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Louisiana Confounds the Science Thought Police - Neo-Darwinism is no longer a protected orthodoxy...
National Review Online ^ | July 08, 2008 | John G. West

Posted on 07/08/2008 11:48:40 AM PDT by neverdem









Louisiana Confounds the Science Thought Police
Neo-Darwinism is no longer a protected orthodoxy in the Bayou State's pedagogy.

By John G. West

To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.

Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is “anti-science.” In reality, the opposition’s efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry.

Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren’t well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the “scientific” view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

Real science, however, is a lot more messy — and interesting — than a set of ideological talking points. Most conservatives recognize this truth already when it comes to global warming. They know that whatever consensus exists among scientists about global warming, legitimate questions remain about its future impact on the environment, its various causes, and the best policies to combat it. They realize that efforts to suppress conflicting evidence and dissenting interpretations related to global warming actually compromise the cause of good science education rather than promote it.

The effort to suppress dissenting views on global warming is a part of a broader campaign to demonize any questioning of the “consensus” view on a whole range of controversial scientific issues — from embryonic stem-cell research to Darwinian evolution — and to brand such interest in healthy debate as a “war on science.”

In this environment of politically correct science, thoughtful teachers who want to acquaint their students with dissenting views and conflicting evidence can expect to run afoul of the science thought police.

The Louisiana Science Education Act offers such teachers a modest measure of protection. Under the law, school districts may permit teachers to “use supplementary textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner.” The act is not a license for teachers to do anything they want. Instruction must be “objective,” inappropriate materials may be vetoed by the state board of education, and the law explicitly prohibits teaching religion in the name of science, stating that its provisions “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine.”

The law was so carefully framed that even the head of the Louisiana ACLU has had to concede that it is constitutional as written.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped the usual suspects from denouncing the bill as a nefarious plot to sneak religion into the classroom. The good news is that the disinformation campaign proved a massive failure in Louisiana. Only three members of the state legislature voted against the measure, which attracted nearly universal support from both political parties. Efforts to prevent local scientists from supporting the bill also failed. At a legislative hearing in May, three college professors (two biologists and one chemist) testified in favor of the bill, specifically challenging the claim that there are no legitimate scientific criticisms of Neo-Darwinism, the modern theory of evolution that accounts for biological complexity through an undirected process of natural selection acting on random mutations.

Fearful of being branded “anti-science,” some conservatives are skittish about such efforts to allow challenges to the consensus view of science. They insist that conservatives should not question currently accepted “facts” of science, only the supposedly misguided application of those facts by scientists to politics, morality, and religion. Such conservatives assume that we can safely cede to scientists the authority to determine the “facts,” so long as we retain the right to challenge their application of the facts to the rest of culture.

But there are significant problems with this view.



First, the idea that a firewall exists between scientific “facts” and their implications for society is not sustainable. Facts have implications. If it really is a “fact” that the evolution of life was an unplanned process of chance and necessity (as Neo-Darwinism asserts), then that fact has consequences for how we view life. It does not lead necessarily to Richard Dawkins’s militant atheism, but it certainly makes less plausible the idea of a God who intentionally directs the development of life toward a specific end. In a Darwinian worldview, even God himself cannot know how evolution will turn out — which is why theistic evolutionist Kenneth Miller argues that human beings are a mere “happenstance” of evolutionary history, and that if evolution played over again it might produce thinking mollusks rather than us.

Second, the idea that the current scientific consensus on any topic deserves slavish deference betrays stunning ignorance of the history of science. Time and again, scientists have shown themselves just as capable of being blinded by fanaticism, prejudice, and error as anyone else. Perhaps the most egregious example in American history was the eugenics movement, the ill-considered crusade to breed better human beings.

During the first decades of the 20th century, the nation’s leading biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford, as well by members of America’s leading scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were all devoted eugenicists. By the time the crusade had run its course, some 60,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will in an effort to keep us from sinning against Darwin’s law of natural selection, which Princeton biologist Edwin Conklin dubbed “the great law of evolution and progress.”

