Category: Science Education
WA Post Front Page Story Misleads, Misrepresents and Misses the Point
The Washington Post today published on their front page the latest in a series of drive-by reportings on intelligent design. Not surprisingly the reporter, Peter Slevin, sees this more as a political issue than a scientific issue. He’s much more concerned with how religious zealots may try to use ID theory in the political realm than whether or not peppered moths really rest on trees. Are Heaeckel’s embryo drawings less fake because the Post wants to make this a political issue? They’re missing the point, which is a scientific one. I tried to get Slevin to focus more on the science than the politics, but he was determined to do a political piece. So he decided to come to Seattle Read More ›
Agnostic Philosopher Caught in Conspiracy to Question Darwinism
The Kansas Board of Education is thinking about implementing science curricula that would teach the controversy over neo-Darwinism. The ultra-Darwinists insist that there is no scientific controversy, that opponents of Darwin’s theory of common descent by natural selection are Christian fundamentalists conspiring to establish a global theocracy. Piercing this smokescreen of ad hominem rhetoric comes the wry voice of Jewish agnostic David Berlinski. In today’s Wichita Eagle he writes: The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences — quantum electrodynamics, say — is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to 13 unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all. Perhaps Berlinski, a philospher and mathematician with a Ph.D. from Princeton, is Read More ›
Stop the Presses! There’s Still Nothing New Under the Sun
The Cobb Co. textbook disclaimer has finally been cleverly parodied by Steve Mirsky in the latest issue of Scientific American. And not a moment too soon. Let’s see, the first disclaimer sticker case was a decade or more ago in Louisiana. The Cobb Co. case originated just after the turn of the millennia, and it was over three years ago that the school district authorized the use of the disclaimers. About time someone at long last humorlessly skewered it. Never mind that in December 2004, The New York Times op-ed page published a chart by Colin Purrington, The Descent of Dissent that poked fun at disclaimer stickers and criticized anyone at all critical of evolution. Purrington of course had been Read More ›
Darwin Thought-Police Pounce on NH Columnist
Portsmouth, NH columnist D. Allan Kerr favors evolutionary theory and equates intelligent design with creationism. So you might think Darwin’s defenders would be pleased as punch with him. Think again. Mr. Kerr is being taken to task by the Darwinist thought-police. His crime? He had the audacity to suggest that students might actually benefit from hearing about intelligent design. Kerr was amazed by the swift reaction his proposal provoked from Darwinists:
Ken Miller’s Ohio: An Alternative Universe?
A college newspaper in Massachusetts reports on a talk by Darwinist biologist Kenneth Miller and rewrites history in the process: In 2002, Miller joined a debate in Ohio, where the theory of “intelligent design” was almost incorporated into education. As a result of the efforts of Miller and other scientists, the school board voted 15 to 0 in favor of prohibiting the teaching of “intelligent design.” If Prof. Miller supplied the information for the above statement, he appears to have entered some kind of alternative universe. Members of the Ohio State Board of Education did not ban the teaching of intelligent design in 2002. Instead, they adopted the following benchmark for student learning: “Describe how scientists continue to investigate and Read More ›