Culture

Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Charles Darwin discovered and advanced the theory of evolution, was, unlike Darwin, a deeply spiritual man who was convinced that materialistic natural selection did not fully explain the origin of man. Unlike so many of his philosophically materialistic scientific colleagues, Wallace was a fierce critic of eugenics and the arrogant scientism of his day. Wallace wrote: Segregation of the unfit is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have had enough of this kind of tyranny already…the world does not want the eugenist to set it straight … Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft.1 Commenting on our modern scientific priestcraft, Steven Lenzer has a superb essay Read More ›

On Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (February 12, 2009), students everywhere can speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution. Let’s turn Darwin Day into Academic Freedom Day.

As regular ENV readers are aware, we just launched the grassroots Academic Freedom Day campaign. Our goal is to transform the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth on Feb. 12, 2009 from an uncritical celebration venerating Darwin to a day that highlights the need for academic freedom to debate the evidence for and against Darwinism. As a follow-up to the release of Expelled this year, we want to continue to raise awareness of efforts by Darwinists to stifle scientific inquiry at all levels, and we want people to sign the Academic Freedom Petition. The centerpiece of our campaign is the website www.academicfreedomday.com.

Announcing the Academic Freedom Video & Essay Contest

Darwin once wrote,

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

That famous quote will be the touchstone for students to communicate their support for academic freedom to explore the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution. The video and essay contest is open to high school and college students and will be judged based on creativity, accuracy, and persuasiveness. One grand-prize winner will be announced and have his or her entry officially unveiled at academicfreedomday.com on Academic Freedom Day, Feb. 12th 2008. For details on entering the contest, go to: www.academicfreedomday.com/actUp.php.

We need your help in promoting the contest to ensure that as many students as possible hear about it and are able to participate.

Here are five things that you can do to help us promote the Academic Freedom Day Video & Essay Contest:

Recently I went to a public library to do some work, and I saw a book featured on top of a reference desk titled Life on Other Planets (by Rhonda Lucas Donald, Watts Library, 2003). The title page featured little green men with big alien bug-eyes, the kind of picture you might see on some nutty UFO website. The book and its display were clearly aimed at students — perhaps junior high or high school-aged. Fun and silly pictures don’t bother me if they get kids interested in reading about science. The problem here was that when I opened the book, what I found was not science, but science-fiction. Where Does Your Information Come From?The second page of the first Read More ›

Looking for a simple way to stand up for academic freedom on Academic Freedom Day? Let people know you support academic freedom by wearing an Academic Freedom Day t-shirt on February 12th, 2009. T-shirts come in a variety of styles and sizes and are inexpensively priced. Click here to browse the shirts and order one for yourself. Don’t stand up alone. Get your friends and classmates to order t-shirts and organize an Academic Freedom Day event at your school, church, or organization. If you need ideas for what you can do to celebrate Academic Freedom Day, here’s a list of five things to do. Or, you can e-mail us at academicfreedom@discovery.org. And you can suit up your dorm or bedroom Read More ›

In Texas, the far-left activist organization Texas Freedom Network is working overtime to try to gut the state’s science standards. This week the Texas State Board of Education holds their regularly scheduled meeting and it seems the TFN will try and whip up a mob to lobby the board when they discuss the proposed update of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for science. TFN is parading a push-poll survey of scientists they did recently. They emailed over 1,000 scientists and science professors at Texas universities and less than half replied. Still, TFN is trumpeting that of the replies they did get, nearly all were in complete lock step with the Darwin-only lobby. As Casey Luskin pointed out in Read More ›

Three of the six reviewers of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) are recommending that students apply less, rather than more, critical thinking when studying evolution. In Part 1 I discussed the recommendations of David Hills, and in Part 2, I discussed the recommendations of Ronald Wetherington. Like Wetherington and Hillis, TEKS reviewer Gerald Skoog wants the TEKS to include many more standards on evolution which dogmatically only present the evidence for evolution. Here are some of the new standards he wants the TEKS to include: “EXPLAIN HOW NATURAL SELECTION AND ITS EVOLUTIONARY CONSEQUENCES PROVIDE A SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION FOR THE FOSSIL RECORD OF ANCIENT LIFE FORMS, AS WELL AS FOR THE STRIKING MOLECULAR SIMILARITIES OBSERVED AMONG LIVING ORGANISMS.” and Read More ›

In Part 1 I discussed how some Darwinist reviewers of the Texas Science Standards are opposing giving students the opportunity to use critical thinking skills when learning the modern Darwinian theory of evolution. One glaring difference between the reviews submitted by those opposing critical thinking on evolution and the reviews of those supporting it is the lengths of the respective sets of reviews. The TEKS reviews submitted by Stephen Meyer, Ralph Seelke, and Charles Garner in support of students applying critical thinking skills to evolution were each over 25 pages in length. In contrast, two of the three Darwinist reviewers submitted reviews that were 8 pages or less. It seems that some of the Darwinist reviewers didn’t take much time Read More ›

In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin famously wrote, ”A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” One might think that modern proponents of Darwin’s ideas would endorse his approach to scientific thinking within evolution education, but it’s not so. The Texas State Board of Education recently received reviews of the proposed Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) from six science reviewers. Three of those reviewers–who are scientific skeptics of Darwinian evolution–support TEKS that would give students a strong grounding in critical thinking skills by asking them to “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence Read More ›

This is the seventh installment of a series responding to John Timmer’s online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution (EE). The first part is here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here, the sixth here. 7. Timmer’s Mis-Aimed Critique of Inquiry Based LearningTimmer calls Explore Evolution‘s use of Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) a “sham” because he asserts the textbook “abdicates the responsibility for reasoning entirely.” But his criticism is bogus. EE contains multiple sections that encourage students to weigh the evidence and consider open-ended questions about the evidence like, “Which picture best illustrates the history of life?,” “Do all living things, past and present, share a common ancestor?,” “Can natural selection produce Read More ›