Posted on 12/14/2005 12:02:42 PM PST by doc30
Atlanta — Nearly seven months after schools in a suburban Atlanta county were forced to peel off textbook stickers that called evolution a theory rather than fact, a federal appeals court is set to consider whether the disclaimers were unconstitutional.
In January, a federal judge ordered Cobb County school officials to remove the stickers immediately, saying they were an endorsement of religion. The ruling was appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments on Thursday.
Advocates on both sides say the appeals court's decision will go a long way toward shaping a debate between science and religion that has cropped up in various forms around the country.
“If it's unconstitutional to tell students to study evolution with an open mind, then what's not unconstitutional?” said John West, a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that supports intelligent design, the belief that the universe is so complex it must have been created by a higher power. “The judge is basically trying to make it unconstitutional for anyone to have a divergent view, and we think that has a chilling effect on free speech.”
Opponents of the sticker campaign see it as a backdoor attempt to introduce creationism – the biblical story of creation – into the public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court disallowed it in a 1987 case from Louisiana.
“The anti-evolution forces have been searching for a new strategy that would accomplish the same end,” said Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and co-author of the science book that was stickered. “That purpose is, if not to get evolution out of the schools altogether, then at least undermine it as much as possible in the minds of students.”
The disclaimers were placed in the books in 2002 by school officials in Cobb County, a suburb of about 650,000. The stickers were printed up after more than 2,000 parents complained that science texts presented evolution as a fact, with no mention of other theories.
The stickers read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
The school board called the stickers “a reasonable and evenhanded guide to science instruction” that encourages students to be critical thinkers.
Some parents, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, sued, arguing that the stickers violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper ruled that the sticker “conveys an impermissible message of endorsement and tells some citizens that they are political outsiders while telling others they are political insiders.”
In Pennsylvania, a federal judge has yet to decide whether the Dover Area School District can require ninth-grade biology students to learn about intelligent design. A few days after the trial ended earlier this fall, Dover voters ousted eight of the nine school board members who adopted the policy.
The same week, state education officials in Kansas adopted new classroom science standards that call the theory of evolution into question.
In 2004, Georgia's school superintendent proposed a statewide science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favour of “changes over time.” That plan was soon scrapped amid protests from teachers.
I don't think that astronomy is either a theory or a fact. It's a field of study.
Evolution is a field of study also. I took several classes in it in graduate school and studied it for my Ph.D. exams. A lot of people work in the field as well.
I think you are arguing from a religious, not a scientific, viewpoint.
No, I don't but that's not what I asked for. I asked how these stickers were a violation of separation of church and state.
Is your motivation for this religious? If not, and if you are just out to advance science, what else are you doing in this regard?
Don't try to kid us. The folks pushing ID are doing so from a religious viewpoint. All of this effort is not for the betterment of science. Just look at these threads-- science is coming from one side and a religious viewpoint from the other.
Thanks for your opinion. For the record, I am not a member of any organized religion, nor do I believe that any of the commonly-designated "holy" books, such as the Old Testament, New Testament, Qur'an, Tao-te-Ching, et cetera are accurate descriptions of history... or guides to ethics.
I also believe that the theory that random mutation and natural selection were the sole factors involved in the development of life on this planet has numerous practical difficulties, and should be viewed, as all scientific theories should be viewed, critically and skeptically. I believe that evolution has itself taken on the trappings of religion, complete with an accepted dogma and the ridicule of heretics.
And being a sane and sensible person, I believe that a sticker urging people to view evolution (or anything else) critically does not constitute an "establishment of religion", which is what was held by the lower court.
It's not a question of free speech in science. The problem is that no one has presented evidence. Science is deliberately closed minded to propositions without support or merit. In terms of science (not philosophy, theology or public opinion) ID and creationism have neither. THey offer nothing that can be falsified in the way every other scientific theory has.
And what, specifically, are these difficulties? ANd how have you researched their irreconcilability with evolution?
You both seem to be asking about the same question.
The "stickers" are not designed to provide an improved view of science. They are meant to single out evolution as the only field of science, out of hundreds, for special treatment--identifying it as a theory, which to a layman means a guess. This is done from a religious viewpoint because some believers do not like the results of evolutionary science.
So, the sticker has one purpose--to destroy students' trust in the field of evolution, although evolution does not differ in its methods from other sciences.
