Posted on 12/11/2002 3:19:35 PM PST by jennyp
Columbus - The State Board of Education yesterday unanimously adopted a set of science standards that makes Ohio the first state to require students to examine criticisms of biological evolution.
But board members also agreed to a last-minute disclaimer stating that their action should not be construed as support for the controversial concept of intelligent design, the idea that life had to be guided by a higher power.
Without the disclaimer, at least a half-dozen board members had intended to vote against the standards because they feared it would give schools a green light to bring religion and philosophy into science classes.
The compromise effectively ends a tumultuous, yearlong debate on how to best teach the origin and development of life.
That debate made Ohio the flashpoint in a battle between supporters and critics of Charles Darwin's theory that life evolved through natural processes - a battle that has raged since the "monkey trial" of biology teacher John Scopes 77 years ago.
"Clearly, it was being misrepresented by adults fighting their own battles and using these standards to fight their own battles," said board member Joseph Roman of Fairview Park, who introduced the disclaimer the board adopted yesterday.
The state academic standards don't dictate what local school districts teach, but they provide a powerful incentive by outlining what students must know by the time they graduate. While intelligent design will not be on the new 10th-grade graduation tests, evolution will.
Local districts that decide to teach intelligent design also could face a legal challenge, said Christine Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. She said intelligent design is a form of creationism, and courts have ruled that teaching creationism is unconstitutional in public schools.
"If any school district implements the teaching of intelligent design, the ACLU will act swiftly," Link said. "Our concern is this gives local districts a false green light."
Board members traveled here Sunday sharply divided on how to come to grips with the issue. The disclaimer that emerged resulted from an 11th-hour compromise fashioned by board members Martha Wise of Avon - a staunch evolutionist - and Deborah Owens Fink of Richfield, who led the charge to bring evolution alternatives to Ohio classrooms.
"Neither side got what they wanted, totally," Wise said. "But this is a win-win."
Stephen Meyer of the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute in Seattle, called the board's action "historic." Already, intelligent design organizers have set up shop in New Mexico, which will soon be drafting its own science standards.
"This represents an important milestone in the effort to ensure that students learn the full range of relevent scientific evidence," Meyer said.
But the disclaimer satisfied most evolutionists.
"The board made a clear statement and said 'no' to pseudo-science," said Patricia Princehouse, a Case Western Reserve University professor and a board member of Ohio Citizens for Science.
The new standards will help Ohio recover from the black eye it received two years ago when a national study gave it a failing grade for not even mentioning evolution in its science standards. Retired California physicist Lawrence Lerner, who headed the study, said Ohio would have received an 'A' this time had it not made a point of singling out evolution for critical analysis. Instead, it will get a 'B' or a 'C,' " he said yesterday.
"Ohio has the opportunity of leaping from the bottom of the heap to a par with excellent state standards," Lerner said. "The compromise would place Ohio in the mediocre middle."
Sounds like your kids are going to grow up being indoctrinated, just like you are. Evolution is a pseudo-religious ideological doctrine, and that's all it is. Nobody has ever observed macroevolution and there is no evidence for it on the planet. Moreover, it requires zero-probability events to occur in combinations at an almost infinite number of steps so that the odds against it are essentially infinite. You almost have to be infinitely stupid to believe in it.
Actually, no. Evolution is a principle of science stating very simply that all things change over time. This simple statement is essentially irrefutable. As applied to life, evolution is a principle of biology stating very simply that over time random mutations result in speciation and divergence. Darwinian evolution is a theory, one with flaws, shortcomings, and exceptions, but one with a greatr deal of supporting evidence. That you would cast your criticism in such language illustrates your fear of competition with your favored stripe of pseudoreligious ideology, not your understanding of the subject.
Nobody has ever observed macroevolution...
Perhaps because no one has ever managed to remain alive for the millions of years required to do so? Hrmnn? Yet microbiological evolution has been observed, even forced. One could make the argument that the various breeds of livestock humans have crafted over generations of selective breeding illustrate the principles of natural speciation, in fast-forward. And, of course...(see below)
...and there is no evidence for it on the planet.
