How about this guy for director of science education
.
Posted on 12/17/2002 6:59:43 AM PST by xsysmgr
After months of debate, the Ohio State Board of Education unanimously adopted science standards on Dec. 10 that require Ohio students to know "how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory."
Ohio thus becomes the first state to mandate that students learn not only scientific evidence that supports Darwin's theory but also scientific evidence critical of it. While the new science standards do not compel Ohio's school districts to offer a specific curriculum, Ohio students will need to know about scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory in order to pass graduation tests required for a high-school diploma.
Ohio is not the only place where public officials are broadening the curriculum to include scientific criticisms of evolution. In September the Cobb County School District in Georgia, one of the largest suburban school districts in the nation, adopted a policy encouraging teachers to discuss "disputed views" about evolution as part of a "balanced education." And last year, Congress in the conference report to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act urged schools to inform students of "the full range of scientific views" when covering controversial scientific topics "such as biological evolution."
After years of being marginalized, critics of Darwin's theory seem to be gaining ground. What is going on? And why now?
Two developments have been paramount.
First, there has been growing public recognition of the shoddy way evolution is actually taught in many schools. Thanks to the book Icons of Evolution by biologist Jonathan Wells, more people know about how biology textbooks perpetuate discredited "icons" of evolution that many biologists no longer accept as good science. Embryo drawings purporting to prove Darwin's theory of common ancestry continue to appear in many textbooks despite the embarrassing fact that they have been exposed as fakes originally concocted by 19th-century German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. Textbooks likewise continue to showcase microevolution in peppered moths as evidence for Darwin's mechanism of natural selection even though the underlying research is now questioned by many biologists.
When not offering students bogus science, the textbooks ignore real and often heated scientific disagreements over evolutionary theory. Few students ever learn, for example, about vigorous debates generated by the Cambrian Explosion, a huge burst in the complexity of living things more than 500 million years ago that seems to outstrip the known capacity of natural selection to produce biological change.
Teachers who do inform students about some of Darwinism's unresolved problems often face persecution by what can only be termed the Darwinian thought police. In Washington state, a well-respected biology teacher who wanted to tell students about scientific debates over things like Haeckel's embryos and the peppered moth was ultimately driven from his school district by local Darwinists.
Science is supposed to prize open minds and critical thinking. Yet the theory of evolution is typically presented today completely uncritically, as a dogma to be accepted rather than as a theory to be explored and questioned. Is it any wonder that policymakers and the public are growing skeptical of such a one-sided approach?
A second development fueling recent gains by Darwin's critics has been the demise of an old stereotype.
For years, Darwinists successfully shut down any public discussion of Darwinian evolution by stigmatizing every critic of Darwin as a Biblical literalist intent on injecting Genesis into biology class. While Darwinists still try that tactic, their charge is becoming increasingly implausible, even ludicrous. Far from being uneducated Bible-thumpers, the new critics of evolution hold doctorates in biology, biochemistry, mathematics and related disciplines from secular universities, and many of them teach or do research at American universities. They are scientists like Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, University of Idaho microbiologist Scott Minnich, and Baylor University philosopher and mathematician William Dembski.
The ranks of these academic critics of Darwin are growing. During the past year, more than 150 scientists — including faculty and researchers at such institutions as Yale, Princeton, MIT, and the Smithsonian — adopted a statement expressing skepticism of neo-Darwinism's central claim that "random mutation and natural selection account for the complexity of life."
Deprived of the stock response that all critics of Darwin must be stupid fundamentalists, some of Darwin's public defenders have taken a page from the playbook of power politics: If you can't dismiss your opponents, demonize them.
In Ohio critics of Darwinism were compared to the Taliban, and Ohioans were warned that the effort to allow students to learn about scientific criticisms of Darwin was part of a vast conspiracy to impose nothing less than a theocracy. Happily for good science education (and free inquiry), the Ohio Board of Education saw through such overheated rhetoric. So did 52 Ohio scientists (many on the faculties of Ohio universities) who publicly urged the Ohio Board to require students to learn about scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory.
