Science and Culture Today | Page 1275 | Discovering Design in Nature

This morning the the Texas Board of Education has begun its deliberations on the final wording of the new Texas science standards. You can listen to the discussions live here.

AUSTIN, Texas–Having watched most of the testimony today before the Texas State Board of Education, the contrast between the pro-strengths-and-weaknesses side and the evolution lobby could not be clearer. The evolution lobby continually focused on religion, trying to distract from the real issue by telling the Board that they should not teach both the evidence for and against evolution because somehow that brings religion into the curriculum. Our side focused overwhelmingly on science. Ph.D. biologists who testified in favor of the teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” included Ray Bohlin, Don Ewert, Wade Warren, and Sara Kolb Hicks. Warren and Hicks gave striking testimony about the lack of academic freedom for university researchers. Warren testified about how a non-mandatory discussion on Read More ›

You can listen live to today’s hearing before the Texas State Board of Education on the Texas science standards here.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has just posted its list of testifiers for today’s public hearing before the Texas Board of Education on the revised Texas science standards. Testifiers are supposed to alternate between those who support and those who oppose requiring students to examine the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories. There are a number of strange things about the list, but the strangest thing of all has to be the listed viewpoints of the two people signed up to testify from the evolution-only National Center for Science Education (NCSE) — Josh Rosenau and Eugenie Scott. Both are listed as favoring the inclusion of “strengths and weaknesses” in the Texas science standards! That’s news to me. While I’d certainly Read More ›

An article in the San Antonio Express misstates some facts in its coverage of this week’s upcoming Texas Board of Education vote on evolution. The article isn’t all bad: It allows Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin to offer an opposing view, and Luskin’s views are described accurately. But the article also states that the Texas Board of Education “voted with the science experts in January to remove the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ standard” from Texas science standards. The Board did indeed vote to do this (to its shame). But in repealing the strengths and weaknesses language, Board members did not vote “with the science experts.” The Board appointed six science experts to review the draft standards. Three of the experts opposed the “strengths and weaknesses” provision, but three of the experts supported the “strengths and weaknesses” language! So it would be much more accurate to say that the Board in January sided with some of their experts while ignoring others.

The article also erroneously claims that in 2005 the Kansas Board of Education “approved new science standards allowing the teaching of intelligent design, which posits that a supernatural creator is required to explain life’s complexity.”

Later this week the Texas State Board of Education will vote to adopt standards overseeing the state’s science education curriculum for the next ten years. Monday, Stephanie Simon of the Wall Street Journal highlighted the importance of this week’s vote and how there’s more at stake than just the “strengths and weaknesses” language usually discussed. Simon stereotypically boils things down to a point that isn’t accurate: The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. No, actually teachers wouldn’t be raising “doubts,” they would be presenting to students not just a one-sided, dogmatic lesson that only discusses evidence for evolution, but also the scientific evidence that challenges the theory. Read More ›

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) usually tries to puts forth a religion-friendly image, despite the fact that the NCSE’s executive director, Eugenie Scott, is a signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto. Something must have slipped through the cracks, because the NCSE’s talking points for Texas have encouraged activists to testify not just that science doesn’t study the supernatural, but to expressly testify that science denies the existence of the supernatural: Science posits that there are no forces outside of nature. Science cannot be neutral on this issue. The history of science is a long comment denying that forces outside of nature exist, and proving that this is the case again and again. There is simply zero scientific evidence Read More ›

It’s always amusing how evolutionists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of intelligent design (ID) (i.e. ‘no really, this time ID actually is dead!‘). We’re pretty used to that, but then it gets a little creepy when they exude what appears to be an unhealthy pleasure in ID’s (purported) demise. Such was recently the exact case when National Center for Science Education (NCSE) president Kevin Padian and former NCSE spokesman Nick Matzke, in a January issue of Biochemical Journal, published a “review article” claiming that the “case for ID” has “collapsed,” gleefully asserting that “no one with scientific or philosophical integrity is going to take [Discovery Institute or ID] seriously in future.” I challenged Nick on his words Read More ›

As we reported earlier, Michael Behe has been responding to critics of his scientific arguments in Edge of Evolution over at his Amazon blog, concluding with this thought: Here’s a final important point. Genetics is an excellent journal; its editors and reviewers are top notch; and Durrett and Schmidt themselves are fine researchers. Yet, as I show above, when simple mistakes in the application of their model to malaria are corrected, it agrees closely with empirical results reported from the field that I cited. This is very strong support that the central contention of The Edge of Evolution is correct: that it is an extremely difficult evolutionary task for multiple required mutations to occur through Darwinian means, especially if one Read More ›