Biology textbook hearings prompt science disputes [Texas]

FORT WORTH, Texas - (KRT) -
The long-running debate over the origins of mankind continues Wednesday before the Texas State Board of Education, and the result could change the way science is taught here and across the nation.

Local and out-of-state lobbying groups will try to convince the board that the next generation of biology books should contain new scientific evidence that reportedly pokes holes in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Many of those groups say that they are not pushing to place a divine creator back into science books, but to show that Darwin's theory is far from a perfect explanation of the origin of mankind.

"It has become a battle ground," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of theNational Center of Science Education, which is dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the classroom.

Almost 45 scientists, educators and special interest groups from across the state will testify at the state's first public hearing this year on the next generation of textbooks for the courses of biology, family and career studies and English as a Second Language.

Approved textbooks will be available for classrooms for the 2004-05 school year. And because Texas is the second largest textbook buyer in the nation, the outcome could affect education nationwide.

The Texas Freedom Network and a handful of educators held a conference call last week to warn that conservative Christians and special interest organizations will try to twist textbook content to further their own views.

"We are seeing the wave of the future of religious right's attack on basic scientific principles," said Samantha Smoot, executive director of the network, an anti-censorship group and opponent of the radical right.

Those named by the network disagree with the claim, including the Discovery Institute and its Science and Culture Center of Seattle.

"Instead of wasting time looking at motivations, we wish people would look at the facts," said John West, associate director of the center.

"Our goal nationally is to encourage schools and educators to include more about evolution, including controversies about various parts of Darwinian theory that exists between even evolutionary scientists," West said. "We are a secular think tank."

The institute also is perhaps the nation's leading proponent of intelligent design - the idea that life is too complex to have occurred without the help of an unknown, intelligent being.

It pushed this view through grants to teachers and scientists, including Michael J. Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The Institute receives millions of dollars from philanthropists and foundations dedicated to discrediting Darwin's theory.

The center sent the state board a 55-page report that graded 11 high school biology textbooks submitted for adoption. None earned a grade above a C minus. The report also includes four arguments it says show that evolutionary theory is not as solid as presented in biology textbooks.

Discovery Institute Fellow Raymond Bohlin, who also is executive director of Probe Ministries, based in Richardson, Texas, will deliver that message in person Wednesday before the State Board of Education. Bohlin has a doctorate degree in molecular cell biology from the University of Texas at Dallas.

"If we can simply allow students to see that evolution is not an established fact, that leaves freedom for students to pursue other ideas," Bohlin said. "All I can do is continue to point these things out and hopefully get a group that hears and sees relevant data and insist on some changes."

The executive director of Texas Citizens for Science, Steven Schafersman, calls the institute's information "pseudoscience nonsense." Schafersman is an evolutionary scientist who, for more than two decades, taught biology, geology, paleontology and environmental science at a number of universities, including the University of Houston and the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

"It sounds plausible to people who are not scientifically informed," Schafersman said. "But they are fraudulently trying to deceive board members. They might succeed, but it will be over the public protests of scientists."

The last time Texas looked at biology books, in 1997, the State Board of Education considered replacing them all with new ones that did not mention evolution. The board voted down the proposal by a slim margin.

The state requires that evolution be in textbooks. But arguments against evolution have been successful over the last decade in other states. Alabama, New Mexico and Nebraska made changes that, to varying degrees, challenge the pre-eminence of evolution in the scientific curriculum.

In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted to wash the concepts of evolution from the state's science curricula. A new state board has since put evolution back in. Last year, the Cobb County school board in Georgia voted to include creationism in science classes.

Texas education requirements demand that textbooks include arguments for and against evolution, said Neal Frey, an analyst working with perhaps Texas' most famous textbook reviewers, Mel and Norma Gabler.

The Gablers, of Longview, have been reviewing Texas textbooks for almost four decades. They describe themselves as conservative Christians. Some of their priorities include making sure textbooks include scientific flaws in arguments for evolution.

"None of the texts truly conform to the state's requirements that the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories be presented to students," Frey said.

The Texas textbook proclamation of 2001, which is part of the standard for the state's curriculum, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, requires that biology textbooks instruct students so they may "analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weakness using scientific evidence and information."

