Science and Culture Today | Page 1353 | Discovering Design in Nature

The Chicken Littles at Americans United for Separation of Church and State are now running around warning that The Louisiana House of Representatives [has]… approved a measure that opens the door to teaching creationism in public schools… Well, no, it didn’t. The proposed Louisiana law expressly states in Section 1C that it “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.” Americans United conveniently neglects to mention that section of the bill. If any school districts or teachers try to use the bill to promote creationism or other religious views, they will be violating the law itself. Any supplemental textbooks Read More ›

The first Associated Press story is out about the passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act by Louisiana’s House of Representatives, and I’m pleased to say that it supplies an accurate description of the arguments both for and against the bill. That may not seem like a big deal, but when it comes to major media coverage of the evolution issue, it is. The beginning of the story states:

Baton Rouge — By a vote of 94-3, Louisiana’s House of Representatives today passed an academic freedom bill that would protect teachers and school districts who wish to promote critical thinking and objective discussion about evolution and other scientific topics.There was no vocal opposition, and the floor speech by Rep. Frank Hoffman made clear that the bill was about science, not religion. “This bill promotes good science education by protecting the academic freedom of science teachers,” said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute. “Critics who claim the bill promotes religion instead of science either haven’t read the bill or are putting up a smokescreen to divert attention from the censorship that has Read More ›

The AP is reporting here about Louisiana’s passage of the Science Education Act. Here is the text of the Act as it passed the Louisiana House of Representatives today:

AN ACT

To enact R.S. 17:285.1, relative to curriculum and instruction; to provide relative to the teaching of scientific subjects in public elementary and secondary schools; to promote students’ critical thinking skills and open discussion of scientific theories; to provide relative to support and guidance for teachers; to provide relative to textbooks and instructional materials; to provide for rules and regulations; to provide for effectiveness; and to provide for related matters.

Be it enacted by the Legislature of Louisiana:

The Louisiana House of Representatives just approved the Louisiana Science Education Act by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 94-3. The bill previously passed the Louisiana Senate by a vote of 35-0. Because there was a minor amendment to the bill in the House, the bill now goes back to the Senate for its concurrence, but the original author of the bill (Senator Nevers) has indicated his support for the slightly amended version, and so Senate concurrence is likely. The Louisiana Science Education Act is designed to safeguard the right of Louisiana teachers “to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being Read More ›

It’s surprising that editorial writers aren’t better educated on the issues they pontificate on.
Last weekend it was the New York Times making the claim that there are no weaknesses in modern evolutionary theory, albeit they were likely led astray by the misleading article by Laura Beil.
(As an aside, Ms. Beil finally did respond to my question about why she didn’t bother to contact Discovery Institute or Texans for Better Science Education, both of which she attacked in her story. Her response:

I did not contact you before the story because I was focusing on the situation here in Texas, and I am not aware that you have any direct involvement. I did not contact Texans for Better Science Education (other than to note their efforts) because the best source to represent their views is Don McLeroy.

You would think that in Journalism 101 reporters would learn that the best source to represent one’s views is one’s self, not someone else. But it is the New York Times, after all.)
Today it’s the Waco Tribune with this statement.

Evolution is fact, not theory.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by evolution.

Can’t get enough David Berlinski? If you’ve been going through withdrawl since Dr. Berlinski returned to Paris after his American book tour for The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, then have we got an interview for you: Read Christopher A. Ferrara’s interview “Jewish Intellectuals Challenge Tyranny of Darwinism.”

Over the past decade or so there has been much hype about computer simulations of Darwinian evolution. The most hyped is Avida at the MSU Digital Evolution Laboratory. Avida researchers claim their work is not a simulation, but actually is Darwinian evolution in action. They describe it like this:

In Avida, a population of self-replicating computer programs is subjected to external pressures (such as mutations and limited resources) and allowed to evolve subject to natural selection. This is not a mere simulation of evolution — digital organisms in Avida evolve to survive in a complex computational environment and will adapt to perform entirely new traits in ways never expected by the researchers, some of which seem highly creative.

According to MSU’s Robert Pennock: “Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is an instance of it.”
You can’t ignore the fact that …

This past weekend, I read in the New York Times that there are no weaknesses left in modern evolutionary theory. Now this from The Scientist. (emphasis all mine). This theory of evolution is really a framework for thinking about change in the living world. It provides no specific guesses for the kinds of traits that may exist, no strong requirements or prohibitions on how they may interact to make a complex organism or ecosystem, and no commitments to how innovation can occur. Even the problem of how a differentiated population ultimately divides into two distinct species (posed in the title of Darwin’s seminal work) remains a major technical problem in evolutionary biology.

Over at his Amazon blog, Michael Behe has a new post reviewing the work of Richard Lenski on E. coli mutations. While Lenski interprets his findings as showing the quirky nature of evolution, Behe has a different perspective: I think the results fit a lot more easily into the viewpoint of The Edge of Evolution. One of the major points of the book was that if only one mutation is needed to confer some ability, then Darwinian evolution has little problem finding it. But if more than one is needed, the probability of getting all the right ones grows exponentially worse. Click here for more.