Science Education

A transcript of the Fox News interchange on May 6 between Eugenie Scott and Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer has been posted on the Fox News website. During the segment Eugenie Scott continues her recent effort to defend “evolution” by virtually disowning Darwin in public.

If you don’t think a civilized discussion of the evolution controversy is possible, watch the May 7 edition of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” which held a low-key and eminently reasonable discussion of the Kansas hearings and the controversy over how best to teach evolution. The program featured Mark Ryland, director of Discovery Institute’s Washington, D.C. office, and Peter Folger of the American Geophysical Union. If only the Darwinists in Kansas were as respectful and dignified as Mr. Folger! You can watch the program on the web by going here and clicking on the program for May 7. The discussion of evolution starts about an hour and twenty-two minutes into the show.

An essay of mine ran in today’s Kansas City Star. It begins:

It seems the Darwinists in Kansas are living in the past. Not the past of, say, the fossil record. The history written there tells of the abrupt appearance of major animal forms, nothing like the gradually branching tree of life that Darwin envisioned. The past that some evolutionists are living in, rather, is the Kansas science curriculum battle of 1999.

Knight-Ridder Newspapers is circulating a false news report after apparently being bamboozled by the Darwinist spin-machine in Kansas. The article claims that the expert witnesses in the Kansas evolution hearings have not read the science standards they are seeking to change. But the charge is false, and the fact that a major news organization would promote such a bogus story makes one wonder about how many reporters have actually read the science standards in question. The article begins:

This morning’s New York Times article on Kansas has a much improved title, and despite its failure to report on the substance of the science testimony that took place yesterday, the article does drop good hints about what went on, such as:

a parade of Ph.D.’s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science’s explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design.

The Washington Times has an excellent editorial this morning outlining the real issue in Kansas. It concludes by faulting Darwinists for not being willing to engage in legitimate scientific debate, quoting Discovery Senior Fellow David Berlinski in the process: “The defense of Darwin’s theory … has fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not,” wrote David Berlinski recently in the Wichita Eagle. Mr. Berlinski, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is widely recognized as a leading Darwinian skeptic. He continues, “It is not a strategy calculated to induce confidence in the scientific method.” It also doesn’t help our students.

Today the Kansas Board of Education opens its hearings on whether students should learn about all of the scientific evidence relating to Darwin’s theory, including the evidence that challenges the theory. The big question is whether journalists will actually report on the substance of the hearings, or will they simply follow the script supplied by the Darwin-only advocates, who have made clear that they want to prevent at all costs any discussion of the science. Darwinists in Kansas have virtually promised to smear and demonize the scientists who will be testifying at the hearings. What they cannot do is make those scientists disappear. After months of claiming that there are no scientific critics of Darwinism, and insisting that the only Read More ›

Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin seems to have become the new press secretary for the pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE). But he apparently hasn’t informed his editors at the Post, who are continuing to publish his stories. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after reading Slevin’s histrionic piece in yesterday’s Post. While many local reporters in Kansas have been working overtime to accurately and fairly cover both sides of the evolution controversy, Slevin has weighed in with a piece that reads from the first sentence like one of the NCSE’s fundraising letters:

Alarmed by proposals to change how evolution is taught, scientists and teachers are mobilizing to fight back, asserting that educational standards are being threatened by what they consider a stealth campaign to return creationism to public schools.

Topeka, KS — Discovery President Bruce Chapman, and CSC senior fellow, Jonathan Wells, answered questions from the media at a Topeka news conference today.

Not so surprisingly, after meeting with the media, there are two accurate and balanced news reports about the coming debate over evolution in Kansas (AP story here and Wichita Eagle story here).

According to a recent Prentice Hall biology textbook, a few centuries ago ‘very light-skinned’ people, shipwrecked on a tropical island, became “dark-skinned” after “many years under the tropical sun.”

But as Pamela R. Winnick at the Weekly Standard explains, this is nonsense, one of many examples of junk science in our high school science textbooks:

There’s lots that’s puzzling about the science textbooks used in American classrooms. A sloppy way with facts, a preference for the politically correct over the scientifically sound, and sheer faddism characterize their content. It’s as if their authors had decided above all not to expose students to the intellectual rigor that is the lifeblood of science.