The state board is empowered to reject books only for factual errors or for not meeting the state's curriculum requirements. If speakers convince the state board that their evidence is scientifically sound, members may see little choice but to demand its presence in schoolbooks.

Proposed books already have been reviewed and approved by Texas Tech University. After a public hearing Wednesday and another Sept. 10, the state board is scheduled to adopt the new textbooks in November.

Satisfying the state board is only half the battle for textbook publishers. Individual school districts choose which books to use and are reimbursed by the state unless they buy texts rejected by the state board.

Districts can opt not to use books with passages they find objectionable. So when speakers at the public hearings criticize what they perceived as flaws in various books - such as failing to portray the United States or Christianity in a positive light - many publishers listen.

State Board member Terri Leo said the Discovery Institute works with esteemed scientists and that their evidence should be heard.

"You cannot teach students how to think if you don't present both sides of a scientific issue," Leo said. "Wouldn't you think that the body that has the responsibility of what's in the classroom would look at all scientific arguments?"

State board member Bob Craig said he had heard of the Intelligent Design theory.

"I'm going in with an open mind about everybody's presentation," Craig said. "I need to hear their presentation before I make any decisions or comments.

State board member Mary Helen Berlanga said she wanted to hear from local scientists.

"If we are going to discuss scientific information in the textbooks, the discussion will have to remain scientific," Berlanga said. "I'd like to hear from some of our scientists in the field on the subject."

This reads like a call for the State to take control and your ideal society is nothing more than Communism

Just the opposite. If you believe that rules and norms which most effectively represent and advance morality and justice are products of human creativity and debate, then you will favor the classically liberal free society as the most effective means of generating such rules and norm.

If you believe that the only acceptable rules and norms are handed down from on high by a supreme authority, then you might (absent the blessing of having been socially indoctinated with liberal values) conclude that governance should be similarly structured, or that any government that proposes to implement your favored moral code is preferable to one where such matters are decided by open debate.

If you want to believe that mankind is moral and "good" when left to his own devices, you are in a dreamland.

That's not what I believe. I believe that the classically liberal free society, where political and economic freedoms, and corresponding responsibilities, make citizens stakeholders in both good order, and in the maintenance of their mutually recognized, and therefore commonly held, liberties, is also the society that produces the best realization of morality.

But I certainly don't believe that this kind of good society is enevitable because of inherent human goodness. Far from it. The liberal society was in fact a hard won historical acheivement which took hundreds of years. It is entirely possible that the whole globe could have ended up as wracked with brutality and despotism as most of Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia are today.

But I certainly don't believe that this kind of good society is enevitable because of inherent human goodness.

Then how do you propose to enact the society and keep it running? You left out religious freedom and once evolution or whatever Godless ideal you want your citizens to emulate is in effect, all you have is a society like Communist Russia, North Korea, etc. As the changes occur in the US, and the Biblical moral code is less and less instilled in individuals to give them a thirst for true Spirituality, you will need more and more prisons and that's happening now. Pretty soon, the mentality will be us against them, happening now. Pretty soon, mass murder will follow, and as human history well shows, this will start with the poor, the looked down upon, whoever makes a convenient scapegoat.

You remind me of a person who says, I won't bring my son up to go to Church or to read the Word of God, I'll let him grow up and then he can choose for hinself.

Well Johnny is choosing for himself, his religion is himself, drugs, Rock and Roll, satanism, homosexuality, you name it. Your great society, under no God, is headed for chaos

You left out religious freedom

!!!???

How did I do that? You're reading things into to my posts that just aren't there. Far from "leaving out" religious freedom, my view is that the historical movement toward the liberal society in Europe began with the issue of religious freedom -- more specifically with the problem of church and state, and solving the problem of the bloody religious wars that haunted Europe for centuries.

and once evolution or whatever Godless ideal you want your citizens to emulate is in effect

I don't want to "effect" any ideal, except by suasion and socialization in the context of the free society. I embrace the dynamism of a society of competing ideas, including those of fundamentalists, nor do I object to fundamentalists, or any other group, socializing their children, and attepting to persaude other members of society, as they see fit.

