Kansas educators clear way for evolution criticism

By Carey Gillam
Tue Nov 8, 5:52 PM ET

TOPEKA, Kansas (Reuters) - Kansas on Tuesday became the latest U.S. state to introduce criticism of evolution into teaching standards, a move that critics charge was driven by religious zealotry.

In a hearing room packed with high school students, teachers and national media, the Kansas State Board of Education on a 6-4 vote approved a new set of science standards that question the veracity of evolution theory.

"This is a great day for education. This is one of the best things that we can do," said board chairman Steve Abrams, who is on record as saying evolutionary theory is incompatible with the Bible's version of God's creation of life on Earth.

The new public school standards include several specific challenges to evolution, including statements that there is a lack of evidence or natural explanation for the genetic code, charges that fossil records are inconsistent with evolutionary theory, and a statement that says certain evolutionary explanations "are not based on direct observations ... and often reflect ... inferences from indirect or circumstantial evidence."

Although the redrawn teaching standards do not mention religion and Abrams denied the changes were religiously motivated, both local and national science groups charged that the new standards are a product of religious zealotry.

Critics said the standards go farther than any other state to date in opening up evolutionary principles to criticism, and said implementation will lead to more aggressive undermining of scientific principles in other states and will ultimately weaken U.S. achievement in scientific arenas.

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, said the decision would encourage school districts in Kansas and elsewhere to make similar moves, distracting and confusing teachers and students.

"It will be marketed by the religious right ... as a huge victory for their side," she said. "We can expect more efforts to get creationism in."

LONG-SIMMERING DEBATE

The Kansas vote is the latest development in a renewed debate over evolution that has simmered in the United States before and since the famed "monkey trial" in Tennessee 80 years ago, when that state's anti-evolution teaching law was challenged.

Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania have in the past few years introduced questions about the validity of evolution into their curriculum but Kansas goes farther.

The Kansas vote follows the trial of a Pennsylvania lawsuit brought by parents who sued a local school board after it instructed science teachers to introduce students to a theory called intelligent design. That theory holds that certain features of the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause, such as God.

The trial ended last week and a decision from the judge is expected in December or January.

Intelligent design is not included in the Kansas standards but nonetheless is rapidly becoming a catch-phase in the debate. Intelligent design proponents say nature is so complex that there must have been a higher intelligence involved.

They claim evolution theory, popularized by British scientist Charles Darwin in the 1850s, wrongly uses only natural explanations for the development of life forms without considering the possibility of a designer.

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based key backer of intelligent design theory, praised the Kansas effort.

"Students will learn more about evolution, not less as some Darwinists have falsely claimed," said Casey Luskin, a Discovery Institute spokesman in a written statement.

In an effort to fight back against the changes in Kansas and other states, a grass-roots group calling itself Campaign to Defend the Constitution said on Tuesday it was launching a $200,000 online ad campaign "to combat a threat posed by the religious right to American democracy."

"This is a significant attack on science," said Jack Krebs, vice president of Kansas Citizens for Science. "They really are advancing a sectarian religious view. They're treading on constitutional grounds."
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There are a few things about this whole debate over the evolution theory:

Fact: You will not PROVE creationism wrong via evolution due to the fact that even if allowed to evolve, all matter had to have a beginning point. That point may have been a super-small, super-dense, super-hot black hole of a point the size of a pinhead that exploded, but something had to start the pinhead sized bit of stuff. GOD is STILL a possibility

Fact: You will not PROVE evolution wrong by allowing creationism to be taught. There truly are scientific processes at work that can allow for much of the theory of evolution to take place.

Fact: Darwin's argument was never an intention to disprove God or the idea that God created the universe. In fact Darwin's idea was to shed light on a possible METHOD God might have used to create it. His theory would fit in well with the so called "relgious right threat" who believe in the long version of creation (that the six "days" mentioned in Genesis 1 and 2 were not literal 24hr days, but rather an age of time. The word yom (meaning day) in Hebrew (the language of the original Old Testament) has 3 different possible meanings.

Fact: Evolution IS a viable theory, but it has NEVER been proven as fact. There are far too many holes in the theory. The fossil record is incomplete, and at times inaccurate.

Fact: Genetic coding of DNA is so complex that to say it happened by evolutionary processes of mutation and adaption due to random selection of traits is SCIENTIFICALLY STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT!! That means that even scientists have to reject it as a possibility because the chances are so small (even with an infinite amount of tries) that it is rendered virtually impossible to think it would have happened this way. And that's just DNA for 1 cell...let alone the millions of cells of 1 human....let alone the billions more from all various species.

Fact: with the best forms of scientific study we have today, we have been able to find NO observable occurences other than a very few fungi and bacteria, where mutation takes place.

Fact: When the above mutations DID take place, the mutation remains a mutated version of the original. What was in the petri dish was a mutated form of the original in the petri dish. NO NEW LIFEFORM.

Fact: There are NO missing links to explain one single solitary bit of how one species jumped rank and crossed over to another species to connect the two. It just hasn't happened in ANY obsevable fashion, in past or present.