Oh, yes, there is. Unless you are one of the tinfoil-cross brigade who insist that the Devil carved all of those interesting bones we keep finding out of stone?
Moreover, it requires zero-probability events to occur in combinations at an almost infinite number of steps...
Moreover, it "requires" nothing of the kind. While any specific mutation is of extremely low (but greater than zero) probability of occuring, mutation in itself is inevitable. Whether these accidents add up to anything, and whether the results survive to alter the general gene pool, this is something that only time can tell. Some will, some won't.
...so that the odds against it are essentially infinite.
Yes, the odds against any given chain of mutations occuring are nearly infinite. So what? The odds against hundreds of generations of one-particular-sperm-meeting-one-particular-egg-at-exactly-the-right-moment which resulted in YOU was also exactly as infinitely remote, yet it is the most commonplace of miracles. Your line of thinking, if we may call it that, is weak.
It is not only flawed, it has been totally disproven. The reason it has not gone away is because it is the backbone of atheism and the left and they still hold sway in our educational system. They also enforce their sway with tyrannical practices and attacks on those who oppose and try to give scientific evidence against them.
Who controls our schools? Conservatives? Who is fighting against alternatives to evolution being taught in the schools? The predominantly left wing bureaucracies that run our schools. In addition, evolution is the basis for the scientific materialism of Communism and atheism in general and those are not conservative dogmas.
The creationism clause was whittled down to nothing due to the efforts of two brave Board members who are themselves creationists: Marlene Jennings & Martha Wise. Neither of them were willing to put ideology above good science, and both of them are quite comfortable that their religious beliefs will be shown to be compatible with scientific discoveries in the end. Neither of them were impressed with the Discovery Institute people when they came to give their testimony.
It has arrived...with schoolchildren being taught what Ramadan is and how it feels to fast for the month.
The IDers have cooked their own goose. Proliferation of "religious tolerance" indoctrinations will now flourish. Profound apologies to the crevos, but you can't have it both ways. Either religion is kept out of public schools (including ID), or ALL need to be presented.
Story of my life... :-)
Are there specific criticisms of evolution being required?
No. In October they voted on a standard that said the students should be able to "describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory".
Tuesday's final vote added a disclaimer that said specifically that they do not have to learn about intellgent design. There were a group of 6 members (out of 19) who had wanted to move the above standard to the 12th grade so the students wouldn't be tested on it; or else reword it to something like "critically analyze scientific theories" so that evolution wouldn't be singled out. But instead they came up with the disclaimer as their compromise.
Many other sciences compliment the theory of evolution. Astonomy and geology provide evidence for the age of the earth, and for the age of the rock strata in which fossils are found. Chemistry (bio-chemistry, I suppose) reveals the inter-relatedness of species at the molecular level. Climatology and plate tectonics provide evidence which is consistent with the various species we find and the history of their development (and in some cases their extinction). One could go on, but the point is that evolution is related to, consistent with, and supported by everything else we know -- which is a problem for those who say otherwise. Well, not such a problem for those who are ignorant of virtually everything.
As for linking evolution to politics -- I don't know. The only rational linkage I'm aware of is the political principle of freedom, which applies to all of science -- a free people should be free to engage in rational scientific inquiry, and they should be free to write, speak, and teach as they wish -- without interference from theological pressure groups. The rubber hits the road in the government run, tax financed schools. I'd abolish them; they're a socialistic enterprise.
How is indoctrination and refusing to allow dissenting views 'good science'? It is not scientific to refuse to address problems with a theory as evolutionists constantly do and as these two IDEOLOGUES were fighting to do.
Evolution is totally incompatible with biology and has been forced to change numerous times because of new discoveries in biology. While evolution claims to explain the descent of one species from another, it has never been able to do so. The original explanation for how evolution transforms species, natural selection, has things backwards. Natural selection kills, it does not create anything. For evolution to be true it needed to propose a creative force which would have been able to add new traits, new functions to the simplest creatures and gradually transform them into more complex ones. The original proposal by Darwin, the melding of features from the parents, did not answer this problem, nor does the more modern version of the exchange of genetic information that occurs in procreation. Such methods do not add any information either, they just reshuffle the information which already exists in the species. Clearly this cannot be the source of increased complexity either.
