teachers themselves from the material, as in, ‘We have to cover this because the standards require it,’” Mr. Berkman said.
And a teacher’s enthusiasm—or lack of it—can make a big difference in how well students learn, said Francis Q. Eberle, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “Because evolution is such a major tenet in science, it’s really not something that can be danced around,” he said.
Teacher education also has opened up as a new front in the battle over evolution in the classroom, according to Mr. Eberle. The Institute for Creation Research, which promotes creation-based science teaching, recently moved from California to Texas to fight for state accreditation to establish a master’s degree program in science education. Also, Louisiana has passed an “academic freedom” law protecting teachers who supplement their standard science textbooks with other materials; a state committee explicitly rejected a move to bar creationist or intelligent design materials from those supplements.
“If you take this term of ‘academic freedom’ more broadly, does it mean a teacher can teach anything?” Mr. Eberle asked. “It’s been narrowly applied to evolution, and I think it’s another term to accomplish the same goal” to undermine the scientific validity of evolution.
No. Better arguments are paying off. Theories of creation that include a rib woman and talking snake just don't persuade. I'm sorry.
I really wish conservatives would stop putting so much effort into creationism. The conservative philosophy doesn't need creationism to order to work.
Not science. Brianwashing. Creationists readily accept natural selection.
At Elizabeth G. Lyons Elementary School in Randolph, Mass., one of a handful of states where the program is being tested, 4th graders have finished a unit on plant adaptation, in which they watched the changes to a water-sensitive-plant population as the amount of water available was altered. The class is now extending the computer model to include rabbits and will soon add hawks to illustrate a basic food chain, said lead researcher Paul Horwitz, a senior scientist at Concord.
Again, no one disputes a food chain.
such as the idea that changes in the environment will prompt changes in a population over time.
Everyone believes this and it has nothing to do with evolution.
How about a rock coming to life!!!
What better arguments?
There are only two ways we could have gotten here.
1. We were created.
2. All of existence came into being from nothing and with no cause (in violation of the Law of Causality).
Matter and energy started it all with the Big Bang. (In violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of the Conservation of Matter)
Random Amino Acids somehow assembled themselves in a primordial mud puddle (from where it came, who knows) and became life (In violation of the Law of Biogenesis.... and incidentally in profound defiance of mathematic probability.)
And then that magic cell that was created in the mud puddle began adding information (even though information has never been shown to create itself.... it always comes from an intelligent source) steadily improving (in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) until it got to us... rational, thinking, emotional human beings.... and incidentally, how does human consciousness evolve out of mud.... they have no explanation for that.
Evolutionists (who are mostly atheists) believe everything happened naturally..... and in happening naturally the laws of nature were and are violated repeatedly.
Yeah.... we creationists are a bunch of morons.
The scientific ‘community’; yes indeed that is enough to squelch any would be opponent to their ‘doctrine’.
Not saying that ID or creationism is valid or even to be considered, but the article mentions ‘overwhelming evidence’ to back nebulous notions.
First, ‘evidence’ is not proof and any mention of ‘evidence’ requires inference based on ‘consensus’. We have all seen how AGW Consensus was led by scamming frauds with an ability to skew ‘evidence’ as they wanted towards their political goals. In my own experience, this happens often inside some protected classes of academic utopia.
Second, the nebulous nature of evolution is commingled with valid observations of natural selection. Intraspecies variations can certainly be tied to environmental stresses causing a natural or unnatural selection, whatever the hell ‘natural’ is understood to mean.
Third, the positing of interspecies differentiation and hierarchy is in the details of the analysis always an act of extreme inference bordering on the religious. That weak maximum likelihood estimates based on scant data or imputed data lead to such conclusions that man ‘descended’ from chimp or some common ancestor or vice versa is an affront to any serious seeker of scientific truth, and such seekers are generally turned off by the leftist dribble that spews from those in the field who insult by saying they are scientists.
Fourth, there are miscreants in science. Science as an activity of humankind is not immune to all the failings of humankind, i.e. some ‘scientists’ can lie and know they lie.
Fifth, this so-called ‘scientific community’ was funded by whom? By the federal government in all likelihood. And that speculation is enough to demand equal funding for alternatives by ‘credentialed’ scientists, those with a reputation and track record of investigating in a true scientific manner. And I am sure such scientists exist that would undertake a thorough and honest contrasting study of the various thought pathways.
As for me, we need to purge and clear the so-call ‘scientific community’ because most are nothing more that bureaucrats groveling for tax/stimulus political fed dollars. Start by defunding all of them and let the cream rise to the top. And I can guarantee you the real cream of science will have nothing to do with this political bullshit that clogs and smells up the faucets of our thinking.
bump
Then you need to stop damaging science's credibility with junk science. John Q. Public doesn't know what to think about it after AGW and the myth of carbon as a pollutant, the Silent Spring that never happened, the population "bomb" that didn't kill off the human race, silicon implants that don't cause cancer, nuclear energy that really is not unsafe, saccharine, IUD's, etc., etc., etc. The politicization of science is doing great damage to the solid work thousands and thousands of non-political scientists do every day out of the sight of the public.
Just because a lot of books have been written about evolution, doesn't mean that it's true. There are a lot of books written about vampires.
The most compelling evidence against life springing up without God and evolving is the astronomical odds against abiogenesis. The odds of one protein to come about by accident have been calculated to be 10 to the 321st power against.
To give an idea of how large this number is, the number of total fundamental particles in the entire universe are only 10 to the 134th power.
