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"Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview. "Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come." Prof Dawkins, professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, is author of books including the...

H.L. Mencken said during the Scopes Trial in 1925 that "those religious groups leading the war against the teaching of evolution are conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters." The proponents of teaching the God-creation theology in public schools have not given up despite the U.S. Supreme Court rulings like the 1987 case where Louisiana tried to use code words for teaching creationism, calling it the Balanced Treatment Act. Other code words for sneaking God into science class are "intelligent design" and "academic freedom." And these anti-evolutionists lobby state legislatures and put political pressure on school boards to subvert...

Posted on Saturday, August 02, 2008 8:44:19 AM by Soliton don't remember when I first learned about the theory of evolution, but nowadays I find myself reading of it a great deal in the popular press and hearing it discussed in the media. As my daughter enters elementary school, I find myself anxious to discuss with her teachers what they will cover in science class and where in their curriculum they plan to teach evolution. OUR COUNTRY HAS LAWS THAT SEPARATE church and state. Public institutions like schools must be neutral on the subject of religion, as required by the...

don't remember when I first learned about the theory of evolution, but nowadays I find myself reading of it a great deal in the popular press and hearing it discussed in the media. As my daughter enters elementary school, I find myself anxious to discuss with her teachers what they will cover in science class and where in their curriculum they plan to teach evolution. OUR COUNTRY HAS LAWS THAT SEPARATE church and state. Public institutions like schools must be neutral on the subject of religion, as required by the Constitution's First Amendment. Our courts have mandated that creationism is...

The case of the San Jose/Evergreen Community College firing of June Sheldon is raising some eyebrows among academics, liberal and conservative. Here is the media version : The controversy centers on an incident in June 2007, when Sheldon was asked by a student in a human heredity class about heredity’s impact on “homosexual behavior in males and females.” Among other references, Sheldon noted a German study demonstrating some link between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males, according to the lawsuit. After a student complained, college officials investigated and dismissed Sheldon, an adjunct professor at the school since January 2004....

What they found was 12 percent of United States high school biology teachers consider creationism a "valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species," and believe "many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian theory."

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A former San Jose City College biology professor is suing the college after she was fired for answering a student's question on the relationship between homosexuality and heredity.On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist.  She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist's views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate...

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science. --snip-- “Colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science, but now they’ll be so intimidated by the Title IX legal hammer that they may institute quota systems,” Dr. Sommers said. “In sports, they had to eliminate a lot of male teams to achieve Title IX parity. It’ll be devastating to American science if every male-dominated field...

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science. The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland. So far, these Title IX compliance reviews...

July 08, 2008, 6:00 a.m. Louisiana Confounds the Science Thought PoliceNeo-Darwinism is no longer a protected orthodoxy in the Bayou State's pedagogy. By John G. West To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life. Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is “anti-science.” In reality, the opposition’s efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific...

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal this week signed into law the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows school districts to permit teachers to present evidence, analysis and critique of evolution and other prevalent scientific theories in public school classrooms. The law came to the governor's desk after overwhelming support in the legislature, including a unanimous vote in the state's Senate and a 93-4 vote in the House. The act has been criticized by some as an attempt to insert religion into science education and hailed by others as a blow for academic freedom in the face of pressure to ignore flaws...

A public school board in Ohio voted unanimously today to proceed with firing an eighth-grade teacher for allegedly teaching his Christian beliefs in science classes and "branding" students with crosses. Responding to an investigation, the Mount Vernon School District board voted 5-0 to consider termination of John Freshwater's contract at its next meeting, July 7. The report presented to the board today charged Freshwater used a high-frequency generator – a Tesla coil – to make a cross on the arms of students, taught the theory of intelligent design and refused to remove all religious articles from his classroom. Board president...

A Mount Vernon teacher undermined science instruction in the public school district by discrediting evolution in his classroom and focusing on creationism and intelligent design, an investigation has found. Eighth-graders who were taught by John Freshwater frequently had to be re-taught in high school what they were supposed to have learned in Freshwater's class, according to outside investigators hired by the district. For 11 years, other teachers in the school district and people in the community complained about Freshwater preaching his Christian beliefs in class and slamming scientific theories, a school administrator told investigators. "There is a significant amount of...

A bill to overhaul the way evolution is taught in Louisiana public schools easily cleared its final legislative hurdle Monday despite threats of a lawsuit. Opponents, mostly outside the State Capitol, contend the legislation would inject creationism and other religious themes into public schools. However, the Senate voted 36-0 without debate to go along with the same version of the proposal that the House passed last week 94-3. The measure, Senate Bill 733, now goes to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is expected to sign it. Backers said the bill is needed to give science teachers more freedom to hold discussions...

What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas: the state is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are loath to produce different versions of the same material. The ideas that work their way into education here will surface in classrooms throughout the country. “ ‘Strengths and weaknesses’ are regular words that have now been drafted into the rhetorical arsenal of creationists,” said Kathy Miller, director of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that promotes religious freedom. The chairman of the state education board, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, denies that the phrase...

DALLAS — Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Over the last decade, creationism has given rise to “creation science,” which became “intelligent design,” which in 2005 was banned from the public school curriculum in Pennsylvania by a federal judge. Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.” The words are “strengths and weaknesses.” Starting this summer, the state education board will...

Sixteen percent of all U.S. science teachers are creationists, according to a recent national survey. In one of the most authoritative studies ever carried out, the results revealed that creationism – despite being challenged and dismissed by courts as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion – continues to be a staple in many science classrooms. Michael Berkman, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and who conducted the survey with a group of colleagues, said that teachers, ultimately, held the final word when it comes to what is taught in the classroom. "Ultimately, they are the ones who...

...So if our high school math and science scores are dropping, our children are dreading these classes, and we ourselves can barely go through the times tables, then why aren’t we demanding real tutelage in math and science? Why is it socially acceptable not to understand fractions, percentages, and exponents, not to mention basic science principles that don't change with time or opinion? One reason, I submit, is relativism. ~~ Relativism allows everyone to be right, and puts our feelings ahead of everything else. We all know that it is not fun to find out that we are wrong about...

...that’s not the path Mr. Delgado followed while investigating the mechanism that bacteria use to resist antibiotics. He did not attend Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan or any of the Long Island public schools that pop out Intel winners like clockwork. Rather he is a senior at Bayonne High School, a three-block-long fortress in a blue-collar city of 62,000 where oil refinery tanks loom over a landscape of one- and two-family clapboard houses. The median household income is $41,566. Only half the 3,000 high school students go on to four-year colleges. ...But a growing number of schools across the region,...

Books attacking religion, particularly Christianity, have earned quite a bit of money recently for publishers and their authors. Pundits are now having a field day attacking Mike Huckabee’s stance on evolution. Democratic strategist Paul Begala reportedly remarked on CNN on Super Tuesday, “Nobody is more conservative than Huckabee. He doesn’t believe in evolution or gravity or photosynthesis.”             Those who love to lob such oversimplified charges imply that those who do not accept the doctrinaire theories of evolution as set forth by one explorer named Charles Darwin, a century-and-a-half ago, are relics of the Dark Ages.  The latest Smart Set,...