Response to Wiesel 38

The Washington Post reports on a letter in response to the criticisms by 38 Nobel Laureates, led by Elie Wiesel, to the changes in the Kansas science standards. A press release with the full text of the letter can be found here.

The response letter points out several factual errors in the Wiesel letter, including the crucial fact that the proposed changes do not include teaching intelligent design, but only provide for presenting the scientific evidence and arguments for and against macroevolutionary theory.

What is most amusing is the fact that the Nobel Laureates unwittingly supported the definition of evolution contained in the proposals that they denounced. This is also the definition from which the Darwin Only lobby has been trying to distance itself, so that they can argue with a straight face that macroevolutionary theory has no inherent religious implications:

Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.

Oops.