Science Education

If you want to watch John West and I speaking about the Kitzmiller decision on C-SPAN-2’s Book-TV, it is now online in Real Player format, here. Unfortunately, the video is pretty low-resolution, but the audio comes through very well. John West makes an interesting point that since the Kitzmiller decision, Judge Jones has engaged in a number of speaking engagements, including one where he stated that as a judge, he is guided by the belief that “true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible.” Here’s the whole statement as recorded in the transcript of the commencement address: The Founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained Read More ›

Seth Cooper and Leonard Brown have published an article entitled, “A Textbook Case of Judicial Activism: How a Pro-ID Publisher Was Denied its Day in Court,” which describes how the publisher of the textbook Of Pandas and People, Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE), was denied the right to become a party to the Kitzmiller trial despite the fact that its intellectual property rights were implicated in the lawsuit. As background, the right of a party to “intervene” in a lawsuit is governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24 (a): (a) Intervention of Right. Upon timely application anyone shall be permitted to intervene in an action: (1) when a statute of the United States confers an unconditional right to Read More ›

Saturday, August 26th at 7pm EST C-SPAN’s BookTV will air “Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision”, featuring two of the book’s authors, John West and Casey Luskin. The program will air again Sunday, August 27th at 6:30am EST and Monday, August 28 at 12:00am EST. The featured event was held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington D.C. for Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision, the first book-length critique of Judge John E. Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller case, the first court case to assess the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The event, held at Discovery Institute’s office in Washington, D.C., was full, (as was a similar one in Seattle at Read More ›

An editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post, “Nothing Wrong With Kansas“, contains many inaccurate statements about the Kansas Science Standards and intelligent design. First, it wrongly frames the Kansas issue as being about intelligent design: [T]he conservatives regained the majority in 2004 and moved to promote intelligent design — a challenge to Darwinian theory based not on biblical inerrancy or overt creationism but on purportedly scientific flaws in the theory. (“Nothing Wrong With Kansas,” Washington Post, Sunday, August 6, 2006) But the standards are not about intelligent design. Not only do they clearly state, “the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design” (Kansas Science Standards, pg. ii), but the standards only require teaching about scientific criticisms of Neo-Darwinism in a Read More ›

I report with great sadness that my friend Wesley Elsberry of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has a publicly stated a strategy of trying to paint ID-proponents as liars: If you want to drive a wedge between an audience of evangelical Christians and the professionals in the ID movement, you need a third approach: show that the ID advocate on stage with you has been lying to his followers. Show misquote after misquote; demonstrate error after checkable error, and make the audience understand that if the ID advocate claims that the sky is blue, their next step had better be to look out the window to see for themselves. Evangelicals do want to take Christ’s message to the Read More ›

On the Scientific American Blog, John Rennie has perpetuated various myths about the Kansas Science Standards (KSS) promoted by “Kansas Citizens for Science.” Mr. Rennie upholds a recent KCFS news post which says the following: Q. How have the standards changed?The KBOE (Kansas Board of Education) Standards:— Change the definition of science so that it can include supernatural causes.— Change the definition of evolution to imply that evolution conflicts with belief in God.— Add solidly refuted criticisms of evolution that are only part of the creationist literature. It’s difficult to call these anything but plain old fabricated lies. Before delving in, please note that there will be a major difference between my post and Mr. Rennie’s post: my post will Read More ›

Some Darwinists have sometimes argued that if ID were taught in schools, then that would risk opening the science classroom to a floodgate of religious ideas about origins, wreaking havoc upon the classroom and turning it into a platform for religious proseltyzation. (For an older example of this objection, see Robert Pennock’s Tower of Babel, pg. xviii.) David Brin repeats this red herring in “The Other Intelligent Design Theories: Intelligent Design is only one of many ‘alternatives’ to Darwinian evolution,” which is the cover story of the current Skeptic Magazine. Brin suggests that if ID is taught, the science classroom will be opened to an onslaught of other “‘alternatives’ to Darwinian evolution” (which he thinks would might offend the sensibilities Read More ›

Last week I explained how Nick Matzke was wrong to argue that the Kansas Science Standards‘ (KSS) mention of irreducible complexity implies that it requires teaching intelligent design (ID). Most of the rest of Mr. Matzke’s post concentrates on the false claim that the Kansas Science Standards’ section on evolution makes claims that come only from ID literature. This argument is only furthering a conspiracy theory which believes that, when the standards read “do not include Intelligent Design,” they really mean, “do include intelligent design.” Under Mr. Matzke’s reasoning, every science teacher in the state of Kansas is supposed to be in on this conspiracy, which would be the only reason for them to know they are supposed to disregard Read More ›

Senator John McCain personally believes in evolution, but he takes a classically liberal view which says that ideas should not be hidden from students — even controversial ideas like intelligent design. Consider this excerpt from a news article on McCain’s take on intelligent design: Mr. McCain, who delivered his prepared remarks in an even, almost perfunctory manner, was at his best in the question and answer session that followed. Responding to a question about a report that he thinks “intelligent design” should be taught in schools, the senator mocked the idea that American young people were so delicate and impressionable that they needed to be sheltered from the concept, which says God had a hand in creation and which has Read More ›

A recent article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch notes that a Virginia Commonwealth University biology professor Jim Sparks complained that a biology textbook by Sylvia Mader, “Essentials of Biology (McGraw Hill, 2007) “had leanings toward creationism and short-changed evolution.” Another article described Sparks’ view as claiming the Mader textbook was “biased toward creationism and intelligent design.” But how accurate was Dr. Sparks’ description of the textbook? Consider what the textbook actually says about intelligent design: No wonder most scientists in our country are dismayed when state legislatures or school boards rule that teachers must put forward a variety or “theories” on the origin of life, including one that runs contrary to the mass of data that supports the theory of evolution. Read More ›