Category: Culture & Ethics
Kansas Board of Education Urged to Reject Proposal to Delete Tuskegee Experiment and Other Science Abuses from State Curriculum
The day after “Darwin Day,” the Kansas State Board of Education plans to vote on whether to delete from its science curriculum standards the study of the abuses of science as well as the successes. This incredible proposal to sanitize the real history of science shows the lengths to which some will go to promote their dogmatic views. We have just sent a letter to the Board protesting the proposed change. The proposal is part of a package of revisions to the science standards that will also delete any discussion of scientific data critical of Darwinian evolution. Below is the text of the press release describing what is going on: TOPEKA—A national group is urging the Kansas State Board of Read More ›
Flock of Dodos Filmmaker Digs the Hole Deeper in His Hoaxing of Viewers
As reported earlier this week (see here and here), filmmaker Randy Olson presented fiction as fact in his anti-ID documentary Flock of Dodos. But rather than apologize for his film’s repeated bloopers and misrepresentations, Olson is now digging himself a deeper hole in recent comments posted to a Darwinist blog.
Cardinal Condemns Suppression of the Darwin Debate in America: “A truly liberal society would at least allow students to hear of the debate.”
In a speech last night in New York City, Roman Catholic Cardinal Cristoph Schoenborn of Vienna sharply criticized efforts in America to prevent students and the public from learning about the debate over Darwin’s theory. According to the Associated Press report: Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna said in a lecture that restricting debate about Darwin’s theory of evolution amounts to censorship in schools and in the broader public. “Commonly in the scientific community every inquiry into the scientific weaknesses of the theory is blocked off at the very outset,” Schoenborn said of Darwinism. “To some extent there prevails a type of censoring here of the sort for which one eagerly reproached the church in former times.”
Hoax of Dodos, pt. 2: Flock of Dodos Filmmaker Uses Fuzzy Math and Falsehoods to Distort the Truth about Discovery Institute
Note: This is the second of two blog posts responding to the errors and misrepresentations in the film Flock of Dodos. For more information, visit www.hoaxofdodos.com. In Flock of Dodos, filmmaker Randy Olson tries his best to discredit Discovery Institute (DI), the leading think tank supporting scientists and scholars researching intelligent design (ID). But he only ends up discrediting himself by showing how far he is willing to stretch the truth. This article looks at some of the film’s most egregious errors about DI, starting with its claims about the Institute’s budget. Inflating DI’s Budget — by over 300%! According to Flock of Dodos, Discovery Institute has a huge budget for its intelligent design program that dwarfs the resources of Read More ›
Hoax of Dodos, pt. 1: Flock of Dodos Filmmaker Wrongly Claims Haeckel’s Embryo Drawings Weren’t in Modern Textbooks
Note: This is the first of two blog posts responding to the errors and misrepresentations in the film Flock of Dodos. This post is co-authored with Casey Luskin. For more information, visit www.hoaxofdodos.com. Were Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams ever used in modern textbooks to prove evolution? Not according to filmmaker Randy Olson, who in his film Flock of Dodos portrays biologist Jonathan Wells as a fraud for claiming in the book Icons of Evolution (2000) that modern biology textbooks continued to reprint Haeckel-based drawings. But it turns out that Olson is the one who is promoting a fraud. The diagrams in question were unquestionably used in modern textbooks, and Olson himself knows that fact.