Science Education

Science magazine has published an article about what it is calling a “mea culpa” by Eugenie Scott of the NCSE for spreading false information about California parent Larry Caldwell. (For background on Scott’s defamation of Caldwell, see here.)

Today’s New York Times has a fascinating page-one article about Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent op-ed declaring that Darwinism is incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine as well as the findings of human reason. As we’ve come to expect from the major media, this “news” article contains errors of fact as well as editorializing by reporters Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, but it is nevertheless informative — and for a piece by the major media, relatively balanced. The article quotes both Bruce Chapman and Mark Ryland from Discovery Institute. The main thrust of the story is summarized early on in the following paragraphs:

AP education reporter Ben Feller has a wire story about the debate over how to teach evolution. I was pleased to see that Feller actually got our position correct, and let us describe our policy in our own words. This is what he got from a recent interview with Discovery president Bruce Chapman: “The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that represents many scholars who support intelligent design, is not seeking to require schools to teach the theory. Nor is it out to diminish the teaching of evolution, said Bruce Chapman, the institute’s president.“We want the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory taught. That’s it,” Chapman said. And he has a better definition of intelligent design than we usually Read More ›

As pointed out in my blog post below, Science magazine is running a bogus news item asserting that the Kansas Board of Education is considering whether to mandate intelligent design. I challenge Science magazine to produce proof of its claim. If it can do so, I am willing to donate $100 to Science’s parent organization, the American Association for the Advacement of Science (AAAS), so that it can promote Darwinian evolution. This challenge is good until 5:00 pm Pacific Time on June 28. The staff of Science are invited to send their evidence to cscinfo@discovery.org. (And no, another false news report from another sloppy news organization doesn’t constitute evidence.)

Science Magazine’s “Netwatch” for today has an item titled “Standing up for Darwin.” I hope the magazine’s review process for scientific articles is better than its apparently non-existent fact-checking of news items. In typically histrionic tones, the piece laments:

Evolution is under attack again, as school boards in Kansas and other states consider whether to mandate teaching of “intelligent design”…

Since the newsmedia have frequently misreported Discovery Institute’s position on the teaching of intelligent design, I thought I would highlight a letter Seth Cooper and I just sent to the Pennsylvania State Legislature opposing a pro-ID bill under discussion there. The Pennsylvania bill would authorize local school boards in the state to require intelligent design as part of their standard curriculum if they so choose. While well-intentioned, we think this proposal is unhelpful for a variety of reasons.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an article about the Kansas evolution hearings. Well, sort of. While the article discoursed at length about the pro-Darwin scientists who did NOT participate in the Kansas hearings, it never actually got around to mentioning any of the people who DID testify.

It looks like Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education isn’t going to be able to get away with her defamation of California parent Larry Caldwell after all. (For the history of the Caldwell case, see here and here and here.) In a press release issued this week, Caldwell states that the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) has agreed to permanently remove Scott’s defamatory article from the world wide web and will be printing a retraction letter by Scott in the next issue of California Wild. In addition, CAS will give Caldwell the opportunity to accurately present his views in his own words in the next issue of the same magazine. Denyse O’Leary has an excellent blog about this latest development, here.

WANTED: A new research assistant for Morton Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call and political commentator extraordinaire. An ability to read original documents and separate fact from fiction preferred. Please reply ASAP in order to spare Mort further embarrassment.

The Kansas State Board of Education is scheduled to take up discussion tomorrow of the proposed revisions to the state’s science standards (although an actual up or down vote might not come until later in the summer).

The Board’s Science Hearings Committee, after hearing testimony from nearly two dozen scientists and scholars last month about how evolution should be presented in the classroom, will apparently recomend the adoption of the draft standards which call for students to learn more about the scientific evidence regarding chemical and biological evolution, including scientific criticisms raised in peer-reviewed science journals. In a one page rationale for their recommendation the committee states that it had “heard credible scientific testimony that indeed there are significant debates about the evidence for key aspects of chemical and biological evolutionary theory.”

Below is the complete text of their statement, which is available on the Kansas Dept. of Education website as well.