Some impressive candidates are already lining up to oppose four of the conservative Kansas State Board of Education members who are up for re-election. Thank goodness.
Jack Wempe of Little River, a former chairman of the Kansas Board of Regents and a former state lawmaker and school superintendent, and Donna Viola, president of the McPherson school board, are challenging incumbent Ken Willard of Hutchinson. In western Kansas, Sally Cauble, a former member of the Liberal school board, and Tim Cruz, a former Garden City mayor, are opposing Connie Morris of St. Francis. In southeast Kansas, Jana Shaver, an educator from Independence, and Charles Kent Runyan, an education professor at Pittsburg State University, were planning to oppose Iris Van Meter, but Van Meter decided not to seek re-election. Instead, her son-in-law, M. Brad Patzer, a middle school math teacher from Neodesha, is running. And in northeast Kansas, Harry McDonald, a biology teacher at Blue Valley High School, and Don Weiss of Olathe are opposing John Bacon of Olathe.
If two of these challengers win, and board member Janet Waugh wins re-election — she is currently unopposed — the moderates will once again control the state board, and Kansas may yet be able to salvage its education reputation.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
49 Comments
All things in moderation.
I hope this is the last ride on the merry-go-round.
The nut job fundies embarrass us. So we voted them out. Then we voted them back in. Now we get a chance to vote them back out,,,,, again.
And maybe give Connie Morris an excuse to continue her porn career.
Isn’t Abrams up too? Or do we have to wait to send him back to being a bad veterinarian? Our loss is our pets’s gain?
Abrams is not up for reelection, but he can be nullified if the moderates win the majority of these races. But we must help these candidates with their grassroots efforts – not just trust that good sense and bad publicity will prevail.
I was thinking about writing a book called, “From Molecules to Love”. If one believes in life being explainable as the result of undirected, random chemical events, then chemistry must be completely able to explain love. It must be able to completely explain all human behavior, which is ostensibly the result of evolutionary processes, which begin with biomolecular evolution.
So, are we to see molecular biologists chairing economics, psychology and sociology departments in this century?
Are we to see rocky marital relationships healed by chemistry? Actually, billions of dollars are made in psychopharmeuticals to enable millions of people to get along better, including husbands and wives, but does anyone find this “yucky”?
Evolution occurs. If it didn’t we would all be replicas of Adam and Eve. But the concept of evolution per se is not incompatible with intelligent design. Consider the television. It has evolved from a grainy 8 inch black-and-white image to 100+ inch detail-rich, full-color HDTV.It has evolved through intelligent design. Same for cars, aircraft, fashion, agricultural tools, communication and every other human invention.
The LA Times recently reported that former Shawnee Mission biology teacher Al Frisby moved to Liberty, MO. He’s been encountering strong skepticism about the random-chemical-mutation theory of evolution from his students.
See http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-evolution31mar31,1,4480969.story. (Sorry, my computer doesn’t generate hyperlinks.)
He’s not happy with the challenges posed by his students, particularly when they pose questions that he cannot answer, but it’s good that his students are thinking for themselves, and he should be happy they are. This a fundamental characteristic of real science. Charles Darwin didn’t have strong scientific credentials. He tried studying surgery and medicine, and dropped out. He tried studying to become a clergyman and quit that. He received some instruction from a botanist, and liked that, so he decided to join the Beagle exploration and study New World species. He was a classic dilettante. And he was certainly not the first person to propose evolutionary change in life forms.
He thought for himself, and so should today’s young people. The Times story implies that the conservative Kansas BOE’s science-standards move has encouraged kids to think for themselves and challenge conventional wisdom. This is what you really want. Shawnee Mission is no educational backwater: it is Kansas’s strongest high school district in academics, by a country mile. Its students as a group, are the smartest, most articulate students in the state, according to ACT averages, AP course-taking and exam scores, and Ivy Leage-level university admissions.
So much focus has been put on the “backward” BOE members, but their action has motivated great students to challenge orthodoxy. It’s too bad for Kansas journalism that the LA Times picked up on this, but Kansas newspapers didn’t.
Oops, having posted, I guess my computer DOES generate hyperlinks. But not on my regular email.: (
I agree that “great” students should challenge academic orthodoxy, but I all I saw in the article were surly and close-minded students who were trying to shut down debate, not open it up (”I feel a tail growing!”). These students were denying the existence of the evidence, not extending alternate explanations that include the available evidence.
For example, take the kid who woke up when he heard the words “millions of years.” His alternate explanation was that the teacher was dismissable because any evidence not fitting his ‘6,000 year’ model was dismissable.
———————————–Frisby promised to show the class several fossils that document the halting and gradual evolution from apes to humans. Then he reminded them not to expect equal numbers of human and dinosaur remains, because hominids emerged only recently, while dinosaurs ruled the planet for nearly 200 million years.
At that, sophomore Derik Montgomery snapped to attention. “I heard that dinosaurs are only thousands of years old, like 6,000. Not millions,” he said.
“That’s wrong,” Frisby responded briskly. “What can I tell you? You can’t believe everything you read.”
Sprawled out across his chair, Derik muttered: “You can’t believe everything you hear in here, either.”———————————–
Frankly, I saw little evidence that these students were thinking for themselves. Also, I failed to see any evidence supporting the adjective “great” as applied to any of the students in this article.
Great thinking almost always comes from challenging academic orthodoxy, but great thinking takes the available evidence and provides a conclusion in conflict with orthodoxy. It does not deny the existence of the evidence. That’s called willful ignorance, and at Liberty it seems to flow from some students’ ideas about their “Christian duty.”
ID (intelligent design) is merely creationism dressed in a disguise of science. Where ID proponents have succeeded is in their efforts to cast evolution as a seriously flawed, seriously challenged theory. The preceding is simply not true. Period. Evolution has wide spread empirical support. The theory has survived about 150 years of critique and empirical investigation.
What one finds from survey data, is that when people believe that evolution cannot account for all of the data, their thinking then goes “well, why not teach alternatives?” There are many things that science cannot yet explain, but how are we served by resorting to supernatural explanations? I have no quarrel with those who wish to use such explanations, just please don’t lie and call it science. That can’t be a particularly good Christian thing to do.
The ID ruse has been a good deception for the Creationists’ purposes. In the end children, especially Kansas children, are the losers.
I applaud the challenge of the many reasonable sounding candidates above. Here is a link to a PAC that is attempting to provide support to candidates challenging the Kansas Taliban.
http://www.ksalliance.org/index.htm
What is good and what is bad in a candidate for the Kansas Board of Education? After the candidates have filed for office, voters need to see a chart of issues with each candidate’s position clearly spelled out. There are many issues involved with Kansas schools that need attention. The issue of evolution vs creationism vs intelligent design (I refuse to agree that I.D. is part and parcel of creationism) is only one issue and perhaps less important than many of the others.