Today, science is typically portrayed as self-correcting, but it took decades for most evolutionary biologists to disassociate themselves from the junk science of eugenics. For years, the most consistent critics of eugenics were traditionalist Roman Catholics, who were denounced by scientists for letting their religion stand in the way of scientific progress. The implication was that religious people had no right to speak out on public issues involving science.

The same argument can be heard today, not only in Louisiana, but around the country. Whether the issue is sex education, embryonic stem-cell research, or evolution, groups claiming to speak for “science” assert that it violates the Constitution for religious citizens to speak out on science-related issues. Really?

America is a deeply religious country, and no doubt many citizens interested in certain hot-button science issues are motivated in part by their religious beliefs. So what? Many opponents of slavery were motivated by their religious beliefs, and many leaders of the civil-rights movement were members of the clergy. Regardless of their motivations, religious citizens have just as much a right to raise their voices in public debates as their secular compatriots, including in debates about science. To suggest otherwise plainly offends the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

It is also short-sighted. The history of the eugenics crusade shows that religiously motivated citizens can play a useful role in evaluating the public claims of the scientific community. It is worth pointing out that unlike such “progressive” states as California, Louisiana was spared a eugenics-inspired forced-sterilization statute largely because of the implacable opposition of its Roman Catholic clergy.

So long as religious citizens offer arguments in the public square based on evidence, logic, and appeals to the moral common ground, they have every right to demand that their ideas be judged on the merits, regardless of their religious views.

This is especially true when the concern over religious motives is so obviously hypocritical. In Louisiana, for example, the person leading the charge against the Science Education Act was Barbara Forrest, herself a militant atheist and a long-time board member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association. At the same time she was denouncing the supposed religious motivations of supporters of the bill, Forrest was seeking grassroots support to lobby against the bill on the official website of Oxford atheist Richard Dawkins.

Conservatives should not support such anti-religious bigotry. Neither should they lend credence to the idea that it is anti-science to encourage critical thinking. In truth, the effort to promote thoughtful discussion of competing scientific views is pro-science. As Charles Darwin himself acknowledged, “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”

— John G. West is the author of Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

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TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections; US: Louisiana
KEYWORDS: bobbyjindal; crevo; education; evolution; jindal; neodarwinism; rageagainstthejindal; science; scienceeducation; sciencethoughtpolice
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To: r9etb
That is hardly a bait and switch. If you cannot or will not answer the question just say so. If the hypothesis is applicable then apply it to citrate plus e.coli.

Unlike an actual object that one is determining if it was the result of an intelligent action, what actual object does I.D. point to other than “biological complexity”?

Well, the ability to digest citrate is biological complexity. Was it caused by the actions of an intelligent agent?

101 posted on 07/09/2008 6:46:49 AM PDT by allmendream
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Comment #102 Removed by Moderator

To: TexasKate
What difference does it make who the intelligent designer is? I do know that the answer to this is in every man’s heart. You just refuse to acknowledge this.

Which goes to my point. How can you classify ID as a science when you have no interest in the ultimate answer? Science may not know exactly how life first came to be on this planet, but they don't write the question off as not worth exploring.

Answer this question-if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes? I don’t believe scientists have been able to give an answer to this, and indeed, since there still are apes this would seem to disprove the theory of man’s evolution anyway.

The answer to that has indeed been answered - it's because man did not evolve from apes. The evolution of man spans the Genus Homo and includes ancestors like Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Rodesiensis, back to Homo Erectus. And, GEICO commercials to the contrary notwithsanding, none of those earlier species still exist. The evolution of apes as we know them, while similar to humans, took a different evolutionary path millions of years ago which resulted in the similar, but distinct species, of today. It's interesting to note that science classes apes as hominoids, as it does humans. And that the family Hominidae includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans. The other family, Hylobatidae, consists primarily of gibbons.

