Posted on 04/05/2005 7:42:56 AM PDT by bedolido
SEATTLE - (KRT) - Three years ago, the Ohio Board of Education invited a small but influential Seattle think tank to debate the way evolution is taught in Ohio schools.
It was an opportunity for the Discovery Institute to promote its notion of intelligent design, the controversial idea that parts of life are so complex they must have been designed by some intelligent agent.
Instead, leaders of the institute's Center for Science and Culture decided on what they consider a compromise. Forget intelligent design, they argued, with its theological implications. Just require teachers to discuss evidence that refutes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as well as what supports it.
They called it "teach the controversy," and that's become the institute's rallying cry as a leader in the latest efforts to raise doubts about Darwin in school. Evolution controversies are brewing in eight school districts, half a dozen state legislatures and three state boards of education, including the one in Kansas, which wrestled with the issue in 1999 as well.
"Why fight when you can have a fun discussion?" asks Stephen Meyer, the center's director. The teach-the-controversy approach, he said, avoids "unnecessary constitutional fights" over the separation of church and state, yet also avoids teaching Darwin's theories as dogma.
But what the center calls a compromise, most scientists call a creationist agenda that's couched in the language of science.
There is no significant controversy to teach, they say.
"You're lying to students if you tell them that scientists are debating whether evolution took place," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that defends teaching of evolution in school.
The Discovery Institute, she said, is leading a public-relations campaign, not a scientific endeavor.
The Discovery Institute is one of the leading organizations working nationally to change how evolution is taught. It works as an adviser, resource and sometimes a critic with those who have similar views.
"There are a hundred ways to get this wrong," said Meyer. "And only a few to get them right."
Ohio got it right, he said, when its state Board of Education voted in 2002 to require students to learn that scientists "continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory."
Scott said it was a small victory at most for intelligent-design supporters, but Meyer considers it a significant one - a model other states should follow. Minnesota has adopted similar language.
The School Board in Dover, Pa., however, got it wrong, Meyer said, when it required instruction in intelligent design. (The matter is now in court.) Intelligent design isn't established enough yet for that, Meyer said.
He also criticizes the Georgia school board that put stickers on biology textbooks with a surgeon-general-like warning that evolution is "a theory not a fact." The stickers were a "dumb idea," he said bluntly. (A Georgia court ruled they were illegal, and the case is under appeal.)
In Wisconsin, the institute hopes it helped the school board in the small town of Grantsburg switch to a teach-the-controversy approach.
In each place, the institute says it responded to requests for help, although it's working to become more proactive, too. Some critics suspect the ties are even closer.
The Center for Science and Culture opened in 1996 as a part of the already-established Discovery Institute, which also studies more earthbound topics such as transportation, economics, technology and bioethics.
Founder Bruce Chapman - who has worked as an official in the Reagan administration, head of the U.S. Census Bureau and Washington's secretary of state - became interested in intelligent design after reading a piece Meyer wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
Meyer, then a philosophy professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., was defending a California professor in trouble for talking about intelligent design in biology class. To Chapman, it was an issue of academic freedom.
He invited Meyer to come speak at the institute. The more they talked, the more Chapman and others at the institute became interested in offering a home to Meyer and others interested in intelligent design.
Intelligent design appealed to their view that life isn't really as unplanned or unguided as Darwin's theories can make it seem.
"It interested me because it seemed so different than the reductionist science that came out of the 19th century ... that everything could be reduced to chemistry," said John West, a political scientist and center associate director.
The private institute has an annual budget of about $3.2 million, and plans to spend about $1.3 million on the intelligent-design work, Chapman said, mostly to support the work of about three dozen fellows.
The Fieldstead Charitable Trust, run by Christian conservative Henry Ahmanson and his wife, is one of the largest donors to that effort. Chapman declines to name more.
Meyer, the center's director, is a tall, friendly man who has undergraduate degrees in geology and physics and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, where he wrote his doctorate on the origins of life.
He says he's no creationist. He doesn't, for example, believe in a literal reading of the Bible, which would mean the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
He doesn't dispute that natural selection played a role in evolution; he just doesn't think it explains everything.
He often points to the Cambrian Period, a time more than 500 million years ago when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. Meyer and other Discovery Institute fellows say those groups show up too fast, geologically speaking, to have come about through natural selection. That's one of what they see as controversies they want taught in school.
Scientists, however, say the Cambrian Period may not be completely understood, but that doesn't mean the theory of evolution is in trouble.
"They harp and harp on natural selection, as if natural selection is the only thing that evolutionary biologists deal with," said Scott. "Who knows whether natural selection explains the Cambrian body plans. ... So what?"
Scientists consider Meyer a creationist because he maintains some unnamed intelligence - and Meyer said he personally thinks it is God - has an active hand in creating some complex parts of life.
"I don't know what else to call it other than creationism," said Michael Zimmerman, a critic and dean at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
Meyer, however, said he's a scientist who starts with scientific evidence, not the Bible. His goal - a big one - is to change the very definition of science so that it doesn't rule out the possibility that an intelligent designer is actively at work.
"Science should be open to whatever cause ... can best explain the data," Meyer said.
That would be a major change for science, which limits itself to the natural world. Scott said it would be a "science stopper."
"Once you allow yourself to say God did it, you stop looking for naturalistic explanations. If you stop looking, you won't find them," she said.
Scott said science isn't an atheistic worldview. In science, she said, "It is equally inappropriate to say God did it, or God had nothing to do with it."
