Showing posts with label Dover trial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dover trial. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Saturday, September 12, 2020
One of the reason why millions of American morons prefer magic instead of science: The biology teachers are uneducated morons. It's a ridiculous disgraceful problem but it used to be much worse than it is now.
Scientific American
EVOLUTION
OPINION
Evolution Education in the U.S. Is Getting Better
The percentage of public school bio teachers who present it as the broad consensus view among scientists—without presenting the creationist “alternative”—has increased markedly since 2007.
By Glenn Branch and Ann Reid
September 12, 2020
Woo-hoo, d’oh, or meh? Which of these Simpsonian reactions is appropriate to the fact, revealed by a 2019 survey conducted by researchers at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), that about two in three—67 percent—of public high school biology teachers are presenting evolution forthrightly, emphasizing the broad scientific consensus on evolution while not giving any credence to creationism? Only in the context of the long and contentious history of evolution education in the United States is it clear what the most plausible answer is.
American teachers have not always been afforded the luxury of teaching evolution forthrightly. John Thomas Scopes, for example, was famously prosecuted for violating Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution in 1925. Although his conviction was subsequently overturned, a national survey of high school biology teachers conducted in 1939–1940 revealed that only about half were teaching evolution as a central principle of biology. And bans on teaching evolution remained in place in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee until 1970.
New obstacles then emerged, particularly requirements to teach various forms of creationism as alternatives to evolution. As recently as 15 years ago, in Dover, Pennsylvania, the local school board attempted to require its high school biology teachers to read a statement to their ninth-grade students describing “Darwin’s theory of evolution” as “not a fact,” and commending “intelligent design”—then a trendy slogan for creationism—to their attention as a scientifically credible alternative. The teachers, to their credit, unanimously refused to comply.
But their refusal, together with the controversy surrounding the related trial over the constitutionality of the board’s actions, Kitzmiller v. Dover, intrigued two parents a hundred miles to the northwest, in State College, Pa. Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer were not just any concerned parents, though: they were political scientists at Penn State with a particular interest in education policy. What—they wondered—are high school biology teachers teaching about evolution, and what factors influence their teaching practices?
To satisfy their curiosity, Berkman and Plutzer conducted the first modern national survey of high school biology teachers in 2007. The results were dire. Only a slight majority, 51 percent, reported that they emphasized the broad scientific consensus on evolution while not giving any credence to creationism, as if to suggest no progress in the 67 years since the less rigorous survey of 1939–1940. That’s why the results of the 2019 survey—a collaboration between Plutzer and the NCSE—are so encouraging.
Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution.
What accounts for the improvement? Did intelligent design’s crushing defeat in the Kitzmiller trial make the difference? Probably not. Science teachers are guided not by case law but by state science standards, which specify what students in the state’s public schools are expected to learn. Standards thus influence the content of textbooks, statewide testing, and coursework for pre-service and in-service teachers. Importantly, they also provide a shield for teachers facing misguided community pressure over socially contentious topics like evolution.
The results of the 2019 survey suggest that a concerted effort to improve state science standards helped to improve evolution education. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which debuted in 2013, include “Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity” as a disciplinary core idea of the life sciences at the middle and high school levels. By now, 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) have adopted the NGSS, and a further 24 states have adopted standards based on the same evolution-friendly framework on which the NGSS are based.
Were states that adopted the NGSS especially hospitable to the teaching of evolution? Not really: in 2007, their teachers were less likely to endorse evolution and not creationism than the national average. By 2019, they were more likely. While a variety of explanations are possible, teachers in NGSS states reported having taken more pre-service and in-service coursework in evolution than their colleagues elsewhere, suggesting that the increased expectations impelled both novice and veteran teachers to upgrade their content knowledge of evolution.
Despite the encouraging trend over a mere dozen years, there is still reason for concern: after all, more than one in six high school biology teachers, 17.6 percent, are still presenting creationism as a scientifically credible alternative to evolution. And almost as many high school biology teachers, 15 percent, are still failing to emphasize the broad scientific consensus on evolution, despite its general prevalence in state science standards and despite encouragement from professional organizations. D’oh!
With 13,500-odd local school districts having primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction, changes to science education are inevitably going to be slow, scattered and incremental. Still, with the aid of uncounted scientists, educators, policymakers, administrators and concerned citizens in general (and perhaps even a certain episode of The Simpsons), clear and convincing improvements for evolution education were demonstrably attained in just a dozen years. It is a victory worth not only celebrating—woo-hoo!—but also enlarging upon.
Glenn Branch and Ann Reid
Glenn Branch is deputy director and Ann Reid is executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that supports the accurate teaching of evolution and climate change.
EVOLUTION
OPINION
Evolution Education in the U.S. Is Getting Better
The percentage of public school bio teachers who present it as the broad consensus view among scientists—without presenting the creationist “alternative”—has increased markedly since 2007.
By Glenn Branch and Ann Reid
September 12, 2020
Woo-hoo, d’oh, or meh? Which of these Simpsonian reactions is appropriate to the fact, revealed by a 2019 survey conducted by researchers at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), that about two in three—67 percent—of public high school biology teachers are presenting evolution forthrightly, emphasizing the broad scientific consensus on evolution while not giving any credence to creationism? Only in the context of the long and contentious history of evolution education in the United States is it clear what the most plausible answer is.
American teachers have not always been afforded the luxury of teaching evolution forthrightly. John Thomas Scopes, for example, was famously prosecuted for violating Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution in 1925. Although his conviction was subsequently overturned, a national survey of high school biology teachers conducted in 1939–1940 revealed that only about half were teaching evolution as a central principle of biology. And bans on teaching evolution remained in place in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee until 1970.
New obstacles then emerged, particularly requirements to teach various forms of creationism as alternatives to evolution. As recently as 15 years ago, in Dover, Pennsylvania, the local school board attempted to require its high school biology teachers to read a statement to their ninth-grade students describing “Darwin’s theory of evolution” as “not a fact,” and commending “intelligent design”—then a trendy slogan for creationism—to their attention as a scientifically credible alternative. The teachers, to their credit, unanimously refused to comply.
But their refusal, together with the controversy surrounding the related trial over the constitutionality of the board’s actions, Kitzmiller v. Dover, intrigued two parents a hundred miles to the northwest, in State College, Pa. Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer were not just any concerned parents, though: they were political scientists at Penn State with a particular interest in education policy. What—they wondered—are high school biology teachers teaching about evolution, and what factors influence their teaching practices?
To satisfy their curiosity, Berkman and Plutzer conducted the first modern national survey of high school biology teachers in 2007. The results were dire. Only a slight majority, 51 percent, reported that they emphasized the broad scientific consensus on evolution while not giving any credence to creationism, as if to suggest no progress in the 67 years since the less rigorous survey of 1939–1940. That’s why the results of the 2019 survey—a collaboration between Plutzer and the NCSE—are so encouraging.
Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution.
What accounts for the improvement? Did intelligent design’s crushing defeat in the Kitzmiller trial make the difference? Probably not. Science teachers are guided not by case law but by state science standards, which specify what students in the state’s public schools are expected to learn. Standards thus influence the content of textbooks, statewide testing, and coursework for pre-service and in-service teachers. Importantly, they also provide a shield for teachers facing misguided community pressure over socially contentious topics like evolution.
The results of the 2019 survey suggest that a concerted effort to improve state science standards helped to improve evolution education. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which debuted in 2013, include “Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity” as a disciplinary core idea of the life sciences at the middle and high school levels. By now, 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) have adopted the NGSS, and a further 24 states have adopted standards based on the same evolution-friendly framework on which the NGSS are based.
Were states that adopted the NGSS especially hospitable to the teaching of evolution? Not really: in 2007, their teachers were less likely to endorse evolution and not creationism than the national average. By 2019, they were more likely. While a variety of explanations are possible, teachers in NGSS states reported having taken more pre-service and in-service coursework in evolution than their colleagues elsewhere, suggesting that the increased expectations impelled both novice and veteran teachers to upgrade their content knowledge of evolution.
Despite the encouraging trend over a mere dozen years, there is still reason for concern: after all, more than one in six high school biology teachers, 17.6 percent, are still presenting creationism as a scientifically credible alternative to evolution. And almost as many high school biology teachers, 15 percent, are still failing to emphasize the broad scientific consensus on evolution, despite its general prevalence in state science standards and despite encouragement from professional organizations. D’oh!
With 13,500-odd local school districts having primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction, changes to science education are inevitably going to be slow, scattered and incremental. Still, with the aid of uncounted scientists, educators, policymakers, administrators and concerned citizens in general (and perhaps even a certain episode of The Simpsons), clear and convincing improvements for evolution education were demonstrably attained in just a dozen years. It is a victory worth not only celebrating—woo-hoo!—but also enlarging upon.
Glenn Branch and Ann Reid
Glenn Branch is deputy director and Ann Reid is executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that supports the accurate teaching of evolution and climate change.
Friday, August 7, 2020
This is one of best explanations for why it's ridiculous to say "evolution is just a theory". The evolution deniers of Idiot America do not understand because they're uneducated morons. This was at the Dover trial in 2005.
Q. Dr. Miller, isn't evolution just a theory?
A. Evolution is just a theory, in the same way that the atomic theory of matter is just a theory, the Copernican theory of the solar system is just a theory, or the germ theory of disease is just a theory. But theories, as I emphasized earlier, are not hunches, they're not unproven speculation. Theories are systems of explanations which are strongly supported by factual observations and which explain whole sets of facts and experimental results.
Q. And how do you distinguish, say, a theory from a fact?
A. A fact is a repeatable, verifiable observation or a result. So, for example, in the earlier demonstratives I showed, it is a fact that there is an altered initiator sequence on the beta-globin pseudogene. It's also a fact that there are five working copies of this gene on Chromosome Number 11. All of these are facts. We can test them, we can verify them, we can put them together.
But facts by themselves don't tell us a whole lot. A very famous biologist once said that without theories to tie them together, biology is just stamp collecting. And what they meant by that was that the production of isolated individual facts is unimportant unless you can tie all those facts together in an explanatory framework, and what a theory is is just such a mechanism.
So evolutionary theory takes the sorts of facts that I have pointed out in the last few slides that the Court has looked at and ties them into a coherent whole by common explanation, for example, by the hypothesis of common descent.
Q. So the term "theory" has a particular meaning within science distinct from everyday usage?
A. Absolutely. And when we're out on the street and we say, I have a theory on what the best way to drive to Pittsburgh is given the traffic or I have a theory on whether or not it's going to rain this afternoon, we mean, in ordinary conversation, a hunch, speculation, a guess.
When we say "theory" in science, we mean a broad, overarching, explanatory explanation that's very strongly supported by fact and by factual evidence and that ties all of this together in an explanatory framework that helps us make testable predictions and testable hypotheses. And if it doesn't do that, it's not a scientific theory.
Q. And is your understanding of theory and fact, as those terms are used in science, reflected by the scientific community?