The renewed debate over how to teach evolution is not likely to stop with Ohio.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, every state must enact statewide science assessments within five years. As other states prepare to fulfill this new federal mandate, one of the looming questions will be what students should learn about evolution. Will they learn only the scientific evidence that favors the theory, or will they be exposed to its scientific criticisms as well?
Ohio has set a standard other states would do well to follow.
— John West is a senior fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and chair of the department of political science at Seattle Pacific University.
Unfortunately he sure is.
How about this guy for director of science education
.
Please note the thread I was responding to in my post and understand the context of my statement. The italics preceding my statement are a quote from the poster I was responding to. He makes an equally simplistic statement about ID and that is what I was responding to. I was essentially turning around his statement to make the point that neither viewpoint can be summarized and summarily dismissed in one sentence. That is the real essence of the initial article posted on this thread.
Ohio is one of the first in a soon-to-be cascade of states that will follow suit. The Evols cannot stifle open and honest debate, with ridicule or any other sophist tool. And contrary to their very loud protestations, Evolution is anything but fact. THAT is a fact.
These represent huge holes in the so-called theory. Add to that the immense complexity of the genetic code. Add to that failed abiogenesis. And on and on. I therefore conclude that Evolution is the last gasp of Failed 19th Century Materialism. It has become an anti-religion cult.
Please, Please, Evols, show me one species that has demonstrably, provably transformed into another, either in the fossil record or in the lab. Note that the key words here are "demonstrably" and "provably". Speculation is not invited.
They cannot do it, Hank. Evolution is bogus science. The Ohio State Board of Science has seen the evidence and they have opened the door. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Others will agree.
Perfection is not my strong suit ...
This is precisely what's going on here, Hank.
So I guess the theory of relativity is bogus then as well?
That is the basic premise you are laying out you know?
No, it's not. Relativity superceded and encompassed Newton's laws, and the physicists back their theories with the math and constant experiment. They respect truth and will always bow to experimental result. Relativity has again and again been confirmed by reality with certain quantum mechanical exceptions, which turn out to be major.
Contrast that with Darwinism which is contradicted by reality; i.e. no transformation of species one into another, species breeding true for millions of years reflecting stasis not change, no transition mechanism, no clear definitions, lies told to our children in public school and on and on. In recent years the leading proponents of Evolution were Dawkins, first and foremost an atheist (ask him) and Gould, a sophist and at one time a heavy promoter of "chance" as the primary Evolutionary engine, which is flat ludicrous.
Egro, relativity is good science, Darwinism is bogus science. It is a religious cult masquerading as science.
Interesting, facts as myth and myths as fact. I find it so amusing.
BS -- you amuse me.
Creationists are getting pretty desperate...
Category Think. Kindly point to the Creationism in any of my posts. I'm arguing science.
... biologists and geneticists use the Theory of evolution in their work all the time. You should probably tell them how wrong they are.
Read the article. Scientific criticisms are permitted, not "Creationist" criticisms. Lots of scientists, an increasing number, do not agree with Evolution.
People that study germs and virus's use the Theory of evolution as well, better tell them too.
Silly nonsense.
99% of scientists agree and back up the theory of evolution ...
More BS. Back this up, if you can (you cannot).
"I can't explain it, therefore god must have done it."
Show me in any of my posts, ever, where I make anything like this claim. FYI I've been posting on this subject for several years. You may want to do a little, or more than a little, research before you make these grand, encompassing, and grandly wrong, statements.
God cannot be proven, nor disproven, therefore to use him/her/it is NOT scientific by definition. It is philosophy or religion. Science can only use cold hard facts, and since God is not a "fact", he cannot be used by science.
Nonsense to this, as well. Western Science gestated within the womb of Christianity and its initial mission was to explore and better understand God. If God is not a reality, please explain to me the origin of the deep order and beauty we see all around us daily. The physical laws so laboriously discovered by science arose by chance? Now THAT is blindness of the first magnitude. Read The Physics of Consciousness and you will find God in more places than the underlying order of the Universe and Newton's laws, which were His laws first.
Now Aric, read this carefully because I am not going to be repeating myself again and again if you go off-point.
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