The only people now in the US and Canada that have no protection from persecution are Christians. A few years ago, and I think it was the columnist, Ellen Goodman, who made the statement, that if Christians can't get along in the world, "something should be done". (If it wasn't her, I apologize to her.)

People are thinking it. We're troublesome, just won't get in line. Something "must be done" with people like that.

Just what do you think "this something will be?" Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as you say. Waco, Ruby Ridge, those "crazies" ie, those different, must be dealt with.

People like the ones posting here, want to keep alive and spread the myth that believers are somehow inferior, what adjectives do we see here? "Drooling, knuckle-draggers, whackos, etc, and they like to infer that we are unintelligent and why? Because we refuse to believe what they believe, that's all. They are intolerant and they suffer from snobbism, as if their spiritual state of unbelief has set them above others in some superior way. They have ben set apart, but not in the way that they believe. They are in spiritual terms, natural men, incapable of true spiritual knowledge. I can't imagine a worse state to be in, but that's me

If a creationist arguement is made by a "think tank" funded by people who are specifically looking for faults in the theory or teachings of evolution than that is dogma, not science. If the mirror image occurs, an evolutionist arguement is made by a group funded by anti-Christian groups or individuals, that is real science and a good use of funds.

But what really makes me snicker some times is the urgency of winning the evolution arguement. It is as if the continued existance of questions on evolution is a threat to civilization.

There have been a number of cases of fraud on the part of those desperately trying to prove the theory. The research money and publishing audience is much sparser on the creationist side and so the evolution side usually gets in the first licks. Then the science catches up and the proof is disproven and disgraced. Worse, the evidentiary drawings and pictures are finally taken out of text books, if at all, 20 or 50 years after being deiscredited even among the evolutionists.

On the other hand many arguements are made for creation by non-scientists before the science has matured enough to support the arguement. This results in a broad brush being used on the whole philosophy to paint it as anti-science. Sort of like "they did to Galileo and now they are doing it again!"

The truth will be known, whether both sides actually want the truth or not. If evolution is true then it just does not matter much what we believe or learn here. Most of us anyway. If there is a creator then the evolutionists' demand that this possibility be kept from students at all costs would eventually be shown to be the height of hubris.

To: f.Christian

Dakmar...

I took a few minutes to decipher that post, and I must say I agree with a lot of what you said.

fC...

These were the Classical liberals...founding fathers-PRINCIPLES---stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress...moral/social character-values(private/personal) GROWTH(limited NON-intrusive PC Govt/religion---schools)!

Dakmar...

Where you and I diverge is on the Evolution/Communism thing. You seem to view Darwin and evolution as the beginning of the end for enlighted, moral civilization, while I think Marx, class struggle, and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" are the true dangers.

God bless you, I think we both have a common enemy in the BRAVE-NWO.

452 posted on 9/7/02 8:54 PM Pacific by Dakmar

Furthermore, the day will come, when you (and by that, not you personally) will murder us and think that you are doing the world a favor. Even now, the two witnesses from the Bible are being murdered daily in the streets and people rejoice, because they think they have new freedom.But these same two witnesses are going to stand up again and all the world, including you this time, will marvel at them. Let them who has ears to hear, hear what the Spirit is telling them

In the first post you say what many darwinites have said when cornered. Your biggest fear is that YOU will be marginalized. You somehow have obtained the "swamp gas" notion that truth, regardless of source, is something to fear. "Truth" must be dispensed through a narrow slit posessed only by those that exhibit few signs of real conservatism, want nothing or very little to do with religion, and spend more time fretting over self-conjured strawmen than politics. It is precisely as if you all had an agenda. And that agenda has absolutely nothing to do with conservative politics, as pointed out by a poster above.

Well said and worth repeating.

Personally I don't link evolution and morals/ethics/philosophy/religion.

Scientific explanations of evolution are mechanistic, not teleological.

Evolution can't explain consciousness or behavior, either. It's reasoning backwards, which is inherently flawed. Fun to do, but not real science.

Some evolutionists, like EO Wilson, try to use evolution to explain behavior, but he's studying insect behavior, which appears to be more or less hard wired in.

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