Tag: students
Want a Good Grade in Alison Campbell’s College Biology Course? Don’t Endorse Intelligent Design (Updated)
Why do we need academic freedom legislation like Tennessee’s HB 368? In case biology lecturer Alison Campbell decides to relocate to the United States. Sadly, even if she remains in New Zealand, there are already people here who don’t allow for the free flow of ideas, especially when it comes to discussion of evolution. Biology lecturer Alison Campbell at the University of Waikato in Hillcrest, New Zealand, exemplifies a mindset that is tragically common in academia. She openly boasts that if a student were to use standard ID arguments such as the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, that student would be “marked down”: If, for example, a student were to use examples such as the bacterial flagellum to advance Read More ›
A Response to Questions from a Biology Teacher: How Do We Test Intelligent Design?
A biology educator recently wrote me asking how we test intelligent design using the scientific method, how ID is falsifiable, and how ID explains patterns we observe in nature. These are very common questions that we receive all the time from teachers, students, and interested members of the public, and they’re usually legitimate, sincere, and thoughtful questions. In this case, they certainly appeared to be such, and below I post a slightly modified version of my response to the teacher, withholding any information about the teacher to protect his/her identity: We help many educators to better understand the debate over evolution. Contact us for more information!
Introducing The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design
There are a lot of false urban legends promoted in academia about intelligent design (ID). They often start with myths promoted by misinformed critiques in scientific journals, court rulings, or even talks by activists at scientific conferences. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for this misinformation to then be passed down to college students, who may know very little about ID and lack the resources to correct their professors’ misinformed and misplaced attacks on ID. Not anymore. If you’re a college student, recently gone back to school and expecting to hear a lot of anti-ID views from your professors, we’re pleased to present this “Back to School Guide” for students as follows: The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent DesignThe Read More ›
Three Tips for Students Going Back to School to Study Evolution
After attending public schools from kindergarten through my masters degree, I learned a few lessons about staying informed while studying a biased and one-sided origins curriculum. My large, inner-city public high school was rich in diversity, and I learned to appreciate a multiplicity of viewpoints and backgrounds. Unfortunately, this diversity did not extend into the biology classroom. There I was told there was one, and only one, acceptable perspective regarding origins: neo-Darwinian theory. As students head back to school this year, I want to share some tips I’ve learned to help students stay informed on this topic: Tip #1: Never opt out of learning evolution. In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get. Evolutionary biologist Patrick J. Keeling claims Read More ›
Helping Students Answer a Professor’s Challenge to “Find a Fact” That Supports Intelligent Design (Part 2)
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, some students from a university biology class have e-mailed us trying to answer a challenge from their professor to “Find a fact (observation, data) that supports” intelligent design or evolution. These students wanted to find facts supporting intelligent design, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I told them that ID meets their professor’s definition of a theory: something that is “supported by a large amount of data (observations in the physical world)” and has a “broad application to explain a wide range of phenomena” and “a framework that allows the development of novel hypotheses (questions about nature).” In this second installment I’ll provide the rest of my response to Read More ›