Posted on 04/19/2006 3:57:51 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A new article in PLoS Biology (April 18, 2006) discusses the state of scientific literacy in the United States, with especial attention to the survey research of Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School.
To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word "evolution" in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%), as has the proportion who accept it (45% to 40%). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.In international surveys, the article reports, "[n]o other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution," quoting Miller as saying, "We are truly out on a limb by ourselves."
The "partisan takeover" of the title refers to the embrace of antievolutionism by what the article describes as "the right-wing fundamentalist faction of the Republican Party," noting, "In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, and Texas all included demands for teaching creation science." NCSE is currently aware of eight state Republican parties that have antievolutionism embedded in their official platforms or policies: those of Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas. Four of them -- those of Alaska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas -- call for teaching forms of creationism in addition to evolution; the remaining three call only for referring the decision whether to teach such "alternatives" to local school districts.
A sidebar to the article, entitled "Evolution under Attack," discusses the role of NCSE and its executive director Eugenie C. Scott in defending the teaching of evolution. Scott explained the current spate of antievolution activity as due in part to the rise of state science standards: "for the first time in many states, school districts are faced with the prospect of needing to teach evolution. ... If you don't want evolution to be taught, you need to attack the standards." Commenting on the decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover [Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al.], Scott told PLoS Biology, "Intelligent design may be dead as a legal strategy but that does not mean it is dead as a popular social movement," urging and educators to continue to resist to the onslaught of the antievolution movement. "It's got legs," she quipped. "It will evolve."
But creationism, creation science, and their politically corrected offspring, ID, are not honest (scientific) criticism. They are all based on religion.
They deserve no promotion in science classes.
####Google the Santorum Amendment.####
It applies to public schools. However, I'm opposed to the entire No Child Left Behind Act, including that amendment.
####Truth hurts, doesn't it?####
You know better than that. I'm not a young earth creationist. I'm not anti-Darwin. I'm not against teaching evolution, though I have my doubts about the theory. I just get tired of the constant running to judges, the silly arguments that giving a few minutes of class time to ID constitutes a "war against science", and the patently absurd assertion that a sticker on a textbook suggesting that kids study evolution with an open mind constitutes a violation of the United States Constitution. Not to mention that a teacher who told his class, for example, that men and women have different ranges of abilities (a perfectly defensible scientific position) would be fired, and the National Center for Scientific Education wouldn't do a damn thing about it.
ROFL!
If so, can you be specific?
Is that your own word? Want to try again in English?
That's because it doesn't exist. The "typical" experimental evidence (moths, finches, etc) is a bait and switch tactic which has no relevance to what you are actually trying to prove.
Attempted proof by assertion. If small changes can be demonstrated over small time intervals, it is reasonable, in the absence of contrary evidence, to infer that proportionately larger changes will occur over larger intervals.
It's quite simple really - demonstrate endosymbiosis of Prokaryotes under the microscope, collect your Nobel, and be done with it.
Prokaryotic endosymbiosis has been demonstrated in the laboratory for at least a half a century, ignoramus. They don't award Nobel Prizes for things you can discover by cracking open a biology textbook. But don't let that dissuade you. It would be a good idea for you to learn some biology, regardless.
We see it already, as evos remove any science mythology from their school textbooks that doesn't agree with a Old-Earth world view.
There...Fixed it for you.
But you only volunteer a condemnation of federal intervention in education when evos are doing it.
I just get tired of the constant running to judges, the silly arguments that giving a few minutes of class time to ID constitutes a "war against science", and the patently absurd assertion that a sticker on a textbook suggesting that kids study evolution with an open mind constitutes a violation of the United States Constitution.
If creationists weren't wedded to wedge strategies, evos wouldn't be so inclined to chopping off the end of the wedge before it gets any purchase.
By the way, I should also have added that once the left takes an issue away from states, localities, and the voters, and places them in federal hands, conservatives are then forced to play that game as well.
For example, I wish abortion and gay issues weren't federal issues, but the left has made abortion a federal issue and is hell-bent on making gay issues federal as well. Once that happens, conservatives have no choice but to take the battle to the federal level since states are powerless against federal courts and federal decrees.
The reason evolution is a federal issue is because the evolutionists made it one. Unfortunately, Santorum picked up the fight once it was brought into his lap.
See below! :-)
I gotta go to bed, I'm in the Eastern Time Zone! Thanks for a spirited debate, as always! You're a good sport and I enjoy talking with you, especially when we disagree! :-)
That's Dr. Evo, in this case.
(Personally, I think you're seeing things what ain't there.)
It should be noted that it was the fundie-dominated Dover School Board, and their out-of-town "legal advisors" at the Thomas More Law Center, who were spoiling to gen up a test case on ID to get into Federal Court, NOT the pro-evos side. In fact, the TMLC had been "shopping" for a suitably ignorant, foolish, and ripe school board for just such a case for more than year before they landed the Dover Board.
It is further worthy of note that the fundie-dominated Dover School Board IGNORED the advice of the the Board's solicitor, who warned them specifically that if they adopted the new "ID policy" it would likely end up in court, and that they would likely lose.
In short, it wasn't the Evos who were itching for litigation......
We were discussing creationists, not conservatives. No Child Left Behind is not a conservative law. Nor is the Santorum Amendment. It's an attempt to ride roughshod over the Bill of Rights.
Exactamundo.
#####It should be noted that it was the fundie-dominated Dover School Board, and their out-of-town "legal advisors" at the Thomas More Law Center, who were spoiling to gen up a test case on ID to get into Federal Court, NOT the pro-evos side.#####
Only to get the federalization precedents overturned. Once an issue is taken away from states and localities by the federal courts, it takes a subsequent court case to return the issue to the locals again. For example, the only way to get rid of Roe vs. Wade is for states to challenge the ruling and get a new abortion case into the federal court system. South Dakota is currently doing that. But it would be absurd to argue that South Dakota, by asserting the right of states to make their own abortion laws in federal court, is seeking to use federal power or seeking to have abortion law transferred to the court system. Quite the opposite. The same is true for Dover.
Well that really blew up in their faces!
Give em time! :-)
IIRC, Evans vs. Aguillard never made it beyond district court. It was just that the findings of fact were so devastating that Louisiana decided to cut its losses and declined to appeal.
I paraphrase Churchill, from his mandatory A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: "Both armies appealed to the Almighty, and the Most High, seeing nothing in zeal or piety to recommend one side or the other, must have allowed purely military matters to decide the contest."
The most zealous and pious design advocate must surely believe that there are some objects in the universe that owe their forms to the purely physical action of unconscious material. Having gone to the trouble of working out the laws of gases and liquids, can the Most High not trust them to generate, unsupervised, the shapes of the clouds?
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