“Many famous evolutionists have calculated the odds of a cell or even just the proteins in a cell randomly assembling. These odds (again calculated by evolutionists themselves) so discredit the theory that they typically are not mentioned in discussions of the topic. The famous atheistic astronomer Sir Frederick Hoyle calculated the odds of even just the proteins of an amoeba arising by chance at one in 1040,000, i.e., one followed by 40,000 zeroes (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, p. 130). Harold Morowitz, former professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, calculated the odds that a simple, single-celled organism might randomly assemble itself from pre-existing building blocks as one in 10100,000,000,000, i.e., one followed by 100 billion zeroes (Morowitz, 1968, p. 98). Carl Sagan and other famous evolutionists (including Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA) have come to similar conclusions (Sagan, et al., 1973, pp. 45-46).”
~http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3511
Evolution is just so hard to swallow. It's not observable. It's not a law or a fact.
Evolution presupposes that the Earth is Billions (or at the very least millions) of years old to support the theory. Perhaps the Earth is not so old.
Consider these Scientific ideas....
Evidences for a Young Earth:
The Sun is shrinking at the rate of 5 ft/hr. The Earth is 93 million miles away from the Sun. In less than 20 million years, the Sun would have been so large that it would touch the surface of the Earth. Further, if the Sun had more mass, the gravity pull would be much larger and the Earth would have been sucked into the Sun long before 20 million years.
Short-period comets, like the Haley Comet in our solar system, whose life expectancy is only 10,000 years old, would have been blown apart by the solar winds years ago if they were older.
Absence of fossilized meteorites in different layers of strata on Earth proves that Evolution is a farce. According to evolution, different layers of strata were exposed for billions and billions of years, but only the top layers of the Earth have fossilized meteorites, and that in abundance.
The Moon is receding from the Earth every year. If the Earth were billions of years old, then the Moon would have been too close to the Earth. According to the inverse square law, the tides would have been so strong that everything would have died twice a day!
Saturn's rings are still unstable, showing they are possibly less than 6,000 years old. If they were billions of years old, they would have stabilized by the binding of the denser particles and the smaller particles together.
Jupiter, Saturn, and its little moon “I-O” are cooling off very rapidly, but they are still very hot. If billions of years had passed, they should have been cold already.
The Earth's magnetic field is decreasing half a life every 830 years. This magnetic field can't be more than 10,000 years; there is no way to reverse it.
The Erosion Rate of the continents is so large that the Earth would have eroded to sea level in 14 million years.
The top soil formation on Earth is formed at a steady rate which shows only a few thousand years.
Oil Pressure would have leaked out if the earth were billions of years old. Scientists can get garbage and turn into oil in a lab in 20 minutes.
The size of the Mississippi river delta ÷ The amount of mud being deposited = The time the delta has been in existence. This shows less than 30,000 years old. Noah's flood deposited 80% of the delta in a few days.
The Earth slows down as it spins at a rate of a thousandth of a second. In a million years, the earth would have been spinning too fast for life on earth.
There is only a small amount of settlement on the ocean floor.
The largest stalactites and stone formation in caves around the earth only show a few thousand years, like in the Sequoia Cave in Tennessee. Stalactites grow rapidly, at a rate of 1 inch every year; the largest stalactite shows to be about 4,400 years old. In Florida, there are stalactites of 16 inches growing from an electrical wire.
The Sahara desert is expanding. Once the soil is depleted, it is irreversible. The expansion rate is 4 miles per year at the present moment. At a rate of ¼ mile per year, the age of the Earth would come to about 4,400 years old.
The seas are getting saltier every year. If the Earth was billions of years old, the oceans would be too salty for any form of life by now.
The current world population is 5½ billion. If we started with 8 people 4,000 years ago, this would give us a population of 5 or 6 billion.
More about how “scientific” evolution is:
http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Evolution-Of-Man-Scientifically-Disproved2.html
There is no such thing as "true, proven science". If you understood science, you'd know that.
Right. It's evolution that needs the philosophy of science to work.
Without the philosophy of science, you get things like creationism.
Hardly. Mutations happen all the time. We know that. They have been observed. It isn't a miracle when one or two out of millions happen to help an organism. That observation, combined with the exponential growth in the number of organisms, combined with a great deal of time, make evolution plausible.
The one-step creation of man from dust has never been observed. The creation of a woman from a rib has never been observed (though scientists may one day accomplish this -- would that make them gods?) Talking snakes have never been observed. That makes the story of creation implausible.
Oh, it might have actually happened. It can't be completely ruled out, but it's much more likely a mythology created by desert nomads that were simply ignorant, and from their ignorance came a magical "explanation".
Their 2000+ year old hypothesis is a very weak one.
How about a rock coming to life!!!
Evolution doesn't claim that a rock came to life. Maybe you put more effort into studying.
There are only two ways we could have gotten here.
1. We were created.
2. All of existence came into being from nothing and with no cause (in violation of the Law of Causality).
Matter and energy started it all with the Big Bang. (In violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of the Conservation of Matter)
[snip]
Yeah.... we creationists are a bunch of morons.
You say "there are only two ways..." How do you know this? You don't. And you're forgetting the possibility that perhaps the universe has always been -- a possibility you implicitly accept by assuming the eternal existence of an god.
Second, there is no "Law of Causality" in science.
Third, matter is not always conserved. The atom bomb is the technological product of that understanding.
How could you be ignorant of these things? I think you need to study some more.
Maybe you should read your own post...you're the one who brought creation into it. By the way this is always the way evolutionist get by without answering the difficult part of the argument...what started all this evolving.
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