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Posts Tagged ‘ intelligent design ’

Why Do Politicians & Other Elected Ones Spend So Much Time Worrying About Evolution?

January 24, 2009

In June 2008, the Governor of Louisiana signed the Louisiana Science Education Act into law which supports the Trojan Horse of using critical thinking as a way to creak open the door for the teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design as part of science teaching.

And now the State of Texas is having at it.

A New York Times article reports the story. Although the forces in favor of teaching creationism gave up their long battle to insist that science teachers explore the “strengths and weaknesses” of all theories, they were able to stick various amendments on the state’s science curriculum including:

one that would compel science teachers to instruct students about aspects of the fossil record that do not neatly fit with the idea of species’ gradually changing over time, like the relatively sudden appearance of some species and the fact that others seem to remain unchanged for millions of years.

… Read more

Mousetraps and Science Teaching: A Follow-up to Only a Theory

By Jack Hassard

August 16, 2008

In Kenneth Miller’s book, Only a Theory, he talks about the fundamental concept underlying “intelligent design” and goes on to show how the fundamental concept is wrong, and not supported in biological research. The fundamental idea is that there are some aspects of nature that that are just too complex to have “evolved” to their present state; they must have been design by an intelligent being. ID proponents call this “irreducible complexity.” In biology, one of the examples that proponents use is bacterial flagellum. To these proponents, the flagellum is too complex to have evolved, and indeed was designed as is. They claim that without all of the proteins that make up the flagellum system, it won’t work. Research biologists have shown that parts could serve other purposes, and through evolution the more complex system evolved.… Read more

Kansas Reverses Science Standards on Evolution

By Jack Hassard

February 14, 2007

Science education is in the news again in Kansas. The Kansas State Board of Education has changed the language in the science standards suggesting that basic evolutionary concepts were controversial and being challenged by new research. Now this statement is out, and the definition of science has reverted to its earlier version limiting science to the search for natural explanations of what is observed in the universe.… Read more

Evolution Enters The November Ballot Box

By Jack Hassard

October 27, 2006

Evolution is an election issue in Ohio this year. Ninety percent of the science faculty at Case Western Reserve signed a letter endorsing the candidacy of Tom Sawyer for Ohio School Board. Sawyer is running against the incumbent Dr. D. Owens Fink, a professor of Marketing at the University of Akron. Fink supports I.D. and the insistence the the science curriculum standards include lessons in which evolution is singled out to be critically analyzed.… Read more

Dodo’s, Evolution and Intelligent Design

By Jack Hassard

April 12, 2006

A former evolutionary-biologist turned filmaker has created a new film entitled Flock of Dodos-The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus. According to the New York Times article, “the biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design’s embrace of a supernatural “agent” puts it outside the realm of science.”

The film he has produced (not his first—he left the biology department at the University of New Hampshire and received a degree in filmaking from the University of Southern California) does not attack intelligent design, but instead challenges scientists to explain evolution in everyday language—something the scientists in the film have great difficulty doing.… Read more

Clergy’s Views on Teaching Evolution

By Jack Hassard

March 30, 2006

As I reported in the previous posting, a recent study entitled Clergy views on evolution, creationism, science, and religion published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Volume: 43, Issue: 4, Pages: 419-442 reported very interesting findings that science teachers, parents, and students might benefit from.

The authors used qualitative (indepth interviews) and quantitative (a survey instrument) methods in their study.… Read more

Intelligent Design Again in the News

By Jack Hassard

March 15, 2006

Last Sunday (3/12/06), the Rev. Nelson Price of Marietta, GA wrote in his Sunday column in the Marietta Daily Journal, “Intelligent design infers there was a designer.” He brought up old arguments related to the issue: scientists are stifling free speech by not allowing intelligent design into the classroom of science; our youth are being protected from such dangerous concepts at I.D.; some things in nature are just too complex to have evolved by means of natural selection—a designer needed to step in and form these complex systems whole; the watch and watchmaker analogy; the orbit of the earth is just right because of an intelligent designer (this is a new one).… Read more