Month: June 2010
How Have Darwin Lobbyists Misused the Santorum Amendment?
Gonzaga University law professor David DeWolf’s recent article in University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy retells the history of the Santorum Amendment. This first installment explained the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Santorum Amendment language into the Conference Report of the No Child Left Behind Act. This second installment will quote further from his article, “The ‘Teach the Controversy’ Controversy,” and give examples of how evolution lobbyists have not only wrongly accused “teaching the controversy” proponents of “misleading” school boards “as to the content of the law,” but also how these same Darwin advocates have themselves understated the importance of Congress’s statement in the Santorum Amendment. Professor DeWolf’s full article can be read here. The Read More ›
Let’s Do the Math Again
Earlier today I criticized Calvin College biologist Steve Matheson’s incorrect view of “junk” DNA. Matheson had argued in February that the human genome contains about 190,000 introns (stretches of non-protein-coding DNA that interrupt protein-coding genes), of which “only a handful” had important functional roles. “How many? Oh, probably a dozen,” he wrote, “but let’s be really generous. Let’s say that a hundred introns in the human genome are known to have ‘important functional roles.’ Oh fine, let’s make it a thousand.”On the contrary, I pointed out that at least 90% of genes are alternatively spliced, meaning that 0.9 x 190,000 = 171,000 introns are involved in alternative splicing, an essential process that helps to ensure that the proper proteins are Read More ›
Matheson’s Intron Fairy Tale
The failure to recognize the importance of introns “may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” –John Mattick, Molecular biologist, University of Queensland, quoted in Scientific American On Friday, May 14, I watched as Steve Meyer faced his critics — two of them anyway, Art Hunt and Steve Matheson — at Biola University in Los Angeles. Matheson had previously claimed that Meyer misrepresented introns in his book, Signature in the Cell. (Introns are non-protein-coding sequences of DNA that occur within protein-coding regions.) In a blog post dated February 14, Matheson had accused Meyer of “some combination of ignorance, sloth, and duplicity” for stating in his book that although introns do not encode Read More ›
“The ‘Teach the Controversy’ Controversy”: David DeWolf Tells the True Story of the Santorum Amendment
I recently blogged about my law review article in University of St. Thomas Journal of Law & Public Policy. Discovery Institute senior fellow David DeWolf, professor of law at Gonzaga University School of Law, also published an article in the same issue of that journal titled “The ‘Teach the Controversy’ Controversy.” One of the most interesting components of Professor DeWolf’s article is his retelling of the adoption of the Santorum Amendment into the Conference Report of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Professor DeWolf’s full article can be seen here. What follows is a section from DeWolf’s article. It is the first of two installments here on ENV that will tell the story of the Santorum Amendment and Read More ›
Teaching More, Not Less
Any critically-thinking parent whose child has been forced to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will sympathize with petitions to ban discussions of global warming in public school science classes. Apparently such petitions are starting to crop up around the US. But I think this impulse, while understandable, is deeply misguided, as Vincent Carroll argues in the Denver Post. While it might be easier just to avoid subjects like man-made global warming (or Darwinian evolution), it’s hard to see how scientific literacy will be improved by avoiding them altogether. It’s much better to separate the data from the propaganda (a tall task, to be sure) and to help students learn to analyze the issue. As Carroll argues: Climate change happens Read More ›