Kansas Board Passes Science Standards
The Kansas Board of Education approved science standards for public schools today that allow for students to hear evidence for and against macroevolutionary theory. This made the front page of the Washington Post and will get a lot of attention from the national media, because they love to pick on Kansas. However, Ohio and Minnesota already did the same thing. Not much attention was paid to Minnesota, presumably because it did not fit the red state stereotypes and the Inherit the Wind mythology.
My persistent question is this: what justification is there for insisting that students be taught the evidence for evolutionary theory but banning any information against it, like the fossil record of the Cambrian Explosion, which all mainstream scientists acknowledge? What possible basis can there be for banning this information, when many people view this as extremely relevant to evaluating macroevolutionary theory?
The fairly ominous AP report in the Washington Post is here. A more positive report is here.
posted by Lawrence Selden @ 3:42 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
The patently blind faith in ignorance that your question presupposes is an affront to the scientific inquiry.
"What justification is there for insisting that students be taught the evidence for evolutionary theory but banning any information against it, like the fossil record of the Cambrian Explosion, which all mainstream scientists acknowledge?"
The basic problem with your red herring here is that you’re assuming an inappropriate forum for a debate which does not exist in the scientific community. High school biology class is not the place to undermine the very material the school is attempting to teach the kids, and the assertion that a debate even does exist about the validity of evolution through genetic mutation is a duplicitous rouse by Kathy Martinites to spin a fact into an issue. It's dishonest.
Additionally, like all Creationists (I'm not going to mince words with ID), you make the woefully wrongheaded assumption that gaps or conflicting information in the fossil or genetic record serve as evidence against the notion of evolution. This is an ignorant and arrogant position, taken by people vainly in search of any sort of logical evidence to buttress their innately religious claims. In fact, we are constantly uncovering and filling in gaps in the evolutionary record - that's how the scientific inquiry works. We didn’t just magically transform from another primate lifeform into homo sapiens sapiens, there were transitional forms along the way, (see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/species.html) and each one of us is one of those transitional forms... Paleoantrhopologists just discovered homo floresiensis in 2003. Do you somehow expect this trend to stop? That the continual stream of new species, both ancient and present, will suddenly cease?
With each new gap or presumed conflict we uncover, we find another biological question to answer. If we find something that initially appears to "conflict," that simply means that we need to re-examine the hypotheses of the certain species involved. This happens every day, and the results are actual, scientific solutions, not more theological questions. To every gap and every conflict there is an answer - it is simply a matter of assembling the evidence in a manner complete enough to find that answer.
But using these gaps and conflicts to argue for a theological agenda completely ill-suited to the scientific inquiry is fraudulent and treacherous. As quotes from my blog have said, ID asks theological questions. ID has no testable hypothesis. ID can make no predictions. ID explains nothing.
ID is not science. If it belongs anywhere (frankly I don’t think it does) ID’s place is in comparative religion or philosophy classes at the college level, not in high school bio classes.
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