RufusAtticus

No. 1 here.

The irony about your comment on the petition is that Kathy Cox did remove the Revolutionary War from American History.

RufusAtticus

Interesting new website.

http://www.KathyCoxEvolve.com

RufusAtticus

Evolution comments irk scientists

(About push for ID in Georgia Schools.)

State stance on evolution a devolution into stupidity

Proposed standards give science teachers leeway

Forum: Should evolution be taught in Georgia schools?

NottyImp

From a letter quoted in the article above:

What do you suppose "viewpoint discrimination" is?

Could the reverse of this coin be, perchance, the "right" to believe any old nonsense you like and foist it onto the minds of young people in classrooms, regardless of the facts?

Surely not...

scaramallion

From AiG:


Compare to Jimmy Carter:
and,


They would rather quote an assistant professor from Emory over another professor at Emory? I'm sure the fact that the latter is an ex-president had nothing to do with it...


Also from AiG:
So that's why they want creationism in schools...

And now I need to take a long shower...so very, very dirty...

Asha'man

Nice start, Rufus.

However, I think you need to make the differences stand out more, the bold text just isn't doing the job. Maybe you should use red for removed text and green for added wording. Alternately, you could underline added words and strikeout removed words. Either way, the removed wording needs to stand out with a glance.

RufusAtticus

I just received a comprehensive mark up from NCSE. I'm going to be working on converting it to some sort of web format. (Maybe just a pdf.)

RBH

NottyImp askedAs far as I can tell, it's a variant of the "fairness" argument - 'it's only fair to include all accounts of origins and let the students make up their own minds.'

But, of course, science isn't "fair" in that sense. To modestly quote myself from material I put together for a local school board facing an ID push (some stolen from various sources ):

It is sometimes argued that it is not fair to teach just one account of the diversity of life on earth, modern evolutionary theory, and that fairness therefore demands that alternative theories also be taught.

That argument ignores the central nature of science, which is to make choices among ideas based on empirical evidence gathered in systematic research. Scientists consider many alternative ideas, and by testing them against empirical evidence scientists make choices among those ideas, keeping the ideas that are supported by the evidence and discarding those that are not supported or that are contradicted by the evidence.

There are many conjectures that purport to explain the diversity of life on earth. Some currently available "alternatives" to neoDarwinian theory are:

• 1. Panspermia - the seeding of life on earth from space
  2. Genetic Engineering by Alien Beings (Raelians)
  3. Intelligent designing actions by one or more unknown unembodied intelligent agents
  4. Young Earth Creationism (Essentialism)
  5. Parallel Natural Origins of All Genomes: Independent natural emergence of all species
  6. Lamarckian Transformism

How does one choose from among these alternatives? Which (if any) are appropriate to teach in high school science and which are not? Every one of them has at least one supporter with a Ph.D.

If the criterion is "fairness" then we have no way to choose among them. All are equally acceptable. But the core criterion for accepting theories in science is not "fairness." The basic criterion is corroborating support from empirical evidence. A theory in science is not a guess or speculation. It is a coherent set of natural laws, principles, and empirical generalizations that have been tested and corroborated in systematic and rigorous research. Here are some of the criteria that allow us to choose a good scientific theory:

• 1. It is empirically testable - it generates predictions of new observations that are testable via systematic field and/or laboratory research.
  2. Its predictions of observations have been verified in research.
  3. It concerns reproducible observations, or replicability.
  4. It provides grounds for the interpretation of data as factual, artifactual, anomalous or irrelevant.
  5. It is consistent with what we know in neighboring disciplines. For example, theories in chemistry should be consistent with what we know about physics.

On those criteria, only the modern theory of evolution, the neoDarwinian synthesis, is a scientific theory of the diversity of life on earth. The rest may be interesting speculations, but they are not part of the body of science. One or another may someday become accepted in science, but none are accepted now, and we have no way of predicting if or when one or another of them might be accepted if the evidence warrants it. As of now, none have met that criterion.

RBH

Lanakila

It seems former President Jimmy Carter is against the changes too Rufus. This thread was started at CF regarding this. http://www.christianforums.com/t89287 Maybe you can get him to sign your petition?

RufusAtticus

I just finished a response to a Hovindphile who claims to be a "scientist" (chemistry bachelors, studying for an MD).

He argued that macroevoltion was untestible, that creationistists and evolutionistists looked at the same data, that biologists' educations made them close minded to creationism, and that there was no such thing as a beneficial mutation.