Some important issues are: How much to reduce the salary of Bob Corkins (50%?), adequate statewide funding to meet the mission of the schools, the actual mission of the schools (age requirements, sports, graduation requirements, etc), the organization of the State BOE (do we need one?) and consolidation of some school districts.
In my opinion, the most important issue is the current state BOE’s desire to establish charter schools under the guidance of the state BOE itself. Number one, this is an attempt to establish an expensive new state level bureacracy to justify the state BOE’s existence. Number two, this is an attempt to cherry-pick a few good schools and students into an expensive and elite level of schools at the expense of the rest of Kansas schools.
There are hugely complicated issues here that don’t lend themselves to easy good or bad answers.
“(I refuse to agree that I.D. is part and parcel of creationism)”
Please share your argument/evidence that they are different.
Yes, clearly there are many tasks ahead for KS BOE. I would contend that priority number one is removing the ideologically driven changes to our state’s science standards. This can only be done by removing the contentious supporters of this medieval anti-science agenda.
I am sure the challenging candidates will have ample opportunity to outline their thinking on the science standards and any number of other issues.
Dear flike:
You’re doing some good thinking. But consider these questions.
1a. Do you agree that love is merely a summation of chemical reactions, generated by random events?
1b. Is this what you tell your spouse: “Honey, I’ve always told you we have great chemistry. I mean it. These tiny molecules inside us that don’t know love themselves have generated it. Of course, our bodies will undergo changing chemical reactions, and depending on how they change, the chemicals may make my brain decide to leave you. Oh now, don’t feel hurt, I’m just being scientific. Actually your chemical changes may make your brain to decide to leave me. Now you feel better, don’t you?”
or howzabout,
“I’m 62. My children are grown and gone. Science says that selfish DNA’s only motive is to replicate itself (chemicals can have motives, fascinating pscyhobabble theory with no scientific support). I’m not having any more children. I should just run my car at 70 miles an hour into a tree.” Salmon die after spawning. According to the scientific selfish-gene theory, I’ve done all that I am supposed to do.”
Do you think Derik might make a good lawyer? He’s got a quick mind: can zero in on a defective argument in a flash. He might become a great litigator.
I may have studied a lot more chemistry and biology than you. I used my Christmas money to buy a light microscope at age 9. I had a chemistry set at age 10. I worked with electron microscopy at age 19, and undertook molecular genetics research training at age 21 and did ground-breaking protein engineering at age 23. (Not too many 23 years olds are allowed to develop their own research projects under federal funding, but my professor had faith in my ideas.) My research was accepted internationally. I studied quantum mechanics in physical chemistry, and statistical mechanics, so I understand the concept of stochastic processes decently.
Applied scientists (technologists and engineers) use the term “intelligent design” in reference to good products. So why can’t extra-human intelligence employ intelligent design? To say this cannot reasonably be possible is to lack a coherent understanding.
If we accept the argument of stochastic evolution–random processes, some of which fit an environment better than others, leading to natural selection of the former–and consider the fossil record, and genetic concordances between living primates and humans, it is quite possible that modern apes and humans have descended from a species that was more intelligent than modern humans, capable of vocal and written communication, creating an advanced civilization, et al.
As it now stands, Darwinian evolution is only based on observation. Darwin was a natural historian. Modern molecular studies are investigating events after the fact. This reflects a tradition dating back to Aristotle, who was a master of natural-world observation and inference.
But modern science is based on experiment. For example, it required Einstein’s theory of the photo-electric effect and special relativity, to create electron-beam photo-electric phosphorescent screens that permitted the experimental invention of television. In essence, if Theory A is true, we should be able to perform laboratory experiments that use this theory to make things happen. Darwinism isn’t even close to this point. As one of Mr. Frisby’s students pointed out, all attempts to create new mutations have yielded defective organisms.
We know that genetic recombination occurs, and generates diversity that is compatible with the idea of a process to generate advantages upon which natural selection can operate. But this phenonomen is nowhere close to sufficient to enable anyone to authoritatively posit that blue-green algae evolved, over time, into mammals. The science just isn’t there. Could it get there? Not without many new fundamental discoveries.
Lawyer Phillip Johnson effectively demonstrated that stochastic evolution proponents rely on many untested SUPPOSITIONS. That they do so is part of science. But it is also an essential part of science to eventually tackle the suppositions. Otherwise you are operating on FAITH and METAPHYSICS. Aristotle is considered the father of observation-and-deduction science. But many of his suppositions were false, and so most of his scientific theories have been discarded.
If you deliberately veer away from tackling the suppositions, to prove or disprove them, then you aren’t practicing real science. Instead you’re building a flimsy house of cards.
Finally, I am not arguing that scientific theory must conform to the Bible. It’s not a basic-science document, although it is fascinating that the creation story is compatible with the Big Bang Theory, and Proverbs labeled worker ants specifically as females, which 20th century chromosomal analysis confirmed to be correct some 3000 years later.
If the earth stopped rotating as Exodus implied must have occurred at Jericho, that would defy all scientific explanation, so it was either a true miracle or a mythological fabrication.
Finally, public-education science in most schools is an oxymoron. You can’t understand science without doing research. The KU and KSU chemistry and biology major programs for secondary science teachers has them spend less than 200 hours in lab courses. Meanwhile, the best chemistry and biology degree students work in research and spend 1000-2000 hours in the laboratory. They work in scientific investigations. Kansas’s science teachers should be demanding similar scientific-research experiences. They need to learn real science by DOING real science.
Real science isn’t aquiring an understanding already-known facts by doing laboratory-manual demonstrations and reading textbooks and attending standardized lectures, it is doing things whose outcomes are uncertain. As Stanford Nobel Laureate Robert Lauglin (Physics) explains in “A Different Universe”, science is WILDERNESS EXPLORATION. If you teach kids, perform experiments whose results sometimes defy expectations, and then figure out with them what happened. That’s real science.
I once met a middle school science teacher who was trying to synthesize ammonium triiodide. This is a fun compound: you put a droplet on a doorknob, let it dry, and whoever tries to open the door creates a micro-explosion. His experiments had not worked. So he was trying to figure out how to make them work. He had a real scientific spirit.
His only mistake was he was working alone, trying to demonstrate a finished product to his students, so that he could appear to them to be a magician. He should have been including them in his experimental endeavors, teaching them, “This isn’t working, but we’ll get it to work.” That’s real science teaching.
Heartlander,
Still waiting for you to explain:1) how ID isn’t creationism in a disguised form; or2) how ID is science.
I would not try either of these, because both are impossible to coherently argue.
