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.
Nonsense.
There is no such effort. This is not a legitimate controversy since ID has no scientific basis, and it does not belong in a science class.
That is a dumb statement, that you guys repeat again and again, somehow thinking that the more you chant it, the truer it becomes. Science is based on observation. If we OBSERVE that certain processes must have had some form of intelligence behind their creation/formation, that is SCIENCE. What's so hard to understand about that?
So please, stop with the mindless mumbling again and again that ID is not based on science.
Well, you are at odds with 99.9% of all reports and studies on the subject. I think this says more about your personal biases than about any objective observation. Very telling indeed.
I'm sorry, but nothing observed in biology MUST have been intelligently designed. To claim such, you must first define a criteria for intelligent design, and no such criteria exists. It has basically come down to, "I can't figure out how this may have evolved naturally, so it must be intelligently designed." This is basing a movement on NEGATIVE evidence, when it needs to be based on POSITIVE evidence to be considered science. In other words, you have to find something to support your position, not something that undermines someone else's.
So, no, science never said the Earth was flat. That was a popular (as in held by most of the population) concept -- much like intelligent design today...
Junior, don't get all hung up on the word MUST. In science, many, many things are taught where the the odds point to a MOST LIKELY scenario. And that is ID. So, don't even attempt to pull that lame straw man out of your bag of tricks.
What bogus crap!
The myth that Christians in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat was given a massive boost by Andrew Dickson White's weighty tome The Warfare of Science with Theology. This book has become something of a running joke among historians of science and it is dutifully mentioned as a prime example of misinformation in the preface of most modern works on science and religion. The flat Earth is discussed in chapter 2 and one can almost sense White's confusion that hardly any of the sources support his hypothesis that Christians widely believed in it. He finds himself grudgingly admitting that Clement, Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Isodore, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas all accepted the Earth was a globe - in other words none of the great doctors of the church had considered the matter in doubt. Although an analysis of what White actually says suggests he was aware that the flat Earth was largely a myth, he certainly gives an impression of ignorant Christians suppressing rational knowledge of its real shape.
You are the modern version of a illiterate flat earth mind set, spreading/repeating nonsense, that truly literate people know is false.
Give me an operational definition of irreducible complexity...
Who are they? Certainly not scientists. The notion that the earth was flat was the position of religionists.
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No one has researched intelligent design...that's the problem, there's no scientific research supporting ID.
None.
You're wrong. In the Dover hearings Michael Behe explictly acknowledged that the Earth was old and that ID doesn't dispute that fact. ID is not Young Earth Creatonism, however much a lot of biblical literalists want it to be.
Spoken like a true self-righteous (but phony) Christian.
The third dimension is an illusion? Of all the nonsensical arguments I've heard in support of creatonism that has to be the best.
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