Darwin in the Classroom: Ohio allows alternatives.

National Review Online ^ | December 17, 2002 | John G. West Jr.

[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.

[HankReardon]

Here's something else for you. It is known that the rotation of the earth is slowing. Even though it's rate of deceleration is so very small if you were to apply this rate backwards into time 60 million years the earth would have been spinning at an ridiculously incredible speed.

[balrog666]

Whatever I beleive or do not believe to be true does not matter. I am telling you there is a canyon at Mt St Helens that was created by a lava flow that exposed the layers of strata that was laid down. Now your choices are either to use your scientific mind and research into this or simply summarily dismiss it all.

Your astounding ignorance of events from just a few short years ago is overwhelming - how can anyone take you at all seriously?

[Aric2000]

My mind is MUCh more scientific then yours. You are a young earther.

That has got to be one of the silliest religions that I have ever heard of.

Delusions are sometimes good I guess, at least yours is fairly harmless.

[whattajoke]

I am telling you there is a canyon at Mt St Helens that was created by a lava flow that exposed the layers of strata that was laid down

Hank, surely you are kidding right? The recent eruption did not produce any lava flows. I even checked on the ICR website who is apparently the responsible for this latest lie, and they are at least careful enough not to mention the word "lava." Yes, there were some serious lahars and 5 miles worth of pyroclastic flow, but alas, no canyon forming lava flows proving a young earth. Sorry. Yes, there is a canyon there, which was formed mainly from the last big eruption there 2000 years ago, but that has nothing to do with your so-called logic.

By the way, mountains are formed in a variety of different ways, as are all caves, lakes, prairies, drumlins...and canyons. I'm hardly a geologist, but man, this is basic stuff! Young earthers such as yourself are a curious lot. I like when they use arguments based on old earth/ evolution models, ie, "You can't explain the Cambrian explosion" blah blah blah, but then again YOU can't explain why you're debating something that happened millions of years before your flat earth came to be!

Hank, Please help me understand why god chose to blow up a mountain in WA creating a canyon to "prove" his young earth, and killing 50-some innocent people. I'll be waiting...

[HankReardon]

Okay, searching for Truth we all stumble upon false information. Do not take this as my concession that my info was false, I'll look into it. It's like who was it, Galileo? He tells the indoctrinated that the earth is not the center of the universe and they accused him of heresy. Well, today people are indoctrinated so deeply in evolution that they do not even want to consider how there could have been an alternative. Oh, I won't begin to 2nd guess God, sorry.

[HankReardon]

It's not a religion, it's a quest for knowledge and Truth looking beyond the general indoctrination. Does that frighten you and your scientific mind?

[Aric2000]

It doesn't frighten me at all.

It's great that you have decided to go in another direction.

Problem is that that direction has been tried and it is a dead end.

The universe, by current computations is about 15 billion years old, the earth and solar system is about 4 billion.

[HankReardon]

Yeah, I heard that one also.

[HankReardon]

I'd never want to think that my conclusions on this subject would ever be unyeildling set in stone. My views must be subject to subsequent facts. This is a great topic, I laughed at my brother when he expressed his views on it to me but found it interesting enough to study it. What about the rotation of the earth slowing? Run that backwards in time speeding it up at the same rate. That does not make sense.

[whattajoke]

According to Chris Stassen, the rotation of the Earth has actually been slowing 0.00002 seconds per year, or 0.002 seconds per century. This would mean that in the Devonian period, there would have to have been around 400 days per year, which in fact corresponds to the approximately 400 daily growth layers per year present in Devonian corals. However, even this rate becomes "much less accurate with increasing time (particularly back to near the origin of the Earth). There are still arguments over the forces which dominate the slowing, and how much stronger or weaker they would have been when integrating backwards in time" (Stassen 1997). Stassen recommends as resources Thwaites and Awbrey 1982, Cazenave 1982, Bursa 1982, and Mignard 1982.

References
P. Brosche and J. Sunderman (eds.). 1982. Tidal Friction and the Earth's Rotation II. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

M. Bursa. 1982. On some topical problems of the dynamics of the Earth-Moon system. In Brosche and Sunderman 1982:19-29.

A. Cazenave. 1982. Tidal friction parameters from satellite observations. In Broshce and Sunderman 1982:4-18.

R. Ecker. 1990. Dictionary of Science and Creationism. Buffalo: Prometheus.

J. Gribbin. 1993. In the Beginning: After COBE and Before the Big Bang. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.

