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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
Once again, the hypothesis of Intelligent design is not that somethings are intelligently designed and some are not and that we can distinguish between them. The I.D. hypothesis is that life itself is incapable of any large scale change without the intervention of an intelligent designer.
61 posted on 07/08/2008 2:33:53 PM PDT by allmendream
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To: allmendream
The I.D. hypothesis is that life itself is incapable of any large scale change without the intervention of an intelligent designer.

Another strawman. There is absolutely no requirement for such a constraint.

To demonstrate the validity of the biological ID hypothesis, it is enough to point out that specific examples of intelligent design -- in the form of large scale biological changes --can and do take place, on a daily and industrial-scale basis.

Validation of a hypothesis is not verification, of course (you do understand the difference, I presume). One cannot simply brush off the scientific necessity of producing evidence through testing.

Nevertheless, your suggestion that the post-production detection of such biological efforts is scientifically impossible, and therefore not worth doing, is rather difficult to take seriously.

62 posted on 07/08/2008 2:44:35 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: r9etb
What then do you consider to be the I.D. hypothesis? If everything I say is a “strawman” then perhaps you had better tell me what “man” you posit is under that straw, because so far straw is all I see.

I accept Behe’s contention as being definitive, as he is the only actual Biologist to weigh in on the I.D. side that I know of. His I.D. hypothesis is that ‘The Intelligent Designer is needed to effect any large scale change or innovation in Biological systems’. So what then is YOUR I.D. hypothesis?

If all it is is that there are things that are designed by intelligent agents and that we can detect such, well then of course that is completely Scientifically valid as long as you are not delving off into supernatural agency.

63 posted on 07/08/2008 2:54:35 PM PDT by allmendream
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To: neverdem
Typical Dyscovery Institute anti-science nonsense.

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.

So when teachers teach that creation "science" and intelligent design are fundamentalist religious propaganda dishonestly masquerading as science they will be protected by this new law.

Talk about unintended consequences!

64 posted on 07/08/2008 2:58:01 PM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: Non-Sequitur

Neither is evolutionary theory “science”. Where are the testable and repeatable hypotheses which illustrate the formation of cells or organs, OR the cross-spcies evolution necessary for the millions of species on the planet to exist? Bob


65 posted on 07/08/2008 3:04:42 PM PDT by alstewartfan
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To: allmendream
I accept Behe’s contention as being definitive, as he is the only actual Biologist to weigh in on the I.D. side that I know of. His I.D. hypothesis is that ‘The Intelligent Designer is needed to effect any large scale change or innovation in Biological systems’. So what then is YOUR I.D. hypothesis?

I believe you have mischaracterized Behe's position. He may well have concluded, based on his observations and interpretation of them, that naturalistic evolution is not sufficient to explain the sorts of large-scale changes one sees in nature. Note, however, that Behe also acknowledges that evolution can and does occur at a certain level.

Clearly there is a balance that can be struck between the two. So I would say that "large scale" is a term that needs to be carefully defined, and you have not done so.

The fact of the matter remains, however, that intelligent design can and does occur on a daily basis. It is clearly not the impossible hypothesis that you make it out to be.

If all it is is that there are things that are designed by intelligent agents and that we can detect such, well then of course that is completely Scientifically valid as long as you are not delving off into supernatural agency.

You're almost there ... but not quite. There's no scientific requirement to rule out a "supernatural agency," either. For one thing, it is as imprecise a term as "large scale." For another, to rule out the actions of a "supernatural" designer a priori assumes that we would not recognize anything that designer did ... but it is not really valid to assume that.

66 posted on 07/08/2008 3:12:06 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: Non-Sequitur
I would also add that the church of the FSM also has a very “credible” theory on Global Warming.

…global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s…As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.



If ID can be taught as science along with Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, then the FSM certainly has an equal place in any science curriculum.
67 posted on 07/08/2008 3:13:40 PM PDT by Caramelgal (Just a lump of organized protoplasm - braying at the stars :),)
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To: r9etb
Let me ask you a very simple question. If the “designer” is indeed “intelligent”, then is it also possible that the “designer” is just as intentionally cruel as it is intelligent?

If that were not so then explain to me how an “intelligent” and “supernatural” designer would design a system, our own human bodies for just one example, that is sometimes ravaged by genetic abnormalities and disease? And why would an “intelligent” designer bother to create certain species only to later render them extinct?

Either the designer is not a very good designer or the designer intentionally built flaws into its creation out of some sort of cruel whim.

How would you, as a science teacher teaching ID, explain this to students with the same or similar questions without bringing your own personal religious/spiritual beliefs into the conversation?
68 posted on 07/08/2008 3:33:56 PM PDT by Caramelgal (Just a lump of organized protoplasm - braying at the stars :),)
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To: r9etb
If you cannot supply a definition of the intelligent design hypothesis it will be hard to address the issue.

I have provided one based upon Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument and it seems well in line with what the Discovery Institute is promoting. If you don't like it provide a substitute.