I bet Heart will continue to keep you waiting DD…
How sad for you Heart. Intelligent as you are you are not capable of an end or near end for scientific investigation. Now ordinarilly, that would be a good thing and the essence of science. But that is not the path you are on.
Even with the facts overwhelmingly clear, you search further……or rather HIGHER. You abandon or denounce the pursuit of the natural and leave it to the Super natural.
I cite your own example of Frisby and students.(Thank you flike for making his own link the arguement against him. Some scientist Heartlander is. He posts a link and tells us what it says. The reality being not to the advancement of his arguement)
You champion the students their questions of Frisby. You call it intellectual curiousity and the real pursuit of science. But such is not the case. Frisby was teaching science as best it is understood. His students questions were not exploratory. They were born not of inquisitiveness but of a defensive nature as to their own well instructed religious DOGMA. They were not practicing sceince, they were attacking science because it conflicted their FAITH!!!
And THAT folks is why we need worry a very great deal about who is on the board of education. Proponents or adherents to ID are not in any way embracing science. They are abandoning science.
But maybe heartlander will enlighten us…….you know…..after he spins away from answering Darwin (damn that nic is appropriate here!!)
Heart? Is it science to say that some things are beyond knowing and attributable only to some unseen unknowable higher power?
“Heart? Is it science to say that some things are beyond knowing and attributable only to some unseen unknowable higher power?”
JR.. Is it science to say that some things are not explained in Darwin’s model and could be attributed to some unknown intelligent life form from another galaxy?
KsSam,
I would say “no” to both of your questions.
I have absolutely no problem with anyone saying “some things are unknowable and it is my faith that God is responsible.”
My objection comes in when someone tries to paint the above as “science.” It is not. Period. Thank you.
DD…Then you are lieing to yourself… WHY are “scientists” looking to the heavens to explain where life came from? Because evolution has no logical explanation.. How can you say that their research is not scientific?
Note: the LAT article heartlander refers to was, when I read it on Friday, 6 pages long. The chopped version linked to is just that: chopped in half and suffering editorially for that.
My point is that if the strongest evidence of Derik’s “great mind” is his willingness to trade the fossil record and carbon dating for young earth creationism, and in doing so to ignore evidence (i.e., if that’s evidence of his piercing mind at work, deftly cutting to the heart of the matter), then not only will he make a very poor scientist but a very poor lawyer as well. In fact, as far as career suitabilities go Derik’s probably best suited at opening up a small church somewhere.
It’s too bad, heartlander, you showed such promise, right up to the time that you turned into a shill for ID and/or creationism. :)
Well said flike. And damn well done exposing that link of hearts.
Could we call it a missing link? It is at least missing in action.
I note also a defensive tone to Heartlanders post.
“I may have studied a lot more chemistry and biology than you” ……and then a further list of your accomplishments.
All well and good. But sounding a bit defensive.
We do tend to get defensive when we are losing ground.
kssam,
“Is there a God?” is not a question that can be answered empirically. Science requires tangible demonstration, not faith.
To say that science can operate with faith is to cheapen science, AND religion. Intelligent Design tries to make religion and science the same thing, which I again contend is a disservice to both.
I suspect that you and I may have to agree to disagree. If the preceding is true, you are doubtless in company with many whom I consider “good” people.
I’m reminded of the old CIA saying: “‘In God we trust’, all others, we verify.”
I hesitate,
But….
ID is not some fundementalist trick. It is not a way to get religion into the school system.
Of course some Christians support it, we know the identity of the Intelligent Designer! But to dismiss it at unscientific as an excuse to dicredit is is intellectually dishonest.
Many of the proponents of ID make thier case in very secular terms. There is no real connection between ID and creationism. ID still supports evolution, it merely says that it is guided by an intelligent designer.
Hank
DD…
I totally agree with you my friend, down to the point of saying that ID makes science and religion the same thing. My example had nothing to do with religion or creationism, but it could be considered ID. I was just trying to stimulate some critical thinking since you issued a challenge to argue your 2 points in a coherent manner.
“Still waiting for you to explain:1) how ID isn’t creationism in a disguised form; or2) how ID is science.”
I think I gave you something to think about.. that’s all. Some DO try to use ID to “prove” their religious beliefs.. but I agree, it can’t be done… well, unless Christ returns and leaves some evidence!
“But to dismiss it at unscientific as an excuse to dicredit is is intellectually dishonest.”
Let me make clear at the outset that I have NO problem with ID as a PHILOSOPHY or THEOLOGY or IDEOLOGY, and it would be perfectly fine to teach it in classes dealing with those subjects. Likewise, for obvious reasons, it could be mentioned in courses dealing with POLITICAL SCIENCE and SOCIAL STUDIES.
But it’s not science. Why do you think the Kansas Board of Evangelism changed the standards to include, basically, miracles?
Sorry, Hank, I’m afraid it is dismissed as unscientific because it is unscientific. There actually IS no theory of ID–it is simply a bald assertion, and a demand that it be taught! Whether one is speaking of Behe’s “irreducable complexity” or Dembski “specified complexity,” these are best poorly-supported hypothesis that designed more to create doubts about evolution that seriously advance any scientific line of inquiry. It’s a smokescreen of intellectualisms to create the impression of serious study goin on.
The ID argument is always the same: “We don’t know or aren’t about this, therefore the ID did it.” To date there has only one–one!–scientific paper on intelligent design published in a peer-review journal, and it continues in the same modus operandi: take (usually inaccurate) potshots at evolution, then posit ID as the alternative. 200+ pages long, and I would swear he doesn’t even MENTION ID for more than about 4 of those!
Excerpt and link:http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177
Detailed critique @ the Panda’s Thumb Blog:http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/08/meyers_hopeless_1.html
Scientists almost universally reject ID, but it does have the support of the “scientific” Raelian religion (Raelians believe we are all descended from benevolent aliens–as is their right, in America):
http://www.light-science.com/raelianmovement.html
Their reasoning is remarkably similar. . .
Ramen Rage!
ID may be a form of creationism. However, this doesn’t have a Christian origin. The ancient Greeks, the originators of rational thought, came up with this. Plato, a pagan, promoted the concept of a dimension of perfect forms of which material substances were imperfect approximations. Plato was not a scientist, but rather a philosopher.
Thomas Kuhn, at MIT author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (he introduced the term and concept of “paradigms”) to scientific research, explained that the scientific community becomes invested in a theory. It seeks to advance it. But then cracks occur. Efforts are made to patch them. But then new cracks occur, necessitating more patches, and so on, and what seemed earlier to be an elegant coherent theory becomes a crazyquilt, with too many internal contradictions.
Somebody then proposes a completely different idea, which is at first largely rejected, because the scientific community is too heavily self-invested in the current theory, which involves people’s own credibility and their HUMAN DESIRE for their own work to not be considered to be A WASTE OF TIME by others. People don’t like to confront their failings.
At various points, when scientists propose fresh new theories that are compatible with the currently-known evidence, a small number of scientists will say, “This is a good idea, we need to test it” while most will dismiss it. The germ theory of epidemic disease is a great example. It was first proposed in 1546 , but rejected. It was again raised in 1844, and again rejected. The chemist Louis Pasteur took it up in the 1850’s. It took him 20 years to convince the medical profession that the theory was valid. They belittled him; then they made him a hero.
String theory is another good example: it has relatively few proponents. But physicists realize among themselves that two fundamental theories, quantum mechanics and general relativity, each of which has been validated through innumerable experiments, cannot be reconciled to each other. So string theory represents a new idea to achieve reconciliation. It already has had to be modified. It may or may not eventually displace the standard atomic model (which was first proposed by the Greeks, BTW).
The Darwin-Wallace theory represented an important contribution to the Enlightenment, which promoted freedom of thought, expression and life, and an attempt to abolish authoritarianism and rigid class and power relationships.
Ironically, it was endorsed by the ruling class to justify class distinctions, and rationalize horrific poverty (as described by Charles Dickens). Some people were just more highly evolved than others.
There are actually many scientists who are avowed Christians and Jews, who nonetheless support evolution. The question becomes this matter of stochastic evolution, which proposes no intelligent-source directive processes as the cause of evolution. These scientists are sort of practicing quantum mechanics during the week and general relativity on the weekends.
The late eminent molecular biologist Sir Francis Crick (Nobel-winning co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helical structure) spent the last two decades of his life in San Diego trying to devise, with Leslie Orgel, origin-of-life experiments. They utterly failed, leading Crick to propose that the first life here may have been seeded by a meteor that originated in some other part of the universe. This was a basic “punt”. How can this theory be tested? So this is a metaphysical proposition.
Today, biotechnology makes marvelous products through genetic engineering. But it has to obtain genes from already-living organisms. No one has been able to create a functioning gene from basic chemicals.
I would say that one can argue that when Pioneer Hi-Bred and Monsanto insert things like herbicide-resistance and insect-resistance genes into plant genomes, this is a form of evolution. But notice that it utilizes intelligent design.
I’ll be frank with you. I have grave reservations about the theory of stochastic evolution for non-scientific humanitarian reasons. The idea at its heart implies that if life just is, without any moral underpinning. It appeared, mutated, and can disappear, and that’s just the way the science goes. But if this is true, then we cannot justify any moral arguments, ranging from educating the disadvantaged, to democratizing the Middle East, to protecting the environment from currently-ravaging degradation.
Taken to its logical conclusion (the Greeks invented this, Latinized as reductio ad absurdem), there isn’t much that can be done, as life is just a sum of randomized processes: we live in a casino universe. Many of us do not want to dwell in a casino universe.
Many people, including young people intuitively sense that when stochastic evolution proponents say, “Science and religion, are not mutually incompatible,” which is to say, “God could have created random-chance-based life for his own pleasure, and then sent Jesus to rescue believers from his casino, we don’t have a problem with your faith,” this is incoherent. The stochastic evolutionists DO have an objection to people’s faith.
If you want to propose making biology an elective course, and make it have no bearing on high school graduation eligibility or college placement, that’s reasonable. On the other hand, anyone who says that all children must be exposed to teaching in evolution is authoritarian. “You must absorb scientific orthodoxy,” is no less onerous than “You must absorb religious orthodoxy.”
If you say, “But kids need to learn science, and evolution is vital to learning science,” that’s nonsense. We can measure the importance of scientific areas by their research funding. How much money is spent worldwide annually on paleontology research? I don’t have the data. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it is less than a single eminent university spends on non-evolution-related biomedical research. For example, Washington University receives and spends more than $300 million in the latter. On an individual level, I am dubious (without proof) that you’ll find too many foremost-respected paleontologists who have $500,000 annual grant funding, year-in-year-out, which is common in the leading medical schools. In the top 10 medical schools there are many professors who have >$1 million annual research funding, as is also the case at NIH.
I daresay that the paleontologist community would love to have the $10 billion or so spent worldwide in drug research by Big Pharma, but that’s not going to happen.
The National Institutes of Health receive $20 billion. There is no National Institute of Evolutionary Biology.
How much money do doctors make? A starting figure for a young family medicine grad is over $80,000, and goes to $150,000+ before he or she is 40. A senior surgeon or angioplasty-performing cardiologist makes more than $400,000. How many senior evolutionary biologists earn $150,00 (excluding book authorships)? I bet you won’t find very many.
So if you look at where we commit money to make important biological discoveries and contributions to benefit humanity, evolutionary studies are not considered to be very important.
I do know from experience and having kids in college, that for bio majors, evolutionary biology has not been an attractive career track to the vast majority of serious, ambitious students.
You can’t win a Nobel Prize in evolutionary biology. There are many Nobel Laureates whosupport evolution, but funny, they have chosen to NOT work in this field themselves, except in rare instances, such as Crick and Jacques Monod, but this occurred as denouments to their primary research careers.
So why is it crucial to teach evolution in HIGH SCHOOL?
I could teach HS biology. The evolution modules are a cakewalk to understand and convey. But I’d rather teach chemistry and physics. Because teaching real biology requires a foundation in the other sciences. Schools don’t even teach the subjects in the correct order.
For example, if you think you’re scientifically knowledgeable why don’t you do some homework, and try to answer the following questions:
Chemistry
If burning a piece of wood generates a lower free-energy state than unburned wood and oxygen, why don’t we see spontaneous combustion at room temperature?
Why doesn’t Boyle’s Law appear to hold up for nitrogen dioxide at high pressures?
How does a transistor work, basically?
What are s, p and d orbitals?
Benzene and cyclohexane are both six-carbon ringed compounds. What causes their chemical and physical properties to be very different?
“Octane number” is used to measure the anti-knock properties of gasolines. What is octane, and what property does it possess that gave gasolines distilled from various-source oils different antiknock properties 100 years ago?
How did the synthetic additive tetraethyl lead make the percentage of octane in gas irrelevant?What is the major compound used instead of tetraethyl lead today, and how does it work?
What are the profound differences in physical properties of liquid helium vs. liquid nitrogen and what are these differences’ causes?
Physics
If a magnet is passed through a copper coil, a transient electrical current is generated. How does this occur?
Explain Maxwell’s Laws.
Explain why a hollow charged sphere has zero internal electrical potential.
Among the following: visible light, microwaves, gamma rays, radio waves and x-rays, order these from longest wave length to shortest.
What is an electron volt?
What is the strong nuclear force generated by?
Here’s some biology:
How do foraging bees lead their hivemates to new flower patches?
What missing element in the eye of the dog renders it color-blind, while being sensitive to the full range of visible light?
How do rays find buried clams and crustaceans?
How are whales and elephant seals able to make prolonged deep dives without experiencing either nitrogen narcosis or the bends?
How do moths find each other in the dark to mate? At what distance can they detect each other, and why?
What do “ring” structure is similar in chlorophyll and hemoglobin, and what does this ring component do in each molecule?
Carbon monoxide and cyanide both inhibit the body’s ability to utilize oxgen, and essentially cause cellular respiratory failure. Describe their different mechanisms.
Describe how RNA viruses mutate faster than DNA viruses.
What is a prion, and why is it considered to be a transmissable disease-causing agent, but not a traditional infectious-disease agent.
What is a stem cell?
What are telomeres, and what is their relationship to aging?
What properties of some pesticides cause them to be endocrine disrupters?
Describe the Krebs cycle, and its purpose. Name some foods that naturally contain chemicals that inhibit the Krebs cycle, and show their points of inhibition in the cycle.
What organelles besided nuclei in prokaryotic cells contain DNA, and what particular characteristic of this DNA in human cells is being used to by researchers chart human origins and migrations around the world?
Science is an enormous field. Almost all of the above questions can be answered without reference to stochastic processes.
So you really need to ask why high schools are engaged in an unending battle for the teaching of evolution.
It is really may be a red herring being used to distract the public from the fact that schools are not teaching science well, which is why America has to import scientists, doctors and engineers. There are a lot of young Americans who could fill these roles–I was able to– but they aren’t prepared to study and master the requisite science courses in college. Students say, “These are too hard.” I saw classmates derailed and dissuaded. It’s really sad when young people have dreams and then find out they can’t surmount the hurdles necessary to fulfill them.
Evolutionary biology may be not hot, but mathematical biology is way hot. Cheap research to fund, too.
I believe HS biology’s evolution unit is what, a week long. It’s not as if many Kansas high schools offer a stand alone course in evolution.
You seem to be arguing that Americans could grow more scientists if we’d chuck evolution out of HS curricula. Your solution is to stop teaching biology or stop teaching evolution in biology. Alternatively, I believe I hear you advocating teaching ID if only because doing so would provide a spiritual bridge for kids to overcome the horrors of a casino universe.
I find this patently condescending if internally consistent with what you’ve written. It’s condescending because you give certain children, evangelicals of a certain bent, no choice but to become burdens on society, anchors to American science as it were, if they’re somehow forced to hold 2 ideas in their heads, ideas which may be dichotomous.
I call BS, and my meter’s pegged.
I also strongly suspect you work for either Lawyer Phillip Johnson or the Discovery Institute.
Heartlander,Ever hear of the scientific principle of parsimony? Your last post leads me to believe you are not familiar with it.
When I have time later, I will sort through the much chaff and see if I can respond to any wheat there.
Suffice it to say at this time: science is about observation, faith is about the acceptance of things without observation. The two things are different.
Certainly in the process of science speculation is engaged in. But it does not stop there – hypotheses are tested (which necessarily involves observation). Whereas, with faith one allegedly knows the “truth” without the second step. Distinctly different processes, in my view.
I’ll second that call flike.
That was quite a post your last one heart. I’m not sure if you typed all that to justify your scientific prowess to us (and I acknowledge your knowledge)…….or maybe to yourself.
I don’t know that it was long or deep enough though to cover your dubious use of a link upthread.
And you are getting furthrer and further afield!
Dear Rage,
You write,
“But it’s not science. Why do you think the Kansas Board of Evangelism changed the standards to include, basically, miracles?”
Have you even read the new science standards as they pertain to evolution? Where is there any mention of ID? Where is there any mention of creation?
The disonest proponents of evolution are excused from any valid questioning of the various falacies of evolution theory by merely labeling any one that questions evolution as a “creationist”.
And you are wrong. Many mainstream scientists are proponents of ID. And there are many oponents of ID that are intellectually honest enough to argue their points without bringing creation into the picture.
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html
Hank
BTW, science is a philosophical discipline. It is also an art. It doesn’t have any endpoints. At the close of the 19th century, physicists thought they had made all major discoveries, and there were just details to be filled out. Then relativity came out, followed by quantum mechanics. Physics was completely changed.
We say that electrons have “spin” and have “angular momentum”. But these are totally different from the physics of a spinning visible ball.
Nanotechnology was first proposed by Richard Feynman ca. 1960. Nobody could conceive of what he was talking about, i.e. molecular machines that operated according to laws that were different from those of the visible macro-scale. They believed he knew what he was talking about, but scratched their heads. Now his vision is taking shape as a developable industry.
We have dark matter. It is only indirectly detectable. But if scientists can learn how to “capture” it, it will undoubtedly change scientists’ understanding of cosmology greatly.
Fifty years ago doctors were ignorant of molecular biology. It has revolutionized medicine and medical theory. What doctors knew back then was essentially mostly wrong.
The field of natural history had very little understanding of the complex dynamics between species: there was no term “ecosystem”.
In the 1960’s Stanford’s Paul Erlich, author of “The Population Bomb” forsaw mass starvation in India by the late 20th century. But amazing new advances in agriculture made “the Green Revolution” occur, and India became a net-exporter of food.
We’re messing up our environment badly. But in nature, there is a “force” that seeks to establish an equilibrium–this is well established, empirically, although nobody knows how the “force” works. Reality is incompatible with a stochastic model. If we say, “This equilibrium-restoration phenomenon is observable, but we can’t scientifically explain it, so it’s out of science’s realm,” this suggests that we need to try to bring it into the scientific realm–the problem is not the phenomenon, but science’s being too primitive.
Feynman described that when a ball is thrown between two points, it will always take the shortest path. That’s a replicable observable phenomenon. But nobody can explain how it happens. Perhaps in the future scientists will.
As I a student, I was repeatedly told, “If you want to have a university career, you must specialize.” This was dogma in the 1960’s-80’s. It was true, THEN. I resisted it.
For the past decade the new mantra is interdisciplinary research, which means your knowledge must be more broadly based. This process itself is generating completely new ideas.
Of all the scientific fields, biology tends to lag physics and chemistry in its pace of evolution. Where practical applications are envisioned that can generate societal benefits, and profits, the pace of change is much more rapid.
BTW, I wasn’t raised in a fundamentalist household. I never heard that the earth was 6000 years old until I was in my 30’s. When I was a Child, I didn’t read the bible. I was too busy playing with my dinosaur models and collecting bugs.
Finally, some of you who followed my link apparently didn’t absorb the whole article. It also mentioned students who asked probing questions that the teacher couldn’t answer. So now we’re going to see in-services and materials to be distrubed to teachers to help them answer these questions. But the kids will then find new questions to ask, thereby stumping their teachers ad infinitim. So the teachers will either have to spend so much prep time that they throw their hands up and skip evolution, or else they will have to tell their students, “Shut up and listen. I’m not taking any questions.” The latter, if it occurs will NOT be science teaching. Real science teaching isn’t presenting textbook facts,because all scientific facts and theories change.
The real reason we have an evolution controversy is that public schools were designed, from their inception, to transmit standardized curricula. This works for some things. But it doesn’t work well for science, unless the standards reflect an understanding of the processes of science. To really do any kind of decent job, four hours a week should be devoted to hands-on projects, with reading done mostly after school–if kids are smart enough to be taking biology, they’re smart enough to read a biology textbook and handouts at home. Has anyone proposed this as a new science-teaching standard?
Doing experiments is what gets kids really interested in science, and prepares them for advanced work. If educators say, “We don’t have enough money for that kind of endeavor, hands- on science is really expensive,” then they’re just deluding themselves and doing a disservice to very bright students and our science-and-technology-dependent nation. They’re misrepresenting science.
BTW, I believe in evolution. Darwin’s Origin of Species makes solid arguments, based on his own observations in the Galapagos, and experience breeding fancy pigeons (the latter involved some intelligent design), and biologists have done amazing work showing what properties males must have, of many species, to attract females, which means the females have demonstrably intelligent designs on their mates.
OK, I am gonna risk a firestorm here. My post, like usual, has nothing to do with science or evolution. It has to do with possibility and choice as opposed to “shoulds” and man-made limitations on our thinking and creativity.
“The idea at its heart implies that if life just is, without any moral underpinning. (snip)…But if this is true, then we cannot justify any moral arguments, ranging from educating the disadvantaged, to democratizing the Middle East, to protecting the environment from currently-ravaging degradation.”
Heartlander, the above paragraph is true for many of us, and is at the heart of the opposition to tyranny held by those of us who do not believe in any supernatural power.
What your paragraph leaves out, is that believing that life just “is” without attaching “moral arguments” is a concept which is quite empowering. It frees us from limitations in thinking and creativity. It gives us choice in a way that many people find frightening, but some of us find empowering.We all have choice. We can choose to do ALL those things you mentioned. And that choice is much more powerful than doing things because we are “supposed” to do them.
From the concept of choice, we get the practice of creating possibility. And the acknowledgement of the idea that creativity only occurs when we “come from nothing”.
Coming from “something” is only change, and usually incremental change from whatever the “something” was. It is not creating anything. Creativity only occurs when we “come from nothing”.
Choice and possibility mean we get to choose the life we live. It means we are not victims, but rather that we are responsible for the life we have and how we live it. No blaming anything or anyone else if choice is ours. With choice and possibility, we are not limited by the thinking of others.
And choice is empowering. We can choose possibility, and then live into that possibility. We can say how our life is going to go, and then make it go that way.
It seems to me that creating possibility and letting people choose to live into possibilty is truely standing for our collective greatness.
I know that is a short and insufficient explanation. I had life changing experiences in a seminar called the Landmark Forum. I learned that “life is empty and meaningless” is actually a good thing, a powerful way of being in the context of creating possibility.
And goddess knows :) we could all use more, not less, possibility.
I should have added something to this: “Heartlander, the above paragraph is true for many of us, and is at the heart of the opposition to tyranny held by those of us who do not believe in any supernatural power.”
The concepts of choice and possibility are also compatable with christians and jews and other faiths. I had the pleasure of attending many seminars with church people, both lay and clergy, who also found these concepts to be empowering and not in conflict with their respective faiths.
Dear flikes
The law of parsimony? I learned this in 1972. I learned it was also called Occam’s Razor in 1982. Course I was late, because his ideas were written in the 1300′’s. When did you come across this?
Probably later than I, but perhaps at a younger age. Which would represent progress.
Evolution occurs. Study quantum mechanics, with an open mind. This German idea proposed truly random processes, as opposed to deterministic processses that human minds could not discern. The quantum mechanics refused the idea of deterministic processes that they could not get to, and measurement was probabilistic, so they decided to advance the the notion that the processes themselves were probabilistic. That’s metaphysics. The stochastic evolutionists took this stance. This doesn’t make the theory CORRECT.
Dear Flikes,
How much do you want to learn?
In WWII, the Americans should have captured the Vatican archives. It secreted ancient knowledge. We saved the Catholic Church, and should have gotten their knowledge base as a quid pro quo. Today, the Library of Congress should be digitized and opened up to public inspection, along with the National Archives, and those of every country.
Google is trying to publicize some of our nation’s most powerful library databases, including the Stanford Library, University of Michigan Library, and the New York City Library. Some people are trying to prevent this. Do you think this is in YOUR interest? Are the opponents trying to help YOU?
I have noticed that since I have begun posting, a lot more people are posting longer, more thoughtful (more often) messages. I’m not seeking to obtain personal credit, because I am anonymous. I’m a chemist. I just want to be a catalyst.
Sometimes I say things I think are right, but am not sure of. Sometimes I say things to provoke counter arguments. I love rejoindres that cause me to think. I am a teacher, and every good teacher is a lifelong learner. Real teachers learn from their peers and from young students.
Somebody mentioned carbon dating. I don’t have any experience in this. I’ve used carbon 14 for isolating radiolabeled compounds, as well as tritium (H-3), and iodine 128 and 135. I don’t know if high school biology teachers can get these anymore, because they may be on a post-911 “terrorist dirty bomb” list.
I recently inquired about getting potassium nitrate, that I used 40 years ago to make firecrackers, and was told that’s on the anti-terrorist list. So in 21st century America, you can’t make 12th century gunpowder anymore. I guess the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration considers this “progress”. Like terrorists might use 12th century gunpowder to kill Americans. With firecrackers.
This is really sad. Young boys love this stuff. Does this make them “future terrorists”? I don’t think so. But maybe I’m wrong. Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld are GENIUSES. Maybe they are OMNISCIENT.
heartlander,I am enjoying reading your posts.I agree with your last post. What boy growing up doesn’t blow up pop cans with firecrackers or play with bb guns or paintball guns? It doesn’t mean they’re a maladjusted crazy gun maniac. It means that they are boys who like things to go “boom”. (my 40 something hubby still likes things that go “boom”)I think it would be facinating to see a demonstration of 12th century gunpowder. Let me know if you are ever able to do this please!
heartlander – ya gotta understand that it was Rightie Tim McVeigh who decided to use nitrate as a terror weapon. And that darling of the Right, Ann Coulter, complained that he didn’t target the New York Times.
Poor ol’ Tim, we need to try and understand him. If we just knew what we were doing wrong as a nation that forced him into terrorism then we can prevent it from ever happening again.
Hank
Julie,
I wish I could, but I can’t. When I was 12, it was completely legal to make small amounts of gunpowder. It may not be lawful today, without a special license, and I don’t have one. I wanted to give a demo two years ago to a friend’s son–not to encourage him to make gunpowder, but just to show him the “magic” of how charcoal powder and sulfur powder burn slowly, and saltpeter not at all, but when you mix them in the right proportion you get a “whoof” (not boom, actually, as that requires a closed device that allows pressure to build up and break through the container walls).
So I tried to buy some saltpeter in a store that once sold me it when I showed my own sons the “magic”, and was told was on a restricted federal list, following the 9/11 tragedy. (BTW Ben, if I recall correctly from news reports, McVeigh used ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel. I’m only familiar with this explosive in passing because I once looked into attending the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, as they were using this explosive to make cool things through “explosion lenses” like small diamonds from coal. Never made any of this explosive myself. If I had known about it as a kid, I might have tried to make some.)
Explosives and incendiaries can be dangerous. I was just lucky. A boy in my school tried to make a pipe bomb (he was just looking to make a loud boom), and foolishly tried to drill a fuse hole AFTER filling and capping the pipe. Lost two fingers.
A friend of mine tried to pack light-anywhere kitchen match-heads into a C02 cartridge to make a rocket, and it pre-ignited, horribly disfiguring half his face from 3rd degree burns.
I came up with an idea to vacuum evacuate and seal a glass tube, and apply a Tesla coil. My friends thought that was cool, looking at purple light. It also generated x-rays, something I was ignorant of.
I also reverse-hooked up a toy train transformer to our TV’s transformer to generate 200,000 volts. It made a terrific spark, and filled the living room with ozone. But in blowing out the TV transmitter, I didn’t please my parents when they tried to turn on the TV and got no image.
I was a different age, living in a different age.
Dear ksfg,
CHOICE IS GOOD. I think we can separate an intelligent designer from humans who said, “I have been chosen by God to tell you what to do.”
The Old Testament WARNED the Jews, “Don’t ask for a KING, as the Pagans have. He’ll cause your enslavement.” (I am paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it.)
You have a right to make your own choices. I have no idea which choices you make are right for you or wrong for you. Neither does anybody else.
“And you are wrong. Many mainstream scientists are proponents of ID.”
“http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html“
Great link, Hank! But what I am supposed to do with this fish in a barrel?
(Hint: I just happened to mention 50% of those “mainstream scientists” upthread, and all four of them just happen to be fellows at the Discovery Institute).
Heartlander,
Your extended philosophical treatise aside, one reason we need to teach schoolchildren the accurate basics of evolution is that, simply put, evolution is the organizing principle of nearly every branch of the life sciences currently in practice. Theodosius Dobzhansky once noted (in 1950) that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” That’s more true today that ever.
Students might just need to understand what evolution IS if they want to work in the burgeoing biotech industry. Others might just become evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists (it’s a very “green” field, but it exists) or, perhaps, help design new antibiotics using evolutionary strategies, being that the current bacteria are rapidly evolving resistance to the antibiotics we’ve produced via more conventional means. I’m really not looking forward to millions dying from Staphylococcus aureus plagues because of a lack of qualified researchers in the pipeline (if that seems like scaremongering, I direct your attention to the current nursing shortage. . .).
Morever, as Kansas continues to get a reputation of as an antiscience backwoods, biotechnology companies and other high-tech firms will think twice about locating here. Bye bye jobs; nice knowing you!
Whatever your credentials (I take your self-ID as a chemist at face value), your bizarre rant about the so-called “selfish gene theory” ALONE (Dawkins was just using a METAPHOR, Ace), indicates an extreme degree of ignorance of the subject on your own part. I could say much more, but, were I thorough, it could easily be perceived as gratutious insult.
The fact that such cataclysmic ignorance of the subject is so prevalent in our society–even among the highly educated–is yet another reason to teach kids the basics of the theory.
Oops, my bad, Hank! I thought Steve Meyer was there, too!
Which means I named 66% of the ID proponents in my link before even seeing it!
But, being human, I make mistakes (burp!).
There are A LOT OF MAINSTREAM scientists who are either agnostic on the matter or believe more in intelligent design than in stochastic evolution. Practicing engineers, doctors, dentists, veterinarians physicists, chemists. The ardent stochastic evolutionists may be a minority. We don’t know, because we have never had a comprehensive survey.
The idea of intelligent design is different from the idea of “I’m connected to the Intelligent Designer, and you’re not, so I’ll give orders to you. I’ll tell you how things are, because you are too stupid to figure out how things are.”
Those of you who are honest, be skeptical. Figure things out. But don’t say there isn’t intelligent design just to object to human authoritarianism. These are two completely different things. So don’t conflate them.
I don’t object to the teaching of stochastic evolution because it is wrong, I object to it because it is taught as dogma. I would object no less strongly to Bishop Usher’s 6000-year-old earth and no-evolution proposition as dogma.
Science is so much cooler than this: conduct experiments yourself and make your own observations and speculations.
Don’t be so foolish as to say “experts have done their work, and tell us how things are”. That’s accepting OTHER PEOPLES’ assertions without testing them yourself. This isn’t science. Science isn’t what textbooks tell you. It’s experimenting and figuring out from your own experiments and observations what is to you.
Does Al Frisby bring to the class fossils, and have kids do radiometric dating? Does he teach them that about isotopic chemical properties that may, for example can cause lighter isotopes to be separated from heavier isotopes when water flows are applied? He can’t do this, because his students don’t have the scientific background to understand these things.
Were Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace wrong. Not necessarily. Were they right? Quite possibly.But two of the greatest scientists in history, Aristotle and Isaac Newton were wrong in some things.
So demand that kids learn the scientific process by experimenting and observing. Allow them to derive their own conclusions. Teach them mathematics, and introduce sciences in a rational order: physics, chemistry and biology, not the ignorant reverse. Eliminate evolution or maintain it, and in either case, 9th grade students are ignorant in biology. It is too complex a subject for the vast majority of 9th graders to understand. Do not dogmatize them, please.
“So demand that kids learn the scientific process by experimenting and observing. Allow them to derive their own conclusions.”
On that, you, me, and Lawrence Krauss agree. And the late Richard Feynman as well.
“There are A LOT OF MAINSTREAM scientists who are either agnostic on the matter or believe more in intelligent design than in stochastic evolution. Practicing engineers, doctors, dentists, veterinarians physicists, chemists. The ardent stochastic evolutionists may be a minority. We don’t know, because we have never had a comprehensive survey.”
Your persistent use of the word “stochastic” suggests annoyance at the random nature of evoluntary processes. Well, the same is true of tornadoes. You can kill your heathen weatherguy if you want, but plenty of people of deep faith have no problem believing crappy weather is, well, crappy weather. Perhaps there is some deeper purpose that a truly awesome prime mover didn’t bother to share with you (or us).
And, of course, the validity of a scientific doctrine is NOT determined by surveys or petitions. Perhaps we should poll computer scientists on whether they believe in mitochondrial DNA! Just as an example. Or how about a real one: Dr. Paul Ackerman, a psychology professor at WSU, suggested–presumably with a straight face–that ID be taught in the schools because a survey showed a majority of his students agreed! (Hey, while we’re at it, Paul, let’s have the biology undergrads determine the curriculum of YOUR classes!).
So, you see, the argument itself is silly and illogical.
Still, I thought you might be interested in seeing the results of Project Steve, an ongoing, uhm, experiment endorsed by over 700 scientists (and counting!):
http://www.natcenscied.org/resources/articles/3541_project_steve_2_16_2003.asp
Dear Rage,
Actually, Larry Krauss may be expressing arguments based on what I told him. He’s not an experimentalist. He’s a theoretical physicist. He’s a excellent interpreter of astrophysical data, but not a theoretical physicist who shapes research for the experimentalists to conduct.
Again, I believe in evolution, but if a theoretical astrophysicist chairing a second-tier midwestern physics department is taken to be an authority in biology, let’s consider the following:
“Larry Krauss is Just Plain Wrong
The New York Times published an opinion piece by Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, titled When Sentiment and Fear Trump Reason and Reality.
In short, Krauss complains about the “marketing” efforts to reconcile science with religion. While he has a lot of contempt for anyone who expresses a religious belief in a public arena, for Kruass the absolute worst are those who express any doubts about Darwin. Those doubters he compares with the bloody Taliban regime of Afghanistan, though he does seem to think we have more entrepreneurial skills.
“Foes of evolution and the Big Bang in this country do not operate with the direct and brutal actions of the Taliban. They have marketing skills.”Apparently, marketing skills are worse than the crimes of an insane, religious oligarchy.What Krauss implies is that anyone who voices dissent with St. Darwin’s theory is lying and is the same as the brutal, terrorists of the violent Taliban regime.
Excuse me if I yawn with boredom. I’ve been called the Taliban, and worse, by more creative people than Krauss, and in places like Texas, where they truly meant it.
Krauss then goes on to make a claim that is just plain, factually, wrong.
“The Discovery Institute in Seattle supports the work of several Ph.D.’s who then write books (and op-ed articles) decrying the fallacy of evolution. They don’t write scientific articles, however, because the claims they make – either that cellular structures are too complex to have evolved or that evolution itself is improbable – have either failed to stand up to detailed scrutiny or involve no falsifiable predictions.”Hmmm. No scientific articles at all. I will have to spend some time getting the exact numbers of articles by Discovery Fellows and posting them here later, but our “several” Fellows (near 40 PhD’s for this year alone) have between them published hundreds of articles in scientific journals.But let’s just take one at random and see what we find.
Dr. Henry Schaefer received his B.S. degree in chemical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1966) and Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford University (1969). For 18 years (1969-1987) he served as a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.Here’s the interesting part.He is the author of more than 1000 scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of the American Chemical Society. … A total of 300 scientists from 35 countries gathered in Gyeongju, Korea for a six-day conference in February, 2004 with the title “Theory and Applications of Computational Chemistry: A Celebration of 1000 Papers of Professor Henry F. Schaefer III.”Did I miss something? An entire conference was held to celebrate the papers of a Discovery Institute scientist who according to Krauss doesn’t ”write scientific articles.”Just as a little side note:
Dr. Schaefer has been invited to present plenary lectures at more than 180 national or international scientific conferences. He has delivered endowed or named lectures or lecture series at more than 35 major universities, including the 1998 Kenneth S. Pitzer Memorial Lecture at Berkeley and the 2001 Israel Pollak Distinguished Lectures at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.. … During the comprehensive period of 1981–1997 Professor Schaefer was the sixth most highly cited chemist in the world; out of a total of 628,000 chemists whose research was cited. The Science Citation Index reports that by December 31, 1999, his research had been cited more than 30,000 times.But I digress.Krauss ends with this: “If the scientific method is out of the mainstream in our country it is time to take a stronger stand against the effort to undermine empirical reality in favor of dogma.”
Indeed. When the scientific method no longer follows the evidence where it leads, it is sadly out of the mainstream. There’s no doubt that it is time to take a stronger stand as Dr. Krauss suggests, and stand up against the Herculean, last-gasp efforts to undermine empirical reality in favor of dogmatic Darwinism.
One more side note. Here are just a few papers from scientific peer-reviewed journals that relate directly to either design theory or scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution.
“The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories”, by Stephen C. Meyer, in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, August 2004
“Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues”, by Michael J. Behe and David W. Snoke, in Protein Science, The Protein Society August 2004
“Self-Organization and Irreducibly Complex Systems”, By: Michael J. Behe in Philosophy of Science 67 (March 2000), University of Chicago PressExamples of peer-reviewed books supporting design include The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press) by William Dembski and Darwin’s Black Box (The Free Press) by Michael Behe. Additionally peer-reviewed and peer-edited books addressing design theory have appeared with Michigan State University Press and Cambridge University Press respectively. There is also a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on design theory, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, which has an editorial advisory board of more than 50 scholars from relevant scientific disciplines, most of whom have university affiliations.”
Larry Krauss WISHES he had these scientific credentials. He did his Ph.D. at MIT, but did his UG work at Carleton U, which is not even close to Canada’s best scientific research universities (e.g. Toronto and McGill, followed by McMaster). It’s vastly harder to get into the MIT UG program than the Ph.D. program. Dr. Krauss has been a summer visiting prof at UCSB. That’s a lot easier than being awarded a full-time professorship there.
I think that some posters here, such as Darwin’s Disciple, may be high school students or teachers. Look at the very top biology students here. They want to go to med school. This is the same across the nation. But nobody polls doctors on stochastic evolution. The late Harvard evolutionist-popularizer Stephen J. Gould WANTED to become a physician, but he flunked organic chemistry at Oberlin. So he switched to a paleontology career. This is a predominant phenomenon–the second and third-tier biology majors decide to study fossils. Combine third-rate science ability and low research funding, and that does not add up to first-rate scientific research.
wow