Spin, baby, spin!
Posted on 11/03/2005 11:39:36 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Not long into his cross-examination Wednesday, Dover schools Asst. Supt. Michael Baksa talked about a seminar he had attended about creationism in public schools.
The typically calm and confident administrator started his testimony with shaky hands and a weak voice as he explained to plaintiffs’ attorney Eric Rothschild that Supt. Richard Nilsen sent him to the Messiah College seminar on March 26, 2003.
Baksa had returned to the stand in a federal civil suit over Dover Area School District’s decision to include a mention of intelligent design in ninth-grade biology class. It was Baksa’s third appearance on the stand after being bumped by out-of-town witnesses for the defense.
Knowledge of the seminar wasn’t new. But the plaintiffs’ attorneys used it and other testimony from Baksa and school board President Sheila Harkins, who also testified Wednesday, to try to tie together events leading up to the science curriculum change and show that religion played a role in the board’s decision.
A policy that had a religious purpose would violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
Baksa testified that hours after attending the conference, he went to a Dover board retreat. According to previous testimony, board member Alan Bonsell said at the retreat that creationism should balance the teaching of evolution. Earlier in the trial, board members, former board members and Nilsen testified about notes made during board retreats in 2002 and 2003 at which Bonsell mentioned creationism and prayer in school.
After the retreat, Baksa said, he told Bertha Spahr, head of the science department, that Bonsell wanted to give another theory equal time to evolution in science class.
Baksa received a memo dated April 1, 2003, from then-Principal Trudy Peterman that said a board member wanted to give creationism equal time with evolution.
“My first reaction is, ‘She got it wrong,’” Baksa said, referring to Peterman’s use of the term creationism. But he didn’t approach either Spahr or Peterman to correct the information, he said.
A little more than a year after Peterman’s memo, controversy erupted during June 2004 board meetings when board members, and one board member’s wife, made religious comments while talking about buying new biology books.
During Wednesday’s questioning, Baksa corroborated some news coverage by saying he heard former board member Bill Buckingham talk about creationism, saying that “liberals in black robes” were taking away Christians’ rights and that the ninth-grade biology book was “laced with Darwinism.”
Baksa said Buckingham said something about a man dying on the cross 2,000 years ago but didn’t remember if the comment was made in 2003 during talks about “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or in 2004 during discussion on the curriculum change.
He also said Buckingham made a comment about the country not being founded on Muslim beliefs but said he didn’t know when that was said.
Earlier Wednesday, Harkins testified she didn’t remember Bonsell talking about creationism or prayer during retreats. She said she heard Buckingham mention liberal judges but didn’t know whether his mention of a man dying 2,000 years ago on the cross came at a 2004 board meeting or in earlier discussions about the pledge.
She also said people in the audience were talking about creationism at the June meetings, while then-board member Jeff Brown talked about intelligent design.
“My recollection is it seems to me I was thinking Jeff was the first one to bring up mentioning intelligent design in the conversation,” she said. “I was thinking Alan, Noel (Wenrich) and Bill got in on the conversation.”
Baksa and Harkins both testified that, at those June meetings, they didn’t know what intelligent design meant.
In August 2004, before the October vote on the intelligent design statement, Baksa and others received e-mail from Stock and Leader lawyer Steve Russell. The district had asked him for advice about the pro-intelligent design textbook “Of Pandas and People.”
“Today I talked to Richard Thompson. . . . they refer to the creationism issue as ‘intelligent design,’” Russell wrote, referring to Dover’s lawyer from the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan.
After court, Thompson maintained that creationism and intelligent design were separate.
Russell’s concern, according to the e-mail, was about various talk for putting religion back into the schools.
Baksa said in court Wednesday that he considered Russell’s words as advising caution in using “Pandas.”
In the summer of 2004, the board decided not to spend taxpayer money on “Pandas” as a companion text. Baksa testified that Nilsen asked him to research how much 50 copies of “Pandas” would cost so the board could then give the information to donors.
Later that year, Alan Bonsell’s father, Donald, and members of former board member Buckingham’s church anonymously gave 60 copies of the book to the district.
Outside court, Thompson said the events simply coincided.
“I don’t think they’re connected,” he said. “I think it’s just happenstance. At that point, I don’t think they were connected. The only reason that’s brought up is because of the case that exists today.”
The plaintiffs’ attorneys declined to comment Wednesday.
Because science is complicated. It doesn't make for good sound-bites. It requires reasoning, which we all know is in short supply.
People want simple solutions, especially ones that vindicate their inborn prejudices. That doesn't change the fact of evolution.
".... and that the ninth-grade biology book was “laced with Darwinism.”"
Complaining that a high school bio text is "laced with Darwinism" is like complaining that a high school math book is "laced with Algebra," a Chemistry text is "laced with Bohrism," or a Physics text is "laced with Newtonianism." No sh@t, Sherlock!
