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."
Huh, cite sources please.
In addition, "evolution", as presently presented and understood, also fails the most elementary tests of what "science" is: Consistent results, independent repeatability, and no gaps requiring leaps of faith.
Nope. There is plenty of evidence to support evolution and it falls well within the realm of science where ID or creationism cannot.
My first thought was that you could substitute "Legalists" for "scientists" and explain a lot about the recent events regarding Terri Sheravo (sic).
Simply defending the process' that have come to define an institution, abandoning the purpose in order to save the structure and sense of "being special", is a disservice to both sides and all concerned.
(Sort of applies to the UN as well....)
I would tell the person to look at the website I am providing, read up on the big bang, and learn why that is a bad statement.
Sorry. That is not science. Prove to me invisible pink faries don't live on the far side of the moon.
Nope. Evolution has nothing to say about God or atheism.
Tell me how you would design a test or prediction for ID. I can for evolution. Evolution falls within the realm of science, ID does not.
The survival of the fittest notion is on of the most misunderstood points of evolution. It should be survival of the most adapatable.
The notion of the fittest is misused by almost everyone.
Just a point that really bugs me.
Science is to a sharp rock as ID is to cloud pictures.
I like that. :-)
I believe in science and expect scientists to adhere to their own ruleset. When they do not and base a theory partially on bad science, I refuse to accept in in whole.
For clarification, there is a difference between macro and micro-evolution. Micro is observable and repeatable, macro is not no matter what hoax fossil is used as some "missing link".
I do not believe inter-species evolution is possible but am willing to look at the facts/evidence if it is there. I also do not believe that if it were true, it would preclude God. My problem, again, is that it claims to be a scientific theory yet is based on flawed science.
False. Humans do ID all the time, so the "feasibility" part of the problem has been experimentally proved.
Beyond that, your objection basically boils down to a statement that it's impossible to tell the difference between designed and non-designed biological phenomena. Of course, this cuts both ways: if you can't tell the difference between design and non-design, then evolution isn't science, either -- how could it be, if the fundamental basis of the theory is, by your own assertion, untestable and unprovable?
So the state of play is this: we know that ID can occur, because humans do it. To demonstrate the concept more generally, one would need to define some means of discriminating between "designed" and "non-designed" or, conversely, some demonstration that one cannot tell the difference between them. This is a valid scientific question -- why would you dismiss it as "non-science?"
The rub with this statement is you cannot prove there even is a God. You have faith there is one, but there is no scientific evidence.
>>
Ask a pure Darwinian Atheist "what came before this, and what came before that, and this and that."
At one point, something came from nothing. And no one knows how.<<
SHUT UP YOU STUPID CREATIONIST!!!
</sarcasm>
This proof must be unique because no one else has it or this debate wouldn't continue. I for one will take proof if you have it.
Ignoring the fact that neither you nor I are research biologists, how would you prove macro-evolution?
Well, certainly not yet. But it is still a good argument against much of the "higher" claims of evolution theory.
Saying a thing is not "scientific" does not make it dissapear in a puff of logic.
>>Evolution falls within the realm of science, ID does not.<<
Neither does consciousness, but I have experienced it personally. 8^>
How does this impact the theory of evolution?
Beyond that, your objection basically boils down to a statement that it's impossible to tell the difference between designed and non-designed biological phenomena. Of course, this cuts both ways: if you can't tell the difference between design and non-design,
You cannot tell me if the world was created last tuesday either. However, that does not fall within the realm of science. Science makes predictions from evidence and observation. And the evidence is that the universe is billions of years old and evolution took place here on Earth. Anything else falls within the realm of faith or a belief system.
then evolution isn't science, either -- how could it be, if the fundamental basis of the theory is, by your own assertion, untestable and unprovable?
Nope. There are predictions that can be tested for evolution. This puts it squarely within the realm of science. ID cannot make such a claim.
Yes, I agree with your statements about good science.
We should make careful observations.
It is what we theorize to account for these observations that brings the controversy especially if there is no way to verify the theory by observation.
The explosion at Mount St. Helens has raised a lot of new questions about geology and uniformitarianism.
Large canyons were formed in a matter of minutes through solid rock. Many layers of sedimentary rock were formed in a matter of days. Each layer having unique characteristics unlike laying down a pile of mud. A whole "forest" of "trees" has formed at the bottom of the nearby lake from logs sinking in a vertical manner soon to be covered with sediment possibly forming a future petrified forest.
These observations are now being used to modify/question current theories about the formation geological features, many of which had been assumed to take eons to form.
Here ya go. :-)
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
BTW, follow the references as well.
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