Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

PSXXX asks a stupid question

ID might well be the only way of controlling far more extreme variations of nonsense. Atheism can't. And evolution theory actually justifies them.

The Gates Foundation responds that it hasn't abandoned science to back intelligent design. Greg Shaw, Pacific Northwest director, explains that the grant to Discovery underwrites the institute's "Cascadia Project," which strictly focuses on transportation in the Northwest. The Discovery Web site lists several program goals, including financing of high-speed passenger rail systems and reduction of automobile congestion in the Cascadia region, which encompasses Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. (The Gates Foundation, which is based in Seattle, gives a small slice of its money -- about $40 million in 2004 -- to groups that aim to improve life in the Pacific Northwest.) Poor transportation is a key problem for low-income families, Shaw says, and "when Cascadia came to the Foundation, there was a sense that there had not been a regional approach to studying transportation. Cascadia's plan to solve the transportation problem "was very much a bipartisan state, local and regional approach with a variety of states and counties and mayors." He didn't know if people at the foundation were aware of Discovery's I.D. work at the time they decided to fund Cascadia. "It is absolutely true that we care about sound science as it pertains to saving lives," he says. "The question of intelligent design is not something that we have ever considered. It's not something that we fund."

Lets not teach physics to anyone because someone may use that information and invent an atomic bomb? Is that where your addled mind is going in your remonstrance of high school curricula?

Lets all just sit around the cave and pick lice out of each others scalps as we wait for someone to discover fire.

Remember , spendi accepts scientific discoveries, he just wants to jealously guard all knowledge from those he feels are "unworthy" to recieve it, and , to him, that includes all kids in public schools.

Just don't get "Discovery Institute" mixed up with "Discovery," a science magazine and multiple cable and satellite broadcaster.

Makes me feel a bit better. However, someone on his staff is redfaced Id bet.

Weird science
(By Dennis Pierce, Editorial, eSchool News, January 6, 2009)

An activist Christian organization called Living Waters, led by minister Ray Comfort and aided by former teen idol and television star Kirk Cameron, was handing out copies of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species free of charge to students at dozens of colleges and universities, with a catch: The group had inserted a creationist tract as an introduction to the text of its special "150th anniversary edition" of the book.

At the same time, halfway around the world, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, were successfully testing the world's largest particle accelerator as they sought to learn more about the universe and its origins.

Comfort and his followers are evangelists for creationism, the theory that life is far too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been created by a divine being. The introduction that Comfort wrote, which you can read here, aims to poke holes in Darwin's evolutionary theory by pointing out the complexity of the human eye and gaps in the fossil record--although, as Salon.com's Laura Miller noted, "It's hard to lend much credence to the scientific arguments of a guy who thinks chimpanzees are monkeys."

In Geneva, Switzerland, scientists weren't monkeying around as they prepared to launch the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, which can send proton beams whizzing in opposite directions around a 17-mile circular tunnel 11,000 times a second.

Using 1,600 superconducting magnets positioned around the ring, scientists on Nov. 20 successfully sent the first proton beams around the huge underground tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, reports the Associated Press (AP). Early this year, they hope to start crashing the protons into each other in an attempt to recreate the Big Bang--which, they believe, explains the creation of the universe billions of years ago.

Like those tiny particles spinning around the collider near the speed of light, science and religion--two very different systems for explaining our natural world--are colliding in ways that have huge repercussions for society.

As author Dan Brown notes in his best-selling novel Angels and Demons, this clash isn't new; it has been going on for centuries. But while this conflict has helped make Brown a very rich man, it has also fractured the average person's understanding of basic scientific concepts.

When critics of evolution argue that it's "only a theory," for instance, they muddy the public perception of what a scientific theory is. Evolution, which forms the basis of modern life science, is supported by decades of research vetted in peer-reviewed journals; it's not just a hunch, or something concocted in a basement lab like Professor Brainard's "flubber."

Complete certainty in one's beliefs, regardless of what the evidence says, is dangerous to our understanding of the world. I'm referring, of course, to Comfort and his ilk … but I could just as easily be referring to the scientists at England's Climatic Research Unit, whose leaked eMail correspondence in late November suggested efforts to hide or suppress information that challenged their theories on global climate change.

In an apparently political ploy intended to undermine a global climate summit held in Denmark last month, computer hackers broke into a server at the well-respected British research center and posted hundreds of private eMail messages and documents online.

Some of the eMail exchanges, which were posted without proper context, expressed doubts about climate-change data. But an AP analysis of the leaked correspondence found no evidence of data falsification, and the messages "don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions," AP reported.

Still, that hasn't stopped global warming skeptics from seizing on the breach as proof of their own fervent convictions. And the climate-change scientists didn't help themselves, or the field at large, by giving their critics an opening in which to drive a wedge of doubt in their credibility.

Amid this heated political climate comes a new set of initiatives called "Educate to Innovate." On Nov. 23, President Obama announced a series of new programs to help motivate and inspire students to excel in science and math, and the timing of these initiatives couldn't be better.

The push to raise the nation's "science literacy" is partly a response to poor showings by U.S. students on international exams, and the need to ensure our global competitiveness in an increasingly technological society. But recent events demonstrate how important these new programs are, not just for preparing and inspiring a new generation of scientists, but also for helping every student make sense of an increasingly complex world.

With so much information and misinformation floating around, it's more important than ever for students to understand how to evaluate real scientific evidence for themselves, in an unbiased and dispassionate way. As the Copenhagen summit suggests, it isn't just esoteric musings about our origins that are at stake--it's also the future of our planet.

As far as I know the only reason the DI exists is to promote Creationism

Physics is not taught in high school on the basis that the students are all Einsteins.