A. Oh, I think it's fair to say that the understanding that I've expressed here in the Court today is exactly the understanding possessed by the members of the scientific community elsewhere.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
There is a lot of interesting stuff about evolution at this website:
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 1 (September 26), AM Session, Part 2
A. Evolution is just a theory, in the same way that the atomic theory of matter is just a theory, the Copernican theory of the solar system is just a theory, or the germ theory of disease is just a theory. But theories, as I emphasized earlier, are not hunches, they're not unproven speculation. Theories are systems of explanations which are strongly supported by factual observations and which explain whole sets of facts and experimental results.
Q. And how do you distinguish, say, a theory from a fact?
A. A fact is a repeatable, verifiable observation or a result. So, for example, in the earlier demonstratives I showed, it is a fact that there is an altered initiator sequence on the beta-globin pseudogene. It's also a fact that there are five working copies of this gene on Chromosome Number 11. All of these are facts. We can test them, we can verify them, we can put them together.
But facts by themselves don't tell us a whole lot. A very famous biologist once said that without theories to tie them together, biology is just stamp collecting. And what they meant by that was that the production of isolated individual facts is unimportant unless you can tie all those facts together in an explanatory framework, and what a theory is is just such a mechanism.
So evolutionary theory takes the sorts of facts that I have pointed out in the last few slides that the Court has looked at and ties them into a coherent whole by common explanation, for example, by the hypothesis of common descent.
Q. So the term "theory" has a particular meaning within science distinct from everyday usage?
A. Absolutely. And when we're out on the street and we say, I have a theory on what the best way to drive to Pittsburgh is given the traffic or I have a theory on whether or not it's going to rain this afternoon, we mean, in ordinary conversation, a hunch, speculation, a guess.
When we say "theory" in science, we mean a broad, overarching, explanatory explanation that's very strongly supported by fact and by factual evidence and that ties all of this together in an explanatory framework that helps us make testable predictions and testable hypotheses. And if it doesn't do that, it's not a scientific theory.
Q. And is your understanding of theory and fact, as those terms are used in science, reflected by the scientific community?
A. Oh, I think it's fair to say that the understanding that I've expressed here in the Court today is exactly the understanding possessed by the members of the scientific community elsewhere.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
There is a lot of interesting stuff about evolution at this website:
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 1 (September 26), AM Session, Part 2
15 years ago. The Dover Trial. Christian assholes were trying to throw out the teaching of evolution. Christians are scum. There was a trial. The assholes for Jeebus lost. This is what Ken Miller said about human Chromosome 2. I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day1am2.html
Q. Could you give us another example?
A. Sure, I'm very happy to. The next slide, this is another test of the evolutionary hypothesis of common ancestry.
We have, as I'm sure most people know, 46 chromosomes in our human cells. That means we have 23 pairs of chromosomes because you get 23 from mom and you get 23 from dad, so we've all got 46 total. We've got 23 pairs.
Now, there's no possibility that that common ancestry which would have had 48 chromosomes because the other three species have 48, there's no possibility the chromosome could have just got lost or thrown away. The chromosome has so much genetic information on it that the loss of a whole chromosome would probably be fatal. So that's not a hypothesis. Now, the curious thing about the great apes is they have more. They have, as you can see from the slide, 48 chromosomes, which means they have 24 pairs. Now, what that means, Mr. Walczak, is that you and I, in a sense, are missing a chromosome, we're missing a pair of chromosomes. And the question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go?
Therefore, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is, somewhere in the human genome we've got to be able to find a human chromosome that actually shows the point at which two of these common ancestors were pasted together. We ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes so that our 24 pairs -- one of them was pasted together to form just 23. And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken.
Go to the next slide. Now, the prediction is even better than that. And the reason for that is chromosomes themselves have little genetic markers in their middles and on their ends. They have DNA sequences, which I've highlighted in here, called telomeres that exist on the edges of the chromosomes.
Then they have special DNA sequences at the center called centromeres, which I've highlighted in red. Centromeres are really important because that's where the chromosomes are separated when a cell divides. If you don't have a centromere, you're in really big trouble.
Now, if one of our chromosomes, as evolution predicts, really was formed by the fusion of two chromosomes, what we should find is in that human chromosome, we should find those telomere sequences which belong at the ends, but we should find them in the middle. Sort of like the seam at which you've glued two things together, it should still be there.
And we should also find that there are two centromeres, one of which has, perhaps, been inactivated in order to make it convenient to separate this when a cell divides. That's a prediction. And if we can't find it in our genome, then evolution is in trouble.
Next slide. Well, lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. This is a paper that -- this is a facsimile of a paper that was published in the British journal Nature in 2004. It's a multi-authored paper. The first author is Hillier, and other authors are listed as et al. And it's entitled, The Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4.
And what this paper shows very clearly is that all of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.
Would you advance the slide. And I put this up to remind the Court of what that prediction is. We should find telomeres at the fusion point of one of our chromosomes, we should have an inactivated centromere and we should have another one that still works.
And you'll note -- this is some scientific jargon from the paper, but I will read part of it. Quote, Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located, the reference then says exactly there, where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple telomere, subtelomeric duplications. So those are right there.
And then, secondly, during the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated, and the exact point of that inactivation is pointed out, and the chromosome that is inactivated in us -- excuse me, the centromere that is inactivated in us turns out to correspond to primate Chromosome Number 13.
So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
Q. Could you give us another example?
A. Sure, I'm very happy to. The next slide, this is another test of the evolutionary hypothesis of common ancestry.
We have, as I'm sure most people know, 46 chromosomes in our human cells. That means we have 23 pairs of chromosomes because you get 23 from mom and you get 23 from dad, so we've all got 46 total. We've got 23 pairs.
Now, there's no possibility that that common ancestry which would have had 48 chromosomes because the other three species have 48, there's no possibility the chromosome could have just got lost or thrown away. The chromosome has so much genetic information on it that the loss of a whole chromosome would probably be fatal. So that's not a hypothesis. Now, the curious thing about the great apes is they have more. They have, as you can see from the slide, 48 chromosomes, which means they have 24 pairs. Now, what that means, Mr. Walczak, is that you and I, in a sense, are missing a chromosome, we're missing a pair of chromosomes. And the question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go?
Therefore, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is, somewhere in the human genome we've got to be able to find a human chromosome that actually shows the point at which two of these common ancestors were pasted together. We ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes so that our 24 pairs -- one of them was pasted together to form just 23. And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken.
Go to the next slide. Now, the prediction is even better than that. And the reason for that is chromosomes themselves have little genetic markers in their middles and on their ends. They have DNA sequences, which I've highlighted in here, called telomeres that exist on the edges of the chromosomes.
Then they have special DNA sequences at the center called centromeres, which I've highlighted in red. Centromeres are really important because that's where the chromosomes are separated when a cell divides. If you don't have a centromere, you're in really big trouble.
Now, if one of our chromosomes, as evolution predicts, really was formed by the fusion of two chromosomes, what we should find is in that human chromosome, we should find those telomere sequences which belong at the ends, but we should find them in the middle. Sort of like the seam at which you've glued two things together, it should still be there.
And we should also find that there are two centromeres, one of which has, perhaps, been inactivated in order to make it convenient to separate this when a cell divides. That's a prediction. And if we can't find it in our genome, then evolution is in trouble.
Next slide. Well, lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. This is a paper that -- this is a facsimile of a paper that was published in the British journal Nature in 2004. It's a multi-authored paper. The first author is Hillier, and other authors are listed as et al. And it's entitled, The Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4.
And what this paper shows very clearly is that all of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.
Would you advance the slide. And I put this up to remind the Court of what that prediction is. We should find telomeres at the fusion point of one of our chromosomes, we should have an inactivated centromere and we should have another one that still works.
And you'll note -- this is some scientific jargon from the paper, but I will read part of it. Quote, Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located, the reference then says exactly there, where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple telomere, subtelomeric duplications. So those are right there.
And then, secondly, during the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated, and the exact point of that inactivation is pointed out, and the chromosome that is inactivated in us -- excuse me, the centromere that is inactivated in us turns out to correspond to primate Chromosome Number 13.
So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
Saturday, June 13, 2020
In a high school biology class evolution should be part of every lesson but here in Idiot America our incompetent fucktard teachers spend no more than five hours on the subject for the entire year. And 18% of these stupid fucking assholes teach magical creationism instead of evolution. This would explain why Americans are so fucking stupid.
Survey Finds That Evolution Education is Improving in Public Schools
BY HEMANT MEHTA
JUNE 12, 2020
In 2007, two years after the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that effectively put an end to the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in public schools, a survey found that teaching evolution wasn’t faring so well.
Only 28% of high school biology teachers taught that humans had evolved over millions of years without pretending God played a role in the process. 16% of high school biology teachers flat-out said they taught Creationism — that humans were “created” by God sometime within the past 10,000 years.
It was truly disturbing. And, again, that was well after the Kitzmiller ruling.
That’s why the National Center for Science Education, along with a researcher from Penn State University, ran that survey again last year to see if the teaching of evolution has gotten better in our schools. What would it say following the adoption, by many states, of “Next Generation Science Standards” and the lack of any serious legal threat by Creationists to inject their mythology in public schools? And even if evolution is being taught, is it being taught “accurately and completely”?
Ann Reid of the NCSE says there’s good news in the results, just released in the peer-reviewed journal Evolution: Education and Outreach:
… the proportion of US secondary-school biology teachers who present creationism as a scientifically valid alternative to evolution fell from 32% in 2007 to 18% in 2019… And the amount of class time devoted to human evolution shot up by almost 90%.
Much credit is due to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of benchmarks released in 2011 that emphasizes evolution as a core concept. The 44 US states that have adopted these, or standards based on the same framework, have seen the greatest improvements.
Look at that. When scientists emphasize the importance of evolution education, it gets taught more often and more accurately. No Ken Ham money-pit is going to take away from that. To be sure, evolution is still not taught as comprehensively as it ought to be. More than half the respondents (65%) said they spent no more than five hours on the subject in class. And yet that’s still an improvement from the 77% who said the same thing in the 2007 survey.
Now, says Reid, the same focus must also be placed on issues like climate change, which are also under attack by anti-science ideologues.
There’s hope for the future in this regard. But it’ll require science teachers not to be distracted from outside noise designed to discredit evidence and reason. They need to continue reminding students that the broad strokes of evolution are settled science, which is why it’s vital for students to understand it.
BY HEMANT MEHTA
JUNE 12, 2020
In 2007, two years after the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that effectively put an end to the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in public schools, a survey found that teaching evolution wasn’t faring so well.
Only 28% of high school biology teachers taught that humans had evolved over millions of years without pretending God played a role in the process. 16% of high school biology teachers flat-out said they taught Creationism — that humans were “created” by God sometime within the past 10,000 years.
It was truly disturbing. And, again, that was well after the Kitzmiller ruling.
That’s why the National Center for Science Education, along with a researcher from Penn State University, ran that survey again last year to see if the teaching of evolution has gotten better in our schools. What would it say following the adoption, by many states, of “Next Generation Science Standards” and the lack of any serious legal threat by Creationists to inject their mythology in public schools? And even if evolution is being taught, is it being taught “accurately and completely”?