So if one can distinguish engineered human insulin producing bacteria as “intelligently designed”, does that mean that the other bacteria is not designed?

Appeals to a supernatural agency is not and never will be Scientific. Not unless that agency is predictable and measurable; and then it is hardly supernatural anymore is it?

So was Citrate plus e.coli intelligently designed?

Was nylon eating bacteria intelligently designed?

What exactly is your I.D. hypothesis. Hard to address it if you will not state it.

69 posted on 07/08/2008 3:38:23 PM PDT by allmendream
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To: neverdem
"Mr West, I reccommed that you read this book"
70 posted on 07/08/2008 3:40:45 PM PDT by Oztrich Boy (Society is well governed when the people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law)
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To: neverdem

I am so pleased to hear this!


71 posted on 07/08/2008 3:54:37 PM PDT by upcountryhorseman (An old fashioned conservative)
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To: gobucks

Thanks for the feedback! Go forth and multiply.


72 posted on 07/08/2008 4:53:37 PM PDT by neverdem (I'm praying for a Divine Intervention.)
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To: alstewartfan
Where are the testable and repeatable hypotheses which illustrate the formation of cells or organs, OR the cross-spcies evolution necessary for the millions of species on the planet to exist?

One could easily ask the same about the intelligent designer? How do you test that?

73 posted on 07/08/2008 4:54:18 PM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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To: Non-Sequitur

I guess your definition of “intelligent designer” is quite different than mine. Sounds like the word “intelligent” is somewhat foreign to you.


74 posted on 07/08/2008 6:30:32 PM PDT by TexasKate
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To: Non-Sequitur; TexasKate
//Then by all means let's add the Flying Spaghetti Monster to the discussion. It's a form of Intelligent Design//

Now that you mention it, I hope that the evolutionists attempt just that in the classrooms. The kids are a lot sharper than you give them credit for and they will see right through that. It will be obvious to the kids that the evolutionist will do anything, use any trick they can grab to 'avoid confronting the weaknesses of common descent'

Actually in that regard ID is used by the evolutionist as a strawman

75 posted on 07/08/2008 6:52:17 PM PDT by valkyry1
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To: r9etb
Selective breeding is a form of intelligent design ... and life is quite obviously susceptible to it.

Exactly - and breeding produces results which are just the opposite of what we see in nature. The products of breeding often (perhaps usually) cannot survive in the wild at all; when they do survive, the features produced by breeding are generally soon lost.

76 posted on 07/08/2008 9:07:13 PM PDT by Christopher Lincoln
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To: Caramelgal
the “designer” is indeed “intelligent”, then is it also possible that the “designer” is just as intentionally cruel as it is intelligent?

That's not a "simple question," it's just you trying to lure me into a religious debate. Sorry ... not biting.

77 posted on 07/08/2008 9:10:29 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: allmendream
If you cannot supply a definition of the intelligent design hypothesis it will be hard to address the issue.

(Rolls eyes) You're determined to add complexity, aren't you?

The hypothesis would be: "this phenomenon was the result of an intentional action by an intelligent agent."

Simple as that.

Now, verifying the hypothesis may very well be difficult to do -- but the hypothesis itself is much easier than you apparently wish it to be.

For example, when confronted with our insulin-producing bacterium, we can state the following ID hypothesis: "this insulin-producing bacteria does what it does as a result of deliberate genetic modification."

One source of evidence to support the hypothesis would be to sequence the bacterial genome. It will reveal the "extra" human insulin gene among what otherwise appears to be "regular" bacterial DNA -- about what one would expect from the recombination process.

As a "scientist" who rejects the possibility of a valid ID hypothesis, you'd be stuck trying to show how that human insulin gene got into the bacterium by natural means. You could probably even come up with a mechanism -- albeit one that requires a whole lot more, and more tenuous, assumptions than the ID hypothesis does in that case.

78 posted on 07/08/2008 9:23:12 PM PDT by r9etb
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To: neverdem; steve-b
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.”

This is the exact opposite of the truth. The point of eugenics is to defeat natural selection, which eugenicists hubristically imagine they are able to do.

steve-b is quite right to point out (in post 2) that eugenics is a form of intelligent design. Not intelligent enough, you say? Exactly: nothing and nobody is intelligent enough. The believer need not dispute this; I have said before that omniscience is not a high level of intelligence, but a different concept altogether.

79 posted on 07/08/2008 9:29:14 PM PDT by Christopher Lincoln
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To: r9etb
So the hypothesis in regards to Biology would be “this complex metabolic pathway was the result of an intentional act by an intelligent agent”?

So what intentional act and what intelligent agent led to the development of citrate plus e.coli?

If one can tell that a gene modified organism was the result of the intentional act of an intelligent agent couldn't this only be detected against the background of an organism that the majority of the genome was not the intentional act of an intelligent agent but the accumulation of millions of rounds of mutation and selective pressure?

80 posted on 07/08/2008 9:33:39 PM PDT by allmendream
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