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Darwin’s Legacy: Scientific Breakthrough or Breakdown?
On Thursday, October 28 the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History will host a panel discussion exploring the impact of Darwin’s theory on eugenics and scientific racism: Darwin’s Legacy: Scientific Breakthrough or Breakdown? Currently the museum is exhibiting LUCY: The Story of Human Origins, which explores the use of anthropologic findings and fossil casts, and The Genographic Project Exhibition that explores the use of genetic/DNA scientific techniques in understanding the origins of humankind. The Wright Museum describes itself as the world’s largest institution dedicated to the African American experience. So, because the exhibit pays homage to Darwinian evolution, it shouldn’t be surprising that they would want to also look at the impact Darwin’s theory has had over the Read More ›
Should it Matter that the California Science Center was “Unaware of the Nature of the Groups Involved”?
In a prior post, I noted that California Science Center (CSC) vice president Christina Sion wrote regarding the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) that “the main problem is that it is an anti-Darwin/creationist group.” This is clear evidence of viewpoint discrimination by the CSC in its decision to cancel the AFA’s screening of Darwin’s Dilemma. More evidence comes in an e-mail from Joe DeAmicis, CSC’s vice president of marketing, to CSC curator Ken Phillips. DeAmicis implies that had the museum known of “the nature of the groups,” they might have acted differently: This screening event was booked through the Events Dept., and they were unaware of the nature of the groups involved. It has come to Jeff’s attention and he is Read More ›
Back to School Lesson Plans That Actually Help Students Understand Evolution
The taxpayer-funded “Evolution Readiness Project” seeks to “teach young children how Darwin’s model of natural selection explains the observation that organisms are adapted to their environment” in hopes that they will “believe in” evolution. The project offers a variety of lesson plans which are just as bad as the book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, a primary resource the project recommends which I critiqued in previous posts (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5). As we’ve seen, this project promotes a decidedly one-sided view of evolution. What would it look like to teach students about evolution in an objective fashion, which follows the proscription of leading science educators to teach students about both Read More ›
Evolution Readiness Project Overplays the Evidence for Evolution
As discussed in previous posts, the $1,990,459 taxpayer funded Evolution Readiness Project recommends reading to fourth graders a book called Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution. The book gives a misleading picture of the development of biological thought when it comes to common ancestry. It says that when “scientists were creating systems to organize living things by placing them into groups,” the same “scientists thought, many different plants and animals had come from the same ancestors and had changed over time.” The problem is that this omits the glaring fact that the father of taxonomy himself, Carl Linnaeus, was not an evolutionist and in fact believed in the fixity of species. While no one–including Darwin critics–would endorse in the Read More ›
Evolution, Then and Now
Let’s set the record straight; things have changed a lot since “then.” When Darwin first ventured to propose an explanation for the origin of species, he didn’t really try to address the question of the origin of life. No one, at that point, had any good idea of what even really needed to be explained. When early optical microscopy gave us our first images of cells, what we saw was puzzling, but not particularly awe-inspiring. As microscopy advanced, in conjunction with advances in physics and chemistry, what came clearer into focus was that cellular structure, function and metabolism, and thus biochemistry as a whole, was a universe awaiting new discoveries of its own. Who could have guessed that the micro-world Read More ›