Ann Reid of the NCSE says there’s good news in the results, just released in the peer-reviewed journal Evolution: Education and Outreach:
… the proportion of US secondary-school biology teachers who present creationism as a scientifically valid alternative to evolution fell from 32% in 2007 to 18% in 2019… And the amount of class time devoted to human evolution shot up by almost 90%.
Much credit is due to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of benchmarks released in 2011 that emphasizes evolution as a core concept. The 44 US states that have adopted these, or standards based on the same framework, have seen the greatest improvements.
Look at that. When scientists emphasize the importance of evolution education, it gets taught more often and more accurately. No Ken Ham money-pit is going to take away from that. To be sure, evolution is still not taught as comprehensively as it ought to be. More than half the respondents (65%) said they spent no more than five hours on the subject in class. And yet that’s still an improvement from the 77% who said the same thing in the 2007 survey.
Now, says Reid, the same focus must also be placed on issues like climate change, which are also under attack by anti-science ideologues.
There’s hope for the future in this regard. But it’ll require science teachers not to be distracted from outside noise designed to discredit evidence and reason. They need to continue reminding students that the broad strokes of evolution are settled science, which is why it’s vital for students to understand it.
Saturday, May 23, 2020
"Why is the antievolution movement so powerful in the United States?" It's because Americans are fucking morons. Science makes Idiot America cry.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16469687/
COMMENTARY | VOLUME 124, ISSUE 3, P449-451, FEBRUARY 10, 2006
Creationism and Evolution: It's the American Way
Eugenie C. Scott
The recent ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case that intelligent design is a form of religion and cannot be taught alongside evolution in science classes in US public schools garnered worldwide attention. But why is the antievolution movement so powerful in the United States?
Main Text
In late December 2005 in the United States, newspapers, weekly news magazines, television, and radio extensively covered the long-awaited decision in a remarkable Federal district court trial, Kitzmiller v. Dover. The court case was brought by Tammy Kitzmiller and ten other concerned parents in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, against the Dover Area School Board. Their concern was the board's requirement that “intelligent design” (ID), a form of creationism, be taught as an alternative to evolution in ninth-grade science classes in Dover area high schools.
The teaching of evolution has been a contentious topic in Dover for several years. A skirmish took place a couple of years ago over a student-painted mural of human evolution, which was torn down and burned by a school district employee. In the fall of 2004, conservative school board members—concerned about the new Pennsylvania state science education standards requiring that evolution be taught in schools—set about finding ways to “balance” the presentation of evolution with something that would reflect the generally conservative religious views of the community.
In US public schools, students cannot receive religious instruction, although comparative religious views can be described. Unlike Canada and some other nations, the US does not have a publicly supported system of religiously affiliated schools; our constitution requires public agencies like schools to be religiously neutral. There are privately funded networks of Catholic and Protestant parochial schools for those who wish their children to receive religious instruction in school. Thus, in US public schools, it is not legal to advocate the six-day biblical view of creation as expressed in a literal reading of Genesis in any classroom, nor, since a 1987 Supreme Court decision, is it legal to teach a form of biblical creationism called “creation science,” invented in the 1960s. Creationists have sought to avoid the legal problems of teaching creation science by inventing ID (in content a minimalist subset of creation science). They have been lobbying for the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution in science class not only in Dover but also in Kansas and elsewhere. Policies requiring the teaching of ID are extant in Bluffton, Indiana, and in Blount County, Tennessee, and efforts have been made to incorporate ID into the science standards of several states.
Judge John Jones III, the judge in the Kitzmiller case, was not persuaded that ID is a legitimate scientific alternative to evolution. “Judge Rules Intelligent Design Is Not Science!” was a typical headline, reflecting the judge's decision—laid out in a 139-page ruling—that ID was merely a form of creationism. His ruling that the new ID form of creationism is a form of religion and thus its teaching in science classes is unconstitutional is of course a great victory for science and science education. However, many newspapers commented that other communities around the country are still wrestling with creationism and that, even with the solid anti-ID decision in Kitzmiller, there may well be other Dovers and possibly other trials in the future. And, proving them correct, within a month, a small school district in southern California was embroiled in a lawsuit brought by parents against an intersession course on ID.
Outside of the United States, people are dumbfounded by events like these. They find it inexplicable that a powerful, modern industrial nation that routinely sweeps the Nobel prizes in science nonetheless is home to a population almost half of whom rejects one of the foundational ideas of modern science. Why do Americans have such a problem with evolution? There are a number of reasons for American antievolutionism, many of which lie in the social, political, and, especially, religious history of the United States.
The US constitution codifies the separation of church and state partly because the founding fathers knew the bloody history of religious warfare that had scarred so much of Europe. Religious history in the US is marked by a strong current of religious dissidence, having been colonized originally by members of sects with quite specific—and different—ideas about salvation. The US has also fostered a tradition of decentralized, do-it-yourself theology that produced many extant and extinct sects, including the Latter-Day Saints, Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Shakers, and others (Scott, 2005). The tendency not to follow ecclesiastical authority has a long history on our side of the Atlantic.
The decentralization of religion arises partly from the dissident tradition and partly from our frontier tradition. For much of early American history, there were no central governing bodies, and, if a frontier settlement desired police stations, fire houses, schools, or other community services, they had to devise ways of providing them; outside help from territorial or state governments was generally unavailable or ineffective, and the federal government was too weak to extend services to frontier communities. If a community wanted churches, it often was on its own: it had to hire a minister (or someone in the community was “called” to serve) and raise funds to build and support a church. Local control and local orientation grows naturally out of a dissident, frontier history where hierarchy is neither possible nor desired.
In the United States, education is decentralized to a degree not seen in any other developed nation. This may reflect America's frontier history, in which local control of education was a necessity that became enshrined as an ideal. Americans are fiercely protective and defensive of local control of education, even when it results in great inequities of educational opportunity. But whatever the relative merits of local control of education—and there are of course advantages—control of curriculum is not one of them. When I talk to the foreign press, I usually have to preface discussion of the creationism/evolution controversy by explaining that, no, the US does not have a national curriculum in science and that, in fact, local school boards composed of well-meaning if largely scientifically uninformed individuals are ultimately responsible for deciding what gets taught and when. I explain that the US has approximately 17,000 independent school districts and that this administrative patchwork results in a highly irregular distribution of curricula. Some students learn the planets of the solar system in grade 2, some in grade 3, and some never get around to it at all. Some districts require teachers to teach evolution, and some ignore it completely. Understandably, this elicits surprise from those who live in countries where national curricula are viewed as the source of stability in instruction.
Standardization of curricula is beginning to take place, however. The Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk called for the establishment of subject matter curriculum standards, and the process was begun during the administration of the first President Bush. Because of the decentralization of American education, the national standards in math, history, and science would only be advisory guides for states as they developed their own standards and subject matter curricula. The National Science Education Standards (NSES) were published in 1996 (National Research Council, 1996 ), and were highly influential as states devised their standards. Because professional scientists had written the NSES content sections, evolution was well represented; evolution thus entered the curriculum of many states for the first time. Through a variety of carrot-and-stick provisions, states would coax or coerce local school districts into adopting the state standards—for example, by withholding state money from districts that did not adopt the state standards. Ironically, what began as an effort to improve the quality and quantity of science education—the standards movement—triggered the current increase in antievolutionism.
The federal 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law requires states to administer periodic examinations to students; test content is based upon state standards. School districts will be rewarded or punished depending upon student performance; these are high-stakes tests indeed. Such high-stakes tests will determine the curriculum: what will be tested determines what will be taught. Because most state standards include evolution (Gross, 2005), evolution will be on the tests and will therefore be taught. When evolution is taught, antievolutionism increases. NCLB requires states to begin testing in science by 2007; this looming date helps to explain current squabbles over state science standards and other creationist activity.
Another important reason that has enabled antievolutionism to take root is that America has a tradition of free speech, fairness, and letting everyone have their say. This admirable cultural quality is a great advantage when making political and social decisions about which opinion should be considered. It is, however, irrelevant in science. Whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth is not a matter of opinion. Whether living things descended with modification from common ancestors or were specially created at one time is not a matter of opinion, though some Americans would like to think so. Scientific knowledge grows as we make inferences from empirical evidence and test explanations: the scientific community has inferred from an overwhelming amount of evidence that, indeed, living things have descended with modification from common ancestors. Like all scientific explanations, evolutionary theory changes with new information and new ways of looking at data, but the big idea of evolution—common ancestry—remains solid. Still, the idea of “fairness,” of “balancing” evolution with a religious idea, has enormous traction for the American public.
Another explanation for antievolutionism in the US is the popularity of biblical literalism in American Christianity, a religious tradition that is relatively rare in European Christianity. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of booklets were published called “The Twelve Fundamentals.” They outlined a back-to-basics type of American Christianity stressing the inerrancy of the Bible, which began a religious tradition known as Fundamentalism. It has been far more popular in North America than in any other part of the world, and it is within the biblical literalist tradition of Fundamentalism that antievolutionism finds its roots. The best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants routinely teach evolution in their parochial schools. Their formal theological positions on evolution are typically a form of theistic evolution—the view that evolution occurred, but it is part of God's plan and God works through evolution. Because of some confusion around this issue, the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, recently published an article by a scientist reiterating doctrinal acceptance of evolution. Historically, some of the most vigorous and effective opponents of creationism in the schools have been religious leaders.
It is safe to say that antievolutionism is largely an American problem. But it is being exported to foreign countries, and in the last couple of years, NCSE has received reports of creationist activity outside of the US. The pattern has been very different from American creationism. Creationist “flare ups” recently have occurred in Brazil, Serbia, and Italy, all of which have top-down education systems in which a central administrator has considerable authority to make decisions about education policy. In all three of these countries, antievolution policies were imposed from on high: the top education official made the decision. In Serbia, for example, Ljiljana Colic, minister of education, decided (apparently with no consultation with other administrators) to remove evolution from the curriculum. After an outcry from scientists, teachers, the clergy, politicians, and others, the decision was reversed and Colic resigned (Hamilton, 2004). This top-down education system is quite different from the decentralized American pattern, where antievolutionist pressure typically arises from grass-roots activity.
In the United Kingdom, a slightly different pattern has occurred with the establishment of “academies,” a charter-school-type system established by the British government to improve student performance in low-performing areas. Citizens can operate independent schools that nonetheless receive a large amount of public money. The academies are free to experiment with curricula, labor policies, and organization in a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to improving public education. A wealthy businessman, Sir Peter Vardy, has founded a series of academies where creationism is routinely taught alongside evolution. British scientists seem to be stunned by this occurrence but, unlike American academics, do not appear to be taking any action beyond the occasional outraged letter.
The decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case that the new intelligent design form of creationism is a form of religion and thus its teaching in science classes is unconstitutional is of course a great victory for science education. The judge's decision was based upon 6 weeks of testimony, a great deal of which focused upon the nature of science, the science of evolution, and whether there was a scientific warrant for ID. Parts of the decision read like a good graduate student paper: When was the last time you read a legal decision that casually referred to exaptation? The “theory” of ID is pretty thin stuff. The main claim is that evolution is an inadequate scientific theory; therefore, it is necessary to explain certain biological phenomena by resorting to the direct actions of an “intelligent agent,” whom no one doubts is God. Accordingly, ID's proponents offer a list of long-refuted creationist arguments about the supposed inadequacy of evolution: gaps in the fossil record, the impossibility of building complex organisms through natural selection, and so on.
Because the religious underpinnings of ID were so clearly exposed in the Dover trial, ID is no longer a viable creationist strategy. The fallback creationist position will be to argue for “balancing” the teaching of evolution with alleged “evidence against evolution,” keeping the content of ID but avoiding the legally problematic intelligent agent. The leading ID think-tank, the Discovery Institute, is already promoting this view, which they call “teach the controversy.” Relying on the public's attraction to the fairness argument, they propose that students should be given “all the evidence” and be able to “decide for themselves.” Of course, the “evidence” is erroneous science, and few would argue that students' critical thinking skills are improved by teaching them incorrect information.
So antievolutionism will continue to be promoted by a well-organized and passionate minority of Americans, to the detriment of science education and science literacy. This is a matter of concern: We seem not to be producing well-educated high school and college graduates, and our graduate programs in the biological sciences already have a disproportionate percentage of foreign-born students. The lack of teaching of evolution in high school is probably symptomatic of a larger problem of the politicization of American education, which is resulting in a dumbing down of the curriculum. Foreigners are perplexed: While students in the scientific powerhouse that is the US are being taught creationism, learning misinformation about evolution, or not being taught evolution at all, students in foreign countries are learning evolution—and then are coming to the US for graduate training. The ruling by Judge Jones in favor of Kitzmiller may have been a victory for science, but the broader issue of antievolutionism in America remains.
COMMENTARY | VOLUME 124, ISSUE 3, P449-451, FEBRUARY 10, 2006
Creationism and Evolution: It's the American Way
Eugenie C. Scott
The recent ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case that intelligent design is a form of religion and cannot be taught alongside evolution in science classes in US public schools garnered worldwide attention. But why is the antievolution movement so powerful in the United States?
Main Text
In late December 2005 in the United States, newspapers, weekly news magazines, television, and radio extensively covered the long-awaited decision in a remarkable Federal district court trial, Kitzmiller v. Dover. The court case was brought by Tammy Kitzmiller and ten other concerned parents in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, against the Dover Area School Board. Their concern was the board's requirement that “intelligent design” (ID), a form of creationism, be taught as an alternative to evolution in ninth-grade science classes in Dover area high schools.
The teaching of evolution has been a contentious topic in Dover for several years. A skirmish took place a couple of years ago over a student-painted mural of human evolution, which was torn down and burned by a school district employee. In the fall of 2004, conservative school board members—concerned about the new Pennsylvania state science education standards requiring that evolution be taught in schools—set about finding ways to “balance” the presentation of evolution with something that would reflect the generally conservative religious views of the community.
In US public schools, students cannot receive religious instruction, although comparative religious views can be described. Unlike Canada and some other nations, the US does not have a publicly supported system of religiously affiliated schools; our constitution requires public agencies like schools to be religiously neutral. There are privately funded networks of Catholic and Protestant parochial schools for those who wish their children to receive religious instruction in school. Thus, in US public schools, it is not legal to advocate the six-day biblical view of creation as expressed in a literal reading of Genesis in any classroom, nor, since a 1987 Supreme Court decision, is it legal to teach a form of biblical creationism called “creation science,” invented in the 1960s. Creationists have sought to avoid the legal problems of teaching creation science by inventing ID (in content a minimalist subset of creation science). They have been lobbying for the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution in science class not only in Dover but also in Kansas and elsewhere. Policies requiring the teaching of ID are extant in Bluffton, Indiana, and in Blount County, Tennessee, and efforts have been made to incorporate ID into the science standards of several states.
Judge John Jones III, the judge in the Kitzmiller case, was not persuaded that ID is a legitimate scientific alternative to evolution. “Judge Rules Intelligent Design Is Not Science!” was a typical headline, reflecting the judge's decision—laid out in a 139-page ruling—that ID was merely a form of creationism. His ruling that the new ID form of creationism is a form of religion and thus its teaching in science classes is unconstitutional is of course a great victory for science and science education. However, many newspapers commented that other communities around the country are still wrestling with creationism and that, even with the solid anti-ID decision in Kitzmiller, there may well be other Dovers and possibly other trials in the future. And, proving them correct, within a month, a small school district in southern California was embroiled in a lawsuit brought by parents against an intersession course on ID.
Outside of the United States, people are dumbfounded by events like these. They find it inexplicable that a powerful, modern industrial nation that routinely sweeps the Nobel prizes in science nonetheless is home to a population almost half of whom rejects one of the foundational ideas of modern science. Why do Americans have such a problem with evolution? There are a number of reasons for American antievolutionism, many of which lie in the social, political, and, especially, religious history of the United States.
The US constitution codifies the separation of church and state partly because the founding fathers knew the bloody history of religious warfare that had scarred so much of Europe. Religious history in the US is marked by a strong current of religious dissidence, having been colonized originally by members of sects with quite specific—and different—ideas about salvation. The US has also fostered a tradition of decentralized, do-it-yourself theology that produced many extant and extinct sects, including the Latter-Day Saints, Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Shakers, and others (Scott, 2005). The tendency not to follow ecclesiastical authority has a long history on our side of the Atlantic.
The decentralization of religion arises partly from the dissident tradition and partly from our frontier tradition. For much of early American history, there were no central governing bodies, and, if a frontier settlement desired police stations, fire houses, schools, or other community services, they had to devise ways of providing them; outside help from territorial or state governments was generally unavailable or ineffective, and the federal government was too weak to extend services to frontier communities. If a community wanted churches, it often was on its own: it had to hire a minister (or someone in the community was “called” to serve) and raise funds to build and support a church. Local control and local orientation grows naturally out of a dissident, frontier history where hierarchy is neither possible nor desired.
In the United States, education is decentralized to a degree not seen in any other developed nation. This may reflect America's frontier history, in which local control of education was a necessity that became enshrined as an ideal. Americans are fiercely protective and defensive of local control of education, even when it results in great inequities of educational opportunity. But whatever the relative merits of local control of education—and there are of course advantages—control of curriculum is not one of them. When I talk to the foreign press, I usually have to preface discussion of the creationism/evolution controversy by explaining that, no, the US does not have a national curriculum in science and that, in fact, local school boards composed of well-meaning if largely scientifically uninformed individuals are ultimately responsible for deciding what gets taught and when. I explain that the US has approximately 17,000 independent school districts and that this administrative patchwork results in a highly irregular distribution of curricula. Some students learn the planets of the solar system in grade 2, some in grade 3, and some never get around to it at all. Some districts require teachers to teach evolution, and some ignore it completely. Understandably, this elicits surprise from those who live in countries where national curricula are viewed as the source of stability in instruction.
Standardization of curricula is beginning to take place, however. The Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk called for the establishment of subject matter curriculum standards, and the process was begun during the administration of the first President Bush. Because of the decentralization of American education, the national standards in math, history, and science would only be advisory guides for states as they developed their own standards and subject matter curricula. The National Science Education Standards (NSES) were published in 1996 (National Research Council, 1996 ), and were highly influential as states devised their standards. Because professional scientists had written the NSES content sections, evolution was well represented; evolution thus entered the curriculum of many states for the first time. Through a variety of carrot-and-stick provisions, states would coax or coerce local school districts into adopting the state standards—for example, by withholding state money from districts that did not adopt the state standards. Ironically, what began as an effort to improve the quality and quantity of science education—the standards movement—triggered the current increase in antievolutionism.
The federal 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law requires states to administer periodic examinations to students; test content is based upon state standards. School districts will be rewarded or punished depending upon student performance; these are high-stakes tests indeed. Such high-stakes tests will determine the curriculum: what will be tested determines what will be taught. Because most state standards include evolution (Gross, 2005), evolution will be on the tests and will therefore be taught. When evolution is taught, antievolutionism increases. NCLB requires states to begin testing in science by 2007; this looming date helps to explain current squabbles over state science standards and other creationist activity.
Another important reason that has enabled antievolutionism to take root is that America has a tradition of free speech, fairness, and letting everyone have their say. This admirable cultural quality is a great advantage when making political and social decisions about which opinion should be considered. It is, however, irrelevant in science. Whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth is not a matter of opinion. Whether living things descended with modification from common ancestors or were specially created at one time is not a matter of opinion, though some Americans would like to think so. Scientific knowledge grows as we make inferences from empirical evidence and test explanations: the scientific community has inferred from an overwhelming amount of evidence that, indeed, living things have descended with modification from common ancestors. Like all scientific explanations, evolutionary theory changes with new information and new ways of looking at data, but the big idea of evolution—common ancestry—remains solid. Still, the idea of “fairness,” of “balancing” evolution with a religious idea, has enormous traction for the American public.
Another explanation for antievolutionism in the US is the popularity of biblical literalism in American Christianity, a religious tradition that is relatively rare in European Christianity. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of booklets were published called “The Twelve Fundamentals.” They outlined a back-to-basics type of American Christianity stressing the inerrancy of the Bible, which began a religious tradition known as Fundamentalism. It has been far more popular in North America than in any other part of the world, and it is within the biblical literalist tradition of Fundamentalism that antievolutionism finds its roots. The best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants routinely teach evolution in their parochial schools. Their formal theological positions on evolution are typically a form of theistic evolution—the view that evolution occurred, but it is part of God's plan and God works through evolution. Because of some confusion around this issue, the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, recently published an article by a scientist reiterating doctrinal acceptance of evolution. Historically, some of the most vigorous and effective opponents of creationism in the schools have been religious leaders.
It is safe to say that antievolutionism is largely an American problem. But it is being exported to foreign countries, and in the last couple of years, NCSE has received reports of creationist activity outside of the US. The pattern has been very different from American creationism. Creationist “flare ups” recently have occurred in Brazil, Serbia, and Italy, all of which have top-down education systems in which a central administrator has considerable authority to make decisions about education policy. In all three of these countries, antievolution policies were imposed from on high: the top education official made the decision. In Serbia, for example, Ljiljana Colic, minister of education, decided (apparently with no consultation with other administrators) to remove evolution from the curriculum. After an outcry from scientists, teachers, the clergy, politicians, and others, the decision was reversed and Colic resigned (Hamilton, 2004). This top-down education system is quite different from the decentralized American pattern, where antievolutionist pressure typically arises from grass-roots activity.