I understand that some of the anti-science folks are at war with reality, but really, this is too rich!
"Evo" and creation are different things. They are not competing theories to be given equal balance. People on these threads have made the comparison of astronomy and astrology, and I think that is accurate. Do you advocate teaching the astrology "theory" with equal weight to astronomy? Evolutionists don't seem to want students to be taught non-scientific subjects in science class.
The problem here is simple. People who interpret their religious beliefs to be opposed to evolution are against evolution no matter what the evidence is. Proponents of CS and its spin-off, ID, have both been trying to get this religious belief into the schools. CS was stopped by the Supreme Court in the 1980s, and now ID is in the docket.
Definitions:
Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory"Belief: any cognitive content (perception) held as true; religious faith
Didn't that happen when Behe, the expert witness for the defence, admitted that evolution and common descent are facts?
You can tell from the comments on these threads that most people don't. Most people aren't aware that evolutionary biology originally relied on the fossil record for it's evidence.
The best argument to that on these threads is, "They're just rocks".
As a conservative, you should be ashamed for bringing left wing populist lines of argument into this discussion.
With television, one makes a persuasive case, then demonstrates it to be true. Unfortunately, that is not possible with evolution.
Therefore you ask us to believe, not know. And I did believe in high school and college. Creationists from Morris to Meyers take the time to explain and persuade rather than demand belief like the materialists.
"People reject evolution because they DO know what it is."
I doubt it very much. Based on the threads here, it appears that the creationist crowd does not even understand the basics of the theory of evolution.
My suspicion is that if a nationwide quiz were taken, asking everyone to briefly describe the theory of evolution in a paragraph, less than 10% would be able to do so with any resemblance of accuracy.
If those arguing the issue do not understand the theory in the first place, then whatever their argument is has no relevance.
The very first error almost every creationist makes is in believing that the TOE has anything whatever to do with the origins of the universe or the origins of the first lifeform on this planet. I've seen few who know that the TOE does not address either.
Based on that, I cannot see why anyone should pay any attention to creationism in the first place, since it is not arguing against anything real. The TOE they're discussing doesn't even exist.
Ignorance is not a good starting point for decisions on how to teach sciences.
You don't. You couldn't give a coherent 900 word description of evolution if your life depended on it. You might be able to copy something from a web site, but you are not capable of presenting a best case description of evolution in your own words.
I've watched you and other evolution critics on these threads for years, and what I'm saying about you applies to pretty much every FReeper evolution critic.
Not only can they not give a coherent description of evolution, they are shocked to find out that ID advocates like Behe take common descent for granted. They don't even know what ID is.
"And I did believe in high school and college. "
And what classes did you take that covered evolutionary theory? What was your major in college? If you're talking about freshman survey classes, then you didn't really learn that much, I promise you.
"Not only can they not give a coherent description of evolution, they are shocked to find out that ID advocates like Behe take common descent for granted. They don't even know what ID is."
You know, I think we should reconstitute the old Know Nothing Party of the 1850s, this time around ignorance of the sciences instead of around opposition to immigration.
All the creationists could join this party and just say, "I know nothing about evolution" in these threads, rather than pretending.
That over-simplification doesn't take into account many things, such as the qualified men of letters who are not evolutionists. My son, for example is in the honors chemistry program with two Ph D's overseeing the track. Neither of the Ph D's are evolutionists.
People want simple solutions, especially ones that vindicate their inborn prejudices.
Careful.. If what you say is true, it is true of evolutionists even more.
That doesn't change the fact of evolution.
Now there we have a perfect example of compound problem involving the use of language and logic. Could it be an illustration of a simple solution vindicating an inborn prejudice?
They wouldn't want the lurkers to focus on the fact that the defenders of this insane ID policy have been shown to be bold-faced liars, and that ID itself has been reduced, under oath, to a cartoonish imitation of science that maintains that while it posits no mechanism for ID, it's practitioners can none the less "detect" design in the "purposeful arrangement of parts."
The clowns who want to jam ID into public school science classes are getting utterly demolished in court, so the disruptor trolls are going to have to be very busy indeed deflecting attention.
I've got a really great used book store with several hundred titles on evolution alone. The best layman's description of evolution I've found is Ernst Mayr's This Is Biology.
If they were not protected by copyright, I'd post the Jack Chick anti-evolution comic strips here. They pretty much represent the ignorance of the theory of evolution displayed by the creationist posters here.
Here are a couple of them. See if they don't sound just like the arguments the creationists post:
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1051/1051_01.asp
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp
That is a good book.
You have it backwards. If the federal courts hadn't intervened in public schools in the South, the Dems would still be in charge.They were the party of segregation. Once segregation was gone, so were they.
A persuasive case for evolution has been made. Many people simply aren't listening.
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