The institute's call to "teach the controversy" meets strong resistance.
"There's no controversy about whether living things have common ancestors," Scott said. "There's no controversy about whether natural selection is very important in creating the variety of organisms we have today."
While the institute touts its list of 370 scientists who have signed a statement saying they have some doubts about Darwin's theory of natural selection, Scott's organization, in a parody of that effort, has a list of 500 names limited to scientists named Steve or Stephanie, in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known biologist who once wrote that evolution is "one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science."
Public opinion is mixed. Many Christian denominations, including Catholics, see no contradiction between evolution and their faith, but a Gallup Poll last November found that only about a third of the respondents think Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported by scientific evidence.
Meyer hopes the Kansas Board of Education will invite the center to speak at its hearings in May. Speakers will be asked to address the issue the center wants to highlight: whether Kansas' science curriculum helps students understand debate over controversial topics such as evolution.
Kansas Citizens for Science, however, has urged a boycott of the hearings, saying the proposals have been "rejected by the science community at large."
Wrong.
"I see neither a necessity nor a possibility of a nexus between insecticides and evolution."
Then you know nothing about science.
Evolution has correctly predicted and/or explained a huge number of things in many areas of biology and medicine, not just one.
There is no such distinction (i.e. there is no such theory as "micro-evolution"). The idea of "micro-evolution" is a weasel-word concept because the creationists CANNOT deny the facts of genetic change caused by the mutation/natural selection mechanism---so they try to have it both ways by coining new language.
There is only evolution---not "micro evolution and species change" as two separate issues.
Why are evolution and creationism at odds. Creation is open for interpretation.
Understood. Again, I never saw religion and science as addressing the same topics, in the same way, in any event.
My boys learn much more in science class now than ever before and GOD is the center and creator of this world's wonders. There is no contradiction between creation and science in these textbooks. Quite the contrary: God made science and we can use it to observe the awesome power of his creation.
I am amazed at His creation and dumbfounded that a scientist wouldn't be.
At least the reporter noticed this. DI's (now openly stated) purpose is to destroy the idea that scientific inquiry is a valid method of obtaining knowledge. In this aim, they have powerfull allies such as the postmoderndeconstructionists, the new-agers, and scientologists to name a few.
Spiced Ham attack?
bump
You teach evolution too, right?
Evolution- Like that some wolves evolved into dogs. That's proven.
I am willing to listen (and have to decades) to the other side of the evolution argument. However, I see a looooooong list of contradictions and inaccuracies that Darwinists refuse to address. That is BAD science.
God created our intellect and we should pursue our science with all vigor . . . but not refuse to acknowledge things that don't fit with our "theory" just because it may require admitting "something higher" than man exists.
"A day is but a thousand years, and a thousand years is but a day".
Quantum physicist have discovered time is a dimensional thing. There are 7 "heavens", and there are "dimensions" found in modern science. Once a molecule switches dimensions, time changes. Even going faster than the speed of light changes time.
My kids do study macro-evolution also but only to the point that they understand the theory. They know that it is a theory and has countless holes that have not been resolved.
Here's part you don't grasp about homeshcooling: this is MY school and it will reflect my beliefs. That's why I homeschool. If you don't like my teaching - don't send your kids to my house! Notice that my school, unlike public schools, is willing to inform its students of theories that contradict our core beliefs! I don't have to but do, public schools should but don't.
Now, as for public schools . . . they use my money to shovel bad science to kids who swallow it whole and ignore ID as if it doesn't exist as an alternate theory.
We do home school. We always have. We're going on 10 years of teaching our own, and the kids just keep coming! We don't want atheism forced on our kids by the federal government.
If they taught both "theories", maybe things would get safer and better in the public schools. In the mean time, the kids are killing themselves and each other, and the poor things can't even read!
Such as? List them and I'll address them.
Prediction: You will respond with a list of misrepresentations about science from creationist sources, not actual "contradictions and inaccuracies" that "Darwinists refuse to address".
A powerful and scientific defense of the indefensible!
I believe that was one of the favorite defenses of Bill Clinton: Just leave him alone.
Strike one: Domestic dogs are not members of C. lupus. And "macroevolution" is equally "provable/observable" -- you're doing your kids a huge disservice if you falsely tell them that it's not.
My kids do study macro-evolution also but only to the point that they understand the theory. They know that it is a theory and has countless holes that have not been resolved.
Such as? Let's see if you're teaching your children science -- or propaganda.
Here's part you don't grasp about homeshcooling: this is MY school and it will reflect my beliefs. That's why I homeschool. If you don't like my teaching - don't send your kids to my house! Notice that my school, unlike public schools, is willing to inform its students of theories that contradict our core beliefs! I don't have to but do, public schools should but don't.
Just be sure you're not crippling your kids' education by teaching them creationist misinformation.
Now, as for public schools . . . they use my money to shovel bad science to kids who swallow it whole and ignore ID as if it doesn't exist as an alternate theory.
Most creationist homeschooling curricula are prime examples of "shoveling bad science to kids who swallow it whole". You wouldn't be using Kent Hovind's materials, would you?
Home schooling is not easy (though my much-better-half does most of the teaching/grading) and takes dedication. We are of the same mind in that we have decided that our kids are worth the cost!
By-the-way, we have been using the Abeka system exclusively this year. My sister-in-law selects her texts from multiple curriculums. There are any number of ways to do this and being new at it, I need input. Any suggestions for this "newbie" homeschooling dad?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.