In the United Kingdom, a slightly different pattern has occurred with the establishment of “academies,” a charter-school-type system established by the British government to improve student performance in low-performing areas. Citizens can operate independent schools that nonetheless receive a large amount of public money. The academies are free to experiment with curricula, labor policies, and organization in a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to improving public education. A wealthy businessman, Sir Peter Vardy, has founded a series of academies where creationism is routinely taught alongside evolution. British scientists seem to be stunned by this occurrence but, unlike American academics, do not appear to be taking any action beyond the occasional outraged letter.
The decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case that the new intelligent design form of creationism is a form of religion and thus its teaching in science classes is unconstitutional is of course a great victory for science education. The judge's decision was based upon 6 weeks of testimony, a great deal of which focused upon the nature of science, the science of evolution, and whether there was a scientific warrant for ID. Parts of the decision read like a good graduate student paper: When was the last time you read a legal decision that casually referred to exaptation? The “theory” of ID is pretty thin stuff. The main claim is that evolution is an inadequate scientific theory; therefore, it is necessary to explain certain biological phenomena by resorting to the direct actions of an “intelligent agent,” whom no one doubts is God. Accordingly, ID's proponents offer a list of long-refuted creationist arguments about the supposed inadequacy of evolution: gaps in the fossil record, the impossibility of building complex organisms through natural selection, and so on.
Because the religious underpinnings of ID were so clearly exposed in the Dover trial, ID is no longer a viable creationist strategy. The fallback creationist position will be to argue for “balancing” the teaching of evolution with alleged “evidence against evolution,” keeping the content of ID but avoiding the legally problematic intelligent agent. The leading ID think-tank, the Discovery Institute, is already promoting this view, which they call “teach the controversy.” Relying on the public's attraction to the fairness argument, they propose that students should be given “all the evidence” and be able to “decide for themselves.” Of course, the “evidence” is erroneous science, and few would argue that students' critical thinking skills are improved by teaching them incorrect information.
So antievolutionism will continue to be promoted by a well-organized and passionate minority of Americans, to the detriment of science education and science literacy. This is a matter of concern: We seem not to be producing well-educated high school and college graduates, and our graduate programs in the biological sciences already have a disproportionate percentage of foreign-born students. The lack of teaching of evolution in high school is probably symptomatic of a larger problem of the politicization of American education, which is resulting in a dumbing down of the curriculum. Foreigners are perplexed: While students in the scientific powerhouse that is the US are being taught creationism, learning misinformation about evolution, or not being taught evolution at all, students in foreign countries are learning evolution—and then are coming to the US for graduate training. The ruling by Judge Jones in favor of Kitzmiller may have been a victory for science, but the broader issue of antievolutionism in America remains.
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
I wrote this 9 years ago. It's about Idiot America's Christian assholes who try to suppress or dumb down the teaching of evolution because science makes them cry.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Breathtaking inanity and why the dead Jeebus lost in a federal court.
All creationists are uneducated morons. As Christian fundamentalists correctly say, their dead Jeebus was a creationist. Therefore Jeebus was an uneducated moron.
If you're a Christian but you accept the facts of evolutionary biology, you're probably still a creationist because Christians virtually always stick their creator into evolution (as if magic is one of its mechanisms).
If you're one of the rare Christians who accept evolution and who also agree a magic god fairy had absolutely nothing to do with it (god did not invent, guide, or use evolution) then you're not a creationist. You're not much of a Christian either. You are admitting your dead Jeebus was an uneducated moron. Since you accept evolution without magic I have to wonder why you would want to worship a dead creationist. I also have to wonder why you believe in a magic god fairy who never had to perform any magic tricks. Maybe you should consider the advantages of growing up.
My point is real Christians are evolution deniers (they either completely deny evolution or even worse they pollute evolution with god bullshit).
This post is about the Christian war against science education and the federal judge in Dover Pennsylvania who wrote in 2005 about the breathtaking inanity of the Christian assholes who unsuccessfully tried to force biology teachers to read a pro-magic anti-science statement to their students. The biology teachers refused to cooperate and the Christian assholes wasted one million dollars of taxpayer money for legal bills when the judge ruled against them and their dead Jeebus.
Why did this federal judge defend science education instead of letting Christian assholes destroy science education? He really didn't have any choice. At the trial the Christian assholes repeatedly demonstrated their dishonesty and stupidity while the biologists brilliantly defended the established truth of evolution. The evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of science and against the dead Jeebus.
The Dover trial was more than five years ago. Why am I writing about it now? Because the dishonesty of the assholes who wanted to dumb down science education to accommodate their dead Jeebus is a good example for why I have so much contempt for Christians. The trial showed the true nature of Christians, their willingness to spread lies for Jeebus, their desire to destroy science education and our nation's future, their total lack of any moral values, and their breathtaking stupidity.
An interesting fact about Christian assholes: Jones also received death threats as a result of which he and his family were given around-the-clock federal protection.
Christians are enemies of America, equal to terrorists, and they deserve to be ridiculed relentlessly.
The rest of this post is from the 139-page Dover trial decision written by John E. Jones III United States District Judge.
In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
Breathtaking inanity and why the dead Jeebus lost in a federal court.
All creationists are uneducated morons. As Christian fundamentalists correctly say, their dead Jeebus was a creationist. Therefore Jeebus was an uneducated moron.
If you're a Christian but you accept the facts of evolutionary biology, you're probably still a creationist because Christians virtually always stick their creator into evolution (as if magic is one of its mechanisms).
If you're one of the rare Christians who accept evolution and who also agree a magic god fairy had absolutely nothing to do with it (god did not invent, guide, or use evolution) then you're not a creationist. You're not much of a Christian either. You are admitting your dead Jeebus was an uneducated moron. Since you accept evolution without magic I have to wonder why you would want to worship a dead creationist. I also have to wonder why you believe in a magic god fairy who never had to perform any magic tricks. Maybe you should consider the advantages of growing up.
My point is real Christians are evolution deniers (they either completely deny evolution or even worse they pollute evolution with god bullshit).
This post is about the Christian war against science education and the federal judge in Dover Pennsylvania who wrote in 2005 about the breathtaking inanity of the Christian assholes who unsuccessfully tried to force biology teachers to read a pro-magic anti-science statement to their students. The biology teachers refused to cooperate and the Christian assholes wasted one million dollars of taxpayer money for legal bills when the judge ruled against them and their dead Jeebus.
Why did this federal judge defend science education instead of letting Christian assholes destroy science education? He really didn't have any choice. At the trial the Christian assholes repeatedly demonstrated their dishonesty and stupidity while the biologists brilliantly defended the established truth of evolution. The evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of science and against the dead Jeebus.
The Dover trial was more than five years ago. Why am I writing about it now? Because the dishonesty of the assholes who wanted to dumb down science education to accommodate their dead Jeebus is a good example for why I have so much contempt for Christians. The trial showed the true nature of Christians, their willingness to spread lies for Jeebus, their desire to destroy science education and our nation's future, their total lack of any moral values, and their breathtaking stupidity.
An interesting fact about Christian assholes: Jones also received death threats as a result of which he and his family were given around-the-clock federal protection.
Christians are enemies of America, equal to terrorists, and they deserve to be ridiculed relentlessly.
The rest of this post is from the 139-page Dover trial decision written by John E. Jones III United States District Judge.
In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Google Search by voice: YouTube - Human Chromosome Two
This is one of many smoking-gun-evidences for evolution. If an evolution denier (someone who believes in magical creationism) watched these 3 videos, then he or she would have to admit we share an ancestor with chimpanzees, unless the person is too fucking dense to understand anything.
"The phases through which chromosomes replicate, divide, shuffle, and recombine are imperfect, as DNA is subject to random mutations. Mutations do not always produce harmful outcomes. In fact, many mutations are thought to be neutral, and some even give rise to beneficial traits. To corroborate Darwin's theory, scientists would need to find a valid explanation for why a chromosome pair is missing in humans that is present in apes."
Chromosome 2 - What separates chimps from humans?
"The phases through which chromosomes replicate, divide, shuffle, and recombine are imperfect, as DNA is subject to random mutations. Mutations do not always produce harmful outcomes. In fact, many mutations are thought to be neutral, and some even give rise to beneficial traits. To corroborate Darwin's theory, scientists would need to find a valid explanation for why a chromosome pair is missing in humans that is present in apes."
Chromosome 2 - What separates chimps from humans?
Ken Miller Human Chromosome 2 Genome
Ken Miller on Human Evolution
Also, I recommend Google search - human chromosome 2
Also, I recommend this post in this blog at December 4, 2010 - Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Ken Miller at the 2005 Dover Trial explains why Human Chromosome Two is "lead-pipe evidence" that shows we share an ancestor with chimpanzee apes. I showed this to some Christian creationist fucktards, and of course they refused to understand. Zero effort to learn anything. Stupid can't be fixed. Here it is. It's very interesting.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day1am2.html
Q. Could you give us another example?
A. Sure, I'm very happy to. The next slide, this is another test of the evolutionary hypothesis of common ancestry.
We have, as I'm sure most people know, 46 chromosomes in our human cells. That means we have 23 pairs of chromosomes because you get 23 from mom and you get 23 from dad, so we've all got 46 total. We've got 23 pairs.
Now, there's no possibility that that common ancestry which would have had 48 chromosomes because the other three species have 48, there's no possibility the chromosome could have just got lost or thrown away. The chromosome has so much genetic information on it that the loss of a whole chromosome would probably be fatal. So that's not a hypothesis. Now, the curious thing about the great apes is they have more. They have, as you can see from the slide, 48 chromosomes, which means they have 24 pairs. Now, what that means, Mr. Walczak, is that you and I, in a sense, are missing a chromosome, we're missing a pair of chromosomes. And the question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go?
Therefore, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is, somewhere in the human genome we've got to be able to find a human chromosome that actually shows the point at which two of these common ancestors were pasted together. We ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes so that our 24 pairs -- one of them was pasted together to form just 23. And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken.
Go to the next slide. Now, the prediction is even better than that. And the reason for that is chromosomes themselves have little genetic markers in their middles and on their ends. They have DNA sequences, which I've highlighted in here, called telomeres that exist on the edges of the chromosomes.
Then they have special DNA sequences at the center called centromeres, which I've highlighted in red. Centromeres are really important because that's where the chromosomes are separated when a cell divides. If you don't have a centromere, you're in really big trouble.
Now, if one of our chromosomes, as evolution predicts, really was formed by the fusion of two chromosomes, what we should find is in that human chromosome, we should find those telomere sequences which belong at the ends, but we should find them in the middle. Sort of like the seam at which you've glued two things together, it should still be there.
And we should also find that there are two centromeres, one of which has, perhaps, been inactivated in order to make it convenient to separate this when a cell divides. That's a prediction. And if we can't find it in our genome, then evolution is in trouble.
Next slide. Well, lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. This is a paper that -- this is a facsimile of a paper that was published in the British journal Nature in 2004. It's a multi-authored paper. The first author is Hillier, and other authors are listed as et al. And it's entitled, The Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4.
And what this paper shows very clearly is that all of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.
Would you advance the slide. And I put this up to remind the Court of what that prediction is. We should find telomeres at the fusion point of one of our chromosomes, we should have an inactivated centromere and we should have another one that still works.