With the re-discovery of genetics in the 20th Century, the Darwinists finally accepted the incorrectness of the melding theory and proposed mutations as the agent of creation of new information. They ran into the problem that with individuals receiving half their genes from each parent and half the genes of each parent being passed on to the progeny, the chances of a new mutation, even one which might be favorable, had not only a very small chance of surviving more than a few generations, but also had an almost impossible chance of spreading throughout a species. They therefore proposed that most mutations were neutral ones and by gradual accumulation they would change the species. This explanation did not even solve the problem of how difficult it was for any mutation to survive, let alone spread throughout a species.
The discovery of DNA made the above possibility, already quite unlikely and totally unproven, just about totally impossible. The high complexity of a gene and more importantly experiments showing that changing even one of the thousand DNA bases of a gene are likely to destroy functioning completely and are extremely unlikely to enhance it, presented another serious problem for evolution. This was 'solved' by proposing that gene duplication would create new functions without destroying necessary functioning. Of course, as before, this was only theory and no experimental proof of it was found to support it. The same problem of it being hard to change a gene favorably applied to such genes, the only explanatory gain was that incorrect mutations would not be deadly. Even then, this was insufficient explanation for the transformation of species. Similar genes, which are fairly common, only accomplish similar functions. The vast changes required for complete species transformation, are unexplainable without the creation of totally new genes.
With the discovery that genes themselves are just factories and are controlled by other DNA in the organism, and that a single gene often produces many proteins, this explanation was rendered inadequate. Now a new function, which was already known to most likely require more than a single new gene, would require a whole complex of DNA outside the gene to make it work when and if needed. This makes the evolutionary explanation of random, non-directed species change totally untenable and indeed biologists are beginning to call the developmental process of an organism a program. Like all programs, those for life are not made at random.
Apparently you have never read the writings of Nazism's primary racial theorist, Alfred Rosenberg. (Admittedly a tedious and odious task.) Presumably it would surprise you that Rosenberg held -- albeit in a decidedly mystical as opposed to "naturalistic" sense -- that races were CREATED, each with a unique "soul" not related to or derived from other races.
Rosenberg's ideas, and his mystical "religion of blood," formed the philosphical basis of Nazi racism and antisemitism. Following are a few quotes from his Myth of the 20th Century, published on the web by the holocaust deniers at the Institute for Historical Review:
Once we recognise the awesome conflict between blood and environment and between blood and blood as the ultimate phenomenon beyond which we are not permitted to probe, a new and, in every respect, richly coloured picture of human history becomes manifest. This recognition at once brings with it the knowledge that the struggle of the blood and the intuitive awareness of life's mystique are simply two aspects of the same thing. Race is the image of soul. The entire racial property is an intrinsic value without relationship to material worshippers who apprehend only discrete events in time and space [...]
[...]
Cultures are not, in fact, things which descend from the empyrean, for no known reason, as formal culture cycles upon one then another region of the earth. They are full blooded creations which are each in their own way (rational and irrational) metaphysically rooted, grouped about an intangible centre, related to a highest value. All possess, even if later distorted, an element of life enhancing truth. Every race has its soul and every soul its race -- its own unique internal and external architectonic shape, its characteristic form of appearance and demeanour of lifestyle, and a unique relationship between its forces of will and reason. Every race cultivates its own highest ideal. If, by the massive infiltration of alien blood and alien ideas, this is changed or overthrown, the result of this inner metamorphosis is chaos and, by epochs, catastrophe. For a highest value demands a specific nexus of other precepts of life which are subject to it; that is, it determines the style of existence of a race, a people or a group of peoples within a nation. Its elimination therefore involves the dissolution of the entire inner tension necessary for organic creation.
[...]
The life of a race, of a people, is not a philosophically logical development, nor even a process which unfolds in terms of natural law. It is the formation of a mystical synthesis, of an activity of the soul, which cannot be explained by rational deduction nor made intelligible through analyses of cause and effect. Comprehending the inner heart of a culture consists therefore in elucidating its highest religious, moral, philosophic, scientific, and aesthetic values. [...]
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