Posted on 11/01/2003 4:14:09 AM PST by I Am Not A Mod
AUSTIN -- Texas will be under the microscope this week in the fight over teaching evolution in public schools as the State Board of Education votes on adopting biology textbooks that have been at the center of the debate.
The board meets Thursday and Friday and is set to consider proposed changes submitted by 11 publishers. The board's decisions -- which could determine which textbooks publishers offer to dozens of states -- will end a review process that has been marked by months of heated debate over the theory of evolution.
Religious activists and proponents of alternative science urged publishers to revise some of the 10th-grade books and want the board to reject others, saying they contain factual errors regarding the theory of evolution. Mainstream scientists assert that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a cornerstone of modern research and technology.
Board members can only vote to reject books based on factual errors or failure to follow state curriculum as mandated by the Legislature.
"There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the California-based National Center for Science Education.
Among those questioning the textbooks are about 60 biologists from around the country who signed a "statement of dissent" about teaching evolution and said both sides of the issue should be taught. Several religious leaders also testified against teaching evolution.
Any changes to the textbooks will have implications across the country.
Texas is the nation's second largest buyer of textbooks, and books sold in the state are often marketed by publishers nationwide. Texas, California and Florida account for more than 30 percent of the nation's $4 billion public school book market. Three dozen publishers invest millions of dollars in Texas.
One of the most vocal advocates of changing the textbooks is the Discovery Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Seattle. Institute officials have argued at board hearings that alternatives to commonly accepted theories of evolution should be included in textbooks to comply with a state requirement that both strengths and weaknesses are presented.
"These things are widely criticized as being problematic. They aren't criticisms we made up; they're criticisms widely held in the scientific community," said Discovery Institute fellow John West.
Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, said there are no weaknesses in current textbooks' explanation of evolution. Publishers are required to cover evolution in science books.
The institute has referred to a theory dubbed intelligent design -- a belief that life did not evolve randomly but progressed according to a plan or design. No book on the mainstream market presents the intelligent design theory of evolution.
"We know that this is a very contentious issue. We know that, but the sorts of things we were proposing we thought were moderate," West said.
Samantha Smoot, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, which monitors religious activists, argues that the Discovery Institute's arguments are rooted in religion. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that the teaching of creationism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state.
"It says that the theory of evolution can't explain the diversity of life on this planet and that there must have been a designer," Smoot said. "That is a very valid and commonly held religious perspective, but not one that is upheld by scientific evidence. Therefore it's not one that belongs in science classrooms."
The Discovery Institute has maintained that its arguments have no religious foundation, but Smoot disagrees.
"The concept of intelligent design was crafted specifically to get around legal prohibitions against teaching religion in public schools," she said. "And as long as proponents of intelligent design deny that they're referring to God when they talk about the designer, they hope to be able to pull this off."
At least one publisher has submitted changes in line with the institute's recommendations.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston has submitted a change that directs students to "study hypotheses for the origin of life that are alternatives" to the others in the book. Students also are encouraged to research alternative theories on the Internet.
Well tell me which it is. ID proponents are told simultaneously that ID is not falsifiable and also that the evidence falsifies ID. Which is it?
As absurd as that sounds, it doesn't strike me as any more absurd than the idea that we all evolved from pond scum or that pond scum spontaneously came into existence.
ID does however, have testible predictions such as "irreducable compexity".
Evolutionists just take it on "faith" that an answer to the complexity problem will be found.
Of course I have a junk drawer. And having written computer programs I frequently leave junk in them. Either because I changed the design or because it's code I might use later or it's debugging code or whatever.
It's not at all certain that any of it is "junk".
If the evidence were there, it should be taught as such.
But it isn't.
This is a two-edged sword. If the evidence shows, for example, that the Flood was not worldwide (this was *known* in the 1830's, decades before Darwin's "Origin"), should any thing else be taught as science?
It is a *fact* that the overwhelming majority of biologists, etc, are evos. It does no-one any good for a teacher to lie about widespread doubts in the biology camp.
Until creationism/id is able to make detailed predictions, and sticks its neck out by possibly being falsifed by new evidence, it is not a theory - it is merely armchair speculation, a hypothesis
...of a decidedly heretical nature. England was comparably free at the time, rejecting the Trinity could get you in **big** trouble elsewhere.
Are you the idiot who constantly uses the term "strawmen"? I think I answered my own question. "Hi, I'm Demensio...strawmen, strawmen, strawmen."
I don't have it in front of me, but Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel discusses this. IIRC, sickle cell is to malaria as cystic fibrosis is to cholera as tay-sachs is to TB. I think lactose tolerance has more to do with culture than disease.
I'm pinging G3k because he always has something to say about this.
In the old areas of malaria, the mutation allowed the mutants to survive longer than the non-mutants who had no resistance to it. In the short term, it conferred a great benefit, in todays world, it is a miserable affliction.
Being heterozygous for hemoglobin-S still protects, being homozygous is real bad. Granted, American blacks don't get any benefit from it. Do a Google search on thalassemia, similar to sickle cell but found in Europe rather than Africa.
Nice pun! (or freudian slip). I'd say big, tax-free profits.
What do you mean it fits all data?
Exactly what he said. What field observation, fossil, or lab test is inconsistent with creationism/id? If there aren't any, the hypothesis (not theory) is vacuous, incapable of making any predictions. How do you test whether a theory is consistent with observation if there's no way it could fail?
PH: It can't be falsified. It's scientifically useless.
DannyTN: Can't you really say the same thing about evolution?
Absoutely not! There are thousands of ways evolution could have fallen had the data been different: EG:
A precambrian rabbit fossil.
An elephant fossil in Hawaii
A pseudogene in a chimp and an orangutang but not in a person
A 'missing link' between birds and mammals (don't get your hopes up, the platypus bill only looks like a bird's)
A pseudogene in a cow and a whale but not in a hippo.
Does either evolution or ID really offer that much in the form of an explanatory purpose? Neither really advances our understanding of anything useful. Advances in biology, genetics, microbiology, etc, could all have come with either or neither of the two theories.
Really? How would an ID-er explain the above facts? How would he come up with new tests for his 'theory'? ("If a pseudogene is found in x and y, it must also be in z.")
Standard biology uses common ancestry to make predictions of this form; it is hard for me to believe that any creationist/id-er would say, with a straight face, that cows and whales *should* share genetic material. Duane Gish used to make fun of the idea that they were even related! (he probably still does)
So? A concept is not religious just because it was thought up by a religious person. Issac Newton's theories aren't religious in nature just because he was a devout Christian (and Alchemist, but that's another matter).
To a christian who believes God is everywhere present and active in the world, why shouldn't the laws that God made for the world not reflect that fact?
There are two very bizarre phenomena in the modern world. One is that idea that one can separate science from religion, and the other that you can separate religion from science. In fact, they are everywhere at least contiguous if not overlapping, and each one develops the understanding of the other at all times. Above all though, religion has always been the primary motivator of science, even if that religion was logical error of atheism.
Newton understood this, and that is why he found alchemy plausible. He would have found Einstein even more plausible, but he didn't know him.
Interesting, I'm always learning new stuff on FR, especially the science threads. Thanks!
So the pap line you were taught in school goes. The important point is where his thinking arrived at the end of his life. Doubting is not the greatest sin in the world, and it is most assuredly one for which there is forgiveness.
This is supposedly the winning prediction. As I explained on that thread that got pulled, it's a loser to most scientists.
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