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.
Scientific creationism differs from conventional science in numerous and substantial ways. One obvious difference is the way scientists and creationists deal with error.
Science is wedded, at least in principle, to the evidence. Creationism is unabashedly wedded to doctrine, as evidenced by the statements of belief required by various creationist organizations and the professions of faith made by individual creationists. Because creationism is first and foremost a matter of biblical faith, evidence from the natural world can only be of secondary importance. Authoritarian systems like creationism tend to instill in their adherents a peculiar view of truth.
Many prominent creationists apparently have the same view of truth as political radicals: whatever advances the cause is true; whatever damages the cause is false. From this viewpoint, errors should be covered up when possible and only acknowledged when failure to do so threatens greater damage to the cause. If colleagues spread errors, it is better not to criticize them publicly. Better to have followers deceived than to have them question the legitimacy of their leaders. In science, fame accrues to those who overturn errors. In dogmatic systems, one who unnecessarily exposes an error to the public is a traitor or an apostate.
Ironically, creationists make much of scientific errors. The "Nebraska Man" fiasco, where the tooth of an extinct peccary was misidentified as belonging to a primitive human, is ubiquitous in creationist literature and debate presentations. So is the "Piltdown Man" hoax. Indeed, creationist propagandists often present these two scientific errors as characteristic of paleoanthropology. It is significant that these errors were uncovered and corrected from within the scientific community. In contrast, creationists rarely expose their own errors, and they sometimes fail to correct them when others expose them. ...
I wasn't aware you are your politicians. So, just because you agree with his policies and voted him in means his administration is faultless? Even if Bush does well for the US that does not mean he does well for other countries, including Canada. Should we avoid complaining about the softwood lumber, beef trade, farming subsidies and other trade problems because you like Bush? Sorry, only Americans vote in their politicians.
"We support the troops but hope they lose the war logic?
Where the heck did you come up with this little gem?
Who said anything about the Feds? (Unless the "educational materials" crossed state lines...). Common-law or state statutory fraud. State-level impeachment.
Fools. We're already making our move. We've been infiltrating the US for decades. We send down Doctors, Nurses, Lawyers, Computer Scientists, Actors, Comedians and more, all insinuating themselves into the fabric of American culture waiting for the day to take control.
The only problem is that with all our smartest people heading to the States, there is no one left up here to make the decision.
And some of them are very good at it! Here's one that's a parody of the ID controversy that we're so fond of discussing.
From http://www.livejournal.com/users/q_pheevr/33337.html
The Wrathful Dispersion controversy: A Canadian perspective
Linguists here in Canada have been following closely, with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, and, it must be admitted, a little trepidation, the deliberations of our neighbours to the south, who are currently considering, in a courtroom in Pennsylvania, whether "Wrathful Dispersion Theory," as it is called, should be taught in the public schools alongside evolutionary theories of historical linguistics. It is an emotionally charged question, for linguistics is widely and justifiably seen as the centrepiece of the high-school science curriculum—a hard science, but not a difficult one to do in the classroom; an area of study that teaches students the essentials of scientific reasoning, but that at the same time touches on the spiritual essence of what it means to be human, for it is of course language that separates us from our cousins the apes.
The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity's hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: "Let us go down," God says to Himself, "and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues. When asked in court to speculate about the possible identity of the disperser, Michael Moringa, a prominent proponent of WD, demurred, saying that the theory makes no claims about the answer to that question, and that it certainly does not insist that the Disperser is the God of Genesis. Moringa has, however, elsewhere avowed a deep personal belief in the Christian God as the power responsible, as have other WD theorists. Indeed, there appear to be no atheists in the foxholes on the WD side of this war, and for that matter, no Jews or Muslims, either; the WD movement is composed almost exclusively of evangelical Protestants.
Wrathful Dispersion appears to owe a great deal of its tenacity to its steadfast refusal to offer specific answers to just about any question. Unlike "young-tongue" Babelism, WD makes no claim as to precisely when the great dispersion took place; faced with evidence of distinct languages reaching back for several thousands of years, the proponents of WD simply say that, well, the dispersion must have occurred prior to that. In the early days of evolutionary linguistics, Babelists used to taunt French-speaking evolutionists with cries of "Your father was a Roman!" WD, by contrast, acknowledges that languages can indeed change over time, and some Wrathful Dispersionists even concede that modern French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and so on may actually have developed from Latin after all. The existence of Latin itself, however, and its mutual unintelligibility with, say, Old Church Slavonic or Proto-Bantu, could only have arisen through the wrath of the disperser. When asked to provide evidence for the existence of a single global language in pre-dispersion times, they reply that of course no such evidence can be found, because the disperser in his wrath was quite careful to obliterate all traces of it.
In lieu of offering any evidence for their own proposal, most Wrathful Dispersionists prefer to devote their energy to attacking the evolutionary approach to historical linguistics, which they generally refer to as Grimmism. Much of their animus is directed against the lone figure of Jakob Grimm, whom they depict as having made up the idea of linguistic evolution off the top of his head, and they delight in pointing out novel "exceptions" to Grimm's Law, such as the fact that English has the word paternal where Grimm's Law obviously predicts fathernal. The evolutionists respond that paternal was a later borrowing into English from Latin, to which the Wrathful Dispersionists reply triumphantly, "So your trees and waves can't explain everything!"
