Science and Culture Today | Page 1293 | Discovering Design in Nature

CSC fellow David Klinghoffer has a recent column in the Jerusalem Post which explains how intelligent design is different from creationism and examines the difficulty many religious believers have with Darwin’s theory:

When Jews and Christians alike aren’t being forced into false dilemmas, we are given alternatives to Darwinian theory that can be imagined as reconciling science and theology only if the whole subject is kept cloudy and confused.
Thus the two most recent popes have appeared to speak of the Church’s comfort with “evolution” but without defining the term. Does it mean an unguided process or a guided one? One that gives scientific evidence of a Designer’s purpose, or not?
The ambiguity and hedging probably comes from a fear of putting their Church on the losing side of a historic controversy, and an unfamiliarity with the scientific details.

Re: P.Z. Myers’ recent post:

I’ll be spending my day at this symposium, “Understanding evolution: the legacy of Darwin”, most of today. It’s about to start, so I’m not going to say much before I focus on the lectures, but it is open to the public, so if you’re in the Penn neighborhood, come on down to Claudia Cohen hall, room G17 (which we have since learned is the famous old surgical demonstration auditorium), and listen in. I’ll report later on the contents of the talks.

I’m having trouble finding the program Myers is referring to (why wasn’t I invited!?), but Claudia Cohen Hall is on the medical campus at Penn, so I surmise that the presentations will be on eugenics (apologies for it, I hope), which is Darwin’s only legacy to medicine.

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 ›

As part of our efforts to support academic freedom on evolution, we are teaming up with the IDEA Center (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) to help students in starting an IDEA chapter on their campus. Such campus clubs are a fun and educational way for students to examine all sides of the debate over evolution. IDEA Clubs are student-initiated clubs that foster academic freedom as students learn about scientific evidence that supports intelligent design and also learn about modern evolutionary theory. IDEA Clubs are a growing network of student-led clubs on university and high school campuses around the United States with thirty new chapters formed to date. Visit www.ideacenter.org or e-mail Brian Westad at brianw@ideacenter.org for information on how you 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 ›

The Waco Tribune has an opinion piece today from one of the scientists selected as an expert reviewer of Texas’ science standards. Charles Garner, a chemist at Baylor, writes: As the Texas Education Agency reviews the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, a controversy has developed about language in the current TEKS, which states: “The student uses critical thinking and scientific problem-solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.” This language promotes critical thinking skills. It has been in the TEKS for years. The TEKS guidelines are working fine and Texas students receive some of the best science Read More ›

The liberal Darwin lobby group Texas Freedom Network has just published a push-poll of scientists titled, “Survey of Texas Faculty: Overwhelming Opposition to Watering Down Evolution in School Science Curriculum.” You might think this is good news, that there are a majority of scientists and professors who support the current TEKS which require students to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories.

Instead, TFN means exactly the opposite. Let me point out that THEY are the ones who want gut the state’s science standards and water down the teaching of evolution. They want to remove the strengths and weaknesses language, language that has been in the TEKS for over a decade.

What is stunning is the TFN’s jackbooted thuggery of threatening parents! Parents reading this should be enraged that liberal anti-science censors are now making veiled threats against any student that doesn’t toe the Darwin party line.

“Many of these science faculty members almost certainly help determine who gets into our state’s colleges and universities,” Eve said. “Their responses should send parents a clear message that those who want to play politics with science education are putting our kids at risk.”

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

As for TFN’s “findings,” there’s nothing new here. As usual it’s misleading, misrepresentative and misses the point.
The report highlights five key findings from the survey:

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 ›