Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

I agree with Wilhelm Reich about Freud.

I don't think your sophistry lays a glove on the quote.

How do you feel about orgone accumlators?

And I do believe that the authority knows best despite the many difficulties which arise, in the course of the daily round, of always adhering to its strictures.

Coleridge's quote stands on its own well enough. It is your mangled interpretation of it, and your attempt to conflate it with whom the Church has burned or not that's all wet.

I can quote too wande--

Quote:

How it ought to humble us when we reflect that it was not in the Dark Ages, that it was not in countries struggling only out of barbarism, but in the very morning, in the brightness of reviving letters, in the age of a Kepler and a Galileo, when every department of human intellect was felt and supported in greatest splendour,--it was then that the dreadful contagion of witchcraft and persecution of witches raged, not in one country but passed like a postillion through all Europe, till it died in North America among the Puritans of New England. . . I mention this as a proof that it is not by learning merely, no, nor even by the knowledge of experimental physics, that the most disgraceful enthusiasm can at all times be prevented.

S.T.Coleridge. Philosophical Lectures. p.320.

Which is coming close to saying that the scientific revolution caused the witchburnings. After all the Church had existed for over a thousand years with no witchburning and the contagion appeared just when the scientific revolution was underway.

On that sociological analysis the anti-IDer's claims that religion caused such an evil contagion is up a gum tree. The very opposite of the truth.

And something very much like it surfaced in every system afterwards which embraced atheism.

Were they correct in impounding Reich's papers?

The idea that biological "selfishness" and relentless competition are the driving mechanisms of evolutionary "ascent", can be traced from Bernard Mandeville's poem The Fable of the Bees (1714) through Darwin to Richard Dawkin's (sic) The Selfish Gene(1976). Coleridge belongs to an alternative intellectual tradition which observes the same phenomena in terms of an emerging "altruism", which may be traced from the German Naturphilosophien to Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1888) to Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue,1996. But Coleridge's evolutionary thinking is always fundamentally religious, and he held what many scientist (sic) would currently dismiss as the "teleological heresy": that evolution has a purpose beyond survival and adaptation. To the end he mocked the "Boa Constrictor of Materialism"

Kansas joins national science standard team
(Associated Press, September 21, 2011)

Kansas has been named one of 20 lead states to help write academic science standards that could be used as a national model for public schools and will include requirements for teaching evolution, project leaders announced Tuesday.

The state-led collaboration was assembled by the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, and a nonprofit education reform organization called Achieve. The effort is similar to one developed through the National Governors Association that led to the so-called common core standards in English and mathematics that were adopted by a majority of states, including Kansas.

"Kansas will have an increased opportunity to have its voice heard as these standards come together and will reap the benefits of collaboration with other states," state Education Commissioner Diane DeBacker said.

States have used standards developed by the National Research Council and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science to create their state standards. The new effort attempts to coordinate what is taught across states to improve science education nationally.

It also will allow Kansas, only a few years removed from a heated public fight over the teaching of evolution in public schools, the chance to establish itself as a leader in science curriculum. The State Board of Education approved the department's application to be part of the national discussion.

Dana Tofig, spokesman for Achieve, said Kansas was chosen in part because of its willingness to commit staff to the writing process, gather feedback and to consider adopting the standards once complete.

KANSAS UPDATE

Quote:

Kansas joins national science standard team
(Associated Press, September 21, 2011)

Kansas has been named one of 20 lead states to help write academic science standards that could be used as a national model for public schools and will include requirements for teaching evolution, project leaders announced Tuesday.

Definitely a good thing. Maybe Kansas has learned from its mistakes.