103 posted on 07/09/2008 7:05:28 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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To: allmendream
That is hardly a bait and switch. If you cannot or will not answer the question just say so.

It is a bait and switch -- you're switching the argument from one of finding evidence to support a specific hypothesis, to one of trying to explain the rationale behind such evidence.

"Science," however, claims not to care about rationale for phenomena ... as to do otherwise would suggest that there were something other than naturalistic processes involved.

Unlike an actual object that one is determining if it was the result of an intelligent action, what actual object does I.D. point to other than “biological complexity”?

Sigh. I gave you a specific example of the "object" and you refuse to see it.

You're not even discussing the issue anymore -- your objections seem directed toward avoidance of the actual points I've made. I'm through.

104 posted on 07/09/2008 7:12:24 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: Non-Sequitur

All of what you mention sounds very scientific, but I believe most of what you quote is based on skeletal remains and much of it has been debunked. But again, its all conjecture, none of it has been proven according to scientific method.

I’m off to exercise my body-need to rest my brain.

Enjoyed the conversation.


105 posted on 07/09/2008 7:14:05 AM PDT by TexasKate
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To: r9etb
Your other comments simply confirm my point. You're raising "scientific" objections to the possibility of finding specific, observable signs of genetic engineering.

Everyone in the ID movement is welcome to look for evidence of genetic engineering. It's not even expensive since genome data is online.

When humans engineer organisms -- and I presume you would include this as an example of intelligent design -- they tend to insert genes from one species to another, even crossing the lines at the level of kingdom.

This results in organisms that do not fit in a nested hierarchy. So ID supporters might spend their time looking for breaks in the nested hierarchy. ERVs would be a logical starting place.

106 posted on 07/09/2008 7:21:31 AM PDT by js1138
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To: TexasKate
...but I believe most of what you quote is based on skeletal remains and much of it has been debunked.

You believe incorrectly.

Fundamentalists tend to deny or ignore what they find inconvenient to their religious beliefs, and their writings are full of this kind of thing.

That they find it convenient to deny or ignore such findings does not make them go away, not does it "debunk" them. To do that requires real science.

If you should have any questions on the different species of fossil man that were mention in the previous post, let me know. Maybe I can help explain things a bit.

107 posted on 07/09/2008 7:26:59 AM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: r9etb
The specific example is citrate plus e.coli. I am not looking for the rationale behind it. How would one determine if that new metabolic pathway was “the deliberate action of an intelligent agent”?

If the object you are pointing to for Intelligent Design is a man made object then I guess that is as far as the I.D. hypothesis can take you and you seem unwilling to take it further. Fine, we know human beings can intelligently design objects. And how can we determine the mark of that interference except against a backdrop of the “not designed” bacterial genome?

108 posted on 07/09/2008 7:27:43 AM PDT by allmendream
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To: TexasKate
All of what you mention sounds very scientific, but I believe most of what you quote is based on skeletal remains and much of it has been debunked.

Debunked by who?

But again, its all conjecture, none of it has been proven according to scientific method.

Thousands of scientists would disagree with that statement.

109 posted on 07/09/2008 7:28:32 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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To: js1138
Everyone in the ID movement...

Silly statement. Why must ID be a movement? Is "evolutionary theory" a "movement," too?

That said, I thank you for summarizing so neatly the testing approach that I had tried to state before.

Clearly, then, you would have to agree that the "ID hypothesis is not testable" canard is no longer valid, at least not as a general statement.

The techniques of genetic engineering (which is a form of "intelligent design," just as you said) are such that the signs of similar activities by "unknown agents" might be recognizable.

110 posted on 07/09/2008 7:34:43 AM PDT by r9etb
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To: r9etb
Clearly, then, you would have to agree that the "ID hypothesis is not testable" canard is no longer valid, at least not as a general statement.

What ID hypothesis? I look at ID websites -- Uncommon Descent and TelicThoughts -- and don't see a hypothesis.