And you'll note -- this is some scientific jargon from the paper, but I will read part of it. Quote, Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located, the reference then says exactly there, where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple telomere, subtelomeric duplications. So those are right there.
And then, secondly, during the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated, and the exact point of that inactivation is pointed out, and the chromosome that is inactivated in us -- excuse me, the centromere that is inactivated in us turns out to correspond to primate Chromosome Number 13.
So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
Q. Could you give us another example?
A. Sure, I'm very happy to. The next slide, this is another test of the evolutionary hypothesis of common ancestry.
We have, as I'm sure most people know, 46 chromosomes in our human cells. That means we have 23 pairs of chromosomes because you get 23 from mom and you get 23 from dad, so we've all got 46 total. We've got 23 pairs.
Now, there's no possibility that that common ancestry which would have had 48 chromosomes because the other three species have 48, there's no possibility the chromosome could have just got lost or thrown away. The chromosome has so much genetic information on it that the loss of a whole chromosome would probably be fatal. So that's not a hypothesis. Now, the curious thing about the great apes is they have more. They have, as you can see from the slide, 48 chromosomes, which means they have 24 pairs. Now, what that means, Mr. Walczak, is that you and I, in a sense, are missing a chromosome, we're missing a pair of chromosomes. And the question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go?
Therefore, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is, somewhere in the human genome we've got to be able to find a human chromosome that actually shows the point at which two of these common ancestors were pasted together. We ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes so that our 24 pairs -- one of them was pasted together to form just 23. And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken.
Go to the next slide. Now, the prediction is even better than that. And the reason for that is chromosomes themselves have little genetic markers in their middles and on their ends. They have DNA sequences, which I've highlighted in here, called telomeres that exist on the edges of the chromosomes.
Then they have special DNA sequences at the center called centromeres, which I've highlighted in red. Centromeres are really important because that's where the chromosomes are separated when a cell divides. If you don't have a centromere, you're in really big trouble.
Now, if one of our chromosomes, as evolution predicts, really was formed by the fusion of two chromosomes, what we should find is in that human chromosome, we should find those telomere sequences which belong at the ends, but we should find them in the middle. Sort of like the seam at which you've glued two things together, it should still be there.
And we should also find that there are two centromeres, one of which has, perhaps, been inactivated in order to make it convenient to separate this when a cell divides. That's a prediction. And if we can't find it in our genome, then evolution is in trouble.
Next slide. Well, lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. This is a paper that -- this is a facsimile of a paper that was published in the British journal Nature in 2004. It's a multi-authored paper. The first author is Hillier, and other authors are listed as et al. And it's entitled, The Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4.
And what this paper shows very clearly is that all of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.
Would you advance the slide. And I put this up to remind the Court of what that prediction is. We should find telomeres at the fusion point of one of our chromosomes, we should have an inactivated centromere and we should have another one that still works.
And you'll note -- this is some scientific jargon from the paper, but I will read part of it. Quote, Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located, the reference then says exactly there, where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple telomere, subtelomeric duplications. So those are right there.
And then, secondly, during the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated, and the exact point of that inactivation is pointed out, and the chromosome that is inactivated in us -- excuse me, the centromere that is inactivated in us turns out to correspond to primate Chromosome Number 13.
So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
Thursday, July 11, 2019
The never ending Christian war against science education in Idiot America.
Evolution makes Christian assholes cry. Science education makes these assholes cry, especially when the science is evolution.
Christian scum want to dumb down or suppress the teaching of evolution. They want all students in Idiot America to be idiots like them.
How do these morons for Jeebus solve their problem? They will do anything they can get away with including harassing and threatening science teachers.
Their other idea which has been successful in some of the most backward god-soaked states is changing the science curriculum to give equal time for both the science of evolution and the religious fantasy called "magical creationism".
Since this would be a violation of the Establishment Clause of our Bill of Rights, they try to get their way by inventing new words to replace "magical creationism". Their idea, which is now several years old, is calling magical creationism "magical intelligent design creationism", except they remove the words "magical" and "creationism".
Their idiotic attempt to stick this bullshit into public schools failed in 2005 when a federal judge would not let these stupid fucking assholes get away with destroying science education.
Judge Jones excoriated members of the Dover, Pa., school board, who he said lied to cover up their religious motives, made a decision of "breathtaking inanity" and "dragged" their community into "this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."
After this bullshit failed did they give up? Of course not. They invented new bullshit. The idea they use now is called "teach the controversy".
Evolution is the strongest fact of science. There is no controversy about the basic facts of evolution. These liars for Jeebus want to get away with this bullshit because they know evolution kills their moronic Christian cult.
If you are interested in this subject (Christian assholes in Idiot America) here are some Wikipedia links:
Wikipedia - Santorum Amendment
Wikipedia - Intelligent design
Wikipedia - Teach the Controversy
RationalWiki - Teach the controversy
Christian scum want to dumb down or suppress the teaching of evolution. They want all students in Idiot America to be idiots like them.
How do these morons for Jeebus solve their problem? They will do anything they can get away with including harassing and threatening science teachers.
Their other idea which has been successful in some of the most backward god-soaked states is changing the science curriculum to give equal time for both the science of evolution and the religious fantasy called "magical creationism".
Since this would be a violation of the Establishment Clause of our Bill of Rights, they try to get their way by inventing new words to replace "magical creationism". Their idea, which is now several years old, is calling magical creationism "magical intelligent design creationism", except they remove the words "magical" and "creationism".
Their idiotic attempt to stick this bullshit into public schools failed in 2005 when a federal judge would not let these stupid fucking assholes get away with destroying science education.
Judge Jones excoriated members of the Dover, Pa., school board, who he said lied to cover up their religious motives, made a decision of "breathtaking inanity" and "dragged" their community into "this legal maelstrom with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."
After this bullshit failed did they give up? Of course not. They invented new bullshit. The idea they use now is called "teach the controversy".
Evolution is the strongest fact of science. There is no controversy about the basic facts of evolution. These liars for Jeebus want to get away with this bullshit because they know evolution kills their moronic Christian cult.
If you are interested in this subject (Christian assholes in Idiot America) here are some Wikipedia links:
Wikipedia - Santorum Amendment
Wikipedia - Intelligent design
Wikipedia - Teach the Controversy
RationalWiki - Teach the controversy
Monday, July 8, 2019
How stupidity became a virtue in the land of the free.
Today Amazon delivered my new most favorite book, "Idiot America, How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free".
From the book:
"They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."
"A politically savvy challenge to evolution" makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of the New York Times.
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"Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums 'so people can understand what the debate is about'."
In 2005 Bush was the President of the United States and he thinks there is a debate about the established truth of evolution. There is no debate you fucking moron.
Idiot Americans love their idiot presidents.
One more thing: Fucktard billionaire Bill Gates is on my shit list because he helps pay for this bullshit. Drop dead Gates.
Here is the whole disgusting thing from the New York Times. Lots of extreme Idiot America stupid in this one. I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
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Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
AUGUST 21, 2005
SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs -- and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities -- and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want to talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school boards simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards. Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in the century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary -- and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a few in the organization are Republicans, though these include moderates drawn by the institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological topics like technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is the recipient of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web site to ensure an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages -- first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in 1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design. About a year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing partner, discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their separate studies of biology and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,"' Dr. Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation, there was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a representative of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County, Calif., who had previously given a small grant to the institute and underwritten an early conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in science, recalled being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons and a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations "committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J. Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes Monkey Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because of its drift to the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here was an academic, credible activity that involved funders. It interested conservatives. It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on www.guidestar.org, a Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped to $4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest years available. The records show financial support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all his papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says it was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between 1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million since its inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science. Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on regional transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation, based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well as the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as devoted to pursuing "new insights between theology and science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell," saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999 for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics. "They're political -- that for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," he added, "what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr. Dembski, whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group, including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials -- advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas, the University of California -- are impressive, but their ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in -- no one else is," Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most of my colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other than Dr. Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not closet creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I don't know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the tough questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a diversionary tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they want to talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had grown increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page outline of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a fund-raising pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars "to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to act on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That, according to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new conservative majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation -- and their potential allies here at the institute -- by dropping all references to evolution from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was silly, outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of the science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to be stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our position clear."'
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum -- so long as criticism of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian conservatives but also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy" approach and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as school districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to "lead the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the right," Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those people."
A Debate Over Darwin
This is the first in a series of articles examining the debate over the teaching of evolution. Ongoing coverage of the Discovery Institute and the controversy over teaching alternatives to evolution: nytimes.com/evolution.
Correction: August 24, 2005, Wednesday A front-page article on Sunday about the Discovery Institute, which promotes the concept known as intelligent design to explain the origins of life, referred incorrectly to the religious affiliation of the institute's fellows. Most are conservative Christians, including Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants -- not fundamentalist Christians.
The article also referred incorrectly to recent changes in science standards adopted by Ohio, Minnesota and New Mexico. While those states encourage critical analysis of evolution, they did not necessarily embrace the institute's "teach the controversy" approach. The article also misstated the university affiliation of Guillermo Gonzalez, a teacher of astronomy who is a senior fellow at the institute's Center for Science and Culture. He is an assistant professor at Iowa State University, not the University of Iowa.
In some copies a picture was published in error in a grouping of key people, places and writings on the subject. The picture showed Howard Ahmanson Sr. -- not Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a major donor to the Center for Science and Culture.
Correction: August 26, 2005, Friday A front-page article on Sunday about the Discovery Institute, which promotes the concept known as intelligent design to explain the origins of life, misspelled part of the Latin phrase meaning "To the greater glory of God," which inspired the name of the AMDG Foundation, a donor to the institute. The words are "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam."
The Times Machine article viewer is included with your New York Times subscription.
Jack Begg, David Bernstein and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting for this article.
From the book:
"They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."
"A politically savvy challenge to evolution" makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of the New York Times.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
"Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums 'so people can understand what the debate is about'."
In 2005 Bush was the President of the United States and he thinks there is a debate about the established truth of evolution. There is no debate you fucking moron.
Idiot Americans love their idiot presidents.
One more thing: Fucktard billionaire Bill Gates is on my shit list because he helps pay for this bullshit. Drop dead Gates.