Fact: There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Creationism a.k.a. Intelligent Design is another viable theory. Let's clarify, not to prove there's a God, but to show that in most all of creation there are complexities so fantastic as to say nothing like this could have happened on its own. This is done purely by the scientific method. By using the 5 steps one can observe in almost all forms of organic and inorganic material, that the basic structures are inifinitely complex AND diverse. The chances of this randomly happening via explosion of matter are so small as to render evolution's explanation void, and to say there is REASON TO LOOK FOR AN INTELLIGENT CREATOR.

Fact: Intelligent design never says that we need to introduce the study of God into science classes and try to figure out observable, empirical aspects of an invisible, unknowable-unless-revealed God. It simply maintains that students should be taught to look deeper than one theory that lacks ability to explain all of the universe around us. In effect, this teaches students to use their brains MORE, not less. It will be left up to the student to decide what he/she believes about the beginnings of all that we see around us in the universe.

Fact: Making students think about the DIVERSITY of ideas will not render them scientific idiots. The students will NOT be asked to include the Bible on their book list to purchase.

Fact: If evolution is the right theory in the end, then it WILL PROVE itself to be so. Its proponents should not be afraid of some well-intentioned, well-thought competition. If it is right, it will prove that once-and-for-all under scrutiny. If it is wrong, it will also prove that once-and-for-all under scrutiny. This scrutiny may take several years. This doesn't mean that students will be less scientific or less able to continue the growth of scientific knowledge over the next years, it simply means that as they do, they'll be looking to reinforce one theory by weeding out its competition.

Fact: According to the constitution, I have as much right, as a Christian, to send my child to public school and know that he/she will receive a diverse, intellectually challenging education. Science cannot disprove the religious beliefs of my family, nor vice versa. AND THEY SHOULDN'T TRY IN THE ARENA OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL. Save those attempts for private schools that are unashamedly pushing an agenda. (and a personal note, I went to private school, and I still learned about evolution, and I still learned about The God of the Bible, and I still learned about most every other major religion IN DETAIL that exists in the world today, and I still received scholarship agreements to MANY prestigious colleges and universities, state and private, of a VERY non-religious bent. Nope, didn't make the big ivy leagues, but I wouldn't have gone if I had. You'd have to know me to understand why. I remain extremely intelligent, have a genius IQ, am extremely well-versed in educational topics of dicussion, and all this after that "zealotry" of the awful Christian right-wing school system had their claws into me. ....good grief, the things you get called because you actually BELIEVE IN GOD! How dare we!) The point is, the schools have long been thundering in the classroom that evolution is fact and God doesn't exist. Both remain unproven, one therefore is most certainly a lie, and one is a matter to be decided based on personal belief...I just hope you can afford to be wrong when you die. In a public school, teach the mainline theories and maybe even a few non-mainline. 2 biggies are evolution and I.D. You don't have to teach one particular intelligence, it simply means you don't make evolution say something it hasn't said yet. Don't attribute something to a theory that shows no ownership of the topic to date. Is it possible that something had to create and design life that is so complex??? Even remotely possible??? YES IT IS, much more so that random selection starting the life of even 1 CELL!! That means ID needs to be taught and not taught against and ruled out.

Fact: There is NOT ONE BIT OF ANYTHING IN THE CONSTITUTION THAT SAYS THE KANSAS RULING WAS UNCONSTITUTIONAL. No separation of church and state, no 'down with God, up with science', no nothing. It's a waste of time, don't look there, nothing to find.

THEORY: 99% of all scientists who reject creationism or intelligent design do so have disregarded it as lunacy without having ever given it a moments thought...yet they would argue against it as if it stood in opposition to science itself. These men and women don't understand the very thing they're trying to fight against, yet they'll argue against it anyway.....doesn't sound like a good scientific method to me.

FACT: SCIENCE AND RELIGION CANNOT, AND WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE SEPARATED. There IS a dual nature of man according to approx. 90% of the world's population. Most people believe in the physical that they see, and the spiritual which they don't see. They believe and can even show evidence SCIENTIFICALLY, that belief in the spiritual increases healing and maintains homeostasis in humans more effectively than not having a belief in God. And yes for all you out there looking for other variables, the studies were accurate, they had tried to eliminate as many other variables as possible.


Folks, the truth is, teaching students to look further than one theory in an honest, open approach, in no way undermines the scientific FACTS that we do know. What it does do is force a greater amount of accuracy on the scientific community. No longer can we simply throw up information and loosely determine that it happened that way due to evolution. Random chances say this this and this, therefore we arrived here! See! Aren't we smart?! No, the scientific community must now admit where the struggles lie, and produce students who will devote themselves to scientifically proving information that will fill in the holes and gaps. Can those gaps be filled? Well, that's what the whole debate is about. But at least Kansas has taken one big step towards making the teams of the debate more equal. Until one side or other shows PROOF of being correct, neither should accuse the other of NEVER HAVING PLAYED A PART IN THE PROCESS.

Developing...

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Athosxc