Posted on 07/09/2006 4:41:41 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
State Board of Education panel may look at guidelines for classroom discussion of science controversies
Less than five months after evolution won a round in the State Board of Education, some board members want to reopen the debate.
Colleen Grady, a board member from the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, wants to add guidelines to the state science standards for teaching on such topics as evolution, global warming, stem-cell research and cloning.
Grady said she views her proposal as a compromise to ensure that differing views are considered when teaching such hot-button issues.
"We would provide a template so schools would be comfortable discussing controversial issues," she said last week.
Grady sits on the board’s Achievement Committee, which is expected to discuss the proposal when it meets Monday in Columbus. A vote on whether to recommend the proposal to the full board is not scheduled but possible.
Talk of revisiting the issue has raised concern among scientists who have long fought efforts that they say undermine Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now, they argue, some board members want to subject other areas of science to heightened scrutiny.
"This is so transparent," said Steve Rissing, a biology professor at Ohio State University. "These are not controversial areas of science."
In February, the board voted 11-4 to eliminate portions of curriculum guidelines for 10 th-grade science and an accompanying lesson plan calling for the critical analysis of evolution.
Critics argued that "critical analysis of evolution" was tantamount to calling for the teaching of creationism or intelligent design, the notion that some life forms are so complex that a higher intelligence, maybe God, had to be involved. Both, they argue, are religious beliefs unsuitable for the science classroom.
Committee co-chairman Jim Craig, of Canton, said he was aware of recent discussions of the issue, but nobody has shown him a proposal.
Getting a majority of committee members to agree on any recommendation will be difficult, he said. While Grady and a few others are pushing her proposal, others on the committee say that no more changes are necessary.
"I don’t think either side wants to get back to the point where it was," Craig said, referring to two meetings this year that were dominated by sometimes-bitter debate.
Deborah Owens Fink, a board member from Richfield who is supporting Grady’s proposal, said modifying existing language should be less controversial than ideas the board has considered in the past.
Specifically, Grady proposes taking existing language in 10 th-grade science standards — "Describe that scientists may disagree about explanations of phenomena, about interpretation of data or about the value of rival theories, but they do agree that questioning response to criticism and open communications are integral to the process of science." — and adding to it: "Discuss and be able to apply this in the following areas: global warning; evolutionary theory; emerging technologies and how they may impact society, e.g. cloning or stem-cell research."
Actually the opposite is true.
The fossil record shows large jumps in morphological change with very little of the gradual species to species change. (although there is at least one very good bivalve species to species sequence, and gradual change of extant species is ubiquitous)
It was this gradual (gradual in distance between steps not gradual in time) change that PE was developed to explain. The idea behind PE is that a species can stay more or less stable for extended periods of time and then under pressure rapidly experience substantial morphological change. This would mean that due to the rarity of fossilization, fossils showing this rapid change would necessarily be missing.
As an exercise someone out there might calculate the probability of discovering the fossil of a specific species.
It must be pointed out that even Darwin suspected that rates of change would vary during a species' lifetime.
Note: Gradual change is not synonymous with an even change rate but of the accumulation of numerous small morphological changes. The main mechanism of change is selection which is never consistent. This means that the rate of organismal change will vary at a rate similar to environmental change.
funny... I don't recall any scientist saying that creationists' efforts undermine the theory.
Instead, they correctly note that those efforts undermine the scientific literacy of the populace.
newsies... can't they ever get the facts straight?
Google "Ellen Craswell" & "Washington" & "Governor". Washington is not a GOP state, but her getting the nomination was a political disaster.
Maybe it's a ages old, worldwide conspiracy!! /Creationist mode
What? And take all the fun out of it?
I am perpetually appalled by the slovenly reportage in professional dailies. I had higher standards as a high school newsie than these "professionals" display.
Different species of plankton - ie a species to species transition, which is what you asked for.
and evolution of horses into horses or whales into whales doesn't do much for the the argument about the "origin of species"
Again they are different species of horse and different species of whale which imply species to species evolution (ie macroevolution).
because Darwin argued that species developed by chance through trial and error, with the less capable versions of the predecessor species simply becoming extinct through "survival of the fittest." Now, logic would suggest that this process would create infinitely more examples of the losers than of the winners in this game of random chance evolution -- but, alas, there is no record of that infinite numbers of less capable iterations anywhere. Very strange.
The losers tend to die before they can reproduce, wheras the winners reproduce so making more copies of themselves. Therefore over time there will be more winners than losers represented in the fossil record. Also losers would tend to be indistinguishable from the winners in the fossil record.
But, the big problem, of course, is the Cambrian Period, where over just a few million years, countless new species appeared on earth with no record at all of anything preceding them from which they could have "evolved."
The vast majority of species on earth appeared long after the cambrian. All species of plants, trees, mammals, reptiles, jawed fish, birds, insects for example, of which there is plenty of evidence of evolution over the time of their existance. So I find the appearance of small aquatic, and relatively simple creatures in the cambrian over a few millions of years to be sometimes over-exagerated as a problem for the theory.
What kind of question is that?
It's a useful question, because it reveals whether it's worth taking the time to respond to the questioner.
Some people can't argue the scientific aspects, but that doesn't stop them from tossing in their invective. They add nothing of interest to the threads and learn nothing of value from them.
JCEccles is the hardest working one.
He asked it of an evo. Thought it was strange.
"Proofs" are not used in science. Just evidence.
Troll pretending to have a scientific education placemarker
Why do you say Piltdown Man is a fraud?
"Why do you say Piltdown Man is a fraud?"
Hell, even the most rabid evolutionists acknowledged it to be a fraud over 50 years ago.
"Proofs" are not used in science. Just evidence."
The ultimate sanctuary of the liberal, semantics.
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