Here is the whole disgusting thing from the New York Times. Lots of extreme Idiot America stupid in this one. I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
AUGUST 21, 2005
SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs -- and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities -- and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want to talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school boards simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards. Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in the century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary -- and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a few in the organization are Republicans, though these include moderates drawn by the institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological topics like technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is the recipient of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web site to ensure an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages -- first they're ignored, then they're attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage. We're somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in 1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design. About a year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing partner, discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their separate studies of biology and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,"' Dr. Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation, there was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a representative of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County, Calif., who had previously given a small grant to the institute and underwritten an early conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in science, recalled being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons and a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations "committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J. Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes Monkey Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because of its drift to the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here was an academic, credible activity that involved funders. It interested conservatives. It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on www.guidestar.org, a Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped to $4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest years available. The records show financial support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all his papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says it was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between 1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million since its inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science. Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on regional transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation, based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well as the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as devoted to pursuing "new insights between theology and science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell," saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999 for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics. "They're political -- that for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," he added, "what I see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr. Dembski, whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group, including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials -- advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas, the University of California -- are impressive, but their ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in -- no one else is," Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most of my colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other than Dr. Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not closet creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I don't know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the tough questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a diversionary tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they want to talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had grown increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page outline of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a fund-raising pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars "to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to act on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That, according to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new conservative majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation -- and their potential allies here at the institute -- by dropping all references to evolution from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was silly, outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of the science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to be stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our position clear."'
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum -- so long as criticism of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian conservatives but also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy" approach and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as school districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to "lead the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the right," Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those people."
A Debate Over Darwin
This is the first in a series of articles examining the debate over the teaching of evolution. Ongoing coverage of the Discovery Institute and the controversy over teaching alternatives to evolution: nytimes.com/evolution.
Correction: August 24, 2005, Wednesday A front-page article on Sunday about the Discovery Institute, which promotes the concept known as intelligent design to explain the origins of life, referred incorrectly to the religious affiliation of the institute's fellows. Most are conservative Christians, including Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants -- not fundamentalist Christians.
The article also referred incorrectly to recent changes in science standards adopted by Ohio, Minnesota and New Mexico. While those states encourage critical analysis of evolution, they did not necessarily embrace the institute's "teach the controversy" approach. The article also misstated the university affiliation of Guillermo Gonzalez, a teacher of astronomy who is a senior fellow at the institute's Center for Science and Culture. He is an assistant professor at Iowa State University, not the University of Iowa.
In some copies a picture was published in error in a grouping of key people, places and writings on the subject. The picture showed Howard Ahmanson Sr. -- not Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., a major donor to the Center for Science and Culture.
Correction: August 26, 2005, Friday A front-page article on Sunday about the Discovery Institute, which promotes the concept known as intelligent design to explain the origins of life, misspelled part of the Latin phrase meaning "To the greater glory of God," which inspired the name of the AMDG Foundation, a donor to the institute. The words are "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam."
The Times Machine article viewer is included with your New York Times subscription.
Jack Begg, David Bernstein and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting for this article.
Monday, June 3, 2019
If you're a Christian, get off my planet you stupid fucking asshole.
A typical theocratic Christian asshole said "The Constitution does not call for the separation of church and state."
That's exactly the point of the Establishment Clause which everyone who isn't a Christian asshole knows is our separation of church and state.
I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
I found his dishonest bullshit in one of my old posts at On December 20, 2005 Christian assholes lost their war against science education.
That's exactly the point of the Establishment Clause which everyone who isn't a Christian asshole knows is our separation of church and state.
I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
I found his dishonest bullshit in one of my old posts at On December 20, 2005 Christian assholes lost their war against science education.
Saturday, May 19, 2018
In Arizona a Christian asshole on the school board wants to throw out the Establishment Clause of our Bill of Rights and let incompetent biology teachers (who should be fired) teach magical creationism instead of science. I'm not making this up. I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.
Arizona could roll back teaching of evolution in classroom
Written By NBC News. May 19, 2018.
The teaching of evolution in Arizona classrooms could be taking a big step backwards.
School Superintendent Diane Douglas is apparently behind a rewrite of science standards for all Arizona school children that would delete references to evolution.
Audio obtained by 12 News shows Douglas believes a version of creationism, called “intelligent design,” should be taught in tandem with evolution.
The proposed science standards could leave it up to teachers to decide which one students should learn.
Amber Struthers, a science teacher at the Jones-Gordon School in Paradise Valley, compares a rollback of evolution in the classroom to not teaching students about gravity.
“This would be something I would definitely be incredibly uncomfortable with,” said Struthers, a teacher for 12 years with five science degrees, including a doctorate.
“It would be a huge missing gap (for students) in understanding core concepts in science," she said.
Struthers was a member of a team of about three dozen Arizona teachers who drafted new science standards, which were presented to the Arizona Board of Education. It’s the first update in almost 15 years.
Teachers say they were shocked when the words “evolution” and “evolve” were crossed out of their draft, which was released in March.
Struthers said the deletions went beyond the usual revisions by Department of Education staffers, which typically amount to no more than corrections of grammar.
Tory Roberg, whose two children attend the Washington Elementary School District, said she was “horrified” at an April public hearing on the proposed science standards at the Department of Education.
“They were dumbing down our evolution standards,” she said. “I want my kids to learn science in science class.”
Back in November, Douglas, who is running for a second term this fall, shared her thoughts about the science standards at a Republican candidate forum in Tempe.
“Should the theory of intelligent design be taught along with the theory of evolution? Absolutely,” Douglas said in response to a question, according to audio of the event provided to 12 News.
“I had a discussion with my staff, because we're currently working on science standards, to make sure this isue was addressed in the standards we're working on.”
Jonathan Gelbart was the only one of five superintendent candidates at the forum to reject intelligent design.
"I think we should stick to scientific theories in our schools," he said.
The so-called “Theory of Intelligent Design” is a sophisticated update and rebranding of creationism -- the religious belief in the existence of a creator.
“It is not a scientific theory,” Struthers said.
In 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania blocked a school district from teaching intelligent design, declaring it an unconstitutional advancement of a religious viewpoint in public schools.
A Douglas spokesperson said she wouldn't comment on the proposed standards until they come before the Arizona Board of Education for approval in June.
The public can comment until May 28. You can provide feedback online at this link.
Written By NBC News. May 19, 2018.
The teaching of evolution in Arizona classrooms could be taking a big step backwards.
School Superintendent Diane Douglas is apparently behind a rewrite of science standards for all Arizona school children that would delete references to evolution.
Audio obtained by 12 News shows Douglas believes a version of creationism, called “intelligent design,” should be taught in tandem with evolution.
The proposed science standards could leave it up to teachers to decide which one students should learn.
Amber Struthers, a science teacher at the Jones-Gordon School in Paradise Valley, compares a rollback of evolution in the classroom to not teaching students about gravity.
“This would be something I would definitely be incredibly uncomfortable with,” said Struthers, a teacher for 12 years with five science degrees, including a doctorate.
“It would be a huge missing gap (for students) in understanding core concepts in science," she said.
Struthers was a member of a team of about three dozen Arizona teachers who drafted new science standards, which were presented to the Arizona Board of Education. It’s the first update in almost 15 years.
Teachers say they were shocked when the words “evolution” and “evolve” were crossed out of their draft, which was released in March.
Struthers said the deletions went beyond the usual revisions by Department of Education staffers, which typically amount to no more than corrections of grammar.
Tory Roberg, whose two children attend the Washington Elementary School District, said she was “horrified” at an April public hearing on the proposed science standards at the Department of Education.
“They were dumbing down our evolution standards,” she said. “I want my kids to learn science in science class.”
Back in November, Douglas, who is running for a second term this fall, shared her thoughts about the science standards at a Republican candidate forum in Tempe.
“Should the theory of intelligent design be taught along with the theory of evolution? Absolutely,” Douglas said in response to a question, according to audio of the event provided to 12 News.
“I had a discussion with my staff, because we're currently working on science standards, to make sure this isue was addressed in the standards we're working on.”
Jonathan Gelbart was the only one of five superintendent candidates at the forum to reject intelligent design.
"I think we should stick to scientific theories in our schools," he said.
The so-called “Theory of Intelligent Design” is a sophisticated update and rebranding of creationism -- the religious belief in the existence of a creator.
“It is not a scientific theory,” Struthers said.
In 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania blocked a school district from teaching intelligent design, declaring it an unconstitutional advancement of a religious viewpoint in public schools.
A Douglas spokesperson said she wouldn't comment on the proposed standards until they come before the Arizona Board of Education for approval in June.
The public can comment until May 28. You can provide feedback online at this link.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
New York Times article about the breathtaking stupidity of Christian assholes who attack science education in Idiot America.
Questioning Evolution: The Push to Change Science Class
By CLYDE HABERMAN NOV. 19, 2017
A growing skepticism of science has seeped into the classroom, and it’s revived attacks on one of the most established principles of biology – evolution.
“Evolution Mama” is a sassy song dating back many decades, probably best played on a banjo, maybe with a kazoo in the background. “Evolution mama,” it goes, “don’t you make a monkey out of me.” That certainly captures the sentiments of religious groups and like-minded politicians who believe Charles Darwin was talking through his hat and there is no way that humans are descended from lower animals.
Darwinism has long been under siege in parts of the United States, even if its critics have practiced their own form of evolution, adapting their arguments to accommodate altered legal circumstances. This installment of Retro Report shows the enduring strength of the forces that embrace the biblical account of Creation or reasonable facsimiles of it. For some of them, the rejection of broad scientific consensus extends to issues like climate change and stem-cell research.
If anything, science skeptics, like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, may feel emboldened in the era of President Trump, who shares their doubts on some matters and has acted on them. Last month, for instance, Mr. Trump nominated a coal lobbyist as deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. To be his senior White House adviser on environmental policy, he chose a Texas official who has described global warming as “exaggerated nonsense.”
Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining major news stories of the past and their continuing relevance, looks at the granddaddy of anti-evolution cases: the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, held in 1925 in the buckle of the Bible Belt. John T. Scopes, a high school substitute teacher, was charged in Dayton, Tenn., with violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in state-funded schools. The trial was epic, with two titans going against each other: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. For all the courtroom fireworks, the outcome was never in doubt. Mr. Scopes was swiftly found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to about $1,400 today).
His conviction was overturned on a technicality. And, in time, the law that he broke was struck down, with courts casting it as religious in nature and thus a violation of the First Amendment’s proscription against “an establishment of religion.”
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The anti-evolution spirit, however, never died. Creationism — a belief that God brought about the universe pretty much along the lines set forth in the Book of Genesis — thrived in school curriculums in some states. But that idea also failed to pass judicial muster. The Supreme Court concluded in 1987 that requiring it to be taught in public schools as if it were a science ran afoul of the establishment clause.
A similar fate befell a creationist stepchild, intelligent design, which holds that the universe is so intricate, so complex, that it has to be the handiwork of a master architect. While God is not explicitly identified as the designer, the implication is hard to miss. In a pivotal case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled in 2005 that introducing intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative to evolution unconstitutionally advanced “a particular version of Christianity.” At heart, the judge said, intelligent design was “creationism relabeled.”
And so, once more, the anti-Darwinists were forced to evolve. What emerged were state laws with descriptions like the “science education act” and the “academic freedom act.” One of the earliest and most successful of these endeavors, the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008, carried echoes of a “wedge strategy” advocated by the Discovery Institute — a step-by-step program to “reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
The Louisiana law permits public schoolteachers to use materials critical of established scientific thought, with “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning” singled out as targets. No blatant advocacy of creationism or intelligent design is authorized. But those concepts make their way into classrooms all the same, as a means of fostering “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories.”