Perhaps paradoxically, proponents of WD have also been known, at times, to play up the religious aspect of their theory when it suits them. The suppression of their ideas about the origin of languages, they have been heard to complain, is tantamount to religious persecution, but at the same time they insist that the use of the public school systems to propagate those ideas would not in any way violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. One cynical observer has likened WD to Scientology, which "is a religion for purposes of tax assessment, a science for purposes of propaganda, and a work of fiction for purposes of copyright."
Wrathful Dispersionists are also fond of pointing out gaps in the written record, noting that there is no physical evidence of different languages dating back any earlier than five thousand years ago, a date which is suggestively close to the one commonly attributed to the Tower of Babel by biblical literalists. The bulk of their case against evolutionism, though, is based on the notion of irreducible perversity. For example, they argue that the sheer alienness of Basque—its apparent lack of any resemblance to any other living language—could only have come about by deliberate, wrathful (and, the Babelists would add, divine) intervention. Similarly, they claim that the notorious "ruki rule" in Sanskrit (/s/ becomes retroflex in the environment of /r/, /u/, /k/, or /i/—a "calculatedly chaotic conglomeration comprising two vowels, a rhotic, and a surd") is so arbitrary and so confusing that it must have been the conscious invention of someone who was absolutely determined that Sanskrit should be thoroughly incomprehensible to native speakers of any other language, such as Finnish.
Most evolutionists have been reluctant to dignify WD by arguing against it, although a few have pointed out that while evolutionary models make a few wrong predictions, WD makes no predictions whatsoever, and others have taken on the ruki rule question, pointing to the feature [+high] as a potential means of herding the offending segments into a natural class. Much of the public opposition to WD, however, has come in the form of parody. In particular, a satirical Web-based grassroots pseudo-cult has grown up around the theory that all modern languages were in fact "shat out of the arse of the Flying Stratificational Grammar Monster," with adherents claiming to have achieved enlightenment upon being "touched by His Boolean Appendage" or "washed in the blood of Sydney Lamb."
From where I sit in the Great White North, the whole debate looks more than a little silly, but there is still a considerable measure of unease among Canadian linguists. The new year will bring to Canada an election and a new government, and there is a non-negligible chance that that government will be formed by the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, who has already shown himself not to be averse to reopening questions that many of us believed to have been closed for good. Will Canada, too, soon find itself debating the merits of Wrathful Dispersion, and asking its judges to map the boundary between religion and linguistic science? Only time will tell.
Thats OK, we can clean up the minor drips.
Local school boards are elected locally, another novel thought.
The remedy for school boards out of step with their electorate is to dispatch them in the next election. Courts, be they state or federal, only have a dog in this fight when an individauls rights are violated, not when your sensibilites are.
It's an American thing.
Like I said, we have a warped sense of humour. ;^P
If that is the case, then it logically follows that offending the policies of George Bush naturally offends those who support those policies which as of the latest election was a majority of Americans.
As for the whining about Canadians having a right to their opinions, whine on.
My favorite arcane fact about Canada is the Newfoundland time zone, which is somehow 30 minutes different from its neighbors. Gotta love a place like that.
That is my point, although the use of the phrase 'trying to offend' is just a little over the top.
"If that is the case, then it logically follows that offending the policies of George Bush naturally offends those who support those policies which as of the latest election was a majority of Americans.
I hate to tell you this, but complaining about a politician is not the same as complaining about the people of the country. Politicians are in power for a very short time, the people are there a heck of a lot longer.
This disagreement may just be about the difference between our attitudes toward politicians and yours. We've always complained about politicians, ours and other country's.
I don't remember whining, I think that was your voice I heard whining about the Canadian attitude toward the Bush administration.
They are a rather ...unique people. You know the reputation Canadians have for pronouncing 'about' like 'aboot' and ending sentences with 'eh'? Many of the people of Newfoundland actually do do that.
It's always a little weird to hear some gorgeous blond with long legs and big ...tracts of land, sound like Bob and Doug MacKenzie.
Priceless!
washed in the blood of Sydney Lamb
The guy who wrote this is knowledgeable as well as witty.
Thanks.
I'm told that Newfoundlanders are quite touchy about their time zone. Tourists are sometimes advised that if they visit local pubs, they should refrain from asking the locals what time it is.
You were complaing about Canadians having a right to express their opinion. That's self evident and hence whining when you make a point of it.
I was simply pointing out that Canadians can no more spearate their abhorence of certain US policies supported by Bush from the people who elected him any more than the left wing moonbats of the world can claim support for the troops while declaring they are losing the war.
You see the difference now sharpy?
If, say, the Wythe County School Board engaged in fraud by claiming ID is science, as far as I'm concerned that's a crime against the people and Commonwealth of Virginia - the School board exists because of, and in accordance with, Va (not local) law. Impeachmant and conviction ensures no recidivism.
Also, court trials and legislative impeachment are the only remedies for appointed officials and employees who engage in fraud.
Why should the the folks in Georgia give a good crap about your IDphobia or your tendency to statism?
yhey shouldn't
You seem to appreciate honesty greatly.. and are put off by lies.. I agree, we are on the same page there.. With an American college system literally controlled by hard leftist ideologues that have a negative agenda..
WHOM most all agree with YOU... on evolution..
One wonders how much your hate of lies and love of truth is genuine.. I have also noticed you are wroth to engage Alamo-girl and Betty Boop whom can support "current scientific reality's"(which are scientists) USE OF 2ND REALITY to support a skewed version of "truth"..
If I said anything in error it was not on purpose.. can you say the same.. I will stand down on this, if I see you loving truth, I have not noticed that yet.. Course I have not read everything here.. Don't need to.. I have those I trust, AND those that have ten poles marks all over them.. disease maybe, maybe mental..
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.