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.
The only poppy-cock here is your complete mischaracterzation of my position. This whole thing started because some people tried to make completely lame attempts at attacking ID, by claiming that because people get all types of sickness, that somehow 'proved' that there was not an 'intelligent designer', or it was sleeping on the job.
It was amazing to see so many supposedly educated people suddenly go stupid, act like liberals and claim that there is no personal responsibilty for diet, exercise, emotional stress, environmental factors, etc. and that these factors have no bearing on a person's health.
In massive quantities. There is no reason to expect a linear response for most health effects, except perhaps for cancer, and there is only very limited evidence of carcinogenicity.
In any case, my original statement was that synthetic chemicals are not a significant extra burden of carcinogenicity beyond natural carcinogens.
The fear over PBDE's is based on guesswork, but IT'S AN EDUCATED GUESS. They didn't pull this out of the air just to torture the chemical industry.
I actually think that quite a bit of this stuff does have an ideological motivation. Greenpeace for a while was trying to ban all chlorine, and brominated compounds are of course very closely related.
You just can't help yourself, can you? Have you ever put more than three sentences in a row without one enormous fib?
Hey yo Way to Go Ohio!
No, you're missing the whole point. It was that it was more important for them to be clean on the inside than some superficial outside cleanliness.
And in fact, eating pork and scallops may be divinely lawful, but it is nevertheless imprudent and unwise?
Hey, I like shellfish but even today with modern refrigeration, you still have to be very careful. Imagine the first 6000 years how tough it would be to keep shellfish from going bad... in the desert? What's hard to understand about that? Until modern times, pigs would eat all type of rotten crap and it would not be easy to keep the germs/disease from the meat that was being consumed. What's hard to understand about that?
Have you ever put more than two claims out without then trying to backpedal on at least one of them?
Danger Will Robinson! Some things shouild not be speculated.
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. "
Backpedalling, by your definition, is denying your deliberately deceitful misconstructions of what I wrote?
In massive quantities. There is no reason to expect a linear response for most health effects, except perhaps for cancer, and there is only very limited evidence of carcinogenicity.
In any case, my original statement was that synthetic chemicals are not a significant extra burden of carcinogenicity beyond natural carcinogens.
No it isn't. I don't care one way or the other if it is taught...I merely said it can be taught in some class other than science. Implied, was that someone wanted it to be taught.
Do you know, I've been following these threads for a while now off and on, and I had embarassingly never known what FSM was until today. It's pretty brilliant, though, for sure. Especially the hate mail on the site, that was really funny to read.
In the right class, I don't see why either can't be taught...evolution in science class...and ID in either a religion or philosophy class.
Where we fundamentally disagree is on the issue of relativism. To borrow from Ayn Rand, "A is A." No matter how hard you might wish it was B, C, or D squared, it is still going to be A.
The same can be said about the scientific theory of evolution. You call it "forcing" it upon a child. I call it an education. In fact, a school that refused to teach evolution, the laws of gravity, the earth is round and revolves around the sun, etc., would be doing a disservice.
If you liked the FSM hate mail, you'll love the hate mail at the Landover Baptist Church website*...primarily from people who haven't figured out that it is a parody site rather than a real church. I don't care for the partisan politics on the site but find the rest of it funny.
*Since some of the FR Moderators do not appreciate the humor in any way, shape, or form, I've been admonished not to link or publish stuff from the website. You'll have to Google search to find it.
300?
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