By CLYDE HABERMAN NOV. 19, 2017
A growing skepticism of science has seeped into the classroom, and it’s revived attacks on one of the most established principles of biology – evolution.
“Evolution Mama” is a sassy song dating back many decades, probably best played on a banjo, maybe with a kazoo in the background. “Evolution mama,” it goes, “don’t you make a monkey out of me.” That certainly captures the sentiments of religious groups and like-minded politicians who believe Charles Darwin was talking through his hat and there is no way that humans are descended from lower animals.
Darwinism has long been under siege in parts of the United States, even if its critics have practiced their own form of evolution, adapting their arguments to accommodate altered legal circumstances. This installment of Retro Report shows the enduring strength of the forces that embrace the biblical account of Creation or reasonable facsimiles of it. For some of them, the rejection of broad scientific consensus extends to issues like climate change and stem-cell research.
If anything, science skeptics, like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, may feel emboldened in the era of President Trump, who shares their doubts on some matters and has acted on them. Last month, for instance, Mr. Trump nominated a coal lobbyist as deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. To be his senior White House adviser on environmental policy, he chose a Texas official who has described global warming as “exaggerated nonsense.”
Retro Report, a series of video documentaries examining major news stories of the past and their continuing relevance, looks at the granddaddy of anti-evolution cases: the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, held in 1925 in the buckle of the Bible Belt. John T. Scopes, a high school substitute teacher, was charged in Dayton, Tenn., with violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in state-funded schools. The trial was epic, with two titans going against each other: William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. For all the courtroom fireworks, the outcome was never in doubt. Mr. Scopes was swiftly found guilty and fined $100 (equivalent to about $1,400 today).
His conviction was overturned on a technicality. And, in time, the law that he broke was struck down, with courts casting it as religious in nature and thus a violation of the First Amendment’s proscription against “an establishment of religion.”
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The anti-evolution spirit, however, never died. Creationism — a belief that God brought about the universe pretty much along the lines set forth in the Book of Genesis — thrived in school curriculums in some states. But that idea also failed to pass judicial muster. The Supreme Court concluded in 1987 that requiring it to be taught in public schools as if it were a science ran afoul of the establishment clause.
A similar fate befell a creationist stepchild, intelligent design, which holds that the universe is so intricate, so complex, that it has to be the handiwork of a master architect. While God is not explicitly identified as the designer, the implication is hard to miss. In a pivotal case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled in 2005 that introducing intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative to evolution unconstitutionally advanced “a particular version of Christianity.” At heart, the judge said, intelligent design was “creationism relabeled.”
And so, once more, the anti-Darwinists were forced to evolve. What emerged were state laws with descriptions like the “science education act” and the “academic freedom act.” One of the earliest and most successful of these endeavors, the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008, carried echoes of a “wedge strategy” advocated by the Discovery Institute — a step-by-step program to “reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
The Louisiana law permits public schoolteachers to use materials critical of established scientific thought, with “evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning” singled out as targets. No blatant advocacy of creationism or intelligent design is authorized. But those concepts make their way into classrooms all the same, as a means of fostering “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories.”
Monday, January 15, 2018
The never ending Christian war against science education. Evolution (aka the strongest fact of science) makes Christian crybabies cry.
Steven Newton, Contributor
Professor of Geology, College of Marin
Celebrating Kitzmas in the Age of Trump 12/20/2017
December 20th marks a special day both for creationists and those who support science. This day is the anniversary of the landmark ruling in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which a school district in Pennsylvania attempted to promote the form of creationism known as “intelligent design” (ID).
The Republican-appointed judge in this case issued a cutting verdict, finding that “ID is not science” and that “the religious nature of ID” meant any endorsement of it by school officials would be tantamount to declaring one religious view superior to another. Therefore, promoting intelligent design in public schools violated the Constitution.
Merry Kitzmas, in other words.
At the time, scientists and science educators rejoiced at this clear, forceful repudiation of attempts to inject religiously-motivated pseudoscience into American public schools. But while this ruling slammed the brakes on intelligent design, anti-science forces simply changed gears.
In the years following the Kitzmiller ruling, droves of so-called “academic freedom” bills appeared in state legislatures. These proposed laws closely followed a pre-determined script with three main assertions: 1) some classroom topics, such as evolution and climate change, are controversial, 2) teachers should be free to teach what they please about these alleged controversies, and 3) these “academic freedom” bills did not promote religion. This last provision, in particular, begged the question: If a bill did not obviously promote religion, why would you have to clarify its intent? A facial reading of these bills exposes their transparent purpose: to give creationist teachers legal cover to teach creationism in public schools.
These so-called “academic freedom” bills fooled no one. They were obviously just one more round in the never-ending fight to defend good science in public schools. Despite legal victories, such as the Kitzmiller case, the vehement rage some Americans feel at the idea of students learning basic science continues unabated.
And now we arrive in the Age of Trump.
We live with daily assaults on the idea of science as a way of knowing about the world. Just this last week, the Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructed policy analysts to avoid terms such as “science-based” and “evidence-based.” (An embarrassed CDC may now be backtracking on this.) This is not the first instance of this kind of Orwellian language control: In 2015, the Miami Heraldreported that officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had been told to avoid using “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications. A 2012 law in North Carolina forbade state officials from considering sea level rise when determining coastal policies. Rather than using our wealth of scientific knowledge to prepare for the problems of climate change, Americans seem intent not only on denying a problem exists, but on restricting the language officials are allowed to use.
Anti-science forces existed long before Trump, but now they have been encouraged and unleashed. Trump’s head of the EPA denies that climate change is real. The US will withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Scientific information on government websites is disappearing or being altered to fit political ideology. Government scientists have been denied permission to make presentations about climate change at scientific conferences.
The Trump administration has not yet clearly articulated an educational policy; so far science education seems mercifully low on their hit list. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seems focused on shrinking her department and undermining public education in general, rather than specific attacks on science education.
That might change under a Pence administration.
While Trump has expressed little interest in science education, Pence has a long record denying the reality of climate change and of targeting evolution education. In July 2002, Rep. Pence endorsed intelligent design during an extended attack on evolution he delivered on the House floor. He dismissed evolution as a mere theory, which evolution is—just like the theory of gravity or the theory of plate tectonics. Pence then characterized classroom evolution graphics this way: “There’s the little monkey crawling on the grass, there’s the Neanderthal with his knuckles dragging, and then there’s Mel Gibson.” (Wait—what? Pence thinks Mel Gibson is the pinnacle of evolution? Hasn’t Pence seen The Beaver, the one where Gibson goes around talking with a hand puppet? Doesn’t he know about Gibson’s infamous mullet from the Lethal Weaponmovies?)
Bill Nye has expressed hope that what we see in the Age of Trump may be the “last gasp of the anti-science movement.” It may turn out that anti-science forces go too far, exposing to everyone their delusional rejection of reality. It may turn out that voters want decisions affecting their lives to be “evidence-based.”
On this 12th Kitzmas, one thing is clear: the Kitzmiller decision was not the end of attacks on science. We should honor this anniversary by reminding ourselves that the struggle to defend science continues.
Professor of Geology, College of Marin
Celebrating Kitzmas in the Age of Trump 12/20/2017
December 20th marks a special day both for creationists and those who support science. This day is the anniversary of the landmark ruling in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which a school district in Pennsylvania attempted to promote the form of creationism known as “intelligent design” (ID).
The Republican-appointed judge in this case issued a cutting verdict, finding that “ID is not science” and that “the religious nature of ID” meant any endorsement of it by school officials would be tantamount to declaring one religious view superior to another. Therefore, promoting intelligent design in public schools violated the Constitution.
Merry Kitzmas, in other words.
At the time, scientists and science educators rejoiced at this clear, forceful repudiation of attempts to inject religiously-motivated pseudoscience into American public schools. But while this ruling slammed the brakes on intelligent design, anti-science forces simply changed gears.
In the years following the Kitzmiller ruling, droves of so-called “academic freedom” bills appeared in state legislatures. These proposed laws closely followed a pre-determined script with three main assertions: 1) some classroom topics, such as evolution and climate change, are controversial, 2) teachers should be free to teach what they please about these alleged controversies, and 3) these “academic freedom” bills did not promote religion. This last provision, in particular, begged the question: If a bill did not obviously promote religion, why would you have to clarify its intent? A facial reading of these bills exposes their transparent purpose: to give creationist teachers legal cover to teach creationism in public schools.
These so-called “academic freedom” bills fooled no one. They were obviously just one more round in the never-ending fight to defend good science in public schools. Despite legal victories, such as the Kitzmiller case, the vehement rage some Americans feel at the idea of students learning basic science continues unabated.
And now we arrive in the Age of Trump.
We live with daily assaults on the idea of science as a way of knowing about the world. Just this last week, the Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructed policy analysts to avoid terms such as “science-based” and “evidence-based.” (An embarrassed CDC may now be backtracking on this.) This is not the first instance of this kind of Orwellian language control: In 2015, the Miami Heraldreported that officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had been told to avoid using “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications. A 2012 law in North Carolina forbade state officials from considering sea level rise when determining coastal policies. Rather than using our wealth of scientific knowledge to prepare for the problems of climate change, Americans seem intent not only on denying a problem exists, but on restricting the language officials are allowed to use.
Anti-science forces existed long before Trump, but now they have been encouraged and unleashed. Trump’s head of the EPA denies that climate change is real. The US will withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Scientific information on government websites is disappearing or being altered to fit political ideology. Government scientists have been denied permission to make presentations about climate change at scientific conferences.
The Trump administration has not yet clearly articulated an educational policy; so far science education seems mercifully low on their hit list. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seems focused on shrinking her department and undermining public education in general, rather than specific attacks on science education.
That might change under a Pence administration.
While Trump has expressed little interest in science education, Pence has a long record denying the reality of climate change and of targeting evolution education. In July 2002, Rep. Pence endorsed intelligent design during an extended attack on evolution he delivered on the House floor. He dismissed evolution as a mere theory, which evolution is—just like the theory of gravity or the theory of plate tectonics. Pence then characterized classroom evolution graphics this way: “There’s the little monkey crawling on the grass, there’s the Neanderthal with his knuckles dragging, and then there’s Mel Gibson.” (Wait—what? Pence thinks Mel Gibson is the pinnacle of evolution? Hasn’t Pence seen The Beaver, the one where Gibson goes around talking with a hand puppet? Doesn’t he know about Gibson’s infamous mullet from the Lethal Weaponmovies?)
Bill Nye has expressed hope that what we see in the Age of Trump may be the “last gasp of the anti-science movement.” It may turn out that anti-science forces go too far, exposing to everyone their delusional rejection of reality. It may turn out that voters want decisions affecting their lives to be “evidence-based.”
On this 12th Kitzmas, one thing is clear: the Kitzmiller decision was not the end of attacks on science. We should honor this anniversary by reminding ourselves that the struggle to defend science continues.
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