Posted on 02/15/2006 12:53:18 AM PST by jennyp
COLUMBUS - The Ohio school board voted Tuesday to eliminate a passage in the state's science standards that critics said opened the door to the teaching of intelligent design.
The Ohio Board of Education decided 11-4 to delete material encouraging students to seek evidence for and against evolution.
The 2002 science standards say students should be able to ``describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.'' It includes a disclaimer that the standards do not require the teaching of intelligent design.
The vote is the latest setback for the intelligent design movement, which holds that life is so complex, it must have been created by a higher authority.
In December, a federal judge barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The judge said that intelligent design is religion masquerading as science and that teaching it alongside evolution violates the separation of church and state.
On Tuesday, the Ohio Board of Education directed a committee to study whether a replacement lesson is needed for the deleted material.
The vote was a reversal of a 9-8 decision a month ago to keep the lesson plan. But three board members who voted in January to keep the plan were absent Tuesday. Supporters of the plan pledged to force a new vote to return the material soon.
``We'll do this forever, I guess,'' said board member Michael Cochran, a Columbus lawyer and supporter of the lesson plan.
Board member Martha Wise, who pushed to eliminate the material, said the board took the correct action to avoid problems, including a possible lawsuit.
``It is deeply unfair to the children of this state to mislead them about science,'' said Wise, an elected board member representing northern Ohio.
In approving Wise's motion, the board rejected a competing plan to request a legal opinion from the attorney general on the constitutionality of the science standards.
The state's science lesson plan, approved in 2004, is optional for schools to use in teaching the state's science standards, which are the basis for Ohio's graduation test. Although schools are not required to teach the standards, districts that do not follow the standards put students at risk of not passing that part of the Ohio graduation test.
The Pennsylvania court decision against teaching intelligent design does not apply in Ohio, but critics of state standards say it invites a similar challenge.
Wise said other events since the ruling made removing the standards even more important. Earlier this month, for example, Gov. Bob Taft recommended a legal review of the standards.
In addition, members of a committee that advised state education officials on Ohio's science curriculum said the standards improperly single out the theory of evolution and could lead to the teaching of religion.
Board member Deborah Owens Fink, who voted against eliminating the lesson plan, said it is unfair to deny students the chance to use logic to question a scientific theory. She said scientists who oppose the material are worried that their views won't be supported.
``We respect diversity of opinion in every other arena,'' said Owens Fink, an elected board member from Akron.
One of my professors once cautioned me against the use of analogies for precisely the reason why you should stop using them. That is, although they seem to at least make sense to the user, analogies are frequently ridiculous when you actually read them.
For instance, the analogy you have attempted to make here to RWP's point breaks down immediately, because the conclusion you have drawn from your premise doesn't follow.
In case you didn't understand what I just said, I'll just point out that still being alive after playing Russian roulette doesn't equal "not insane." After all, one can be alive and insane, yes?
I see. So again, the designer is absolved because humans abuse their backs. That's two where you find the design itself to be blameless, and where you seem to be contending that proper care necessarily equals non-failure (a contention I'm sure a great many patients and doctors would find peculiar, especially with respect to colon cancer).
How about eyes? Do humans abuse their eyes too, thereby causing vision failures and the common need for corretive lenses?
I don't think that's a fair criticism. For biochemical systems they clearly mean it's IC if it won't perform its function is you remove one of the proteins.
Mainly to make evolutions look foolish, by holding it up as another PROOF of humans having come from lower life forms.
Thus, although scientists have long discounted the human appendix as a vestigial organ, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that the appendix does in fact have a significant function as a part of the body’s immune system. The appendix may be particularly important early in life because it achieves its greatest development shortly after birth and then regresses with age, eventually coming to resemble such other regions of GALT as the Peyer’s patches in the small intestine. The immune response mediated by the appendix may also relate to such inflammatory conditions as ulcerative colitis. In adults, the appendix is best known for its tendency to become inflamed, necessitating surgical removal.
Sadly, I've found this line of argument to not be effective, regardless of how logical it is. He can always claim that your idea of engineering "perfection" is entirely in the eye of the beholder and that any "design flaws" you point out are in fact eneffably purposeful and necessary parts of our makeup. The infection-prone appendix is obviously some sort of "test" that we must overcome in order to make us better people, along with a litany of other bad things that often happen to good people. It's all part of the big "plan".
The inevitable conclusion is that God did it because that's the way he wanted to do it, and it is not our place to question why. This is a supremely simple argument, but one that is entirely unsatisfying from a scientific point of view. If he did design us, he did so with the capacity, and indeed the drive, to seek out connections and recognize patterns in the world we live in. Evolution is just one of the incredibly beautiful laws we have discovered that seem to drive and organize the world around us.
Whether there was a supernatural impetus behind the existence of these laws is a matter of faith, but the patterns are there regardless of how you conceive they were originally wrought.
That's precisely the problem. A blanket statement noting that all theories -- gravity, relativity, evolution, round-earth geography, whatever -- are subject to change pending further evidence would be fine.
So If you claim that all crows are black, and I show you a white crow, you can still go on and claim all crows are black. That's amazing. It's not logic, it's not reason, in fact it's total insanity, but it's amazing.
Explains a lot about creationists.
Creationist: "Nothing in a literal reading of the Bible contradicts science"
Scientist. "Yes it does. Science says the earth is 4.5 billion years old. But a literal reading of the Bible implies it's 6000 years old.
Creationist: "Nothing in a literal reading of the Bible contradicts science"
Note that no one called the appendix or the tonsils an "engineering problem." You made that up. We were talking about elements of the human body that function, but not optimally. That you cannot grasp the concept does not bode well for our continued discussion.
Note that this evasion is precisely equivalent to the creationist use of the ad hoc categories "microevolution" and "macroevolution". Holocaust deniers can't avoid conceding the reality of the "microgenocide" represented by firmly documented individual cases, but insist that the generally accepted "macrogenocide" inferred therefrom did not happen.
See Msg#194.
Perhaps you should look up the word ... genre.
You DO realize that vestigial isn't synonymous with functionless, right? Darwin was very clear about that. It means the structure/organ is not doing the original function it was designed by evolution to do. For instance, the appendix was originally a much larger organ that digested cellulose in our ancestors. It no longer performs this function anymore. That doesn't mean it has no other functions.
How about eyes? Do humans abuse their eyes too, thereby causing vision failures and the common need for corretive lenses?
Yes, absolutely! Nutrition plays a big part in eye care and also modern man's propensity to look at many things from 1-2 feet away from their face, i.e. books, TV, indoors.. Eyes need exercise from far to near in balance.
a contention I'm sure a great many patients and doctors would find peculiar, especially with respect to colon cancer).
The fact that you're asking these types of questions says you're not very well versed in health related subjects. Doctors love sheeple types like you who have fallen for the big lie that sickness (what we see today) is inevitable and should be expected. Modern prepared foods, toxins, preservatives, etc., etc. being consumed daily into the colon and you're shocked that 40-50 years of the treatment causes cancer? I think it's incredible that we're not all dead or sick by the time we're 20, with the way the body is abused in todays modern life.
"Those who home school tend to produce book smart children who lack the social skills to excel as adults."
Care to back up that claim with studies that prove it? Nah, didn't think you could.
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