Category: News Media
Mort Needs a New Research Assistant
WANTED: A new research assistant for Morton Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call and political commentator extraordinaire. An ability to read original documents and separate fact from fiction preferred. Please reply ASAP in order to spare Mort further embarrassment.
Kansas Board of Education Poised to Adopt New Science Standards
The Kansas State Board of Education is scheduled to take up discussion tomorrow of the proposed revisions to the state’s science standards (although an actual up or down vote might not come until later in the summer). The Board’s Science Hearings Committee, after hearing testimony from nearly two dozen scientists and scholars last month about how evolution should be presented in the classroom, will apparently recomend the adoption of the draft standards which call for students to learn more about the scientific evidence regarding chemical and biological evolution, including scientific criticisms raised in peer-reviewed science journals. In a one page rationale for their recommendation the committee states that it had “heard credible scientific testimony that indeed there are significant debates Read More ›
PBS Tackles Evolution Debate Again, but Fumbles in the Endzone
This past weekend PBS program Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly aired a story about the Kansas board of education’s recent hearings on evolution. The producers tried to cover the whole debate and allowed many of the different points of view to be included. In that regard the program was better than most news stories on the issue.
Privileged Planet Critic Taken to the Woodshed
The NCSE has posted a rant against The Privileged Planet by William H Jefferys from University of Texas at Austin. Fortunately, I don’t have to waste time responding to this anti-intellectual diatribe because physicist David Heddle has already responded with a detailed rebuttal, noting that of all The Privileged Planet reviews out there’s he’s never seen “one as comprehensively bad and unthinking as William H Jefferys’s.” If you’re wondering who is Heddle to be trash talking a “scientist” from a state University, well first he has his very own Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. And hey, he has actually put it to work conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And, oh Read More ›
Privileged Planet Critics Still Don’t Get It
Today’s Washington Post has a handful of letters about the dust-up at the Smithsonian over the screening of The Privileged Planet later this month, both good and bad. First the good.