I proposed something to look for, but in order for that to become a hypotheses, it needs to be tied to some general conjecture about causation, or assigned to an agency having some defined attributes.

What ID does is assert that unspecified things were done by unspecified entity(ies) at unspecified times for unspecified reasons using unspecified methods. In other words, one or miracles occurred.

Now it would be extremely exciting to find a major exception to the nested hierarchy, and very troubling for common descent if the exception doesn't look like a viral insertion. Unfortunately for the ID "hypothesis," the converse doesn't apply. ID is not troubled by the lack of exceptions. That is because, in the absence of a causative agent having attributes, anything is possible.

111 posted on 07/09/2008 7:46:43 AM PDT by js1138
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To: r9etb
Clearly, then, you would have to agree that the "ID hypothesis is not testable" canard is no longer valid, at least not as a general statement.

ID is not about showing that people can design things.

ID is about proving that the Christian deity created everything, just as stated in Genesis, so that religion can be wedged back into the classrooms.

112 posted on 07/09/2008 7:46:51 AM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: TexasKate
Answer this question-if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes? I don’t believe scientists have been able to give an answer to this, and indeed, since there still are apes this would seem to disprove the theory of man’s evolution anyway.

You must be listening to that science mental midget, Rush Limbaugh. If America came from England, then why is are there still English? If Christianity came from Judaism, then why are there still Jews? You need to pick up a biology text book.

113 posted on 07/09/2008 8:39:17 AM PDT by doc30 (Democrats are to morals what an Etch-A-Sketch is to Art.)
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To: TexasKate
Answer this question-if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes? I don’t believe scientists have been able to give an answer to this, and indeed, since there still are apes this would seem to disprove the theory of man’s evolution anyway.

If Miss Jones married Mr. Smith, how come there are still people named Jones?

114 posted on 07/09/2008 8:43:00 AM PDT by onewhowatches
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To: doc30
If Christianity came from Judaism, then why are there still Jews?

Because Satan deceived the Jews (as he has deceived many) into believing that Jesus was not the savior. Which proves that evilution is the work of Satan, as well.

/Sarcasm off.

115 posted on 07/09/2008 8:49:00 AM PDT by onewhowatches
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To: MrB
"Evolutionarily speaking - the creation of life from non-life is being papered over. The odds and the time involved preclude this happening, and any experiments to the contrary have fudged, to put it mildly, the conditions that existed on the early Earth." [excerpt]
You can see the mathematical impossibility of abiogenesis demonstrated here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2040738/posts?page=17#17
116 posted on 07/09/2008 9:26:48 AM PDT by Fichori (Primitive goat herder, Among those who kneel before a man; Standing.)
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To: Non-Sequitur; TexasKate
"OK, who is the intelligent designer and how do you test for that?" [excerpt]
ID doesn't say who the designer is.

Just like Biological Evolution doesn't say where its source material came from.

BTW, The Big Bang was outside the natural laws of physics and was thus supernatural. (i.e., cosmic miracle)

117 posted on 07/09/2008 9:35:40 AM PDT by Fichori (Primitive goat herder, Among those who kneel before a man; Standing.)
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To: onewhowatches
If Miss Jones married Mr. Smith, how come there are still people named Jones?

The existence of people named Jones has been debunked. Evidence shows that these so-called "Joneses" are really people with other names who have merely been misidentified by scientists with a sinister agenda.

118 posted on 07/09/2008 9:58:15 AM PDT by Bubba Ho-Tep ("More weight!"--Giles Corey)
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To: muleskinner

“The only thing the Discovery Institute has come up with to try and disprove evolution are some rhetorical shenanigans. IOW, a big pile of steaming B.S.”

How can you disprove something that has never been proved. Why don’t you concentrate on proving what so far have proven to be unprovable? Wouldn’t that actually be science?


119 posted on 07/09/2008 10:04:24 AM PDT by gscc
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To: Fichori

Wow, a real live snake handler.


120 posted on 07/09/2008 10:04:34 AM PDT by Philly Nomad
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