The proponents of this viewpoint are almost universally acting from a religious belief, and are in no way trying to improve science. They are being dishonest in hiding their beliefs under the Trojan horse of ID, as pointed out by the Wedge Strategy a decade ago.
Is that clear enough?
Item A-10 from the Evolution Troll's Toolkit.
I'm just surprised to see it in the science section of a Canadian newspaper!
The problem with the IDer's is that their idea of observed speciation isn't evolution - it's more like supernatural transmutation, where a frog gives birth to a bird or some other ludicrous thing that is obviously outside the scope of evolution.
Only the effects of gravity can be observed, not the force itself. So you're observing the "law" of gravity, but you can't observe the theory of gravity. In fact there isn't a theory of gravity, but rather multiple, and largely inconsistent theories, e.g. General Relativity (which says that gravity is a warping of space time caused by the presence of matter, but also that it is indistinguishable from the forces of acceleration) and OTOH force unification theories (which suggest gravity is a fundamental force mediated by a particle, the graviton, which has however not been discovered yet).
So given this state of affairs, where there is much less consensus and more uncertainty about gravitational theory than evolutionary theory, why does evolution need a sticker but gravity doesn't?!
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. Yes, macro-evolution.
Ichneumon's legendary post 52. More evidence than you can handle.
Post 661: Ichneumon's stunning post on transitionals.
Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics. Anatomic similarities are confirmed by DNA similarities and copying errors.
Evidence of Evolutionary Transitions. There really is evidence out there.
Lots more to be found here: The List-O-Links.
That website cites the relevant literature on the subject. Whether or not the site is propaganda, the cited research is not.
For starters, I find the argument from complexity to have merit. A system comprising numerous dependent parts and requiring all of them for a reproductive advantage would be difficult to evolve through random mutation and natural selection.
Proponents of evolution often endeavor to hypothesize ways in which such systems could evolve through a series of intermediate steps, which brings me to my second objection: the universality of certain traits which may provide a reproductive advantage, but a very tiny one. For an example, try this experiment. Stand with your head facing straight forward, with your eyes looking ahead. Now slowly rotate your head at the neck while trying to keep your eyes pointed straight forward relative to your head. (This means that if your head is rotated 20 degrees to the left, your eyes will be pointed at 20 degrees to the left relative to your body.) As the angle of rotation increases, you'll find this becomes difficult. Your eyes "want" to rotate in their sockets the same direction as your neck, so while your head is oriented 35 degrees in one direction, your eyes will be looking at 40 degrees or so.)
This tendency is hardwired into us, and it is undeniably an advantage... it means that if you want to look at something on your periphery you'll be able to see it a fraction of a second faster than you would otherwise. But how much of a reproductive advantage does it confer? An organism with this tendency would survive an encounter with a predator that an organism without it would not if the predator approaches from a very specific angle. If the angle of approach is too shallow, an organism would see it coming even without the tendency, and if it's too deep an organism wouldn't see it coming even with the tendency. So on the average, what would the reproductive rate of the organisms with the tendency be over the organisms without it? A ratio of 1.00001 : 1? And yet the tendency is universal. How many generations would it take for a trait conferring such a minuscule advantage to become universal?
And again, this goes to all the attempts to argue against irreducible complexity by positing long strings of incremental advantage. The smaller the advantage, the longer it would take to spread. Stack a few dozen (or a few hundred) additional incremental improvements on top of that and the likelihood of the chain happening in only a few hundred million years becomes infinitesimal.
I'd also really like to know how proponents of evolution jive their theory with increasing evidence that homosexuality is a genetic trait. One would think that a trait providing such an enormous reproductive disadvantage would be wiped out in a heartbeat, on an evolutionary scale.
This is not to say that the theory that random mutation and natural selection were the sole factors shaping life is false. It may well be true. But it's certainly not proven and it certainly diserves critical scrutiny. And in a large part of the scientific mainstream, it doesn't get it. It is, as I said, treated as a religion... with heretics ostracized, ridiculed, and shunned.
ANd how have you researched their irreconcilability with evolution?
DURRRRRR I opened my Bible, of course. Haven't you heard that anybody who dares to question the orthodoxy of evolution is an imbecilic unscientific Bible-thumper?
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