Last week the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove from state standards references to evolution as the underlying principle of biology. While the vote allows schools the freedom to teach about evolution, the battle is being reported as a simple conflict between scientific ‘evolutionists’ on one side and fundamentalist ‘creationists’ on the other, following the standard trope of the Read More ›
A Chinese paleontologist lectures around the world saying that recent fossil finds in his country are inconsistent with the Darwinian theory of evolution. His reason: The major animal groups appear abruptly in the rocks over a relatively short time, rather than evolving gradually from a common ancestor as Darwin’s theory predicts. When this conclusion upsets American scientists, he wryly comments: Read More ›
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — The debate leading the Kansas Board of Education to abolish the requirement for teaching evolution has about the same connection to reality as the play ‘Inherit the Wind’ had to the actual Scopes trial. In both cases complex historical, scientific and philosophical issues gave way to the simplifying demands of the morality play. If the schoolchildren of Read More ›
Proceeding’s summation by then sitting board member Robert P. George: Authentic education plainly requires fair consideration of all reasonable points of view. It is disturbing that there are efforts to exclude from the curriculum responsible criticism of Darwinism. There is nothing to be lost, and everything to be gained, from free and open inquiry. Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Read More ›
The evolution controversy is getting out of hand. Passions have yet to cool in Kansas, where a 7-3 majority of the state board of education has made evolution a centerpiece of the state’s new science standards. But already there’s another donnybrook brewing in Pennsylvania-also over state science standards. And that’s not to mention all the lesser scuffles over the last Read More ›
One can hardly imagine a more contentious issue in the American culture wars than the debate over how biological origins should be taught in the public schools. On the one hand, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Civil Liberties Union have insisted that any departure from a strictly Darwinian approach to the …
Design theorists argue that intelligent design constitutes a valid scientific research program aimed at understanding the effects of intelligence in the natural world. There is currently considerable debate whether this program is indeed valid, and in particular whether concepts like specified complexity or irreducible complexity, are coherently defined and can usefully be applied to actual systems in nature. In her Read More ›
One thing I love about the creation/evolution controversy is that it provides no end of amusement.Take the summer of 1999 for example. When the Kansas state board of education voted to de-emphasize the more speculative aspects of evolution in the state science standards, folks went wild. In a broadside published in Time, Harvard paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould Read More ›
The Fordham Foundation’s highly touted report by Lawrence Lerner, “Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States,” recommends increased emphasis in America’s public schools on biological evolution–which the report never adequately defines. (1) But the Lerner report fails to point out that students are being systematically misled about the scientific evidence, and it thereby encourages precisely the sort of Read More ›
We count on scientists to tell us what they know and do not know–not just what they want us to hear. But when it comes to the origin and evolution of life on earth, spokesmen for official science–and science education–have been far less forthcoming than we might wish. When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss many scientific difficulties Read More ›