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Sticker Shock at Instapundit
Instapundit is featuring a joke equating the Cobb County evolution sticker with belief in a flat earth. Glenn Reynolds doesn’t fit neatly into the Republican or Democrat camp. For that reason I’m optimistic he will soon move past the simplistic binary opposition of idiot-Darwinism-doubters-who-only-grudgingly-concede-the-earth-is-round vs. enlightened-secularists-who-understand-that-Darwinism-is-a-given-and-doesn’t-threaten-religion.
Uncommon Knowledge: Wells vs. Pigliucci
Earlier this month, the PBS show Uncommon Knowledge taped a discussion about the controversy over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The guests were Darwinists Dr. Massimo Pigliucci of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and CSC Fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells. Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson moderated the discussion. The 30-minute show will be aired by PBS sometime in the next few months, but in the meantime Dr. Pigliucci has posted his version of what happened on a skeptics’ web site. We recommend that anyone interested in this controversy watch the actual show when it airs. Since Dr. Pigliucci has chosen to publicize his own version of the discussion beforehand, however, we have asked Dr. Wells Read More ›
Did I miss the memo on the sanctity of Darwinism?
The New York Times lead editorial Sunday, Jan 23, avoided addressing in any detail the scientific issues in the national debate over how to teach evolution and instead tried to equate the scientific theory of intelligent design with creationism, and proclaimed all critics of Darwinian evolution are Biblical creationists. It reads like a briefing paper from the ACLU, and probably was inspired by one. Critics of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution become more wily with each passing year. Creationists who believe that God made the world and everything in it pretty much as described in the Bible were frustrated when their efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools or inject the teaching of creationism were judged Read More ›
Rhetorical Excess of the Day [II]
The tasteless, over-the-top effort by some Darwinists (especially those at the ACLU) to castigate anyone who disagrees with them on evolution as Nazis or Holocaust deniers continues unabated. In a recent article in the Cleveland Jewish News, Jeffrey Selman, whom the ACLU represented in the Cobb County case, implies that if we allow students to hear about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory we are one step away from putting Jews in the ovens: When a federal judge in Georgia ruled last week that a local school board’s decision to put a small sticker on its science textbooks labeling evolution “a theory, not a fact” was unconstitutional, Jeffrey Selman said it was primarily an American issue. Still, he said, he could Read More ›
Rhetorical Excess of the Day [I]
The Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Massachusetts is running an absurd editorial with the histrionic title, “Ayatollahs in the classroom”. To get the full effect, you might want to turn on a CD of some suitably melodramatic music from a horror film before you start reading: A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it’s a handful of judges — “activist judges” in the view of their critics — who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America’s public-school classrooms. According to this Berkshire editorialist, discussing scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory in the classroom is tantamount to turning America Read More ›