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Kudos to Richard Gallagher & Alison McCook from The Scientist for being gutsy enough to do an even-handed piece on President Bush’s record on science, and for asking the question in Gallagher’s editorial, “Is Bush Science’s Nemesis?” in more than the conventional rhetorical fashion. McCook’s piece “Sizing Up Bush on Science” answers with a resounding “no,” or at least no more than past presidents, including Bill Clinton.

By Joe Manzari and Casey Luskin John Derbyshire claims that modern biology is built on evolution. He says that “Creationists seem not to be aware of how central evolution is to modern biology. Without it, nothing makes sense… Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied.” However, in 2001, A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, made it clear that “evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.” Apparently Derbyshire sees things differently from Wilkins, claiming that evolution is vital for “such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops.” Yet Wilkins’ sentiment was re-affirmed in 2005 by Philip Skell, a member of Read More ›

What happened in the Kansas school board primaries earlier this week, where supporters of the current science standards apparently lost control of the board, is something that lots of people are asking. It’s not a difficult question to answer. Darwinists mounted a massive, and effective, misinformation campaign.

They fed to the media and public three false facts. First, that the Kansas science standards include intelligent design. They do not. Second, that the Kansas board redefined science to include the supernatural. It did not. And third, that the Kansas standards do not teach students the consensus view of science and include criticisms of evolution rejected by mainstream science. Also not true. We answered these false claims many times, but most succinctly here.

David Klinghoffer spells out perfectly what happened in his article at National Review Online today, “What’s The Matter With Kansas?“

There is a concerted effort underway in Kansas to censor science and undermine the strong science standards adopted there last year. In 2005 the Kansas state board of education (KSBOE) courageously voted to adopt science standards that require students to learn all about evolution, including both the scientific evidence and for and against the theory. That’s it. The Board didn’t require any alternative theories be taught, just the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution. However there are a number of groups both inside and outside of Kansas that are seeking to stifle discussion in Kansas classrooms of anything critical of Darwinian evolution. Chief among them is “Kansas Citizens for Science” (KCFS). Not content with simply complaining about the Kansas science Read More ›

Dear editor,

In “The Collapse of Reason,” Cathy Young agrees with leading liberal intellectual Todd Gitlin who believes “the academic left is making itself irrelevant by embracing ideological extremism and trying to purge its ranks of those who are not politically correct.” It’s a shame, then, that Young herself characterizes those who see evidence for intelligent design as religiously motivated right wing nuts, and in her own collapse of reason, provides no evidence for her position.

One day after an elected Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science urged the Ohio State Board of Education (OSBE) to keep its evolution lesson plan that presents some of the scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution, a member of the National Academy of Sciences also encouraged the board to retain the lesson plan. The plan has recently come under attack from dogmatic Darwinists seeking to dumb down the teaching of evolution in Ohio.

Philip S. Skell, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Evan Pugh Professor (Emeritus) of Chemistry at Penn State University, sent a letter to the OSBE stating: “I am writing–as a member of the National Academy of Sciences–to voice my strong support for the idea that students should be able to study scientific criticisms of the evidence for modern evolutionary theory along with the evidence favoring the theory. … Encouraging students to carefully examine the evidence for and against neo-Darwinism will help prepare students not only to understand current scientific arguments, but also to do good scientific research.”

In the November-December edition of Harvard Magazine in an article titled “Forum: Intelligent Evolution” E.O. Wilson recites the long debunked mantra of Darwinists accusing ID of merely being “God-of-the-Gaps”. In Wilson’s own words:

Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: There are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (and most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work.

This statement is pretty ironic given the prefatory statement to the piece which said:

At a moment when discussion of evolution and “intelligent design” preoccupies American political discourse to a surprising degree, shedding more heat than light on the nature of life and life science, Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote.