Dover Case Attracts Worldwide Coverage
A tiny selection of today's coverage...
"On second day, evolution trial delves into topic of faith"
Martha Raffaele, The Associated Press
"Pa. Case Is Newest Round in Evolution Debate 'Intelligent Design' Teaching Challenged"
Michael Powell, Washington Post
"Evolution Lawsuit Opens in Pennsylvania"
Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times
"A teachable moment on 'just a theory'"
The Roanoke Times
Philadelphia Daily News Editorial Cartoon
Signe Wilkinson
"Parents challenge US 'intelligent design' teaching"
Julian Borger, The Guardian
"'Intelligent design' doctrine goes to US federal court"
China View
"US evolution court battle opens"
The Journal of Turkish Weekly
Check out the full coverage from the York (PA) Daily Record
"On second day, evolution trial delves into topic of faith"
Martha Raffaele, The Associated Press
"Pa. Case Is Newest Round in Evolution Debate 'Intelligent Design' Teaching Challenged"
Michael Powell, Washington Post
"Evolution Lawsuit Opens in Pennsylvania"
Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times
"A teachable moment on 'just a theory'"
The Roanoke Times
Philadelphia Daily News Editorial Cartoon
Signe Wilkinson
"Parents challenge US 'intelligent design' teaching"
Julian Borger, The Guardian
"'Intelligent design' doctrine goes to US federal court"
China View
"US evolution court battle opens"
The Journal of Turkish Weekly
Check out the full coverage from the York (PA) Daily Record
posted by ACLU of Pennsylvania at 9/27/2005 12:32:00 PM
10 Comments:
From the 4-paragraph statement which started this debate:
"The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
"Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations."
Found here.
Would any of you disagree with that?
Answer to trevor.
Yes, I would like to disagree!!
OK. Darwin´s Theory is a theory and not a fact and a theory is defined as "a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations."
BUT .. and a very important BUT the third paragraph states: "Intelligent Design is an explanation ..."
So, of course, who would not like an explanation instead of a theory! Why should the students bother with a mere theory when there is an explanation in "Of Pandas and People" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People
Soon some pastafarians will appear and tell us that the theory of gravity is not a fact but a mere theory and that the real explanation is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster - is willing things to fall.
Could we not all agree to keep faith outside the science classrooms, please?
I am a recently retired public school teacher who taught a yearly lesson (for five years) that showed students that evolution is impossible and Intelligent Design is scientific. I did this with the full knowledge of local and state education officials and the ACLU.
Also, Dr. Mastropaolo and I have yet to find an evolutionists that will dispute our claim that evolution is inverted anti-science and creation is science. See the Life Science Prize at http://www.csulb.edu/~jmastrop/
Also, Dr. Mastropaolo and I have yet to find an evolutionists that will dispute our claim that evolution is inverted anti-science and creation is science.
I'm not surprised. They probably took one look at your web site and decided you had no credibility. You seem to mistake evolution with abiogenesis.
"Can Life Arise From Nonlife?" has nothing to do with evolution.
"Biology Eliminates Evolution", which discusses the creation of amino acids upon the application of electricity to certain chemicals, also has nothing to do with evolution.
Darwin's dream of "the spontaneous generation of the first living cell" has nothing to do with evolution.
All of the above deals with abiogenesis.
It's no wonder the Institute for Creation Research publishes your stuff. According to their website, they believe as follows:
We believe God has raised up ICR to spearhead Biblical Christianity's defense against the godless and compromising dogma of evolutionary humanism. Only by showing the scientific bankruptcy of evolution, while exalting Christ and the Bible, will Christians be successful in “the pulling down of strongholds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (II Corinthians 10:4,5).
Since you clearly have no agenda, perhaps you ought to testify for the Plaintiffs in this case. It would definitely help prove that religion has more to do with intelligent design than science.
Unfortunately, none of the media coverage so far has mentioned how the Discovery Institute has spent millions of dollars promoting ID - in order to save society from destruction caused by not enough people believing in the supernatural.
See, the ID advocates are postmodernists of the right. They think that the real world gives us no objective truths, so all moral disputes come down to competing interest groups, each using their own private self-serving arguments to justify their positions.
Unlike traditional leftist postmodernists, the creationists seek to create a God-as-Lawgiver as a surrogate for the objective truth they wish existed. He doesn't merely want us to do the right and avoid the wrong. He decides what to declare as "right" or "wrong" in the first place.
If this moral subjectivism were true, then of course we'd end up in Hobbes' war of all against all, and maybe we could use an all-powerful supernatural "strongman" to dictate some rules for us. But the fact is the real world is objective, and ideas do have objective consequences. As a conservative myself, I'm deeply embarrassed by these people and their postmodernist crisis of confidence in objective truth.
It's too bad that no reporter has picked up on this internal debate within the conservative movement yet.
p.s. Any reporter interested in this issue should seek out Larry Arnhart, whose recent book, Darwinian Conservatism, looks like a good rebuttal to the Discovery Institute guys' misguided agenda.
(No, I'm not working for Arnhart. But I did enjoy his previous book, Darwinian Natural Right.)
The point is not that Darwin's theory is a theory, or that (as is true) many scientists now accept other theories (such as punctuated equilibrium). The point is that many textbooks teach Darwins original theory as the sole explanation for life on Earth, which in fact it is not, even amongst Evolutionists. All widely-supported theories should be taught, or none of them. I am an advocate of the latter.
Darwin's dream of "the spontaneous generation of the first living cell" has nothing to do with evolution.
While that is rather against the point, I would point out that Darwin himself never properly accepted spontaneous generation and this was mostly attributed to him by others.
Actually, punctuated equilibrium flows naturally from what we know today about Darwinian evolution and the mathematics of population genetics.
See Theobald [2003], which concludes:
"Punctuated equilibrium is a valid scientific hypothesis, and when geological strata are complete with good temporal resolution and the fossil record is well-represented, the hypothesis is testable. PE, as construed by Eldredge and Gould, is founded upon the modern allopatric speciation model which lies well within mainstream population genetics. However, PE is not novel, and in large part PE originated with Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (Darwin credits British paleontologist Hugh Falconer with first proposing that stasis is more predominant in the fossil record than periods of morphological change). Thus, in any meaningful sense of the word, the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium is resolutely "Darwinian." "
ID, on the other hand, has about as much scientific validity as the "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" theory, or Holocaust denial. (And no, I'm NOT calling ID'ers Nazis. :-) It's just that some competing theories do not deserve to make the cut to waste time on in a high school class.
The picture of Vic in the Washington Post is unfortunate ;-)
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