Kansas

State school-board elections don’t normally receive much national media attention. Yet the school-board primary race in Kansas on Tuesday, representing a key front in the Darwin wars, was an exception. Will Darwinism be taught as unquestionable dogma? That’s the question that voters decided. In Kansas, it seems it will. Kansas has been one of five states with biology curricula that Read More ›

As the debate over how to teach evolution continues, two new radio commercials promoting www.standupforscience.com and the online petition to “Stand up for Science, Stand up for Kansas” will air this weekend across Kansas. One ad features molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, explaining that “it is imperative to understand both the evidence for and against a scientific theory… as a scientist, Read More ›

The Associated Press cited Discovery Institute in an article on Kansas science standards published on Nov. 8, 2005: “Under these standards students will learn more about evolution, not less,” said Casey Luskin, a spokesman for the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design research. Luskin added: “Anyone who reads the proposed science standards will see that they deal solely with Read More ›

This article, published by The Christian Science Monitor, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow John West:

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute distributes a DVD, “Icons of Evolution,” that encourages viewers to doubt Darwinian theory.

One example from related promotional literature: “Why don’t textbooks discuss the ‘Cambrian explosion,’ in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor – thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?”

Such questions too often get routinely dismissed from the classroom, says senior fellow John West, adding that teachers who advance such questions can be rebuked – or worse.

“Teachers should not be pressured or intimidated,” says Mr. West, “but what about all the teachers who are being intimidated and in some cases losing their jobs because they simply want to present a few scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory?”

This article, published by WorldNetDaily, discusses Senior Fellows of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture:

This week, the leading lights of the Intelligent Design movement — Drs. Jonathan Wells and Michael Behe among them — will make their way to Topeka, Kan. There, they will make an appeal to the state’s elected school board to allow in-class criticisms of Darwinism and its derivatives, which are now taught not as theory — not even as fact, actually — but as something close to dogma.

The ID advocates may very well succeed. The school board now has a 6-to-4 majority sympathetic to a rational challenge to Darwnism. What is more, in the six years since the evolution controversy first exploded in Kansas, the ID movement has done an impressive job refocusing the debate on science and logic and undoing the crude stereotypes under which all opponents of naturalism have had to labor since the Scopes trial.

Starting today, the Kansas Board of Education will begin a six-day debate on the state’s science standards, specifically the teaching of Darwinian evolution. On one side there will be about two dozen skeptics of Darwinism and proponents of an alternative theory of evolution known as intelligent design. And on the other side there will be a trial lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, who has volunteered to defend Darwin.

If this seems one-sided, that’s because the Darwinian scientists have chosen to boycott the debate, which is surprising since Darwinian theory is still the accepted standard within the scientific community. Their reason for doing so, at least according to Mr. Irigonegaray, is that “[t]o debate evolution is similar to debating whether the earth is round. It is an absurd proposition.” But that’s not entirely fair. Nearly 400 scientists have signed a statement of dissent from Darwin’s theory. Moreover, Darwinian skeptics and ID theorists don’t question evolution, at least as it’s understood as species changing over time.

SEATTLE, DEC. 21 – Students in Kansas will be allowed to learn about the scientific evidence both for and against Darwinian evolution if the State’s Board of Education adopts a set of proposed revisions from a group of scientists on the science standards writing committee. The eight proponents of the proposal made it very clear in a statement to School Read More ›