S. Hawking. 1988. A Brief History of Time. Toronto: Bantam.

S. Hawking. 1993. Black Holes and Baby Universes. New York: Bantam.

R. LePoidevin. 1996. Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. London: Routledge.

F. Mignard. 1982. Long time integration of the Moon's orbit. In Brosche and Sunderman 1982:67-91.

C. Sagan. 1994. Pale Blue Dot. New York: Random House.

L. Smolin. 1997. The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

C. Stassen. 1997. Personal correspondence.

W. Thwaites and F. Awbrey. 1982. As the world turns: can creationists keep time? Creation/Evolution IX:18-22.

A. Vilenkin. 1982. Creation of universes from nothing. Physics Letters 117B:25-28.

M. I. Vuletic. 2000. Book Review: Nature's Destiny. Philo 3(2): 89-103.

J. K. Wagner. 1991. Introduction to the Solar System. Philadelphia: Saunders College Publishing.

[whattajoke]

why is this wrong?

Today we have atomic clocks. These are extremely precise (and accurate) timekeepers. Now since the earth is slowing down at a rate noticeable to these clocks one cannot use the usual definition of one day being x many seconds. The second, as defined for the atomic clock, is based on an atomic process and was defined in such a way that it matched the day as it was in 1900.

The Earth is really slowing down at about 1.5 milliseconds a day per century—not 1.5 milliseconds a day per day as the young-earth creationist state. Whoops!

Now a century has passed since 1900.

(1.5 milliseconds/day/century)(century)=1.5 milliseconds/day

Basically because of a century of the Earth’s rotation slowing down, the second as defined for atomic clocks is shorter than a second as defined by day/night cycle which we ordinary people use. So a discrepancy of about 1.5 milliseconds a day accumulates. To keep the two time systems within a second of each other the a leap second was invented. It is important to note that even if the Earth stopped slowing down and rotated at a constant speed, we would still need to have leap seconds because the second was defined to match the Earth’s rotation in 1900 when the Earth was rotating faster.

(Keep in mind that 1.5 milliseconds/day/century is an approximate figure and that the slow down of the Earth is not absolutely constant. I chose the value for the sake of simplicity.)

For more info on leap seconds see a site from the U.S. Naval Observatory, the agency which keeps time for the United States. Also see another debunking of this false claim. This site also debunks this claim and several other “proofs” that the Earth is young.

Now this one is a bit confusing at first until one sees what is going on. The creationists mistook the discrepancy between the second defined as one 86,400th of a day and the second as the physics people define it for the rate of which the Earth’s rotation is slowing down. I really don’t blame them for making this mistake initially. We are all entitled to a few mistakes. But this does not justify keeping this claim going for years and years. My question is, why is this claim still being made?

**from some SCIENTIFIC website, not my words.

[HankReardon]

Thank you for not merely mentioning that I was ignorant and wrong and not giving me any info. This is very informative, it's what I was wanting, I was not just asking the question to try to show you up, I think you realize this, I just wanted an explanation. Here's another one, it is believed that humans were sophisticated enough to have been ritually burying their dead 100,000 years ago yet it took them all the way until 12,000 years ago to figure out if they planted seeds and tended them they could produce a major portion of their food supply. Now this is hard to believe. Do you agree? Some things deserve our skeptism.

[HankReardon]

Thank you, good looking out. I went back to my source and checked. It was not a lava flow but a mud slide that carved out a canyon 600 ft across and 150 ft deep that exposed the layers of strata that can prove millions of years of history that took days for Mt St Helens to lay down. My flat earth? I don't have one. The indoctrinated are such a curious lot. Does the sun still circle the earth?

[PatrickHenry]

End-of-session placemarker.

[ContentiousObjector]

Well if the bible was wrong about the solar system, maybe it is wrong about creation too!

[ContentiousObjector]

Because several people have sent me messages asking, the person in the picture is banned spammer "Medved"

[Phaedrus]

End-of-session placemarker.

Thanks, Patrick.

Ohio is the first in what will become a long list of states that will allow scientific critique of Darwinism. This is a firm prediction on my part. Why? Because America believes is full disclosure. The issue is as simple as Truth vs. the ex cathedra pronouncements of a self-anointed popular scientific "elite" who exhibit a marked Materialistic bias. I am confident that Truth will prevail.

[VadeRetro]

Mount St. Helens didn't do anything to undercut geography. The geographic column has layers with distinct fossils in each. Each layer is the relic of a distinct time, an ecological zone.

In the folded-over sediment mountains--the Appalachians--where I live, one layer might be marine limestones with shellfish, another might be shales of one-time swamp mud with leafy plants, another might be sandstone from a beach environment, etc. They record long periods at completely different times, separated by other long periods in which there was more erosion than deposition. The total time involved to build up each layer with its fossils, then have the depostion gradually end, then erode some amount, then change to the next deposition environment, was inescapably large.

The Mount St. Helen's layers are sorted volcanic ash; no fossils at all, just different sizes of particles in different layers. It is indeed "flat earth" science to trumpet such a non sequitur as your claim that the latter's sudden origin proves that the former might have happened rapidly as well.

[Phaedrus]

... America believes is [in] full disclosure.

Wish I could learn to type.